MicroHorror

“Nothing cain’t live if’n it ain’t got a heart.” Rusty looked at the snowman and then at her coonhound, Wooly Bear. Wooly Bear rolled on her back in the snow and waited for a tummy rub. She was treated to a tummy rub and a hunting knife through her throat. Rusty ignored the hurt entreaty in the dog’s glazing eyes as she slit open the animal’s abdomen and reached up under the ribs for the still beating heart.

“You can live now,” Rusty told the snowman as she scooped snow over Wooly Bear’s corpse and washed her hands clean. “You be walking about tomorrow.”

As she trudged back through the drifts of snow, to the warmth of the family cabin, Rusty sensed a presence behind her, in the darkness, amongst the trees. She turned to see the snowman staring at her through coal-black eyes. “Well, don’t that beat all. You’s alive an’ walking.”

A hole appeared beneath the carrot nose and grew larger and deeper. Rusty peered in. At the bottom of the pit something a deep, hot, crimson pulsed rhythmically. Rusty leaned closer. “Well, don’t that beat all.”

“Musta gone this way. Here’s the tracks. Goddammit! Ain’t I told her enough? Git home afore dark. I’ve half a mind to give them a whipping, both. Where the hell’s them dumb bitches?” A mournful howl answered his question, and Henry Niails thrashed his way through heaped drifts to the scene.

Rusty lay arched backwards over a mound of bloodied snow, a carrot clutched in her hand. She was sliced from neck to navel, a ragged gash that did nothing to hide the broken ribs and missing heart. Niails sank to his knees in the snow, overcome by the horror of what he was seeing.

Something pushed against his hand and Wooly Bear gazed up into his face, her muzzle and coat congealed with blood. As he reached for her the dog rolled onto her back, revealing a fresh scar along her belly.

“The hospital has, of course, been closed for many years now.”

I pondered the irony in my guide’s words. The term “hospital” implied a place where the sick were cared for and, hopefully, cured. St. Jude’s had been, at least in its latter days, a place of incarceration, where the mentally ill awaited death’s merciful release and often waited, and suffered, for a very long time.

“Are there ghosts?” I asked.

He smiled. “Undoubtedly, but you needn’t be concerned. Ghosts can’t hurt you.”

He led me on, down long, dark, stone-flagged corridors, with iron-gated cells at intervals on either side.

Above my head, set in the ceiling, I saw a large wooden pulley. “They used to use that pulley to raise the dead from the Pit,” he said, just as I stepped not on stone, but into nothingness. I slid down a stone chute and fell into a windowless space with no exit but the hole through which I had entered, now high overhead.

“This is where they kept the maddest of the mad,” said my guide from above. “You’ll be one soon enough. Like I said: ghosts can’t hurt you, but they can lead you to places that can.”

The fire in the forward paint locker might have been contained and put out if the crewmember who discovered it had been trained in firefighting. But ignorant of the risks, he simply opened the locker door. The fire, almost dead from lack of oxygen, exploded with renewed fury and scorched the clothes and skin from the man even as superheated air shriveled his lungs and blistered his wind-pipe. The first victim of the General Slocum disaster was dead before he hit the deck.

Several of the women and children passengers nearby were also struck by the cloud of burning paint and kerosene that burst out of the paint locker, igniting every flammable thing within its reach. Clawing at the sticky, flaming mess on her daughter’s cheek Amelia Weisskopf found herself pulling at the child’s teeth; the flesh was burnt right through. Another woman fell against her. Ablaze from head to foot, she had suffocated within moments when she had inhaled the flames from her burning dress. Frantic with pain and terror Amelia pushed her way through the crush of blazing bodies and screaming, blackened faces. Burning flesh was flowing like wax down the bones of her seared skull and Amelia knew she would soon be blind and helpless. Dragging her unconscious daughter with her she threw herself over the rail and into the East River, where moments later one of the General Slocum’s huge paddlewheels crushed them.

When news of the fire reached the bridge the captain called for his officers to take charge of the passengers and crew. Below them the flames were taking hold, in both the oak structure and the pine decks, the painted and varnished wood burning fast and easily. To their horror the crew found that the fire hoses were rotten and fell apart in their hands; bucket chains were formed, but were hopelessly inadequate against the ferocity of the fire.

Panicked by the flames and the thick, hot, smoke which was sweeping down on the wind from the front of the ship and making it difficult to breathe, women and children and the few men who were among the excursion passengers ran to the boat decks. Those clambering up the steep, narrow, stairs of the companionways met those climbing down and the cries of the crushed echoed the screams of those pushed overboard, their heavy clothes dragging them to their death at the bottom of the river. The screams of terror grew louder when it was discovered the lifeboats were chained to their davits and couldn’t be launched. Mothers, desperate to save their young ones, fought for the few lifejackets, which then crumbled in their hands, rotted to uselessness.

By now the fire was out of control, and fanned by the boat’s forward speed the flames raced through all three decks. People running to the rear of the vessel fell through collapsing decks onto the crush below.

Burning bodies were pressed against those as yet unaffected and the heat and flames welded them together in grotesque tableaux. The living and the dead were thus bundled overboard together in a desperate and hopeless attempt to stop the fire spreading further. Whole families clutching one another jumped in to the water to avoid the flames only to be caught by the still turning paddlewheels. Broken bodies could be seen trapped between the blades, lifeless arms waving a piteous farewell.

Boats were launched to try and rescue those still alive, but such vessels as could get close enough to the flaming hulk were quickly swamped by the sheer numbers trying to get aboard. Men waded into the icy waters up to their necks to reach survivors, but burnt clothes and blacked skin simply sloughed off outstretched arms and the victims slipped back into the water and drowned. In mute horror those on the banks of the East River could only watch as the by now drifting remains of the General Slocum burned inexorably to the waterline.

The flagellum has done its work and the man’s back is a single open wound. What is left of the muscle flexes and tears itself afresh as the wretch writhes and twists in agony. Two soldiers of the duty Century cut him down from the whipping post and throw him onto his back on the stony ground. A thin shriek like steam from a kettle is all the sound a throat raw from screaming can make.

The man’s arms are pulled to either side and lashed to a roughly cut timber weighing over a hundred pounds, the patibulum. His head and neck are now forced forward by the baulk lying across his lacerated shoulders. The soldiers kick him to his feet. Half crazed with pain he staggers this way and that under the crippling weight as the soldiers drive him, like a beast, along the path to the place of execution.

Unprotected, his bare feet are lacerated by sharp rocks and leave a bloody trail in the dust. A few idlers follow the group and throw stones at the man’s back, causing clouds of insects to rise briefly from the mangled flesh. One youth runs forward with a goatskin of water to tempt him, but the Centurion in charge of the detail knocks him aside, breaking the boy’s nose with his fist.

After an interminable time laboring under the morning sun the group arrives at the stipes, the vertical post to which the patibulum will be fixed. The man is thrown on to his back once more, but already half-dead and delirious from his injuries he barely stirs. Soldiers cut the ropes binding his arms to the cross-piece but then drive thick, square nails through his wrists and into the wood. Fierce new pain runs from fingertips to neck and the man’s eyes bulge in horror.

It takes eight soldiers, four on either side, to lift the patibulum and its burden into position on top of the stipes where dowels locate it centrally in place. As his weight tears the sinews and nerves in his pierced wrists the man vomits and thrashes about tormenting his bloody back against the rough timber and dislocating his shoulders and elbows. So extreme is his suffering his tongue protrudes between his teeth and he bites it in two; blood pours over his lip as he howls.

The soldiers step to either side of the stipes to avoid staining their tunics with the blood and bile and from this position force the soles of the man’s feet against the post and nail them in place. A square of wood under the nail’s head ensures he cannot pull his feet free. Desperate to relieve the agony in his arms the man pushes down on to his spiked feet and then flops back again with a wail. There is no relief.

Now begins the slow, hideous descent into death. Hung from the arms, air can be drawn into the lungs, but not easily expelled. Each breath is won at a terrible cost as the arms or the legs or both must lift the body and move it against the rough wooden post to which the blood and serum of the raw flesh has clotted. The sun beats down relentlessly on the naked skin and the dehydrated body tortures itself still further with blinding headaches and crippling cramps. Flies gather to feast on the blood running down the back and legs and become a heaving black mask over the man’s face where such sweat as remains is mixed with blood from burst vessels in the eyes and nose and from the ragged and swollen remains of the tongue. Eventually, the body stops moving and the dreadful torment is finally over.

The soldiers march away. There is nothing for them to do and they have no interest in such a familiar spectacle.

One man, nearby, squats and waits. After dark, he will release his son, Dismas, and take him for burial.

Charlie had never heard the word malice, but he sure as hell knew what it felt like. His dad could get pretty mad, but Mrs. Kowalski topped him out. She was real sore and he was the focus of anger so hot it scorched his soul.

“You are wicket und bad boy. May you rot for vot you did, Charlie Brown.”

Thirteen-year-old Charlie staggered as though she had hit him. The energy in her spite was like a punch between the eyes. Behind her mother’s skirts, Ginny Kowalski watched and smirked. They both knew she was the wicked one here, but Charlie was no snitch, and anyway Ginny was a girl; who would believe him over her?

Even now over fifty years later, he could recall the moment perfectly. For right then, as Ginny’s mother glared at him, a tiny pebble of doubt was dislodged in the minds of those townsfolk who were watching. A pebble that started an avalanche of bigotry carrying him away from everything he had ever known and out into a world that made sure he never forgot he was an outcast.

Charlie had existed ever since on the edges of society. He had been used, abused and cast aside, time and time again, by whoever had found a temporary satisfaction in someone more wretched than themselves. Now he had fetched up in Indiana, or some such place. He wasn’t sure because he had never finished school, so he didn’t read too good. Couldn’t write or figure much either, and at his age even stacking shelves was a trial, so he’d just drifted, existing on road-kill and handouts. Now he had fetched up against this shack, a place even more derelict than he was, and here, worn down and weary, he had settled to await his fate.

The way he’d lived, critters of some variety or other were always around. Some had tried to chaw on him and in turn he’d chawed on a good few of them. He’d got snake bit a couple of times, but then he’d just heated up his skinning knife and burnt out the bad stuff, after he’d killed the snake of course. Then he ate the snake. Snake was good. Tasted like chicken.

But it weren’t no snake that had bit him on the butt yesterday. At least no snake he could find. He’d dug at his ass with the red-hot tip of his knife, but even so he could feel something working into his vitals and eating him up from the inside. He’d clawed at himself with his ragged, dirty fingernails and even got the skillet hot and sat on that, but apart from the fearsome pain it didn’t make no difference; he still sensed something nibbling away. Then he got bit again and this time he saw and killed the spider. It was a fiddleback and Charlie knew he could be in trouble. Fiddleback bites sometimes went bad and sometimes, very bad. Fiddleback bites could rot the very flesh from your bones and sure enough the bite on his hand was turning black. Charlie built up the fire and prepared for some cutting.

But it wasn’t till he tried to settle back down again, blood running over his fingers, that he got an inkling of just how much trouble he was in. He got closer to the ground than he should have done and there was a warm, wet squelching in his pants that wasn’t going to be good whatever had caused it. He pushed his jeans down, rolled on his side and stared into Hell. Most of his left cheek and half his thigh was black streaked with white, like a part-burnt log, and as he stretched a lump just fell off. A moment later blood began to ooze. Charlie had never heard the word necrosis, but he sure as hell knew what it felt like.

“Shoot, Mrs. Kowalski,” he muttered, “you cursed me real good.”

I sit, lie, squat or stand in total darkness. Such air as is vouchsafed to me is as foul as may be endured and the breather remain incarnate. Any sound, other than that I make myself, comes from above my head and that infrequently. My tomb, for such it will become, is a cone. Widest at the base and tapering above my head to a hole through which I was dropped to my Doom. The stone of this sarcophagus is smooth to the touch and flat beneath my feet, though I must perforce stir the slurry in which I stand to feel the floor and as I shift my feet the filth of my own excretion and micturation is swept aside only to return to claim the ground once more.

I clutch my chest with one hand to protect the journal I am preparing of my incarceration. Should my wretched remains ever be taken from this place of punishment, my sins such as they are and the injustice that has been visited upon me will be evident for those with the power to decipher the meaning of the simple words I record here. For want of finer things, my parchment is my own skin, my ink the filth in which I wallow and my stylus, a fingernail shaped and sharpened to a point upon the wet-running stone. With one hand I scoop my filthy excess to my chest and with the other prick out, as in the manner of seamstress, point by bloody point the cyphers that compose my sampler. My own waste is visited upon me again, and pressed into my flesh to form as best it might an account of my pitiable Fate.

I survive by virtue of the strength of my weakening spirit, the wet that weeps like a woman from the stones of my cell and the occasional manna that descends squeaking or fluttering from above. Such bounty, howsoever delivered, is a gift indeed, for it gives me hope that even Hell has boundaries. Such creatures as tumble into my hands are delivered as swiftly to their Maker. I uncork the furry or feathered vessel with my teeth and sup on the thick, hot, claret that flows from therein. Then feathers or fur nothwithstanding I consume all that may be chewed and swallowed by mortal man. Fortified, I press my lips to the wall and take such as I need of the foul damp that flows unceasingly there. Where I find mould, it is as a vegetable to the meat and like any good Christian I give thanks for it and such sustenance as it may provide. My meagre meal complete I stuff my beard into my mouth in case there may be missing morsels adhering there. Then I turn, once again, to my journal.

When I weary of my work I force my stylo the deeper into my chest, ever wary of ending my sorry existence by piercing, through chance, an organ vital to my life. Over the hand bearing my needle I place the other palm, the intent to prevent my pricker from being displaced and thereby rendering my efforts void through the obfuscation of overwriting. The sole purpose for my continuing existence thus secured, I squat, sit and ultimately lie amongst the foul and evermore odorous ventings of my decaying body.

To sleep, perchance to dream, is as far from my hope, as is my expectation of seeing the sun or sky again. I am here to die, no more no less. I am left, abandoned, forgotten. They wished me out of sight, to put me out of mind, and as they continue in their daily round above, I remain beneath their feet and beneath their contempt. My very existence is a defiance against those who set me here and I persist for but one reason: to wreak my revenge on those who cast me into this foetid Pit, to complete my record and prepare a last, damning, testament.

Christopher Robinson had almost walked past the shop before he registered it was there. For a moment part of his mind tried to tell him it had come into existence in response to his presence, but he knew that was stupid. An entire shop doesn’t suddenly manifest just because you happen to be walking past. Yet he could have sworn it wasn’t there yesterday, or was it? He has a memory of it. A new memory, but a memory nonetheless, of him standing outside this shop the day before in almost exactly this position thinking, “I don’t remember this shop being here.” Is this déjà vu? Or can it be he is losing his marbles?

Robinson suddenly leaps back across the pavement, his eyes bulging in terror. In the window is a display of glass marbles with the slogan “Rediscover your youth.” On the other side of the display is a boy about eight years old looking at him curiously. Robinson whimpers. The boy is himself, twenty-five years ago. What’s happening? The boy picks a marble from the display and holds it out. The marble and the hand came closer and closer, through the window, across the pavement and…

His eyes snap open. The window has gone, completely disappeared. The shop has vanished. Robinson stares. He must be going crazy. One minute there is a shop window and his eight year-old self is offering him a marble and now there is just a blank wall and he is flat on his back on the ground. He rolls over and pushes himself up.

Something is wrong. In his confused state it takes him a moment to realize what it is. The pavement is soft and slightly springy like thick rubber. Robinson tries to tell himself that it is his disorientated state that is producing this effect, but he is not convinced. Then his mother appears with a teapot and a plate of biscuits, his father rides by on a bicycle and Robinson starts to cry.

Concealed behind a fold in time a creature more thought than substance systematically dissects its catch. Held in a specimen tank of his own memories Christopher Robinson gives up without thought or understanding his innermost soul. The alien takes what it wants of Robinson’s life force then resets the trap with its newly psychotic bait. Now, as a young woman approaches, the shop window has a naked window-dresser.

He’d been watching them work the Carnival crowd. They favored the Smash and Grab method: crude but effective. What made him fume, though, was not what they stole, or even how they stole it, but who they stole from. They targeted women with young children and that was not just nasty, it was downright evil.

So he watched and waited, just another horned devil amongst dozens. Waited for the time when he knew they would go to change their costumes.

These changes were an important factor in their success, particular the different wigs. The gang knew that the first thing people look at when deciding whether or not they recognize someone is their hair. So a change of color and style and you’re a new person. Change your clothes as well and you’re virtually unrecognizable. That’s why the police were struggling to catch this group. Their victim’s descriptions varied so wildly it sounded as though all of London’s villains were in Notting Hill this year.

He had given them nicknames–Teeny, Meany and Mo–more for his own amusement than for any purpose of identification.

Mo was the leader and selected the victim. Then Teeny and Meany would go into action. As the unsuspecting woman walked along, a child or two by her side, Teeny would work his way into her path. Walking a few steps in front, he would suddenly turn round and “accidentally” collide with the woman. As he was only around five-foot-one, most people literally overlooked him until his head was buried in their chest or stomach.

As the woman’s first instinct would always be for the safety of her children, Meany walking right behind her was perfectly placed to snatch a purse or bag while she was distracted. Then Mo came into play. Acting the concerned citizen, he would distract the victim again, while Teeny and Meany made their getaway. When the woman discovered her loss, Mo would look around angrily, pretend to see the thief and rush off into the crowd.

The three would then regroup at the anonymous white van they used as their base. Slipping inside to change before setting out again. However, this time they had a visitor. He had decided to join them.

“Where in Hell did you spring from?” gasped Meany.

“Let me show you,” said the devil, stopping their hearts mid-beat with a click of his fingers.

Joy Lane was anything but; it was the most desolate street in the whole of Benningfield and that was saying something. Ever since the mill had closed the place had just fallen apart. But the town still had its attractions.

The big house at the end of Joy Lane was haunted and therefore a favorite haunt of thrill-seekers on Halloween. An old man was supposed to have died in the house, of starvation, and kids went looking for him at midnight. But the only thing that was ever found was freshly gnawed bones on the stoop on November the 1st.

Geoff was good at ducking for apples. He had small teeth and a wide bite and he didn’t mind getting water up his nose.

He got up Petey’s nose though, big time. Petey waited for his chance and when Geoff went down for the third time Petey assisted him with a good grip on his ankles. Geoff tried to fight his way out of the tub, but Petey just shoved Geoff’s ankles up towards the back of his head. Then it was simply a matter of waiting till the thud, thud, thud, on the bottom of the tub died away.