MicroHorror

The first thing you have to understand is, I don’t have a lot of time. This recorder, it still has one of those little cassettes and it’s winding smaller and smaller even right now. If you find this, listen.

What no one tells you is how to properly fashion a noose so the slipknot doesn’t come undone with your weight. The little piece of information people neglect to tell you about shooting yourself is that you should never pinch your eyes closed. For the longest time the way I lived wasn’t what you would call perfect. I was the bottom condo in a brick filing cabinet for young pseudo-artists and college dropouts. The night the news story about reincarnation came on I was boiling water to make mac and cheese. The bubbling sound of water muting out every other word until all I can do is watch the pictures of people smiling and jumping off of buildings. I watch the TV and see people chugging drain cleaner or wrapping their faces in grocery bags and wonder how much milk I mix in with the powdered cheese. The reality is I don’t care if those people died.

When the story goes back to a reporter with his tie looped around his neck I snap off the stove and start digging for my strainer. The TV is talking behind me, saying that reincarnation is true. There is physical proof of a second life. The TV is saying that all of my hopes and dreams are just a gunshot or razor-slash away. I pick out a piece of macaroni and blow on it until the tendrils of steam are gone. I pop it in my mouth and turn back towards the TV. My apartment is nothing but the burp smell of what everyone else is cooking above me and the hollow clicking noises of someone’s leaky bathtub dripping water onto my ceiling. Mixing the cheese product in with my noodles and some butter I turn the other burner up to high and let a little gas leak out until I get that septic smell of propane in my nose. Spooning and rolling the ingredients together I do the same to the back two burners and I can hear hissing.

With a house full of propane gas, everything seems significant. Each blink is as hard and heavy as any garage door. What you don’t realize when you’re trying to commit suicide to make yourself a better life is that a lot more people attempt suicide than commit it. Dizzy and reeling I am digging through my closet for something to wear and an extra sheet to tie to the light fixture in the room where my TV is. Somewhere above me I hear a gunshot and glass breaking and I wish I had a gun.

I grab out an afghan and toss it around on the arms on the fixture. On top of my recliner, in my wedding dress, I tie a knot around it, tangle the other end around my neck and jump.

The threads unravel from around my neck and I drop to the floor. The hot bulbs of the fixture burning my neck and arms. I can’t feel my legs and my upper body feels as heavy as a wrecking ball. What no one tells you is that if you attempt suicide and you don’t have friends that check on you, you’ll just have to wait and die slow.

I smell something burning and it might be me or I don’t know what. I hear sirens. I hear cracking and voices screaming, asking if I’m all right.

That brings me to now. The recorder in my hands, I am hearing the door broken down. I am hearing footsteps. If they save me, the hospital will keep me alive forever. This is what no one ever says to you when you are trying to reincarnate.

“Ma’am. You’re going to be just fi…”

You know the guy. He’s the one who shows up uninvited to parties and drinks all the booze. He hits on your wife right in front of you. One time, you even heard him remark at the funeral for your friend Lisa, “Damn, she was a nice piece of ass.”

Enough is enough. It has been this way since college. Somehow he insinuated himself into your group of friends and couldn’t take the hint that he wasn’t wanted. He’s been fired from every job he’s ever had because of his malapropos outbursts. It’s as if the filter between brain and mouth was just never there.

But he went too far last week, when, at the reading you were giving as part of the book tour for your new novel, he showed up halfway through, high on gasoline fumes or household cleansers, and declaimed to the entire audience that you once had sex with a Dalmatian. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true, it doesn’t matter that he was on mind-altering chemicals. He has destroyed your career.

And so you don’t feel so bad when he whimpers through the urine-soaked hand towel with which you gagged him four days ago. There was a twinge of regret when you sliced off his nipples, but that went away. You’ve been cutting away at him for days, and you’re astonished he’s still conscious. He’s lost so much blood.

A dog barks outside, and you hear your wife’s car in the driveway, home from a long weekend with her parents. She steps into the kitchen, and for a brief moment you’re afraid she’ll run away, call the cops. But then you remember the look on her face when the bastard in front of you grabbed her breast at a party long ago, and she seems to remember as well, because she gently takes the knife from your hand and smiles.

When the first Demon came the world knew darkness. The last battle against us Angels was fought with the demons driving us out. The world knew peace. The Demons lived and breathed building their monuments and writing of their deeds. We Angels tried to take back the world. Inevitably the Demons always beat us back. The world belonged to the Demons for countless forgotten ages. Then the apes came.

They first crawled out of the jungles. Then they wandered the plains. They brought down the same great beasts the Demons did. Then they stopped wandering and grew from the ground. Some Demons spoke fear about these new arrivals. The Demon King told them not to worry. They’d ruled this world for countless generations; their mastery of this world was unquestionable. The Demons’ confidence came from believing they were the only ones who could shape iron with fire.

Then one day the apes’ arrows came. They charged over the hill with the sun shining off their armor. The Demons ran for the safety of their black walls. After the Demons shut their gates the apes hurled great rocks to smash them open. When the apes charged in the Demons fought them long and hard. When the third day dawned the Demons started to go back from whence they came, leaving behind the world they’d called home for countless generations. From on high we Angels watched the apes burn all the Demon works to the ground.

While we watched the apes change the world one of the younger Angels asked to go and meet them. I as Elder Angel told him that any Angel that went down there would meet certain death. I told him that they weren’t in the grand plan. They were an accident, the result of a botched experiment. Capable of more cruelty, hatred and violence than even Demons could muster. I told the young Angel that the world we watch is now ruled by a group of soulless monstrosities. I showed him that even before the ashes of the Demons’ city had cooled the apes had already started killing each other. The last thing he asked was their name.

I told him Man.

“C’mon,” he urged, “try it, just once, you might like it.” Her eyes met his. She trusted him. Ten days since they had met and already she trusted him.

“Okay, then…”

He laughed, took her hand and under a curved new moon they entered the building giggling together.

“Ugh! How did I let you persuade me?” She clung to him, eyes clenched tight. He stroked her hair. On screen, the beast howled and she shrank further into him.

“I just don’t do horror,” she shivered on the walk home. He tightened his arm around her shoulders and rubbed her warm.

“Sorry,” he said, and he thought he might be. It had been a good plan, his way of warning her.

When they kissed he felt the lunar pull. Only fourteen or fifteen days before the change, before he would cry “Run!” Before he would give chase and taste her properly.

“I assure you, Mrs. Crane, we’ll do everything in our power to find your little boy,” FBI Special Agent Miller told the distraught mother. “Speaking bluntly, you understand,” the tall man with the lantern jaw and de rigueur dark sunglasses continued, “the good news is that we didn’t find him hurt, unconscious… or worse… in the pool.”

With that, Mary Crane began sobbing uncontrollably. She tried to respond but, in the place of coherent words, all that emerged was an inarticulate, almost animal-like keening. Her husband, more or less successfully fighting back tears of his own, put his arm around his wife and pulled her in close.

“Robbie was swimming, just like we said,” Mr. Crane offered for the hundredth time. “We looked away for a moment or two, no more, to turn the chops on the grill. The next thing you know, he was gone. We spent almost two hours scouring the neighborhood–knocking on doors, making phone calls–before we notified the police. I can’t understand it. There’s a fence around the yard and the gate was still latched. There’s no way anyone could have gotten in here to take him. Please, please, find our little boy. He’s only five years old!”

“First of all,” Miller replied, “and I know it’s difficult, but you have to calm down. Calling the authorities as quickly as you did makes everything much easier. I’ve been investigating this kind of thing for nearly twenty years. Chances are very good that your son heard or saw something interesting and simply wandered off to check it out and got lost. There are woods behind your house and he’s probably hiding back there now as we speak, afraid that he’s going to get in trouble. You certainly know how children think.”

Miller spoke briefly into his phone and then turned back toward the anguished parents. “Mrs. Crane, I’d like you to stay in the house near your telephone. Agent Benning will keep you company. Use your cell if you want to continue calling the neighbors or any relatives that live nearby. Mr. Crane, it would be best if you came with us while we searched the area. You can call Robbie’s name and try to convince him that everything’s okay.”

Agent Benning, a fit young woman with stylishly short blond hair, led Mrs. Crane gently toward the house. Mr. Crane accompanied the search party out of the yard and into the woods that abutted the rear of his property. Before disappearing from view he glanced back over his shoulder and gave his wife what he hoped was a reassuring wave. She barely noticed.

Meanwhile, late afternoon sunlight turned the Crane’s in-ground pool a scintillating, eye-straining blue. Little Robbie’s inflatable shark bobbed with a gentle poignancy on the ripples that spread across the deep end. If anyone had thought to examine the carcharian float more closely they might have detected an especially contented and well-fed look playing across the exaggerated features of its toothy, smiling face.

My angel told me what needed to be done.

He summoned me to the forest. As dark the night was, the moon cut a clear path for me to follow into a clearing. I counted this as a small blessing. When I reached the end of the trail the angel stood there, with his foot on a stone.

His eyes were fire. He told me in a voice that was so clear, so loud, that I should come to him.

I had never seen the likes of him before. He was beautiful. His frame was that of a soldier: tall and thin, wiry, muscular. His hair was light. And his mouth, rounded and soft, smiled at me. There was a form of brightness behind him. The light was so bright that it hurt my eyes, but I could see they were wings.

He said come, and I came, even though everything inside of me told me to turn away.

He handed me a shovel, and told me to dig. A treasure would soon be revealed to me.

Not knowing what to expect, I did as instructed. I dug until he told me it was enough.

By then, the sky had begun to lighten. The dark would soon pass into morning.

I paused. He took the shovel from my hand, and tossed it away.

He touched my hand as he did so, and the feel of his flesh made shivers run through me. So bright and beautiful he was that I had expected his touch to be heat. Instead, it was the deepest of cold.

He bent near, and a draft of his icy breath touched my cheek. I stood, unable to move. And he pulled me to him and kissed my mouth.

His kiss was ecstasy; I felt as if I were floating, my heart beating too fast. He pressed himself hard against me. Beneath my half closed eyelids, I looked into his face. I saw the light of his eyes turn into pitch black, like crude oil spreading through water.

I stumbled backwards, trying to get free of his grip. And I fell into the shallow pit that I had dug.

“Mmmmm,” he growled, the low, guttural sound coming from deep in his throat. He licked his lips. “So very sweet, you taste. You must ask, if an Angel should tempt you into the woods, one important question. What is his name?”

My peripheral vision was shrinking, until there was nothing but him, his bright wings and his now black eyes. I knew the answer, but I could not help myself from asking.

“What is your name?”

He smiled, and the terrible beauty of his face was all coldness, like his breath, like his mouth, and emptiness like his eyes.

“Dear one. My name is Death.”

A great goose descended on the ruffle of leaves in the breeze, a bird of inappropriate size to its surroundings, a phoenix formed before its flame. The voice reached the shadow who stood in the wake of an elm. Then it burst through the canopy above, a clarinet bellowing a call to judgment.

Immediately, the shadow separated into the most human of moments: a memory. He recalled a concertina uncoiling like a life between his fingers and the clarinet punctuated his waltz. The goose landed awkwardly, webfooted to a stop as if something stronger than nature itself had drawn it here.

And he was no longer alone as he had been ever since the living one, his doppelganger, left here minutes… or was it hours… ago. Oh, he hadn’t been alone all that time. There were the sparrows. Perhaps they were what scared the other one away. After all, he was still breathing, life pulsing behind his temples with each inhale and exhale. He knew only what he could feel, see, believe. Yet something deeper than death or the void that existed between them must have told him what they meant.

The birds came two by two, a semicircle enclosing the men. Then he who passed for a living person bolted, forgot the visit to his grandparents’ grave which occupied his mind today. Or was it something else, the tie that bound these two? Either way, he broke it as if it never happened.

And the wraith who was known as Jan during life was alone with the sparrows. They meant to have him, and yet he wasn’t prepared to accompany them… yet. He’d stood near this elm, mingled with the few undead souls in limbo but none of them had any better answers than he why they haunted this sphere, rising with each breeze only to fall to earth again, padlocked and hasped.

Even when the young man came that first time, it was as if he had… and hadn’t gone with him. The fellow mourned grandparents he never knew; that empty ache inside him proved an adequate vessel for a kindred spirit. He’d no idea how long or far he travelled with his fleshy counterpart nor had he expected him to sense a presence, much less expunge a clue here or there on the page.

Still, it proved the most facile of ways to relive all that had transpired, didn’t it? It seemed so… a hundred years ago. Reliving a life cannot lengthen its span, however, so the sparrows were to bear him over. In that instant, Jan noticed the plaintive dirge of a mourning dove and it was a sound to frighten even those who are neither living nor dead, simply beyond fear.

If the specter had words or the lips to form them, he would have run headlong into the sparrows’ midst, arms flapping as if he might take flight, screaming “Be gone,” bidding death farewell. But he just stood transfixed by the goose. Someone, perhaps the voice of God, stroked his ear, moved lips long since unmoved to speak, cry out “Brother Husa, wing away with me, pull my heart up high among the clouds, so high we could almost touch the stars. Can you feel it? Already your feathers and my arms merge, lighter than air yet heavier than muscle and bone, blood and beak thrusting its way south, aiming north as naturally as a human compass—guiding us home.”

And suddenly, he knew where the sparrows meant to lead him, a place Jan sought for so many years. This bird could bear him there as well. In a moment, he was astride its broad back—or did he dangle beneath a wing?—borne farther aloft than he had ever dared dream, carried away out over the verdant growth of the Bohmerwald, the meadows and groves of his youth and he was tumbling, swallowed up in the green arms of his family at last.

Funny name for an inn, I thought, but it had been raining all day and I was soaked to the skin. This was a lonely part of the road and I didn’t fancy sleeping under a hedgerow tonight–any port in a storm, I thought, and reined in the mare.

The sign creaked over my head like a gallows–it was crudely painted and showed a pantomime devil roasting gobbets of flesh on a pitchfork over a blazing fire. Rain ran down the sign and funneled down the back of my neck, quenching my indecision. I raised my hand to the knocker–this one another gargoyle–and let it fall. A peal resounded through the house and I heard slow shuffling footsteps. Eventually the door opened to reveal a small wizened creature in mobcap and apron.

“Will you come in, sir?” it croaked and I stepped over the threshold.

“Will you look to my mare?”

She called an ancient ostler and he led the mare away to the stable. I should check on her later, I thought, but for now I was glad to get in from the weather.

The interior of the inn was not encouraging. I got the impression there was little or no custom in the house and yet there was a fire lit in the parlor and nothing wrong with the glass of brandy my hostess offered me “to keep out the cold.” Looking at her by candlelight she was no beauty but she seemed anxious to make me comfortable and I felt a bit ashamed of my earlier prejudice. I was no oil painting myself. It was time to make amends for my brusqueness, show her I was no savage.

“My compliments to the master of the house.”

“He’ll be here shortly,” she said. I wondered if she was deaf. She bustled around laying out supper for me, a dish of chicken soup with a curiously wrought long spoon, freshly baked bread and a thick wedge of cheese. I ate heartily; I was famished and drank deeply of the pitcher of foaming beer. The hostess had taken my sodden greatcoat to dry, and as I stared into the embers of the fire I found myself relaxing, the events of the day receded, I felt myself sliding towards sleep.

The door blew open with a crash and as I gathered my fuddled senses I saw that I had been joined by my host. He wore a crimson smoking jacket and seated himself in the chair facing me. The landlady hovered around him, filling his glass, but he waved her away and she went out, cackling gently.

“Welcome to my house,” he said. “Did you have a pleasant journey?”

“No,” I said, “but I am glad to be here and thank you for your hospitality.”

“The honor is mine,” he said. “Is that blood on your shirt?”

I glanced down at the spreading stain over my heart. “But…”

“Don’t worry, your adversary is dead.”

“I know.” I’d made sure of it. There were tears on my face. I shook my head blearily. “How did you–who are you?”

“Did you not read the sign?”

“The Devil’s Within?”

He nodded slowly. “All of us. When you let that boy die, you found your path to my door and you accepted my invitation to come in.”

Her dark silhouette danced underneath the chandelier. I watched in awe as the shadow moved across the ballroom floor so gracefully, almost as if in a waltz. Twisting and spinning, the shadow suddenly stopped before my feet. A lady’s pale hand surfaced before my eyes, reaching out to me. Shocked, I didn’t take the hand right away, but kept on staring instead, forgetting what I had come to the house for in the first place.

Then the ghost’s face appeared, and how dumbstruck was I when I laid sights on the beauty. She smiled softly at me, her chestnut curls framing her face nicely. I was surprised that I wasn’t scared as she curtsied slowly, her large white dress billowing around her body. Thick cream lace covered her entire neck, and the white fabric was loose around her arms.

She reached out to me once more, and without much needed consideration, I took her hand. She led me out onto the floor gently and I shuddered at how cold her hand was becoming. We started off the waltz slow then we began to pick up speed. As she gazed into my eyes, her hand sent chilling frost down my arm and I cried out in pain. I tried to tug my hand away but I found that my palm was frozen to hers.

Grinning evilly, she spun me faster and faster, causing our surroundings to become a blur. When I closed my eyes, I could hear her laugh as we kept spinning. Finally opening them, I noticed that we were now floating; her white hands were keeping me afloat. Yelling now, I still couldn’t seem to pull my hand away from hers. Our head grazed the golden ceiling, causing me to glance down. We were up high, and if I fell, I knew that the injury would be fatal.

Then we descended and I felt myself growing weak. My pulse slowed as we passed through the ballroom floor, and I watched in horror as we sank. Without choice, I stared at the ghoul holding me hostage, a sweet smile still on her lips. I ceased struggling as my soul gave up and all turned black as she pulled me under the marble floor.

The girl on the margins of the dance had been there every day for a week now, clinging to the edges of the party, half-hidden behind a fan that she had purchased cheaply in a Chinese shop. Whether she imagined that it brought her a kind of mystique, or she merely held it to cover the bored, tear-stained face of the perpetually left-out, the disc jockey didn’t know. She was wearing a red dress that had been in style perhaps thirty years ago, and probably imagined that it was retro. It clung to the awkward curves of her body like an eel-skin clings to the fingers when pried free of the flesh.

He waited until his set was over, and then wandered across to extend an invitation to her. She lowered her fan a little, and he could see the surprise, the excitement of hope that so closely resembled terror. Someone had asked her to dance. Her smile was as awkward as a broken mannequin’s as she took his hand and allowed him to lead her, at last, out onto the floor.

Later, when he lowered her down into the waters of the harbor and watched the red cloth of her dress swirling like a carp through the waves, he would remember that smile. Alarmingly similar in life as in death.