MicroHorror

Carrying the last box of belongings into the cottage, Harrison paused in the doorway. He took time to admire the dying October sun touching the marshland and reflecting from the estuary.

Smiling, he continued into the hard-won retirement home that followed forty years of teaching plus a small fortune in renovation costs for the once derelict property.

“Come on, girls!” Two Jack Russell terriers, Minnie and Maizie, ceased to bark at something in a ditch and followed him inside.

By the time he’d unpacked the last of the small items, it was late. Exhausted, he prepared beans on toast and ate them listening to the radio.

Perhaps it was the cheese or the strangeness of his new surroundings, but it was difficult to drift off. Since Anne died, he’d taken to letting the dogs sleep at the foot of the quilt, but now their uncharacteristic trembling was irritating.

Sometime before dawn, the dogs started to howl. Harrison shouted for them to stop. Pulling on his dressing gown, he went downstairs to the kitchen for wine to steady his nerves. Minnie and Maizie followed, growling.

After a large glass of Pinot Noir, he was on the way up back up, when there was a volley of small thuds against the front of the cottage.

“What the hell?” He retraced his steps, dogs close behind.

Harrison switched on the porch light and swung the door wide. The full moon illuminated a wall of thick fog a sickly skull-grey. Taking up his walking stick, he stepped outside. The dogs remained on the step, ears pulled back, teeth bared.

“You little cowards,” he laughed, but their fear was infectious. He backed into the cottage and bolted the door.

The lights stayed on well past dawn, the ex-teacher having fallen into a dream-free sleep at the kitchen table.

After sharing breakfast bacon with the dogs, he took them for their morning walk. It was on the return that he noticed the balls of slime, patterned like a shotgun blast across his lounge window. He touched one gently but it popped, releasing a sulfurous stench.

“Slimed, and it’s not Halloween until tonight,” Harrison laughed. “This will be young Mr. Thomson and his friends’ work. A reminder from my ex-pupil to make sure his old teacher has some treats if he doesn’t want tricks.”

In the late afternoon he took the dogs to an inlet where the water was shallow and they liked to explore. He’d been watching a gull force open a mussel shell when both extendable leads were violently tugged and he almost overbalanced. The dogs barked frantically and the reeds hissed as they thrashed violently. Then there was silence.

The leads retracted easily; the collars whipping into view were empty of dogs but dripping blood and slime. Harrison yelled, and floundered down the bank but there was no sign of his pets. Evening was drawing in and the green reeds were darkening to a menacing black.

Returning to the cottage, he bolted the door. There was no response when he flicked the nearest light switch. “Great, a power cut.”

He found the torch in the cupboard under the sink and examined the fuse box, but could find no problem. Patting his pocket he realized he must have dropped his mobile trying to find the dogs. There was enough light to see the wine bottle and he drank directly from it, shivering a little.

He’d forgotten the landline, so jumped when the old BT telephone in the lounge started to ring. He picked it up.

“John Harrison here.”

From the earpiece came the sound of a great crowd of sobbing voices.

“Who is this?”

“We called last night,” a Munchkin-like voice trilled. “Will you let us in, call us in, invite us in? It’s dark out here and we’re afraid. Are you?”

Mr. Stark, not his real name, rented the house because of the letter, not because he had any intention of living there. It was pleasant enough, a Tudor-style detached with quite a lovely garden. No doubt the neighbors, in their equally expensive houses, were nice too.

He lowered his holdall and shut the door. It was a little after ten in the morning and he planned to be out by dark. He smiled, imagining the twitching curtains as people waited to inspect the contents of the removal vans that would never arrive.

The crabby handwriting had hinted, in annoyingly elliptic language, that what he sought was hidden here.

He started at the top of the house, checking the wardrobes and the airing cupboard, and removing the side panel from both baths. Then he opened the kitchen units, looked in the unused coal bunker and the cupboard under the stairs. Next he used a sledgehammer to sound out the walls. Soon a faint cloud of plaster hung in the air and there were holes and broken laths everywhere.

Outside, dark thunder clouds had blotted out the sun while heavy rain was taking the rest of the light. He’d not bothered with the utilities; he always carried a torch.

A little despondent, he sat at the foot of the stairs and broke out a lunch of poached salmon and a half bottle of wine from an estate long given over to weeds. In the early days he’d been very successful, especially around the Weybridge stockbroker belt, but now he was having to travel further and further to follow his hobby. Money was no object, but he hated wasting time.

The carpet masked the approaching footsteps, but Mr. Stark felt a deep chill as a pale white hand clamped onto his shoulder.

“I see the letter did the trick; you forgot the loft, though. Led us a merry dance, but now the game’s over.” The words were dry as parchment.

Stark looked up into the descending fang-filled mouth. He pulled it to his own, for a garlic-flavored kiss.

News came to the Inn of a lightning strike tumbling St. Eldric’s tower the previous night, causing its ancient bell to fall among the tombstones.

“Loud enough to wake the Dead, was it?” Jethro the Blacksmith’s boy laughed.

Some of the older heads exchanged worried glances.

“Let the Dead lie undisturbed,” growled old Amos, warding the Evil Eye.

Jethro banged his glass down. “You buggers are poor company for a young fellow. I’m back to work.”

That afternoon he walked to St. Eldric’s, picking hedgerow flowers along the way.

“Jethro,” the Vicar greeted him.

“Everyone all right, sir?”

“Thankfully the church was empty, and the vicarage too far away to suffer.”

“The damage?”

“The Bishop will be alarmed. Lloyd’s of London may class this as an act of God and refuse to pay out on the insurance. I feel blaming the Fallen Angel more appropriate.”

The weighty bell had hammered through ground, coffin, shroud and corpse.

“A big hole.”

“Yes. A way into a crypt or tunnel of some kind. Must be ancient, the graveyard itself is twelfth century. Quite exciting! I’m something of an amateur archaeologist, you know?”

Half the village found the common sight of the vicar kneeling in a field of cowpats, trowel in hand, most amusing.

“Hello, Jethro,” Lucy, the Vicar’s dark-haired daughter, purred. “They for me?” She took the flowers. “Father thinks there may be treasure down there. Often is in secret places.”

“Looks deep.”

“I have a rope and lamp if you’re up for it?” the Vicar said, developing a convenient limp.

“Well…”

“Find treasure and you and I might marry,” Lucy whispered, “then I could have better than this rubbish.” She dropped the flowers into the darkness.

“I’m your man,” he said, feeling the gnaw of Lucy’s acidity.

With the Vicar and Lucy holding the rope, he got down safely. His match flamed as he lit the lamp. He gasped. He was at the entrance to a vast cavern, a mound of gold and silver coin before him. Scattered jewels magnified and returned the light. The ceiling, and the four great columns supporting it, glittered with embedded treasure.

He entered, and an unfamiliar, acrid odor caught his throat. Looking up to admire the ceiling it suddenly lowered, flattening him to the ground. The Worm, awakened earlier by the bell’s discordant clapping, snorted a bubble of blue fire and settled back to another hundred-year sleep.

For a while, Jethro could feel the Worm’s slow pulse through the pain of its weight. His last thoughts were of Lucy’s mercenary heart.

I fought to return, one step at a time, from the ancient vaults that coil around London‘s dark heart. Sword and flame have taken dozens of my tentacled adversaries, creatures whose masters howl in the darkness between Space and Time.

The mill-owning Satanist and Member of Parliament, Joseph Slater, retained me to procure a volume of arcane writing buried with the court magician John Dee.

Through converse with the Rat People, I located the internment in the deepest vault.
It was the work of seconds to tumble the fungus-crusted coffin from its webbed alcove, to shatter on the flagstones. My head reeled; the Elizabethan was not in the repository.

Sense prevailed; I was cheered to find the volume among the splinters. Black and heavy, with a strangely smooth leather binding. I traced the knife-carved title, N-E-C-R-O-N-O-M-I-C-O-N, and shivered. I wrapped it in silk lining torn from the coffin. Only the thought of Slater’s fee kept me from bolting.

The corpse-pale monstrosities lay ambush, attempting to seize me in their ichorous tentacles. Hours of blood later and here I am, at the exit. Blocking it is the tall form of bearded John Dee. His eyes shine like red coals.

My hand refuses to grip the sword and the torch flame is growing smaller, as if starved of air. I have one hope. I will set fire to the book, let it drop into the vaults. He will need speed to save it.

It was midnight but the streets were as busy as at midday. Lunar City never sleeps.

I rolled a cigarette, focusing on subduing the coarse Russian tobacco into a neat white tube. Before I was posted I’d never smoked. Now these “coffin nails” had spiked my voice.

In the Service you don’t get to choose where you go. A planet sized administration selects the optimum placement. This time I’d drawn a backwater of the 22nd Century. I’ve had worse.

In my job you can’t be a coward. You can start as one, hold back and let the scene play out, but then, the consequences. After, you either give up or use bluff in place of courage and get on with the Work.

My temporary HQ was a table at Mario’s Italian Café. Mario’s famous pasta and pizza had never been blessed by the Mediterranean sun. It was artfully concocted from the hydroponics tank, but you can never fully disguise the taste of seaweed.

I lit the cigarette, and my mind was starting to enjoy it, the occasional cough saying my body felt otherwise. Then she materialized, walking toward me through the center of the second smoke ring I’d blown.

By the time the smoke had floated out of shape, she was standing in front of me.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said.

It was difficult seeing that sneer on such a pretty young face.

“And I of you,” I said.

“I know what you are and you know what I am.”

She settled into the seat opposite and ordered a latte, a small one.

Seeing me glance at her drink, she said “I don’t intend to stay long.”

“How often have I heard that line?”

“I’m on my own. Just going to pick up a few supplies and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Sure, then you’re off to another town or planet, then another. Soon there’s an epidemic on our hands.”

“I didn’t ask for this, you know.”

“How long?”

“Almost two Earth centuries.”

“A good innings.”

She took one of my hands in hers. “You’re a cool customer,” she said.

“It has to be soon.”

“But I don’t want things to stop. I want to carry on living.”

I was enjoying the feel of her hand in mine. It was an age since I’d let one of Them get close.

“I have to do my duty.”

“I’m asking for more time, not eternal life.” She reached across and stroked my cheek. “Come with me, limit my excesses.”

Then we were kissing and her tongue was in my mouth, promising, making an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I dropped the dog-collar in the bag at my feet, to rot among the wooden stakes and holy water.

Arms linked, we began our hunt for supplies.