MicroHorror

Cal no longer believed the “mongrel mud people” were inferior to his own Aryan race.

“I don’t hate nobody no more,” he mumbled before slurping his thin soup.

Raised on a Montana compound, home and temple for the Church of Jesus, White Christian Savior, Cal now knew all races were equal. Cal even questioned if there really was such a thing as “races,” plural.

How could he not reject the Church’s core belief after all he’d been through these past five nightmare years? The War savaged the world, killed near all things, left piles of dead to rot, the air thin and poisoned, with few left struggling to survive.

This nightmare time revealed to Cal how false the Church’s teachings really were. No race was “chosen,” nobody “inferior.” White people were no better. They taste like salty pork, same as everyone else. Just red meat once you peel away the skin, even that bony old Prophet.

• Copyright: © 2010 David J. Rank

The infected howled like beasts. They hunted him. He ran, dying, blood drip-dripping from a teeth-torn arm.

They howled. Only minutes before he would join those plague-enraged revenants and betray the survivors. He knew where they hid.

He knew when the infection overwhelmed his mind the bestial hunger would turn him upon his friends, his lover, his child, leading the howling mob to them.

He could not let that happen.

He ran. There was a place, the old courthouse, now a museum. Bursting through a side entrance, he stumbled up stairs. On the third floor he found the attic door–kicked it open.

Mind dying, he willed his spasming body up the stairwell to the steel cistern once used to collect rainwater. He climbed its ladder, heaving his palsied body into the twelve-foot depth. Bones snapped.

One thought flared–no escape–before his mind vanished.

Hunger burned–and he howled.

• Copyright: © 2010 David J. Rank

“We don’t want to eat anywhere that’s empty,” said Jamie. “Let’s find a restaurant with lots of locals.”

“Here,” said Ty, parking their car. “This place is full.”

As they approached the hostess, they wondered if they’d have to wait.

“Just follow me,” she said.

As Jamie and Ty walked through the restaurant they noticed that some of the customers were not very animated.

“Here’s a nice spot,” said the hostess. She dragged the two corpses that were seated at the table into a corner.

“No one comes into an empty restaurant,” she said. “So we keep the tables filled.”

• Copyright: © 2011 Mark S. Bacon

It was Epiphany. Snow fell thickly over the graveyard among the trees and on the narrow path designed for biers–not hearses. We parked and walked back towards the older headstones that leaned uniformly toward the path from the subsiding bank rising on the right, among tree roots frozen by time and this bitter chill. Tall conifers scraped the heavy sky and ivy tangled, clinging on to everything for dear life amid dead leaves–so picturesque.

I took my camera out and snapped the scene.

Quite without warning my spouse pushed me to one side and sprang to the other.

“What are you doing, pushing me?”

“I thought I heard a carriage, a–a cart or something coming from behind but…”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“It really felt real. Spooked me.”

“You don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

There was a sudden flurry and beating wings among the greenery.

“There, you see?” I said. “It’s just wood pigeons squabbling.”

“I expect they don’t like the snow.”

“And nor do I.”

The place was utterly deserted as we trudged to the grave we’d come to visit and laid our wreath–a little late this year because of severe weather. We didn’t linger for the cold, but returned immediately to the car, glad to sit in heated comfort again. The snow fell heavier as we drove off, the air a thin white gruel of it.

The carriage came from nowhere, its pallid lamp alight. It looked a few hundred years out of time. There was no place to pass.

“Oh, God!” I shuddered and spoke the words aloud.

I saw the horse’s hooves crash through the bonnet and my heart lurched. I covered my face with my hands but the apparition passed straight through us.

“What the blazes is wrong with you?” said my husband, braking hard due to my reaction.

“I–nothing,” I said. He hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t real. “It was nothing. It’s just–spooky here, like you said.”

“Well, don’t ever do that to me again!”

Upon returning home I uploaded the photo I’d taken. There on the photograph, a yellow orb above a certain headstone–I had seen no light.

“What do you suppose that is?” I asked my husband.

“Trick of the light,” he said and looked away.

I told him what I’d seen.

I had to know whose grave–but not any time soon. I walked over the new spring grass, admiring the resurrected snowdrops until I reached that grave–the one with the light. . I was wearing a cross. I never wear a cross, but today I did. It looked peaceful and benign today in bright sunshine.

The headstone read:

Herein lieth the earthly remains of
Tully Cuthbert
Undertaker of this parish
who departed this life on
6th January
ANNO DOMINI 1812.

Two hundred years to the day the photo was taken.

• Copyright: Story and photograph © 2011 Oonah V Joslin