MicroHorror

I awoke with a terrible feeling clutching my heart. I’d been told it was simply a fact of having a baby in the house that I’d wake up with these feelings, but something really did seem wrong. The atmosphere in the house was strange; the light was dulled somehow and the air felt old and stale. There was an almost palpable stillness that defied description.

I rushed to the nursery, and for a moment I was relieved that everything appeared normal. Then a strange shape strode into the light; a ghastly silhouette of a hunched shape on stilts with a huge triangular blade stood out against the moonlit curtains. I flicked on the light, but it too was wrong. The light was dim and somehow sepia-toned, and the shadows seemed to jerk and move as if in the light of a guttering, polluted candle.

A great and awful stork stood beside the crib. It was black and white, but dingy, like a once fine black suit worn to a charcoal gray. It had a featherless, sunburn-pink head and neck splotched with sickly patches of darker skin. It turned its hunched form toward me and looked at me with ageless, grim eyes.

“We storks are charged with the care of all infants,” it began haltingly. “The white storks bring the joy and promise of new life. I…” the stork hesitated, struggling with the words, “…have other duties.” It looked at me once more with its sad, undertaker’s eyes, then spread its massive wings. The light suddenly snapped back to normal, and I was alone in the nursery with the tiny, silent form in the crib.

The house on Roanoke Circle was incredibly well maintained for having been abandoned for several months. The grass was neatly trimmed, the roses were pruned and healthy, and the walkways were swept clean of fallen leaves. Ted decided to find out which of the neighbors was taking care of the yard and send them a gift basket. It was much easier to sell a house that didn’t look like the derelict wrecks he was used to abandoned properties being.

A quick inspection of the interior turned up several odd but generally pleasing things. The previous owners had left all their furniture, decor, and major appliances. This might have been a problem except that it was nice stuff, and the entire house was apparently receiving regular cleaning by someone. The cleanliness and furnishings almost felt staged, like he was in a model home. Also of note was that the house astonishingly still had electricity. The televisions worked and the refrigerator was running, but none of the lights worked.

There was also a skinny black cat, possibly left by the vanished original owners. It had appeared in the living room shortly after he’d come in. It never came close to him, simply stayed back in the shadows and followed him from room to room, its bright yellow eyes never leaving him. He could see why it had been left behind; the thing was eerie.

The last stop on his inspection of the house was the garage. I wouldn’t. Ted whipped around search for the source of the voice he thought he’d heard. There was only the cat. He turned back and opened the door to the garage.

There was a car. Ted’s mind reeled; the sense of something being off that he’d had since he arrived assaulted him almost like nausea. There shouldn’t have been a car. The owners hadn’t been seen in months. Then he saw the two piles of bones in the corner. Sorted, organized, and neatly stacked with the skulls on top. They were also terrifyingly clean, just like everything else.

I tried to warn you. Ted turned back toward the living room. The cat was surrounded by dozens more sets of lambent yellow eyes. “Cat” wasn’t the proper word for it either; its shape was only vaguely cat-like and only one of its eyes was had a cat’s slit pupil–the other had the wide rectangular pupil of a goat. What he’d originally taken for fur was a side effect of the creature having no defined outline–it simply faded out around the edges. None of the other things, for that was the only word for the miscellaneous horrors, were as big as the cat. Besides being asymmetrical shadows with mismatched yellow eyes, they had no common form.

This is our house now. The cat-thing projected its words into his mind as it reared up on its hind legs. Four more eyes were set haphazardly across its torso. They’d started to go yellow, and the pupil of one of them had started to shift like a broken egg yolk, but you could tell that they were human eyes. The missing homeowner’s eyes. Ted’s mind filled with the grisly, hollow laughter of the other assembled apparitions. The nauseous feeling in his stomach wrenched violently, and Ted vomited. Suddenly, the laughter stopped, and every horrible eye was on the mess on the carpet. Ted took the opportunity and fled the house.

Ted Safford quit his job as a realtor shortly after that, and was never seen more than a few feet from an electric light until his disappearance during a power failure two years later. The second realtor that was sent to inspect the house never returned. 1408 Roanoke Circle was never sold, and those that live near it never seem to question why the “abandoned” home is so well kept up, though there seems to be a universal fear of black cats in the area.

She’d overslept by quite a bit. Trisha blamed her clock radio for that. It was playing static, and the white noise just hadn’t been enough to rouse her. She fiddled with the knobs, trying to figure out if it was broken, or if her station was just off the air. The dial traveled quite a ways through multiple stations. She thought that she should have picked up something by now, but the radio was still only giving static. Then it finally picked up a news show.

“…genetically altered strain of kudzu. Citizens are advised…” the newscaster was saying. Trisha flipped the radio off, satisfied that it still worked.

Idly, she wondered why it was so dark in her room this late in the day. She turned to the window. A subdued glow of green-tinted light managed to penetrate the wall of leaves pressed up against it. Trisha decided that the neighbor’s ancient willow must have finally tipped over in the night. She wasn’t terribly surprised to have slept through it. Trisha was one of those people who could sleep through anything.

Trisha lazily got dressed, ate her breakfast and prepared to venture out into the world. There was one small problem, though. Her front door wouldn’t open. After a couple of well placed rams loosened it, she was able to force the opening slowly wider. There was much ripping and the smell of abused foliage as the web of vines that had apparently been blocking her door gave way. She stepped out into another world.

An alien landscape stretched away in all directions, odd shapes all done in a single shade of green. Almost like one of the deep snows she’d seen in her youth, the landscape was reduced to suggestions of what lay beneath. Trisha was able to pick out some of the shapes. The rounded hump to her immediate right was her beloved Volkswagen beetle. A round plateau was the neighbor kid’s trampoline. A massive cone had once been a tall pine tree. The boxy mountains all around her were her neighbors’ houses.

She was also struck by how quiet the morning was. No birds sang, no traffic noise reached her, and the Johnsons’ dog hadn’t started its morning routine of barking madly at her. In fact, the only sound she could hear was an odd whining sound, like a clogged motor trying desperately to run. The sound seemed to be coming from an odd little hill across the street. The shape was familiar, something she’d seen before, but she couldn’t remember there ever being anything permanent in front of Mr. Craig’s house. Then something clicked in her mind and she realized that the shape was Mr. Craig, sitting atop his riding lawnmower. A lawnmower which had still been running when it had been overgrown.

For the first time that morning, it dawned on Trisha that she should be afraid. She tried to run, but found that she couldn’t move. The vines had silently entrapped half her body while she’d been musing. They tightened around her when she struggled, cutting off the circulation in her legs. She tried to claw the vines off of her hips, but they caught her hands and began to creep up her arms. Her last act was a reverberating scream that no one was around to hear. The vines grew into her open mouth, seeking the moisture. The next morning, Trisha didn’t worry about oversleeping.

A lone pigeon flew low by an odd little hill that had long since given up making mechanical sounds. Exhausted from trying to find a perch that didn’t try to snare it, the bird fell to the ground. There were a few brief moments of flapping, but afterward the world knew an unnatural peace of unbroken green.

The Slasher had been surprisingly easy to capture. He had been armed with nothing but the now famous knife, and had broken down crying and cooperated completely once it was out of his grip. The Slasher, terror of the entire state, sat weeping incoherently in the back of a squad car.

The knife itself rested in an evidence bag held by Officer Kyle Bowman. It was a ghastly-looking thing. The files identified it as a Mangbetu sickle, with a long curving blade and a handle made of ivory and carved ironwood. Feathers from some exotic bird had been tied to the pommel. The knife had obviously been cared for almost reverently. The blade was polished to a mirror finish, and not even the feathers showed the slightest stain of blood. It was almost beautiful, in a macabre kind of way.

Knives were really terrifying weapons when you got down to it. A scrape or even an animal claw mark was a good honest wound. A blunt weapon at least depended on the strength of the assailant. A knife, though; with almost no push behind the attack a sharp knife would cleave clean red lines and arcs, unnaturally even separations in the flesh welling with blo–His partner called to him. Kyle realized that he had been staring at the knife resting, so seemingly innocent, in its evidence bag. Staring at it for quite some time. He followed his partner back to the squad car, feeling oddly dazed.

Kyle would have preferred to go home and rest, but the Slasher had been a big case, and they wanted him to get his part of the paperwork done as soon as possible. As he signed one bit of bureaucratic nonsense after another, he began to become entranced with the way the pen cut the white surface of the paper, leaving neat black loops of letters behind.

Kyle awoke on his desk and realized several hours had passed. Since it was already evening he decided whatever paperwork he hadn’t finished before he’d fallen asleep could wait until tomorrow. Part of his mind wondered why his fellow officers had allowed him to sleep at the precinct, but something pushed the thought away before he could dwell on it. His feet slid in something wet as he walked out of the building, but he hardly noticed.

His wife was watching television when he got home. She turned to greet him, but suddenly started to scream. He tried to comfort her, but she just backed away, screaming and pointing at his hand. Kyle looked down at his hand, saw his wife’s reflection in the polished blade he carried, and immediately realized what was upsetting her. Her skin didn’t have nearly enough beautiful red lines and arcs. Well, he could fix that for her.

There were three of them following me now. I never saw them all at once, but I knew there had been two before, and this new one was bigger, but scrawnier, than either of them. Hell, there could be ten of them by now. The way they moved silently between the sparse bits of cover in the gloom, I was never entirely sure that they were still there at all. That was probably more because of delirious optimism than anything, though.

I stumbled over a rock in the darkness and jolted my injured leg, and a few more drops of blood spattered to the ground. I kept thinking if I could avoid doing that for long enough, they’d get bored and leave. More delirious optimism. I’d been walking since early afternoon, and so far I don’t think I’d gone more than ten minutes without spilling at least a few drops of blood. And that was before it got dark. I cursed.

I cursed my luck at having slid in that patch of soft sand at the top of the ridge. I cursed the jumping cactus I’d landed on at the bottom. I cursed the damned coyotes following me. Mostly though, I cursed my own stupidity for going mountain biking alone in such a remote location. It was a cold comfort that the cactus that had so grievously punctured and lacerated my leg had probably saved me from more debilitating injuries. It had given me the chance to be dinner and a show for the coyotes.

My vision swam and I stopped for several seconds until the dizziness and nausea passed. The exhaustion and blood loss were getting to me. I probably had dehydration and a touch of septic shock, as well. If I sat down to rest I probably wouldn’t be able get up again. Plus, the coyotes would take it as an invitation.

Sudden dizziness overtook me, and I collapsed. For the first time, I could hear their pawsteps. Either they were much closer than they’d been before, or they weren’t sneaking anymore. Crazily, I wished a cougar would come to finish me; it would be nicer to be eaten by something that would have at least had the balls to jump me while I was still standing.

I managed to roll onto my back, and stared up at the sky. The night sky was beautifully clear, a crescent moon shining among thousands of stars. I remembered the majesty that I had come out here to see in the first place. Then I closed my eyes, and resolutely tried to become unconscious before they started.

The garden party was in full swing when Gertrude waddled in, fussing with her red, feathered hat the whole way. She made her way over to the table where her two oldest friends, Winifred and Mildred, were waiting for her.

“You are twenty-five minutes late, Gertrude,” said the thin, severe-looking Winifred. “What kept you?”

“You probably just fell in the toilet again, didn’t ya, Gertie?” Mildred joked, letting out a dry wheezing gasp of a laugh. She was a cheerful, hunched old lady with coke-bottle glasses.

“Oh, it’s not that interesting, I wouldn’t want to bore you,” Gertrude replied.

“Bore us? Unless you happen to be late because you stopped to watch your lawn grow, any story would be a marked improvement over this party,” Winfred said dryly.

“Yeah, all the excitement’s gone out of these things since Hattie stopped mixin’ her meds,” Mildred added with another wheezing gale of laughter.

“Oh, very well then, I’ll tell you,” Gertrude said with mock exasperation. “This morning the boy who mows my yard showed up asking for money. Of course, I paid him last week, he’s only supposed to mow every other week, but he was trying to save up money for one of those game thingies, and he figures I’m too senile to remember when I paid him last.”

“That’s terrible,” Winifred said, gathering herself to start her “youth-of-today” speech.

“What’d ya do?” Mildred asked, before Winifred could start.

“I took my kitchen knife and sliced his throat right open. You never saw such a surprised look on someone’s face.” Gertrude chuckled.

“Gertrude dear, you should not be making such statements!” Winifred said disapprovingly.

“Oh dear, you’re right,” Gertrude replied evenly, drawing a bloody kitchen knife from her handbag. “I’m going to have to eliminate witnesses now, aren’t I?”

There was a muffled bang, and Gertrude slumped forward onto the table, upsetting the flower vase.

“Millie, you realize you’ve ruined the purse I lent you?” Winfred said irritably, pointing to the smoking hole the in the purse’s side where the gun had fired through the material.

“Sorry, Winnie. It couldn’t be helped,” Mildred replied. Then she chuckled.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell her that you don’t bring a knife to a garden party?”

“A curse I place upon your head, to last until the day you’re dead,” she rasped. “With each dollar that you take, a bite of flesh you will forsake, and for every dollar that you give another moment shall you live.”

“That’s great, ma’am,” Charles responded. “You have two days to vacate the premises, or I’ll have the police remove you.”

She slammed the door in his face. Charles Thorton grinned to himself; he was actually glad that the building caretaker hadn’t done the eviction. The old fortune teller had been a hoot. A week from now her shop would be part of his new Cineplex’s parking lot. Charles went home and slept the sleep of those without a conscience, which is to say well.

“Thanks for the new computer, boss,” his secretary said venomously, the word “boss” sounding like an insult. “It’s a great Secretary’s Day gift.”

He’d just walked into his office, and Jessica was already being entertaining. Her “gift” was an upgraded system he’d gotten free from a deal with the supplier, and they both knew it. She’d spend all week transferring files and installing programs to get it caught up with her old one, too. He was thinking of a clever retort when he felt a sharp pain in his hand.

“Uh, sir, you’re bleeding,” Jessica said, trying not to sound happy about it and failing miserably.

Charles ran to the bathroom to check his wound. He washed the small but deep puncture on his hand, and then looked up at the mirror. Whatever Charles possessed that passed for a heart, it stopped.

Perched on his shoulder was a creature that, except for having scales instead of feathers, appeared to be a vulture. It had slouching shoulders, a long neck, and a sharp, hooked beak beneath sharp, yellow eyes. A mop of greasy hair hung around its head in strings, like a wig of rotten seaweed. A gold collar on the apparition’s throat was connected by a chain to another collar around his own neck. Charles shut his eyes, hoping it was just a hallucination. It wasn’t. That trick had never worked with his ex-wife either.

“What is this?” he whispered.

“This is the demon what’s chained to yer fool neck, do I need to draw ye a wee map?” Its voice was like a raven that had eaten something that didn’t agree with it.

“B–b–but… I d–don’t… w–w–why?” Charles fumbled, his childhood stuttering problem making an unwelcome return.

“Old hag glued me to a right prize, she did.” The thing sneered. “The curse, ye stone-wit sack o’ owl vomit! The curse binds us! If ye become wretchedly good an’ generous ye get me lifespan added t’ yer own. If ye don’… Well, by the look o’ yer midsection I’ll be needing t’ diet ‘fore I can fly again. Ol’ hag can claim she bettered the world whichever way it goes.”

“Y–you’re going to e–eat me if I d–don’t change my ways,” Charles whimpered.

“No, I’m goin’ t’ show ye what Christmas was like when ye were wee. Of course I’m eatin’ ye, ye thunderin’ halfwit. It’s all here in the contract the ol’ hag tricked me inta.”

“Contract, you say?” Charles replied, feeling altogether himself again.

The old fortune teller stumbled through the jumble of boxes which contained her life. She knew who to expect at the door. They always wanted to bargain.

“Come back to plead already, have you? Couldn’t even wait for a respectable hour of the morning to beg an old woman’s forgiveness?”

“No,” Charles Thorton replied cheerfully. “The curse is all taken care of. I happen to know the best contract lawyers in the field. I actually came here to introduce you to my new business partner.” A man with slumped shoulders and a beak-like nose stepped out of the shadows. His overly greasy hair was combed neatly and he wore a fine suit. The model executive.

“He’d love to have a chat with you,” Charles grinned.

I had crashed my car in the desert while on the way to my sister’s wedding. I had swerved to miss a moose in the road and crashed into a cactus on the roadside. In the back of my mind I felt that something was fundamentally wrong with that scenario, but the important thing was that I find help.

A sign nearby advertised a repair shop. I couldn’t read the letters on it, but it had a picture of my car crashed into a cactus next to a picture of my father with a wrench, so it must be for a repair shop. I started walking up the road in the direction the sign pointed.

As I was walking a car pulled up beside me. It was a green station wagon with wooden sides, just like the one my grandmother drove. The driver was a short, balding man, whom I was sure was a famous comedian whose name escaped me. The passenger was a blonde supermodel type, who smiled invitingly at me. They offered to drive me to the repair shop, though I hadn’t said where I was going. I climbed into the back seat.

After we’d been driving a while the supermodel turned and looked over the back of the seat at me. Her eyes were a pearlescent sky-blue with no pupils, and her mouth was full of serrated shark’s teeth. It was obvious now that I was being abducted by aliens. She leapt at me but I caught her easily; she didn’t seem to have any weight at all. I threw her out the window, which I couldn’t remember having been open before that point. She bounced lightly along the road behind us, like a balloon caught in a breeze.

The driver turned to me and howled. He was orange and his eyes were on stalks, but otherwise he looked the same. I climbed into the front seat next to him and we began to fight over the wheel. We swerved wildly around the fortunately deserted road. Suddenly a voice came from the back seat.

“You know,” said the supermodel, who was somehow back in the car, “with all the possible ways for life to evolve on other planets it seems very strange that there would be humanoid aliens at all. Something just seems off about that.”

“I agree,” said the driver, who was somehow talking calmly and howling at the same time, “I always hate it when sci-fi stories use humanoid aliens; only the human mind could be egocentric enough to assume that aliens look like humans.”

“This whole day has been off, actually,” said myself, or a copy thereof, sitting in back next to the shark-toothed supermodel. “I don’t even have a sister, so why was I driving to her wedding?”

I looked around confused. Though we were still wrestling over the wheel, the car was no longer swerving. It was driving straight down the road at a leisurely pace. We passed the moose standing by the side of the road. It shrugged, as if to say it didn’t understand what was going on either.

“What we’re trying to say,” the howling, stalk-eyed driver said, “is that if you meet two humanoid aliens, then you must be dreaming…”

“… and the real alien already has my mind!” copy-me finished.

I awoke screaming on a metal table. A reddish-purple, cylindrical creature shambled over to me on a dozen interconnected legs. In one claw it held an unrecognizable device, which it held near my face. There was a hiss of gas and then I was falling through a pearly, sky-blue mist.

I was driving through the desert on the way to my sister’s wedding. Suddenly, a moose ran in front of me.

At first Dave thought that the lights floating about outside the window were just a fallen string of Christmas lights. He got up and went to the window to see. Outside the sky was filled with hovering multicolored lights, chasing each other in beautiful patterns over the snow covered yard below.

Dave woke his wife and children, and they gathered in the front yard. All around their neighbors stood in snow watching the aerial light show. Lights of every color swirled and danced in the lightly falling snow, entrancing the neighborhood. The lights move lower, the ethereal display now at their fingertips. Dave watched as his children leapt around, playfully trying to catch the shining specks. No one realized anything was wrong until a cloud of lights descended on the children. First one then another fell, bejeweled in glowing lights. People panicked, but none made it inside before the lights caught them.

The glowing insects, attracted by the Christmas lights, had finished their mating flight and needed a place to lay their eggs. The denizens of the neighborhood, paralyzed by the insects’ venom, were slowly covered by the lightly falling snow. They made perfect places for the eggs to incubate.

The insects rose into the night sky, their swarm of lights a perfect reflection of the light displays on the houses below. As the insects rose to the clouds, another neighborhood strung with multicolored lights called to them.

I crouched on top of the bookcase, watching the thing from behind the spider-plant. The thing paced around the house, as if waiting for something. It moved jerkily, as if it were lame, but at the same time displayed far more agility and intensity than I’d ever seen in a human. It was definitely not human, but, at the same time, it was. Worse still, the not-human/human seemed to be my feeder. It looked similar, but was pale and sickly, even more so than was normal for a human. Its scent too was almost that of my feeder, but there was a wrongness about it that repelled me. It had been in my house since early the previous morning, when it had come in instead of my feeder. Something deep within me told me stay concealed where I was until it left. Something else in me, around the stomach region I believe, told me it was time to risk anything to get downstairs to my food bowl.

I waited for the human/not-human to wander out of sight, then sprang lightly down to the floor. I looked out into the hallway, but I couldn’t see into either of the other rooms. The human/not-human had blocked all the windows, making the house darker than even I liked. As I slunk toward the stairs, the human/not-human appeared from the doorway beside me. I froze, expecting it to pass me in the gloom, and then the unbelievable happened. It saw me. Humans don’t see in the dark, but this thing saw me.

I abandoned the stairs and plunged straight through the banister to the first floor. The definitely not-human jumped after me, landed lightly on all fours, and rushed at me. I fled as if Cerberus itself were on my tail. The not-human followed me on all fours, flinging the furniture I ran under aside like dry leaves. The not-human caught the scruff of my neck. I whipped around in its grip, sank my claws in, and bit deeply into its forearm. Its blood tasted wrong, much like the not-human smelled wrong. Suddenly, my heart lurched painfully, my vision went red, and I passed out.

Weeks have passed since that night, and my feeder and I have found a new way of life. We sit together on the roof of a building at night. I can see farther in the moonless night than I ever could in the daylight, not that I’d seen any of that lately. I can hear the pigeons shuffling in their nests two buildings away. I can smell the blood of mice in the building below, racing through their short-lived bodies at a breakneck pace. My feeder nudges me.

“Tom, prey,” it says, its teeth already lengthening in preparation.

I glance over the edge of the building. A lone human wandered in the alley below. It’s funny how much they smell like mice now. My own teeth and claws grow out in anticipation. It is time to hunt.