MicroHorror

That bastard Mitchell is moving up in the polls again. He parades that damn cripple son of his out at every stop and everyone falls in love with him. I was born to be Governor, dammit! Where is the sympathy for a single mother, raising her two young daughters on her own? Why the hell did Kelly and Sara have to be so perfect. You’d think at least one of them could have been autistic or deformed… something. Or even stuck in a wheelchair, like his stupid little retard.

“You awake, Kel?” I kneel next to her and brush her hair from her face.

“Is Sara sick? I heard her crying.”

“She’s going to be okay, honey.”

“Why was she crying?” She sat up and rubbed at her eyes.

“Never mind that now.” I know I should feel bad for this. Some kind of guilt or something. But I have to be Governor! “You want to help Mommy get elected, don’t you, sweetheart?”

“Uh-huh.” She nods. “How?”

“Don’t you worry about that now.” I pull her to me as I pull the ice pick from my pocket. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Surely I’ll win now. Maybe he has a cripple for a son, but what is more sympathetic than a single mother with two blind daughters?

I killed a girl when I was twelve. It was an accident, that first one. She just made me so angry. I only wanted to talk to her. Sit by her and talk to her. It was lunch time at school. There was an open seat next to her. She couldn’t be nice, she had to humiliate me in front of everyone.

But it wasn’t her fault, really. She didn’t know what I was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I didn’t know then. They found her in her bed the next day. She had simply stopped breathing. I didn’t know it was me at the time. It wasn’t until much later that I made the connection.

Sometimes they go peacefully like she did. Sometimes not. The guys that beat me up in ninth grade weren’t that lucky. Their bodies were a bloody pile of mush when they found them. It took a long time to sort out which parts belonged to which kid. They should have left me alone.

It’s not like I enjoy it, though. I hate it. I hate it. Someone gets me angry enough and they just die. Sometimes quietly, sometimes violently. A guy cut me off in traffic one time and died almost instantly from a heart attack. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but for one second I was so angry at him, and he didn’t have a chance.

If you don’t believe me, I’ll understand. I have a hard time with it myself. How can a person kill someone just by getting angry at them? I wish I had that answer, but I don’t. I don’t know.

If you want real proof you could ask my girlfriend, if it wasn’t too late. Brain aneurysm. It was a stupid argument and I lost my temper. God, I really hate myse

(Editor’s note: The following story, like all stories on MicroHorror, is a work of fiction. If you yourself are experiencing suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or impulses, please seek professional help immediately. There is hope for you. –NR)

I can’t die. Believe me, I’ve tried. I stepped off a roof, jumped in front of a car, and all I got out of it was a broken leg, which miraculously healed in just thirty-six hours. The doctors convinced themselves that the X-rays got switched, completely overlooking the fact that it would mean that some other poor guy was walking around out there with a shattered left leg. I guess the closest I got was when I stepped into one of those big wood chippers. Damn, that hurt.

Why am I so set on dying? I don’t know. At first it was everything in my life, but then it sort of became a challenge. What made me want to end it all in the first place was a variety of things. Boredom, mostly. Depression. Maybe general teen angst. It doesn’t help that my parents are raving lunatics. Trust me, any embarrassing thing your parents have ever done to you I can top, ten-fold. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend dumped me. Whore.

In my quest to snuff out my meaningless existence I would have to overcome my apparent ability to come back from any injury I could imagine. It occurred to me that I still do get injured. I get injured, maybe even die, but I always come back. But it’s always after the activity that injuries me is over with. I wouldn’t be able to come back if it was a continuing process. I wouldn’t be able to regenerate, or whatever it is, if it was still going on.

I thought of freezing myself, that would surely do it, but the logistics were hard to work out and I was afraid that eventually something would happen to thaw me out. I considered chaining myself to concrete blocks and tossing them into the water, but I’ve seen all those movies where the campers stumble across the guy at the bottom of the lake and he comes to life and hacks them all to death. It never stops him, why would it stop me? And I don’t want to hack anyone up except myself. I needed something more permanent than that, more definite, something that wouldn’t leave me wondering if someone would one day thaw me out or pull me from the water.

Concrete. I could lower myself into wet concrete. At first I would drown, feeling the pain and burning as my body fought for air, my lungs sucking in the wet cement. Then the concrete would harden and I’d be trapped forever. A perfect plan.

Perfect. Was I ever wrong! I awoke to that pain of my lungs trying to fill, to the pressure of all that weight pressing upon me. I hadn’t considered this possibility. Now I just want out. I want to live the sixty or eighty years I was supposed to live and die of old age. I don’t want to be here, alone in this dark with my muscles and joints aching because I haven’t moved them for days.

Maybe I will still die of old age. What will it be like to be trapped in here for eighty years, all alone with only my thoughts to keep me company? I guess I’ve really screwed myself this time. Is this what hell is like? What if I don’t die soon? What if I do die of old age? Oh, God, what if I don’t?

I came to realize that nobody else saw what I saw. It happened so gradually that it is hard to blame them for not seeing it. I didn’t notice at first. It was my Doberman, Walter, that eventually alerted me with his barking night after night.

“Probably saw a coyote,” Dad proclaimed.

It happened every night for weeks. Mom and Dad talked of getting rid of Walter if it didn’t stop.

One night his barking woke me and I went out to try to quiet him. Walter, with his chained pulled tight, was barking away at the oak that was out by the road. Only it wasn’t. That was the first time I noticed that the tree was closer. Thirty feet closer, at least.

When I told my parents, they thought I was crazy. I couldn’t believe they couldn’t seem to even remember that it had been out by the road only a few weeks before. After my persisting with this for several days, trying to make them understand, Dad started getting angry with me easily and Mom started crying and talking about taking me to the doctor.

I gave up on convincing them, but I watched that tree closely. I watched it, and I kept my distance from it. It was getting closer. And it was increasing its pace.

One morning Dad woke me early. I had slept through the night, Walter had not barked and woken me.

“I’m sorry, son,” he told me.

Dad took me out front and showed me the place by the tree where all the blood was. Walter’s chain was stretched out tight, and now it reached all the way to the tree. No Walter. Some animal had come in the night and gotten him. That’s what Dad said.

I sat there half the day, staring at that blood. All over the ground, the chain, and the tree. That tree! Walter’s collar was no longer attached to the chain, but I did see it. It was embedded in the bark of the tree.

I couldn’t tell anyone; they’d think I was nuts. It was still getting closer to the house. In the stillness of the night I could now hear it. A low grumbling, shuffling sound. More of a vibration that I could feel rather than hear. It already had Walter, so what it wanted now was obviously me and my parents. Then one night I heard the scratch-scratch-scratch sound of its branches against the siding and I knew it was time that I did something.

I couldn’t chop it down. Mom and Dad would hear and stop me before I could finish. I’d have to burn it.

I waited until my parents were asleep before getting matched from the kitchen. I used gas from the barn to douse the oak. I could hear it crunching and creeping in reaction. After the first three failed to light it, the fourth match set it ablaze.

Flames shot up the trunk and there was a loud screeching sound. It pierced my brain with a sudden, sharp pain. I covered my ears and watched as the leaves caught and the limbs began to thrash about.

Dad grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. “What the hell are you…”

He saw it. He finally saw where the tree was, heard the screeching, saw the limbs moving.

We never spoke of what happened. Two years after that it began to grow back in its place out by the road. We took care of it again, and several more times since. The dirt road is now a highway and the house no longer stands, but I go back each year to make it hasn’t returned. It has been twenty years now since the last time. I think it’s just waiting for me to die before it returns. Maybe that’s the one thing that has kept me going so many long years. What will happen when I’m gone?

“I have something to show you,” he says. “Want to see?”

In his hand he will hold a window into a world you and I will never see, a world only a child could understand or believe in. A horrific world, meant only for them, to imprison them, to steal them away.

It could be anything that hooks them. Jewelry works well on the girls, baseball cards on the boys. Older kids like the Game Boys, or the cell phones, or just lately the iPods. It used to be watches and transistor radios. It used to be carved idols of the gods or of the Pharaoh.

When he’s done, once they’ve glimpsed that other reality, they are no longer your child. It might look like your child, but it isn’t. You may think it’s your girl or boy that you grab by the shoulders and shake, attempting to rouse them from their daydream, but it’s not, and they aren’t daydreaming. You may think the thing you carry in your arms into the emergency room is little Billy or Jane, but it’s not. It’s just a husk; a nothingness; a blank place-holder where your child used to be. Flesh and bone wearing Timmy’s clothes, but Timmy is no longer there. Timmy has gone on to that other world, that other place that you’ll never see and never be able to rescue Timmy from. Others have tried and failed.

Your child, the one you brought into the world and taught so well not to talk to strangers, ensnared by the oldest of all predators. The bait has changed with time, but the result is the same: he gets their souls, their essence, their themness. Watch your children closely, and if your child has already gone blank then I pray for him and I pray for you.