MicroHorror

Sleeping, dreaming, waking–there was no rest for Susan Soght after the strange disappearance of her husband Simon. He haunted every moment of her every day. He was gone and yet not; no closure, no funeral, no real goodbye. No insurance payment either though he’d spent all his working life in that field. He’d always been away a lot–but this was different. She received little sympathy for what was hardly perceived as loss. There was plenty of avoidance from neighbors, friends–even family. There was suspicion around town. Whisperings.
 
Whisperings there were at home too. Whisperings and shadows. Black shadows where shadows should not be. Shadows grey on sunlit afternoons. Shadows and whisperings in the swift twilights of that hopeless spring. There were shadows that moved from tree to tree, wall to wall, chair to chair and shadows that flitted across floors, around doors and always in the corner where he sat–a shadow.
 
Their grown-up children came and went like shadows too–needy shadows always wanting something but ultimately leaving her alone; yet not alone–bereft, confused.
 
She imagined him sitting there, in the very chair in which he’d disappeared, sitting there open mouthed, finger pointed in accusation. She sold the chair, got rid of all his clothes. She bought a new car. One that was–more viable. Once in the night, she suspected he was lying there beside her. She’d felt the sheets, cold yet crumpled, move. After that she took to sleeping in the spare room; sold the marital bed. And yet it seemed he would not wholly disappear.
 
In the attic there remained now one small case. A small brown case filled with fading documents. It echoed an apparent faded life; receding memories of flesh once solid, warm and real. Susan opened it with trepidation. She picked up a sheaf of dead leaves fallen from an old exercise book. The writing was in Simon’s hand but far from faded to her vision now, it shone most vibrant from the page in turquoise ink:
 
in cobalt blaze
there,
there you stood
aloof, alone,
and I
in breath-struck silence gazed
upon
a heav’n to be attained.
 
Alas there was nothing in me,
nothing
to retain your love…
 
The letters swam. Before the children, before so many dull years of insurance sales and hurried meals in cold cafes always halfway from somewhere, home. Before all that–before the wraithing process had begun–Simon Soght had somewhere been a poet. Gradually but irrevocably fading as his dreams; reality took him–as reality is wont to do.
 
There lay the photograph of her she’d thought was lost; her auburn hair (now in reality faded) tied back in bow of velvet blue. Before the children, before years of cleaning, scrimping and scolding, she had been a beauty. Susan fell to her knees. If only she had known. If only she could mourn… But no tears came–just a chill and inevitable certainty that Simon was not gone. And she could not bear it.
 
Nobody saw Susan Soght leave the house that day. She drove out to the spot from where he’d phoned–that last time he’d wanted to be home. There must be a drive-through burger booth nearby–but she saw none. Then her telephone rang. Her eldest wanting something done, no doubt.

“Hello–are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” she said. And with those words she saw a bright, clear sign–turquoise. The burger joint was right along the road.

“Simon?” she said.

“Yes, Susan–it’s me.”

“Oh, Simon, I’m so sorry…”

“You’re here now…”

“We’ll be together now?”

“Of course we will.”

And now she saw him standing in the road. And as she approached and he became clearer, so she disappeared from normal view.
 
You could not have witnessed that meeting, unless, of course…
 
Perhaps you were once a beauty or a poet too… for only wraiths are welcomed at a Ghost Burger Bar.

The taut skin glistened with lymph. Pathologist Ben Bright bent to his task, pausing only to speak his findings. The flesh had cracked open in places, showing purple-grey wounds. The swollen eyes were open and hideously red.

Professor Richard Daws tapped on the glass but made no attempt to enter. Bright, seeing his horror, signaled he’d meet him outside and Daws gladly turned away.

“I got your preliminary, Ben. Fungal infection.”

“Yes. No. There’s something… more. Some kind of invasive vascular disorder. Fifty percent iron depletion. And whatever it is, that was the cause of death. The discoloration of the epidermis isn’t surface–it’s broken blood vessels. It’s like he was being drained. Oh, and there’s something fuzzy growing on fungus inside the pulmonary artery. I’ve asked for a microcellular examination. Speed that up, would you? I hate to be alarmist but this looks like a new disease–unless it’s the red death.”

“You watch too many movies, Ben. Define ‘fuzzy.’”

“Looks like… flowers. Better get onto WHO.”

“Just sit, gents. He’s on the phone.” Jareed’s receptionist was listening intently to the radio and chewing gum.

“…spreading across the globe. Winds are expected to blow this dust cloud…

“He’ll see you now.”

Jareed stood to shake hands as they came in. “What’s with the ‘must see you ASAP,’ guys? Ben?”

“It’s a mycorrhizal fungus.”

“That’s not uncommon, is it?”

“No. In fact they’re kind of hard to avoid. They live in decayed matter, in the soil–they’re everywhere. Normally a healthy person would have no problem with them. They’re opportunistic but they aren’t the direct cause of the illness in this case.”

“So, Richard?”

“I’m afraid it’s rather… serious. These particular mycorrhizal fungi are playing host to a plant. Now, that’s not unusual either; it’s part of the normal development of lots of species, including some orchids. Their seeds are so small they contain no nutrient mitochondria of their own, so they latch onto a fungus, take carbon from that and then the fungus draws more carbon from the host plant and so forth.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“It’s just that this particular plant isn’t related to any plant on Earth. And it’s not looking for carbon the way indigenous plants do. It wants iron. So the fungus has to be in contact with an animal host.”

“Veterinarians and farmers are reporting animal mortalities at a staggering rate over high terrain. So this might be connected. Where’d it come from?”

“We don’t know that, but we know where it is now,” said Ben, “and there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping it.”

“Richard?”

“That dust cloud that’s been reported spreading across the continents–it’s not dust.”

“Ben?”

“It’s–we think it’s–spores, sir.”

Lights glared along the highway, reflecting off the wet road surface and making everything blur into a yellow fug of unreality. Simon was tired. He wasn’t near his quota. Damned buyers weren’t buying. This was no kind of life! Dead-beat salesman in a dead-end job…

The radio music faded into static and attempts to retune were unsuccessful.

“Damned thing!”

He switched it off and shrugged, changed position, rubbed his neck, felt in his pocket for sweets, gum, anything. He found only fluff so he took the next junction heading for the Café & Donut. Susan would be wondering why he was so late. He could call from there, tell her to keep supper warm. The Café & Donut was closed.

“Well, I gotta have something,” he said.

Further on he could see a Drive Thru sign. It looked fairly close though he’d never noticed it before. He hated those places but the thought of a coffee–any coffee–and a burger was better than driving on empty so he made for that. It was off the main drag. He made a turn, then a second, a third. Didn’t have a clue where he was but he could see the sign. Getting to it was another bag of cats. A Drive Thru in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. Didn’t make sense, but he finally got there.

The pale man in the kiosk didn’t say a word, just took the order and then the money, handed over the food and turned back to his TV screen, which Simon noticed was showing nothing but static. No signal on his phone, either…

He pulled out and drove a little way away, pulled in and parked. Simon took the lid off the coffee. It wasn’t even very hot and if they’d put any coffee in, he couldn’t taste it. And the food–if you could call it food; he sank his teeth in, chewed, swallowed. The burger had no discernable taste. It was vapid. The texture was uniform throughout, the bun indistinguishable from the meat, the onion, the cheese; the pickle had no sting of vinegar. He’d have driven back to complain but looking in that direction, he could no longer see the lights that had led him there. Besides, he wanted to be on his way, and hunger compelled him to eat. Trouble was, when he finished he didn’t feel any less hungry. He phoned Susan. But somehow, by the time he got home, he’d lost his appetite.

The next day, Simon Soght had lost his voice–working too hard, his wife nagged. “What you need is a holiday. You don’t eat proper, you don’t sleep. You never have time for me and the kids any more, Simon Soght. Why, half the time you might as well not be here.”

He looked a little greyer that weekend: off-color, according to his wife. By Sunday morning he was ever so slightly transparent.

“You need to see a doctor, Simon,” his wife said.

On Monday his left arm disappeared completely. The doctor said he couldn’t find anything–said he was at a loss.

By Tuesday Simon was a shadow of his former self, unable to affect anything around him. He could no longer hear his wife’s prognostications nor respond to them.

There was no funeral for Simon Soght. There was nothing to bury. He hadn’t died. He had simply ceased to exist. In the pocket of his suit his wife found a faded receipt:

Dead-End Drive Thru
1 latte
1 ghost burger
to go

I look around and slip off-piste into the snow fields; so pure, so white.

You called so I came. I thought it can’t be–not after all this time, it’s impossible; but I still came. I am uncertain of the rendezvous. Unsure after all…

I pull up with a swish. Ice splinters off the blades. There, the jagged tree-line to the left, a bosom slope of valley, a chasm on the right; a deep gully of crepuscular shadow. I turn west. The sun is low now. The fields take on the mantle of its glow and the cloud bank’s a mountain of indigo on silver-grey.

What if I can’t find you?

Ungloved I press the keys with numb fingers. I C E Home. Nothing. I C E Home. I try again; expect no signal here; expect no signal at all, just a cold dead line. But I hear a faint response, some way distant, muffled: a ring tone.

I’m coming. I’ll be there soon. Hold on.

I ski as if the devil were at my back, my heart pounding. I know the terrain now. I recognize the position of the sinking sun, low on the slopes just there, leading me to you, over the ridge and down. Over the ridge, to you.

I can’t wait to reach you. Can this be?

I ring again. I listen. You’re here. You really are. I know it. I feel it. I follow the tone clear now in my mind.

I clear away the snow. Ah, there you are. You haven’t changed in all these years. In profile you look just as you did. I grasp you, lift you up.

Half in horror, half in fascination, I stare. Your left cheek is gone, exposing the lower jaw and teeth. The flesh is cleanly cut away and I remember.

I should have stayed. I should never have left you here, or rather I should have left sooner. You begged me, save myself. But I didn’t have the strength to leave–not without a meal–and then you were so cold then and still… and I never could reveal what I’d done to anyone so I left you here, alone.

But I’ve kept my promise now at last. You called; I came. I’ll never leave again.

Dr. Luis Castille, unencumbered by clothing, floated free inside Nada, tethered to the station only by a thin umbilical: a literally out of this world experience.

Nada looked small from the outside and though he knew the specs by heart, the illusion of space took him by surprise. He was a tall man, well built. He thought he at least would be able to touch the walls and top of the chamber, but no. Everything was just out of reach.

It was curious, this lack of sensation. Weightlessness was a little nauseating at first but soon he was enjoying it. He had no impression of being inside the tube; the darkness was complete. He raised a hand but could see nothing. The soft, ambient music, designed to initiate calm, faded after a few minutes to silence. The air he breathed was bio-filtered, dust-free, ionized and slightly O₂ enriched. It smelt like rain after a thunderstorm, pleasantly charged. The chamber used thermal imaging to keep the temperature just right for the occupant and it was soundproof.

They’d drawn straws for this assignment, Aboline, Timpson and Castille. Aboline had won. He was supposed to be the test pilot but had chickened out at the last minute and Castille had offered to replace him. Other people suffered from phobias, he allowed. And in any case, this was his project too–a one-third share in Nada. He’d designed the chamber, though not the systems, but so far everything seemed to work perfectly.

Castille had suggested voice-recording the experience but Timpson and Aboline had urged that the test should be as the client would experience it, unadulterated by any such distraction, and they were right, of course. But somehow his mind just wouldn’t switch off. He began to calculate how much they could charge for this zero-gravity total deprivation experience–how much would people pay for nothing? It made him smile. They said they’d get him out in fifteen minutes… How would he know when fifteen minutes were up, he wondered? He should have built an internal chronometer into the design. If Aboline hadn’t put one there it was because it wasn’t in his specs.

The darkness did not become any less and he allowed his eyes to close. He began to doubt his arms were real–touched his fingertips together. Other people suffered from phobias–not Castille. He thought he heard a faint sound from outside. He opened his eyes. Perhaps something was wrong with the umbilical. Perhaps… but the sound had gone. He pondered on how it could be unsettling to some, after the hectic pace of planetary existence, to come up here into elective isolation…

A spot of blue light appeared above him–no, yellow–blue. It zipped away through the wall. He thought he heard breathing close by. They should have installed a communications button so that he could report this. He’d tell Aboline as soon as he got out. Surely the quarter hour was up…

What if the others had gone? What if the umbilical had broken away? But then there’d be no air, no warmth… Maybe the door was stuck. What if the other two had decided to profit from a two-way split? Maybe… “Is anybody out there?” His voice trailed away. Silly. The chamber was soundproofed. He couldn’t really have heard anything and they sure as hell couldn’t hear him. But somehow he couldn’t help himself. “Is anybody there? Can anybody hear me?”

Castille flailed about, trying to find a surface to hammer on, but he just went into a spin. He wondered now which way was up. “Timpson, can you hear me?” Surely they must be monitoring his vital signs… and if they were, they’d see… “Aboline… Timpson… Can you hear me? Somebody… please!”

Blud Fountain dominates the harbor. It’s strange and iconic. An amphora six feet high set upon a plinth of granite, girded about with a rill which overflows into a basin ten feet in diameter. Slits in the sides of the vessel ripple water into the rill. The black basin is deeper than it looks and engraved with characters around the base: sea serpents coiled, sharp-toothed bloaters, wild-eyed mermen that stare out to sea like lost souls. A great gibbet-type arm, articulated, used to hang over the open mouth of the jar. No more.

Benjamin Bentham Blud was the mayor’s son. That happened when he was thirteen–just at the age when it was the un-coolest thing that could happen to any boy. So on the first day at his new school he’d introduced himself as BB and started building a reputation as class clown and “Bad Boy” Blud which was ice, right? He made sure he was always in some kind of trouble and, as much as he could be, an embarrassment to his father. It was mostly kid stuff–stealing sweets, getting into fights. True, he stole a car once, but the ride didn’t last long and he lost two teeth in the crash.

I remember the day Mr. Masters whipped a Playboy out of Jif Jensen’s hand before he could pass it round the class, Godiva Reigns scrawled across the bottom in BB’s hand. Bill Gantry giggled.

“Usual suspects. Gantry, Jensen, Blud, have you been drinking?” He was not amused. “Your ancestor might have been a pirate, Blud, but you certainly can’t hold your rum.”

There was the usual scene but BB got off the hook. He was the mayor’s son.

“You’re going to come to a sticky end, lad. Remember I said that.”

Jensen and Bill Gantry were suspended.

Some say Blud Fountain caps a sacred well but no survey has ever found evidence. Others say it was where they executed Captain Blud for piracy. Story goes they sealed him in a vat of his own rum ’til his very bones dissolved. Doesn’t seem very likely, wasting good rum.

Anyway, Blud’s Cove is deadsville at New Year. So New Year’s Eve, Gantry, Jensen and BB had been drinking, walking the ledge, staring down at stars reflected in the deep, black pool and breaking off icicle shards that festooned the fountain. The gibbet arm swung and moaned woefully in the wind so they kept leeward.

BB had drunk most as usual. “I need to take a leak,” he said, unzipping.

“You ain’t going to piss in the fountain?” said Jensen. “Go down to the harbor, man.”

“It’s my fountain,” protested BB. “It’s my bluddy fountain so I’ll bluddy piss in it if I bluddy want, see.”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Gantry. “Something bad will happen.”

“Ooooh, get her! ‘Something bad will happen,’” mimicked BB and he peed.

As the stream hit the water there was an almighty blast of icy wind from the sea. The gibbet arm swung into action. It came down and hooked BB’s coat. Gantry turned deathly white. Jensen screamed like a girl.

It lifted BB high above the fountain, still laughing. “This is great!” he shouted. “What a ride!”

His laughter echoed as the arm lowered him into the amphora. Then he stopped laughing and started screaming. Ice knives pierced him through the slots in the amphora, slicing through until his body slumped like a rag inside the monument and lay inert. His blood flowed and trickled through the slots into the rill below, into the dark basin.

Jensen and Bill Gantry fled the scene screaming. Always stuck to their story. People suspected foul play but there’s no evidence. Some said it was fated, that somehow that fountain was a family curse.

Bill and I lay a wreath every New Year and tell our children the story. Thing is, Bad Boy Blud never really was all that bad. I loved him. He was my twin brother.

Charioteer perched on one of the highest promontories and strained to hear sounds from below. Up here in the skyless darkness he lived alone. The Fold was his domain. Here he was solid. Here he had shape, mass, width and height. Still, he was as impenetrably black as the void beneath him and sightless.

But Charioteer needed no visible spectrum, required no translation of form to light. He perceived The Fold in other ways and felt the ambient note of all that was around him. He was patient–awaiting some disturbance of tone, a break, a Doppler shadow, clicks of sound, any hint of perturbation, much like a spider awaits the twang of tension on a thread.

Beneath lay another world. The beings that inhabited that other world called it Solitaire. They had no idea they were one of many in that realm and they lived, unsuspecting that above them he waited, the great black Charioteer, one who was too big to enter their space or their cognition and if he existed for them at all, it was as the great unknown.

Solitaires were insubstantial creatures but their lives were rich. Charioteer listened and waited for their souls to come adrift and float upwards so that he could swoop and fall upon them SNAP!–ingest all they had learned and all they were. Sometimes they came in ones and twos. Sometimes they came in shoals–eight, sixty, a hundred or more all at once. Their time was not his time. Their lives were brief as the flicker of a candle flame.

But sometimes there alone with time to think, Charioteer wondered whether The Fold was all there really was. Whether there might not be others like him, feeding on remnant lives in other space and whether after all, this place might be equally finite. His mind reached out. He sensed unknowable boundaries in The Fold.

You’re afraid of me. I see it behind your eyes; behind everything you do, the way you fill the house with stuff! Trinkets, clothes, food and more and more–the glut of it to squeeze me out! You only diminish your own dimensions staring intently into that mirror–not mine. Your sad preoccupation with that usurper, Time, will do you no good. I will prevail.

The constant grumble of modern life suits you, the slow traffic crawl. You hate that dark patch where a street light should be. You crave photons, but deny them material existence; live in cities, near shopping malls, in urban sprawls, in places with adjoining walls and floors, persistent voices, peopled hallways, filling your days with “busy”; lunch on the run, appointments, soaps.

On Facebook, Blog, Community, you celebrate petty details of this, your little occupation, while iPods play, play, play even cyberspace away and you dream of multitasking holidays in far flung resorts, on crowded turtle beaches packed with twittering blackberries; a sea of sail, a sky of packages, star ships, sardines.

Fear is written in your restlessness. You rise, turn on the radio, TV, lights, your phone. The gadget-buzz of breakfast oozes into that hideously empty corner in your mind like jam in a doughnut. Coffee grounds pervade the air with molecular aroma; the plug-in in the lounge, cologne spray and all the other things you use to fill your senses and deny the day that will come, even if you don’t listen to the feeling in your bones. It’s inevitable.

You cannot taste emptiness for chewing gum. Family, grand children, dogs, the Sunday cricket club and caravan, mowing the lawn, whatever plan best fits your comfort zone and makes you feel that you occupy me–not the other way around.

You’re aware it’s a lie. Thoughts jump between synapses; gaps in your brain. There are gaps in your memory too now. Flesh and blood may clothe that skeleton but the cracks will be revealed eventually. I’m inside you. I’m all around.

It’s full of holes–your argument, the universe; it’s all-of-a quantum flux. You can’t avoid space forever. There’s no solidity, no coherence to it all. It’s lumpy, unpredictable, interstitial; not stretched like a drum skin over the bones of time.

This is what you dare not contemplate: gaping sockets; the cavity that once housed your brain. It’s not death you fear. It’s that lacuna you arrogantly think you’re going to leave behind; the space you can never again fill, once it fills you. The utter fragility of being subsumed into something you can’t begin to understand terrifies you.

Ah, I have more dimensions than you know. I’m so vast there’s room for all of you. And I am always hungry. I constantly stretch, collapse and reinvent my boundaries. Imagine yourself for an instant–particles in my expanse. Space isn’t out there. I’m already part of you and you are part of me. Don’t fight me. You can’t win.

There’s not enough space to stretch out. I shift position constantly but I can never fully extend my arms. It would be great to straighten my elbows, my knees… if only for a moment; un-curve my back, let my spine unfurl, give my neck a workout.

I’ve found I can relieve a muscle at a time; pull my knees up to give my back a break; curl tighter to flex an ankle. I push hard against these walls. Nothing is ever comfortable. Sometimes I kick. I cannot break these confines yet but I won’t give up.

I will be born.

“A fine portrait indeed, sir. And so your ancestor Roderick would have won, but for a magnanimous gesture?”

“It would appear so. He had drawn first blood and the matter might have ended there–should have ended there.”

“But the challenger would not hear of it?”

“That’s right. Suddenly he proclaimed it a fight to the death. Roderick had no such wish or intent. He had only accepted the challenge as a gesture to satisfy the older man’s sense of honor and now here was that same man, wounded and yet still determined to shed the blood of his rival.” De Bere leaned over and filled the other man’s glass.

“This is an excellent claret.”

“It is from my own vineyards–an exceptional year. I’m glad you approve, Racine.”

“So Roderick lost the fight but retained the vineyard?”

“By no means. He did not lose the fight.”

“But you said he did not prevail.”

“Nor did he. He tried reason, to persuade his foe that there were less… final ways of settling their dispute. He even put up his sword. But the other man attacked him from behind.”

“From behind, you say?”

“Precisely. Hardly the actions of a gentleman.”

“Quite so. But in that case he must surely lose the fight.”

“Ah, but that is the meat of the tale. The fates intervened.”

“How so?”

De Bere leaned forward, clearly animated by the story. “I have heard it told so many times and still it thrills me in the retelling. Roderick tripped on a vine root before the stroke fell. The challenger stumbled and fell over him as he lunged forward in his murderous vehemence, and all at once the sword flew from the blackguard’s hand, upward into the air and, as he lay winded on the ground, it pierced his own deceitful heart. No vine has grown since, where he fell. The soil bears a black stain. I can show you the place.” He drank deeply.

“No need. I have seen it.”
“You have the advantage of me, sir?”

“I thank you for your hospitality but now I think it is time to finish what our great grand-cestors started.”

“What?” De Bere stood to his feet.

“You never utter the name of the man who brought that righteous and justified challenge ’gainst Roderick De Bere. Perhaps you do not know it?”

“It has been considered bad luck in our family for three generations to pronounce the name of… of…”

“Augustine Malevola? The name dropped like bad blood between them.”

“And you?”

“His great grandson, Justice Malevola Racine, oh yes. The fight was not over a woman, as you have been taught. Nor was Augustine the person who attacked from behind. It was all done for land. It was for the disputed vineyards and for settling an age-old family rift that went farther back than even these two could remember.”

De Bere began to be afraid. He had no weapon, no wish to fight and even less wish to die. “You said you come… to finish this?”

“Yes. I bear you no personal grudge. I see no reason for us to be enemies just because our ancestors were greedy and foolish men. I have my own rank and standing. I need no other’s.”

DeBere breathed again.

“Only this I ask; that you no longer perpetuate this story–this lie. Augustine Malevola was a good man–a family man with a loving wife who mourned him deeply though she never knew his fate, for he was buried here, where he was murdered.”

“I…”

“Yes, murdered. But we shall say no more about it if you will agree to this.”

“The story, truth or not, will die with me.”

“Then let us just drink a toast in this good wine: to new formed friendships and old disputes laid to rest.”

De Bere filled the glasses and such was his relief that he did not he notice Malevola’s sleight of hand, nor the bitter taste of death.