MicroHorror

Picture the scene on a deserted midnight platform as a man waits for a train that is already late. Ten minutes, eleven, twelve; he abandons his clock-watching and paces as the girl laughs again. His teeth grate at the inanity of the overheard conversation; double her age and you wouldn’t be far off her IQ. Time passes slowly. It is the last train and, if it doesn’t come, he will be stuck here all night. Nowhere to sleep but a rubbish-choked length of concrete that stinks of piss and secondhand takeaway. The waiting room with its hard seats would have been preferable but that’s all locked up now. The girl is talking to someone else on her mobile and her voice carries. She does not seem worried that even the night cleaners have gone home.

“It’s not coming,” he hisses under his breath. “What do I do now?”

What indeed? Nothing to do but wait as the foghorn blonde pollutes the air with noise. There is no one else on the platform except for a hunched figure of undeterminable age and sex. Bundled in a filthy blanket, it appears to be drunk, stoned or asleep; it hasn’t moved in an hour at least. He looks at the clock and at his watch. Both stopped at exactly the same time as the clock on the Town Hall. Impossible; his scientific mind quashes the medieval superstition before it takes root.

“You just think that,” he says firmly. “Your mind’s playing tricks on you.”

Speaking of which.

The vagrant jerks convulsively and the blanket ripples as if something is trying to get out.

“What the hell?” His voice sounds strange but he gets no answer.

The girl drops the phone and her eyes are saucer-wide, her mouth open in a soundless scream.

He turns too late and then he hears it, a crescendo of sound sweeping onto the platform like a wave. The rats do not care that the last train never arrived but the live meat special draws them in their thousands.

It is not every night that they get such a treat.

• Copyright: © 2006 R. S. Pyne

Diana Greenleaf was single unless you counted the spirits. They are not real, she told herself and concentrated on her own breath. Declarations drowned out the voices. If she concentrated, it even blocked out the things in the shadows.

The telephone rang as if to prove that it was real. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

“You have a problem.”

For a minute, she suspected a new tactic in selling double-glazing.

“Who is this?”

“That is not important.”

She took a deep breath hoping it was a persistent salesman. “My windows were replaced last year and I am not interested in a timeshare in Spain.”

“This is the last warning; if you want to wait for the Mediator, that is your business. I promised the old one I would help you.”

“You knew my grandmother?” She listened in case there was anything more but heard only a dial tone.

She still wore the amulet, a three-inch talon on a gold chain. A protection, the old lady told her, but against what? The matter raised itself three days before she died. She summoned Diana to her bedside, an old lady who looked frail for perhaps the first time. “Take this.” Ilsa Greenleaf’s voice was bird-like and Diana had to strain to hear the words. “They will know I can no longer keep them from the divide”.

A feather-light hand touched her granddaughter’s wrist. “Their agent is in the city. You will know him on sight but do not listen, however sweet his words. He can turn your weakness against you.” Something of the old strength returned like a welcome ghost.

“Do not trust your eyes when they tell you that something you see is there when it should not be there. Do not trust your ears when you hear something that should not be in this world. If you allow yourself to see or hear them, they have an invitation to stay.”

A year and a day later, the invite had been sent and accepted.

The doorbell rang and, when she answered it, a figure in a trench coat that seemed almost to carry the darkness with it, stepped over the threshold. The face was little more than a child’s drawing–lidless eyes black as boot polish, a thin-lipped mouth with pointed ivory teeth. “My clients have been patient,” he said in a voice like a creaking coffin lid. “But they are tired of waiting. My clients do not want you dead. It is against their interests and they sent me to negotiate a compromise.” A questing hand brushed the gold chain and the claw that hung from it. “You are beautiful–why wear a barbaric trinket? Gold suits you better than pieces of a dead bird. This is a thing of the past.”

She undid the clasp with his voice in her ears. They had her then, body and soul.

The Mediator kicked the amulet away before she changed her mind. “Look at me, Diana. See Them, Hear Them.” The coat opened and the spirits issued from the bloodless slash in the not-man’s belly, spilling out instead of his internal organs, too many to count.

Give us the life we deserve, the voices said as they surrounded the only one who could release them into this world.

“REAL!” Her scream carried as she threw herself out of the window. Shards of glass covered her broken body but the Mediator was no longer there to watch. His work done, there no longer seemed any reason to stay.

One of the doctors in the psychiatric ward straightened his white coat, unwilling to admit how much the new patient disturbed him.

She had not spoken a word in six months. In fact, she would never speak again. They had been able to save her sight but she stared into nothingness, trapped forever in a world of her own making, where only the spirits could come and go as they pleased.

• Copyright: © 2007 R. S. Pyne

Her eyes were those of a medieval saint, seeing nothing except the world she created for herself.

“I phoned your office. You left at five.”

She screamed the last few words at him and he knew she had stopped being rational.

“Give me the knife, Anne. You’re not well. I don’t think this new diet suits you.”

She traced her reduced waistline, leaving a bloody streak on the fabric. The Grapefruit Diet, the Heart Foundation Diet, the Orange, Onion and Pilchard Diet–she had tried them all. Weight Watchers banned her from all future meetings for inciting rebellion–a bell, book and candle ban with no second chances. Slim-Fast didn’t but this new diet seemed to be working.

The disappearance of two paperboys had yet to be explained but he kept his suspicions to himself. “Have you eaten anyone today?” was not the question to ask in such a situation.

She had eaten at least five people but he’d never liked the window cleaner anyway.

She picked the knife up and he trailed uselessly in her wake. The kitchen was tidy as it always was but the table bore a grisly addition. A human heart and a pair of kidneys adorned a serving platter and, on top of them, blue eyes stared at him with a disturbing intensity.

“What have you done?”

“Are you so stupid that I have to explain?” Her voice was so soft that he had to strain to hear it. “I hired a private detective and he was useless so I followed you myself. Then the detective wanted his money.”

“You killed him.”

“What do you think you’ve been eating for the last month? The rest is buried in the rose beds or your bean trenches. We should have lovely beans this year.”

“They’ll get black-fly,” he said, preferring to talk about his allotment rather than current events. Up to three months ago, he had not even looked at another woman. An unsolicited phone call and a meeting in the street and one thing led to another. Stella walked back into his life and their affair started again as if it had never halted. He watched as his wife reached into a bowl and picked up a piece of raw meat that looked like fillet steak but wasn’t. She picked up an eye and rolled it around the table, watching him like a snake.

Stella’s eyes. Last night, they smiled at him when he promised to leave his wife.

Now, in the bottom pit of Hell, he stared madness in the face.

He opened his mouth to speak but no words came and his wife watched him, relishing his pain as if it were a fine wine. He was incoherent with shock but there was little he could do to claw back his self-control. “How could you do such a thing?”

“You left a number in your jacket pocket–the one that went to the dry cleaners and it wasn’t difficult to trace her. 33 Oak Street–just opposite the Ferret and Shovel. I only went there to talk but it didn’t work out like that.“ She retold the story of her rival’s death, leaving not even the most trivial detail to the imagination. “Now you can be with us both in a very organic sense.”

She plastered a bloody mane of blonde hair over her own tangled birds nest. “Did you know she was pregnant? You’ll find your by-blow in the compost bin.”

She flicked her borrowed hair out of her eyes as he began to sob like a child.

What could he possibly have said?

• Copyright: © 2004 R. S. Pyne

He was like a little kid at Christmas. Tonight was the night, or so he said, that the Dancers would grant him a single wish. “We can bring her back,” he said and everything fell into place.

The women that appeared out of the stones themselves were all tall and of a beauty that stopped your heart to look at them. There were twelve of them, dressed in gowns of many different colors that shimmered in the moonlight. The eyes were more suited to those of a wolf than a woman.

“The Dancers,” Mike said in a far-away voice. “Soon the music will start.”

“Let’s go back.” I was uneasy now.

“It is only just beginning,” his hand clamped onto my shoulder. Even when I brought my elbow back and slammed it into his ribs, still he did not let go or tear his gaze from the stones.

“They are not dangerous.”

They looked dangerous to me but it was already too late. The women formed a circle and a bodhran drum began to beat out a complex rhythm, joined a few minutes later by a fiddle and otherworldly voices. The music of the Dancers filled his soul.

I used every curse word I knew but he brushed me away, even though I said things I still regret to this day. Katherine was my sister and she must have had her reasons for what she did. His head rocked back as I hit him on the jaw but he did not even stagger.

The headache that had been plaguing me all day roared and the world faded. I lost consciousness, could only have been out for a second but when I looked for him, he was not there.

I saw him step into the circle and they incorporated him into the dance without missing a beat. The honeyed words sounded false to me but he did not seem to think so. He was flattered by the attention. The poor bastard had never had much of that and could not recognize the trap. The music stopped abruptly and then started again, wilder and more exultant as they began to edge him away from the circle.

Cold, skeletal hands gripped my shoulders from behind and I was pulled around to face a pair of grinning skulls. They both blinked and once again became the shining-haired beauties with wolfish eyes.

“Bring him forward”, a tall woman in dark blue robes commanded and I was dragged through the double ranks of dancers.

Michael had disappeared as if he had never existed and the faces changed as I passed them. Smooth skin shifted to bone or rotting, maggot-ridden flesh and I was forced to kneel in the icy fog. One of them put a knife to my throat and held it there.

The leader stretched out a slender arm heavy with gold jewelry. “No,” She said in a voice like an open grave. “We need only one, Sisters, and we have the chosen sacrifice.”

Then the world went black and the last thing I heard was the screaming. There is not a lot more to say on the subject, except to bring the story to a close.

When I came to, I was alone. I found him less than half a mile away, sightless eyes staring at the sky. He had been dead for hours and, from the look on what was left of his face, it was not a pleasant death. Clenched in his right fist was a fragment of dark blue silk that looked as if it had spent centuries under the earth.

I have drifted ever since, rarely staying in one place for more than a few days at a time. It is better that way because I know that They have not forgotten me.

• Copyright: © 2005 R. S. Pyne