MicroHorror

Not many people drive by the Old Camden Cemetery, Abner said, not since the four-lane highway turned traffic away from Old Camden Road. So when a car does come by, be ready for it. Lushana nodded her head at this. She had been learning from Abner, who had been here at least two hundred years, what to expect in Old Camden. Lushana was new here: joined two weeks ago due to a fall during cheerleader auditions. And she wanted to go visit her friends and family. Abner explained the only way to do that was to hop a ride with one of the rare people who came by, and hope they went close to where you wanted to be. If they didn’t, take control for a little bit, but not too much or the body will reject you and then you’ll be stuck. A blue SUV made an appearance, and Lushana was all set to hop on board. But she was locked out somehow. Had she done it wrong? Nah, Abner explained, they had kids on board. Kids always hold their breaths when they pass a graveyard. They think it adds a year to their life. Just head back to the road and wait. Sooner or later, someone will come by who doesn’t believe silly superstition about adding years to your life.

I’m outside the old woman’s kitchen, and I can tell you want me to open the door. So I do. There’s a knife on the table. You will me to pick it up, so I do. At the far end of the room is an old woman, asleep in her chair, her crocheting hanging off her lap like a skirt. You will me to approach, so I do. I don’t want to do this, don’t want to do anything else. But you want me to. Of course you do: the only thing you want me to do is hurt, to do the things you’re unable to do. You, wherever you are, you’re not just the passive audience to my works. You’re the actor, not me: you make me do these things. Please, I beg you, walk away from the story of my works. Don’t finish reading this. Because I don’t want to spill her blood, stain her white yarn, end her life. I refuse to take any more responsibility for it. It’s not me, it’s you. If you really are that hungry for slaughter, then you keep on pushing ahead with my story, but know damn well that it’s your hand on this knife, not mine. You’re the one who’s going to sink the blade into the loose flesh of her neck and watch how the ichor pools on her wrinkled skin. You’re the one who’s going to have to live with yourself, you whose violence this act is the result of. You. You. You! Don’t make me. Don’t you make me. Please, don’t you make me. there are only a few words left, please stop reading, go do something else, don’t make her die, let her live, please please please. Please… at least she was asleep when it happened.

Jessica Troy was a perfect match for the job description the HR manager had in front of her. She had decent grades at the University of Texas at Austin, possessed letters of recommendation from her summer job and two teachers, and was polite and quick-witted in person. Jessica was type O negative, wasn’t much of a drinker and thus had a wonderfully healthy liver, and exercised so regularly that her athlete’s heart was just a little bigger than normal. The corporation signed her up as the new resource manager for the corporate headquarters in the Fort Worth office. After one week of training she began her position, and two weeks after that her health and life insurance policies kicked in. Two hours into her coverage, a delivery van rammed her vehicle in the parking garage. She was rushed to the hospital, and declared brain-dead. Surgeons immediately began harvesting organs while Jessica, it was recorded, experienced “purposeless limb movement.” Her heart went to a retired employee who was costing at least half a million in expenses a year. Her liver went to one of the board of directors with a fondness for scotch. Seven other parts of her body were also extracted for use by the corporation. Her next of kin received double her salary as life insurance, almost sixty thousand dollars. Jessica’s resources had saved the corporation almost two million dollars in healthcare costs. Jessica, in her brief time with the corporation, had been an admirable resources manager.

Jermaine’s latest temp job was in an office, which always paid better than light industrial warehouse work. He was supposed to shred documents for a law firm which had apparently just lost a big client. Since it was a government contract, someone had to dispose of all materials. Jermaine was in heaven at the thought of this. He had a big conference room all to himself, and the firm was paying by the hour, so he worked nice and slow. He even played music. He’d fill up a blue recycling bag every hour with paper, and a black garbage bag twice a day with cardboard and plastic folders, which he cut in half before tossing. After four glorious days he found a ancient-looking parchment among the law pads and photocopies. It had the client’s names on it like everything else, but not the law firm’s name, so he put it through the shredder. It jammed. He tried again, and it wouldn’t go through. Scissors time. Jermaine grabbed orange-handled shears and snipped, but the parchment turned and flossed between the blades. Next, he blacked it out with a thick magic marker, but the permanent ink beaded up like plastic wrap. He tried stabbing it, tearing it, and even burning it with his lighter. But the document would not be destroyed. Finally he gave up and brought it to his supervisor, explaining to her all the steps that he had tried. Maybe it was some special space-age material, he suggested. The supervisor took a long look at the document, and muttered “So this is what one of these looks like.” She explained this was one of the original contracts her firm used for the government contractors. Jermaine asked why it was under a different name. “Oh, we have so many names,” his boss replied.

Peter, Paul, and Mark Falcone, the three sons of widowed Isadora Falcone, each had their own secrets. Father Peter Falcone had the sanctity of the confessional. Dr. Paul Falcone had doctor-patient confidentiality. And Mark Falcone, esquire, had similar legal protection for what someone told him. Their Sunday dinners with Mama Isadora were usually boisterous celebrations of three happy sons. In the last few weeks they had grown quiet, each of them troubled by sinful, immoral, unethical men they had met on the job. Father Peter brought up some troubling confessions he had heard, of a man who was contemplating killing the wife who left him. Peter did not describe the confessor, to protect his anonymity. Mark added a similar tale of a particularly ruthless new client of his, who wanted to see if he could inherit the property of a deceased relative if he was charged and then cleared of murdering her. And Dr. Paul recalled an older patient in for a checkup who seemed in perfect health, but wanted to know how much shock was needed to guarantee a heart attack. Mama Isadora, busing the table, asked if any of the men had a pockmarked forehead. It would be immoral, unethical, and illegal to answer that question, but all three sons broke their sacred vows of secrecy. Yes, yes he had! It was the same man! And Mama knew him! Mama Isadora gasped, dropped the gravy-streaked plates, and fell over in shock. “Your horrible father…” she gasped, breaking her own secret as a mother with her last breath, “He’s not as dead as you think.”

There was a tartan by an enormous yew tree next to the river, but it was a plaid Cameron Mackenzie had never seen before. He knew the distinct plaid patterns of his Mackenzie clan, of course, as well as the other locals: Ogilvy, Keith, Macleod, Macthomas. But the grey undercheck and white overcheck, without a hint of green or red, was new to him. Who was this newcomer, this Sassenach to the lands of clan Mackenzie? Could his gray and white be one of the Mackenzie’s many tartans, which mixed black undercheck with white and blue and green stripes? Or was he an emissary from the King? Cameron approached the garment, nine yards of woven cloth worn as a kilt and sash. The intricacy that he saw from the two colors, triple and quadruple tramlines, was more than any loom he knew could produce. And the tramlines seemed to actually taper off towards the top…! Impossible! Cameron had to learn more of this fine tartan, so he scooped it up. It stuck to his hand, and when he tried to shake it free it tugged on fine filaments running upwards into the giant yew. Unraveled strands of silver and white dropped down upon him like a net. Cameron screamed as he was dragged up into the tree, then his screams stopped as a painful bite brought his body into quick paralysis. He was a big one, a good two days’ worth of juices in him. A new tartan was lowered from the tree, its alluring weaving as magnificently deadly as a spiderweb.

How Gloria got the restricting ring on Simon Meaney’s finger at the alter was a mystery, but the sucker refused to come off. He’d be on a sales call for his die-cutting business, or at the bar next to some primo tail, and the last signal he wanted to send was that he was the sort of person who’d settle down. People who settled down settled, they didn’t close. Simon might as well not get out of bed. But that damn ring, an heirloom from Gloria’s grandfather, was too small even though a jeweler stretched it two sizes. It was summer now, and people’s fingers were plumper with moisture in the summer. Also, maybe Bob had a few good-life pounds on him. But going on a two-month no-bread diet just so he could do his job or relax when out of town—that required the type of patience which no human being possessed. This was the easier solution, Bob though, threading his hand around the plastic safety guards on the die-cutting machine. The only solution. Replants were incredibly common. It’d be a cinch with this machine’s optical inspection accuracy of 0.001 inch, way sharper than a scalpel. And, he thought, feeling a moment of resistance and then seeing something cigar-like fly across the room, at least now that damn ring will be ruined.

Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. Harold, the Oakdale gravedigger, upon hearing a bell, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time wasn’t. A voice from below begged, pleaded to be unburied. “You Sarah O’Bannon?” Yes! the voice assured. “You were born on September 17, 1827?” Yes! “The gravestone here says you died on February 19?” No, that wasn’t true, she was alive, it was a mistake! Dig her up, set her free! “Sorry about this, ma’am,” Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. “But this is August. Whatever you is down there, you ain’t alive no more, and you ain’t comin’ up.”

One of Yelena Ortega’s residents, Rose Midasovich, the wife of a deceased gas station owner, was throwing up her meals. She was put on a liquid diet, and all of that came up, and then she was on meds washed down with water and Ensure. Miss Rose threw up on her nightgown on Tuesday, and some idiot had sprinkled glitter on it as a prank. The glitter was there the next upchuck as well, and the next. By Thursday Yelena had gone to an Alaskan web site and busied herself in the bathroom cleaning up the latest spill with a sifter. Rose was throwing up gold. It might have been all the lead she absorbed from the gas station. Yelena didn’t know, or care. But each meal Rose’s stomach couldn’t hold was worth a few hundred bucks of flecks. It was Yelena’s secret, and she paid off her car, and bought some clothes and began to pay off credit cards. Then Rose started digesting again. Yelena started mixing in castor oil and vodka into Rose’s food before she could even consider the ethicality of such a move. She even got bold enough to put a small plastic chain inside a pill capsule, which Rose gold-plated before she regurgitated it. All that tampered food affected Rose, though, and she lapsed into a coma. Rose’s family argued against heroic measures, but lost the argument. Yelena inserted the feeding tube directly into Rose’s unconscious side, her brown eyes flecked with the yellow and green.

Martin’s first wish to the djinn was to die. Over the decade it had taken him to track down the 6th-century amphorae in which the djinn’s essence was trapped, Martin had destroyed the lives of those around him, and grown to hate the very thing he had sought. He killed out of self-preservation, then out of greed, another word for self-preservation. Only a fool would choose to be the back instead of the knife. Now, with three choices to make, Martin knew that what he had become was not something that should be in this plane of existence. The djinn grinned at the request, nodded, and then wrapped his spectral hands around Martin’s neck. Martin spasmed and died, then began to writhe in a hundred new agonies. He was being burned, frozen, ripped apart, squeezed, shattered, broken, every moment of pain relived in a constant second. The djinn had never seen the place he had sent so many, and was aghast in a place of such unfulfillment. He asked the writhing Martin if wish number two should be a resurrection. “No,” Martin said, “I want to be at the top of this mountain. I want the throne.” The djinn’s murderous hands began to tremble in fear at this. “Can you do that?” The djinn waited an eternity, not wanting to answer, compelled to be truthful, then nodded. “Good,” Martin said. “By the way, I may take centuries to decide on my third wish. But you’ll be by my side every second for all that time in case I change my mind, right?” Another eternity’s pause, another nod.