MicroHorror

Meadow Hill is home to twenty-seven ladies and gentlemen, all of whom have advanced dementia. And that is were I work nights.

We give out the medication and help them to bed, and usually they sleep well.

But every now and again they won’t.

Some will cry quietly, others shriek, but all will have a terrified look in their eyes that I can’t begin to describe.

When this happens we don’t know what to do and just increase their medication. But it never helps.

And the next morning one will always be dead.

It happened again last night. But this time, in the darkest shadows, I saw something move…

I suppose I first noticed something was wrong a couple of months after my return from Brazil. I’d been out there studying deforestation patterns and part of my remit was to visit the peoples living in the rain forest. While on one of these reccies, I was bitten.

The culprit slithered off too quickly for my guides to identify it and all they could do was give me catchall anti-venom and hope for the best. I had a mild fever for two days, but when that passed I thought nothing more of the incident.

It was Lindy who first noticed the change. She was stroking my back one night and felt a patch of plastic-feeling skin. You know what blokes are like, it didn’t hurt and no one could see it, so I happily ignored it.

Ten days later the skin on my arms and legs started to change too, became dry and stiff like leather. It was vanity I suppose, rather than fear for my health, that eventually propelled me to the doctor’s. She had seen nothing like it before, and I came home with a prescription for an emollient and instructions to return in two weeks if things were no better.

I actually went back to the doctor’s after just three days. It was on my face. I came away with cortisone cream and an urgent referral to Dermatology.

I’d stopped going into work by now, stopped going out at all if the truth be known, and was becoming seriously worried. Then Lindy got called away to look after her mother who’d had a small stroke. I was on my own.

Lindy would ring every night and I would tell her things were fine and not to worry. I did enough worrying for us both.

Every evening, once it was dark, I would sit in the back garden and get some fresh air into my lungs after a day indoors. It was during one of these evenings that a small mouse ran past me. I can’t explain why, but the thought of that little creature stayed with me until the following evening. This time, however, while I was sitting there, I was watching, waiting, listening for it. After an hour or so I became impatient and broke up some biscuits, scattering the crumbs around me. I stayed frozen until the moment it was within reach and then, almost instinctively, with a speed I didn’t know I possessed, I grabbed it and dropped it live into my mouth. It went down easily, no chewing needed. The following night I caught three more, but it wasn’t until the weekend that I got my first cat.

It sauntered along the path and I grasped its tail, lifting it high above my head. The thing yowled and spat and writhed while I lowered it into my mouth, the hinges of my jaw, for the first time, dislocating. The peristaltic waves of my gullet crushed the life out of the poor animal and propelled it into my stomach, while I spat the fur from my mouth. I catch a cat most nights now.

I still tell Lindy not to worry when she rings, but God knows what she’s going to be coming home to next week. My skin has turned to scales now and my nose has flattened, kind of blended into my face. But most worrying of all, yesterday I noticed that my arms and legs are not as long as they once were.

It would have made more sense if I had killed them all, but I didn’t. Now everyone is suffering.

The idea came to me when I was still testing insecticides for Chem-Tec all those years ago. 100,000 flies would be released into a room into which fly spray had been used. Usually a few would have an inbuilt resistance and live despite the strong chemicals used. We had strict instructions to kill these with a swatter, as we feared that if they got out and bred, their resistance would spread through the fly population, rendering our product useless.

When the plant shut down, I decided to do some experimenting of my own. I took 100 locusts and used low doses of insecticide on them. The ones that lived, I bred and repeated the process on them. Again and again I did this until no chemical I had would kill them.

My experiments lasted three years, by which time I had locusts that were damn near indestructible. I was ready to blackmail the world.

I sent a batch to America in the post to prove my claims. I wanted people to know the sort of person they were dealing with before I began demanding payments. But the packaging apparently came apart and they escaped, soon breeding with the native locust population.

That was five years ago, and they still haven’t found a way to kill them. America, the supposed “Bread Basket” of the world, loses 80% of its crops to the offspring of those that I bred and is on its knees. Africa is desolate, a barren wasteland; there is nothing to feed the cattle or people now. We thought AIDS was hell on Earth; how naive we were.

And the Food Wars in Russia and Europe have reduced this continent to one inhabited by savages–peopled by those ready to kill for a loaf of bread. Put together the two World Wars and you are not even close to the devastation we are witnessing.

Do I feel guilty? Yes, I do. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret what I have done, but finally I have an answer to the problems of the world. I have bred a carnivorous locust which when released will eat the crop-eating locusts and solve the problem.

I’m sure I’ve got it right this time. Absolutely sure.

We came out of the bunker, not because we knew it was safe–radiation was still a problem–but because we had simply exhausted the food reserves. For eight years two hundred of us had lived together underground, and when the moment to open the doors came, most of us were frightened. No birds or mammals had survived, and the rivers and seas were as dead as the fields and forests.

The bunkers had only a tiny fraction of the population, so we were greeted by a sea of rotting corpses that had a stench all of its own. The only living things we saw were flies and cockroaches which were living on the cadavers that were strewn across the land. They had adapted like other creatures hadn’t, and were kings of all they surveyed. Neither had predators now and they swarmed in unimaginable numbers. Smelling us, they quickly covered our clothes and skin with their black bodies. But we were too hungry to care and just plucked off handfuls, eating them with relish.

I say relish–they were vile, the flies were vilest.

We retreated to the bunker to sleep and plan. To get away from the insects. Many became ill that night through eating the raw creatures, which in turn had lived off putrefied flesh, yet the following day hunger forced us to eat them again.

Eventually we set up a system to gather them, bringing them by the bucketful to hastily built sheds where the women would crush them, sift off the shells and wings, and then go about processing them, first with water, then heat, to make them safe. Some of the women were charged with making them palatable, and prepared them in different ways, but nothing they did could ever disguise the overwhelming foulness.

My job was clearing corpses. I took the rotting flesh to the fledgling roach farms where others were tending and harvesting the insects. Others less fortunate than me had the job of clearing the dead fish from the rivers for the fly farms.

Every now and then I would visit one of the sheds to pick up Alice and would always notice the fresh blood on her hands from countless tiny bits and scratches. Broken insect husks filled the air like dust and every breath filled lungs with the tiny particles. I could only stand it for minutes–Alice had it all day every day, and it worried me. When I kissed her I could smell them on her breath, taste them on her skin.

Since emerging from the bunker, some of our number have become pregnant. This was always the plan as the human race depends upon our breeding. Alice and I are blessed in this way, and she has just three weeks to go.

Last night Victoria was taken to our hospital to give birth and, having some medical knowledge, I was asked to help. This was the fourth birth I had supervised and I have never seen a woman in so much pain. Her screams will haunt me until I die, of that I am sure. Her poor body ripped like no other when it emerged, encased in a membrane, covered in blood and mucus. We had not seen this before, any of us, and quickly went to get a knife to remove the sac that covered the newborn. But before that was possible, teeth and claws tore their way through the thin sac. I cannot describe what was within; suffice to say it was black as pitch, and had a face like no human.

We have been eating insects contaminated with radiation, breathing the dust of their bodies, and our bodies are covered in their bites, so I think I understand what has happened to Victoria’s baby.

But I can’t bear to tell Alice.

I died 350 years ago.

I had been a Witch Finder, and even found a few I think. But I burned even more, because deep down I found a perverse enjoyment in it. The sight of flames licking higher, burning away clothes to reveal skin that turns first red, then brown, followed by hair bursting into flame–all so very exciting. But it was the screams I liked the best; even the brave ones eventually succumbed.

I caught one witch too many though, and she cursed me, said when I died, I would return and live forever in the body of a black cat.

So most nights I spend cold and wet, looking for food, avoiding stray dogs and living on my wits. I’ve tried to use up my lives on roads and in rivers, but I’ve many more than nine, and nothing I do brings this curse to an end.

I’m shunned; no household wants me as a pet. I think at some unconscious level, some primitive part of the psyche senses the death in me. Other cats avoid me too, possibly for the very same reason–they know I am not of them. There are others like me, not many, but every few years I see one, and when I do, I know to run like the wind.

But what the Witch that inflicted this on me forgot was that man’s nature never changes. I am the same as I was back then, have the same needs. So many nights I will steal into someone’s home, hiding in dark corners. Sitting behind a chair or basket I will watch transfixed as a lady undresses, having the same unholy thoughts I have always had. And if perchance she leaves her underwear on the floor, when the light is out, I will nestle amongst it for the night, dreaming of what I can’t have.

But it is the screams of women that I relish above everything else, and there is only one way I know to achieve my desires.

I’m sure it can’t be true, the old wives’ tale about cat’s sitting on babies faces, killing them, for surely the baby would wriggle, shake off the cat. That is certainly my experience, unless of course I dig my claws into its face first. It only takes a minute to be sure.

And then I wait, hidden by the blackness of night, for the screams to begin.

“This came for you today.” Paul reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a yellowing letter addressed to his father. “It must have got lost in the post or something.”

Edward leaned over, careful not to snag the saline drip that terminated in the back of his right hand, and took the aging envelope from his son.

“The postmark is 1938,” said Paul, knowing the old man’s eyes would not see the fading print. “It’s a miracle it’s ever reached you after all these years.”

Edward stared at the scrawled handwriting amid the various redirection notices, a grim look developing on his face.

Noticing his father’s unexpected reaction, Paul looked quickly around the hospital ward, making sure no one was within earshot, then, with concern in his voice, asked, “What is it, Dad?”

“There was a boy at my school,” began Edward, his eyes focusing on nothing in particular. “Odd he was. Never saw him smile. He had ice cold eyes that looked into your soul. And the blackest hair you’ve ever seen. Didn’t speak much, never made any friends.”

“Dad?” Paul had no idea where this was going, but for reasons he couldn’t explain he felt worried now.

“It was said he was the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, had magical powers or something,” the old man continued, ignoring the interruption, “but that didn’t bother me and my two mates, Charlie and Bill. We hated his aloofness and bullied him mercilessly. I am ashamed of what I did but they say children can be cruel, and we were. I was. We bullied him to death.”

“What?” Paul could not believe what the kind, gentle man whom he adored had said.

“The day he hung himself he posted three letters, one to each of his tormentors. Charlie’s arrived on the Saturday and it contained just one word: Pain. Three days later he got caught in a house fire. He was horribly burnt, but lived another two weeks in pain I can’t begin to imagine before he died. Bill’s letter arrived on the day of the fire and his word was Solitude. By the end of the month an infection had taken both his hearing and his sight. I think he lived fifty years like that before dying an old man. That lad did have powers. And now my letter has arrived. I thought I’d been let off the hook when it never came. How stupid was I to think that? He cursed us all.”

Paul shifted in his chair uncomfortably, but wanted to put his father’s mind at rest.

“Look Dad, if there was a curse, and I’m not saying there ever was…”

“You know there was!” Anger, mixed with fear, in the old man’s voice.

Paul ignored the interruption. “If there ever was, you’ve escaped it. What can he do to you now? You’re eighty-five, have lung cancer and are high on morphine most of the time. He can’t hurt you.”

Edward held the unopened letter tightly. “He was evil, that one; he won’t have let me, his chief tormentor, off the hook.” Moisture in his eyes now. “Son, I’m scared.”

“Throw the damn thing away then. Lord, I wish I hadn’t brought it now….”

“I can’t, I must know.” Arthritic fingers began to tear at the flap as Edward fumbled to open the envelope with an energy his son had not seen for weeks in the dying man. He read the note he’d extracted and paused for a second before letting out a wail, an animal wail the likes of which his son had never heard. Nurses came running to the bed, but Paul ignored them, his eyes now searching for the paper his beloved Dad had dropped. He could not imagine what had caused such a reaction but needed to know.

The paper lay at his feet and as he saw what was written, he knew his father had every reason to be terrified. The letter simply said “Rot in Hell.”