MicroHorror

One was for the sky and he used a soft, powder blue the color of her eyes. In slow, lazy strokes he crisscrossed the top of the page and covered all the ones in an azure haze. It was soothing after the morning’s work. The grass below was green and the number two would be as dark and deep a shade as the ribbons in her hair. Her hair, alive with the scent of flowers and yellow like spun gold braided to her scalp. Three, the sun was stark white in the far left corner of the sky. He dipped his brush in the paints then globbed a golden orb into the white circle on the page. Carefully he swirled it, inking yellow into a two-dimensional vortex on the page. The birds were next and the number four on his key suggested they be painted tan and gray. He ignored the suggestion and looked to his muse, finding inspiration in the pale flesh behind her faded freckles bridging her nose and cheeks.

Five was for the lake, a mirror in the center of the dark green grass to reflect all the world that he had created. He tapped the brush to his chin, smearing a dark rainbow under his lip. What color, what shade reflected his world, what made the artist’s heart bleed onto the page? The question gnawed at him every time. The heavens had stretched out from her eyes, her hair making the sun burn. Her skin like snow had given the birds life and now, from the pool spreading ever farther from under her lips and chin he had it. He dipped his brush into the slowly congealing crimson beside his colors and stroked it once, lightly into the chasm in the center of the world, admiring for a moment before filling in the lake.

Carefully he hung it from the clothesline in his blue studio alongside a dozen identical copies of the same scene. Each one had dripped red into his carpet, forever forming a lake in the thick green shag.

“Perfect,” he whispered to the head on the table, her eyes staring vacantly up at the gallery. “Should we do another?”

Damn it, another wall. I fumbled on the masonry for a moment, groping blindly for some lever or pull that would ricochet me back into the daylight and away from whatever that thing was. Red brick, gray mortar, imprints from fingernails but no switch. My heart was beating in my chest, pounding through my rib cage as it tried to escape the doomed body encasing it. My pulse throbbed in my ears like a series of gunshots while my hands, my whole body quivered. What had been wrong in my brain that had made me think this was a good idea? Brain. Hadn’t it said something like that before I ran? So preoccupied with the memory, with my desperate want to leave this place I didn’t hear the footsteps sloshing through the narrows behind me. Cold hands gripped me, first by the collar of my shirt, then by the neck. Teeth gnashed in the air as I shoved the desiccated husk off my shoulders and into the shallow water surrounding our feet. It snarled up at me, an asexual shell that had been human once, a long time ago.

Static crackled on the air and echoed through the slouching darkness beyond that thing struggling to its feet in front of me. A voice, soft and masculine, echoed out through the night.

“Try not to take it so seriously,” he said. “It’s only a game.”

The brick work to my left began to crackle, rotated around to reveal a glass case with a fireman’s axe. “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass,” it read in large, red embossed lettering. There was a small hammer attached to a chain beside it. I grabbed it and smashed the glass, yanking the axe from its pedestal inside. The thing was up from the water now, snarling at me with yellowed, gore soaked fangs that had been filed into tiny spears inside its head. I turned the axe in my hands to the sharp, pointed end on the back and swung it into the green flesh before me. The thing, not a man any more but some drooling animal that had thirsted for the life inside me collapsed into a heap at my feet.

“Very good,” the voice echoed from an unseen speaker box over my head. “One down, a hundred more to go.”