MicroHorror

Steps, cut from basalt, chipped with weather and covered with moss, rise up before me. They are ancient steps, reminiscent of cathedrals or the quay steps lining the Parisian stretch of the Seine. There are five in number and, for a moment, I find myself pondering the meaning of this until the cold seeps in and I pull my jacket close.

A mist has risen from the ground, a mist touched by fingers of ice and smelling faintly of lilacs and roses. It is a ground-creeping mist, the bulk of it staying low, its touch painful.

Shivering again, I break my reverie and mount the steps, ascending to the near-crumbling wrought-iron gate at the top. The gate, its metal almost as green as the moss-covered basalt steps, creaks open with a single touch, revealing, as if my eyes had previously refused to penetrate the spaces looming between the bars, an empty chamber of stone. The chamber is marked by rotting leaves piled into its far corners and by a single, rusting fetter hung by a single rusting chain drilled into the far wall.

I linger on the threshold before feeling an almost imperceptible tug. I step past the gate, into the chamber, into that basalt edifice that was my longing and desire. Into the slipstream of curvilinear time, into the purview of a memory long ago buried and walled away.

“Hello, Peter,” a dead voice says. And, with a lump clawing its way up the abyss of my throat, I turn, tears filling my eyes.

For a fleeting moment, the tears blur my vision, and in that moment she is there, before me, in the corner of the chamber, her black dress tossed lightly in the misty breeze of lilacs and roses.

With a sob, I clear my eyes, only to see an empty corner—empty save for a piece of torn fabric, once black, now covered in mold and dirt. I reach for the cloth, and as my fingers touch it, a sound reaches my ears.

The sound of metal on stone.

Now, as I sit in an unmarked room with unmarked attendants to bring me food and water, I can only close my eyes to the nightmare of that empty chamber, in that stunted forest, in that lonely cemetery.

I can only close my eyes and see the image of that rusting chain writhing like a snake, of the pale, reaching hand, feminine, appearing as if from nothing within the circle of the rusting fetter, of the face looming out of the wall of the girl I’d once loved and hated all in the same breath.

“Peter,” she said, “you’ve come back for me.”

The cat scratches on the basement door. I’ve been waiting for this. I whisper to your mind.

“You worked hard at the hospital today.”

You’re on the couch, feet propped up, trying to watch television, trying to relax. You can’t release the tension, though, because you can’t ignore that sound, that constant scraping of claws on wood. You can’t hear me like you hear the cat or the sitcom, but you can hear me in a different way.

“The baby will probably wake up crying tonight, and Sheela will take forever to get to it. Then, when she gets up, you know she’ll leave the door open so light comes in and won’t let you go back to sleep.”

Your heart thumps, and your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten, causing you to sense the pain in the back of your neck. The scratching seems louder.

“Of course, when you get back to sleep, the hospital will call to say one of your patients is crashing.”

At this point, you can’t even hear the TV. You try to ignore the noise, but you can no more ignore that than you can ignore thoughts about the patient complaint from two days ago, the one your colleagues assure you won’t amount to anything but that remains trapped in your mind nonetheless.

“You’ve busted your ass to get to where you are. And you still toil everyday. Yet you have to sit here in the four-bedroom home you pay for and be discomforted by a cat your money rescued from the shelter.”

You clench your fists and shake a little.

“Sheela wanted the cat. Then she wanted the baby, and demanded the cat remain downstairs. Now the cat won’t stop scratching at the door, and she says you should just ignore it. She can ignore it, because her small mind doesn’t notice that much. She doesn’t understand that it’s not so simple for you.”

You stand up, but you’re not sure why.

“Sheela and the baby aren’t here right now. Why not do what you want to do?”

You rush toward the back of the house, to the basement door. I have you now. You grab the knob, give a crazy laugh and shout, “Here I come!”

You open the door. The fuzzy, orange cat is on the top step, looking up at you. You snatch it up, then pull it back in one hand.

“Yes! Do it! Teach that damn cat a lesson it won’t forget!”

Your hand starts to go forward, but stops. You stand very still for a few seconds, then take in a deep breath. You move the cat in front of you and hold it with both hands.

You gently laugh and speak to it in a way that is sickening to me.

“What’s wrong, buddy? You lonely?”

You walk with the cat held close to your body so that it purrs. You take it to the bottom of the stairs, show it where its food and water are.

“See. It’s nice down here.”

You get down on the floor and throw little cushballs for it, pull a string, think nice thoughts about getting the cat a friend to play with.

I’m so sickened I have to go upstairs to be away from you.

Sometimes I think of leaving, but I know I won’t. Your mind is like a trap, and I know once I get a good grip on it, you won’t be able to get me out. I just have to make you throw that cat one time, or maybe kick it, to make you feel the pleasure of violence. Then I’ll get you focused on that neighbor kid who plays his bass too loud, or maybe your wife, who has lost interest in sex, or maybe that baby that screams at night.

The cauldron simmered gently, suspended by a thick chain over the glowing coals of a small fire. A red-faced hag with lank grey hair stirred the steaming contents, chuckling quietly to herself as she grabbed a handful of the herbs she’d grown specially, and tossed them into the brew.

Surrounded by a myriad of ingredients, she paused to read a yellowing parchment by the light of a full moon, before selecting the next item, a rotten apple, which was duly plopped in.

The woman’s cat mewed and she looked up to see it playing in the box of pig’s ears. She simply hissed through blackened teeth, sending the animal fleeing from the room.

The hag picked up the partly chewed ear and lowered it into the pot along with a handful of chicken’s feet. Leaning forward, she sniffed the steam that rose from the cauldron, and frowned. She looked around at the ingredients to hand and smiled as her one good eye fell on a box of slimy leeks. Three went into the unholy brew followed by the lips of a long-dead cow and the brains of half a dozen rats.

With her wooden spoon the hag scooped up a portion of the liquid, brought it to her lips and tasted. She began coughing violently and immediately spat it back into the pot.

Dissatisfied, she scanned the room and spotted the cat again, this time playing amongst the sheep’s lungs. She shooed the animal once more and, choosing the organ it had been sitting on, lobbed it into the mix.

It was then the ringing started. The old crone stopped, pulled a mobile from her pocket and said as sweetly as possible, “Aunt Betty’s Handmade Sausages, how can I help?”

“You’re not very good at your job, are you?” he asks me.

I’m standing out here in the middle of the day, the sun’s burning down, and I’m helping him stack firewood.

The things you’ll do for a client.

There are snakes out here, I’m sure, probably hiding in the log pile. We’re way out in the backblocks, a good hour from the nearest sealed road. And I don’t understand why anyone would want to have a fire on halfway through summer.

But I can’t be too fussy. Consulting’s a competitive market, so I don’t say no to any client requests. Especially not when the boss of a major city firm–who, I’m told, is seriously wealthy, if not a little eccentric–rings during his summer break and summons me out to talk personally.

“I’m not convinced you’re the best,” the CEO tells me. “You call yourself a recruitment consultant, but what do you give me? Huh?” He sneers, takes some of the timber away.

Twenty years on the corporate ladder, he says, and the only way to survive is if you’re hungry enough. “What about you? Do you have the hunger?”

I shrug. “I’ve sent people up here. Three possible candidates this week. Weren’t any of them suitable?”

The trouble is, I don’t know what happened. None of them even had the courtesy to ring back and tell me how their interviews here went.

“I gave you this simple job,” he says eventually, “to test you. Just get me someone to help me with my hobby.”

I’ve got to admit, his request was fairly simple: someone young, fit and comfortable being on an isolated community for a while. Maybe a backpacker, for example.

He takes a log and points out the fields, the smokehouse, the main building. “Look at this. My own little holiday retreat. Lots of privacy. No visitors, and a long way away from town. I just need someone around the place. Like I said, if you can help me get that, then maybe in the future we can see what work the company has for you.”

We keep on stacking wood, sharing the silence.

But the CEO can’t stay quiet for long. Clients never can. “The first one you sent me? Wouldn’t say a word. I couldn’t get her to say anything.

“And that guy, the second one? Hopeless.

“The third one, the student… well, he was keen, but…” He sighs one more time.

The heat is getting to us both. Sweat is falling into my eyes.

“I’ve got the hunger,” he tells me one more time. “Do you?”

He takes some more wood out of the pile and down to the smoking shed, calls me over. The room’s dark, full of fumes and a scent that mixes burning pine with something else. Sitting inside, slowly drying out in the heat, the three of them are lined up in a row, grinning at me from dead faces.

He pulls out a boning knife and a whetstone. He sits down, starts sharpening up, and looks me in the eye. “Well,” he asks, “are you going to join me?”

He’s right. I don’t have the hunger.

So I stay in my office these days, far away and down in the city. Every holiday, when he needs them, I send up some round-eyed innocents to the farm. I get paid extraordinarily well for my efforts and, if anyone asked, I’d have to admit that I’m more or less just prostituting myself now. I know that I’m no longer the slightly wide-eyed recruitment agent anymore.

In fact, these days I’m much more of a corporate headhunter.

Andy’s cell phone rang while he was pulling away from the gym. He flipped it open. “Hello,” he said.

“Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“Andy…”

He held the phone closer to his ear and pulled to the side of the parking lot. “That you, Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound funny. You all right?”

“No, I’m not,” Mark said. His voice was a strained whisper and awash with exhaustion. “There’s something in my car, Andy. Something I can’t get out. It won’t let me out either.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s in your car?”

There was a moment of silence, then, “I need your help, please. Can you help me?”

Andy pulled back onto the parking lot and drove for the road. “Where are you?”

“I’m parked behind the bar. Just past the lights. Please hurry.”

“I’m on my way.” Andy flipped his phone shut and sped through the night towards the bar.

Mark’s car was parked as foretold: behind the bar where it sat encased in darkness and resembling the shadow of a car more than a car itself. Andy parked a few spaces over and got out. He strained his eyes to see. Mark was sitting in the driver’s seat as erect and still as a tombstone. He jogged quickly over to the driver’s window with a flashlight in hand and peered inside. Mark remained staring straight ahead with a doped expression on his face. He did not move until Andy tapped on his window. He rolled the window down and looked up sleepily.

“Thank you for coming,” he said in a low voice.

Andy tried to survey the inside of the vehicle, but it was too dark to see anything save Mark’s face. There was an odd smell seeping from the car, something sweet and sour.

“You okay? What the hell is going on?” Andy clicked on his flashlight and began to raise it.

“Yes,” Mark said. “Everything’s fine now.”

Andy shone his flashlight through the window. “What’s in there with you?”

“Something that won’t let me leave.”

It was then that Andy saw the passenger. It was crouched behind the seat, a thing spindly and black with long legs and arms folded like ghastly pretzels. A creature born of shadow. A thing with no face, only a swirling mass of blackness that sat where its head should have been and occasionally cracked by a grin lined with jagged, yellow teeth. It was melting in and out of the shadows like ink swirling in a glass of water. But there was more to be seen in the back seat.

There were bodies.

They lay piled atop one another in a pitiful shambles of bloody, broken body parts like junk marionettes, their blood vanished, their eyes soulless. Andy saw that the passenger had stretched one of its arms up to the back of Mark’s head where it disappeared into a hole that it had punched into his skull. He saw the passenger move its arm. Mark’s head moved along with it, and he looked at Andy with dead, soulless eyes. The passenger flexed its black fingers somewhere inside Mark’s skull, and Mark began to speak.

“And he won’t let you leave, either.”

The last thing Andy experienced in this world was an impossibly long, black arm stretching through the window to clutch his face and snatch him inside the car into history and oblivion. When done doing everything it saw fit to do, the passenger dumped Andy’s body atop the rest and picked up Mark’s cell phone again. It scrolled through the contacts. It was done with the As. It went to the first entry under the Bs and hit send as it raised the phone to Mark’s mouth.

“Hello?” a woman said.

The passenger flexed its fingers. “Barbara?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Barbara…”

“Mark? Is that you?”

“Yes. There’s something in my car. I need your help.”

Let me make something clear–what’s your name, officer? Perez? Alright–Officer Perez, let me make something clear before I say anything else: I ain’t crazy.

I know that’s the first thing everybody tells you: that they ain’t crazy. But I ain’t lying. I ain’t crazy, Officer Perez. And that’s the irrefutable truth.

See? I’m even using big words to tell you I ain’t crazy. What crazy person says something like “irrefutable?” None. Crazy people don’t say “irrefutable.” So again–and you’ve got to believe me because if you don’t you’ll think I’m crazy–I ain’t crazy.

My wife… she’s the crazy one. She’s the one who sees ghosts and talks to the dead. Heck, if I were her I’d be crazy too. I wouldn’t want none of them ghosts whispering in my ear to kill my husband.

No. I ain’t know what they told her; I’m just guessing. See, a week ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a big back pain–you know how those get with age–and found her standing next to the night table, staring at me. “What you doing standing there for, woman?” I told her. And she just looked at me. And then she left the room.

But I saw. Before she left.

I saw the knife she was holding in her hand.

She’d been standing there, holding that knife, and thinking about killing me, Officer Perez. I asked her about it in the morning, but she didn’t know what I was talking about. But she knew, alright. I know she knew. And I know she’d been wanting to kill me that night.

Why do I think that? Well, what she do that for, then? Standing there next to me with a knife in her hand. I don’t know ’bout you, but I ain’t thinking nothing pretty.

Now, I ain’t know how she spoke to them ghosts, but sometimes I could hear her talking in the kitchen, saying stuff I didn’t understand, and I’d go and look and there be nobody there. And then she’d see me and get mad at me and send me away.

Them ghosts killed my wife, Officer Perez. Drove her crazy. They told her the Lord was waiting for her in Heaven, and the only way to get there was burning herself alive. And she believed them, because them ghosts are already dead, and they said they knew how to really get to the other side.

I came home tonight from a poker game in a friend’s house–his name? Wilson–and found her in the kitchen, pouring oil over her head. She saw me, said she was gonna meet the Lord, and she was laughing crazily when she lit that match.

I watched her burn, Officer Perez. Watched her laugh and scream at the same time while she burned. I thought she chanted something–like a prayer–while she screamed. Then more screaming. And then nothing more came out her mouth and she just burned.

I screamed then, but them ghosts came and quieted me down. They told me I’d done nothing wrong, that my wife was where she was supposed to be, that I’d helped deliver her into the Lord’s embrace. It made no damn sense, but they kept talking. Talking and talking all at the same time till I couldn’t understand a thing.

And then they left me alone.

I ain’t know what happened after, Officer Perez. Only thing I remember is the police coming into the house, putting handcuffs on me, and bringing me here. They didn’t tell me nothing. The person who came before you told me I was being charged with homicide. I ain’t know what he was talking about. I still ain’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t do nothing.

I done told you, Officer Perez, them ghosts–them goddamn ghosts–did it. They killed my wife.

And you know I’m telling the irrefutable truth, Officer Perez. Because I ain’t crazy.

I don’t believe in ghost stories, but I’ve heard weird tales about Mount Misery Road and Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington, Long Island; you gotta be a fool to travel on these narrow, winding, and intersecting roads late at night surrounded and shrouded by dense forests; back in the 1700s, there used to be a mental asylum near Mount Misery Road, but it burnt down twice and sometimes you can see the Lady in White, the patient who allegedly burned herself and burned down the mental asylum, darting and flitting across the road and leaping in front of cars in the eerie pitch-black darkness; yes, you may, according to legend, see this ghost or others on your trip through Hell; and hidden in the thick, preternatural woods, the Hell Hound waits for you; this black-furred creature lurks in the hallucinogenic woods and watches you, clutching and capturing you with its fierce, red eyes; and I’ve heard ghastly tales that if you see the Hell Hound, death is nearby, coming soon to clamp your throat with its monstrous teeth, and steal your last mortal breath; so after midnight, I drive through these winding roads in search of folks who’ve lost their way, desperately in need of a free ride out of Hell, or teenagers testing their courage by traveling, they believe, on haunted roads in the dark; my police siren shrieks across the ghostly road and I pick up all the strays; inside my car, they sit in the back seats I turn on the lights and look in the mirror; the Hell Hound stares at me and my passengers who scream and try to escape; but they can’t; and now that they know I’ve got no skull in the back of my head, I turn around and gaze at them with red eyes, my thrashing tongue tasting terror, as I devour their minds and souls, before feasting on their shards of flesh, humans destroyed by a chimera, perhaps, alive in their fire-breathing imagination, or something real and incomprehensible from beyond, a ghost that wanders these dark roads forever.

This house is dead and desiccated. The windows patched with pages of yellowed newspaper, peeling at the corners. Windowsills are littered with dead flies and wasps that spent their last moments futilely bumping against the grimy glass, seeking freedom. Coagulated dust blankets all surfaces, choking all colors to gray. Corners are heaped with broken prams and wheelchairs, smashed televisions and unloved dolls. The air hangs heavy and oppressive.

A monster lives here.

The architecture is aggressive and nightmarish, a Geiger landscape incarnate. Razor-edged mirror-frames bedeck the lopsided walls. Corridors twist away secretively into the shadows, a rabbit’s warren of abrupt corners and gloomy hiding places. In the living room, barbed mantelpieces crown a fireplace stoked with charred bones. A grand chandelier of crystalline daggers is suspended precariously in the middle of the room, a trap waiting for a victim.

A monster lives here.

In the aphotic cellar sits a disconsolate shadow. Hunched and breathing shallowly, he stares at the walls, not moving for whole days at a time. His living quarters are carpeted with scattered glass and debris that cracks like chicken bones when trodden underfoot. The colorless beast in his colorless lair tries to tame the rats for company but they only bite his wicked fingers. Here sits a slayer of innocents, a creature of the night. Once wrathful and terrible and feared as legend. Now old and broken and very, very alone.

Martin Clarke re-read the e-mail, wondering how it had bypassed the spam filter. “Donate to Heart’s Desire Retirement Facility, and as a thank-you we’ll make your wish come true! Please be generous.” Well, it was different. Most places sent you a free pen or a set of adhesive address labels.

Who lived at this facility? Aging lampless genies? Retired fairy godmothers? Did they really think he’d part with his hard-earned cash so some old biddies could laze around all day? He had all he could wish for, anyway, thanks very much: a million in the bank, luxury mansion, cars, and friends. Everything, except…

He typed inside the “wish” box: “To be irresistible to women,” and made his donation. No harm in having a go, he thought. Oh, girls threw themselves at him, of course, but he knew from their glazed looks in the bedroom that they craved his fortune, not his body. A twenty-something stunner wouldn’t normally look twice at a bloated fifty-something with a receding hairline.

The front door slammed.

He rushed into the hall. Three scantily clad beauties stood there, and before he knew what was happening, they’d pushed him gently but firmly through an archway into the antique-strewn sitting room. “Steady on, ladies. We haven’t been introduced.” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt. “How did you all get past the security gate?” They were a gang of girl thieves, that was it. It couldn’t be that stupid wish thing; he didn’t really believe in that stuff.

“We’ve been sent by Heart’s Desire,” purred the tallest one, as she pushed him down onto a sofa and began unbuttoning his shirt. She leaned into him, so that her long dark hair tickled his chest. She smelled of vanilla and musk.

“You wished us here,” said another, stroking his thighs. Martin’s body started to respond. He’d remember this night forever, he thought. He was the luckiest man alive.

The third girl pressed Martin’s hand against her left breast and began licking his ear. “You really are irresistible,” she whispered.

He groaned softly, and tipped his head back in pleasure. As he did, he caught a glimpse of the girl’s unusual dentition. His last thought, just before feeling the sharp pain in his neck, was that he should probably have donated more than one lousy dollar.

A fine looking ring, you say? Aye, innkeeper–and truly, there is a gruesome tale attached to it.

Need I say that I drew the short one?