MicroHorror

“Not worthy,” Max said, waking from his nightmare. He didn’t want to write about the serial killer he’d dreamt.

He smelled something foul in the room, looked, saw it just inside the doorway, its silhouette upright like a man, but shaped differently.

He whispered, “No, werewolf, I’ve written too many of your kind already.”

The beast growled, but Max wasn’t afraid. He just let it slide out of his mind, and it turned to smoke. His wife had not stopped snoring through all this.

Feeling restless, he got out of bed, took the hall to the dining room. Something sat at the table. It spoke with a thick Transylvanian accent.

“Hello, Max. Sit down.”

“No, I’m going to grab some juice. Meanwhile, you can give me a short spiel about yourself. But keep in mind that I’m not going to chronicle your life in a novel. I doubt I’d even do a short story, but you might get a flash or drabble out of me.”

“Flashes! Drabbles! I have drunk the blood of a king! How dare you insult me!”

Max selected tomato from the selection of juices in the fridge, and said, “Yeah, well, I’m going to have to let you go now. You might try talking to Anne Rice, but you’ll probably have to take a number.”

The vampire surged, but Max put it out of his mind, and it dissipated into smoke. He took his juice downstairs to his basement office, pulled up his web browser. He had ten e-mails from editors, and his website had a hundred new hits.

“Wow! Maybe I should take a vacation.”

Hearing a ruckus on the stairs, he turned to see his wife’s legs. His wife was hot, so he had high hopes for what might have broken her slumber. Then, when she got downstairs, he saw her face was a little different from before. She was still pretty, but giant incisors came from her mouth, and her eyes emanated red light.

“Very impressive. Nothing usually affects my wife. I mean, she just slept through a growling werewolf, and I presume she slept through the yelling vampire, but you’ve managed to wake her body and cause its cells to change. Let’s hear your spiel.”

The beast didn’t speak with his wife’s voice, but something like a mixture between a chainsaw and a dog. Its English was fine, though.

“I like to travel in time and possess a relative of a productive writer. Then I like to eat the writer’s brain.”

The entity in his wife’s body moved swiftly across the floor, grabbed him by the hair of his head and lifted him almost to the ceiling.

Dangling and in pain, Max said, “This is very unnecessary! You’ve already managed to outdo any monster I’ve met. Now put me down, or I’ll put you out of my mind!”

The monster quickly, but gently, placed him in his chair.

“That’s better. Now what is it you’re looking for?”

The monster sat on the futon a few feet away. “I thought my story might be worthy of a novel.”

Max smiled. “We’ll see.”