MicroHorror

In the empty room stood a pine coffin, open.

Iggy had invited no guests. His grandmother wouldn’t have wanted it, he told people. And anyway, what a ridiculous expense for a dead person.

He had no intention of staying sober himself, however. “Dear old Granny,” he said each time he took a drink of fine whiskey. “Dear old Granny.” He let out a laugh. He admired his youthful face in the mirror.

His rich youthful face.

Dear old Granny had done well. A shrewd lady. For two decades a cosmetics conglomerate had paid large annual fees for her potions. And for a photo of her in old age, looking like a woman of thirty.

Ma Sullivan’s Anti-Ageing Cream. It Works Like Magic.

“It sure does,” said Iggy, and he laughed again. He raised his glass. “What a clever old witch you were.”

And what a strong old witch, he’d thought, when he held the pillow onto her face. Who would imagine a person could take so long to die?

“Some party this is,” said a voice.

Iggy stared at the coffin.

“I said, some God-forsaken party this is.”

“Granny?” he said.

“I’ve seen Presbyterians have more fun.”

He dropped the whiskey bottle.

“Not only a murderer,” said the voice, “but cheap.”

He looked into the coffin. On his grandmother’s face there was no movement. Only a silent, wide-eyed scream.

“You user, you sponger. You cheap little prick,” said the voice.

Iggy plugged fingers into his ears, to no avail.

“Hey, pretty boy! Go look in the mirror.”

What Iggy saw there made his heart stop mid-beat. As he watched, his face fattened rapidly. Then it sagged. Then it wrinkled and shrank. It became the face of a bitter, sad man.

A man in his nineties.

“Call it inheritance tax,” said the voice.

The prisoner reached out to the stone floor but his hand touched instead a scaly body like a snake’s which hissed and with a twist slipped away from him. He kicked out, but the creature had gone. The blackness around the prisoner was complete, an inkiness so dense the only things visible to him were the star-bursts and light-shows of his own straining retinas.

Away in the distance a rackety noise flared up and died down, an excited conversation. And beyond this noise, a blaring, as though of a nagging voice infinitely distant, over-amplified, blown out. And in response to the nagging each time, a loud shout. Beyond all this, separate and intense, came the clicking noise, always there, a furious, irregular, dull-sounding click-click, click, click-click-click. Its source seemed embedded in the very stones of the dungeon walls.

The snake-thing slithered across the prisoner’s ankles and wriggled up his side, hoping to graze on the sweat bacteria of his under-arm. He brushed it away. It hissed and turned, and the curtain of its thousand legs fibrillated against him. “Little fuckers,” the prisoner whispered. The dryness in his throat felt like razorblades.

From far away came the noise of a key grinding round the inside of an ancient lock. Then a scraping sound, grit against stone. Hope skittered through the prisoner’s mind when across the crude flagstones dim light stole towards him. It crept into his eyes, painful, unwelcome, exposing to his sight his own smeared, wasted flesh.

A voice, hardly audible, raised itself from the direction where the light and the scraping had come, a voice which echoed around the dungeon like a whisper in a nightmare, “time to die… time to die… time to die… time to die…”

“Time to die,” said Criss.

“Yeah, man,” said Manny.

“Time for dungeon creep to catch the train to pain. We will make this h-u-u-u-rt.” Criss rolled the wheel, selected “machete,” hit F2 for max armor and Ctrl+K to slide himself under the door’s low lintel.

“Do him,” said Manny.

“Yeah, man.”

A voice called from downstairs.

“Criss, you won’t get told again. Get down here.”

“No way. No. ”

“Now!”

“No.”

“Your Dad’s gonna be home,” Manny said quietly. “You better be down.”

Criss kicked shut the bedroom door.

“He’s not my fuckin’ Dad.”

He rolled the mouse, jumped down the rotten stone staircase three steps at a time and landed in a crouch. Gloom embraced him, and something extra-sensory twitched into life in his brain. He moved forward with careful little stabs at the up-arrow. “Hey, dungeon creep,” he whispered. “Look. I’ve got something for ya.”