MicroHorror

Word got out in the building that four people committed suicide that morning. Bound by religious conviction, they had at first assured the other fifteen hundred or so people who sought refuge in the tower that after forty days, the unnatural rain would end and the waters would subside. “It’s happened once before,” they said. They waited patiently, and when the deadline passed, they gave it another three days. Just in case. But this morning they plunged themselves into the cold, black floodwaters, surrendering to God’s will.

Even Darien and Keith heard about it, over the building’s intercom system. As janitors, they alone had access to the forty-second floor and the view that came along with it, from the top of the tallest building in Milwaukee. The eastern windows used to overlook Lake Michigan, but the lake was gone now–replaced with this endless ocean. Only the tops of two other buildings in town remained above water, and at the current rate the sea level was rising, they would be swallowed soon enough. The skies overhead were sooty even at noon and continued to drop sheets of angry white rain, but where all that water was coming from, nobody could say.

“Hell, it must be as high as the thirtieth today,” Darien said. He flopped back into a leather chair and put his feet up on the mahogany desk. Darien and Keith had cleaned the luxurious offices on this floor thousands of times but had never had occasion to enjoy their comforts or to eat from the fully stocked executive kitchen. “Bet it’s getting pretty crowded down below.”

“Bet it is,” said Keith. Now and then some people from down below would try at the doors, knocking, pounding, but ultimately giving up; every door to forty-two was locked and barricaded from the inside.

Darien reached into his pocket, felt the weight of his big ring of keys. Jingled them slightly.

“You think we should let them in, don’t you?” Keith asked.

“Well, maybe if we did, and we all got together–there’s a lotta wood in these offices. Maybe we could build a–a lifeboat or something.”

“Or an ark?” Keith snorted. “You want to find a building taller than this one? That’ll be Chicago. You think we’d make it there in a lifeboat even if the waters were smooth?”

Darien shut up. He let the keys be.

A week or so passed. All the while, Darien and Keith amused themselves as well as they could without electricity. They played cards in the dim light, flipped through magazines left in reception areas, screwed around with a putter and a package of golf balls they found in somebody’s office. They also discovered a cache of decent cigars in a desk drawer and smoked them through in two afternoons. At night, they burned file cabinets full of now-useless papers to cook what they took from the kitchens, gorging themselves.

“If it was any of them up here,” Keith said, “and we were down there? They sure as hell wouldn’t let us in.”

One morning, they awoke to the familiar sound of outsiders trying to get in. They waited for it to go away like it always did, but today the pounding wouldn’t stop. Darien rubbed sleep from his eyes and went to the window.

“Up past thirty-nine today,” he said. “I–I can’t see any other buildings.”

Bloody knuckles continued to hammer. Thick as the doors were, they couldn’t muffle the sobbing, the ratlike shrieking and scratching on the other side.

“C’mon,” Darien said. “Maybe we should open the doors.”

Keith, sprawled out on a plush couch. “Aw, let ’em knock. Just let ’em knock.”

“Just a while longer, right? Gotta quit messin’ around. Just till the next floor goes?”

Keith stared up at the ceiling. He couldn’t bring himself to look outside anymore. “Hey, Darien? You want to get another round of golf in or what?”

“Sir,” said Eliot, “I need to talk to you about what this job is doing to me.”

Mr. Dyffyd nodded like he’d heard a hundred conversations start this way and gestured to an even plushier leather chair than his. “Before you begin, I’d like to remind you that during the hiring process, you assured us you could stomach this sort of work. It’s unpleasant, I realize, but that’s why it pays so well.”

“It’s not that, sir.” Eliot sat and became almost weightless on the sumptuous cushions. “I mean, it was hard when I started. The first time you tell someone their organ transplant won’t be covered because of a clerical error. But that was nine months ago. I don’t even feel it anymore when I have to deny a claim.

“But there was a letter on my desk this morning. Addressed to the company; don’t know why I got it. It was handwritten by this little girl, thanking us for paying for her grandmother’s operation. She said they’re very poor, and without our insurance… they go to the park together every Saturday, and that would’ve been the end of it. Real emotional stuff. But all I could think about when I read it… was that she’d misspelled ‘tumor.’”

After a pause, Mr. Dyffyd asked: “So?”

“So I should’ve been bawling my eyes out, sir! But… but I can’t feel anything anymore, not even the good stuff! I squeezed every last bit of feeling out like a tube of toothpaste for this job, and now there’s nothing left inside me!”

“Well, don’t worry about it too much, Eliot. The letter’s only a final test, after all. Wrote it with my left hand, you see? I always worry spelling ‘tumor’ with the double O is playing it too broadly, but I guess I got away with it this time.”

Eliot meant to ask why, but only wind came out.

Mr. Dyffyd continued: “See, when the Overseers manifest in a host body, they have no physical mass, but they occupy some sort of… spiritual volume, I guess. I’ve seen seventeen men burst like balloons during the possession process. There was just too much stuff inside, even if you can’t measure it. So you have to be prepared. Emptied, like you said, so the Overseers have a space they can live in.” He looked out his thirtieth-story window onto the city below. “Running an insurance company’s just for recruiting and paying the bills, you know. It’s not what I really want to do with my life. Or yours.”

Eliot thought about getting out of the chair, but it was too comfortable, too inviting. He sank back, not fighting it, and in a moment he was being filled with light. Something from someplace else curled itself into the hollow place in his chest, and excruciating warmth like hot honey flecked with broken glass spread from the center of his heart to the edges of his ribcage, but he couldn’t deny it was nice to feel something again.

The man behind the counter watched out the window with sweaty excitement. A squat silver car pulled into the gas station and flirted cautiously with one of the pumps. For a moment it looked like it might stop but suddenly lost its nerve; the tires squealed, and soon the car was back on the highway, burning to get some distance between it and its little detour.

“That’s another one’s passed us by,” the man behind the counter groaned. “I just don’t get it, do you?”

His brother, who’d been helping himself to beef jerky while they waited, raised his hunting knife to his lips thoughtfully. After a few seconds’ deep consideration: “What number’d you put up on the big sign out there, anyways?”

“I don’t know. A dollar-fifty?”

“Well, there’s your problem. A buck-fifty? There ain’t a gas station in this state sellin’ it for less than two-seventy a gallon today. Y’ought to go out there and bump it up. A dollar’ll do.”

“I don’t understand.” The man behind the counter dug well trimmed nails into his scalp and scratched like it was going to help. “If they’re not stopping now, why wouldn’t we lower the price instead of raising it?”

His brother arched his back with the posture of a self-satisfied college professor. Strange that someone who ditched school at sixteen and never went back would look the part so well. “You see,” he began, “no matter what you might think, people really can smell a deal that’s too good to be true. You see gas more than a dollar cheaper than any place else’s got it, you’d be crazy not to think something’s going on. But twenty cents?” He spat on the dirty tile floor. “Twenty cents cheaper a gallon and you’ll have people lined up around the block.”

The man behind the counter looked down at his neatly pressed sweater and thought about it a moment. “I can see where you’d be right,” he said. “I’ll change the sign.” And so he knelt down behind the counter, nudged aside the cold, blood-smeared body of the gas station clerk who’d been working when they came in, and grabbed the box with the plastic number sheets in it.

“Twenty cents is all it’ll take,” his brother insisted, and he was probably right.

There are three of them, and they only come after my wife and young daughter have gone to bed. They make no effort to be quiet when they arrive; they hurl the front door open, no matter how many locks I put on it, and slam it shut behind them. Each step is punctuated by the typewriter clacking of bone against bone. When they speak, it’s in high-pitched howls, laughing and crying; they have a drunk’s wild abandon paired with a sober intensity and meticulousness in every word. But my family never wakes up, and so I understand that these sounds are made for me only.

All I know is that I am somehow responsible for them, but when I ask why they only tease and scream nonsense in my face. I don’t understand–I’m no murderer or rapist, no criminal. I’ve done some terrible things in my life, the same as anybody has–I’ve lied and cheated, I’ve hurt people deliberately with words, I’ve refused to help people I knew really needed it. So I can only conclude that somewhere along the line, one of these common, everyday sins has had some unintended consequence–that some thoughtless misdeed run through the Rube Goldberg machine of time and human events resulted in some terrible crime I never meant to commit that nonetheless claimed three lives. But I have no idea what it was.

They know, though, and they say one day they’ll tell the world. They’ve promised the knowledge will ruin me: friends will pretend they never knew me, people on the street will spit as I pass, and my family will leave–leave running with tears squeezed from eyes heavy with looks of disgust. Sometimes I get a little wild myself and yell that they have no power, that nobody’s going to believe a bunch of skeletons spreading slander about a decent man like myself. But, inside, I know that if they can walk without muscles and talk without tongues, there’s probably no limit to what they can do. They promise all I have to do to ensure their silence is do as they ask.

They want me to take a knife and go out into the night and make them a fourth partner.

I tell them I’d never do it; I’d never deliberately add to the blood already on my hands, unmeant and unseen. They smile politely as I shout and storm–with no lips, they can’t help but smile–and when I’m done they ask me if I’m quite certain of my decision. And I tell them I am.

But after they leave I walk through the house in the dark and see my daughter in her bed, the covers pulled snug around her face, and my wife rolled over to one side of our bed, dreaming and waiting for me to join her.

I have decided to do as the skeletons request.