MicroHorror

“You’re back again.”

Will took his ticket from the woman at the museum admissions desk and said, “I still haven’t seen everything.”

“Knock yourself out, young man,” the tired-looking woman said, “but know that we close in forty-five minutes.” Her stare showed that she thought he was weird.

Will understood the judgment. After all, he’d only been coming weekly for the last year. The death of his fiancée had triggered the visits. As he descended the marble steps to the chilly bottom floor, he remembered that February night he’d gazed at Louise’s mangled figure on the train tracks behind the museum. Her distorted back and bluish skin made her look like a crone even though she was only twenty-eight.

“Why would she be here?” Will had asked the policeman.

The policeman shrugged and said, “Someone might have chased her or dragged her. Whoever it was wasn’t a robber. She still had her belongings in her coat pocket.” He handed Will Louise’s wallet, her keys, and a ticket stub from the museum.

Will was certain Louise had met her murderer in here. He wandered past the stained and chipped torsos of the Greco-Roman sculpture gallery the same way he’d wandered through the rooms upstairs–with an eye out for the sicko who’d perhaps spoken to his wife before getting her to the tracks. Yet Will was alone–just as he would be when he lay awake in his and Louise’s bed on this freezing night.

Warm air blew through a doorway Will hadn’t noticed before. He soon discovered another gallery, this one burnt-smelling and painted crimson. Small, black-and-white illustrations adorned the space. Each artwork featured a victim. Will saw a man with a broken wineglass protruding from his throat, a woman with flailing arms falling through the shaft of a stairwell. Presiding over every tragedy was a white-skinned figure in a black suit. The man–if that is what he was–had a face in the shape of a crescent moon and raisin-like eyes.

All the drawings unsettled Will, but the last in one row caused him to whimper. In the picture, a woman resembling Louise stood beside the moon man above train tracks. The man held her upright, and her head was turned in an unnatural position, as if someone had twisted it that way.

Will’s knuckles were white when he gripped the edge of the admissions desk. “Who’s the artist behind those works down there?” he barked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said, fingering her two-way radio. “They’re all dead and buried near the Coliseum or somewhere.”

“Not the sculptures,” Will said. “Those nasty drawings in the other gallery.”

“There’s only one gallery. We don’t have any drawings downstairs.”

“I can show you,” Will said, grabbing her sleeve.

She stepped back and spoke into the radio. “Security,” she said.

Minutes later, Will paused on the snowy sidewalk. He knew that by retreating home he would never learn what had really happened to his love. He waited until the woman left her desk before sneaking into the lobby. As he stepped over the chain link that signaled the museum’s closure, he thought he might be able to locate the artist’s name on the illustrations.

The gallery had become dim and hot. Will moved from picture to picture, searching for a signature but finding none. He reached the illustration containing Louise and gasped. This illustration was no longer the last. To its right hung a drawing of Will. He was prone on a floor, a chain link wrapped around his neck and his eyes blankly staring. The moon man crouched over him.

Will’s dread became panic when he heard the clinking of metal. He didn’t have time to turn around before the links pressed into his skin. He glanced at his image and then that of Louise. He remembered telling her that maybe they should forget wedding photographs and have a painted portrait instead.