MicroHorror

They appear like barely visible dark shadows jumping around the room taunting you, shape-shifting. Depicting your biggest phobias and darkest nightmares. Whispering threats in deep scratching voices inside your ear, sending fear crawling around your brain. They promise they will bring macabre violence to those you love while you watch. You can blind yourself to them, ignore their existence to feel safe when you sleep at night. Those are the people they like to trap, people who think they are just “ghost stories.” They wait for you to feel safe, then start messing with your mind. They drive you paranoid to the point of insanity.

It’s all a game to them, and you become their favorite toy. They eventually get bored with you, but instead of moving on, they destroy you. They stand over your bed while you sleep and rip out your spirit from your chest. The process is clean, without blood or gore, but the sound is ghastly. It sounds like hundreds of victims dying an agonizing death. When they are complete your soul joins their ranks. Much like how a plump grape becomes a dry raisin, your body becomes a shriveled shell, stripped of everything it had once been.

“We only have one vacancy, but we don’t rent that room out,” the manager, Ted Westwood, said, reading the logs. “You are going have to try somewhere else; sorry.”

“Let’s see if we can work this out,” Peter said, pulling out a wallet. “My wife is very tired.”

“No, I won’t be–” he stopped, seeing the amount of money he was being offered: three times the room’s price.

“So can we stay in that room?” he asked, knowing the answer. “Please get someone to help with her bags.”

“One of you help them with their bags,” the manager said to the bellboys. “Enjoy your stay here at Sunrise Hotel.”

After the exchange of money, they got the keys to the Lovers’ Suite. It had been named that, but was now called Lovers’ End Suite. The room was no longer rented out to anyone and most workers avoided it out of fear. The bellhop left them as soon as he opened the door and switched on the light in the room.

Peter and his wife, Leslie, inspected the room and found it quite attractive. It had the regal decorations of all the other rooms, but it looked aged and covered over with dust. They didn’t bother undressing, being too tired, and got into the bed to fall asleep.

Peter woke when he felt his wife climb out of bed, after the first few hours of the night. She’s going to the restroom, he thought to himself, and dozed off again, listening to the humming air conditioner fill the room with refreshing cold air.

He woke up once again, this time not being able to breathe. His wife was on top of him, strangling him. He tried to push his petite wife off, but she felt oddly twice her weight, and she started punching his face. His nose crushed and his eyes swollen shut, his body gave one last spasm and he was dead.

Leslie snapped out of her trance, confused and dazed, and saw that she had blood on her hands. Peter’s blood. She started to piece it together, and realized her husband was dead and she had killed him with her bare hands. She ran to the restroom, yelling like a banshee, where she broke the glass mirror and slit her wrists. The other hotel patrons did not hear any of this, and did not find out till the next day.

“Same as the last time, the other young couple, both dead,” the investigator told Ted. “Just different circumstances.”

The police investigator ruled the death as a murder-suicide, but Ted Westwood knew what it really was: the spirit of the Lovers’ Suite. It was where an ex-wife, over forty years ago, killed both her former husband and the new woman he was seeing. He had come to the hotel with his new fiancée as a vacation before their marriage, and the ex-wife found them and shot the husband in the stomach, the fiancée in the face, and herself in the temple. The room, when rented to two lovers now, always ended in their deaths–one murdered the other and then committed suicide. This is how the room became known as “Lovers’ End Suite.”

Jared ran hard, at a pace that normally he could not have kept up for this long, but it was after him. He felt himself slipping as his foot pounded into the gravel of the driveway he was running on. He had already emptied the cartridge of his Smith & Wesson handgun on the werewolf. The werewolf just pulled the bullets out as if they inflicted no pain on him. It even gave Jared a devious grin showing its dagger length, razor sharp teeth as it pulled out the bullets. The six bullet holes then sealed themselves before the werewolf started chasing him. He was trying to run to the safety of the chapel that was just over the cement wall that enclosed the house he was running from. The cement wall, with its decorative cement gargoyle statues, was so close Jared could reach out and touch it.

The werewolf gave what sounded like a low rumbling roar that resonated deep inside of Jared. The sound made Jared wish this was all just an extremely vicious nightmare and he’d wake up in the safety of his bedroom, lying in his bed snug under his warm blankets. Jared didn’t let the sound stop him, though; he had made it to the cement wall and then he looked up. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

The gargoyles, which had been made of stone, were flaking it off revealing their leathery bodies which were covered with pulsating cankerous sores. Their eyes all seemed to illuminate with a black glow, like looking into the pits of Hell. They opened their mouths and started to roar ferocious roars back to the werewolf, sounding like a pack of enraged bull elephants. Jared put his arms on the wall to cross over it, and tried scrambling over it. One of the gargoyles wrapped its talons around Jared’s forearms. Jared tried unsuccessfully to free his arm. The gargoyle had what felt like a vice grip, digging its talons into his veins. The gargoyle cackled like a hyena in Jared’s face, spraying bubbling spit everywhere. Jared inhaled a sulfurous acidic breath that made his stomach turn. He felt himself flying threw the air back towards the werewolf. The gargoyle had thrown him.

The creature with the matted, black, coarse fur ripped its jaws into the jugular of Jared, who was yelling for help, but the yells had ended in a gurgling sound as the blood seeped from his opened mouth, which was frozen in a look of terror. The gargoyles watched with excitement, and jumped with eagerness, their boar-like snouts dripping with yellowish
foamy drool, and each time the blood spilled the gargoyles were tempted to jump from the wall. They knew they had to wait till their master finished eating. The werewolf had torn off the pieces of what had been Jared and was now only a carcass of meat and blood. When the werewolf slinked away, the gargoyles jumped down, fighting for a piece of meat like crazed vultures.