MicroHorror

Mona Shotzki took her husband Dan’s hand. It felt cold to her despite his gloves. They stood with other neighbors behind yellow police tape. They were both bundled against the night’s slushy cold. Mona spoke first: “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Mona felt his hand shiver. She knew he was trying to forget.

“Another body,” he said softly.

She heard the pain in his voice. She turned her head to look where he looked. Fifteen bodies in body bags laid out on the grass front lawn of the dark rundown house. Two policemen gently laid another alongside the others. A small lump in a large bag. A child.

Hard to believe, Mona thought, pure chance between her husband and them. Pure luck that he was alive and those in the bags were dead.

“That’s her,” Dan said. Mona felt him squeeze her hand hard.

A tall, muscular woman was led out by police. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back. She wore a jumpsuit and red apron.

With a start, Mona realized the apron wasn’t red. It was white. It only appeared red because it was almost completely stained with blood.

The other people around her began to shout. Hateful shouts. Fearful shouts.

Mona wanted to shout too, but she felt Dan let go of her hand. She looked at her husband. He was bent over. She saw him pick up a stone, a big stone.

As Dan stood Mona saw a look of hatred on his face. A look that she’d never seen before. He snarled and showed his teeth. He didn’t say a word. With all his might he threw the stone at the woman.

The throw was off. It broke a front window in the house. The result looked to Mona like sharp teeth she’d once seen in a museum, a shark’s teeth.

The police hustled the woman quickly into a police car. Other stones were thrown by others in the crowd. A rock flew past Mona’s head. It cracked the rear window of the police car as it drove off. The car slipped sideways briefly in the slush then sped away, red lights flashing.

Neighbors pushed past the police then, as if a dike had been opened. Pushed past and broke the yellow tape. They rushed to the body bags to find their loved ones.

“Don’t open the bag,” Dan said softly.

Mona looked at him. He looked afraid.

“Please don’t open the bag,” he said again.

Mona looked back at the house.

A couple she recognized from church knelt by one of the bags. The last one brought out. The one with a child.

Mona watched as they zipped open the bag.

Mona felt her husband take her hand.

Mona watched as the couple screamed. When she saw what was in the bag she felt herself involuntarily sob. She grabbed her husband and hugged him. She buried her face in the rough wool of his coat and wept with love for him.

My Dear Kerry,

Written here is my greatest secret.

I thought long and hard about telling you this, believe me. You are sixteen. You’re on the cusp of adulthood now. I could have told you back when you were little, when you first came to my door. But you were just a little thing then. I couldn’t be sure what they’d tell you about a woman like me. So I had to be careful.

I feared you would not believe what I have to tell you.

Your mother is my great-granddaughter. She never knew me, but I am sure she heard about me. People make up all kinds of stories.

Where our people come from, on the island, shamans and mystics are respected. They are looked towards for answers and comfort. People speak as freely of magic as they discuss the change of seasons or the tides that bring in the fish that leave their spawn at the shore.

On Kitanya, magic is simply a fact. Like the warm rain or the breeze in the palms.

The New World is filled with only one way of thinking. When I first came to live here, when I was only a few years older than you, the silly things that people said were good enough to get you killed.

They burned our kind. They drowned us. They buried us alive.

If you were born with the veil, they knew to fear you. If you speculated that it might rain on a clear, cloudless day, and it happened, they were like to send the dogs after you.

The day you were born, Kerry, I read the talismans. A bird stood outside on the porch and chirped three times. The wind blew heavy from the northeast. I went outside and slaughtered my hen, waiting to see if the blood would speak to me of things whispered on the breeze. And it did. A new seer was to be born into the family.

I found out where my great-granddaughter and her husband had moved to in order to be closer. I went to the hospital and watched you in the nursery. And I waited.

The day you came to my door for candy, when you were only seven years old, changed everything. You came for Halloween! I will never forget you, your precious face.

Over these years it’s been my privilege to watch you grow. But now I must prepare you for the inevitable. The life of a seer is never a safe one, even in these times when they speak of tolerance and diversity. People will want to test your skills. Some will want to make an experiment of you. Others will hold you up to ridicule.

Miracles have been made with technology, my love, but men now fear the miracles that are inborn within us.

Truly, the important thing is that you are honest to yourself, about what you are.

Kerry, tonight, as you enter your sixteenth year, you will come into your full powers.
Use them wisely. Remember what you were always taught: that evil returns to the house from which it came, only a hundredfold stronger.

I have left you every spell, every incantation in this book… Guard it wisely. Commit whatever you can to memory, because you will not always have it when you need it.

There are those which still seek to destroy our kind. I am leaving you, but I do not leave you without defenses. It is safer for you–and I–if we are not together. During this powerful time, all manner of Others will be drawn to you: creatures from the dark as well as those from the Underworld.

You will know them by your power. Their real forms will be revealed to you.

Be strong, and keep well your secrets. I pass onto you the strength of the ancestors who went before us.

You are a Witch.

My Love Always,
Mary Ava

The chase began after I saw the man murder a woman in the hallway. The building was mostly vacant after a late-night party. I chased him up several flights of stairs before reaching the roof.

The man was at the ledge when I caught up with him. He stared at me with coldly as I attempted to talk him down. In his hand he held a heart. Evidently he took it from the woman in the hallway. I stared in horror as he bit into it and jumped off the roof. He extended rudimentary wings and disappeared into the horizon.

“She was a demon! I swear it!” The man twisted and contorted in vain against the steel handcuffs.

“Tell it to the judge, freak.” The officer lowered the man’s head and pushed him into the back of the car.

The crime scene was terrible. Another dead prostitute at the hands of the “madman.” He was finally apprehended after two long years.

Soon another will be commissioned by the church. Another martyr will keep up the good fight against the succubae that haunt the street corners. In the meantime, countless will be seduced and the balance will again be shifted.

The mossy steps led to the water’s edge; it was murky as ever. The creature was met with resistance again. He shuffled toward the cool depths of his shelter. Tears met the expanding ripples generated by his webbed feet. Who knew a creature such as he could lament?

The setting sun darkened the hillside, yet then blazed alight from a hoard of torch-wielding villagers. They chattered slanderous, hateful things. If only the woman wouldn’t have screamed, he wouldn’t have murdered her. He dove into the water, washing away the blood and matted hair from his conscience. Tomorrow is another day.

He smashed the dark oak desk into shards of stray wood strewn about the chamber with his sledgehammer. He couldn’t eat the whole thing in one bite.

As the veins in his eyes pulsed and his teeth ground for individual superiority over the others, he tried to think of something that didn’t involve what the guard outside the heavy door was going to watch him eat through the bulletproof glass.

Blueberries, they’re nice, I remember blueberries. The best ones came from the big bushes outside the McCoy house in Michigan. I’m going to eat a desk for a crime I didn’t commit. Blueberries.

He laid his hammer down, sat on the floor, and stared for a few minutes at the wall. He eventually picked up a dime-sized chip of wood. He held his nose and opened his mouth wide.

This is a blueberry. This is a McCoy blueberry. They’d always be happy to give me their blueberries, and this is one of them.

As he swallowed it whole, he gagged as he felt the edges of the chip cut the lining of his throat. He forced it into his stomach. The back of his mouth became sour with little drops of blood.

That was a blueberry, a very sweet blueberry, picked at just the right time. I probably liked it.

He choked down more chips. More blood came up, and nausea set in from the wood and its varnish. He couldn’t throw up; then he would have to start over.

He got to his feet and raised the sledgehammer high above his head to make more of these pieces out of the bigger ones.

I love blueberries, I’m going to eat a lot of blueberries.

The door flung open, and before he could say anything, the guard took his hammer and slammed the door.

Well, it looks like I’m going to be eating big blueberries.

He sat on the floor and grabbed a foot-long length of splintered oak. He tried to break it, but it would only break in half.

He pointed his face at the florescent light on the ceiling and opened his mouth wide.

This is a blueberry. I know it looks nothing like a blueberry, but it is. I’m a sword swallower, I can eat a sword, a sword made out of blueberries.

He nudged the wood past the opening of his throat. He felt it scrape, he felt it slide, gently, gently, gently.

This is a blueberry. It doesn’t taste like one, but it probably is.

He felt his mouth water, and in doing so he gagged. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to pull the wood out of his throat but the edges were caught on the inside of him.

With a long scream saturated by his torn throat, he ripped the stick out and threw it to the other side of the chamber. His mouth was a fountain of saliva and blood. His esophagus might as well have been on fire with the pain.

He turned his head, and saw a sturdy board that made the surface of the desk. He only split it in half with the hammer.

That is no blueberry.

With gentle strokes, I brushed all my teeth out of their sockets that morning. I didn’t notice until I heard them fall one by one on the linoleum. I felt for any that remained, and my index finger went through my lower jaw with no effort. There was no pain.

I pulled away, but a broken sliver of jawbone caught the finger and it peeled off the knuckle. I checked with my tongue, and my finger was still there. In doing so, I wore my tongue to a flailing stump. There was no pain.

Blood was splattered all over the sink. I looked in the bathroom mirror, and my stained white robe sank as it cut into my shoulders. I held my hand out in front of me and looked at the finger stump. I heard my bones pop as my arms began to crumble at the shoulders. There was no pain.

I brought a hand to my forehead, and it lodged itself into my brain. The finger in my jaw had fallen out, cutting a long gash. The weight of my body was too much for my pelvis, and my torso fell between my legs. There was no pain.

When I hit the floor, the shock sent some of my bones flying to the corners of the floor. I darted my head around trying to find a possible solution, and in doing so, I broke my neck. I tried to scream, but my voice became a gurgling whisper as my larynx shriveled. There was no pain.

I stared at the high ceiling with my neck snapped backwards. The arm in my head obstructed my view, but somehow I could still see through my splitting eyes. As my lungs filled with blood I struggled to breathe. I should have been dead by then. The weight of the robe snapped whatever flesh was left on my torso and I fell in a twitching puddle. There was no pain.

I sat there decomposing, watching the sky change colors in the bathroom window. As the blood over what remained of my eyes coagulated and blinded me, I waited for anything. There had to be pain. There just had to be.

Julie adjusted the rear-view mirror and let up on the accelerator. The tires on the pavement whined and the wiper blades were too loud. She turned on the radio, but all it received was static. Somewhere behind her was Max. Somewhere, she knew, he was hunting her. She shuddered and glanced behind her. No headlights. “He can’t be following me. He doesn’t know where I’m going.” She took a deep breath and focused on the road.

Faintly, from the passenger seat, she thought she heard a scratching sound. “It’s your imagination.” She snapped off the radio hard, as if the action could banish the voice between her ears. Max always knew how to get to her, even here, on the road, far away from him.

Again she thought she heard the scratching sound. Reaching up she flicked on the overhead light and glanced over at the seat. It was bare. “I told you it was your imagination,” she muttered and snapped off the light.

A car appeared around the upcoming bend and she squinted in the sudden light. As it was about to pass she glanced over at the passenger side of the windshield.

A large hand was crawling on the dash.

No, a spider, a very large spider, the size of a hand, was crawling on the dash.

Max had known she was terrified of spiders.

She screamed and swerved to the left, barely missing the oncoming car. As she swung back into the right lane she scrabbled for the dome light again, but she missed the switch and hit the open case instead, breaking the bulb. The spider was no longer on the dash, but there was a scratching among the fast food wrappers on the floor. She looked up just in time to narrowly make the upcoming curve. There was nowhere safe to pull over.

“Please, please.” Absurdly, the sound of her voice steadied her.

Headlights appeared in her rearview mirror. The same tinted license plate light as on Max’s car.

Her tires shook as she hit the graded pavement on the side of the road and she jerked the wheel in time to avoid plunging into the ravine. Whimpering, she glanced in her mirror.

“There is no way you could be following me. No way.”

The scratching was on the seat beside her, and something touched her bare thigh. Julie screamed, and swatted whatever-it-was away, her hand connecting with something large and prickly that flew away towards the floor, landing with a soft thump.

“Oh-god-oh-god.” She was only glancing at the road now. The headlights behind her filled her rearview mirror. To her right black nothingness spilled over the guardrail.

Then something scratched her sandaled foot, and she jerked it away from the pedals, screaming, trying to kick it, looking down and not at the road. Her car lunged through the barrier and down the rocky hill, rolling several times, coming to rest at the bottom.

She couldn’t move. The car behind her had stopped and someone was scrambling down the slope, carrying a flashlight. It was bright, very bright, and it made her eyes hurt and her vision flicker. Then she realized that the flickering came from the flames licking around the body of her car. Gravel bounced down the hill as the figure came closer.

Then she felt the spider crawling over her shoulder. But she couldn’t move. Her arms lay there like dead things.

The spider slowly crawled through the blood streaming down her face.

All she could do was moan.

“All right, Johnny, lay them bags over there,” Ronnie said in a gruff voice.

Johnny had only been doing this job for about a month when he was finally partnered up. He had been looking forward to bigger jobs, as sweeping the floors and polishing knobs was too lonely for a guy like him.

“I’m gonna chop ‘em up. You bag ‘em,” Ronnie said as he pulled the hacksaw out from under a long metal table.

“What? I gotta touch that? It’s all slimy!” Johnny protested.

“So? We gotta do it,” Ronnie exclaimed as he shot a sideways glance at Johnny while resting the edge of the saw against one of the lifeless, gray limbs.

“I got my new shoes on!” Johnny protested once again, but he knew Ronnie was right.

With a heavy sigh, Johnny laid out the plastic bags in perfect unison along the warehouse floor. It was cold in the flimsy tin building, a cold he just noticed while standing around. Usually, pushing a broom and working with his arms kept him warm, but today, it was at least ten degrees colder then usual.

Times had been tough for Johnny. He recently lost his job as a car salesman after the dealership closed. There was nothing out there. No one was buying luxury items and he had to find something to support his wife and three kids. Desperation took him to the house of his cousin Lorenzo, who gave him the hook-up with that side of the family’s business. It was grunt work, but at least it paid with some fringe benefits of cash in hand. He could put groceries on the table again.

The hacksaw ripped back and forth, back and forth, until bone was hit. The grinding sound of metal on bone sent a shiver down Johnny’s spine.

“Hey! Ya know what? We could be Ronnie and Johnny. We sound like one of them morning shows on the radio.” Ronnie laughed, but Johnny did not.

“Pretend like we’re in the fish market. Heads up!” Ronnie declared as he tossed the gangling stump towards Johnny.

Johnny stumbled as he reached out for the limb, nearly slipping on one of the plastic bags as he caught it in his arms. It left a handsome, gooey mess on his jacket, splattering excess on those new shoes.

“Aw, geez, I was gonna wear this jacket for another job hunt,” Johnny lamented as he laid the arm down, starting the tight wrap in the plastic wrap.

“You know, you get used it after a while. And next time, wear jeans. You weren’t meant to wear a suit.” Ronnie shook his head, going back to his work of hacksaw against flesh. “Besides, this is the last job you’ll ever need.”

Johnny felt himself sicken as he wrapped up the limb like a wet fish, rolling and sealing it tightly. One down, three more to go, and a head. And the torso. This was going to be a long night.

Ronnie spoke again, throwing back a larger, heavier limb.

“Yeah, I know what yer thinkin’. The mob ain’t what it used to be.”

An Appalachian apple bitten to the core rested in the palm of Percy’s pretty teen daughter, Missy, who wore a pink party dress and blue flannel shirt. She sat on a discarded sofa, using a cushion for a boot-rest, while his three boys searched for bonfire wood. They were gonna burn it all at sundown–cremate their Mama’s memory with a blazing mountain of broken remains, until the preacher walked up the path leading to their two-room crippled shack, slumped in the dimple on the hill–like it was ashamed.

“Howdy, Percy.” Preacherman tipped his sweaty straw hat, half expecting to catch expletives spat from the drunkard’s mouth, but Percy had a morbid mellow malaise holding his tongue in check and he just grunted, “Hey,” with a back throat growl.

Missy tossed the apple to the ground and a worm slithered out onto the pine-straw path. She moved closer to the chopping block, finger-combing her dirty hair ‘til her palms were greasy, then rubbed her bare knees, making them shine like her Daddy’s bald head. She didn’t make eye contact with the preacher, but she didn’t take her eyes off him neither. She studied his muddy loafers and frayed tweed trousers, looking for signs she was too young to read, but her Daddy knew what lies were embedded in the man of the cloth’s clothing. He’d smelled the odor of her Mama on the preacher many times before; this day was no different. Missy caught the scent as well and one whiff was too much.

“I come to talk to you about Bonnie. She’s worried sick about the younguns and wants to see ’em, if’n you say it’s okay. It ain’t right to deny children their mother’s love. Even if she ain’t all there, she’s still their mother. Can’t change that.”

“I know she birthed those babies, but that don’t mean she’s their mother. She ain’t fit for mothering; you know that better than most.”

“Now, Percy, I came up here and tried to shake those demons loose, the one’s that got hold of her, but she was too far gone by the time you called me. She’s doing some better these days and she calls for her kids every evening, as soon as the sun goes down.”

“She does a lot of thangs soon as the sun goes down. That’s why I don’t want these kids around her. She needs to be kept under lock and key, like you promised.”

Preacherman took a deep breath then turned his attention toward Missy. “Missy, wouldn’t you like to visit your Mama?”

Missy sat silently, choking her shiny bald knees with her bare hands, digging her nails into her pale flesh until it looked like teeth marks, then she raised one eye brow and said, “What d’you thank?”

“I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking you.”

She looked over at the chopping block and had a flashback of her mother decapitating a chicken, grabbing up its feet, while it flapped bloody feathers ‘til its blood drained out. The next vision she had was of her mother holding up her baby sister by the feet, while her lifeless head sat on the block staring at Missy, who had been the one to sharpen the blade.

Percy turned up a jug of moonshine to his mouth and chugged a big swaller, then said, “Might as well take Missy to see her; she’s just as sick as her Ma.”

That’s when Missy’s eyes rolled back. She sprung up from the sofa, gripped the axe, and split Percy’s skull like a pumpkin. At the scent of blood, her brothers scurried out of the woods, arms loaded with twigs, eyes like boiled eggs–glossy and white. Preacher saw the family resemblance for the first time.

Missy grabbed Preacherman by the ankles. The boys tied him to a pine log and hoisted him over the fire. At sunset, they roasted his marshmallow ass singing Appalachian campfire songs their Mama taught them.