MicroHorror

Children and youths clap and whoop to the beat of tambourines, dancers whirl and caper in the dirt square. Now in steps a new entertainer, a strange stooped figure with wild white eyes. He begins to sway, the children clap and smile. Suddenly their smiles turn sour as the music grows weirder, his eyes grow whiter. Then they too begin to sway, as if against their will. Terror grips them as the figure dances; his limbs lengthen; he towers above them like a clown-colored tree; the sun is blotted out by him. On and on wails the weird music, like a wind that shakes away all joys, all hopes and good smells, and the figure keeps swaying, lengthening, enclosing the whole cosmos. The children have now become part of him, dangling from his many teats like brightly colored bells. They are screaming now, merging with the music that wails and kicks up to a final pitch…

The sunlight shines down upon them. The figure is gone. Nervous smiles are exchanged. They feel themselves released from the grip of a horrible dream and, slowly, they begin to clap again.

It started as a small glitch in the top left of everyone’s screen. Too small, too irrelevant certainly, to notify our administrator about, and nothing at all to effect any break in our work. But by midday it had grown, warping the pixels around it to a garish hue: a patch of mold in an 800×600 square of shapes and order.

“A rottenness,” we said. “A flaw in the system. We’d better tell admin.”

Admin sent a man in, a man from the outside. He declared there was nothing wrong with the servers, it must be a hardware fault. Admin agreed and sent the man away. We were glad when he went. Our screens were now fully afflicted, putrid and pulsing with disease, disrupting our order, disrupting our thoughts. We began to think it wasn’t merely a hardware fault. And there’d begun a strange saturation of surrounding colors, bleeding into the world about us. Everyone noticed it, even dull, incurious Charles. Beneath the clean matt grayness of the monitors and the printers and the scanners, beneath the wire-rimmed glass of our eyes, there’d begun to bubble a rainbow of colors, a quivering chaos that threatened to burst forth at a touch. Everything had the quality of instability, as though the very plastic had come alive.

“Our work is impaired,” we said. “The problem must be dealt with.”

The solution was simple. Three of us took him into the storage room. The rest kept watch. When the function was fulfilled, two more deleted the body. It was all done with envious efficiency. The screens had returned to normal. And as we had done that day, and the countless days before that, we returned to our work and forgot about the whole affair.

I was passing the basketball court on the way home when I saw another one. Two eyes, surrounded by chaos, two hands reaching out into the world. The sick-smell of spray cans was still fresh in the air. I looked about, but the street was empty.

The graffiti on our estate wasn’t limited to the usual places. It was everywhere, on the tops of phone masts, the underbellies of cars. Once, peering through a drain at the side of a road, I saw one lurking beneath the filth and the running water.

No one seemed to know who did them. No one ever saw them done. One old man, a meth addict, swore blind that he’d seen the word “LIFE” materialize in an alley as he sat in a drunken stupor. He offered to show me, but I gently declined.

The problem grew worse, and within the space of a few weeks, our entire estate was ravaged with ink. Everywhere I looked sprang pulsing colors, wild patterns… I began to wonder whether what I was seeing was not a covering up but an unveiling, and I began to fear that something might soon be coming through.

One night I had my chance to square things.

I was passing the basketball court on the way home when I heard a strange noise, like teeth rattling in a skull. This was followed by a hiss. I stole forward. The streetlights were cold and fizzy. Everything was gray. At the end of the street I saw a figure. It seemed to dance and leap, a cylinder in its hand. Its face was hooded. Keeping to the shadows I came to within a few feet of the scene and paused. The figure made the rattling sound again and sprayed a snakish symbol on the wall. I shivered. I was scared and aroused, as if I knew I was witnessing something I shouldn’t be. My hands reached into my pockets and felt for the leather cord. The figure, enrapt by its pagan ritual, had still not noticed me. I watched for a moment more, palms sweaty, as the concrete seemed to writhe and grow free with every new stroke of the artist’s can. Then I sprang forward, and the cord whipped over its hooded head and tightened around its neck.

The cell I’m in is cold and gray. I’d thought it the safest place in the world. But a moment ago I noticed something–I noticed a small patch of graffiti beneath my bunk. So I ink this down now, for I have no doubt that by tomorrow it will have grown.

I was making tea on the kitchen counter. I had boiled the water, prepared the bag and was reaching for the kettle when I saw a rat. As I jumped back my palm pressed the edge of the washing machine then skidded down the gap by the wall. Not pain, not alarm, but the thought that one rat might mean a dozen caused me to jerk my hand away from that dark crevice and look down. When I looked up again the rat was gone. My knuckles stung where they had been chafed by the rough plaster, but I took up the broom and instantly made a search of the room. I banged on cupboard doors, thrust the broomhead between the sides of the cooker and the refrigerator, always keeping my ears attuned to the telltale scuttle of claws on wood. Nothing. I then thought about making a thorough search of the house, for the kitchen door had been open at the time. Somehow, I knew it would be fruitless. Rats are skittish creatures at the best of times, fleeing at the first sign of discovery. Yet this particular rat had eyed me from but a few feet away (I could have reached out and touched it had I wished); it had eyed me with nothing more than a coldly resolute stare. It would eye me as such from any dark corner it chose. My thumping-gallumping attempts to unearth it had served to do nothing more than upset the neighbors, whom I now heard moving in the room below.

That night I had a dream: The kitchen floor had fallen in. Plaster filled the air, and the cupboards, cooker, and boiler were covered in white. I clung to the edge of the doorway, surveying all this in a sort of vertiginous horror. The floorboards and joists had sagged toward the darkness beneath, which the light still revealed in shifting shadows as it swung from the ceiling above. As I looked down, I noticed that one of the boards had not snapped, but extended willow-like to the bottom, where my eye was drawn to the pall of filthy black water that entirely flooded this basement chamber. The light had settled somewhat and I could now make out wriggling things in the water which I knew instinctively were rats. My first fear was that they would use the lone floorboard as a bridge, and so make their way to the room above; my second, that the kitchen would henceforth become like the room below, irredeemably filthy and polluted. Yet there was nothing I could do, for the board extended from the other side of the room, and I could not, nor would not, set a single foot into that room. Instead I watched the water intently, almost willing the rats away from it and praying that whatever forces keeping the wood from snapping would relinquish. But as is always the case with dreams (or nightmares rather) the very act of wishing for something is turned on its head. The board did not snap, one of the rats tugged itself horribly out of the water, and in that telepathic way they have, a hundred of his fellows joined him, a surging black mass of bodies. I slammed the door and awoke.

Since my dream (or dreams) I can no longer tolerate the sight of rats, as I can no longer tolerate anything that coexists with us in the darkness and filth of our most brightly lit places.

I’d passed the shop several times before. What made me stop now, peering through the grime-streaked glass at the grinning, wide-eyed faces beyond, I do not know, but presently the bell tinkled, the street sounds dimmed, and the door closed softly behind me.

The shop was larger than I expected. Puppets had been crowded near the front, hung up or propped in little groups where they jostled for attention from the strangers outside. Beyond them, rows of shelves stretched into the gloom.

Down one of these rows I walked, looking about me with a sort of inane glee. On every side slumped lifeless little figures, their legs dangling, their heads cocked coyly to one side.

I picked one up: a particolored Punchinello with brass buttons and tassels. I squeezed his body, I waved his arms and legs, made him pirouette and kick the air. Finally, I made him take a bow, and sat him back on the shelf.

I saw the longing in the eyes of the others and smiled. “Pick me! Pick me!” they seemed to say, dead hands struggling to rise. Each was given its chance at life.

This had been going on for some time when something brushed my nose. It was dark here, and I stood still and waited. Again it brushed my nose. Soft little shoes. I looked up and saw one of the puppets seated before me. Its feet swung back and forth, like a hideous child’s; its head nodded softly, its chest heaved in minute, jerking breaths beneath the fabric.

I looked at my hands, which rested by my sides…

I never passed the shop again. I no longer know if it exists. Though sometimes, when I look about me, I come upon figures, slumped in curbs, hanging from windowsills and propped in doorways, writhing with a movement that is not mine. Horror seizes me then, as it did in the shop, and I flee through endless streets where it seems that the eyes of a thousand thousand dead things regard me. But then I recall that dead things attract rats, and I recall also the black sleek shape that darted away as I screamed, leaving the puppet lifeless once more.