MicroHorror

Back when Dr. Howard Morris used to smile, he’d often joked, “These apes aren’t just chimps–they’re chumps!” which had excused his failure so far to teach an ape named Simba how to talk. That had always made the investors chuckle, back when they used to chuckle, before they shelled out another five grand to fund the next month’s research. But that was also when they understood that experimental failure had to precede experimental success.

Defeated, Dr. Morris now sat at his desk and glanced at the wall clock beyond Simba the ape’s cage. Almost quitting time, in more ways than one.

“Don’t look at me that way,” he said to Simba, who stared at him from her bed of straw. “This gun isn’t intended for you, you worthless bag of fur.”

Dr. Morris put the .357’s muzzle under his chin and pulled back the hammer. “See? I’m not going to kill you–although I should.”

Simba regarded him solemnly before reaching out to a computer keyboard by her foot. The buttons were labeled with pictograms showing a wide variety of nouns and verbs that could be constructed into simple sentences. On one side, things like a tree, a cat, and a moon. On the other, pictures of Simba eating, Simba sleeping, Simba running. Across the top, hash marks represented numbers.

Simba touched two buttons, and a voice synthesizer said, “Four four nine.”

“Yeah, I heard you the first four hundred forty-nine times you said that.” Dr. Morris used the gun muzzle to push his glasses back up his sweaty nose. “Four hundred forty-nine. Four hundred forty-nine. Why don’t you say anything else?”

Simba tapped the keyboard: “Four four nine.”

“Yes yes yes.” Morris set the gun upon a stack of grant-rejection letters so he could take off his white lab coat. He grimaced at the cloud of body odor that rose from the garment–a byproduct of being up for three days straight–as he dropped it on the floor. He was starting to think the ape smelled better.

He hesitated, rubbing his thumb against the gun’s handle. “Two years with that machine–a thousand phrases it could recognize–and yet all you can say is that damn number.”

Simba blinked and reached for the keyboard. “Four four nine.”

“Whatever.”

Dr. Morris swiveled his chair, turning his back on Simba so she wouldn’t be the last thing he saw. He jammed the gun under his chin and took a deep breath… then pulled the trigger.

The bullet exited from the back of his head amid a spray of red bone. A moment later, Dr. Morris fell backwards out of his chair.

The impact jostled the clock off the wall. It flipped one time before landing face-up beside the ape’s cage.

Simba looked from Dr. Morris, who was leaking his brains onto the tile floor, to the clock lying on the other side of her bars, and blinked. The hands pointed to the time of the scientist’s death: 4:49.

“It’s a murder simulator,” Dave Clearwater said in answer to the woman’s question. Others in his audience took notes as he leaned into the microphone. “The Death Alleys video game teaches our children to kill, and it teaches them to like it.”

The woman frowned at the billboards on Clearwater’s podium that advertised his new book, Video Games Corrupt Our Youth. “But where’s your evidence?”

“I’m sorry, but we have to move on to the next question.”

The woman blinked her eyes. “Oh, I see. Maybe you need to research this a little bit, huh?”

“Next question, I said.”

Her eyes began to glow. Clearwater felt a tickling sensation along his spine an instant before the room vanished.

He found himself in the front passenger seat of a car. The street scene tearing by looked like a cartoon drawn by computers. He screamed and looked at the driver, who was also a computer animation. The man–if you could even call him that–had close-cropped hair drawn with simple brown lines. His eyes were two black pits. His arms turned the steering wheel, but there were no pedals.

“What is this? Let me out!”

But even as he spoke, Clearwater recognized him. It was Nero Blaine, the protagonist of Death Alleys.

“Gonna get your ass,” a child’s voice spoke from Nero’s throat. It had a tinny quality, as if it came over the phone.

“Let me out! Please!”

“The people in this game are so noisy,” Nero said.

Another voice, a woman’s, answered in the same phone-in voice: “Maybe I should turn them off the next round.”

Despite his terror, Clearwater couldn’t help but note how unusual this was. What little research he had done into the topic suggested that males usually played these games. Not females… This was a game, wasn’t it?

As they conversed, Nero smashed out his side window with an elbow. Ahead of them, a white van turned onto the street. An Uzi appeared in Nero’s left hand, and he hung it out of the window to shoot at the van.

Clearwater screamed as they sideswiped the van. Both vehicles stopped in the middle of the street.

The two drivers shot at each other through their windows. A bullet grazed Clearwater’s shoulder, feeling like a bee sting. Still screaming, he pushed his door open and fell out upon gray, animated pavement.

Nero and the van’s driver, an animated woman, also got out. Clearwater gasped as he recognized her–or at least this crude representation of her. It was the woman with the glowing eyes.

She shot Nero in the head. An instant later, the main character of Death Alleys vanished. He left behind a glowing Uzi that glowed red until she picked it up.

She turned to Clearwater. “You’re next.”

A handgun lay on the street a few feet away, glowing red. Clearwater seized it and shot the woman in the chest. “Go to hell!”

The woman vanished.

Elation filled him. He’d never killed anyone before. The sensation was strangely exhilarating.

But how did he get here? Was he dead? Was this place Hell?

But there was no time to consider these questions. The street vanished and then reappeared. Clearwater and Nero again sat in the car. The car lurched forward. Nero again broke out his window with an elbow.

This time, Clearwater found a gun resting in his lap. Despite his terror, he couldn’t help but grin as he hefted the weapon.

Maybe this time, he could kill the van driver before she even got out of her vehicle. That would teach her.

Jake Stagger leant on the wheel of his Caterpillar mini ’dozer and watched the funeral party from a distance. It was practically always the same group of people, and he’d come to know them well in his time filling in graves. Jake popped a Kingsport cigarette from a rumpled pack and flamed up as the mourners stood in a black moon around the fresh grave in the distance, heads bowed and hands clasped. He recognized the widow immediately; she always stood out like a snowball in a coalmine. Face as white as death, almost luminescent behind the obligatory oversized sunglasses. Always dressed completely in black, the only thing that ever changed was the height of the hemline and the exposure of the bosom, according to the widow’s age. This one was approaching middle age, a respectable dress falling below the knees and just a hint of speckled cleavage.

Next to her were the children. The eldest son looked, as all eldest sons at funerals did, angry as a hornet’s nest. No sunglasses for this one, he wanted the world to see the rage and resentment in his eyes. His tie was crooked and hastily made, his long black coat seemed to billow behind him like a still from a Hong Kong gangster movie, and he was just waiting for someone to offer the wrong words of condolence so he could explode like a grenade.

Jake stubbed out his cigarette and checked his watch. Almost time now. He did a quick scan of the rest of the funeral party. The disinterested and distant family members who were only there out of genetic duty, staring at their shoes and tapping fingers against legs. The close friend who could barely stand, shaking like a baby kitten on a cold day. He’d be drunk in a couple of hours. The work colleagues attempting to look respectful and sad but not quite pulling it off. They had probably already cleared the dead man’s desk and taken him off the payroll; this was just the last in a list of annoying corporate chores.

The coffin was in the grave (five feet deep minimum for adults, two feet for babies and young children) and the porcelain widow tossed a handful of dirt into the hole. This was when it always happened, Jake thought, and he sighed, knowing what was coming next, crossing himself and spitting onto the ground.

And there they were. No-one could see them but him; he put that down to the years he had spent in this very situation, becoming attuned to the low frequencies and vibrations of a burial. They came clambering out of the grave, all claws and eyes, tiny little black creatures that resembled crabs without shells, pointy and sharp all over like a child’s drawing. Jake called them Choosers, and he watched as they pulled themselves from the dirt hole and started to scurry and trundle towards the mourners. Here it is, thought Jake, the moment of truth.

The Choosers, about a dozen of them, clicked and scratched their way over to the angry son. The first Chooser used its pincers and climbed the son’s pants, pulling itself up the side of his leg, over the belt, and then using the messy tie it scuttled up his chest and settled at his throat. The rest quickly followed, swarming up the son’s clothing and all falling still in different places over his body.

The funeral party started to disperse, Jake’s cue to fire up his digger and push mounds of earth into the grave. He watched the son as he walked away, the hideous creatures hanging from every part of him, knowing he was the next in line to die, not even speculating as to how it would happen as he had seen this way too many times. Jake started riding towards the grave, knowing that one day the Choosers would come crawling out of a hole and cover him from head to toe. And he’d see.

Whatever I want in all of the world could be mine with a simple click. A twitch of a muscle will press flesh to trigger, action to history, desire to fruition.

The offer is hard to refuse at the face of the usher. He possesses a secret hidden in the fold of his eyes. A simple crease maps out a limitless atlas of potential.

The page descends. His hand relaxes, untwists his grip on the greatest gift of all. The glint of nail casts sparks of light against the shadowed cloak.

And yet I do not relinquish. Could it truly be there? Could it come from this? The offer falls, picking up speed as every second passes before my eyes. The breath quickens, exhausting time on his face, in his mind, his generosity. The echo begins to fade, strike one, two, three clicks from my finger.

Four, five, six lights descend from his hand, his fingers, glowing across my face, my neck, around his cloak. Seven, eight, nine pulses open up the eye. Ten blinks to focus on his contract. Eleven wishes for brevity. Twelve.

The deal is done.

He takes his fee.

My leave is left.

When I first made it, it was just three words. “I feel incomplete.” A statement, simple; a sentiment to describe an emptiness, a longing. I never could have known that it would… develop, as it has, taking small bites of life when I didn’t notice. Accumulating, assimilating it grew, adding to itself. Maybe I should be proud. Proud of its cunning and wit and skill. It grew in word, in feeling, in scope and grandeur. It fulfilled itself. Incomplete. It became Shelly next door when she let me feel them, “…only outside of my shirt. Okay?” It became her mother, breath thick with alcohol and cigarettes, hands soft, “Does that feel good? Does it? You want to see how I can feel good?”

It was shame and confusion and excitement too. What sin ever made left no room for pleasure? That asshole Kevin at school; he grew it taking my pencil just to hear me beg for it back. Or Mr. Grane, watching and letting him do it, hating the “little pale puss-fag.” Maybe he saw himself in me then. These things, all of these things adding to nothing and the incompleteness growing. The idea is there, the picture formed. My life went on, I grew, like my statement, my sentiment, my other. It whispered to me while I slept. It replayed its building block scenes of scar and tear and empty holes, holes ever deepening and ever filling.

I crack my neck a lot, twisting my head hard to the side and back. It’s compulsive. Sometimes the smallest of shocks shoots up my neck and into my face and I see out of other eyes. My wrists are slim, knots of bone on either side, like bolts I sometimes reflect. Hot water on my wrists, the heat travels. It climbs my arms, my shoulders and my chest. I breathe fire in these times. The wind stirs my hair and my scalp rises, imperceptibly, above my brow firing cold air against my brain, nitrous-shock ride to the system. I swallow saliva, rust sweet with blood, grinding my teeth again. I cry and never outwardly and never notice. I do not notice and you do not. I sit beside you on the bus. I smell like honeysuckle and cloves. Or I grin at you at the bookstore, over the cover of some garishly colorful and oversized book, an equally oversized coffee and sugar concoction at the will of my left hand. You grin back. You are interested or ill and run to the bathroom. Sometimes I follow you back and sometimes we write a stain on the wall. I leave alone and maybe you see me at work, each day with a grin and a “Morning.” We complain about work. We leave. Where do we go? What are we made of outside of the role? What is driving, who is at the wheel, what the hell have you just done!

I’ve strangled you in khakis and slit your throat in an embroidered polo shirt. My loafers have been stained with your piss and your blood and your tears and your saliva, begging and pleading on your knees. You’ll really do anything? And nothing that a good scrub and polish could not erase. My nails are trim but enough to raise the blood. My hair is short, neat. I sit by you at church. I buy my ground beast of burden at the fast food joint. You showed me the ketchup when I seemed confused. I sleep on cotton and scent my sheets with mint. I bathe in rose oil and patchouli. I sing along to the commercials and vote for the next Best American Singing Star. I wear a razor belt around my stomach and get butterflies as I push through a crowd.

What beast has ever left a grave, howled at the moon or craved your sweet candy-cane neck so and been the danger that is my thought now? I feel incomplete.

Lila is spooning bicarbonate of soda from the tub directly into her mouth and swallowing it down with filtered water. Cystitis, caused by sexual activity after long abstinence. He’s gone, but her body is still reacting to his intrusions. Earlier this afternoon she conducted a cleansing ritual–sprinkling bicarbonate of soda in all four corners of the bedroom. Bicarb is absolutely harmless to human beings and good for so many things. Now it’s dark and full-mooned outside her bright kitchen. She can hear foxes, or maybe cats.

She met Peter on a dating website, Halloween 24/7. He defined himself as a werewolf, a podgy one. She hesitated over the categories, then chose witch. Before she knew it, he’d taken over–reordering her kitchen, deciding on a place for everything, he’d cleared a little shelf above the fridge for the bicarbonate of soda. “It must sit right here.” She’d been lonely for a while and quite enjoyed being bossed around, at first. Then it started to get on her nerves. Likewise she enjoyed the sex, until her body clammed up and simply refused. She tried to think reassuring thoughts, to overcome its objections, trick herself into compliance. But no, no, no.

Lila puts the empty tub of bicarbonate on the recycling pile. Peter also loved bicarb, which he called baking soda. He used it to clean his teeth, to counteract his bad breath, and to remove sweat stains from the underarms of his shirts. She feels guilty now, a wicked witch, for canceling their weekend break at a Glastonbury B&B. Telling him, “I think our personalities are just too different.” Showing him to the front door, to the threshold she’d blithely invited him to cross, just weeks earlier.

To rid yourself of earwigs and other crawling insects, mix one measure of bicarb and one of icing sugar, and place the mixture in a container. When the tiny creatures eat the mixture, they will bloat up and not be able to climb out again. You can then do with them what you will. Tempt cockroaches with a mixture of equal parts of bicarb and sugar. The sugar attracts them; the bicarb is deadly to them. Cockroaches are cannibals and will eat up their dead, so that’s an added bonus.

Why does Lila say oh God? Because she just left the kitchen for a moment and when she returned, she saw the bicarbonate of soda tub wasn’t on the recycling pile, it was on the little shelf above the fridge. And yet she’s alone in the house, she knows. Trapped, she thinks, I’m trapped. No, Lila, calm down. You just forgot where you put it. You’re so absent-minded. With trembling hand she grabs the bicarb and plonks it back on the recycling pile. It’s there, definitely. She switches the light off and then on again. The bicarb is back on the shelf. Oh God, she says, oh God.

This is how it begins.

Dan Reed hated the ocean. Always had.

He hated its mystery, its vastness, and he especially hated its romantic reputation. Truth be told, there wasn’t much in his life at the moment that he did like. He was divorced and bitter, and the thought of investigating the disappearance of a group of tourists in an isolated, Italian fishing village didn’t leave him wearing his best mood.

“I can’t believe I got stuck with this,” he complained to his partner, Paul. “Does anyone here even speak English?”

“I doubt it. We’re pretty far off the usual tourist path,” Paul replied, shining a flashlight on the blood-splattered dock.

“God, it looks like someone exploded.”

A group of children suddenly ran towards them with the type of zeal that said they had somewhere to be, and soon.

“Hey, do any of you speak English?” Dan yelled, trying to corral their attention.

They all turned around and stood in a restless silence, pleading the fifth.

“Well, does anyone know what happened here?” Dan asked, waving his arms around the blood.

Only one child spoke; one word: Angelina.

“Who’s Angelina?”

The response was unanimous. They all pointed towards the ocean, before turning and running off the beach.

“That was weird,” said Paul.

“Yeah, let’s split up,” Dan replied. “We’ll each check out a side of the beach, and then find ourselves a hotel. We can finish this up in the morning.”

They had barely separated, when a strange noise broke through the waves. It sounded like a needle scratching over an old 45. Dan felt his feet freeze to the sand; his entire body was swept with an icy numbness, as if hypnotized by the melodic screech. He heard Paul scream, but he couldn’t move, unable to even turn his head.

Paul screamed again and again. He screamed until it was no longer a scream, but an inhuman squeal, suffering in the wind.

The song suddenly ended, and Dan was able to feel his legs again. As he hobbled back towards Paul, he heard something thrashing against the sand and water, something just on the other side of the dock. It sounded like it may be a fish feverishly fighting for its last breath, but as he moved closer, he saw that it not only had a fish tail, but wings and a small, round head.

His heart met his throat when he saw Paul’s face, shrunken and nearly unrecognizable, wracked with pain. But Paul wasn’t alone.

The air was filled with the tortured creatures; some flew with ease, while others skipped awkwardly off the waves, bouncing back and forth between air and water. They separated into two columns, making way for the large creature flying through them.

It was her.

Angelina.

She looked like a mermaid crossed with a bat. A matted blaze of red hair flowed over her red eyes, down past her leathery wings, and onto her lengthy fish tail. She began to sing and Dan realized his body was no longer his own.

He watched everything.

He saw her snake-like fangs, and felt the venom enter his bloodstream as she bit into his shoulder. He felt his body dissolve, his arms and legs melt into a scaly tail, and his blood drain onto the beach. He tried to get up, but could only flail and flop in the sand and blood, thrashing until the night air took his breath. He screamed out the last of his humanity, when the wings tore through his back.

The song and the tide pulled him towards Angelina. She was calling him, calling all of them, through the waves and the moonlight.

She took them into the liquid night, down into the darkness.

Dan Reed hated the ocean.

Always will.

I am here and now. I have existed forever.

I have lived so long that it’s come to the point that I cannot even fathom all of my own past. I can tell you this: there was a beginning. When the world was young, so was I.

I may have been alone on the shore when the sea was new. I remember feeling a part of the air and the wind, how the water that cooled me was a new sensation. I was a part of it all, a being that was corporeal, but knew no difference between itself and the outside world.

For decades I was carried on the sea into this confusion that humans call the modern world. Time is nothing.

I will always be.

If I could touch you, I would, because it’s been so long since I have…

When was the last time that I did? It’s hard to remember. But you’re a human man; my touch may kill you.

What name did they give me? I know they called me Mara. I sang songs. I drew men to me. How perfect they were for all of their imperfection.

How their eyes light up when they see me. Upon that moment, I am their ideal, full of life and irresistible; I am what they have waited for all their lives, the thing that they cannot resist. No two men ever see the same woman when they see me.

But they will all tell you that I am the most beautiful woman that they have ever seen.

How many of them dived into the depths for me? How they kissed with abandon, as I pulled them down into the water, sucking the last breath of their lungs into my mouth?

In those moments, the last of their lives, I drew in all of their essence: their life, their need, their pain. To take this is the depth of ecstasy. They give, and their vision of me flows away as does the last of their spirit.

My soft arms turn cold and hard, made of bones and not the softness of skin. My long hair tangles them into a mass of dead seaweed.

My song is the first of the sea, the last of the sea, what all men that sailed in ancient times grew wise enough to fear.

I am Siren.

Illustration by Sarah Clarke

Charlie had never heard the word malice, but he sure as hell knew what it felt like. His dad could get pretty mad, but Mrs. Kowalski topped him out. She was real sore and he was the focus of anger so hot it scorched his soul.

“You are wicket und bad boy. May you rot for vot you did, Charlie Brown.”

Thirteen-year-old Charlie staggered as though she had hit him. The energy in her spite was like a punch between the eyes. Behind her mother’s skirts, Ginny Kowalski watched and smirked. They both knew she was the wicked one here, but Charlie was no snitch, and anyway Ginny was a girl; who would believe him over her?

Even now over fifty years later, he could recall the moment perfectly. For right then, as Ginny’s mother glared at him, a tiny pebble of doubt was dislodged in the minds of those townsfolk who were watching. A pebble that started an avalanche of bigotry carrying him away from everything he had ever known and out into a world that made sure he never forgot he was an outcast.

Charlie had existed ever since on the edges of society. He had been used, abused and cast aside, time and time again, by whoever had found a temporary satisfaction in someone more wretched than themselves. Now he had fetched up in Indiana, or some such place. He wasn’t sure because he had never finished school, so he didn’t read too good. Couldn’t write or figure much either, and at his age even stacking shelves was a trial, so he’d just drifted, existing on road-kill and handouts. Now he had fetched up against this shack, a place even more derelict than he was, and here, worn down and weary, he had settled to await his fate.

The way he’d lived, critters of some variety or other were always around. Some had tried to chaw on him and in turn he’d chawed on a good few of them. He’d got snake bit a couple of times, but then he’d just heated up his skinning knife and burnt out the bad stuff, after he’d killed the snake of course. Then he ate the snake. Snake was good. Tasted like chicken.

But it weren’t no snake that had bit him on the butt yesterday. At least no snake he could find. He’d dug at his ass with the red-hot tip of his knife, but even so he could feel something working into his vitals and eating him up from the inside. He’d clawed at himself with his ragged, dirty fingernails and even got the skillet hot and sat on that, but apart from the fearsome pain it didn’t make no difference; he still sensed something nibbling away. Then he got bit again and this time he saw and killed the spider. It was a fiddleback and Charlie knew he could be in trouble. Fiddleback bites sometimes went bad and sometimes, very bad. Fiddleback bites could rot the very flesh from your bones and sure enough the bite on his hand was turning black. Charlie built up the fire and prepared for some cutting.

But it wasn’t till he tried to settle back down again, blood running over his fingers, that he got an inkling of just how much trouble he was in. He got closer to the ground than he should have done and there was a warm, wet squelching in his pants that wasn’t going to be good whatever had caused it. He pushed his jeans down, rolled on his side and stared into Hell. Most of his left cheek and half his thigh was black streaked with white, like a part-burnt log, and as he stretched a lump just fell off. A moment later blood began to ooze. Charlie had never heard the word necrosis, but he sure as hell knew what it felt like.

“Shoot, Mrs. Kowalski,” he muttered, “you cursed me real good.”

“Shh, there’s a croucher on the ceiling,” said Timmy, pulling the blanket up to his eyes, shivering.

Randy had been sleeping over at his good friend’s house since forever and he’d never seen him this shaky. There were stories passed in school about Billy and his crazy monsters but Randy never believed them. He thought it was all some sort of misplaced nightmare.

Timmy kept looking at the ceiling, sensitive to the touch. He jumped when Randy called his name.

There was a certain longing buried within Timmy’s eyes. He wanted to see something there but feared the unveiling. What if there was a monster? What if it wasn’t a dream?

“What’s a croucher?” asked Randy.

Timmy shook out of his stupor, shushing his friend.

“Timmy, what’s wrong?”

“He came a couple nights ago. I saw him there on the ceiling, crawling around and licking his ears. His eyes appear from time to time to see if I’ve fallen asleep but I never do,” whispered Timmy.

Randy started feeling anxious, looking around for movement. “I don’t see anything.”

“He’s not always there.”

“What does he want?”

Timmy shrugged, nibbling on his fingers. “I don’t know. He says he’ll kill anyone who gets near him. He likes that area over the door. That’s where he crouches and waits. I think he’s hungry.”

A passing car streamed light across the ceiling, illuminating what looked to be a sliding bulk in the far corner, retreating back to the darkness to remain hidden.

“He’s there,” said Timmy.

“I see him. Make him go away.”

Timmy shuddered, pulling the blanket over his head and praying. Randy joined him and listened, wishing he was home in his own bed.

There was a sharp thud above them and then a grinding wiggle.

“He’s close,” Randy said.

“I don’t want to look. You do it, Randy.”

“Okay.”

Randy slowly peeked above the hem of the bed sheet, struggling to see. He reached over to turn on the bedside lamp but it didn’t work. Timmy seized his arm.

“Something’s got me!”

An unseen force yanked Timmy from the bed by his feet, pulling him along the floor and up the walls. Timmy screamed, arms stretched out, disappearing into the darkness.

Before Randy could react, Timmy was gone.

“Timmy!” Randy shouted, dashing to the bedroom door. No matter how hard he twisted, the knob wouldn’t turn.

From outside in the hall, he heard Timmy’s voice, speaking steadily with a hint of fear like he had in bed–an apparitional memory.

He likes that area over the door. That’s where he crouches and waits.

Randy froze, paralyzed in fear. There was another slithering movement above him and then a strong hand grabbed his neck, pulling him to the ceiling.

He saw Timmy’s cold, lifeless face, jutting out from the darkness. His eyes were black and his teeth were pointed, grinding in anticipation. Like a lifting fog, his face began to change, reverting back to the same rough, jagged features of an unspeakable vermin from Hell. Its eyes started to glow, emitting heat like an oven burner.

“Sorry, Randy,” said Timmy, crawling out from under the bed and sliding beneath the sheets, covering himself so he wouldn’t have to watch.

Timmy was never taken. He was only the bait.

The creature’s mouth started to widen and the combined screams of a thousand lost children drowned out Randy’s own.

From beneath the sheets, Timmy covered his ears and started to pray.

I think he’s hungry.