MicroHorror

The house had been deserted for the length of memory. No records existed of its architect, its owners, or any inhabitants. Decades ago, the town attempted to board up the structure, but that effort ended after the first nails sank through the planks and into the structure of the house itself. Those men who came to seal the house off from the world, so the story goes, fled screaming and whimpering after they struck the first hammer blows. The walls of the house, they said, were bleeding.

Josh Kovacs knew the stories about the house with the bleeding walls, but while standing in the great hall of the house, examining the walls, his only emotion was not apprehension but disappointment.

No clanking chains. No wailing wraiths. No slimy manifestations of ectoplasm or any other phenomena he read about in his collection of magazines and paperback books devoted to psychic phenomena, cattle mutilations, alien abductions and/or impregnations. No bleeding walls.

Josh wanted to be an paranormal investigator, a ghost hunter. What better place to start his career as a ghost hunter of the supernatural than here, in this legendary house with the bleeding walls? When the grisly phenomena transpired, he would be ready to witness the event. Then he would write an article and send it off to one of the magazines.

He glanced up at the cathedral ceiling of the hall. The aging timbers that supported the vault of the ceiling reminded him of a human ribcage. The smell of mold was depressive, deepening his disappointment.

“Well, let’s look it over,” he said out loud. Maybe he could find some old diary or manuscript revealing the house’s sordid, hopefully murderous history, something to salvage to make this midnight excursion worthwhile.

He took hold of the newel post of the staircase that ran alongside the wall leading upward. He immediately jerked his hand back. The post was repulsively moist, slimy.

His sneaker-shod foot moved up the first riser of the stairs. The steps, he vaguely noticed, glistened in the ambient light.

Before he made it five steps, his foot slipped, twisted to the side, and went through the space between the posts that supported the railing.

He tried to extricate his foot. The space between the posts seemed too narrow to allow his small foot to pass through and get caught at all. Was he imagining it, or was the space between the posts becoming even smaller?

Josh braced his other foot against a post, his back braced against the plaster surface as he pushed to force his ensnared foot free.

Strange. The wall didn’t seem solid enough to brace his body. It seemed somehow… soft.

Josh craned his neck to study the wall. He pressed his fingers against it and pushed. The smooth surface bowed inward like rubber, pliant and spongy.

Shivering now, not from the dank cold, but of realization, Josh pulled out his jackknife and snapped it open. He plunged the blade point into the wall, and drew a long scar against its surface.

The staircase shook.

The blade entered the wall as if the surface was not formed of poured plaster, but capillary-rich flesh.

The slash on the wall dribbled blood. First a viscous line, black in the fading light, then a long stream of gore that ran copiously down the stairs.

Josh dropped his knife from numbed fingers. Now he knew why those men fled the house when they tried to nail planks to its openings.

There was nothing supernatural about the house at all, Josh realized. The great ceiling, which he had first thought resembled a human set of ribs, was the roof of a mouth–the huge, cavernous maw of a voracious carnivore that was descending as the staircase rose, carrying Josh to meet the ceiling.

Nothing supernatural at all.

It was actually very natural. The nature of biology. The biology of prey and predator.

Soon the walls were drenched in bright, newly bled blood.