MicroHorror

“I want to get him now.”

“Be patient. We must never arrive early.”

“It’s hard. I hate.”

“I know. I also hate, but we must do this right. It is a privilege to be allowed from the depths to perform this deed.”

“What is that hooked to him?”

“That is his body.”

“No, I mean the thing.”

“Oh. That is something that breathes for him and pumps his heart.”

“Is that what we wait for?”

“No, we wait for people. Ah, here they are.”

“What are they doing?”

“They are here to take away the thing’s power. When they flip a switch, the thing will stop giving him air and pumping his heart. There, they’ve done it. It’ll only be a minute now, and then we can take the spirit to Hell.”

“What is he doing?”

“Well, he can’t move his body to communicate, but with his spirit, he’s trying to get the people to turn the thing back on.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think it’s because he hears us.”

With each breath came the scent of decay. There had been a living girl with her in this darkness. Charla had touched her emaciated frame, comforted her.

“Couldn’t change him,” was the only thing the girl had uttered. Charla had fallen asleep shortly after that, and when she’d awoken, the girl was dead.

There were others she’d felt, all gone, in various stages of decay, some skeletons.

“Help me!” Charla screamed. “Somebody let me out of here!” She was afraid he’d hear her and come back. But she was more afraid of rotting in this place.

The stone wall she pressed against had a crease, like it could be a door. She slapped it, shouted for several minutes.

Finally, she thought she heard something, a slight clattering, coming from outside.

“Help me! He’s trapped me in here!”

The clattering became louder. “Who’s in there?” a female voice shouted back.

Charla started to yell again, but a coughing fit came instead. It lasted nearly a minute. She hoped the girl was still there. “I’m Charla! The man picked me up at the bar. He took me to his house. He beat me up and raped me. Then he put me in here to die.”

Charla stated coughing again. But she heard a click, and the door slid open.

Light poured in and stung her eyes so much that she couldn’t see the girl in front of her. She could hear her voice, though.

“You mean the guy with the big blue eyes and crooked smile?”

“Yes. He was wearing a leather jacket and faded blue jeans.”

The girl gasped. “That’s the guy who picked me up. I thought he looked like a real bad boy. I couldn’t resist. He’s upstairs in the shower now. He doesn’t know I went snooping around.”

Charla’s eyes had adjusted to the point that she could see this was a young girl, petite and cute, like Charla. She knew of the sentiment the girl had felt. She too had not been able to resist, felt the urge to help him. “He’s picked up others. They’re all dead. We have to get out of here and call the police.”

Charla started to move, but was stunned by a blow to her jaw, which knocked her to the floor. She tried to get up, but her legs were like jello. She heard the girl talking again.

“You had your chance with the bad boy and couldn’t change him. Now it’s my turn.”

Charla tried to speak, to reason with the girl, to beg, but another coughing fit came instead. The door shut, and light was gone.

“Not worthy,” Max said, waking from his nightmare. He didn’t want to write about the serial killer he’d dreamt.

He smelled something foul in the room, looked, saw it just inside the doorway, its silhouette upright like a man, but shaped differently.

He whispered, “No, werewolf, I’ve written too many of your kind already.”

The beast growled, but Max wasn’t afraid. He just let it slide out of his mind, and it turned to smoke. His wife had not stopped snoring through all this.

Feeling restless, he got out of bed, took the hall to the dining room. Something sat at the table. It spoke with a thick Transylvanian accent.

“Hello, Max. Sit down.”

“No, I’m going to grab some juice. Meanwhile, you can give me a short spiel about yourself. But keep in mind that I’m not going to chronicle your life in a novel. I doubt I’d even do a short story, but you might get a flash or drabble out of me.”

“Flashes! Drabbles! I have drunk the blood of a king! How dare you insult me!”

Max selected tomato from the selection of juices in the fridge, and said, “Yeah, well, I’m going to have to let you go now. You might try talking to Anne Rice, but you’ll probably have to take a number.”

The vampire surged, but Max put it out of his mind, and it dissipated into smoke. He took his juice downstairs to his basement office, pulled up his web browser. He had ten e-mails from editors, and his website had a hundred new hits.

“Wow! Maybe I should take a vacation.”

Hearing a ruckus on the stairs, he turned to see his wife’s legs. His wife was hot, so he had high hopes for what might have broken her slumber. Then, when she got downstairs, he saw her face was a little different from before. She was still pretty, but giant incisors came from her mouth, and her eyes emanated red light.

“Very impressive. Nothing usually affects my wife. I mean, she just slept through a growling werewolf, and I presume she slept through the yelling vampire, but you’ve managed to wake her body and cause its cells to change. Let’s hear your spiel.”

The beast didn’t speak with his wife’s voice, but something like a mixture between a chainsaw and a dog. Its English was fine, though.

“I like to travel in time and possess a relative of a productive writer. Then I like to eat the writer’s brain.”

The entity in his wife’s body moved swiftly across the floor, grabbed him by the hair of his head and lifted him almost to the ceiling.

Dangling and in pain, Max said, “This is very unnecessary! You’ve already managed to outdo any monster I’ve met. Now put me down, or I’ll put you out of my mind!”

The monster quickly, but gently, placed him in his chair.

“That’s better. Now what is it you’re looking for?”

The monster sat on the futon a few feet away. “I thought my story might be worthy of a novel.”

Max smiled. “We’ll see.”

I was once with a magic woman. I don’t mean magic in some metaphorical sense either. She showed me things I’d never seen before. She was gone the next morning.

I was left longing, but somehow certain I would never see her again. Then, one day, I was traveling on business and on a layover at Hatfield in Atlanta. I was walking through the concourse when I felt something incredible. The best way I can describe it is a pleasant coolness in my stomach, like some kind of drug, but purer somehow. I turned to see a pregnant woman sitting alone in a terminal station.

It didn’t look like her at all. The woman I had been with was blond and busty. This woman had dark hair, and was petite, aside from her distended stomach. Still, I knew from the feeling that it was her.

She looked up at me as I approached. There was no denying the recognition in her brown eyes, the eyes I’d once seen as blue. I sat next to her.

“How are you?” I said, wanting to skip the small talk, but not willing to be so bold.

“It’s yours,” she said, rubbing her hands over her stomach. “But he also belongs to many other men, which means he belongs to no man.”

Had she not shown me the things she had shown me before, I would have thought her mad. But instead, I was all the more amazed. “Why do you look so different?”

She smiled. “I assume whatever form is needed and never show my true form.”

Something about that gave me chills. Maybe it was a subconscious understanding. I didn’t dwell on it, though. There were other things to dwell on.

“I didn’t want you to leave.”

She gently nodded. “No man ever does, but I had to go. The child inside me has many fathers, each very different from the father before, but it has only one mother. Thus, I must keep my path ever changing.”

I didn’t say anything to that, but she must have read my need for elaboration. “People create paths for their children by the paths they take in their own lives. The child is not forced to follow those paths, but is instinctively drawn to them.”

She made circles with a finger, moving from left to right, so that each circle was identical to the one before it, but further down the line. “That is the path of most. The scenery changes, but the persons remains within the same tight circle, always the same person, but in a different place. The child in me is to be greater than any man or woman before it, and for that to be true I must not have a repetitive path.” She moved a finger erratically, but generally from left to right.

I looked deep into her eyes. There seemed to be many things moving in them, and I knew she was just reminding me of what she could do.

“Will I see you again?”

She shook her head. “I leave this world when the child comes.”

I felt as if my heart dropped.

“Go now,” she said. “Or you’ll miss your flight.”

Flames grew in her eyes, and I knew I had to go. I got up and left. As I walked away, I felt her presence, the feeling, taken from me. In my mind, I heard the echo of her words.

“I assume whatever form is needed and never show my true form.”

“People create paths for their children by the paths they take in their own lives.”

I turned back, but she was gone.

That was about a year ago. I have some inkling of what was in her, and I’m horrified. Now I wait, wondering what my child will do, and wondering if I’ll recognize it.

Allswald Clarot stared at the image in the mirror. No guilt. No shame. He grinned. It was how he liked it.

A loud, steady voice came from the next room. “She’s sorry.”

Allswald rushed from the bathroom and saw his subject still quartered to the bedposts. Her eyes were wide open, not frantic, just energized, and her lips were straight.

“How did you get your gag out?”

“It wasn’t hard. And once I knew that Bella Transon was sorry, I had to tell you.”

The name sent shivers through him. He backed away and steadied himself against the wall.

“You didn’t know it, but you were looking for a certain image while sitting in that bar. I assumed a form close to that image, so you would follow me out, and then I let you capture me.”

“Shut up, slut, or I’ll end you right now!”

She shook her head. “Poor Allswald. All those girls you killed, trying to prove to yourself that she couldn’t make you feel shame anymore.”

He pulled his switchblade from his pocket, but just held it, folded in his hand. “How do you know all this? And how do you know my name?”

Her expression still hadn’t changed. “It’s right there in your mind, with all the rest.”

He flipped out the blade. “You lie!”

She didn’t even look at the knife. “No, it’s true. I saw what you saw in the mirror a little while ago, saw what you wanted to feel. I went deeper inside you, to the places you don’t look at any more, to the root of what you’ve become, and I found Bella.”

He stepped closer. “I swear I’ll cut your head right off!”

“In the fifth grade, Bella used to tease you. She humiliated you daily in front of the other children. You felt it then, the terrible shame.”

He stuck the knife to her throat.

Suddenly, her skin seemed to melt. He backed away and watched her body become smaller and her face became that of another person. He resumed his posture against the wall.

The woman that had become the child Bella Transon melted again and reformed into the woman that just resembled Bella Transon. “When someone becomes such a significant part of you, they leave a trace of their soul. I used that to find her. And she is very sorry. She not only hurt you; she hurt many others, and the guilt eats at her every day. She has crippling depression.”

Allswald barely felt the knife slip from his hand. He felt something unfamiliar burning inside. “Really?”

“Yes, Allswald. Really.”

Tears formed in his eyes, and he sat on the floor.

“You’re welcome,” she said, though he hadn’t thanked her. “I wanted you to be free of that, Allswald.”

He looked up and saw her skin was melting. She slipped from her binds and became an amorphous blood of gray gook in the middle of the bed. That blob became a person with a giant anaconda head.

She spoke in the same voice she had before. “I still have to eat you, though. I mean, a shape-shifter has to feed, and I don’t feel much guilt when my prey has been a predator.”

She was on him before he could move.

Joseph Leganal awoke to the awful feeling, a sense ingrained from years of combat. There was something wrong. He reached for his wife, but the other side of the bed was empty. He rolled and saw a silhouette next to his bed.

It was his youngest grandchild. Had to be, by the size.

“Mandy? What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

She was very still. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye? But you guys just got here, tonight. We’re going to open Christmas presents in the morning.”

She stepped back, away from him. “I was with you for ten years, from the day we met. I couldn’t do anything to you, just make you dream. I passed to your son, and was with him for twenty-five years. I was the one who made him walk in his sleep. I couldn’t make him do much more. He passed me to Mandy. I’ve learned to take her over completely while she sleeps.”

Joseph remembered his nightmares and the guilt they caused him. He remembered Derek sleepwalking through the years. “I know by the way you speak that you’re not my granddaughter. You should leave her now, because I’m not a man to be messed with.”

His granddaughter laughed, in a way almost as adult as her words. “I know exactly what you are, Joe. I didn’t know your language at the time, but it was easy to tell that you gave the orders.”

Joseph thought back, subtracting the ten years the spirit said it had been with him, the twenty-five in his son and the five in Mandy. “You’re from Nam.”

“Yes. My name is Trong, and I’ll be leaving your lineage tonight. I hope you will accept the favor I’ve given you.”

Trong was silent, cueing Joseph to speak next. “What favor?”

“Years ago, when you had most of my village, including me, exterminated, you allowed my brother to leave. I guess you wanted him to tell others what would happen if they didn’t cooperate.”

Joseph reached over and turned on the lamp. Mandy’s little face was grinning. “Since you left one in my family, I’ll leave one in yours–this one. You’d better make sure she’s the only one if you don’t want me to come back for her. Goodbye, Joe.”

Mandy collapsed to the floor. Joseph looked her over and saw she was sleeping.

He then got out of bed and moved through the house. He found his wife in the hall, his son and daughter-in-law in the guest bedroom and his two older grandchildren on the hide-a-bed in the living room. He knew why he’d not seen any blood on Mandy. Trong had slit all their throats very neatly.

Joseph went to the phone. He dialed the numbers.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“I just killed most my family.”

He hung up, walked back to the bedroom, got his pistol, went outside, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and made sure Mandy was the only one left.

“Who are you running from? Everybody?”

The alley woman didn’t respond, just limped behind her shopping cart. Her mangled hair stretched down her back and her dirty coat stretched to the ground.

“It’s hard to pretend you don’t hear me, isn’t it? We’re the only two people in this alley.”

Debbie pulled out her cell phone, just to check. She had power and bars, but when she pushed a button the number didn’t appear on the screen. She put the phone away.

“I kept looking through these stores, trying to find who was doing it, but there was no one common to each store and the effects seemed to move. It took me a while to figure out the source was in the alley.”

The woman finally stopped. She hesitated and then abandoned her cart. Debbie trailed her at a trot.

“I can get you help for that limp.”

“Leave me alone!” a worn voice said. “No one can help me.”

The woman was near the end of the alley, when a car stopped dead on the road. Debbie watched as the driver tried to restart his car, failed and pulled out a cell phone. He then looked as if that had failed too.

The alley woman backed away from the road. “You see what you made me do?”

Ahead, the man got his car started and moved on. Debbie moved up, stood right next to the woman and looked her in the eyes. There, Debbie could see a lot.

“You haven’t been on the street for more than a year or two, and you used to live a very domestic life.”

The woman looked away. “That’s a fine trick, but you should get away from me, before it’s something inside you that stops working. I promise I’ll move on tonight, when there are no people around. It’s just that I didn’t know it was going through walls.”

Debbie gave a compassionate laugh. “Don’t worry. It won’t break the barrier around me until I let it. What happened to you?”

The woman studied her. She soon became satisfied with whatever she was assessing, nodded and looked away.

“At first, it was just inanimate stuff that stopped working wherever I went. Then it was my husband’s heart. It didn’t kill him, but I knew I had to get away.”

Debbie placed a hand on her back. “I can take it from you.”

“Then you will have it.”

“Yes, but only for a while. This kind of thing won’t leave the world, but I can control how it comes and goes in me.”

“So you’ll be okay?”

“Yup. I’ll be fine. I’ll drop it off soon enough.”

“No! Don’t curse another person with this.”

Debbie chuckled. “I know a man who specializes in child racketeering. His business associates kidnap children and sell them in foreign countries. There’s big money in it. He’s well connected and well lawyered, untouchable by the police, but not untouchable by me.”

The woman now looked angry, but not at Debbie. “Will it work?”

“Oh, yeah. I can take it out of you.”

“No. I mean will it work on him. Will the things around him stop working?”

Debbie smiled. “I guarantee it. Just give me your hand, and I’ll take it out.”

The woman hesitantly stuck her hand out and Debbie took it. She relaxed her body first and then relaxed the shield inside her. She felt the darkness flowing from the woman and into her. When the last of it had come in, she let go of the woman’s hand.

“Is it gone from me?”

“Every last bit. Go test it, though. Walk around for a while until you’re satisfied. Then, by all means, go find your family.”

The woman smiled, but she was obviously not convinced. She could not feel the darkness like Debbie could; she could only see the aftermath. She would test it.

“And you?”

Debbie laughed. “I’ll make my delivery tonight.”

“His mother died in childbirth.”

Trevor came from the reverie of his mind. The red dirt road passed beneath his car. His passenger was a black pistol in the seat beside him. Had he really just heard a man’s voice?

“He was five when Daddy got smashed,” a woman’s voice said.

He sighed, thinking this a likely time for going crazy. And the content of what the voices said made sense enough. His mother had died birthing him, and his dad had been crushed when a semi blew through a red light. The man’s voice was next.

“He was eleven when Jake got fried.”

Trevor shook. “Shut up!” How could they be so coarse when speaking of his brother’s death. “Stupid downed power line.”

“Eighteen when Sissy was murdered,” said the woman in a pestering tone.

Trevor touched the pistol. “Don’t talk about my sister! I’ll do it now!”

“Twenty-six when Wifey died,” said the man.

Trevor brought the pistol to the side of his head. “I’ll do it right here on the road, for whatever random passerby to find me.”

“Thirty-five now and thinks he has it figured out,” said the woman.

The man smirked. “Pretty easy pattern, really.”

“He thinks he can save his little girl by making sure he’s the next to die.”

“He can’t.”

“No, he can’t. Patterns cannot be broken.”

“Nope, but they can be stopped.”

“And they’re stopped when they’re figured out.”

Trevor gasped, and then he shouted, “I did figure it out! Five, six, seven, eight, nine!”

“It’s true,” said the man. “He’s got it right.”

“Let’s give him his new pattern,” said the woman.

He felt an icy hand on his shoulder. He no longer had control of his body. Something else willed the next set of movements. It made him set the gun aside, pull the car to a stop, and turn toward the back seat.

A man and a woman, hairless and transparent, sat there, smiling. The woman was holding something out. He wasn’t breathing, and his heart raced audibly, but he otherwise had control of his body again. He reached out and took what the woman had. It was a simple piece of paper, but he couldn’t feel it in his hand. The woman, the man, and the paper all disappeared.

He sat there motionlessly and nearly thoughtlessly for a time he could not sense, and then a sound brought him from this numb state.

His cell phone chimed in his pocket. He sucked in a breath and turned forward in his seat. His breath raced to compensate for the time he’d spent breathless, so he took a few seconds to get it under control. He dug out the cell phone and saw it was his sister-in-law, Carol. He answered it.

“Hello.”

“Trevor, where are you?”

“I… I… Never mind. How’s Tracy?”

“Why didn’t you come to the hospital?”

“Never mind! How’s my daughter?”

There was silence for several seconds, and then Carol said, “She’s fine. The doctor said she just passed out from the heat. He said to make sure she got rest and fluids.”

Trevor felt as if he could melt into his seat. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

“You didn’t answer your phone earlier, so I just took her to your house. I hope you don’t mind, but she played your messages on the home unit and I overheard.”

“Overheard what?”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t hear it from me.”

“Overheard what?”

Carol was silent for another few seconds. “Well, it was someone at your company about a promotion you were up for. It sounds like you got it.”

Trevor’s felt himself shrug, as if someone were there to see it. “My interview was just a technicality. I was at the bottom…” He stopped. He remembered what the spirits had said. “Oh. My new pattern.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m coming home.”

It wasn’t like Barty had heard it would be. There was no tunnel with a light at the end. There was only the light, and it was in the shape of a door. It followed him around.

Barty knew he was supposed to go in, and he could feel it pulling. But he wasn’t ready to go yet. He was trailing his murderer, a big, rough-looking man, with eyes that were either enlightened or crazy.

A voice came from the door. “It’s as I said. The tunnel leads into this realm, and the door leads out.”

“Ohhhh,” said a second voice. “That’s why the people who die and come back report seeing a tunnel.”

“Yes, those who die and come back have their memory erased for the door, but they’re allowed to remember the tunnel because that is easily explained away with silly scientific theories. But that’s mainly a side note in your retriever training. More important is the psyche of your subject. This particular spirit is trailing his assassin, trying to decipher how a ghost exacts revenge. What he doesn’t realize is that this assassin only kills those who are ready to die and don’t know it yet.”

“So the spirit doesn’t realize it was ready to die?”

“No, and he also doesn’t realize that the anger he feels is not really due to his death, but the life he had before death. He feels he must act on that anger. That’s why he has not come through the door and ascended.”

“Ohhhh. I get it.”

Barty darted away from the door, but not really. It tailed him just fine. Two glowing spirits came out and grabbed him.

“He’ll be purified upon entering the next realm,” said the initial voice. “The anger he feels will be stripped away.”

“No!” Barty screamed. “I’m not ready!”

They took him through the door.

“I feel unbearable guilt for what I’ve done,” Evelyn said through the darkness, standing at the foot of the man’s bed.

“Unbearable guilt,” said the sleeping man and then stirred a little.

“I would rather end my life than live with the guilt for another day.”

“End my life.”

She sensed a third presence, in the new way she sensed things. She spoke to it telepathically, so the sleeping man would not hear. “Who’s there?”

The voice that came back was female. “I am like you, just dead longer.”

Evelyn hesitated and then said, “What do you want?”

She felt the presence come closer. “What are you doing?” it asked. “Why have you not ascended?”

Evelyn considered lying, but didn’t know if she could lie to a ghost. “I shout at him all the time. He only hears me when he sleeps, and he only hears me when I speak in the first person.”

“That’s because he thinks he hears his own thoughts. But still, what you do is in vain. By the time he wakes, the thoughts will be stored in a place deep within his mind, where they cannot affect him.”

Evelyn had found that she did many of the things as a ghost that she had done as a person; they just didn’t affect the world. She sighed. “This man stole me from my home and brought me to this very room. He raped and tortured me for days, before he killed me. He’ll do it to other girls. I’ll not ascend until I see him dead.”

“Fine, but you have to do it right. You must place these thoughts in his head and then rouse him quickly, so they are still there when he wakes.”

“How?”

“Place the thoughts in his head and then shout the word that all people attend to most, the word that is different for most every person.”

Evelyn thought she knew what the ghost was saying. “But I don’t know his name. I can’t find it either, because my only two choices are to ascend or remain in the room where I died. And it’s not like I have hands to search through his wallet or dresser drawers. He speaks to no one in here, so I don’t hear his name uttered.”

They were both silent for a few seconds and then the presence said, “He is called Andrew.”

Evelyn, though pessimistic, felt a tinge of optimism too. “How do you know?”

“I told you. I’m dead longer, much longer. I can get things you can’t yet. Now do this, so you might ascend.”

Evelyn felt the presence leave. She spoke out loud. “I feel guilt for all I’ve done.”

“Guilt for all,” the man said back.

“I cannot bear to live another day because of it.”

“Can’t live another day.”

“I have to end my life.”

“End my life.”

As loud as she could, she shouted, “Andrew!”

The man on the bed gasped. He then sat up and looked around. She could tell he couldn’t see her. He pulled himself to the side of the bed. He looked down. He put his face in his hands and sat that way for about a minute. She worried that he was just tired, not guilt-ridden. Then he reached under the bed, pulled out a pistol, stuck it to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger.

She sensed his spirit leave his body in the new way she sensed things. “Burn in hell,” she said, and then she ascended.