MicroHorror

Childlike and pale in her hospital gown, Sarah cried out into the darkness.

Something answered.

A guttural growl rose up behind her from the dim hospital bed where her warm corpse still lay.

“I’m just a kid!” Sarah’s ghost shouted as she fled from the sound. “Please just give me a break!”

The grinding, inhuman voice escalated to a scream. She would not get a break.

Sarah looked around frantically for a doctor or nurse, but the halls were abandoned now, bare of the living. She charged toward the elevators.

Shouldn’t they be right here?

She saw only blackness ahead and didn’t dare look behind.

It’s coming.

Inhaling shakily, Sarah forced herself onward. She’d been on the high school track team for three years when she was alive, but that didn’t help her ghost body. She was weighed down by the dark, the noise, invisible heavy hands.

And the bad thing I did.

Then the hospital began to change around her. Paint peeled off the walls and tiles pulled up from the floor like she was watching a time-lapse movie of decay. She danced across the broken ground, terrified she might fall. Sarah choked as she smelled the rotting bodies of the patients who had inhabited the rooms she ran past. Blood pooled under the doors. She heard what she knew was a chorus of creaking bones rising to follow her.

Ahead, a white figure came into view, running toward her. She couldn’t turn around–the howling hit a crescendo and the bones rattled–

Abruptly, the noise stopped. Sarah shut her eyes and held out her hands protectively, and touched

Glass?

She had run into a mirror. She stepped back and looked at the collapsing hospital around her, and finally at herself.

Oh, God.

Her neck was black and swollen above the chaste white collar of her gown. She could see the marks from the rope. Her lips were tinted blue.

Sarah hesitantly raised a hand to the mirror and touched the reflection of her fingertips.
A black spindly claw reached out of the mirror and clasped her hand.

Sarah shrieked as she was dragged down, down…

She opened her eyes.

Before long, she realized where she had been taken. She last saw this place only days before.

The hospital’s nursery was lit with dirty, flickering fluorescent lights. The many cribs meant for newborns were barren, except for one.

In the center of the room lay a small figure draped in a black blanket. It shifted slightly as Sarah watched.

She realized there was no way out.

Sarah stepped forward. The shape twitched silently.

Again, she stepped closer. Closer.

Why me, why did they do this to me, why did I do this…

She grabbed an edge of the blanket and yanked it off. All at once, the memories flooded back.

The pregnancy test taken in a bathroom stall at the homecoming game. Positive.

The comments about her weight. The stares. The gradual rising horror as her belly grew round.

The senior prom night spent at home.

Graduation day, last week, in the labor room. She’d yelled and moaned and finally the wrinkly thing popped out.

“You wouldn’t stop crying,” she said shakily to the gray, hollow-eyed creature. “I had to shut you up. Had to.”

The hands, Sarah’s hands, had wrapped around the baby’s neck. Then, shaking. A sharp snap. Silence.

“I followed you, okay? I paid for my sin.”

The rope she’d taken from the garage. The chair she’d stood on, then kicked away. Mother and baby, broken, breathless.

The shriveled creature opened its toothless mouth and began to wail the same deep call that had brought its mother here.

Sarah picked up her dead child. She cradled and stroked it, and waited for it to take her.

• Copyright: © 2009 Cheryl Hall