MicroHorror

Some people may have sharp tongues but Jack had for a tongue a real scalpel. He attended undergraduate school and was isolated and single throughout. He attended medical school. Had hopes of being a surgeon. He was tight-lipped and talked very little. He woke up one morning with chapped lips; cut the meat off as he tried to lick them. He became so disfigured he couldn’t hold down a proper night job to support his education. He dropped out and underground where he could make his money doing illegal kidney transplants or black-market organ harvesting.

The sick motherfucker. Clients laid smelly corpses across his dinner table to have essentials harvested. Jack parted his fleshless lips and went to town. The slick silver scalpel in his mouth would have slid effortlessly across his lifeless farms, but Jack preferred to put some effort behind it. He liked to get his nose right up against the sour smell that was like aluminum and tomato juice and vinegar. Jack’s heart was broken by solitude.

He had made an advertisement online: “Lipless man seeking unconditional love.” What an affair. The desperate old hag lay across her widow’s bed and laid bruised fruit on her papery white skin. Jack blindfolded himself so he wouldn’t see the fickle blue veins under her translucent, moth-like wrapping.

“It’s sexier when I can’t see,” he said. “I am more of a texture man.”

“You naughty young man,” she said in reply, glad he couldn’t see her eyes watering with the memories of lost youthfulness.

With eyes clenched beneath the blindfold Jack dragged his nose like an Eskimo-kiss across her coldness until the scent of the fruit beckoned to him. He sliced it as sensually as he could; she shivered as the juice ran down her frail ribcage. He blindly fed her kiwi or orange slices from the sharp tip of his tongue.

This sad exchange continued until she insisted on dominance during the last time that he wrapped the blindfold tightly around and around and around against the sight. She tied him down. Slit her wrists on the indifferent cuspate of the tongue she gripped with pliers as he writhed for freedom from below her.

She slumped aside and he licked himself loose. Stuffed his blindfold in his back pocket. Walked away without indulging a final glance.

There was a three-way intersection where a patch of ice zigzagged diagonally across it. Somebody in a green sweater walked a dog. The furry beast shivered as though ill prepared for the weather.

Jack stood shell-shocked and didn’t know what to make of the ice. Or the dog. Or the sweater. Jack’s feet became cold in the icy rain that splattered in sheets along the sidewalk. There was a hole in his left shoe where the sole sealed up at the toe. His laces were untied and he left his soles behind him. He threw his shirt into the gutter. His pants hung over a fence that he climbed over. His dark argyle socks lay soggy on the edge of a private residential pool.

Jack looked from below the water to the sky. Specks of rainwater plunged through the surface like silver thumbtacks that evaporated upon impact. He sliced his tongue through the water and into the wet air like the dorsal fin of a baby shark. Drying blood streaked from it into chlorine.

He pictured his perfect pretty brunette. She would kiss his lipless tragedy and he would nuzzle her neck. She would say “Oh, Jack!” in ecstasy as he licked the erogenous zone along the jugular. Jack drew himself from the water, walked naked into the house of whoever owned the pool. Later left steamy red footprints amongst screams and gurgles.

• Copyright: © 2010 Josiah McGinnis

The thing with no face pushed me back onto the bed and slowly undid my belt.

I closed my eyes, in expectation of ecstasy.

That was when I heard the shots.

***

I’d seen the advert a few months before.

Are YOU confused? it asked. Are YOU jaded with all you’ve seen? Do YOU think YOU have all the answers? Well, if so, let US change your mind!

And below that, an address and a phone number had indicated just who “WE” were.

I’d not been able to stop thinking about it all day, unable to shake the spooky but not completely unpleasant suspicion that the ad had been written for me, just for me. And before too long, I’d dialed that number.

Had made my appointment.

***

I pushed the faceless thing away and ran to the door and opened it.

Across the whole of the building, people were doing the same. Most of them were strangers, but one wasn’t; Ross, a fellow member of the confused and jaded camp that I knew from work, was here too, and for that I thanked God–I knew I could rely on him to take charge in a crisis.

But he looked just as confused as me.

“Where’d it come from?” I asked.

He pointed.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“What?”

I began running. “That’s Buck’s room.”

***

Buck had answered the phone that first time, his voice at once friendly and knowledgeable, like the wise tutor I’d never had but always wanted.

“What do I do?” he’d replied, in answer to my first nervous question. “Why, nothing. It’s not what I do, son. It’s more about what they do.”

Then he’d pointed, and I’d seen with a gasp the “they” that he meant.

***

Ross and I barged through the door.

And saw the blank-faced body with the gun in its hand.

But it wasn’t just any blank face.

It was the one we’d all wanted.

The only one not on offer.

Buck’s blank.

He’d called her The Princess, this bikini-clad beauty with the body of a supermodel topped by a featureless face. They all had great bodies, the blanks–some male, some female, some a mixture of both for the truly jaded–but none so great as this.

We’d all desired her.

But Buck had his one rule, and no one dared challenge his authority.

We’d all been too addicted by then.

***

“You haven’t tried it all,” he’d said that first night, “till you’ve been with a blank!”

He was right, and it was easy to see why.

They could be any fantasy you longed for, anything at all. With all the relevant fun organs except a mouth, you could use them how you wanted.

But damn, they were addictive.

And now, it seemed, deadly.

***

There were more shots.

We ran from the house.

To safety.

Next thing I knew, Buck was on the news.

So was his wife.

Missing, the newsreader said. Not murdered. So the blanks must have hidden his body.

Pretty crafty, I thought.

And with that thought came paranoia.

I started drinking to forget my terror, became a regular at the local bar. Outside of it, too, where the gutter became my toilet.

That was where they found me.

***

I woke up in motion.

Looked around.

And saw Buck and Ross grinning down.

“Had to get away from the wife,” Buck told me. He was caressing The Princess’s breast as he spoke. “Needed to spend all my time with the baby here.”

He looked at me.

“That was why I came up with the plan.”

He motioned around the moving van, where other familiar faces were waking up to see non-faces.

“Fake my death, that was the plan. Fake all our deaths. So we can be with our new loves forever.”

“But what about the shots?” Though I voiced doubt, I still cuddled up to one of the strangely sensual beings.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as an orgy commenced. “Those bullets were just blanks.”

• Copyright: © 2011 Shaun Avery

They throw you into a dark room and shut the door. They hold you down as they lock the entrance. It’s just you and them. No matter how much you struggle, you can’t break free from their grasp. Ready for some fun? They beat you; they break you. They hold you down and shave your head. Now you’re ready for the next part.

Tying you to a chair, they ready knives and screwdrivers and belts and bats and crowbars and any other torture device they might have. You just sit and watch. Your heart is racing, threatening to jump out of your mouth, but your face, your calm and indifferent face ignores it. The blows begin to come. Every part of you hurts. But you don’t turn and cringe, you refuse to. That’s what they want you to do. They may have broken you, but they will never get you to bow. No, you will never bow. You will never kneel to them. No matter how long the torture goes on for. Which will be a couple of hours. You know; you’re very used to this whole process. After all, you used to be one of them.

• Copyright: © 2011 Will Shadbolt

The shovel was heavy. The oak shaft chafed his palms as Eustace heaved one shovelful after another, mounding the soil alongside the six-by-three-foot rectangle he was cutting into the dirt floor. Eustace shoveled and shoveled until his calluses tore off, leaving red lesions on his palms. He grimaced and kept shoveling.

In all his twenty-seven years as sexton at the Church of St. Michael in Allagash, Maine, he’d never had to work on Mother’s Day. But here he was, stuck in the church basement, digging. It was hotter than blazes down here. Even in May, the furnace was roaring just so sweater-laden old ladies could be all toasty-warm at the service. Sweat stung his eyes and ran down his arms, burning his torn-up hands.

He paused and spat. Damned old ladies, he thought. He bent back to his shoveling, cursing every blue-haired widow from Allagash to Bangor and back.

He especially cursed his cousin Johanna. Who the hell was she, anyway, with all her highfalutin’ talk about mitochondrial DNA and threatening a court order if he wouldn’t let her exhume his mother over in the Mount Hope Cemetery? Who’d appointed her the family genealogist? Wasn’t digging up the dead taking this family tree thing a bit too far?

Eustace paused and spat again. She was a real witch. The kind of woman he’d like to tie to a metal chair and nestle the blades of a garden pruner against her pinky fingers. Snip! Ladyfingers for lunch. More like witch fingers. He would do it carefully, attentively. Almost lovingly. That would get her attention. That would show her who was boss.

Okay, so she’d never dressed him up in girls’ clothes. She never locked him in his closet or beat him with a belt. She never insisted on bathing him in the tub even after he turned fifteen. And she never ran his girlfriends off, calling them filthy whores.

But she was a witch and she was going to get hers.

Eustace stood and parked the shovel. He laughed until his coughing choked him and he swiped spittle off his chin with the balled-up wad of snot he called a handkerchief. Maybe he should let her open that coffin in Mount Hope, after all. That would teach her. Then he could watch her expression when she came face-to-face with Canis lupus familiaris, otherwise known as Ol’ Yeller. Or whatever was left of him. Nothing but bones and rags of fur, most like.

That would save him all this trouble. But no, that wouldn’t do. He had to finish this job. He wasn’t back to digging more than a minute before the shovel tore through some canvas. He scraped off the dirt and pulled back the shroud and stared at the skeleton in the floral print dress with its skull detached from its spinal column.

Both of its pinky fingers were missing.

Eustace stared into the grave and smiled. He grabbed his back suddenly, where an old scar from her beatings protested all the digging.

“Hello, Mother,” he said, then grimaced. “It’s moving day.”

• Copyright: © 2011 Robert Meade

I know she loves me. She leans in and kisses me on my shoulder, her teeth and tongue barely disturbing my goose-pimpled skin. We met in a dungeon, we both like sex mixed with pain, I was looking to get and she was eager to give. I never counted on this.

The darkness is terrifying but arousing. Her hands slide up over my rib cage and her breath is a warm gasp in my ear as she demands, “Tell me you love me, my dear,” and I can hear her laughter as I whisper I do, I love her so very much. I know she can smell my fear. I know she is happiest when she is licking away my tears. She feeds from me and I have so little left and we both know it. But she loves me so she won’t end it. Even though I have pleaded with her to.

There is a hard-edged sparkle, a whispering slice through the air, and her mouth is on the freshest cut. She suckles there while I arch up under her and beg her to stop, to take it all and leave me in peace, dammit. But oh, in some corner of myself there is pleasure, still. In some hard and unbroken place there is something that wants her to leave me living so she can hurt me again and again.

More pain, blue-edged and vicious. The sound of her chewing and the smell of my blood. Coppery like pennies you have sucked on and then spit out into the sun. Things fade to a far distance as she helps herself to a choice morsel of my flesh. I know what she looks like when she eats it; she has the manners of a cat. She is fastidious and self-satisfied while licking away crumbs and blood and eyeing another helping.

“Kill me,” I beg. But she won’t.

Because she loves me.

And love always eats us alive.

• Copyright: © 2011 Angel Propps

He tells us that we are pure.

He tells us that we are islands of grace in a sea of iniquity.

He tells that our parents were undeserving of our love.

He tells us that no harm will reach us under his roof.

He stands an eternal vigil, his broad arms slick in the blood of the unworthy.

We call him father.

• Copyright: © 2011 Kevin G. Bufton

I had inherited the house from my grandfather. When I moved in I found a box filled with old journals. At first I was excited to explore his thoughts. However, when I opened them, they were empty.

The signs of use were there. Pages had been dog-eared, coffee stains lined the binding.

He died in this house, just like his father. Regardless of its age, it was in remarkable condition. Each day I found it pulsing with a revitalized energy. The paint was vibrant; the stain on the hardwood floors was immaculate. My energy, however, had been fading.

Since I lived there I started feeling more and more drained. I slept more. At first, I would find myself waking up later in the morning and into the early afternoon. Now I’m missing days at a time.

I wondered why all of the houses on St. James Island were like this. Sparkling. Fresh. All of these houses were heirlooms. All of them had been died in.

My life had been fading. The house had been profiting.

I started writing into the journal, only to find my words vanished moments later. I carved it into the table, scribbled into the wall. Each time, they disappeared and my body gave up its will.

Even now, the words are leaving me. My house will most assuredly sell.

• Copyright: © 2011 Timothy Tarkelly

Don’t talk to the Dead; they lie. The angry ones do, anyway. The angry Dead purposely stay on Earth to cause trouble; the others somehow got stuck here and do their best to cope. Sometimes they even help out Living humans. Trying to build up karma, I guess.

You can tell which of the Dead are angry–they have a darkness about them; it engulfs them. You cross the street to avoid them because they’ll start shit for no reason. They can’t touch you, but they can still fuck with your mind and spirit. They claim to know things about people. Secret things, hurtful things. They love to use that stuff to mess up your mind, your life, your soul. They feed on the misery they cause.

My wife died a few weeks ago of the cancer that ravaged her body for over a year. Thankfully, she passed on to whatever is next. I miss her terribly, but I’m glad she didn’t stay. But now one of the Dead is following me. He’s saying things about my wife that aren’t true. That she was having an affair with him when they used to work together years ago. That my son is not mine; he belongs to this Dead man. I beg him to stop lying and leave me alone, but he won’t.

As I look through pictures of my wife and me with our son, he whispers behind me. Look how he resembles me, Matthew. You know he isn’t your boy.

“Leave me alone! Just shut up!” I yell. It only makes the Dead man smile.

Maybe I’ll go talk to my son today. Maybe I’ll tell him just what a whore his mother was.

“Please leave us in peace,” I sob. “Just go away. Why are you doing this?”

Because I can. Am I lying? Telling the truth? You’ll never be sure. You have doubts now about her. You’ll never have another peaceful moment. Now you’re like the rest of us, only Living. For now.

Then he faded away. His work with me was done. And he was right–now I have doubts. That bastard took the best part of my life and shit all over it. Maggie and I were so happy together and when Michael came along, we were ecstatic. There is no way, no way she slept with that guy and got pregnant with Michael.

“Hi, Daddy!” My son comes into my room and climbs up on the bed with me. I give him a hug, then gaze into his beautiful face. The face that doesn’t resemble me much at all. I say a prayer.

Dear God, please let them lie. Let the Dead lie.

• Copyright: © 2011 Sheri White

Ants in her pants, after the push–the fall. Hitting head already spinning–swimming in gin: blackness. Ants invading the gap (hairy lips sticky and red and thick with raspberry jam, and something else) in (sex) education. Dead drunk, she lay on her back, legs splayed. Author’s thought for the day: do ants sting? or bite? or spray poison?–itch in knickers anyway–seven years after breaking mirror, breath on it visible, but foul–as open drains, as open graves.

Ants all over her: carpenters–fire-red ants camouflaged in her red drying essence–and some flying, in face of goddess. Ants under her skin, under lids–eyes unblinking (what did they see in her?)–everywhere: every crevice, crack and gaping, stinking corrupted hole. Cover blown (a right Charlie) nose–tissue, bloody-torn: hanky-manky-panky–even worse since habit kicked: him getting his some other way–boot in–coming to a sickening crunch.

Body dismantled. Prime cuts drying up: no desire to eat, going off the very idea. Left the bits scattered. Caressed the sliced off breasts: did nothing for him–small and saggy, no milk, no humanity after murder (pure) tipped off–trophies. Milk nor blood flowing: her tits (as in life) shriveled like a starving, native African mother’s–or a would-be, couldn’t-be rapist’s prick–made to feel inadequate. Him losing face, while the corpse’s snotty, stuck-up nose cut off, lost to spite, not running down the road, but marching (followed by toes and cut and puckered nipples) right under the policeman’s nose: a regimented black line filing by…

Case and old wounds–reopened.

• Copyright: © 2011 Jane Fell

Dr. Luis Castille, unencumbered by clothing, floated free inside Nada, tethered to the station only by a thin umbilical: a literally out of this world experience.

Nada looked small from the outside and though he knew the specs by heart, the illusion of space took him by surprise. He was a tall man, well built. He thought he at least would be able to touch the walls and top of the chamber, but no. Everything was just out of reach.

It was curious, this lack of sensation. Weightlessness was a little nauseating at first but soon he was enjoying it. He had no impression of being inside the tube; the darkness was complete. He raised a hand but could see nothing. The soft, ambient music, designed to initiate calm, faded after a few minutes to silence. The air he breathed was bio-filtered, dust-free, ionized and slightly O₂ enriched. It smelt like rain after a thunderstorm, pleasantly charged. The chamber used thermal imaging to keep the temperature just right for the occupant and it was soundproof.

They’d drawn straws for this assignment, Aboline, Timpson and Castille. Aboline had won. He was supposed to be the test pilot but had chickened out at the last minute and Castille had offered to replace him. Other people suffered from phobias, he allowed. And in any case, this was his project too–a one-third share in Nada. He’d designed the chamber, though not the systems, but so far everything seemed to work perfectly.

Castille had suggested voice-recording the experience but Timpson and Aboline had urged that the test should be as the client would experience it, unadulterated by any such distraction, and they were right, of course. But somehow his mind just wouldn’t switch off. He began to calculate how much they could charge for this zero-gravity total deprivation experience–how much would people pay for nothing? It made him smile. They said they’d get him out in fifteen minutes… How would he know when fifteen minutes were up, he wondered? He should have built an internal chronometer into the design. If Aboline hadn’t put one there it was because it wasn’t in his specs.

The darkness did not become any less and he allowed his eyes to close. He began to doubt his arms were real–touched his fingertips together. Other people suffered from phobias–not Castille. He thought he heard a faint sound from outside. He opened his eyes. Perhaps something was wrong with the umbilical. Perhaps… but the sound had gone. He pondered on how it could be unsettling to some, after the hectic pace of planetary existence, to come up here into elective isolation…

A spot of blue light appeared above him–no, yellow–blue. It zipped away through the wall. He thought he heard breathing close by. They should have installed a communications button so that he could report this. He’d tell Aboline as soon as he got out. Surely the quarter hour was up…

What if the others had gone? What if the umbilical had broken away? But then there’d be no air, no warmth… Maybe the door was stuck. What if the other two had decided to profit from a two-way split? Maybe… “Is anybody out there?” His voice trailed away. Silly. The chamber was soundproofed. He couldn’t really have heard anything and they sure as hell couldn’t hear him. But somehow he couldn’t help himself. “Is anybody there? Can anybody hear me?”

Castille flailed about, trying to find a surface to hammer on, but he just went into a spin. He wondered now which way was up. “Timpson, can you hear me?” Surely they must be monitoring his vital signs… and if they were, they’d see… “Aboline… Timpson… Can you hear me? Somebody… please!”

• Copyright: © 2011 Oonah V Joslin