MicroHorror

A roar like an incoming tidal wave broke forth from the television before crashing over the sofa and reverberating against the walls. Martin ran in, cutting knife in one hand and a carrot in the other.

“Awww, man!” he exclaimed. “The Spurs just hit a three-pointer with fifteen seconds left to go.”

He sulked back into the narrow kitchen. He couldn’t believe he had spent the afternoon making salads, vegetarian appetizers and homemade Bloody Mary mix. Not that he had anything against food, but the Spurs and the Mavericks were on. Game six and possible elimination for the Mavs. He should be sitting on the sofa with a beer in one hand and some hot wings in the other.

“But nooooo,” he muttered to himself. The things he found himself doing for this woman.

Martin shook his head and placed the carrot back on the cutting board before glancing over at her. He admired her long, lightly tanned legs as they disappeared into her snug fitting shorts. He stroked the curve of her back and long neck with his eyes.

“How’s it coming over there?” she asked in a husky voice that bore the faintest hint of a lisp.

“Just fine, sweetness,” Martin replied. “The Spurs have erased a twelve-point lead and are on the verge of eliminating the Mavericks, but I’ve got things covered here.”

“Good,” she said, seemingly oblivious to his attempt at sarcasm. “You know I appreciate all the help with dinner.”

“Yes, dear,” he said, feeling mildly perturbed.

“You’re not nervous about meeting the family are you?” she replied.

“Of course not,” Martin lied.

In truth he had been obsessing about it for a week and a half. He certainly loved being with this woman but they had only been dating for about six months. It seemed as if things were moving a bit quickly. Not that he didn’t enjoy clubbing with her or catching a movie. And the sex, well, the sex was out of this world.

The positions she could assume, he thought, as the knife slipped and shot a carrot piece across the counter.

“Careful over there,” she said.

Martin’s face reddened as he finished slicing the carrot and grabbed for another. She was a wonderful woman. But was he ready to settle down, meet the family and buy a house?

“So when are we going to get the meat going?” he said.

“Already taken care of,” she replied, tossing the salad with some oil and spices.

“Really?” he replied. “I don’t think the broiler’s turned on.”

“That’s not a problem,” she said, turning towards him. “We like our meat on the rare side.”

“Well, that’s good,” Martin chuckled as he looked through the kitchen to the clock on the living room wall. “They’ll be here in less than an hour.”

“Yes, they will,” she replied with a hiss.

Martin started to turn as she stepped towards him. The muscles in her back bunched for a micro second and then burst forward as the vertebrae in her neck and back shot forward. Her full lips slapped wetly against his neck as two fangs broke through the roof of her mouth behind her canines. They sunk into his throat and her blood and venom pumped into his veins.

Martin struggled, eyes wide with surprise and horror as her arms and legs wrapped around him. His limbs felt heavy and his breathing grew shallow. He tried to form words but couldn’t focus. Her eyes bored into him, hypnotically, as she lowered his paralyzed form to the ground. A single tear escaped his unblinking eye as his brain processed its final conscious image.

Two beautifully shaped almond eyes with long dark lashes and slit, black irises.

• Copyright: © 2008 Kevin M. White

Josie limped along the sidewalk, pushing her belongings in a rusted shopping cart. Wary eyes swept the adjacent park until she spotted the donut bag and to-go coffee cup perched on the rotting bench.

She sat, looked around for the owner, and seeing no one nearby, opened the bag—one glazed, one cream-filled and one chocolate, her favorite. Warmth radiated through the palms of her fingerless gloves when she picked up the cup and drank in the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

These haven’t been here long, she thought.

“Wonder what happened, Irene,” Josie said. “You think someone killed the donut man and dragged him into the bushes?”

Irene didn’t answer.

Josie closed the bag and looked around. A young mother pushed a stroller on the opposite side of the lake. A jogger ran past her and smiled. Josie wondered if he winked at the mother.

“Just like a man to do that. Right, Irene?” Josie shook her head. “Next he’ll run off with some shameless floozy and leave his wife destitute. Somebody should kick that jogger in the balls. Bet he wouldn’t wink then.” Josie laughed and heard Irene guffaw.

Her eyes followed the jogger as he rounded the lake. Was he a rapist who used the park to find his victims? Was the mother his target? What about Irene? Josie knew Irene wouldn’t survive another rape. They’d have to put her in an institution.

Placing the donuts and coffee on the bench, she grinned, her plump face looking like a jack-o-lantern, as the jogger raced by. Josie watched him leave the park and climb the stairs of an apartment building across Jefferson Street. She let out her breath, retrieved the bag and took out the glazed donut. She’d save the chocolate one for last. She wiped five rogue ants from the pastry and put it to her mouth. She glanced from side-to-side before slowly biting into the sweet delight and thought about what she would write in her journal tonight.

Dear Diary: Irene and I had a good day today. Nobody raped us, and we shared a chocolate donut.

• Copyright: © 2008 Jim Harrington

I had come to believe that there is not much reason to the passage of time. I am certainly not trying to suggest anything as clichéd as the phrase “life is not fair” or to ask where is God. I am merely stating that our very existence is absurd.

We spend our entire lives trying to fill up the empty minutes and hours with pleasant distractions. With things we believe have meaning. Killing time, as it were, and yet our greatest fear is death itself. We ask each other, so what are you doing tomorrow? I ask does it matter at all. Everything is going to keep moving regardless, so how much influence do you really expect to have on the universe? These are my questions on responsibility and consequence.

And for all my philosophical musings I get weary of it. Like everyone else I forget about the meaning of life and attempt to move forward, giving into my ego that somehow I do matter in the scheme of things. I can make myself believe this sometimes. I imagine you can too.

Then tonight I saw them coming out of the cemetery. Not in the darkness of night like you would expect of monsters but in the orange glow of an autumn sunset. I saw them clawing their way out of the earth. Using concrete slabs to pull themselves out of it and up onto all fours. These were not humans returned from the dead. No rotting zombies or walking corpses. These lurching staggering beasts were something else entirely.

I felt the stab of fear in my gut that one always feels when one thinks they see something horrible. Only this time it did not fade with the relief that it was just a trick of my eyes. This time the adrenaline rush continued because it was real.

Still my horror was limited to the fact that they existed. I had no real fright for physical self. Somehow I knew they were not coming for me. One of them passed under the streetlamp and I saw its matted dirty pelt and the yellow gleam of its eyes.

I knew it wanted her. The girl across the hall who wears her doom on her face like makeup. No one could see her and not know that she was meant for an end like this. Her fragile beauty marred by some kind of malignant destiny. No one would talk of it, but anyone who saw her would know such tragic beauty would never last in this world.

I watch as the creatures make their way inside. I hear their lumbering up the stairs and the click of paws on the tile outside my door. And now I wonder what is it I should do?

Warn her? Attempt to fight the demons and save her? I don’t even know if anyone can truly be saved. Or if it is my place to do so. Maybe she even has this coming.

Maybe she is evil herself and these are harbingers of her sins past. Maybe I just don’t care what happens to her.

I hear the sound of cheap wood cracking beneath their paws. It will happen any moment now. I hear her screams. What will I do? I am eager for any scenario as though this is the answer I have been waiting for. What will I do?

I’ll do it any moment now.

• Copyright: © 2008 Liz Keaton

A marble angel stands at the head of Arthur Fletcher’s grave. In her hands, she raises a birdbath to the heavens while, close by, a bulldozer flattens the council-run cemetery to make way for a new housing project.

Amid the noise of destruction, men wearing hardhats throw debris into industrial skips. Unseen, the angel grows taller and taller.

Beneath the angel’s feet, Arthur Fletcher stirs, his skeleton shifting with new growth that has slept inside his rotting flesh for over twenty years.

Green slime pulsates. Amoeba-like creatures hatch out. Hundreds of corpses, agitated by external activity, awaken and writhe in many old graves as yet untouched by demolition.

Rapidly, these creatures grow. Tentacles take shape. Heads the shape of footballs enlarge. Hungry mouths yawn into cavernous pits and when the bulldozer draws nearer, the angel meets the startled gaze of its driver.

Suddenly, the birdbath smashes through the windscreen. Decapitated, the driver’s head falls from the cab into the mouth of the first emerging Grunchling. Then the cemetery erupts and thousands of its species slither out from their dark nesting places.

Frantic, slithering on green slime, workmen, trying to escape, are sucked up by those immense, blubbery mouths and fresh white bones spew out on top of older, grayer ones.

Minutes later, their eating frenzy ends and the Grunchlings move en masse towards the town where, outside the Council Chambers, demonstrators hold up placards, chanting, “Save our local cemetery.”

• Copyright: © 2008 Jennifer Walmsley

It seemed at once that all eight men who made up the circle caught their breath at once as they felt the palsied tremor in the earth before them and the great stone unmistakably began to move.

Henry Oster was new to this. His robe fitted poorly; it made his skin itch and gathered in loose pools of material at his feet. The cowl hung low, narrowing his vision to the small rectangle of ground that lay just ahead of him. He had initially regarded this as a virtue but as the sounds around him had grown in strangeness and magnitude and consumed the night with the howls and wails of unseen demons and phantoms that either haunted the desolate switch of trees at his back or crept and stirred, dragging their sluggish carcasses through the clinging ground fog towards him, he wished he were not there. He wished also that he had never been reintroduced to Lord Freddie Reynolds at an Old Etonians’ alumni dinner. That he had dreamt his meeting with the cadaverous Dr. Leth and that most of all he had never ventured out upon this blasted heath with its ancient stones and druidical carvings to stand in another man’s robes before the yawning pit that was now opening at his feet.

“It will be such fun,” Lord Freddie had exclaimed in that high braying whinny he used for a laugh. “You simply must join us. Dr. Leth is going to summon forth a creature for the new millennium.”

And Henry had laughed as the gin and vermouth gripped his mind and garbled whatever Lord Freddie was saying until it seemed that whatever was being suggested was going to be the greatest fun he had ever experienced and who on earth could believe that the shrunken homuncular Dr. Leth could summon more than his own breath.

The ancient stone slid away. The dank fog poured into the opening and it seemed as if the gaping chasm sank forever. Dark storms stirred in the stygian depths. Lights flashed and pulsed as immense tentacles and gigantic scaly reptilian limbs flickered and swept into view before disappearing again in the boiling darkness.

Dr. Leth spoke in a voice clear as a church bell striking the hour. “I call upon the Great Ancient Ones. I ask you now to bring forth the unnamed one.” He drew a deep breath for the name he intended was long and complex and no error could be afforded.

The cavernous pit belched fire and flame in anticipation, and in a moment that Henry would come to recognize as his one contribution to his kind he gave voice to his terror.

“Christ on a bike,” he exclaimed.

A bolt of lightning erupted from the depths and as sudden fear flashed on Henry’s face, from deep within the bowels of the earth the tinkling of a small bell announced the Second Coming.

• Copyright: © 2008 Mike Driver

They thought they’d tamed him. They guessed he was saddle-broke.

He took the first motherfucker with the smashed neck of a wine bottle, the godawful jagged edges slashing the bastard’s face, taking out an eye in the process, before raking open the jugular. Old asshole deserved it, farting the night away like a humanoid skunk, day after day.

Second one bought it with a biro, jammed hard into the ear canal, busting his hearing aid nice and good, so the fuckstick didn’t whine and whistle no more.

Third sucker choked on a domino. It was probably about the tenth one that old Joe rammed down his gullet that did the trick.

Latest one–the old prick had had an indecent fetish for housework–had fizzled and jiggled when his vacuum cleaner had somehow ended up in the bathtub with him.

Now old Joe has a new neighbor in the sheltered housing apartment block. This cat’s-turd plays his fucking violin into the godless hours.

As the superintendent mops old Joe’s brow, she pities the poor guy for his wretched paralyzed state. Still, she guesses he’s so doped up on drugs and shit that he just doesn’t register which planet he’s lying on. Probably best, as the cops are having zero success catching the psycho who’s taking out the residents, one by one…

If she would look just a little closer, she might see that flash in his eye. Just a little. But she doesn’t. Never does. And she turns away, oblivious as he clenches his hands into tightly balled fists.

And a smile ghosts his lips. Shit–she has a great ass!

As she closes the door, and the kingshit next door fiddles on, old Joe thinks of a hundred ways of rubbing somebody out with a violin bow. Within half an hour, the string player will have sawn his last tune.

Old Joe grins. Wide and toothy. And he raises himself up, stretching copiously, all pretense gone–the saddle thrown off one more time.

• Copyright: © 2008 John Saxton

“Did you see that?” Beth screamed in his ear. “Did you fucking see that?”

Bill nodded his head slowly. Of course he had seen it. Wasn’t the truck slid halfway around on the road? Weren’t the tires still smoking from the screeching stop they had braked to? Weren’t his knuckles white and weren’t his eyes round and frightened?

“Yeah, baby. I saw it.”

He took a slow shuddering breath, looked at Beth, looked away quickly. Taking his foot off the brake and slipping the truck into reverse, he had just enough time to get it rolling backwards before the passenger window of his ’78 Bronco exploded in a hail of gum-edged glass.

Beth screamed as he tromped the gas and turned to see out the rear window. He wished he had turned his head over his left shoulder because if he had, he wouldn’t have seen that large hairy hand groping and seeking for a grip on his girlfriend’s head.

The Bronco jittered in a semi-arc and he felt the back tires leave the road, slammed on the brakes. Taking a quick look at his girlfriend, at the hand now finding purchase by hooking its large fingers under her chin, its thumb running her jaw line and touching her ear, he dropped from reverse, through neutral and into drive and stomped the pedal.

He heard the engine roar, heard the… thing… outside the window roar, and heard Beth screaming. The truck shuddered, skidded right and found footing. There was a horrendous snap and Beth wasn’t screaming anymore. He didn’t look.

With his eyes ahead on the road, he faced the truck east and kept the pedal down. There was a loud metallic bang and he felt the ass end sliding to his left, let off the gas, felt the wheel jerk and settle in and punched it again.

From behind him and fading fast into the distance and the roar of his 302 motor came a deep-throated guttural howl of pain and fury. He didn’t lift his eyes to the rearview, just kept driving.

After several miles were behind him and he felt safe, he turned and looked at Beth. Turning his attention sharply back to the road, he felt his stomach flip, opened his mouth and ejected the contents of his stomach onto his lap, the dash, the wheel, and the windshield.

Nobody was going to believe this. Nobody.

• Copyright: © 2008 Jon Bautz

Yaden had been part of Landon Coven for five years. When the old master passed on, Yaden took his place. Leadership brought many things, including an endless supply of young girls, all rebelling against their father-figure God.

But Elgar Astaroth changed all that. Yaden knew Elgar from when they both were learning incants and tracing the seven points of light. While Yaden recruited new girls and shacked his wick, Elgar continued to study.

It wasn’t long before a deep-seated schism was brewing. Elgar even tried to interrupt one of the ceremonies. When he upended several candles around the pentagram, which broke the sacred form and unsettled the newer acolytes, Yaden knew they needed to talk. Yaden found him in the cramped back room that passed for the coven’s library.

“What’s the hell’s wrong with you?”

Anger colored Elgar’s face. “You defile our master. You don’t worship him during Sabbat.”

“That’s a load of crap,” Yaden said. “I think you’re just jealous.”

“Of you? About what?” Elgar thought for a second, then said, “Oh, you think I want to be like you and spread every pair of legs I can find?”

The truth felt good. Leaning in close, Yaden softly whispered, “Why else do you think I’m here? It sure isn’t for the make-up and the clothes.”

Elgar’s eyes widened at the confession. A shadow passed over his face and he glanced away. When he looked back, he gave Yaden a little lop-sided smile, just like he used to. “Fine,” he said, and that was the end of the argument.

***It was like nothing had happened. The next Friday, Yaden was back at the altar. When the rite ended, he drank down the ceremonial wine. As his foot reached for the floor, the room began to spin, and he felt arms reach out to catch him as everything went black.

Yaden woke to pleasure. A warm wetness moved up and down on him, and he raised his head to see a young girl’s black hair bobbing in his lap. Feeling him move, she pulled her mouth off him with a loud pop.

Yaden realized he was naked, bound to the altar and gagged. Still disoriented from the drug, his head lolled to one side. There were more people here now, and the group of onlookers formed a larger circle around him and the altar.

Elgar appeared behind him, and by tilting his head back, Yaden could see part of his face. The Sabbat mask couldn’t conceal his feral grin. Leaning in close, Elgar whispered, “So glad you could join us.”

Unable to move, Yaden glared at him.

Raising his voice to the observers, Elgar said, “This man has been accused and tried of heresy. You have found him guilty. Now let the master pass his judgment.”

Stretching out his arms, Elgar softly mumbled incantations. Clouds seemed to form on the ceiling, and settled like mist around the onlookers. From the blackness, a deep, rasping growl said, “Der Verrat des Narren.”

Yaden had heard those words before, but he couldn’t remember what they meant. As the darkness lifted, Elgar let out a grim chuckle. “The master has spoken.” Yaden saw him nod towards the end of the altar, and long hair began to tickle in his lap again. To his embarrassment, and despite his fear, the girl’s efforts were successful.

Yaden knew something was very wrong, but he couldn’t concentrate. His hips started to rise to meet her bobbing head, and he was almost there when Elgar cleared his throat. Just as the girl stopped, Yaden remembered what the words meant.

The fool’s betrayal.

From the corner of his eye, he saw something glitter in Elgar’s hand and began to struggle. Then the girl’s teeth ground down on him. Agony ripped through him. He was pulling in a ragged breath when the razor bit deep into his throat.

Over the gurgling and frothing of blood, Yaden heard, “Das Bankett der Kinder.”

The Feast of the Children.

• Copyright: © 2008 Thane Thompson

A taxi ambled down the rain-laden asphalt, past a certain Mr. Nigel Hathaway, who was returning to his flat from an undisclosed location. It was early spring and London’s signature haze was beginning its daily formation, enveloping old brick closes and the chimneys that rose like minarets above them.

The sky was turning that dreadful shade of blue that signaled morning’s quick approach. Nigel always hated that color. It reminded him of the sky that peered into his windows on weekday mornings at the asylum. That ghastly azure told him that it was time to rise and feel his sickness.

His sickness… He remembered it without a shred of fondness. He remembered the way the walls looked, white and sterile. Nigel saw them as putrid and disgusting: white greasepaint on the face of a clown, a clown that laughed at the illness.

As Nigel would sit before a panel of doctors, incoherently fumbling for a way to describe his current feelings, the clown would be there. It would sit in the supposedly empty chair against the wall, eyeing the handsome young Englishman in his bedclothes, stuttering and making a fool of himself. The doctors would just look at each other, nod, then write something on one of those awful little clipboards, the ones that held each patient’s life. One doctor would speak up. Something condescending and disbelieving. Nigel would rebut with a shout. The clown would laugh. Nigel would stare toward the clown, feeling the hearty guffaws reverberate throughout him.

“That’s very nice, Nigel.”

“Don’t you see it?”

Hahaha.

“It’s there!”

Hahaha.

Even before the asylum, the clown would accompany him about, laughing and making fun of Nigel’s daily tasks. Nigel would get a newspaper and the clown would giggle. He’d retrieve a cup of tea and the clown would chuckle. He’d sit down with his tea and newspaper and the clown would go into fits of laughter that looked akin to a seizure. It was when Nigel told the police of his painted-faced stalker that he was put away. If only he had kept silent.

But Nigel was a new man. He ignored the clown and took his medications like a good boy. He was released from the asylum and found a job clicking typewriter keys in the patent-office. He had been worry-free for three years, now. Nigel was now a normal man with a normal job and a normal life. He could put all of the past events behind him. As Nigel neared his flat, he noticed a man standing out front. Most likely Mr. Gardens from upstairs waiting for his bus. Nigel neared Mr. Gardens and offered him a cheerful “Morning!” The figure turned about and returned the greeting with a loud, boisterous, sickeningly familiar… laugh.

• Copyright: © 2008 Tulips for Mr. Wilde

I am far bolder in death than I ever dared to be in the monotony of my life as a certified public accountant.

Janet is every Matisse curve in motion, the type of woman whose aesthetics alone would have twisted my tender nerves into a coiled jumble in the black pit of my stomach.

That was before.

Now, I shadow her down the concrete sidewalks while she’s on her way to work. I place the tips of my bony phalanges in places on her that any moral-minded apparition would feel guilty about.

She shivers and stops walking when I do this, pulls down the pink edges of her skirt, composes herself, moves on.

“Stop it,” she says to the empty street.

I can feel the warmth leeching out of her body and into the whole of me, and I understand that she doesn’t really mean it.

I may even whisper a chill word or two in her ear. This inevitably causes her to cross her arms over her ample chest and make a mewling catlike sound.

I love it when she does that.

She steps up the pace to the office, the clickety-clack of her four-inch heels dodging the cracks in the walkway with marvelous dexterity.

When she reaches Lincoln Street, she turns down the final block and glances back over her shoulder. I catch a tempting flash of her thigh, and I reach down with one phantasmic arm motion and snip the garter belt free of her hosiery.

Her pink leg flesh ripples with goosebumps. She closes her eyes, snaps them open, gives a shriek, begins to run.

Such a sport!

I’m playing with the breeze now, lifting up discarded newspapers and scattering them in front of her face.

Temporarily blinded, she doesn’t see the checkered taxi until its chrome bumper has snapped her in half, leaving her ragdoll form scattered bonelessly across the asphalt tread.

I leave the scene and drift through brick alleys towards the WGC building, where her specter awaits. As always, she’s hiding her grim visage in the shadows of the stairwell four floors below her old cubicle, as if she’s embarrassed by her appearance.

“Bastard!” she burbles, unable to form a smile within the folds of her gray-green flesh.

Touched by her remains, I reach for her bleeding face and kiss that elegant shattered jawbone. She responds in kind, wordlessly grasping my skull and pulling me to her.

We’ve replayed variations of her demise for all eternity, and we never get sick of it.

Ever.

• Copyright: © 2008 Chaz Siu