MicroHorror

Andy’s cell phone rang while he was pulling away from the gym. He flipped it open. “Hello,” he said.

“Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“Andy…”

He held the phone closer to his ear and pulled to the side of the parking lot. “That you, Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound funny. You all right?”

“No, I’m not,” Mark said. His voice was a strained whisper and awash with exhaustion. “There’s something in my car, Andy. Something I can’t get out. It won’t let me out either.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s in your car?”

There was a moment of silence, then, “I need your help, please. Can you help me?”

Andy pulled back onto the parking lot and drove for the road. “Where are you?”

“I’m parked behind the bar. Just past the lights. Please hurry.”

“I’m on my way.” Andy flipped his phone shut and sped through the night towards the bar.

Mark’s car was parked as foretold: behind the bar where it sat encased in darkness and resembling the shadow of a car more than a car itself. Andy parked a few spaces over and got out. He strained his eyes to see. Mark was sitting in the driver’s seat as erect and still as a tombstone. He jogged quickly over to the driver’s window with a flashlight in hand and peered inside. Mark remained staring straight ahead with a doped expression on his face. He did not move until Andy tapped on his window. He rolled the window down and looked up sleepily.

“Thank you for coming,” he said in a low voice.

Andy tried to survey the inside of the vehicle, but it was too dark to see anything save Mark’s face. There was an odd smell seeping from the car, something sweet and sour.

“You okay? What the hell is going on?” Andy clicked on his flashlight and began to raise it.

“Yes,” Mark said. “Everything’s fine now.”

Andy shone his flashlight through the window. “What’s in there with you?”

“Something that won’t let me leave.”

It was then that Andy saw the passenger. It was crouched behind the seat, a thing spindly and black with long legs and arms folded like ghastly pretzels. A creature born of shadow. A thing with no face, only a swirling mass of blackness that sat where its head should have been and occasionally cracked by a grin lined with jagged, yellow teeth. It was melting in and out of the shadows like ink swirling in a glass of water. But there was more to be seen in the back seat.

There were bodies.

They lay piled atop one another in a pitiful shambles of bloody, broken body parts like junk marionettes, their blood vanished, their eyes soulless. Andy saw that the passenger had stretched one of its arms up to the back of Mark’s head where it disappeared into a hole that it had punched into his skull. He saw the passenger move its arm. Mark’s head moved along with it, and he looked at Andy with dead, soulless eyes. The passenger flexed its black fingers somewhere inside Mark’s skull, and Mark began to speak.

“And he won’t let you leave, either.”

The last thing Andy experienced in this world was an impossibly long, black arm stretching through the window to clutch his face and snatch him inside the car into history and oblivion. When done doing everything it saw fit to do, the passenger dumped Andy’s body atop the rest and picked up Mark’s cell phone again. It scrolled through the contacts. It was done with the As. It went to the first entry under the Bs and hit send as it raised the phone to Mark’s mouth.

“Hello?” a woman said.

The passenger flexed its fingers. “Barbara?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Barbara…”

“Mark? Is that you?”

“Yes. There’s something in my car. I need your help.”

• Copyright: © 2010 Trinity Martin