MicroHorror

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[The bottom of the brochure has been torn away.]

• Copyright: © 2011 Duncan R. Bowsman

Under the stairs–the cubbyhole, some would say; to my mum and I, it was the glory hole. In the old lamp’s dim, electrical glow in the must, full of glistening, silky webs and dramatic shadows, it was an Aladdin’s cave.

My mum in her youth was a dancing girl in pantomime, dressed in shiny, glittering materials to become a jewel, or a slave of the Lamp. With her stories she had me in her thrall, her memories mine–all her love pure magic, shared under the stairs.

Shiny trinkets and tinsel, not just at Christmas–decorating the dark–for bravery. Daring to pretend and live out our dreams in glory–outlived my genie with her light brown hair silvered. Her eyes dulled emeralds, ceasing to sparkle and twinkle. Years on, glistening–shimmering with tears.

Precious were her gifts (in that confined space) of her imagination and time, indelible in my mind, to hark back on. Angels and fairies in our grotto. Even a virgin sometimes appearing–to be quite happy in her naïveté–mother or child doing well; I never grew up, drew up to full lack of height. Blessing only little: under the stairs a tight fit. Risking concussion–for an adult, not much room for two–usually on my own in there, in most recent childhood memories. Little headroom, cluttered thoughts jumbled, voices of doom in my head hurting when raised–the way I was brought up.

All my toys crammed in, then dragged out. My little brother mad on Batman: needed a Batcave. He had a homemade costume, and little air. Door ajar–shutting mysteriously–me out–for revenge.

He played in there alone. Popular enough to be left on own, and not feel threatened. An independent man in the making. He pored over his glossy horror magazines in the gloom. Sometimes closing the door, putting off the lamp, having small, luminous plastic ghosts–free with breakfast cereal–glowing in the darkness of my jealous heart; a gleam, a contagious germ of a bad idea, I fear–not for fun–I did—well– sometimes I admit– no one else welcomed into lair. Outside looking in.

Years older, looking in. I am alone. My parents are in deep, black, confined places, rotting away. I am existing, not alive–rotten to the core. I hate myself: a brat, a whore. Went back to the old, abandoned home (by closing my eyes). Ideas of revenge building. Back to the wall, glory hole bricked in, when I still dare to dream.

My faint heart strong again and hammering, at the hidden doorway. Surprise in store. Bricks collapsing, dropping like heavy hints of madness. And inside, a child’s skeleton crucified. Not like Christ, but looking like Batman, with homemade cape spread like wings, in rotted tatters. My grey hair having dust in it, my skin covered in dust flaking.

The light filtering in, weak in the ancient, cracked mirror in the corner–putting me in my place: showing my brother’s face, tears streaming down mine–hard to believe–real feeling, tasting like blood. I lick my lips.

• Copyright: © 2011 Jane Fell

I wake up and my face is gone.

You can feel it, but it’s not there.

I run my fingers around what the mirror can’t see a few more times, just to be sure, but excitement is already building in me, refusing to fade.

I’ve been waiting for this.

I go downstairs and say to my family, “Hey, look–it’s finally happened!”

They don’t reply.

They never do.

***

“Oh, wow,” Del says. “You too!”

We’re both fading more and more each day. But still we know each other. We’ve been compatriots a long time.

I grin. “Yep.”

He slaps a hand you can’t see against my shoulder. “Proud of you, buddy.”

Then he walks away.

Leaving me to frown.

Pride is something none of us should feel.

***

It’s apathy that drives us, that we all worship. When you’re a vacuum of care and concern for anything, even yourself, that’s when your body will start to consume itself, to fade from this world.

Blessed be.

When we saw the rightful way of things we turned an abandoned factory into a shrine and painted “whatever” on the wall and bent down to pray to it. Me and Del first, then many others.

That was six months ago.

A lot can happen in that time. Yet still no one has come to check on our families.

They all had to go. Mothers, fathers, siblings too.

That’s the price they had to pay for not making us care about them.

***

Certain parts of Del’s anatomy are hanging on, and he calls to ask if he should lose his virginity before they finally disappear.

“Why should you?” I ask. “Why do you care about something like that?”

Silence is his answer.

But he’s already hanged himself with his last words.

***

When I get to his house, he’s nowhere in sight. But I know he can’t have vanished completely, not yet–ideas like pride and desire are still holding him back.

“Come out,” I say. “I know you’re here, Del.”

He does not obey.

But I can still feel him here.

Hiding.

Afraid.

Still filled with a care for things that will be his undoing.

I start fondling his dead sister.

“Look, Del,” I say. “Look what I’m doing. Don’t pretend you don’t care.”

I look at the corpse.

I feel nothing.

I wonder what Del feels, what will bring him out to face me. Guilt at what he’s done to her, to the parents stuffed down in the basement? Or love for his sister that not even murdering her could erase?

I say, “Come and get me, Del.”

And he attacks.

***

When you don’t care what happens to you, you fight pretty well.

As Del finds to his cost.

His emotions have made him partially visible again, and he trails blood from a torn face as I drag him to our shrine.

He’s dead on arrival, and becomes fully visible again, slumped on the ground. This scares some of the other guys, making them worry that Del was right to still care about things.

I can see what has to be done.

I need to martyr myself, and I am soon nailing myself to the wall–displaying the nothing that we should all allow ourselves to become.

They understand, and soon the masses of my fellow non-carers begin to fade from view.

But then something else happens.

Something rises from Del–some sort of spirit lifts out of him.

Del’s ghost. Or soul. Or whatever you want to call it.

“I’m going now,” the spirit says. “To the other side.”

“Rubbish,” I scoff, hanging from the wall. “There is no other side. There’s nothing, that’s what I believe.”

“Of course you do,” he says.

Then other spirits come to join him.

His family.

They take him by the hand, forgiveness in their eyes, then they fade from view, too.

Leaving me to hang there alone.

Wondering if I still believe what I just said I believed in.

• Copyright: © 2011 Shaun Avery

The elves pushed their chairs back and groaned. No one spoke.

“There’s nothing like a good Christmas roast,” said Glitter. It sounded a bit forced.

“Best ever!” said Gretchen. That sounded equally forced. There was a kind of finality to this feast that required a degree of solemnity. It was the end of an era.

“Tinsel, you out-sparkled yourself, girl.”

Tinsel blushed, knowing it.

“Yep! Here’s to you!” Spice emptied his flagon and farted loudly. The others ignored his lack of sensitivity.

Time was, a hundred elves would be seated around tables here in the workshop, singing and celebrating the success of the season well into New Year. Tinsel had cooked turkeys and hams, jellies and puddings that would do the heart good to see, and beers, breads and homemade sloe gin. That was before–they were just a handful now and they weren’t exactly celebrating. There’d have been more fun at a wake.

“What do we do now?” Pickles, always ahead of every game, sounded unsure for a change.

“The dishes?” said Gretchen, hopefully.

Pickles gave an exasperated sigh. “I mean, what do we do now?”

“As in?” inquired Sprinkle.

“As in, for instance, do we open the mail?”

There was already a pile stacked up in the corner and they all knew that if it wasn’t tackled bit by bit, it would build to a mountain in no time at all. However, none of it was addressed to them. Suddenly the dishes seemed to be the least of their problems.

“It doesn’t seem right somehow.” Glitter’s voice sounded small. “I know we used to help with the mail, but…”

“We’re going to argue ethics now?” said Pickles.

“You mean we should just carry on like before?” Franzipan had always been a keen worker. He specialized in handmade wooden toys, but the big stores with their mass-produced mouldeds meant he was the only one of his department left. It seemed there was little demand for craftsmanship. Santa had been going for cheaper options for years. It was more cost effective.

All that was part of the original dispute.

“It’s a consideration,” said Pickles, self-appointed shop steward through all the unpleasantness of the past months.

Franzipan had become bitter. “Whoa! Weren’t we made redundant? Let go? Cast aside? Cost-cutting exercises, remember? The economic downturn? Trimming the fat?”

“We could become a co-operative. Go it alone,” said Pickles.

“But nobody can afford Christmas any more. That’s what he said.” Glitter’s voice kind of swallowed itself.

“That’s right, comrade. And why should we work now? We have a roof over our heads; plenty here to eat.”

“Plenty of what?” asked Gretchen.

“Venison. We have a breeding herd.”

“But I like the deer.”

“Me too, Gretchen, but as Santa himself pointed out, there’s no room for sentiment in times like these–nice with redcurrant jelly on the side, too. You can manage that, can’t you, Tinsel?”

“Just as long as I don’t have to behead them myself this time.”

“Involuntary severance,” reminded Pickles, “and again, as Santa said, commerce is our business. He’d be the first to realize it’s nothing personal. Now–what about that mail?”

“I think we ought,” said Sprinkle.

“But we can’t deliver toys without logistics.” Franzipan thought of the beautiful sleigh he’d made so long ago. It had been replaced by ugly, fuel-guzzling lorries and now sat rotting in a shed, eaten away by profit.

“Someone should let the kiddies down gently. Whatever else happens, Santa definitely isn’t coming to town this year.”

It was a hideous truth.

Spice rubbed his rotund belly contentedly and picked a strand of white hair from between his teeth. “Tough old bird! Had to be, I suppose, old-timer like that. Been everywhere. Done everything.”

Franzipan gave him a look of disgust. “Ghoul! Nobody said you had to eat boots and all.”

Spice just laughed.

• Copyright: © 2011 Oonah V Joslin

“Where’s Bill?” Duncan Brines asked between slurps of coffee. He twitched for a cigarette.

Above the noise of the copier, Sally Bean screamed, “Has anyone seen Bill? I have a fax for him.”

“Bill in the crapper?” George Tipply guffawed, his beard studded with Twinkie crumbs.

“Is William in today?” bossman Jenkins, smelling like booze, asked after lunch.

HR Cindy smiled. “Has Bill already left for Cancun?” Her legs looked friggin’ amazing in that skirt.

“Where’s Billy-boy?” I sang out as I unlocked the door to my house that evening, cautiously avoiding the drying puddle of blood on the floor.

• Copyright: © 2011 Sheryl Normandeau

Mathis paused at the doorway. Four unwashed, filth-caked forms, some huddled in blankets and others in what scraps of fabric they had freed from the wreck of the room, looked back at him.

He was stalling. Everyone knew it. The truth was, no matter what stoic mask Mathis plastered onto his face, he could not elude his fear. He turned away before his ailing nerves betrayed him, stepped through the door, and closed it behind him.

The hall stretched ahead. Far to the opposite end, he saw the other door, the exit. He took a careful step, and then another. He began the walk from one end of the hallway, from sanctuary, toward the distant other end, where anything could happen.

The only lighting in the hall stammered from poor fixtures overhead, dim and flickering. The carpet beneath Mathis’ tattered shoes was stained an ugly, splotchy maroon. In several areas along the hall, portions of carpet were burned away, and black circles remained.

Cigarette butts and snack wrappers littered the floor in front of Mathis. He stepped around the wrappers, because they would make noise, and that was the last thing in the world he needed right now.

On the walls hung pictures, many an abstract mess of grays and blacks. One of the pictures had fallen, and lay on the floor against the left wall. Mathis stepped past it, and over a dirty diaper, to proceed.

Ahead, the right side of the hall opened into another area which was even darker than the main hallway. It featured no lighting at all, and only a single stairway, which led up to a place that no sane person wanted to think about in detail, least of all Mathis. He crept past this area, but against his better judgment, allowed a flitting glance toward the stairs. Dread found his heart, and squeezed it. Breathing became difficult.

He had to stop. He leaned against one wall to recuperate, taking slow, easy breaths to quell the sense of panic that clenched him. He resisted an urge to look again in the direction of that stairway. Instead, Mathis looked toward the door from which he had come, where all those other refugees hid.

He had come far, he realized. Now was not the time to hesitate. Not here, not now.

He righted himself and started walking again. His steps treaded the ugly carpet with cautious silence. The battered old oak door neared his reach. He took the last few steps, and grasped the door’s cold brass knob.

At the sudden chill, Mathis shuddered, but he forced himself to open it. The door cracked open, and the unoiled hinge squealed.

A dark blur swept down the stairs and up the long hall. Mathis screamed in terror, and the immense blur of motion was upon him. The hallway lights flickered out.

Almost a minute later, the lights, ever faint, came back on in the hallway, but continued to blink uneasily. The hallway was empty. In front of its exit, freshly burned through the carpet, was a smoking black circle.

Back in the room Mathis had left behind, the remaining refugees looked at one another, expressions torn. There were no words.

Mathis was gone, and still the food supply dwindled. Even knowing this to be so, as they passed around an old can of peas, a quiet hope sustained them. They remained four in number. Soon, they would have to choose another to walk the long hall. Perhaps the next one, whichever one of them it might be, would make it.

Above, up a stairway in the upper reaches, a searing heat pulsed in the darkness, and lingered in anticipation.

Beyond the oak door at the end of the long hall, outside the ice-covered shambles of the building, everlasting winter reigned over a barren, albescent land pocketed with uncounted circular scars.

• Copyright: © 2011 Tommy B. Smith

So this one time I was driving up State Highway 104. Listen up. I swear on my dad’s balls that this is a true story. So I was driving up 104 at night when a man, naked as the day God made ’im ’cept for his shoes, runs across the road. I could see him clear as the hair on my hands in the bright light of the moon and my high beams. Good lookin’ fella, a bit too much hair on his chest for girls these days if ya know what I mean. Girls these days seem to like their men to look like boys, but I digress. Anyhow, he’s running erratic-like across the road and back again, across and back, like a drugged up roadrunner or somethin’. A black car comes barrelin’ down the other lane, no lights on, speedin’ like he’s tryin’ to outrace the end of the world. BAM! He hits the man and doesn’t even slow down. Just keeps goin’ down the road like nothin’ at all happened. I hit the brakes hard and almost swerve into the ditch. I get out of the car and call out, “You all right, mister?” Don’t hear nothin’. I get my flashlight out of the glove box. I find my way back down the road to the gory scene. And I do mean gory. And the stink. Jesus, the stink! I have to cover my nose and mouth with my shirt to keep from passin’ out from it. The man’s gone. Just gone. The dead thing is a wolf. Biggest damned wolf I ever did see. He’d be six-foot-six at least, standin’ on his hind legs. Now he’s all black fur and tripes and raw meat and innards. Just a mess of roadkill. I’ll be damned to the depths of Hell if there ain’t a pair of bloody sneakers. One’s hangin’ off the claw of a hind paw and t’other is a foot or two away in the gravel. I was shaken by the whole thing, but what’s a man to do? Ya can’t report the hit and run of a wild animal to the po-lice. And the sneakers? Well, I dunno about that. Pro’lly just a coincidence. You do see shoes alongside roads often enough.

• Copyright: © 2011 Shannon M Wendt

Jason was on the road to his cabin before hunting season was even an hour old. News reports of deer acting strangely didn’t worry him, and as it turned out he actually bagged his first buck with the front of his car.

Approaching the mangled corpse Jason noticed a chewed human arm poking from a split in the deer’s side. He heard growling from the tree line. Three more deer–eyes blazing, fangs gleaming, foam dripping from their muzzles–lumbered toward him. Jason realized with dismay that hunting season this year was going to be a little different.

• Copyright: © 2011 Robert C. Eccles

She touches him. Maybe it’s gone, she thinks, but knows it’s not. It’s always here, the priest told her. It’s everywhere, the priest told her. She spreads her fingers to cover his chest, to feel with her fingers is there life inside. She feels it. Please, God, she thinks. She feels it getting stronger. Stronger. She hears it now. It’s getting closer now. Please, God, she thinks, help me remember the Catholic prayers, every word this time, all the words this time. She waits… She waits for it. He opens his mouth and it flies out. It circles the room. It screeches. It looks at her. Eyes like glass, dead eyes. It circles. Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary… She can’t remember all the words. It looks at her. Dead eyes. It circles closer. Hail Mary full of… full of grace… She can’t remember all the words. Please, God, help me remember all the words this time. It screeches. It touches her. Please, God. It looks at her. Dead eyes look at her. Hail Mary full of grace… She can’t remember all the words. Help me. It rips her flesh. She bleeds. The Lord is with thee… She screams. She can’t remember now, screaming now, her flesh ripping now. She bleeds. The pain, the pain. Now and at the hour of… of… She won’t do it, won’t, won’t let it in, won’t let it inside her. But the pain… Now and the hour of our death… The pain, the pain. She opens her legs. It flies in. Amen…

He watches. Not much time left, he thinks. Must go to Mass, he thinks. He’ll go to Mass and he’ll listen to the priest, the priest’s prayers, the Catholic prayers. He’ll listen harder this time, much harder this time. He won’t forget this time. He’ll go back and he’ll touch her stomach with his fingers, and he’ll wait. He’ll wait for it. And when it’s time, he’ll remember. He’ll remember this time. He’ll say the Catholic prayers, every word, all the words this time, and it’ll fly far, far away this time. He won’t forget. He won’t forget this time. He’ll say Hail Mary full of grace and he’ll remember every word, all the words. He’ll remember all the words this time.

• Copyright: © 2011 William J Fedigan

“Zack, I don’t know why.” Those were the first words Emily said to me when I opened the front door. There she was– the one that got away. I hate to sound trite, but it’s true. She had moved away from Stillwater when we were both just kids. Years later, in college, I had read on Facebook that she had been in a car accident. People said she lost sight in both her eyes, as well as sustaining some damage to her spine. She would spend the rest of her days blind, immobilized and helpless.

In hindsight, I should’ve gone and seen her. I should’ve been there for her. I should’ve shown her that I still cared. But I was afraid. What if she didn’t remember me the way I remembered her? What if she got the wrong impression? Like I said, I was a scared and stupid kid.

But standing there in the doorway to the rundown brownstone that I rented with a couple other guys, the past meant nothing. There she was, and I’ll be damned but she was looking me right in my green eyes with her own bright blue ones. They were just as vivid as I remembered. “Nobody believed it, least of all me. I mean, I just woke up and I could see. Zack! I don’t even know what to think…” She stepped forward and gave me a hug. “And then, after a while, I could move again, and I could feel my legs and Zack, it’s the most incredible thing! It’s a miracle!”

I took her inside. We sat down and she told me her story. She told me everything. We talked about the impossibility of her recovering her sight and her mobility, how there was no medical explanation for it. I told her about all those years I spent wondering about her, about the kid who still kept me up at night even as I just brushed my feelings off as nothing more than a childhood crush. We were both crying by the end. She told me she wouldn’t leave again.

Her tears of joy made it harder to give her the news, but I had to. I told her more of my story–how I had gone in to the doctor and walked out with the sobering knowledge I had months to live. Despite the treatments, the cancer kept progressing, and fast. Em was horrified at the news. We were finally together again, but for how long?

Then, inspiration. I realized, in a moment of decisiveness, how I was going to ensure that Em and I would be together forever. I took her by the hand and led her to my bedroom. I told her to sit on the edge of the bed and close her eyes. She was confused, and more than a little nervous, but she obeyed me. Next, I went and fetched the nailgun one of my roommates keeps. I was a little nervous, but my plan was in motion, so no going back. She didn’t hear it coming: a whooshing noise and then a wet crunch as it penetrated her brainstem. Another shot to the head. I wanted to make sure it was over quickly.

When my roommates come back, I can only imagine their disgust at finding her dissected body heaped on a plastic tarp in my room. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, so I collected samples of whatever I could: blood, hair, ovaries, kidney and brain tissue, cerebrospinal fluid, eyeballs, bone marrow. Some samples I injected myself with, using a syringe from the trash. Others I had to, well, eat.

As I washed up and threw on fresh clothes, I noticed that one of my eyes had turned her shade of blue. And perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I swear that old scar on my arm began to disappear as I studied it in the mirror. I stepped outside with Em.

• Copyright: © 2011 Sotirios Fox