MicroHorror

The room was quiet and empty. She locked the door behind her, allowing herself a moment’s respite; it had been a rough day. She shed the annoying skin covering, enjoying the cool air on her scales for a moment. She checked her watch. Damn. It was almost time to get back to work.

She slithered back into her human skin camouflage and left the room.

“Good morning, Kathryn. What were you doing in the broom closet?”

She recovered swiftly. Her species were very quick thinkers. “Good morning, Mr. President. Just returning a dustpan.”

“You’re much too important to be doing work like that. Call maintenance next time.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Anyway, your security clearance came through this morning. You now have access to the mainframe.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll begin secure oversight of the nuclear launch codes immediately.”

She smiled inwardly. It wouldn’t be long now. Her species loved the taste of roasted human.

Rex Miles lay stretched out on a beige couch with his hands behind his head. A therapy session will do me some good, he thought lazily.

“Mr. Miles,” Dr. Irene Paddy said, uncrossing her legs, “we’ve talked about your parents. Your childhood. Your hopes and your so-called dreams.” She paused, tapping an ink pen against her notebook. “Um… tell me, Mr. Miles, about your job. What do you do for a living?”

Rex smiled like a shark. “I’m an assassin.”

Irene Paddy adjusted herself in her seat. “An assassin?” she asked, taking her horn-rimmed glasses off. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” Rex answered. “I get paid a lot of money to kill people.”

Irene took a moment to think. Her voice was flat and flustered when she asked, “And you enjoy that?”

“Hell, yeah!” Rex exclaimed. “I enjoy the hell out of it!” He sat up quickly, and his look of cheerfulness turned into a portrait of despair. “But here lately my business has slowed down.” He shook his head somberly. “Must be the economy.”

“Uh, Mr. Miles,” Irene said nervously, “are you joking? Did my husband put you up to this?”

“Sort of,” Rex answered, looking her dead in the eyes. “Your husband was going to pay me to kill you. Then frame one of your patients for the murder. It was a good plan. A great plan.” Rex paused, and let out a deep sigh. “But then I asked him why he wanted you killed–”

“And his answer?” Irene broke in.

Rex huffed, “Because you’re pregnant by your lover.”

“He knows about that?” Irene asked, covering her mouth with a thin, bony hand.

“Yes,” Rex answered. “And he’s pretty pissed about it, too. But I told him I wouldn’t do it.” He shrugged and added, “I’ve got a no-killing-a-pregnant-woman rule. Not many assassins care, but I do.” Rex hesitated and watched Irene Paddy’s look of surprised shock change into bitter hatefulness. That’s when he made his move. “Mrs. Paddy,” he started, “I am here today to help you out.”

Irene leered at him like he was a crazy man, and thought to herself that he was. “Help me out?” she asked sarcastically. “How’s that?”

Rex smiled a cunning smile. “Your husband will find another assassin to kill you. I have no doubts about that. And as you can imagine most assassins are heartless bastards. But I’m here today to make you a deal.”

“A deal?”

“Yes, Mrs. Paddy, you pay me ten thousand dollars and I’ll kill your husband and–” Rex looked at the huge metal file cabinet– “let me go through some of your files and pick three or four people to kill.”

The look of surprise-shock returned to Irene’s face. She opened her mouth to say something…

But Rex threw her a stern, cold glance. “I told you, Mrs. Paddy, business has been slow.”

Irene shook her head and managed to say, “Okay. Deal.”

An hour later Rex Miles knocked on the front door of Mr. and Mrs. Paddy’s big, expensive home.

“Rex Miles,” Mr. Paddy said with a thick New Orleans accent, “did you change your mind about my offer?”

“No,” Rex replied. “I told you, sir, I don’t kill pregnant women.” He pulled a large chrome .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. “I’m here to kill you, sir.” And Rex pulled the trigger. He glared down at the body of Mr. Paddy and added, “I don’t know about you, Mr. Paddy, but I believe I need to go to more therapy sessions. Because if a man enjoys my line of work something must be wrong with him.” Rex paused to think. “But what the hell.” He raised a shoulder. “It pays good!”

Drip…
Shula can feel the life leaving her, one heartbeat at a time.

Drip…
“What’s he doing?”
“Just sitting there. Watching.”
“How long now?”
“About three minutes…”
“It’ll be soon, then.”

Drip…
The darkness is a physical thing, crowding my senses. I can feel my humanity snapping and fluttering off my bones in the gale of the thing I’ve done. How did it come to this, how did I get here? A flash of light and the sudden glare of the truth throws the dark stains into stark relief. I don’t know who the girl is, but she’s looking directly me, her eyes filled with accusation and fear. Why doesn’t she talk to me?

Drip…
It didn’t hurt, and that’s amazed Shula more than anything else. Even now, afterwards, there was no physical sensation. Only a deep well of regret. The sea of existence, long thought to be infinite, had proven to be a woefully inadequate puddle. This wasn’t fair–she hadn’t even had time to wet her feet on the shoreline before the horizon had descended on her in a fury of teeth. Slowly the sea was draining away before her eyes, potential experience transmuting into gut-wrenching mortality. The tide of her life was turning.

Drip…
“Shame, really…”
“Yeah–you want another coffee?”
“Uh. Sure.”
“Biscuit?”
“No–you want to wait? This should be good. You might not be back in time…”
“Ah, I’m not that bothered–the video’s getting everything, right? I can watch the rerun. Anyway, these things always turn out the same.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”

Drip…
A pale echo of anger builds in my chest, swelling and twisting, entangling itself around my ribs, around my heart. My still, dead heart. The stolen life courses through it, but it doesn’t beat. Only the anger and the hunger stir within me now. The girl’s eyes are losing vitality now; she is nothing more than meat, food to be used and discarded.

Drip…
Her life was draining away with a terrible gravity, her very soul being dragged down by forces beyond her understanding. Fragments of her past sparked feebly against the black wall bearing down on her, but they were crushed utterly.

Drip…
“You wanted a biscuit, right..?”
“Mm-hm, yeah. Seen this? Why do they always do that?”
“What…? Oh! That? No idea, they just do.”
“Proper goldmine of information you are. You think he’s still aware of what he’s doing?”
“Nope. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be, would you?”

Drip…
She’s staring at me, her stupid, dead eyes somehow still clinging to one final tiny human emotion. I suppress the urge to pound her pale face to a mushy pulp and let her dead weight slide away from me. Standing, I turn to face the false mirror, surprised to still see my reflection there. What surprises me even more is the fact I can see the two men sitting behind it, recording my rebirth for their masters’ pleasure. I snarl and step over the useless, drained carcass, barely giving it a second glance. It… she… is dead to me now. Her breath, low and fast, is becoming more and more erratic and the pathetic trickle of blood oozes slowly from her shredded throat. Her mouth works, almost soundlessly, but I hear it. One single word and for a second, only one second, the horror of what has been done to me crashes around me.

…
Shula know this is it, the final curtain. Her final word is a combination of question, pleading, longing and betrayal.

“Daddy…?” Her final heartbeat passed, she surrenders to the blackness, diving headlong into the oblivion, leaving all her cares behind her.

It was this way with Edna when the demons came to call. They knocked on the window of her soul and whispered through the cracks of her skull. When at first they entered, Edna was terrified. Soon enough, however, she gloried in their power.

I should have paid attention when the houseplants turned brown and died, just as I should have taken notice when the wallpaper disintegrated into a chalk-like dust that floated through the house. What I did notice was that our cat had exactly nine seizures before succumbing to the world beyond. I cried over the cruelty of fate, even as Mother dismissed these and other calamities with a wave of her hand.

“Edna is family. She lives with us and we have to accept her, no matter what.”

Sometimes, Edna raked her claws across my flesh, drawing blood. Other times she ripped out chunks of my hair. Still others, she grabbed me so tightly that I heard my bones crack.

“It’s not her fault if she’s possessed by demons,” Mother insisted.

One day, when I looked into Edna’s eyes, I saw a red light shining through. It was then I realized that Mother was not home enough to protect me, and that I would have to run away. On the morning of my plans, Edna approached me at the kitchen table. She must have sensed something.

“You cannot escape your fears,” she said, as red lights flashed inside her eyes.

“But I can escape you,” I whispered, “and that is all I want.”

She took a menacing step toward me. I gasped and slid under the table as she extended her claws. When she began ripping at the tablecloth, I withdrew the steak knife I had hidden under my chair cushion and emerged ready for the attack. Her screams did not deter me, nor did the sight of her blood cascading in arcs before it splattered over the floor.

I stabbed away until she collapsed before me. I looked upon her with a sense of sadness. It was really too bad that it had come to this with Edna. I thought Mother would be angry when she returned home; instead, she gripped my hands in hers.

“We’ll have to bury Edna under the floorboards, dear, and keep it as a family secret.”

We never speak of Edna, not even when her screams cut a bitter edge through the long dark nights. For the most part, we lie in bed until the pale morning sunlight burns our sins back into our eyes. Sometimes I wonder if we really had any choice in committing them. We sit at the kitchen table and pretend that everything is the same, but the fragments of our conversations usually fade into oblivion as we focus on ignoring our secrets.

We must also contend with the demons. They crawl beneath my flesh, causing me to scratch until I bleed. I stand alone in the privacy of my bedroom, naked and exposed, as they wrap their insidious presence around me. When I look into the mirror, it makes me shudder to see the red lights shining in my eyes.

I know that Mother knows from the tears in her eyes. I want to reach out to her, but my hands are cold and my fingernails sharp enough to draw blood, as well they should be. I know where Mother hides her knife and I cannot really blame her. The day will soon come when she will have to use it. Right now, Mother sits at the kitchen table, staring at me with sad, empty eyes.

We both know that just as it was this way with Edna, so too it will be this way with me.

The cancer had spread, promising a lengthy, painful demise. It was something neither Mac nor his elderly father was looking forward to. Both wondered whether there was a quicker, easier way out.

Mac stood by his father’s nursing home bed, the loaded pistol lying on the blanket. “It’s time, Dad,” he said. His father nodded agreement. There was a bang, and blue smoke spread like spilled ink through the air while blood spread on the floor below. An autopsy would show the extent of the disease, and Mac’s father would face no charges for ending his son’s life.

Shelby Day had long legs like bones in skinny black jeans, built like a boy in green combat boots. All limbs and inelegance, the geometry of her body cut in a narrow waist, small breasts and no ass to speak of. Because of this the boys in Parker County looked through Shelby rather than at her. Small town boys liked blond hair and cheap beer and breasts spilling out from tight shirts. Shelby couldn’t compete with that.

She stopped trying in high school, when puberty passed over her with an anticlimactic sigh. She had only watched from the sidelines, while every other girl in town started filling out bikinis and halter tops over the summer of Shelby’s quiet dissatisfaction. Somewhere down the line, Shelby figured out that teenage boys were stupid, and Parker County boys were even dumber. They just talked about football and beer and big tits, anyway. She didn’t need that.

The nice thing about the end of the world was that there was no one left to look at her breasts. Except for Spike and Bill and Jo, but they didn’t really count. Shelby wasn’t concerned with their opinions on her breasts in any event.

“You know it makes me nervous when you do that,” Bill said from the lawn chair on the other side of the rooftop of his uncle’s repair shop, sitting by the portable CD player running Dolly Parton on loop.

Jo was downstairs behind the barred and boarded windows, cooking lunch from canned beans, eggs and cured ham. Spike sat nearby, chained to the railroad spike Bill had driven into the asphalt, as he occupied himself watching the crows fly overhead. Bill was cleaning the heavy Colt .32 he appropriated from Howards Guns and Ammo down the street, his dirty blond hair smoothed back from his face with a handful of water. Squinting in the afternoon sun, he scratched at a stripe of grease on a stubbled cheek, licked the dust from his bottom lip, and let out a sigh.

“Do what?” From the ledge of the roof Shelby swung the purple hula hoop around her skinny hips. She watched the hordes of zombies from behind her father’s aviator sunglasses, the ones she’d found on the dashboard of his truck the last time she saw him. They all stumbled around aimlessly down Main Street below, a moving mass of decaying flesh, moaning and burping from bloodied jaws.

“Tempt the zombies like that,” Bill answered patiently, watching Shelby in distraction as he began to piece the disassembled gun back together again. He made it sound like Shelby was the dog that peed on the rug, after repeatedly having her nose rubbed in it. “It’s just weird. And I think it’s gonna give Spike the wrong idea.”

Sitting on his ass four feet away from Shelby, Spike rattled at his leash in what could pass as irritation. Bill looked at the zombie and rolled his eyes. Shelby let the hula hoop drop, catching it with a turn of her wrist and stepped back from the ledge.

“Oh, Spike’s fine,” she brushed Bill off, planting a hand on her hip with an affectionate glance in the zombie’s direction. “You know he’d never hurt anybody. He’s like a big Labrador puppy.”

Spike made motion to clap his hands, missed, and instead burped appreciatively. Bill shook his head with a sigh.

“A dead Labrador puppy,” he insisted, popping the clip into his newly cleaned and assembled gun. “With a wooden plank nailed to his head.”

Shelby made a face, sliding the sunglasses to the top of her head. “Nobody’s perfect.” Tossing her hula hoop in Bill’s direction, she sat down on the ledge and peered over it. A zombie with a missing arm belched, while another in a patterned yellow sundress chewed lazily on the missing limb. It looked like her third grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson. Shelby sighed.

“Besides, that’s the one benefit of having a flat chest: even the zombies don’t want you.”

Lucas entered his living room to find all of his dining room chairs had been arranged in a circle. In each seat sat one of his colleagues, though he was sure they all probably referred to themselves as his friends. But friends didn’t enter your home without invitation when you weren’t even there to let them in.

The one man Lucas didn’t know, dressed in khaki pants and a brown checkered shirt, gently grabbed Lucas’s arm and led him to a chair. Lucas eyed the man the entire time and wondered who had given the permission to touch him.

Once Lucas had been seated, those in attendance wasted no time in explaining why they were there. They were worried about him. He never slept but stayed out all night. His complexion had gone beyond pale to a snowy white. And then the stranger in the khaki pants emptied his trashcan all over the carpeted floor that Lucas had just vacuumed the day before.

A bouquet of beer cans and bottles fell from the bin, clinking and clanking like rainfall on a tin roof. The majority of the garbage consisted of the alcohol containers, with a random banana peel or Kleenex here and there.

Lucas looked up from the shining pile of empty aluminum and glass to find everyone staring in his direction. It finally dawned on him that they all believed the contents of the trash had once been his. In truth, it all belonged to the previous tenant, untouched since Lucas had moved himself in. Lucas glanced out the window and stared at his backyard and the grassless patch of brown in the center. That was where Lucas disposed of his trash.

Lucas’s trance was broken when the man in the khaki pants spoke.

“I think it’s time to admit you have a drinking problem.”

His answer was only a smile, one that revealed his two-inch-long incisors. The khaki-panted stranger inhaled to scream but was cut short when Lucas sprang from his chair and sank his teeth into the moderator’s flabby neck.

The others tried to flee but Lucas drank quickly, slurping up the insides of each of their throats before moving on to the next. When he was finished, the bodies still remained in a circle, but were now splayed on the floor instead of in their chairs. A few spots of blood that Lucas failed to suck into his mouth had landed on the carpet, leaving dark stains behind in the white material. Oh, well. The carpet was already ruined by the trash spill.

A sharp pain stabbed through Lucas’s gut right before he released a tremendous belch. He had consumed far too much–six humans at once. He would feel sluggish for the rest of the night and a glutton’s guilt would haunt him for longer.

Lucas wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and licked the smear of blood that came off. He looked around at the circle of corpses and pursed his lips.

Maybe they were right. Perhaps he did have a drinking problem.

“Hey, does my butt look big in this?”

“That’s not funny, man, and stop shaking the goddamn bag! You’re getting blood all over the place! Hold it steady while I put the feet and head in, will ya… Jesus, I’m fucked if I know what we’re gonna to do with the rest of this guy.”

Johnny awoke from his world of sleep. Another day to be alive. But for what? Another day at work to be harassed by the same boss and coworkers? Another night spent alone for dinner? A few hours of watching television to waste away the passing hours of his life? A few minutes in the shower to wash a body that had no purpose? Then back to the same bed to start the exasperating routine all over again? No, Johnny thought. What’s the point?

He thought about all the ways to end his painful, empty existence. Pills and alcohol. A gunshot to the head. A razor blade against the wrist. Jumping off a building. With so many choices he couldn’t decide.

What was this game of life all about? Johnny knew that he was a player and life was the game, but he felt he missed getting directions on how to play. And what did you have to do to win? And what did you win? He was overwhelmed by it all. Johnny rubbed his forehead. He couldn’t make any sense of it.

He came to the dark conclusion that he was a mere pile of nothing. A pile of nothing that no one would miss. Life to Johnny was like a sickly spinning merry-go-round, constantly jerking him up and down and moving him in the same monotonous circle with no real direction, no purpose. All he wanted to do was stop the nauseating ride and get off.

Permanently.

He needed to end the pain inside his head. Life just hurt too much.

He remembered Charlie, a friend of his. A friend of his that owned a gun.

Johnny watched Charlie remove the black revolver from under his mattress. He rubbed the smooth black metal with his fingers as Charlie held it.

“Is it loaded?” Johnny asked.

“Never know when you’re going to need it.”

Johnny smiled. “Right, right.” His eyes glazed. “You never know.”

Charlie slid the gun back under the mattress.

“You want a beer?” Charlie asked.

“Yeah.”

When Charlie left the room, Johnny knew what he had to do. He pulled the black revolver out from under the mattress and slid it inside his coat pocket. It was the only way to do it. He wanted to exit the house, exit everything, exit himself.

A moment later, Charlie entered the room and handed the beer to Johnny.

He quickly guzzled it down. “Sorry, but I gotta go.”

At dusk, Johnny started back to his same old house in the same old direction.

He waited at a traffic light with a lady and her young son. Suddenly, the boy ran out into the intersection before the light turned green.

Johnny saw a speeding Camaro approaching, and quickly darted out into the road, grabbed the boy’s shirt and yanked him back onto the sidewalk.

Then the woman approached him.

“I don’t know how to thank you for saving my son,” she said. Then she walked away.

As he stood there, he experienced an epiphany that revealed to him that his body, mind and being had a purpose. He had saved a boy’s life. The woman’s voice confirmed it.

Johnny’s view of life had dramatically changed in just a few seconds. He no longer felt the pain inside his head, the sickly merry-go-round of life had vanished, and he no longer felt like a pile of nothingness.

He remembered Charlie’s gun.

Johnny’s new purpose now was to preserve life, not to end it. He smiled about his new feelings, his new beginning.

He had to bring back Charlie’s gun. Now.

He walked back, feeling for the gun inside his coat pocket. He suddenly stopped. There was no gun to be found. He frantically searched his clothing. Every pocket, every opening.

Johnny twirled around as a voice yelled out to him.

“Hey, mister, did you drop this?”

The echo of a fired bullet pierced the silent night air.

Mavis dismounted the stair-lift. Her steps imprinted into the carpet, showing that she always kept to the left. Those steps had kept the same measure for too many rusty-hipped years. Even the tip of her walking stick had its own little marks just like needle tracks in the carpet.

She was keeping the house out of spite more than anything. Mavis was pretty much sick to death of her kids hounding her to move somewhere smaller. Telling her how they’d handle everything, the estate agents, the lawyers, and the removals men.

Mavis may sometimes forget where she’d left a remote and would find it in the fridge a few days later, but she still had enough of the grey matter spitting sparks for her to know that what they said in words translated to numbers in their wallets.

It angered her; they hadn’t been brought up that way. She’d thought there’d been a balance between them being given what they needed and what they wanted; obviously she’d been wrong. They were more intrigued about how she was feeling whenever they came around, looking at her the way a doctor would, rather than with the loving eyes of a child. They moved through the hallways as though they were surveying the structure rather than remembering their childhood days. Especially Nick, her eldest. He had his father’s mouth, but that was all he had of his father, reckoned Mavis.

She disrobed and de-toothed, then got into bed. She looked at her late husband Tom who stood proud in the garden. In her memory of that moment he’d been framed by trees. In the photograph he was skirted by faux silver.

Mavis could hear their song playing, “Twelfth of Never” by Johnny Mathis. It sounded so clear, not like an echo from some cavern in her crumbling mind, but real, external. Mavis sat up and smiled wistfully. She hadn’t a wireless in her bedroom, nor had she one of those compact deck contraptions that didn’t work when you put the other side on.

It couldn’t be a memory. Mavis pushed back the bedding as though it were a tide. She used the stick to help her towards the sound. It was coming from outside. Her ears were just as good as they’d always been; it was just that sometimes the words turned to stone, like Medusa had peeped at them once they’d gotten inside.

With the crook of the stick she separated the heavy curtains. She didn’t bother about anyone gawking in and seeing her in only two layers of cotton; trees stood sentry around the garden.

Mavis opened the window. One of those good old-fashioned ones, the kind that are a match for neither arthritis nor burglars. It was another one of those things that Mavis had been adamant about keeping whenever one of her adoring children tried to coax her into lavishing money on the house to “bring it up to date” and now it was paying off.

He was there. Tom was in the center of the lawn wearing his favorite light grey suit. His face was only half seen beneath the trilby that had practically been more a part of him than the marrow in his bones.

“Tom!” she called.

The head dipped and rose, but only enough to show his mouth.

“Come to me, Mave. Let’s make it the Twelfth of Forever.”

Her heart tripled, tightening the blue wires of veins and arteries. She smiled. She knew the feeling of an angina attack; she didn’t care. She could be with Tom.

The man in the trilby looked at Mavis on the ground. It didn’t take much for the fall to work her calcified joints to make elaborate shapes from her limbs.

The man in the trilby spoke, staring at the body. “It’s okay, she’s dead.” He looked up as his younger brother and sister came out of the shadows like scavenging cowards, now that the kill had been made by the pack leader.