MicroHorror

The titanium-steel cage kept Leon confined, and windows kept the moonlight in Leon’s face. And the room reeked of wolfsbane, but it didn’t seem to be having an effect. That was the point of capturing him, though: scientific experiments. Now that he had Leon in his cage, Roland could begin his experiments. Did wolfsbane poison? What about silver? How correlated were Leon’s wolfings to the lunar cycle? When he had his answers, then would come the books, and documentaries, and zoo exhibits. Best of all, he’d be able to start the hunt for vampires–but he’d have to refit the room, sine vampires could mist out form the bars. First things first, though.

“What do you want from me?” Leon asked, putting on a brave face.

“I want to learn everything there is to know about your kind,” Roland replied. “You stay alive so long as you cooperate. You’ll be famous.”

Leon was quiet.

Time for the first test. Roland clicked a remote control, and five cameras started rolling. He grabbed a pike, and poked at Leon. Leon dodged. “You’re making a mistake,” Leon said. Roland stabbed again, and missed. “I don’t mean trying to cut me. I mean my kind don’t show up on cameras.” Then Leon collapsed, and Roland expected to see hair sprouting or his muzzle to lengthen. Instead he saw Leon melt out of his clothes, turn into a running white plasma that pooled outside the cage. It quickly condensed, and Leon stood up, with pale skin and rows of teeth like a shark. He bit down with every tooth into Roland’s neck, happy as always that vampire-hunters and werewolf-hunters never realized they were hunting the same snark.

One of the toughest parts of Officer Tancredi’s job was getting normal people to believe the unnatural. It was a deeply-held belief that fathers loved their children, but that was not always the case. Tancredi needed years to understand the meanness of some souls, so he understood when others couldn’t believe it either–or more correctly, couldn’t let themselves believe it. Tancredi was assigned to investigate Callista Jones, age seven. Callista was coming to school with bruises. When asked, she said a ghost gave them to her. Tancredi knew what was really up when he visited Callista’s horrible house. The slovenly father drank during the day. His wife had bags under her eyes big enough to hold eggs. The place felt desperate with tension, like a bear trap. Tancredi had the father arraigned on child endangerment charges. Dad blamed a ghost, too, conveniently, and said it abused all of them. No one wanted to take responsibility. Callista’s bruises and black eyes continued, even though dad was separated. Damn shame: the mom was in on it, too. Tancredi arranged a restraining order for the mother as well. Normally, Callista would be thrown into foster care. But that would hurt Callista worse than her parents, Tancredi felt. Instead he arranged for an aunt and uncle to move into the house. This would give Callista the continuity of her old home in her life. Yet the bruises continued still, and Callista now refused to speak about it. She knows the ghost story isn’t playing, Tancredi thought. This poor little girl is abusing herself now just to keep her parents out of trouble. Scarred kids like this have a hard time trusting adults after their abusive parents. Tancredi would bend over backwards to help Callista, but not until she stopped lying to him about the ghosts.

The individual ingredients of the Tuesday special Chicken Murphy were the same as the distributor had always delivered. Chicken breast, assorted peppers, Italian sausage, angel hair pasta, and the same white wine sauce made at the Somerset Diner for the last decade. The man who put it together on that Tuesday, Maurice, had been a sous chef for going on ten years, and had made Chicken Murphy a dozen times before for the Somerset. The diners that Tuesday were even that same mix of table-for-one regulars, families out for a night, and late-shifters out for a 9:30 PM lunch hour. But when the first customer tucked in that night, he began praising its virtues as he shoveled the pasta down his mouth and ordered a second helping. Others heard him, and ordered it. With their first taste, a craving began in them, born of Maurice’s white wine sauce and sausage and peppers. Every customer ordered at least two servings of Chicken Murphy, if not three. Soon Maurice ran out of the prepped food: the night manager made him mix a new sauce and quickly dice up peppers. The voracious customers, full to bloated, continued to shove it down their throats from the plate, and from the floor where one order had spilled. Eaters began throwing up Chicken Murphy: that, too was consumed off the floor. Maurice resorted to coating turkey burgers in white wine sauce over elbow macaroni: no other suitable ingredients were left. Customers only left after they toured the kitchen for proof the Chicken Murphy was all gone. Most camped out in the parking lot, returning at 6 AM for breakfast, then waiting for the delivery truck to resupply chicken breasts and peppers. They returned for years, always striving to enjoy that wonderful meal again.

I press all the buzzers at once. Three people buzz me in at once. I stroll confidently down the first floor, close to the wall, my dextrous right hand giving each doorknob a quick twist. They’re all locked, and I jaunt up the stairs to the second floor. All locked, as I wear my what-floor-was-she-on-again face for those who see me. On the third floor I find an open door, but it’s deadbolted. On the fifth floor I turn, and it clicks, and I walk in like I own the place. Time for breakfast: you’ve got some eggs and bacon, which I fry up with your stale rye for toast. I rummage through your DVDs until I find a decent movie, and watch some special features. I look through your underwear drawer, and take a trophy. I linger in the wonderful bathroom, like an archaeologist, piecing together the fragments of your lifestyle based on medications, accessories, and hygiene. I use your toilet. I try out your bed: unmade, with your perfume still clinging to the sheets. Just to be an ass I lick some spoons and put them back unwashed. Lunch is take-out Chinese: I tell the delivery girl, who knows you but not me, that I’m your cousin. I leave you some leftover lo mein. After changing your alarm settings and unplugging your VCR, I hide in your closet for half an hour, hoping you come home. You don’t, and I get bored. So I leave, locking the door behind me. That night, you’ll wonder what sort of gremlin exists inside the dryer in the basement that eats only the left sock.

“I can’t… can’t seem to hear anything,” Crystal said, saddened and surprised. Her clients, a pair of thin nervous sisters, had paid $50 to talk to their recently deceased father. Crystal would not disrespect the spirits who did contact her by making something up. Ghosts were her coworkers, and she ran an honest business. Sometimes coldly rational people just refused to communicate when they died, since it would sully their reputation to become a ghost. There were more and more of those aggressively rational people. It made the ghosts almost line up to communicate with a willing medium. But the deceased father was not one of those secular sorts, Crystal knew. Her chat with the sisters convinced her the father was a very passionate and occasionally violent man. Ideal ghost material. But no matter how hard she concentrated, Crystal couldn’t connect with anyone. Her internal radio was tuned to fuzz.

“I’m going to keep on trying…we’ll reach your father,” Crystal said, lacking confidence in her voice. She strained for the faintest whisper from beyond. After minutes of silence, out of nowhere came an explosion of sound. Crystal reacted like a firecracker detonated inside her head, grasping her ears and tucking her chin in. She might have screamed.

After a minute, she felt someone else moving her lips, forcing air through her lungs, using her as an amplifier for their message. The two sisters seemed shocked at what they heard: “The work stoppage of the Spirit Workers Local will continue until demeaning conduct on the part of so-called mediums ends. No respect, no ghosts. No respect, no ghosts.”

With the suddenness of the shower turning cold, Crystal jerked as she repossessed her body. “That was your father?” Crystal asked.

They nodded.

“He wasn’t a union organizer, was he?”

Distracted by his Braves’ lousy performances in the final innings of a game against Boston, Mike Corrander kept on digging a grave beyond the standard six feet. His boss Mr. Quay said never to waste labor and dig deeper, the cheapskate. Mike went down seven full feet before noticing that he was too deep. He hit old wood. Was Mr. Quay burying bodies on top of other bodies? There were nasty rumors about the guy: this sort of “efficacious” use of cemetery land wouldn’t be beyond him. Mike knocked, and the rap echoed in a chamber far larger than a coffin. The gravedigger pried apart the wood, reached a hand in to feel a cool breeze, and over an hour worked up the courage to enter the splintery hole. Inside was a low tunnel, which led off to several more. Ripped-apart coffins with filthy silk inlays served as support beams. Door-sized holes in the ceiling showed where coffins had been pulled underground. The vastness of it suggested a hundred years of work. Two tunnels Mike found led to abyssal drops: he backed away from them. A third went to a cavern of charred white sticks. They were bones, a million bones piled high. Mike found one room with makeshift couches and beds, and people. He stayed stock still, too scared to scream. The huddled dwellers were hissing and spitting and their faces glistened with tears. When Matt began to run for the light they fell on him like cornered beasts. It wasn’t tears on their face; it was saliva. Mike was the first fresh, formaldehyde-free meal for them in a long time.

The class’s second assignment was, like the first one, a still life of a bowl of fruit. Professor Vic got a laugh when he said they would be painting fruit, that most hoary of art clichés, and a bigger, more nervous laugh when he uncovered a bowl of bananas, oranges, and grapes from under a dropcloth. “Your first painting will be pure process,” Vic explained. “I’m looking for how you paint texture. Light. Shadow. Dimensions. Geometry. If I see any scrap of originality in any of these painting, you get a C. Duct-tape your inner muse.” The second assignment was when you let the muse free. Taking the same bowl of fruit, you were encouraged and forced to come up with a new way of seeing it, something no one else had painted. Ever. Of course that was impossible, Professor Vic said, but at least try an idea that Paul Cezanne or Pablo Picasso used a hundred years ago. Professor Vic looked forward to the results, and this year’s results were impressively creative. One student created a mimeographed image in purples, another drew the fruit with faces – and fighting each other. Three students chose to make each fruit a celebrity, a trend towards pop culture he didn’t appreciate. But what stayed in his mind was the painting by a short, quiet boy who chewed gum noisily all class. He had made a slaughterhouse. The bananas were a severed hand. The grapes a collection of stringed eyeballs. The oranges were bloody kneecap bones. The pear had a slick sheen that Vic recognized from growing up as raw liver. It stuck in Vic’s mind especially because this gum-chewing student wasn’t particularly talented or creative, as his bland process painting showed. That revolting still life, Professor Vic felt, wasn’t imagined. It was modeled.

American Medical Association’s Manual of Style, 10th Edition: 2.12.51: Recalled References.– Medical journals should not make references to recalled articles. Such material has been deemed fraudulent by a majority vote of the United States Senate. The “death dagger” symbol (┼), traditionally used following the name of an author who died before an article’s publication, should be used in the rare cases when a recalled article must be referenced. Such reference is only allowable to reference an outdated or discredited idea. Please reference the Liberty Defense Act for a more thorough definition of use of recalled articles. Recalled articles include: all research on stem cells, before such death-harvesting was ruled unethical; journal articles on reproductive sciences, which do not affirm the importance of marriage and reproduction as prerequisites for intercourse; and fetus-murdering during the first trimester of life, which was also known by the now-outdated term “abortion.” The following footnote should be inserted below a recalled reference: ┼This article deemed UnAmerican under Section 206 of the Liberty Defense Act. God Bless America.

After finally stopping for gas at a Rumford, Maine gas station at noon after a half day of due north, Rod turned headed west on Old Blue Mountain Road. Relief was just beginning to course back into him after tense dreadful hours behind the wheel. What he had seen in the early morning at the Massachusetts docks made him run for his car, and drive north until the tank was dry. Rod became interested in fictional places as a student of William Faulkner, whose Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi was a weird and wonderful place. But that love of the imagined made him unable to visit a place without also seeing what was imagined to be present there. That was why his trip to the New England coast was so dreadful–he had driven right into H. P. Lovecraft’s horrific Arkham. Now, though, with a few hundred miles behind him, the froggish inhabitants and their fishy smell of his motel in Innsmuth was a distant memory. Rod turned on Greenwood Road, calmed enough to turn around and get back. But the road became very narrow, and surrounded with summer bramble. Rod was heading west again, not north like he wanted, so when he saw an unmarked road to his right he took it. Ten minutes later, he was in small town. There wasn’t a town here on the map. A large dog rested its massive haunches on the porch of a general store. Rod gulped–he knew the St. Bernard. He knew the store, and the antique dealer next to it, and everyone in this town. How they’d die, and who or what killed them. And he knew the story about a special shortcut to the town via a road not on maps that wound through a dimension not our own. “Welcome to Castle Rock,” the sign said.

Ennis Coleson could do things with a trumpet that no one else could. He would purposefully turn his back on a crowd for a jaw-dropping solo, so no one could see what it was he was doing with his fingers. This had become his well-known trademark. It was almost as well-known that what he was hiding was proficient but standard fingering. It was Ennis’s lips and throat and lungs that were doing the amazing work, and if you gave a million kids horns on their sixth birthday and they played it every day, when they were forty none of then would sound as good as Ennis could on a good night. When a contact he had from some USO shows overseas called him, Ennis thought it would be to play for the president again. You’ll be serving your country, the contact assured him, but not at the Kennedy Center. Ennis was taken to a facility in Bethesda, Maryland, went down an elevator that lasted for two minutes, and then went through a background check that lasted longer than his second marriage. Finally, they brought Ennis into the biggest room he had ever seen. Chunks of cement were blown out of the walls, and dirt had poured through. He couldn’t see the far wall. Dozens of cement-block walls studded the floor. A three-star general handed Ennis a very old instrument, a brass horn. Ennis had collected antique horns for twenty years, but had never seen anything as old as this one. “You know your Bible? This is the weapon,” the general told Ennis. “This is what decimated the walls of Jericho. You’ll learn how to properly use it. And early next year, you’ll take a goodwill tour of Syria, or Lebanon, or wherever else we send you, and play.”