MicroHorror

Curtis Henle tossed his pen down. He drew off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. It was late, a thrice emptied coffee mug sitting before him as if to validate the point. Despite the overhead fluorescents humming quietly to themselves, his desk lamp cast his office in thin shadows, reminding him again of the hour. He shook his head, replaced his glasses, and walked from his cluttered desk to the window in his office wall. His office overlooked the university’s quad from the fourth floor, and there, by the ornate fountain donated by the graduating class of ’79, was a flicker of movement that had nothing to do with the living, human throng traversing the late-night grass and cement. Curtis squinted at it, and then frowned. He’d more than grown accustomed to the flickering of shadows, of the chills and occasional whispered voices, but he rarely saw the dead now, rarely made out their beckoning, disjointed forms.

He turned back to his office, trying to dismiss the flicker of movement below. On his desk, the collection of scribbled notes, formulae, and references compiled by his diminutive team of four grad students caught his attention, but he merely frowned at it. He and his students were working out the process through which single layers of a viscous, compressible fluid, no thicker than a few molecules, traversed a small channel bisected at irregular intervals with lasers attuned to various wavelengths. It was really nothing more than busy-work, but David Cortez over in Applied Math had some theories and had asked Curtis and his team to look into it.

A not unfamiliar chill worked its way down Curtis’s back, and he absently shrugged off a feather-light touch across the nape of his neck. He sighed, steeling himself internally against the shiver which inevitably followed any haphazard touch of the dead. He closed his eyes, willed himself to relax, and nearly jumped when the phone on his desk rang.

“Hello,” he said, momentarily forgetting himself. “I mean, this is Doctor Henle.”

The faint, distant line noise on the other end sounded like someone crinkling metal foil across the strings of an electric guitar.

A fragmented, childlike voice said, “Children like to play.”

“What?” Curtis, annoyance getting the better of him, glanced at the receiver before speaking again. “Hello? Who is this?”

“–said this is David Cortez,” said the caller, the line suddenly clean and quiet. “Are you okay, Curtis?”

“Yeah, sorry, Dave,” Curtis breathed. “I’m fine. These late-night number crunchers are just getting the better of me.”

“That’s why I called to see if you wanted to get a couple of drinks over at O’Connor’s,” replied Cortez.

For a split second, Curtis almost agreed. He knew he should get out, but when the dead started interrupting his phone calls, he knew his concentration just wasn’t up to being social.

“Sounds good, Dave, but I’m going to have to take a rain check. I’ve still got the new Optics midterm to write. I’ve got to see how many up-and-coming young physicists I can force into switching over to Humanities.” He was no longer surprised at how easily the lie slipped off his tongue.

“All right,” came the reply. “Just don’t work too late, buddy. That’s what you have TAs for.”

“Right,” Curtis said, inserting an obligatory chuckle. “Talk to you tomorrow, Dave.”

“’Night.” The line went dead and Curtis hung up.

He stared at the phone for a moment, thinking. Whenever the dead started becoming annoying, Curtis could never focus on actual academic work. Instead, his mind turned to other designs. He typed a filename into his computer and called up the latest notes and specifications for a machine that would banish the restless dead from his world forever. He glanced over his latest entries, then pulled a fresh notepad from another drawer and began jotting down notes.

And as the dead flitted to and fro just out of the line of sight, Curtis forced himself not to notice.

The ash remains of several vampires hung thick in the air. Matt Falcon coughed, finding it hard to breathe, finding his eyes stinging with the ash-tears of the undead.

Across the darkened room, the thin, crumbled, waifish form of Laura Dunlop, fifteen and missing from home for the last three days, lay chained to an ornate marble statue. The statue, shaped like a grotesque, fanged Pan, was stained with dark streaks, and Matt found himself trying not to think of their import.

Instead, he concentrated on remaining alive.

Another vampire dove at him, moving with blinding speed. Matt raised his pistol and fired, the silver, holy-water-dipped bullet taking the vampire high on the shoulder. The vampire, a male dressed in a silver three-piece suit, crimson handkerchief tufting out of his breast pocket, stopped in his tracks, shrieking. Matt blinked the ash-tears from his eyes, steadied his pistol, and fired again, the echoing shot driving the pain in his head to new heights.

The bullet punched through the shrieking vampire’s fanged mouth. Red-silver eyes wide, the vampire disintegrated into a cloud of ash.

Matt coughed again.

Matt Falcon stood above the motionless Laura Dunlop. His pistol was empty, his gun hand hanging limp at his side. His breathing was ragged and shallow, his free hand hugged tight to his chest, trying to suppress the bleeding that seeped between the torn folds of his dirty T-shirt, beneath his battered leather jacket.

He had been side-swiped by the last remaining vampire, a female dressed like a Hollywood hooker who part-timed at the Museum of Death. She had driven him to the ground, driven her teeth into his chest, and he had accidentally fired his last shot into a distant wall. He had sucked in a shearing breath, choking on more ash, before slamming his empty pistol against the bridge of her nose, again, and again, and again.

Finally, the vampire had released her bite and pulled her bleeding head back. He had squirmed beneath her, gotten his hand beneath his jacket. The stake he had pulled from the holster in the jacket’s lining took her in the right breast.

He had rolled over and puked onto the tiled floor. When he could finally breathe, see, and keep from retching, he had crawled towards the hapless Laura Dunlop, hauling himself to his feet via the stained, marble, fanged Pan.

The girl lay still. Blood streaked her pale features. Matt Falcon raised his pistol before his eyes, stared at it.

“Shit,” he said.

He reached under his torn jacket once more.

Laura Dunlop moved. Her red-silver eyes opened, her fanged mouth gaped, and she lunged at him.

The stake slammed into her right eye. Her shriek filled his head, blasted his headache into a million painful shards.

Her dust brought new tears to his eyes.

She wasn’t sure when she decided to fuck the Devil, but there was only one option at that point and she knew it.

The Devil was going to be hers. Hell be damned.

He entered her room just before midnight. The room was small, almost barren, decorated in the haute-macabre of black-laced decadence, where clove cigarettes were smoked as incense. Two tea lights burned atop a small, stylized altar. The tea lights guttered and nearly extinguished themselves as he entered, causing shadows to dance about the room like gothic gremlins.

Mansell’s Lux Aeterna roared through the air.

She rose to meet him, her gloved fingers clasping her black satin robe to her throat. He stepped closer, a rush of being, amorphous, lurid. She let the robe slip from her fingers, let it fall past her snow-white skin to cluster around her bare feet.

The full-length, mauve gloves were the only defense decency offered as she stood before him. He reached for her, touched her. She shivered, her breath bated. His fingers caressed the gentle curve below her navel, slowly moved upward, causing her flesh to tingle.

He smiled.

She screamed.

The gothic gremlin shadows danced.

Afterward, when there was nothing left, he blew out the one still-burning tea light–the other having been engulfed by the shadows shortly before.

In the sudden darkness–with Mansell’s Lux Aeterna on repeat, still roaring, driving, building–the faint, nearly stale, clove-cigarette incense failed to cover the bitter, metallic tang that was beginning to permeate the room. Subtle currents, not unlike the gentle curve beneath the navel, driven by the fading vorticity of the blown-out tea light, by the reverberations of the climaxing orchestration pouring through speakers now hidden in the darkness, increased the entropic manifestation of that new, bitter, metallic tang.

And in that darkness, as his passage, vorticity, and candle-extinguishing followed him from the room, as Lux Aeterna reached its last crescendo and descended abruptly into the final, quiet sob of a few lonely notes, she simply, silently, ceased to exist.

Steps, cut from basalt, chipped with weather and covered with moss, rise up before me. They are ancient steps, reminiscent of cathedrals or the quay steps lining the Parisian stretch of the Seine. There are five in number and, for a moment, I find myself pondering the meaning of this until the cold seeps in and I pull my jacket close.

A mist has risen from the ground, a mist touched by fingers of ice and smelling faintly of lilacs and roses. It is a ground-creeping mist, the bulk of it staying low, its touch painful.

Shivering again, I break my reverie and mount the steps, ascending to the near-crumbling wrought-iron gate at the top. The gate, its metal almost as green as the moss-covered basalt steps, creaks open with a single touch, revealing, as if my eyes had previously refused to penetrate the spaces looming between the bars, an empty chamber of stone. The chamber is marked by rotting leaves piled into its far corners and by a single, rusting fetter hung by a single rusting chain drilled into the far wall.

I linger on the threshold before feeling an almost imperceptible tug. I step past the gate, into the chamber, into that basalt edifice that was my longing and desire. Into the slipstream of curvilinear time, into the purview of a memory long ago buried and walled away.

“Hello, Peter,” a dead voice says. And, with a lump clawing its way up the abyss of my throat, I turn, tears filling my eyes.

For a fleeting moment, the tears blur my vision, and in that moment she is there, before me, in the corner of the chamber, her black dress tossed lightly in the misty breeze of lilacs and roses.

With a sob, I clear my eyes, only to see an empty corner—empty save for a piece of torn fabric, once black, now covered in mold and dirt. I reach for the cloth, and as my fingers touch it, a sound reaches my ears.

The sound of metal on stone.

Now, as I sit in an unmarked room with unmarked attendants to bring me food and water, I can only close my eyes to the nightmare of that empty chamber, in that stunted forest, in that lonely cemetery.

I can only close my eyes and see the image of that rusting chain writhing like a snake, of the pale, reaching hand, feminine, appearing as if from nothing within the circle of the rusting fetter, of the face looming out of the wall of the girl I’d once loved and hated all in the same breath.

“Peter,” she said, “you’ve come back for me.”