MicroHorror

Night things gathered on a ridge to watch the last human city burn.

“Our prey. Gone,” a werewolf said.

“The dead will feed me—for a time,” a walking corpse answered. “But then…”

A vampire slumped to the ground, head bowed.

“I can still hunt vermin,” the werewolf said. “But… humans sustain me.”

Head still bowed, the vampire spoke. “I think I will sit here and watch the dawn. It’s been centuries since I’ve seen the sun. I would like to see the sun one last time.”

The walking corpse turned to the werewolf. “What comes next? We’ll be gone, with the humans.”

A distant coyote yipped. The werewolf saw rats scurry from the burning city. Crows cawed nearby.

“Something new will come,” the werewolf said. “And someday there will be nightmares again and new night things will rise.”

“Little comfort,” the vampire said, and he wept bloody tears.

• Copyright: © 2008 David J. Rank

Meg gasped. “Michael! What happened? You look marvelous!”

She guided him into the party. “Brazil was good to you. How—”

“Eighty-nine pounds—in six weeks.” Michael smiled as he stroked his throat.

“What? Surgery? Stomach banding?”

“Nothing like that. I don’t eat like I did—little appetite, anymore.”

They stopped at the refreshments. “Martini?” Meg asked.

“Alcohol doesn’t agree… with me. Water will do.”

“You have changed. You found something, in Brazil, didn’t you. Appetite suppressant, right?”

“Something like that.” Michael nibbled an olive, swallowed and winced. “Amazonia is amazing. Mysteries… lost secrets. I found one. A… treatment. It’s permanent.”

Michael selected a toothpicked sliver of prosciutto and fromage, hesitated, then brought it to his lips.

Meg blinked and questioned what she next saw.

Michael’s lips parted; tiny jaws snapped at the meat and cheese.

“Little appetite,” he said.

A forked, black tongue slid across his lips, slipping inside a lopsided grin.

• Copyright: © 2008 David J. Rank

Paulie felt safe in the light.

He tucked Lego soldiers and himself within the squared sunbeam falling from the skylight crowning the Great Room. Around him, Mom and Dad carried and directed boxes and furniture into the house they wanted Paulie to call home.

The cave-like place frightened Paulie. All stone, timber and glass, boasting “a breathtaking view,” the house thrilled Mom and Dad. They did not notice the cold places like he did, or see gray things dormant in corners, waiting to be nourished in the night.

Paulie pulled sneakered feet closer, moving Lego soldiers tighter to him as light shifted with each tick of the wall clock.

Taffy the cat joined Paulie in the light. She did not purr, did not nap, but watched shadows reaching for them while the sunbeam well narrowed.

“Isn’t this exciting?” Mom said.

Paulie knew the truth.

Taffy hissed at the coming night.

• Copyright: © 2007 David J. Rank

The wife and kids sleep well each night, but not me—because I know what haunts the dark outside. In peace and ignorant of these terrors, the family sleeps unaware how I watch over them, patrolling the halls and rooms of this poor house, alone, pulling curtains tight, peering behind them, watching monsters stalk the night.

Closer they come, bolder, each night, taunting me with distorted faces of sunlight humans: my boss, the ass; neighbor woman who spies; messy dog walkers; and store clerks, all whispering words I strain to hear.

I fear soon a night will come when these demons breach my thin walls and find this family and me unprotected, soft and alone, throats bared.

When that night comes, I will save us all from the soul-rending tortures. Hell will not claim us!

The kitchen is well stocked. I know where the knives are stored. And I wait.

• Copyright: © 2007 David J. Rank

“It’s okay, Pita. You’re okay, Pita, tita, bobita.”

The German shepherd looked back at Wade with begging eyes.

There were two other people in the lobby, with two other dogs. His anxiety wouldn’t let him be embarrassed. Still, he moved his head close to the dog’s and whispered.

“Daddy loves you. I talked to the ones in the sky.”

The dog looked away from him and around the room. She was nervous. This was the place where strangers stabbed you.

Wade was nervous too.

His eye glimpsed a van pulling up. A woman got out with a bundle wrapped in her arms.

“Here comes a kitty so pretty,” Wade said absently, seeing the little, striped head bobbing outside the bundle.

The woman carrying the kitten came inside and went up to the counter. Wade didn’t notice she was crying until she spoke.

“I ran over him.”

Moans filled the room. Wade hadn’t known its condition; he had attributed its loosely bobbing head to the antics of a playful kitten.

“Dr. Lane!” the receptionist shouted as she made her way to the back. Dr. Lane came to the front, a practiced expression on her face.

“I think he’s dead,” the woman said. Dr. Lane led her into an examination room.

Wade looked around, exchanging sympathetic gazes with other pet owners, then he looked back at Pita, who pushed herself into him and whined.

Wade waited, making small talk with a lady wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt and holding a poodle, trying to forget the poor kitten, trying to forget why he was here.

Dr. Lane soon came out, leading the woman, who was now carrying a closed bundle. She walked her all the way to the van. They exchanged a few words there before the doctor came in. For the first time, she seemed to notice Wade.

“Why are you here?”

It took Wade a few seconds to answer. “Your assistant called last night. She said the results were positive.”

She seemed confused. “I don’t think so.” She moved behind the reception counter, pulled up something on the computer, studied it for a few seconds, then shook her head.

“Pita’s fine. There’s been some kind of miscommunication.”

He lit up inside, but tried to hide it, given the scene they’d all just witnessed. There were a few guesses as to how the mishap occurred. The vet took full responsibility and apologized. Wade accepted graciously and left.

He was in his car, Pita in the backseat, no doubt thrilled she’d escaped the evil place without a single stabbing, when he remembered the conversation with his wife last year.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“What, was there some kind of mix-up?”

“Someone else’s test results were in my chart. My results were negative. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

Wade drove off the lot with a healthy dog, wondering about the price.

• Copyright: © 2008 Joshua Scribner

“A penny for them?” he asked for the third time in ten minutes. So, picking up a butcher’s knife, she sliced open the top of her head and, when all her thoughts tumbled out, she demanded he give her that penny.

• Copyright: © 2008 Jennifer Walmsley

She was immensely proud of the pottery she had found near the Navajo Indian reservation.

It went perfect in her new Santa Fe-style house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and people would visit and ask her about it.

“Stacey, that is amazing. Where did you get that?” they would ask upon seeing it on her shelf in her spacious living room.

And it was perfectly understandable to inquire about.

It was centuries old, nearly perfect with a few nicks and minor cracks but other than that it was perfect.

To make it even more alluring were the petroglyph-like drawings of what appeared to be a mother holding the hand of a child, and in the background were buffalo and deer.

“We’re not supposed to remove these things from Anasazi ruins because it’s against the law but I had to get this because it was perfect,” Stacey would say.

Her younger son, Jeff, was a typical 14-year-old boy who hadn’t grown fond of things like that.

Much less had he learned any appreciation of the Native American cultures in New Mexico. It just wasn’t important.

And then one day Stacey was sitting in her living room looking at the pot when she remembered the Navajo sheepherders who were there with her that day when she found the pot.

“Don’t take those. They belong with the dead. Us Navajo stay away from those things,” they were telling her.

Of course she asked the typical white man question of why.

“Because they’re gone and their lives on this Earth are broken. If you take these home with you your life will break or much worse.”

She paid no heed to the superstitions and the warnings and took it home anyway.

And as she sat there that day looking at the sensual, heartwarming scene of the mother holding the child’s hand she noticed another figure beside the child. It was a light inky type of spot then it became a child shape.

She was horrified and ran to her son’s bedroom to tell him about it.

He wasn’t there.

She searched all over the house, called his friends, and drove around the neighborhood looking for him.

Nothing.

Then she realized that maybe he was the one on the pot. Horrifying as it was it made sense.

That night she dozed off after a tremendous cry and dreamed of an old Indian lady talking to her in her living room.

“You must take it back then I’ll give you your son back. I made that pot for my child long ago after he died. I put his heart in it and I could see him still when I looked in it. Please bring it back or you’ll become twisted and your son will stay lost.”

Stacey woke and realized that she could get Jeff back anytime she wanted.

“We’ll give it a week,” she figured.

The boy was a burden to her and she never loved his father in the first place. Now he was an irritating liability who had turned on her.

“Let him learn a lesson from this,” she laughed.

And at the end of the week she thought about it once more.

Life was so much easier and free now without the ungrateful son of a bitch.

Suddenly she felt a tug in her chest. Feeling her pulse she discovered there was none.

She raced to the pot and looked in it.

Her heart was beating in it then it began to disappear.

As horror raced in suddenly she began to laugh.

“Oh, to hell with them all,” she hissed and left to go to a bar with a friend.

“That pot is worth more than him and all them Indian traditions.”

• Copyright: © 2008 Michael Krueger

Hands tied. Legs bound.

Skeet awoke and looked around the room. His wrists and ankles chafed. A single electric bulb hung from a wire over his head and it swung from side to side casting shadows which crept and danced in the silence. The only sound was his own breathing, and that was labored. He heard a slight whistle with every inhalation and grimaced with pain. He thought to scream, but couldn’t get any sound around the sock duck-taped into his mouth.

Blood trickled. Body trembled.

His eyes better able to focus after a few seconds of consciousness, he looked to his left. He saw her sitting at a table. A lit candle flickered and she dabbed at her mouth with a dainty gesture. She hulked in the semi-darkness. A mound of rippled flesh that appeared to weigh in at half a ton. Three empty pizza boxes were spread out on the floor at her bloated white feet. Her once white gown was stained by what Skeet hoped was tomato sauce from the recently devoured pizzas he had delivered.

He hoped. He prayed.

He sniffed at the air and smelled a familiar scent. Body odor perhaps? He saw sweat glisten on the bare flesh of the large woman’s arms. Skeet felt her eyes light upon him, and he turned away, closing his eyes. Was it her he smelled? He doubted it. A childhood memory flitted through his mind. He remembered poking the bloated corpse of a dead cat on a riverbank. Maggots poured out of the nose, mouth, and ears with the slightest compression. He remembered that smell.

Death smelled. He poked.

The memory sickened him. Why the fascination? He had poked and explored that corpse. Despite the stink, despite his twisting stomach and active gag reflex, he had poked. He peeked over to the woman again and saw her eyes. There was a glimmer, a reflection of his twelve-year-old self poking at the dead cat. She managed to stand. She used a walker and began creeping towards him. Skeet shook uncontrollably. She looked at him, curious. The woman held a knife tight in her hand. Skeet looked away as the blade glinted while the light bulb swayed overhead. He saw into the shadows where dead eyes reflected the light.

She poked. He screamed.

• Copyright: © 2008 T.J. McIntyre

I mean, really, with a name like Grendel (Grendel, for crying out loud!), what else could I turn out to be but a freakin’ monster? What was wrong with Jack? Or Bill? Or Tom, Dick or Harry? But no, no nice, normal, regular name for me; instead I get Grendel the Gruesome (well, I added the Gruesome for effect, but you get the idea).

Of course, being seven-foot-tall, with spindly, bent legs, claw hands, a ratty mass of hair, a lumpy, misshapen body and a face that missed being attractive by oh, just a kilometer or two, didn’t help either. And this was when I was still a child, my supposedly “cute years.” Some kids grow like a weed; me, I grew like a deformed, noxious one in some forgotten corner of the devil’s garden. My hygiene wasn’t good either, and the circle of flies that hovered around me all the time didn’t help my popularity in school.

Kids can be so cruel, you know. Calling me horrid names became an art form for them, each brat trying to outdo the previous one. So what could I do? I killed them all on the playground one cloudy afternoon at recess. I mean, they shouldn’t have made fun of me during my awkward adolescence; even a monster has his limits. To hide my crime, I ate as many and much of them as I could hold (they were delicious in a steak tartare sort of way).

Well, school and police authorities are so quick to judge, although as the only one left standing and covered in their blood, I guess the evidence did sort of point toward me, so I took off to hide in the nearby swamps until the scandal blew over and everybody forgot about it.

Which no one did, so I remained in the swamps, growing up alone (except for my nut job of a mother), just another nasty and vengeful young punk with a taste for senseless violence and human flesh. My mother blamed it on the heavy metal music and Internet porn.

One day, while tooling through the swamps, I discovered a fancy castle on the edge of the bog, which turned out to be just full of tasty warriors and handmaidens (I had been working out daily in my room, lots of time on my hands you know, so I was dangerously powerful by then and even taller I think; hygiene and appearance remained about the same). Nighttime was the right time for my little search-kill-and-gorge missions.

I was finally happy for the first time in my life, hitting my stride as a tough young punk (well, tough young punk monster), tasting the good life (pun very much intended), and scaring the hell out of the castle dwellers. I was finally somebody, respected (well, feared) and noticed (actually reviled, but still, some attention is better than no attention after years in the swamp).

Then, just when things were rocking along, this pretty-boy Geat comes striding in and decides to play hero, casting me as the monster in his little melodrama (no surprise there).

So one night as I’m tiptoeing around the sleeping warriors (as best I can tiptoe) and peeking under the handmaidens’ bed clothes, this self-deputized Geat (I prefer to call him Geek), leaps up like some undercover cop and proceeds–now get this–to rip my arm off! (What kind of fighting strategy is that? And this guy is the hero?)

Now if that doesn’t just ruin your day, I don’t know what does, and, get this, while I’m bleeding like crazy, he’s beating on me mercilessly with the bloody stump of my own arm! And they call me a monster.

So there was nothing left to do but run like hell and tell my mother on him before I pass out and boy, will he ever be sorry, because my mother is a real monster.

• Copyright: © 2008 Rod Drake

Every morning Helen Bobble emerged from her house and slowly made her way to her front walk. She proceeded to wash leaves and other debris off the stretch of concrete between her lawn and the street.

The kids showed up halfway through. John Barker, Andy Bumble, and Kelly Bobo. Five, six and seven years old. Like a tiny gang of candy-white spoiled brats.

“What’cha doing, Ms. Bobble?”

Helen had learned to ignore their taunts.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

The children’s faces and names altered. Their insults did not. In her seventies, Helen taunted back, “Can’t think of anything original to say?” This wit was lost on the little demons. Now, in her pragmatic eighties, she generally let them prattle on, like broken records, saying the same thing every day.

Then Andy Bumble said something she hadn’t heard before:

“Why are you too lazy to use a broom?”

Helen stopped, looked at her frail body, her tiny arms. Long after her friends had been placed in retirement homes, long after everyone she knew throughout her life had passed away, she still had the strength to take care of herself. How could this little brat not see that?

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, then quickly stopped herself. She had broken her own rule.

Andy stuck his tongue out at her.

That was enough. Helen picked the hose up and showered all three of the children with water. They screamed and scattered in different directions, coming together once more across the street.

“I’m telling my mom!” John shouted.

Helen smiled and continued watering her sidewalk.

***The children decided old Ms. Bobble needed to be taught a lesson. They took turns making number two in a brown paper bag, rolled it up and stole a lighter from John’s father.

As soon as their parents went to sleep, all three snuck out and met across the street from Helen’s house. The only lights came from the lamps lining the sides of the road. They crept across it, opened Ms. Bobble’s creaky gate, and slipped inside her yard.

All three failed to notice a quiet rumbling rising from the sidewalk in front of her house.

John placed the bag in front of Helen’s door. Andy got the lighter going, held it to the bag. As soon as it caught on fire, Kelly rang the bell. The kids ran as fast as possible for cover by a tree across the way.

As they approached the sidewalk, Kelly saw that the patch Ms. Bobble watered every morning was opening, like a giant mouth.

“Jump!” she cried.

Kelly and John managed to hurtle the sidewalk. By the time Andy got there, a claw had formed from the concrete. As he jumped, the claw reached up and grabbed him.

“Help!” he screamed.

Ms. Bobble’s front door opened and the old woman quietly poked her head out to see who had the indecency to ring her bell at ten o’clock at night.

Andy put his hands out to her, cried her name, “Ms. Bobble! Help me!”

Ms. Bobble’s eyes glowed from the flames bouncing off the burning bag on her porch. She made no effort to help the child being devoured by her sidewalk or even extinguish the fire before her.

John and Kelly saw nothing. They had gotten home before Helen had even opened her door.

***The next morning Kelly and John went to inquire about their friend Andy. They turned away as soon as they saw two police cars in the Bumble driveway. “She probably caught him and turned him in,” Kelly suggested.

The kids decided to make their morning rounds, beginning with testing Ms. Bobble while she watered her sidewalk.

“What’cha doing?”

The old woman had a tiny smile on her face.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

Helen chuckled to herself. The children didn’t even notice how the water turned slightly red as it brushed debris into the grass and dirt.

• Copyright: © 2008 Alec Cizak