MicroHorror

The crack along the wall appeared to be getting bigger and Gerald thought that he could see eyes, blinking eyes somewhere deep in the darkness. He looked at his feet and they kept moving, slipping in and out of his line of vision. The skin on the back of his hands had turned very grey and had begun to crumble, dust puffing away in to the air. Ice had formed on his hair and his breath ran out in a painful frozen mist, his throat burning.

On the floor next to his left foot an upturned bottle of red wine dripped the last of its contents on to the wooden floor. Gerald’s dog lay, paws on ears under the kitchen table, his big eyes darting back and forth, too afraid to sleep.

The crack wrenched and ground, each sound scratching at Gerald’s head, the inside of his skull, thin pins scraping at bone. He felt hot wax drops on the back of his eyes and his nose began to stream, viscous snot burning like ammonia. He raked his tongue across the roof of his mouth, flicking off the small polyps that had grown there. He wanted to scream but his throat had constricted, an almost airless rasp, a weak whistle.

“Hello, Gerald.”

The white pain in his brain eased for a second and he stared at the crack in the wall as the thing within began to push rubbery, slick hands out of the thin hole. It grabbed the edges and began to pull. Its bald slimy head was next, just muscle and sinew and blood vessels over a stark hard skull. In a few moments it stood before him, naked and dripping blood on the black rug.

Gerald tried to speak but nothing happened, the pain was severe and now more of him began to peel and dust, his nose slipping away in clumps, like wet sand. His tongue began to swell, bloody gums leaking pus filling his mouth with stench.

The dog padded over to the man and began to lick his feet, wet bloody licks. The man crouched down and clasped the dog, ruffling the fur on either side of its head.

“Hey, Steve, how are you doing, boy? You’re such a good and loyal dog.”

Steve showed his appreciation by nuzzling the man and letting the man tickle his tummy.

“Now, Gerald, don’t fight it. Relax.”

The man smiled gently at Gerald and bent down so his eyes were inches away from Gerald’s rolling yellow sickened eyes. Gerald’s face had begun to melt, dollops of blood and skin pit-patting on the wood floor below.

“It’s okay, Gerald, not long now.”

The man picked up Gerald’s watch from the small pool of body fluids and slipped it over his own wrist; he rubbed the new formed red raw skin that had begun to grow on his arms and smiled again.

Gerald had become a lifeless mass oozing off the chair, his face barely recognizable. His dog, Steve, sat still, waiting on the man’s command, barely noticing Gerald.

The man began to get dressed, one of Gerald’s old suits, charcoal grey, an austere touch he thought for an important occasion. He slipped on a pair of Gerald’s worn brogues and flexed his toes, perfect. Finally, he slipped Gerald’s wallet into the inside breast pocket of his suit and patted his leg. Steve came bounding over to him, tongue lolling and tail flapping furiously.

“Goodbye, Gerald. Thanks for everything.”

The crack in the wall had closed almost perfectly now and the rest of the room just looked bare and very normal. The puddle that had been Gerald was beginning to disappear, seeping into the floorboards.

The man took a last look around the room and flicked the light switch off. He began to whistle, flashing his newly minted pearly white teeth and then shut the door behind him as he left. Steve walked along beside him, always happy to be at his master’s side.

Out in the desert I grew sick of locust. Guts of paste, papery wings, legs like barbarous toothpicks; whether roasted, honey-pickled or fried in their own tobacco spit. Besides, the idea entered my head: why not give food a chance?

Then came that broiling afternoon I stumbled on a thriving hill. Scooped up a handful. Sifted out the sand. Devoured several dozen writhing beings.

The taste was piquant, sulphurous; with a metallic hint of exquisitely thin tin foil. Forget candied corpses: we’re talking swarming nibbling live pismires.

Most got crunched to death. Petioles, gasters, mandibles, heads, legs, antennas, alitrunks–broken, crushed; salivated, swirled, gulped.

But a minute percentage made it. Clung to the palate. Curled between molars. Grasped the uvula the way a whorehouse monkey might a chandelier. Onto the root of the tongue latched. Or got swallowed alive–thence to do battle in the belly with my tapeworm, like a mongoose with a cobra.

That first lunch totaled thousands. I was starved–had fasted for days; disgusted with locust, unable to locate a viable substitute. Of these maybe ten lived–hunkered down, scrounging off my esophagus; while I continued, ignorant of the infiltration, to consume prey alive.

I took a fancy to the eyes. Tinier than pinpoints. But of a toothsome gelatinousness yielding a tangerine licorice tang. Were I a gourmet, instead of an anchorite, I would doubtless have blinded billions, expressly to obtain a few precious thimblefuls of ocular caviar, so keen became my passion.

As it was, I gobbled only three more meals of squirming hymenoptera, before deciding they tasted too sublime. I returned to the killed, cooked, bland locust; the confusion of who ate whom no longer enchanting.

But of the few score who survived mastication, at least one resultant ant not only lodged herself in my larynx, but learned to manipulate the organ. So that, while talking to God (I’m talking to you right now, Lord) I unpredictably lapse into appeals for heaps of dead beetles.

When the insect commandeers my voice I also sometimes pray aloud for Domino sugar sacks high as Sinai; colonies more vast than Shanghai; the extinction of ant lions. A honeydewed aphid in every pot. And life everlasting–incessantly working oneself to death in the service of Heaven’s Queen.

Each time such pirated prayers erupt, the ants play musical chairs, racing around like thoughts that ought not occur.

Oh Lord, I recant me of these rants. Can’t you see? It was just a momentary mistake in dietary intake! Don’t hear this banter, this Indianapolis 500 of heretics!

Words be damned! This chaff of chance chants! Words, words, I got words in my pants. More words yet–all I own is a loin cloth!

You know me. Are intimate with my thoughts. Although (was it only yesterday?) thought felt bug crawl up back of throat–to penetrate some membrane giving into the brain…?

Time feels all the same out here under the sun, above the sand, among the horizons. Likewise inside–where you scrutinize the ant farm of my skull.

And because I am your slave, oh Lord–a feeler, a treader, an eater upon the face of the earth–all the world fills with the promise that work will conquer life.

Hey, Luna–tick-tock! Smile crazy, lick a tear. Let your face tell time. Set alarm for Xmas. Wake me to mass murder.

Hey, Luna–tickle time tomorrow. Such a sorrow, to own no particular erotic tic!

Oh, la la! Take me to your sister Ola. Land me in a cup on her saucer. While you rise, Luna, lusty as a tick struck blood. Rise from the couch, beaming at our antics, anticipating orgasm; in your fist a pearl-handled pistol gasping.

Oh, Luna–tick-tock! Tell when to dash a skull gibbous through the wall. Scent the room crescent silver. Crown the scalp with sparks. Detain logic lollygagging in the undead hall. Up from a half-dream you don’t even HAVE a sister–own brother sun.

Oh, Luna–tickle me fresh blood!

The road was shadowy, where the leaves had not yet fallen. Every so often one or two would fall to the ground with something like the sound of a husky whisper. The entire place was aflame, and were Nathaniel to walk in it, the crackling the action would produce would seal the likeness to a world of flame, the flames in which the world would end.

The world would end. One of these dusty mornings, the world would catch fire, ignited by the sunrise, and by the time it had all burned out, hollow, the night would be unending. There was no cycle; the world would not begin again. There would be night, ashes in the darkness forever. It would be cold then, thought Nathaniel. He wouldn’t like it, then. But he’d have to live with it.

He’d have to live. He didn’t know how long. It might be forever, and then again it might be just this side of forever. His death could always be a step ahead, teasing, just out of reach. Not that there would be any days to measure it by.

Nathaniel took a step, and the flames rose.

The little man, shriveled up and hunched over in his metal cage, stares vacantly into space. Mindlessly, he touches the scar on his left cheek and contemplates his incarceration. He does not recall who imprisoned him. When was he arrested? Why? Has he been convicted of a crime? A misdemeanor or a heinous crime? He does not recall. Trapped within a square cage fit for an alley cat or a stray dog with rabies, inside a dank and dimly lit room, he is lost and claustrophobic.

Periodically, he is assaulted by violent panic attacks and he breathes heavily, as he listens to the relentless palpitations and the fierce pounding inside his chest. He feels faint but can’t fall. Perhaps he’ll black out or die. Death would be sweet. Yet he does not die. And so he contemplates his incarceration.

Will they release him? Or can he escape? Once more he stares vacantly into space. But when his fugitive mind returns, he notices that the cage is not locked. What kind of trap have they set for him?

If he leaves his cage and perhaps this tomblike room, a sarcophagus for the living dead, where shall he go? Is he above the earth or below? In an attic or basement or subterranean structure? In an old-fashioned prison or an eerie futuristic one with new forms of torture? How shall he find his way home?

He drifts off again and wanders in a barren wilderness of his mind where he dreams dark dreams. When he returns, he will crawl out of his cage or crumble into a ball of terror from which he may never return.

Lindy was tired after her birthday party. She had just turned eight and her friends had come over to sing for her; they gave her presents and spent the afternoon with her, playing games and having fun. Now, after dark, they had all gone home and she started to look again at all her gifts. There were a few pretty dolls, a teddy bear and a miniature tea-set, but she was especially excited about the rocket lamp her parents had given her.

She switched it on in expectation. Soon, the heat would cause the reddish wax to become less dense and the blobs would start floating up and down, the movement caused by differences in density and temperature, and convection. However, she was too tired to wait for the blobs of wax to heat sufficiently to start moving, so she fell asleep while the mass was still lying inert at the bottom, cold.

It was changing in color. It was no longer a reddish orange, but had become dark red and had not formed several blobs, but only one. It started to pulsate. Embedded in it was a network of veins of an even darker color, like in a half-hatched egg. The surrounding glass itself became soft, membrane-like. It started to tear, and the liquid first seeped through, then it flowed more freely. The wax itself squirted through and landed on the table.

Then it slid off and fell onto the floor, splashing out a bit in the process. After a while it started gathering itself, making itself more compact. Now it was creeping up the bed’s leg, like an amoeba, with peristaltic movements, contracting and expanding in turns, systematically. Once it was on the bed, it started slithering towards Lindy’s head, extending tendrils to her face…

When Lindy’s mother peeked into her bedroom the next morning, she was surprised to see that the lava lamp had been shattered, fragments of which were lying on the floor.

What was even more unsettling, though, was the heaving mass under the blankets. Of Lindy, there was no sign.

I breathe, I live, and I exist.

It’s what I tell myself every day, every miserable second that my stomach lurches from hunger. I hide down here, in the dirt, waiting. Waiting for the day when I can return, when man can no longer hunt me. It is important that I wait, or I and the rest of my kind will become acquainted with extinction. Although it is not our only fear; fire, guns, and above all, man are our highest anxiety, we do not wish to kill for fun. We only bring death upon those that we have chosen to benefit our stomachs.

I have no name, no definition for my species. What I am, although I appear almost human, I regret that I am not. I am a beast, a shape shifting demon. I and others of my kind can choose whatever form we would like to be. I have chosen the shell of a man because, for the entirety of my existence, it is what I have yearned to be. But it is not what I am and many humans, who I have come into contact with, have known this truth. My eyes are too red, and round, an obvious flaw. Also, my skin is the color of the moon; another imperfection.

It is all quite peculiar. I eat these human, their flesh, as well as drink their tantalizing blood and yet, I want to become one of them… but I am not sure why. I believe it is because of a woman I knew once. She was kind to me, when many of them were not, and it was her pure soul that released my veiled emotions. Though I can’t seem to remember her name… it was so long ago, before the age of technology, when family was the most important goal in life. Yes, I know she is the reason I choose to carry on.

And although it is dark down here, and I am all alone, I can feel her beside me. I can smell her honey-colored waves, and the scent of her womanhood. She’s been gone for a long time now, but I’ll see her one day when the Earth starts to decay and I am left to die. On that fateful day, my eyes will cloud over and in the place between worlds, I will see her approach my fallen corpse with open arms, summoning me to join her side in the afterlife.

“It only takes one shot.”

“What does?”

“To kill a zombie,” Fred said, rubbing a damp cloth over the barrel of his shotgun while the two sat comfortably in Fred’s small kitchen. The feel of the cool metal excited him as he continued on cleansing, ignoring the astonished expression from his friend Daniel.

Daniel, who was rather against violence but not when it came to zombie killings, replied, “I don’t think so. It takes at least three bullets to take one of those suckers down.”

Fred shook his head at his friend’s mild manner. “No, no, Daniel. Here, follow me, I’ll show ya.” He led him out of the kitchen and down to his cellar, where a loud howl was emitting.

“What the hell is that?” Daniel asked, as they grew closer to a door at the bottom of Fred’s basement. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve got one of ‘em locked down here.” He said fearfully, while he kept close to Fred’s backside.

Fred only smiled a toothless grin as he unlatched the thick metal door. And as it slowly swung open, Fred lifted the gun into air just as the zombified man charged in his direction.

The sound of the gun rattled the walls of the basement, and Daniel was forced to cover his ears from the harsh vibrations. As Daniel peered over Fred’s shoulder, he saw the bloody mess of what used to be a living zombie.

“It’s dead. Just in one shot… how’d ya do it, Fred?” Daniel asked with conveyed amazement.

“Aw, hell, Daniel, you just shoot ‘em in the head!”

No one paid much attention to the huge man in bib overalls, a stained white T-shirt and dirty work boots as he pushed a cart toward the grocery store’s bottle return area. There was a black plastic bag inside the cart, and the cart’s front right wheel wiggled and squeaked. It wasn’t until the man arrived at the bottle return and began removing body parts from the bags that people took notice.

The giant hefted a human leg from the bag and guided the bare foot into the receptacle. Toes painted hot pink disappeared into the hole. The machine beeped loudly. Its display indicated that the store didn’t accept that brand of bottle. The man grunted, and shoved the leg in up to the knee. He leaned into it, and the rest of the leg went into the machine.

Customers who had been redeeming bottles and cans fled the bottle return, their faces green, their hands covering their mouths. Only the store clerk who was in charge of the bottle return area stayed behind. He watched with horrified fascination as the man reached into his bag and pulled out a woman’s severed head.

The giant held the head up to the bottle machine’s opening by its long, matted brown hair. The head was too big. The man pressed the head against the hole and pushed. The bones in the head began to give way with wet, cracking snaps and pops. Fluids seeped from the head’s ears, eyes, mouth and nose. He pushed harder, wedging the head halfway into the opening. The machine beeped again. The display requested that the item be inserted bottom first. Ignoring the request, the giant put all of his weight behind one final push. The head sounded like an imploding cantaloupe as the man crammed it into the receptacle.

Blood dripped down the front of the machine. Strands of long, brown hair and one pink toenail stuck to the gore that surrounded the opening. The read-out flashed and fizzled for a moment, then indicated the man had $4,372 in returns. The giant pressed a button and took his receipt. The clerk held his breath as the man pushed his cart past him and out of the bottle return area. The clerk let his breath out and shook his head, reaching for the phone on the wall. As the giant pushed his cart down the aisle, its right front wheel wiggling and squeaking, a voice came over the store intercom.

“Cleanup in bottle return.”

It says V. Westerman on her mailbox. I call her Victoria. She moved into the apartment above mine eight months ago, and my life’s been one long symphonic poem ever since. If it wasn’t for Frank, I would’ve asked her out by now.

She’s standing at the head of the line waiting for the bus with her friend A. Zelnick. They’re both tall. They have slim builds, dark hair, and their voices remind me of Julie Andrews. They could be sisters, but they’re not. I remember the day shortly after Victoria moved in when they met at the mailboxes and introduced themselves. I stood off to one side and acted like I was reading my mail while I inhaled Victoria’s fragrance and listened to her genteel laugh.

They work in a legal office in the high-rise across the street from where I toil as the director of the local arts council. I know this because I rode up the elevator with them one day. Victoria acted like she didn’t recognize me. I waited for her to press a button and then selected 12, two floors above hers. The door opened, and they stepped into an area that contained the offices of Klein, Armour, Franks and Celeste, Attorneys at Law. I assume Victoria and A are paralegals. They don’t dress in suits or carry the kinds of briefcases I associate with lawyers. Someday when A’s not around, I’ll ask Victoria.

It’s been six days since Frank’s been in her apartment. Maybe they’re not seeing each other any longer. He’s not right for her anyway. Unlike my Victoria, he’s a horny rabbit.

One Saturday, I awoke to the sounds of her mattress squeaking and two people moaning. I looked at the clock on the table next to my bed. It was 7:53. I pulled the pillow and covers over my head and went back to sleep. The adagio movement of their erotic symphony started at 9:30 and lasted almost an hour. When the rondo commenced at 1:30, I went to a matinee. I returned home after dinner and saw them kissing in front of the elevators. His hands were all over my Victoria, like an orchestra conductor urging the musicians to a Wagnerian climax.

When I entered my apartment, I heard the introduction to the final allegro in progress, and left for another movie. A spirited encore was underway when I returned. Poor Victoria. Why didn’t he leave her alone?

The sounds of squealing brakes interrupt my reverie when the bus pulls up to the stop. The doors open and the melody in my heart strikes a dissonant chord when Frank exits. He and Victoria look at each other for a few seconds before she melts into his arms like butter on a hot English muffin, and they lock lips.

Damn, I guess Frank isn’t as ex as I thought. Oh well, one fish does not an ocean make, as my mother used to say whenever I told her about another lost love. I avert my eyes to A, look her over and wonder if she might make a worthy partner for my next pas de deux.