MicroHorror

Before Frank there was Muchka. Muchka was a lovely, blond, indigo-eyed poem of a child, whose smile dazzled like a white orchid. Speech came quickly to him, and by age three he could tell me the names of all the teas lining the kitchen shelf. But he grew cruel when brother Izzy joined our family, tormenting the newborn with what he called his devil faces–though when I thought of the seventeen hours of labor Izzy put me through, this sometimes pleased me. Still, Muchka’s bullying presented a problem.

Like his brother, Izzy disliked welcoming a new member into the family. When he was eighteen months, we caught him peering into the microwave window at Frank. Izzy was still in the babbling stage, and only gaped at us when we tried to explain why sticking Frank in the microwave–even with the power off–was wrong. With his lustrous black hair and eyes like moonlit water, Izzy played on our sympathies with even greater cunning than Muchka. But we couldn’t allow him to subject Frank to yet more morbidly curious experiments–I mean, we wouldn’t be very good parents, would we?

That was a year ago. Frank is now full-grown. And spoiled as a Turkish sultan! His purr conjures the song of the sea in your ears, his nose kisses the slightest brush with wet velvet. He sleeps between us most nights, though sometimes he perches on my husband’s chest, blinking in amber complacency. Frank likes to surprise us, a shadow pouncing with a ninja’s near-weightlessness in the middle of the night, according to his comings and goings. Unfortunately this must stop. Because Larry likes to chase Frank down the stairs if we leave the door open, and then we take turns running him down as he taunts us weaving in and out of furniture. Larry’s still a puppy, of course.

Larry came to us a week ago, from a shelter. When we got him he was emaciated, nervous, and terrified of the color white. It took three days before he stopped barking at the creakings underneath us, the sniffles and sighs that accompany our sleep. Now he’ll jump down and lick the hands that offer themselves from under the bed, stopping to shake himself as dogs do. This seems to annoy Frank. He crouches on my shoulder, lashing his tail, poised to strike. We fear Frank might try to turn Larry into a scratching post. And Larry’s eyes are so vulnerable, so exposed in that round, fleshy face, so grinning and ludicrous, like Falstaff’s.

We may have to get rid of Frank–unless he’s willing to sleep under the bed, like the others.

First they fed him laxatives, and rubbed him in his own filth.

Next they clothed him in a well-worn trench coat, and poured liquor down his throat.

Then they showed him a dry-erase board with several words scrawled on it: bad words, not nice.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Your palette,” the man said. “These words will be your working vocabulary from now on. You’re free to use them in any combination you wish–if you attempt to speak others, we will rephrase them for you through microscopic implants in the whiskey you drank. Think of them as your paints, and downtown as your canvas. Now go out in the world and create your masterpiece.”

Then they stopped at the corner and shoved him out, and the black van sped away.

The kids were screaming. Swallowing, he took the scaly brown slit from the wall and held it under his nose. It squirmed, and it stung, and he felt its prickly appendages scratching at his upper lip.

“See, it’s just my mustache,” he said, mustering a smile. “I keep it on the wall.”

“But Daddy, you need a beard to go with it! A beard to go with it!”

They were pointing at the dead rat in the corner.

The boy lacked the patience to follow the book’s instructions on stamp collecting. And though he admired the pictures, he found making papier-mâché dinosaurs complicated and sloppy. Shadow puppets addled his budding fingers, rocks were boring, and his parents wouldn’t buy him test tubes and beakers.

Then one day he thumbed to a section he hadn’t noticed before.

He pored over the instructions, examining the pictures, mentally rehearsing each step. It was quick and easy, the way he liked it. “I just hope it won’t taste funny,” he thought, sneaking into his father’s study.

Then he reached into the desk drawer and grabbed the gun.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, gazing at the monitor. “There really are angels, and they really do dance on the head of a pin.”

“Point of a needle,” the old man corrected.

My father was a genius. Putting aside the fun had at Aquinas’s expense, he had devised a machine capable of detecting angelus rays–what in modern terms would be described as an angel’s thermal energy loss. The idea was first propounded in an anonymous eighteenth-century German work, by a theologian who seemed to take seriously Cudworth’s statement that “some who are far from Atheists, may make themselves merry with that Conceit of Thousands of Spirits dancing at once upon a Needles Point . . .”

Which might explain why they were so… hot.

We watched the infrared readings on the video screen. Bright, streaming veils of color, like Dali landscapes melting inside the frame. To think these were the electromagnetic radiations of God’s messengers, His celestial attendants, emitted from seraphic and cherubic flesh… Teary-eyed, we gazed upon the thermographic images as the holy celebration unfolded under my father’s angelus-ray detector.

I checked and re-checked our instruments.

Though we were not equipped with sound, I heard them singing, calling my name as clearly as the old man weeping beside me.

“Their voices,” he said, “are exquisite–”

Plucking up the needle, I jabbed it in my father’s eye.

And now he’s sprawled on the concrete, amid his centrifuges and microscopes, thousands of spirits cutting loose on the point of a needle sticking in his brain.

Like everyone else, we had assumed only those with wings and haloes cavorted in such a tight place.

Now I know why they were so hot.

So calm, thought Richard Hellgram, staring into the water a thousand feet below. So solemn, like a chess game left unattended in the dark. Hellgram was CEO of Bellefleur Enterprises, the world’s leading manufacturer of household cleaning products–at thirty-six, the youngest ever to gain that distinction. And here he was, alone, reflective, peering over a balcony rail at water so smooth it might have been glass.

At that moment street lamps lit in the bay’s polished mirror, capturing perfectly the sterile, drone-like order of his surroundings.

Spotless City, the official name of the Central Bellefleur Campus. Where the drive to gather the world’s best minds to create fast-acting cleaning solvents began. Even now Thomas Bellefleur, the company’s founder, was staring at him from a dour portrait by the inner door, surely wishing he could wipe out Hellgram like the food particles he’d helped dislodge from so many breadboards. Instead his son-in-law, who had an associate’s degree in business, was calling the shots.

Hellgram turned and went inside.

He did not glance at the dead man’s portrait, mounted at his wife’s insistence. Instead he went to the silver egg on his desk. He’d picked it up himself, riding the Town Car across campus as he did every day to remind everyone of his presence and the position to which he’d ascended. Despite its technology, the egg had been devised off-site by an unknown source, acquired through channels Hellgram had become acquainted with during the war which were best forgotten.

Time for quality control… He pressed the “on” button and waited.

Above the egg’s apex her image appeared, hi-res, 3-D, without the shimmery, ethereal quality he had imagined.

“Say something,” he said.

She refused to acknowledge him. His contact had warned him of this; working with the plans before Hellgram had secured the hardware was bound to produce glitches. No doubt others would follow before Bellefleur Enterprises unveiled its “Wipe Your Tears Away” Grief-Relief products.

“I’m not a puppet,” she said, at last.

His brows furrowed. “No. You’re a virtual simulation of my wife who committed suicide six months ago. You’re supposed to say something sentimental to make me feel better–for example, that you’re in a better place.”

“Suicide?”

“I knew she was depressed. So I had her take some tests. The technology is cutting-edge… think about the marketing potential. Want to talk to Dad, Aunt Betsy, or your first kitty-cat? It’s hyperreality meets grief counseling. Now I can talk to my wife whenever I want. Or rather, a template based on her brainwave imprints and psychometric analysis.” He smiled. “So, what’s it like in the great beyond?”

“It’s dull, and you remember things,” she said, and this time she looked at him. “And you realize that, with a little practice, you still retain some kinetic influence over the physical world.”

Definitely a glitch, he thought. “You sound like her, anyway–all tarot cards and healing crystals and astral projection discs. A spoiled heiress who could afford frivolous pursuits while I was busy guarding the bottom line.”

“Not frivolous, dear. The applications are incremental, but effective. Sliding doors, for instance, are easy to open.”

Hellgram swallowed. He felt himself rising, but not his will driving the movement. Felt the door handle click under his pressure, but not the mental command behind the act.

He had time to look back at Thomas Bellefleur’s gloomy visage before crossing the balcony threshold–a spot of color, it seemed, in his cheeks.

“This is just like it was that night,” he heard her say, as he climbed the rail, watching the water a thousand feet below. “The bay so quiet and still, and you turning me to face it. ‘It’s like a mirror,’ you said, ‘Spotless City perfectly reflected…’”

Then the wind was screaming in his ears, and the mirror shattered.

He screamed once after the cleaning lady left, alone with Mr. Olivetti. Mr. Olivetti was in the Rose Room, all dressed up for his viewing. Then Joe Jr. sat beside the eighty-year-old meat cutter, father of five, as dusk fell and all he could see, with the lights off, was the fax machine’s glowing ON button through the blinds of the adjoining office.

It wasn’t fair to Mr. Olivetti that Joe Jr. had screamed, seeing as it hadn’t been about him.

The funeral was like all the others, only it was his father’s turn to fill the casket. After the ushering had been seen to, it had been Joe Sr.’s long-standing custom to slip away to the balcony behind the flowers where he could nap. The mortician was mourned with many hugs and sniffles, golf anecdotes, coffee at the reception.

And all through the hour Joe Jr. screamed, though this time he kept it inside.

That night, stalking through the empty halls, Joe Jr. found a box cutter and made a shallow incision from his wrist to his elbow. He would never scream again, not around Mr. Olivetti, or the newly arrived Mrs. Moran, or the Armstrongs’ five-year-old son. It bled right out of him, the feeling he had only guessed at behind the red-rimmed, snot-filled faces of the mourners he had observed passing through his parents’ funeral parlor all of Joe Jr.’s thirty-five years.

He would never manage the family business holding in such pain.

Still bleeding, he mounted the stairs to his mother’s room.

After several attempts He made me stop. It seemed important to Him that I get it right.

“There,” He said, snaking a tentacle down my throat, “now try.”

I’ve never had my stomach pumped, but can imagine how it must feel.

“Close enough,” He said, withdrawing.

I stared at Him across the empty table. “What does it mean?”

“The meaning is somewhat lost in translation. Something like, ‘He Who Cannot Eat Until You Speak His Name.’”