MicroHorror

The attic: an old trunk full of wool blankets, the pink torso of a tailor’s mannequin, boxes of old books, a cache of once glossy pornography magazines, dust motes playing against streams of light filtering through the exhaust fan. The attic is vast, unreasonably so, miles of old hobbies, dreams, and memories. This is where children’s excised nightmares go; often they are found, dried to a crisp, and stuck in old spider webs and dusty corners.

Tina pulled the string that lit the bulb. It did not so much cast light as deepen the shadows.

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” she whispered.

Something old, the attic murmured back.

In the rooms below Mother fixed a seam on Tina’s wedding dress, and her fiancé Daryl drank Scotch with her father on the deck as they planned out the seating arrangements for the wedding.

“Something old,” she said aloud, and poked at an accordion case with her toe. Packing boxes shifted with a groan, thrown out of balance. Tina stepped back, as the floor boards creaked, and the smell of mice wafted in the air.

Something old? the attic breathed in her ear.

She squared her shoulders, rubbed a tickle from her nose, and pulled at the lid of an old packing box, searching for something old.

The boxes shifted again, this time of their own accord. Perhaps squirrels had gotten in through the exhaust vents. She made her way through the boxes searching. Nothing unusual presented itself. Perhaps the attic was only playing tricks on her. It would not be the first time.

Something old.

The heel of her shoe wedged between two boards. Twisting and jerking, she pulled it free, wrenching a muscle in her calf, and a curse from her lips.

Tina knelt and squinted in the dim light: a crack, a chink, a passage between what was above and what was below. She put the tips of two fingers on the edge of the crack and ran them gently around the rim. A breeze blew from the hole, she pulled at the board, and to her surprise it lifted up, revealing the cobwebbed mystery that was below. The next board came away as easily as the first.

She could hear the bold whispers of conspiracy, the plotting of darkness… more boxes, big and small, were hidden here… Something old?… she opened them one by one… here she found her first kiss in a perfume bottle, a sour dream in a wooden jewelry box, the sweetness of a favorite boyfriend in a sugar bowl, a bruise from the back of her mother’s hand was wrapped in a handkerchief. A bouquet of dried flowers, each grown from a hoarded baby tooth, dutifully planted and harvested from a secret garden hidden in the woods. Tina dug deeper into the cache of boxes… Something old? She tossed aside the damp smell of her once curious fingers that she had folded into a origami swan, she cast a lonely sunset over her shoulder, pushed aside a needle and thread she’d had repaired her virginity with. She crumpled an argument with her father into a tight little ball and pressed it into a silver thimble.

Something old.

“Tina!” Daryl called. “You still up here?”

“Yes,” she said so softly that Daryl could barely hear her. The boxes were all pushed aside and there was something more, something old. She reached for it cautiously, but not afraid, even as it pulled her gently down into what was below…

“Where?” Daryl said.

Where? the attic invited.

First there were dozens, and then there were none. He floated on the fear, not knowing if he had ever existed or if he had been the reflection, and his host had walked away. He knew he shouldn’t have pulled his hand from this father’s and roamed and wondered what it was like to live behind a mirror, to exist as only an reflection–now he knew as the world was snuffed out. He had tried screaming but the sound did not come, and what was the world without sound or sight? Only fear. Had he ever had the warm bed with the soft flannel sheets and a mother who would read Curious George twice if he asked? Had she ever existed?

Perhaps, but not here.

And what horrors these thoughts induced, as he twisted and ebbed in the darkness; perhaps the reflection had found some way to replace him and even now was walking into the bright sunlight holding his father’s hand. Perhaps they would go together to see the hairy Wolf Boy and the mountainous Fat Lady… he reached out; the world was perfectly smooth as his fingers touched cool glass.

Alone, in the hungry darkness, alone stuck between raven feathers in a world with no sun. He tried to speak again but the words didn’t come, only the hollow echo of glass shattering and the splinters of pain between his fingers, only the scalding grip of the shadows as they took him by the wrist.

“We have a name that can be never spoken,” they hissed. “We are breath with no soul, soul with no flesh. We are your humanity, their dark dreams, their twisted thoughts. Your repulsion is our perfume, your fear is our fodder–you inhale our used breath. When one of us dies, one of you is born.”

He tried to pull away as they lit the world and he saw himself, indeed gripping his father’s hand, being pulled through the maze. They chased him, mimicking every move as twisted reflections flailed in the darkness.

“We have the light sometimes,” the voice said. “And they have the darkness.”

He saw through the glass to his father, who bellowed out in fear and broke yet another mirror as red blood dripped down his arm. The shadows dragged him along, continuing to cruelly masquerade as their prey, toying with them, teasing the fear from their flesh like a lover might tease the object of his lust.

“Two seasons, my child,” the voice said and slammed him to the cold glass that bent but did not break. “We have two seasons here, the Now and the Gone.”

He whimpered now, even as the sunlight spilled over him and his father, and they stumbled with the shards of mirror stuck into their arms and between their fingers. And the sharp yells of the barker came quiet and the other patrons gasped. A doctor fought his way through, braving the crowds and their blood. For a brief instant he saw the horror in their eyes, then he yelled for clean water and rags to tie up their wounds. He dismissed their terror quite readily for such was part of his trade. The doctor bandaged their trembling limbs as the crowds gawked and gasped and the smell of sweat and popcorn hung heavily in the afternoon air.