MicroHorror

Jake Stagger leant on the wheel of his Caterpillar mini ’dozer and watched the funeral party from a distance. It was practically always the same group of people, and he’d come to know them well in his time filling in graves. Jake popped a Kingsport cigarette from a rumpled pack and flamed up as the mourners stood in a black moon around the fresh grave in the distance, heads bowed and hands clasped. He recognized the widow immediately; she always stood out like a snowball in a coalmine. Face as white as death, almost luminescent behind the obligatory oversized sunglasses. Always dressed completely in black, the only thing that ever changed was the height of the hemline and the exposure of the bosom, according to the widow’s age. This one was approaching middle age, a respectable dress falling below the knees and just a hint of speckled cleavage.

Next to her were the children. The eldest son looked, as all eldest sons at funerals did, angry as a hornet’s nest. No sunglasses for this one, he wanted the world to see the rage and resentment in his eyes. His tie was crooked and hastily made, his long black coat seemed to billow behind him like a still from a Hong Kong gangster movie, and he was just waiting for someone to offer the wrong words of condolence so he could explode like a grenade.

Jake stubbed out his cigarette and checked his watch. Almost time now. He did a quick scan of the rest of the funeral party. The disinterested and distant family members who were only there out of genetic duty, staring at their shoes and tapping fingers against legs. The close friend who could barely stand, shaking like a baby kitten on a cold day. He’d be drunk in a couple of hours. The work colleagues attempting to look respectful and sad but not quite pulling it off. They had probably already cleared the dead man’s desk and taken him off the payroll; this was just the last in a list of annoying corporate chores.

The coffin was in the grave (five feet deep minimum for adults, two feet for babies and young children) and the porcelain widow tossed a handful of dirt into the hole. This was when it always happened, Jake thought, and he sighed, knowing what was coming next, crossing himself and spitting onto the ground.

And there they were. No-one could see them but him; he put that down to the years he had spent in this very situation, becoming attuned to the low frequencies and vibrations of a burial. They came clambering out of the grave, all claws and eyes, tiny little black creatures that resembled crabs without shells, pointy and sharp all over like a child’s drawing. Jake called them Choosers, and he watched as they pulled themselves from the dirt hole and started to scurry and trundle towards the mourners. Here it is, thought Jake, the moment of truth.

The Choosers, about a dozen of them, clicked and scratched their way over to the angry son. The first Chooser used its pincers and climbed the son’s pants, pulling itself up the side of his leg, over the belt, and then using the messy tie it scuttled up his chest and settled at his throat. The rest quickly followed, swarming up the son’s clothing and all falling still in different places over his body.

The funeral party started to disperse, Jake’s cue to fire up his digger and push mounds of earth into the grave. He watched the son as he walked away, the hideous creatures hanging from every part of him, knowing he was the next in line to die, not even speculating as to how it would happen as he had seen this way too many times. Jake started riding towards the grave, knowing that one day the Choosers would come crawling out of a hole and cover him from head to toe. And he’d see.

Every evening Michael had to sit in the den with his Nan whilst his mum made dinner. Just to keep an eye on her, like. Make sure she didn’t wander. Nan wasn’t quite right in the head anymore; she had some old people’s disease that Michael couldn’t pronounce. She forgot people’s names and things that had happened just that day, and she saw things.

She always saw things. Michael would sit as far across the room from her as he could, one eye on the telly and one eye nervously on his Nan. He’d repeat the words “Just sick, just sick” over and over in his head like a safety mantra. He always tried to keep the sounds of his mum clanking around in the kitchen in his earshot, too; it was reassuring and something he could run to if things went weird.

Things always went weird. Nan would start looking around strangely, staring at the floor, the fireplace, the ceiling. Then her hands would start weakly swatting at the air; “Shoo!” she’d say, “get away!” as she flapped at nothing. Michael would watch her sideways when this happened, trying to look like he was concentrating on the footy highlights on the television. Nan had liked football once, lifelong Liverpool fan she was; they’d watched games together on a Saturday afternoon and cheered together. Now she barely knew she was in Liverpool, let alone how the team was doing. Michael dreaded her talking to him these days.

She always talked to him, eventually.

“Neil,” she’d say, calling him by his dead dad’s name, “Neil, can you see them? They’re coming across the carpet! Ooh, get them off me, get them away, Neil!” Then she’d stomp her feet a little and bang her hands on the chair. Mum said she saw things in the pattern of the carpet and her illness made them real to her. Other times she’d see shapes and people in the flames of the fireplace: deceased relatives, dragons and fish, monsters and angels. At first Michael had pretended to help her, stomping the floor or waving his hands in the air at nothing. Now, he didn’t like to get that close and tried to ignore her when she had a moment. “Just sick, she’s just sick,” he repeated in his mind.

The moments were getting worse. Nan had started telling stories at breakfast about the hats on top of her wardrobe. She was an old lady, and all old ladies have hats on top of their wardrobes. For Church on Sunday, and special, fancy dos. Big, gaudy things with ribbons and brims, pins and lace. Nana had three hats on her wardrobe, and they had become her latest weird thing.

“They came up, right up in the hats!” she had told Michael’s mother one morning the previous week. “All chattery and white, just grinning at me. I called you, and our Neil, but you never came. They stared at me all night, smiling and chattering their teeth together, and saying things, ooh it was horrible, horrible. I don’t like those heads.”

Michael thought about this as he continued to watch his Nan from the side of his eyes. It was the worst thing she’d said yet and had scared him half to death. He wouldn’t go in her room for anything anymore, not with those hats lined up in there. She was completely still, now, staring straight ahead at a point above the television. Michael relaxed a bit, heard his mum cough in the kitchen and felt all right. Almost time for dinner, and it was his favorite tonight, sausages!

Nan turned her head and looked straight at Michael.

“Michael!” she whispered. “Michael!”

He looked at her, shocked she knew his name.

“Yes, Nan?”

She nodded her head.

“They were asking about you last night, Michael. The heads in the hats, they asked about you. They said they’d be seeing you very soon. Just sick, just sick, they said to tell you.”

The tiny piece of chalk crumbled against the blackboard and Gwynn Meadows simply sighed and walked back behind the counter to find another piece, brushing pink dust from her hands. This was her favorite part of the work day, writing up the daily flavor of ice-cream on the board. There was always chocolate, strawberry and peach, but that fourth flavor, that could be anything at all and was rarely the same thing twice. Gwynn made it herself the night before, five nights a week, and had been doing so for two years. That was when she’d opened her little business, “Amy-Lou’s,” part ice-cream parlor and part knick-knack store. She had named it after her only daughter, the love of her life, her precious gift from God. Amy-Lou’s daddy had left town before Amy-Lou could walk, but Gwynn had managed just fine as a single mom, for sixteen years now.

Gwynn found a box of yellow chalk on a shelf beneath the cash register and slid a piece out, cool and smooth to the touch. She smiled as she stepped back over to the blackboard on the wall. Today’s special flavor was honey and cream, because that’s what Amy-Lou had decided upon the night before. Amy-Lou decided the special flavor every night; it was a ritual that Gwynn enjoyed more than anything. They’d sit at the kitchen table beneath the ceiling fan and Amy-Lou would come up with some wonderful idea, and if Gwynn didn’t have the ingredients in her pantry she’d make a quick trip to the supermarket just outside Cowpens. She’d spend a couple of hours making batches of the ice-cream in her Electrolux machine, making sure it was packed into scoop buckets and put away in her chest freezer ready for the shop the next day.

Gwynn stepped back from the board, making sure everything was in proportion and looked pretty. It was perfect, as always, neat and simple just like Gwynn. She did a quick trot around the store, eyeing everything quickly to make sure it was all neat and tidy. The merchandise was arranged in perfect formation on the shelves, from the local ceramics to the hand-decorated bird feeders to the beautiful paintings Gwynn sold on behalf of local artists. She went back to the counter and made sure there were toppings and sauces ready for the sweet-toothed schoolchildren and hot, tired local workers who would be stopping by later. It was a scorcher today and business would doubtless be good. Gwynn brushed down her apron, checked herself in the mirror she kept on the back wall, and went to unlock the door and flip the sign over to “Open.”

That evening, back home, Gwynn sat at the kitchen table waiting for her daughter, drinking an iced tea and browsing the new Cracker Barrel catalog. It was almost six o’clock; Amy-Lou was due home any minute. Teenagers, though, they’d roll in on their own sweet time whatever you said to them about punctuality. Gwynn heard a familiar step coming down the hall, and smiled to herself.

“Baby, come in here, darlin’, I want to tell you how well the honey and cream went over,” Gwynn called.

Amy-Lou Meadows, who had been abducted, tortured, raped and murdered two years ago, at the age of fourteen, lurched into the kitchen and awkwardly fell into a chair at the kitchen table opposite her mother. Amy-Lou’s slit throat gaped like a hungry red mouth, her broken fingers and broken arms hung at horribly wrong angles down her broken legs, and her eyes were black slits in a mass of red, puffy flesh. She was naked and her body was a ghoulish tapestry of bruises, cuts and burns, the canvas of a twisted psychopath who had sent her screaming to a way-too-early grave. Her body had never been found.

Gwynn Meadows looked across at her beautiful daughter with her pretty mouth and pretty eyes, wearing her prettiest dress, and smiled proudly.

“What’s tomorrow’s flavor, darlin’?”

It was a frantic day in the small town of Cowpens in South Carolina. The air was chilly and the sky overcast as the residents scurried around town preparing for their big night. The few stores closed early, rusty shutters pulled down over the windows for the one night a year they were needed. The florist and grocery were already dark and empty, security grills fastened. It was 3 PM.

The school bus was tearing around the town’s small suburb, dropping off kids to nervous parents as fast as possible. Moms and dads were picking their children up in their arms at the sidewalk and running into their houses. Slams and bangs echoed down Maple Street, the sound of hammering reverberated across Greenway Drive, excited barks all around town as dogs were let out of kennels and ushered indoors by their owners.

Today was January 17th, the anniversary of the biggest day in the history of the town, the Battle of Cowpens where American loyalist forces defeated the British. Today was the day of the parade.

At 5 PM a thin mist started wisping down the silent Main Street, originating from up the road towards the battleground, curling around the streetlamps and encircling the pagoda outside the Town Hall. It reached the one set of traffic lights and started rolling both left and right, up and down Church Street, thicker and faster now, along the walls of the auto repair place and the police station, where gaudy murals were painted of soldiers in red and blue fighting each other, those in red caught in death poses, those in blue cheering victoriously and silently with permanently open mouths.

Every building in Cowpens was dark; no lights glowed warmly inside windows or behind doors. No birds sang, no insects hummed. The streets were desolate. Then, a sound clipped the evening, slight at first but growing louder. A knocking, a clanking and a shuffling.

In the whole town only one person was actually outside. Teenager Sam Webb had sneaked out of his house, taking advantage of his father’s inebriation, passed out as he was every year on parade day. Sam had climbed a lamppost next to the mechanics and managed to get himself up onto the flat roof. Now he lay, shivering and wide-eyed, peering over the edge of the roof at the thick fog. Potters Antiques was already obscured by fog, and those strange sounds were getting louder. Sam’s whole body felt numb, and then he spotted them.

Their skeletal forms were luminous, shining in the falling darkness. Tattered red coats, white britches and black hats seemed to hold them together. Half shuffling, half marching, they lurched into town gripping filthy muskets. Their skull heads twisted left then right, searching. Some, Sam noticed, were missing hand and arm bones, and one, legless, was dragging itself along, thigh bones scraping the ground.

There were dozens of them, and behind them came green coated cavalry. Horrible and terrifying, these helmeted ghouls clutched rusty sabers and rode astride skeletal horses, clip-clopping down the road on too thin legs, their saddles and reins slapping. The Hellish Dragoons veered away from the Redcoats and started banging on doors with their sabers, rattling windows.

Sam held his breath, pressing himself against the roof as tightly as he could. The marching dead had reached the crossroads below his vantage point, and Sam shivered.

He started to slide himself back out of view, but there was a sudden bellow and the noise below him stopped dead. He looked down and, horrified, saw that a Dragoon had ridden up behind the mass of Redcoats and, pointing his saber straight at Sam, his eyeless sockets seemed locked on Sam’s face. Every single skull rose in unison and faced Sam up on the roof. It looked as if they smiled.

The next morning, they found Sam’s mutilated body slumped against the war mural, his body hacked and gouged, wrapped in a tattered, bloody, mold-covered Union Jack.

Megan had bathed both the twins, fed them and laid them down. They were actually sleeping, and Megan, exhausted, was slumped in her favorite chair, bare feet up on the coffee table, letting her body relax and stretch out.

There was a sharp rapping on the front door. Megan ignored it, moving being the very last thing she wanted to do, but when the knocking sounded a second time she jumped up angrily, worried it would wake her babies.

She jerked the front door open with a scowl on her face ready to scold whoever had disturbed her, but the figure on the front porch startled her and no words came out.

“Buy some seeds, dear?” said the tiny old woman who stood before Megan. She wore what amounted to rags, her hands filthy with black nails and soiled skin, her face blotched and speckled with the signs of old age and disease. She was holding a wicker basket in her bony hands, and in it was a pile of little rolled-up paper packets, twisted at the top.

“No thanks,” said Megan, trying not to look into the old woman’s face, “I don’t garden.”

“Only a quarter a packet, dear.” The old woman pulled a paper roll from her basket and shook it towards Megan’s face. “Just a quarter, for all this beautiful life!” She shook the packet again.

“Really, no thank you, I have no need of seeds.” Megan took a step back, smiled coldly and closed the door a couple of inches. “I have to go back inside, I’m quite busy at the moment, you have a good evening.”

The old woman’s face clouded over in an instant, she turned her head and spat on the wooden deck.

“Just a little kindness dear,” she growled, her tone hostile now, “just a handful of change, a little jingle for my pocket, that’s all I ask. This is a lovely home you have here, very lovely.” The old woman looked around her, taking in Megan’s house.

Megan was shocked that this old crone had spat on her porch, and the last words she had spoken had sounded to Megan like a threat. She was angry now and just wanted to get back inside and relax.

“Listen, you old hag, how dare you spit on my property? I’m giving you nothing, get out of here right now and take your crap with you, if I see you hanging around here again I’ll call the police, you hear ? I don’t want you anywhere near my home.”

The old lady looked Megan right in the eyes and slowly, ever so slowly, let a big gob of spit fall from her cracked, grey lips and fall slowly to the deck, finally hitting the wood with a slight ‘glop.’

Megan was furious and shouted now.

“Get out of here, you nasty witch, get the hell out of here right now!”

In the background Megan heard one of the twins crying. She stamped her foot in anguish, her entire body groaning at the lost chance of relaxation, and made a shooing motion at the old lady. The old lady stepped back, then pointed at Megan’s face.

“I curse you, dear; I curse you with one word.”

Megan scowled. The crying baby had become two crying babies and she shook her head at how quickly peace had turned to disturbance.

“Go ahead, curse me, say what you want, but then please, JUST LEAVE!”

Megan slammed the door shut, rested her forehead against it and sighed. The crying was louder now; the twins had obviously heard the disturbance the wrinkly old bitch had caused. She listened for the old lady leaving, walking down the steps of the porch, but there was nothing. Megan knelt down and carefully pushed open her letterbox to look outside.

The old lady was staring right back at her.

“Childless!” she hissed, and Megan let the letterbox snap closed and fell back in shock.

The crying had stopped.