MicroHorror

My mother always told me that I was special. Too much empathy. But it’s not that. It’s just that I know what people are thinking. I can get into their minds. So when she arrived, half dead and covered in blood, I didn’t like what I saw inside her. Everything was dark.

“You’re jealous,” they said, but they were wrong. I was afraid of her thorns.

She was fourteen years old, or at least that was how she appeared, but her hunger was something as old as the world. Our mayor was the first to succumb. He turned into an animal and raped her until he fell unconscious. The furious townsfolk burned him in a bonfire as high as his soul was filthy, right at the entrance to the village, but there was no respite. The priest was next to fall to the temptation of the flesh, and he suffered the same fate as the mayor. Many adults followed them, until no men were left alive except for the librarian. She couldn’t tempt him because he was blind. She fled the village soon after that failure.

Much later, I learned that beings like her give birth to as many daughters as there were fathers to mount her when she was in heat. Next time, it won’t just be the village. The whole county will fall.

My mercy condemned me to this hell on earth, but today will be the end of it. She’s drugged; it was the only way to bring her here. This is a place far from the city, away from the roads. Nobody can save her this time. No merciful soul will take pity on her pleading eyes. I would tell her to pray, but I don’t think she has any god to listen to her. Not now, not after all the deaths and pain she’s caused.

I raised the shotgun and aimed at her heart, and just when I was about to fire, he shot first. That stupid bastard shot me point-blank. I’m so cold that I can hardly speak, but I’m watching him untie that angelic-looking creature, hearing him whisper that everything is fine and nobody will hurt her again. It’s too late to tell him that he’s taking a wolf in the guise of a lamb. His grief, his sorrow and his misery are just beginning. Mine, thank God, ends here.

I know that people talk about my leg. They look at me with pity and wonder how I lost it. It was only five or six years ago. That was an unusual winter, with heavy rains that turned into floods. Our town’s infrastructure wasn’t ready for so much water; we were prepared for the floods of tourists who descend upon us from June to September, but not for these rains. The water came up to our ankles and destroyed the crops. All we wanted was to survive.

Nevertheless, the worst thing wasn’t the water, but what came with it. The beings arrived, apparently human, and one by one they hunted off the weakest among us. We lost children and old men and women, but that wasn’t enough for them, and they started hunting everyone who came near the river or close to the lighthouse. We had to know what these creatures were, so I tied myself to a post in the harbor, but we never realized how fast they were. I escaped with my life although they kept my leg.

But I captured one of them alive. Since then, I’ve studied it, preparing myself in case they return. And the forecasts say this is going to be an unusual winter.

The snow has returned to cover the town. All the kids are taking their gloves, coats and hats from their closets so they can go out and play. They make snowmen and throw snowballs until they’re exhausted. That’s when I go out and play. When it’s almost midnight, and there’s nobody in the streets but me, I drive to a remote park and make my own snowman. I’ve always loved making them–so round, with two buttons for eyes and a carrot nose, and inside I place the body of one of my victims. Finally, I decorate it with some accessory of theirs like a scarf, or a brooch, or anything I can use to identify them.

I always feel sad when the snow melts, but springtime brings its own rewards, especially once the police discover more than a dozen bodies.

After I had chased you for two blocks, you turned around nervously. Afraid you might see me, I ducked into the nearest store. It was a bookshop. I approached the bestseller rack and took a book at random. There, on the back cover, was your photo: Elena Arias. I read the synopsis looking for a sign, anything that could link us. It was all there: “One morning, Alicia Sandoval didn’t go to her office. A man was chasing her.” I didn’t know whether I should keep pursuing you or read the story. Our story.

Many years ago, reading a woman’s Tarot cards, I saw how she would be murdered, as well as the face of her killer. Many years have passed since then and he still appears every time I read my cards. I’ve gone to the police, but they think me mad. Last night, the man appeared again in my cards. Soon he will come for me.

He doesn’t know that he can’t kill what’s already dead.

Gordon asked me how I could spend all day writing about things I’ve never done and probably will never do. How could I describe the agonies of death if I’d never witnessed them? I returned home full of questions, doubts, resentments… His interrogations distressed me and hindered my prose. I couldn’t think clearly.

When she knocked at my door, talking about God, I knew she was a sign from heaven. God had sent her to me to ease my pain. She came into my home and sat on the sofa, and while she talked about salvation, I could only think about how to do it: strangling, throat-cutting, poisoning. A whole range of possibilities opened up before me. Then I thought, horrified, of the blood and the screams. I offered her a cup of coffee which she accepted without hesitation. She was the first in my long list of creations, but it’s funny how I never write anymore.

They have all been burned. Not a single book remains; libraries are hollow, barren and useless. I’ve been told they are to be closed and modified to make us forget about them, about them and about the books. To make us believe they never existed. Nevertheless, once a month we all meet down in the sewers below the town square to see–or should I say hear–little Cecilia read. We call her Hope for obvious reasons, as well as to avoid being discovered. Every night she relates to us different parts of forgotten books. Perhaps what keeps me coming back, despite the rats, despite the stench, despite the danger and the fear, is her voice, clear and crystalline. I don’t know how she reads the blank pages, being blind.

Just when I was about to lose the last of my strength, I arrived. Although I’d been told that the galaxy NGC 3660 was similar to the Milky Way, I’d never imagined how close it really was. Finally there after travelling a distance measured in years, I felt the déjà vu of my old life intermingling with the beginnings of a new one. I had been led by rumors of the largest stellar fossil fuel deposit ever discovered, and I knew that even though it would take me the rest of my days, the hope of that discovery outweighed any other passion.

I surveyed planets and explored moons, searching for any sign, documenting every discovery, dating and collecting every fossil. To my crew, I was nothing but a crazy old woman wasting what remained of her life by travelling. My only desire was to find the true deposit. If it was where shooting stars go to die, perhaps I could find one that was still alive. Weighing my options and the possibilities, even knowing that I was chasing a fantasy, I could not believe otherwise. I was risking everything on this trip, to find a living star and ask her to grant my wish.

I bet and lost. There is no place in this galaxy I haven’t explored. Everything has been in vain. I don’t have any fuel, crew, or air to breathe. All I can do now is fade out, little by little, as I and my ship become just another fossil.

I love working with kids because of their ability to surprise me. For many years I’ve been living inside their closets, and every time they see me or feel me the situation is different: some cry, some have nightmares, some wet the bed. That’s when my favorite part begins: Some kids smile maliciously and ask their fathers to read them stories over and over, while the grownups battle a mixture of fatigue and guilt. Still others ask their mothers to sleep with them, contemplating their darkest fantasies—they hate their fathers, who get to smell their mothers’ hair every evening. But on my last job, I was living inside a boy’s closet when he walked up to me with a question.

“Hi. Do you want to be my friend?”

“Why do you want to be friends with the monster in your closet?” I didn’t emerge from the shadows.

“Because I don’t have any friends. Nobody wants to play with the son of the hangman.”

From that moment on, we went together to the other kids’ closets. We had such wonderful times. It’s a pity he grew up so fast.