MicroHorror

You don’t know me. I fixed some things while you were away. I noticed the faucet on the side of the house was leaking, so I tightened it. I figured you might not be back in time to prevent real damage. It had to be done. The faucet in your back yard is fine.

The door to the garage doesn’t lock properly. I oiled the bolt, and now you’ll be able to close it to secure that entrance. You’ve let that go, but it’s important.

The entrance to the crawlspace was hanging loose, and I found evidence of rats. They seem to have pulled out insulation in places, but I repaired all that as well. It took some time, but none of your neighbors came by to ask about it. You have nice neighbors. People who keep to themselves and don’t pry.

On the upper floor there were several windows with broken latches. I wondered if you even noticed, but I replaced them. I cleaned as well. You had some filthy spots in your bathroom and kitchen. It could attract all kinds of pests.

And I replaced the air filter, which hadn’t been done in some time. You want to do that once a month, because you can get respiratory infections. You have a family, and you need to take care of them. They could get something serious, especially that newborn girl of yours. Your wife would never forgive you.

You’re very lucky to have this house. I hope you appreciate it. I hope you’re grateful.

One night in late winter we’re short-staffed. I am the sole deckhand aboard the last ferry leaving Surry County. Above me only the captain. Below sits one Lincoln, polished and black, with a thin-faced woman at the wheel. We three push off into the fog.

A quarter way across the river I hear her engine still running. Down onto the lower deck I go and knock on her window. She stares ahead, her eyes dry as glass. I check for a pulse in her neck and run up to the bridge to find it empty. The captain’s coffee is spilled out onto the instruments, and a police scanner is crackling some report I barely hear.

I race below, calling out to no one. And now the Lincoln’s empty too, its door hanging open like a mouth. Somewhere above me I can hear the click, click, click of high heels on the metal floor. The police scanner’s report. A theft. From a funeral home.

Click, click, click–something comes down the stairs. I see a hand grip the rail. Skin the color of old snow.

Now I am in the water, swimming away as fast as I can. Weeds tangle around my legs, promising bad things. But I make it to the wet bank and climb up. Then a hood goes over me, everything dark.

“We have to take someone across this river,” says someone holding me hard by the hand.

“You’ll do just fine.”

Pressed into the morning frost on a low pane of glass was the shape of a small mouth, a tiny nose, and two little eyes–as if a girl had climbed onto the porch in the middle of the night and put her face against the window to see inside. By 10 AM it had melted away. A cold snap returned a few days later, and it reappeared on the other side of the house–on a glass door, just three feet high, as if the owner were barely old enough to walk.

The old tenant hunted in the garden and examined the front steps, but he could find no footprints. He drove slowly through the suburban streets at twilight, but no one looked like his evening visitor. The weather stayed warm for the next few weeks, and the face did not come back. But then he found a delicate hand print in the ash of his fireplace. He opened the flue and looked inside, feeling foolish. He rubbed it away with a brush. It made him nervous. He told his grown children, and they decided it was time for him to move.

On his last day in the house, with the walls bare and the floors swept clean, the old tenant took one last walk from room to room, his steps echoing back at him. He peeked into cabinets and closets; he removed a panel leading to a crawlspace and put his whole head inside. Satisfied the house was empty, he locked it up and left it behind.

Within ten years he was lying in a hospital cot barely able to remember his own name. Before he died he gripped an orderly’s hand and whispered something to her. But he slurred his words, and she understood little English.

By then a couple had moved into his house. And when they brought their newborn son from the hospital, they woke up again and again to check on him. They did this all through that first night, and for many nights after. They felt his chest and listened carefully to his breathing, and they positioned and repositioned him in his crib. The couple left a monitor on, and they would lie awake to hear to their baby’s low sounds emerging from the device’s static like a shape coming out of a heavy snow. And once in the early morning hours the young father started awake, certain a man’s voice had come over the speaker.

“She could be anywhere,” the voice said. “She could be anyone.”

But he realized he’d probably dreamed it. And anyway, the monitor often crossed frequencies with other traffic in the area. There were many couples with many young children. Scores of monitors crackled softly out there in dark suburban nurseries, their red LEDs dim as failing stars. Mothers and fathers slept lightly. A whole world waited full of bad things that could happen. No one could stop them all.

As he drifted off the father barely noticed the sound of the young girl, singing his son to sleep.

1. I love the smell of old houses.
2. I hate the smell of wet earth.
3. I like driving at night with the radio turned all the way up.
4. When I was barely two I took a fall and still have the scar beneath my hairline.
5. I lost a coat long ago–blue cloth–and I still miss it.
6. When I was six my bicycle hit a rock, and I tumbled over the handlebars. I keep a chip of the cast in the crawlspace behind my old closet.
7. People tell me I should leave for a new home, but I can’t.
8. The accident I had when I was 18 was quite severe, and there was a notice in the paper.
9. The driver of the other car survived.
10. I spent the night in the hospital’s coldest room.
11. I used to be afraid of the dark.
12. I stand in a corner, watching you read my words.

My doctor put me on Psypil, and within weeks I was a new man. Before, I’d suffered extreme anxiety in any social situation. At the beginning of a party I’d spend half an hour in the bathroom gripping the sink and staring into the mirror, trying to stop shaking. The thought of getting up on a stage hit me with waves of nausea and powerful stomach cramps. Even understanding people–knowing when they were really happy with me, for instance, or if they were just being sarcastic–was impossible. It’s hard to describe how debilitating it was, and as a result I never had close friends. Coworkers took advantage of me, and I was often the last to be promoted.

Psypil regulates the neurotransmitters in the social centers of your brain. You don’t feel drugged at all. You’re in control of your emotions… instead of the other way around. I can actually look at someone who would normally make me mad or afraid, and I can just turn those feelings off.

And with that control comes a wonderful clarity. You can read people better than you ever thought possible. Two days after I started my treatment I watched a couple from across a crowded restaurant, and I knew she was going to break up with her boyfriend before he did! A week later I knew the best time to confront my supervisor about how he lied on my review was on his way home. That would have been out of the question before Psypil. I would be too scared of “making a scene.” But I watched his body language as he fumbled with his keys in the dark outside his apartment, and I just knew he lived alone. I knew no one would miss him.

Getting his job was the best thing I ever did. Well… the second best. But what’s really important is for the first time in my life I feel good about myself.

What happened Friday was terrible, something I always feared as a parent. My daughter was eleven, and I saw threats to her everywhere.

There was the teenaged bagger at the grocery store, who stared at her every time we shopped. I found myself tracking him as he worked throughout the market, always putting us in a different aisle, another section, or the farthest checkout line.

There was Mr. Sloan, the barber, who parked more than a block away from his shop, in a hidden spot behind a tree, where he could talk people into his car if he wanted. I started coming there every morning to make sure it was always his spot. I was never disappointed.

And then there was Steven, the school janitor, polite and deferential to everyone who knew him. But he had terrible photos on his computer at home. Photos I found on Friday, and that was when he came home earlier than I expected. But I had a hammer with me and wore gloves. A good father prepares. There are so many people who might hurt my daughter, and I have a plan for every one. You can’t be too careful.

Two women from the auction house walk down the hallway, and the younger one speaks in a whisper as if people still lived there.

“Despicable,” she says. “His own wife. And he didn’t even attend the funeral.”

The older one shoots her a look, but she’s oblivious.

“They say…” she adds conspiratorially, but the other cuts her off with a raised hand. They pause outside a closed door.

“This will take some time,” the older woman says. “There are five hundred of them, many quite valuable. It’s really something to see.”

Only one boat leaves the marina after midnight, its lights off and its course erratic. The man at the helm barely notices the pylons and buoys as he slips out toward sea. Next to him is a plastic bag filled with some clothing and a letter; he intended to drop them into the water. But he seems distracted.

“Stop,” he mutters to no one, shaking and shaking his head, the boat veering this way and that. “Stop it.”

“She collected her entire life, but acquired almost a third of them–more than a hundred–during the last two years of her marriage. Those weren’t pleasant years.”

“Where are they from?”

“All over the world. She stacked them on specially-made bookcases that line the room. You might want to prepare yourself. It’s a bit of a shock, walking in and seeing them all…”

“I said, stop it!” the man shouts out in the wind as his boat zips by a reef. But it’s no use. People in the street. Mannequins in the storefront. Photos in the frame shop. None of them would listen. They were everywhere, and all of them, all of them…

They enter the room. Every space on the wall is lined with shelves, and every shelf is filled with dolls. Exquisite, porcelain dolls, their small faces expressionless. But something is wrong, because the young woman chokes and can’t speak. The older one looks around, seeing and not seeing, seeing and not seeing, until finally it strikes her, and she is just as dumb.

Each of the five hundred dolls stares from its shelf with a set of tiny black sockets, its eyes plucked out.

The man heads full throttle into the open ocean. But water is collecting in the bottom of his craft; he must have hit something back in the harbor. He doesn’t care, doesn’t even look down. The boat drives onward, thumping over the waves and catching great bursts of spray, until the nose slips into the surf and doesn’t come up. The whole thing turns on its side once and sinks, the man strapped into his seat and not struggling.

“Stop looking at me,” he says with finality before he’s gone. And down in the deep water his last thought is of the fish.

All those eyes, just like glass, hanging in the dark to watch him go.

No piece bigger than a quarter, that’s my rule. You can use knives and acid to strip the meat off the bone. The clothes you can burn. But then you have to break up the skeleton into fragments small enough that they won’t attract attention, that they don’t look human if you come across them. There are plenty of places to scatter them if you’ve done the job right. I’ve taken down three dozen this way.

Of course you have trophies, but you must hide those too. The police can find them in your crawlspace, in your attic. If you rent a storage unit you’re asking to be caught. But you can’t just give them up. You have to be able to take them out once in a while and… remember.

I’ve found the perfect way. It’s not for everyone. The tools hurt worse than you can imagine. You might get an infection if you don’t sterilize everything. But when you’re done, you can just let the authorities search any part of your house. I have three dozen trophies, hiding in perfect plain sight. I just smile when the police come. And no ever counts my four extra teeth.

It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.
–”The Tell-Tale Heart” by E.A. Poe

I know many things about the man who will soon kill me. I know he fears my left eye with its watery film. Each night when he thinks I’m asleep, he cracks open my door and puts his head into my room. The single spider-thread of his lantern’s beam searches for that eye. But I close it tight, and he can’t see it, can’t bring himself to murder. Of course I am scared, so scared I can’t breathe. If I had any strength I’d leave. But I can hear his breath in the hall like a winter wind through a filthy alley, and I know he’s terrified too. His own heart must be pounding like mine, only stronger of course.

I know how he will dispose of me when my last night comes. Each morning he arrives to greet me cheerily, and chat about whether I’ve rested, and he gazes idly about the room to this spot and to that, as if all of it and none of it matter equally to him. But he stands in the same place, the place where he does not look, which is the loose board over a hollow space beneath my floor.

I know he can hear acutely. Whatever disease he has has sharpened his senses to an unbearable edge. He starts at the sound of beetles in the wall or a single cough from the street outside. And I know he’ll notice that small clock, which I wind each evening before bed and bury beneath the linens in my dresser’s bottom drawer.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss–we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.
–”The Imp of the Perverse” by E.A. Poe

I almost never listen to Whisper-Man. He tells me to step free of the bridge and see what happens. He says bad things when I’m outside the animal’s cage, when I handle a gun, when I notice the grinder’s spinning blades. I’m sure you’ve heard his voice as well.

Now we’re driving together–you, Whisper-Man, and me– on a long two-lane road. Ahead there’s a dip, so we see the onrushing truck duck down beneath the ridge as I’m popping into its lane, just for a moment, to pass another car.

But why don’t you linger? Whisper-Man asks me.

Linger, linger. And I can’t say no.

My spine electrifies as you make a comment… and then bark an order… and then grab for the wheel. As the truck’s driver punches his horn and pounds his brakes, and everywhere there’s the smell of scorched rubber. But somehow we make it through and you hit me on the shoulder, almost crying, and I laugh like it was a joke. Like I could control myself, and I knew we would be all right in the end.

Whisper-Man laughs too. He knows we have far to go.