MicroHorror

Freda loved to hold Halloween parties. At the age of thirty-two, three times divorced and achieving three generous divorce settlements, she had plenty of money to spend on extravagant affairs and, as she supervised the caterers making preparations for a grand buffet, she confided to Elaine, her PA, that she already had her eye on husband number four.

Elaine gasped when Freda mentioned Jonathon Bliss, a rich divorce lawyer. “He’s engaged!” she exclaimed.

Stepping out through French doors onto a large, Romanesque patio, Freda laughed as she tipped three kilos of Granny Smith apples into a Jacuzzi the size of a small swimming pool.

“What are you doing?” Elaine asked, watching those apples bob about like green-headed babies.

“We’re ducking apples tonight,” Freda told her and casting a glance of disdain at her skinny companion, added, “Hope you’re wearing decent underwear.”

Blushing, Elaine stared into the Jacuzzi. “I’m afraid of water,” she said.

“That’s not water,” Freda scoffed. “That’s best Chilean wine.”

Then voices behind announced the arrival of her guests so there was a lot of air kissing to be done.

Jonathon Bliss, after telling Freda how beautiful she looked, introduced her to his fiancée Ruth. Freda smiled a smile of derision and asked, “Didn’t I see you working in Bellingham’s Specialist Fruits, this morning?” Ruth nodded and mentioned, in a timid voice, that she owned the shop and the apartment above.

After her guests had eaten, Freda led them outside, saying, “It’s Ducking Apple Time,” and stepping out of her designer dress, like a refined stripper, she displayed an exquisite body adorned in brief, sexy lingerie.

Tipsily, her guests undressed and, one by one, climbed into the Jacuzzi. “No hands!” Freda told them. “Keep them above your heads.”

Laughing, they dipped their heads into bubbling wine, snorting and gasping as they tried to catch those elusive apples. Then Freda jumped up and down, an apple clenched between her teeth.

“Take the first bite,” Ruth said. “It’s said you’ll get what you richly deserve.” Surprised by the meek suggestion, Freda happily complied.

Later, after her guests had gone, Freda, reclining on her water bed, wondered what Jonathon saw in mouse-like Ruth but her wonderings came to an abrupt stop when painful scratching began in the depths of her stomach.

Minutes later, the scratching traveled upwards and, in horror, she saw her flesh writhe from pelvis to chest. Screaming, Freda fell off the bed but the black creature, shooting out from her mouth, slithered after her, its jaws extended to easily accommodate her limbs, torso and head.

“A penny for them?” he asked for the third time in ten minutes. So, picking up a butcher’s knife, she sliced open the top of her head and, when all her thoughts tumbled out, she demanded he give her that penny.

A marble angel stands at the head of Arthur Fletcher’s grave. In her hands, she raises a birdbath to the heavens while, close by, a bulldozer flattens the council-run cemetery to make way for a new housing project.

Amid the noise of destruction, men wearing hardhats throw debris into industrial skips. Unseen, the angel grows taller and taller.

Beneath the angel’s feet, Arthur Fletcher stirs, his skeleton shifting with new growth that has slept inside his rotting flesh for over twenty years.

Green slime pulsates. Amoeba-like creatures hatch out. Hundreds of corpses, agitated by external activity, awaken and writhe in many old graves as yet untouched by demolition.

Rapidly, these creatures grow. Tentacles take shape. Heads the shape of footballs enlarge. Hungry mouths yawn into cavernous pits and when the bulldozer draws nearer, the angel meets the startled gaze of its driver.

Suddenly, the birdbath smashes through the windscreen. Decapitated, the driver’s head falls from the cab into the mouth of the first emerging Grunchling. Then the cemetery erupts and thousands of its species slither out from their dark nesting places.

Frantic, slithering on green slime, workmen, trying to escape, are sucked up by those immense, blubbery mouths and fresh white bones spew out on top of older, grayer ones.

Minutes later, their eating frenzy ends and the Grunchlings move en masse towards the town where, outside the Council Chambers, demonstrators hold up placards, chanting, “Save our local cemetery.”

She said Jane was a liar. She said the Devil would take her soul. She told her that one day, when her daughter grew up, she would grow a Pinocchio nose.

Her mother lied.

He said she was his little girl. He said she was his queen. He told Jane that she was his one and only.

Her father lied.

Zak said she was a crybaby. He said she was dead ugly too. He told her that she was a cuckoo in the nest.

Her brother told her the truth.

At night, Jane curled up into a ball. Through the dark hours after he’d left, she clung onto her teddy bear. By day, she crept about the house. Sometimes she’d hide but always her father would find her in the cupboard under the stairs.

Last September, she told her mother. Her mother screamed and hit her for telling such wicked lies. After her confession, her parents huddled together on the sofa and if he caught Jane watching, he’d give her a big smile.

Today, at dawn and on her fourteenth birthday, she barricaded her family inside their bedrooms. Then Jane called out, “Come and get me!” Moments later, three doors bashed against heavy furniture piled up outside their doors.

“Let me out!” all three started yelling. Laughing at their angry pleas, she put a lit match to a taper already dipped in paraffin.

Suddenly there was a whoosh of flames gobbling up a paraffin path. The sizzling blue carpet turned black. Seconds later, flames leapt up to the ceiling. The lampshade exploded showering orange rain down onto banisters and stairs.

Dashing outside, Jane stood on the front lawn listening to her family’s desperate cries. And while she stood there waving up at their faces, Fred and Alf, her favorite garden gnomes, laughed so much Jane thought they might fall off their toadstools.

They say, at night, damned voices call out from the centre of Pevril Woodland. But it’s daylight, and Jake, running along dappled paths, laughs while his friend Sam counts up to one hundred. As Jake runs, his feet sink into decades of mulch and small dead things while all around him there is a deafening silence, but he’s unaware of that and his mute, half-human watchers.

On reaching the count of one hundred, Sam sets off, following the same paths until he reaches an oak tree where ten centuries have gouged a large hollow deep into gnarled wood. Peering inside, looking into musty depths, he sees his friend tumbling, tumbling downwards, chorused by ten thousand screaming voices.