MicroHorror

If you go out onto the bridge that looks down from our town over the neighboring hills, and you walk there, slowly, with a slight lilt in your walk as though you have no particular place to go that day, and if you allow your heels to click on the surface of the bridge, and stop for a moment to look down at the ripples of fish swimming beneath the crystal waters, you will see an intimation of the great secret that has haunted our town since its first days. Down there, underneath the rocks and the gaily waving algae, you will fancy that the fish are swimming over the contours of a woman’s face. For a moment you will stop, your breath catching in your throat, and you will tell yourself that it is just a trick of the light, and will marvel at the way in which the sun and the shadows can come so easily to create the illusion of a face where there is none. But then, if you are patient in your study, you will see her blink, and will see that there is something stirring beneath the sand that lies in the riverbed, as though hands were struggling to claw up the river’s bottom, as though the woman’s face was struggling to pry the clogging mud out of its mouth, and to clear the weeds out of her eyes. The sense of someone buried alive will overcome you, and you will look away.

Perhaps you will walk off, then, telling yourself that you saw nothing except a shadow writhing across the bottom of a river. But you will know, and your heart will not allow you to leave behind that sight. She will come and haunt your dreams, and eventually you will come here, to our river, with a spade, like a thief in the middle of the night, to dig down in the weeds and the mud, like a madman, to disturb the hatching places of buried fish eggs, and to discover, God forbid, the bones of a murdered girl. But you will not find them, though you will dig like one possessed. For the face in the depths is your own face, and the bones that you are searching for will not be yellowed for a long time. And you will not be the first that the river has pulled down into her bosom, the first to be sucked and held in the mud, searching for a mystery that can only be answered when the weeds and the fishes come to fill your throat.

The girl on the margins of the dance had been there every day for a week now, clinging to the edges of the party, half-hidden behind a fan that she had purchased cheaply in a Chinese shop. Whether she imagined that it brought her a kind of mystique, or she merely held it to cover the bored, tear-stained face of the perpetually left-out, the disc jockey didn’t know. She was wearing a red dress that had been in style perhaps thirty years ago, and probably imagined that it was retro. It clung to the awkward curves of her body like an eel-skin clings to the fingers when pried free of the flesh.

He waited until his set was over, and then wandered across to extend an invitation to her. She lowered her fan a little, and he could see the surprise, the excitement of hope that so closely resembled terror. Someone had asked her to dance. Her smile was as awkward as a broken mannequin’s as she took his hand and allowed him to lead her, at last, out onto the floor.

Later, when he lowered her down into the waters of the harbor and watched the red cloth of her dress swirling like a carp through the waves, he would remember that smile. Alarmingly similar in life as in death.

The market was alive with all the fresh scents of turmeric and cardamom pods, which fell from the high-piled spice bins and cracked underfoot. She made her way along, her hips bending back and forth to the feel of the night air, the whisper of cobblestone underfoot. The night lowered itself over the stalls like a cold-breathed lover or a recently dead child. The eyes of the sky were bright, but Elana did not think that they burned for her.

She settled herself down in her traditional stall, pulling the wisps of cloth across her face. Her breath stole across the veils with the promise of mystery. The cards were soft and worn in her hand. It was her own deck, repainted in honor of the truth which she had read so many times written across the face of the heavens: death. Not only the sinister Hangman, but also the rose-faced Queen of Cups, and all her entourage, wore that same face: the skeletal eyes gaping, filled with cold stars.

A customer came, sat down, his eyes shifting back and forth. He was fat, with a golden chain that clung inside the folds of his sweating neck. Some matter of no importance was weighing like a millstone on the unbalanced spindle of his mind. A business deal, a marriage, the fate of a voyage. She dealt out the hand which predicted his death, watched his eyes widen, the fear rolling in large drops down his brow. The question that he had come to ask sunk into the Lethe of his fears. He stood, wandered off into the darkness of the night market, already more a ghost than a man.

She heard, a few moments later, the sound of screams, men and women rushing around, and she knew that the sentence which she had read him had been carried out. She picked up the cards and shuffled them again.

The battlefield had turned itself inside out, and now everything was spattered with green, the soldiers clutching their stomachs and trying to hold in bright, grass-colored worms that must have been intestines. Their faces were as dark as pine trees, and the sky overhead a sinister orange. The orderly lay on his back, looking up at the blindingly black sun in the face of the pumpkin sky and began to laugh, with the high-pitched assurance of a man who knows that he is dead.