MicroHorror

All around me lurks dark energy. It runs through me, roaring away toward the fringes of the universe. When I try to sleep dark energy throbs against the backs of my eyelids. As you might guess, I don’t get very much sleep. When I’m awake I have these crazy day dreams. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

For instance: I’m in my basement, standing in front of a mountain of Girl Scout cookies. The pile is enormous. Tagalongs and Samoas and Trefoils everywhere. I’m covered in chocolate, trapped in a pit of coconut peanut butter. I crawl out and open the furnace and start chucking the boxes in. The cookies scream for mercy. I’m laughing like a lunatic and then I snap out of it and I’m walking to the bus stop, giggling. People stare.

Don’t go out much anymore because God knows what I might do. Start throwing kids into the street as the bus pulls in. It’s enough to make a person cry, but I haven’t cried in a long time. Too much dark energy clogging my tear ducts.

I’m very tired.

I took enough Ambien to choke an ox. All I got was a twelve-hour blackout and an army of lumberjacks hacking at my brain when I came to. It’s white pain in there, so I wash down some Maxalt with a little vodka. I wait for the numbness. It’s like I didn’t sleep at all. I close my eyes, but it’s all dark energy, buzzing and throbbing.

I open my eyes and my mother’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, a cigarette dangling off her lower lip and her bathrobe exposing her blue-veined chest. Her breath reeks of Thin Mints. Between swigs of Smirnoff she undoes my braids and tugs off my Brownie vest and my skirt and unbuttons my blouse.

“Bath time,” she mumbles. Behind her the water is running into the tub. I’m nine years old. I don’t want my mother to wash me. Again. I pull back and her palm slams across my face. I cry.

I snap out of it. The door bell is slamming into my brain. Holy good God. How can anything be that loud?

I pull open the door and she’s just standing there, the perky girl from down the street. She’s wearing a white blouse and a green skort with a green vest to match. Her mother must love her very much. Her insignia and badges are sewn meticulously. They tell me she is “Becoming a Teen.”

She waves a paper in my face, quite sure of herself.

“Would you like to buy some cookies, ma’am?” She waits for my reply. I ponder the implications of “ma’am.” I stare out the door, see the streams of energy surrounding her like dark fingers.

“Of course,” I answer. “Please come in.” She hesitates, then crosses over into the living room. I smile. I take her by the arm and bring her over to the stairs where beneath us awaits the furnace.

I’m very tired, but I feel a sudden burst of energy, lovely and dark and deep.

The shovel was heavy. The oak shaft chafed his palms as Eustace heaved one shovelful after another, mounding the soil alongside the six-by-three-foot rectangle he was cutting into the dirt floor. Eustace shoveled and shoveled until his calluses tore off, leaving red lesions on his palms. He grimaced and kept shoveling.

In all his twenty-seven years as sexton at the Church of St. Michael in Allagash, Maine, he’d never had to work on Mother’s Day. But here he was, stuck in the church basement, digging. It was hotter than blazes down here. Even in May, the furnace was roaring just so sweater-laden old ladies could be all toasty-warm at the service. Sweat stung his eyes and ran down his arms, burning his torn-up hands.

He paused and spat. Damned old ladies, he thought. He bent back to his shoveling, cursing every blue-haired widow from Allagash to Bangor and back.

He especially cursed his cousin Johanna. Who the hell was she, anyway, with all her highfalutin’ talk about mitochondrial DNA and threatening a court order if he wouldn’t let her exhume his mother over in the Mount Hope Cemetery? Who’d appointed her the family genealogist? Wasn’t digging up the dead taking this family tree thing a bit too far?

Eustace paused and spat again. She was a real witch. The kind of woman he’d like to tie to a metal chair and nestle the blades of a garden pruner against her pinky fingers. Snip! Ladyfingers for lunch. More like witch fingers. He would do it carefully, attentively. Almost lovingly. That would get her attention. That would show her who was boss.

Okay, so she’d never dressed him up in girls’ clothes. She never locked him in his closet or beat him with a belt. She never insisted on bathing him in the tub even after he turned fifteen. And she never ran his girlfriends off, calling them filthy whores.

But she was a witch and she was going to get hers.

Eustace stood and parked the shovel. He laughed until his coughing choked him and he swiped spittle off his chin with the balled-up wad of snot he called a handkerchief. Maybe he should let her open that coffin in Mount Hope, after all. That would teach her. Then he could watch her expression when she came face-to-face with Canis lupus familiaris, otherwise known as Ol’ Yeller. Or whatever was left of him. Nothing but bones and rags of fur, most like.

That would save him all this trouble. But no, that wouldn’t do. He had to finish this job. He wasn’t back to digging more than a minute before the shovel tore through some canvas. He scraped off the dirt and pulled back the shroud and stared at the skeleton in the floral print dress with its skull detached from its spinal column.

Both of its pinky fingers were missing.

Eustace stared into the grave and smiled. He grabbed his back suddenly, where an old scar from her beatings protested all the digging.

“Hello, Mother,” he said, then grimaced. “It’s moving day.”

Marcella marched into the faculty room and pulled open the refrigerator door. She reached in and retrieved her Ziploc baggie and tossed it onto the counter. It seemed like three weeks since her bagel breakfast. She couldn’t wait to fix herself an avocado salad.

“Look,” Bob said to Christos. “It’s Marcella. All the way from the headmaster’s office.” They turned from their grading, chuckling.

“What’s that?” said Christos. “A clerical mess that needs untangling?” He grinned at Bob.

“Marcella!” they yodeled together.

“Someone has to mop up puke in the conference room?” Bob winked back.

“Marcella!” they teased, laughing.

“You guys,” she said, shaking her head. She took the avocado out of the baggie and sliced it. The stench slammed into her, rancid and raw, rank as a yak’s groin during mating season. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, then bent over and dry-heaved into the sink.

“Marcella?” said Bob. She bent back up, red-eyed and shaking, wiping bile from her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Bad avocado,” she said.

Christos was still at Murphy’s Pub on the Upper West Side at nine o’clock that night, nursing a margarita. He’d been there since five, and had only picked at his chicken Caesar salad. He felt a little woozy.

The usual Friday crowd was packed into the place, making a ruckus. But Christos sensed something different. He could feel eyes on him, moving methodically over his body. He had noticed the eyes earlier, large and dilated, staring out of the crowd. But they disappeared and he tried not to think about them.

“Not much of a dinner,” the eyes said, suddenly standing beside him. He looked down at the remains of his salad, then back up to the eyes. They seemed completely black, without irises. He gestured at the seat next to him.

“Guess not,” he said. He smiled as the seat squeaked, accepting its new occupant. A cool, pale hand brushed against his own.

“I’m always hungry,” his guest said. “Mind if I pick?” Christos shook his head. They chatted. As the night went on, it was as though they had climbed inside a well. The crowd receded, lost behind the swirl of his companion’s conversation.

Later, out in the back alley, Christos was unsure how they had gotten there. He didn’t care. He could feel hands moving over him, could smell the musk of dead leaves and decay coming from his lover’s neck. There was something else, though, something strong and wrong emanating from the lips of his eternal friend. Two words came to him just before fangs sunk into his neck and he collapsed into the black well of his killer’s eyes.

Bad avocado.

Across the river in Weehawken, Marcella was just sitting down to a late-night, intimate dinner. She smoothed the white tablecloth and lit the candles, pouring a little red wine into her glass and helping herself to the platter of liver and onions. She piled her plate high.

It was nice of Bob to escort her home after she hadn’t been feeling quite well. She could have taken the bus, of course, but there was something gallant in his offer of a ride. How could she refuse?

It was nice of him to see her to the door. It was nicer that he accepted the offer to come inside. Nicest of all was his willingness to come downstairs into the basement to help her find the candles.

He hadn’t run when he saw the abattoir tools or the stainless steel table with the blood gutters. He simply looked perplexed, his final expression as he turned toward her and got his skull crushed with a hammer.

Marcella felt close to Bob as she chewed on his liver. She was suddenly very thankful for the circumstance that had brought them together at last.

Bad avocado.

A red moon loomed overhead as Christian Fogler scaled the fence and dropped down beside the mausoleum. He was laughing. The sign on the gate always cracked him up. There were two signs, actually. The big one said, Gate of Heaven Cemetery. The small one warned, Gates Close at 4:30. Total bummer for anyone dying after 4:30, assuming they were paradise-bound.

Christian trotted up the hill toward the harvest moon. He didn’t bother to conceal himself. If anyone ever wanted proof that the dead came back to life, all they had to do was show up here at closing time. The workers woke up from their naps, started up their trucks, and cleared out faster than cats chasing one-legged sparrows.

Christian stopped by a hedge row and reached in for the shovel he put there yesterday. He pulled out a plastic trash bag and slung it over his shoulder. The large bolt cutters inside banged into his spine. He cursed and rubbed the spot. He jogged on.

He was going to pay his respects to one Mr. John C. Hobbs, interred yesterday in Section 26, Lot 549. He planned to relieve Mr. Hobbs of both his arms. They were worth three hundred dollars each. You’d be surprised how many companies paid top dollar for human remains. He needed the money so Amanda could go to the clinic and divest herself of their latest sexual faux pas.

Christian stopped by the elm next to Lot 549 and leaned the shovel against the trunk and dropped the bag. He reached inside for the cutters, then froze.

He heard an odd squeaking sound, like kids playing on rusty swings. The noise was coming from every direction. He’d face one way and the sound was behind him. He’d face back that way and the sound was behind him again.

“Wind,” he told himself, “rubbing tree limbs together.” He set the cutters beside the freshly filled grave and grabbed the shovel and started digging. Only the harvest moon watched, hanging above him like a fuzzy blob, oozing red. Except for the wind and the squeaking trees, the only other sound was the snick of the shovel as it cut into the earth.

He soon hit the coffin and cleared the dirt off the top. He pried it open with the shovel and pushed the lid up against the side of the pit. Mr. John C. Hobbs, eyes closed, was nestled in the satin lining of his walnut coffin, the gloss finish glowing red from the moon. His face was red too, as though he had suffered a sunburn on the way to eternity.

Christian reached up and grabbed the bolt cutters. He positioned them above Mr. Hobbs’ left arm and pulled on the handles, opening the jaws.

“Sorry, old sport,” Christian said. He slammed the cutters down just below the shoulder and pushed the handles together, slicing through the flesh and snapping against the arm bone. He gave one last push and found himself face down in the coffin.

Mr. Hobbs, suddenly, had grabbed the cutters with his free hand and pulled Christian down on top of him. His eyes, red and rheumy, glared back into Christian’s with a crinkle of smile at the corners.

Christian felt a cold hand on the back of his head, pushing him toward Mr. Hobbs’ wide open mouth. Christian screamed as his nose disappeared behind the gnashing teeth. First one eye, then the other, disappeared down the vacuuming maw.

The lid slammed shut and the coffin shook for a minute, then stopped.

Across the cemetery, the harvest moon washed the marble mausoleums in red light. The doors were swinging open with eerie squeaks, discharging their tenants. They would dig up their mutilated fellows.

They would all rendezvous at Lot 549. The gates opened tomorrow at 10:00. Until then, they would have their way with one Mr. Christian Fogler.

My father always told me never to be satisfied with what I had in this life. It was important to get ahead, he always said. As many times as I heard him say it, though, I have to admit I never paid much attention until he was screaming it while I was on the receiving end of a beating.

He’d take off his belt and make a loop out of it and grab it at either end. Then he’d yank the loop flat, making a cracking sound like a bullwhip. That sound always got my attention. That and the cowboy belt buckle shaped like a horseshoe. It left wedge-shaped red gashes on my back.

You see, my father didn’t have much himself. He tried to make a living out of sharpening scythes and mowers and such for them who took care of the lawns for the summer folks out by the point on Hilton Head Island. But as the years went by, there was less and less need for his services until finally he became a lawn cutter himself. It was a step down, he always said, but he prided himself on having the sharpest shears and mowers on the Island.

So, when I say my father beat me, don’t judge him too harshly. He was just trying to do what was right by me, even if it meant I might resent him until I got old enough to understand what he was going through. He wanted me to know that getting ahead required hard work and sacrifice.

I started my own storage business by putting fifty dollars down on an abandoned warehouse on the north side of the Island. Turns out a lot of the summer folks had more junk than they knew what to do with. Putting it all in storage was just the trick. And I was just the man to help them. I opened up a lot of warehouses over the years, and I did pretty well.

In the lean times I’d sell the contents of a warehouse right out from under the noses of the rightful owners. Then I’d burn the warehouse down for the insurance money. Sounds awful, I know, but it was all just part of getting ahead.

For example, take Cousin Buford here. He caught on to my little insurance fraud scheme, and tried to blackmail me. I keep him right here in the warehouse in this hat box. Look here. I’ll pop open the top. See how his eyes are bugged out and his mouth slacked open? That’s how he looked when I came at him with my father’s scythe. I’d open the plastic bag for you, but he’s still mighty ripe.

This shelf here? Over the years I’ve had a lot of partners who tried to cheat me and keep me down. So, all I could do was try to get ahead. Or heads, in this case. I keep them in pickle brine. I’d take one down for you, but my back is a misery these days.

And my father? I always promised I’d retire him. And one fine day in August that’s exactly what I did. He’s over there in that black pail filled with kitty litter.

Now you seem like a nice feller. But I can’t have state inspectors snooping around my warehouses finding things they aren’t supposed to find. So you just sit there and I’ll be right back. Oh, you can struggle against that tape I tied you to the chair with, but it’s the same stuff I put over your mouth. It’s pretty tough.

You may hear a snapping sound when I come back. It’s just something I like to do with my father’s belt. It’ll all be over soon.

Nothing personal. Just another day of getting ahead.

Malak slouched through the bowels of the keep, intent on his present purpose. Age had withered his limbs and twisted his face into a warped mask, but his loyalties remained strong. In the old days, his Master had trusted him with a most important task. He would ride out with the cavaliers and rescue the errant children fleeing the flaming remnants of their villages.

“You will be my angel,” the Master instructed. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”

He had been a good and faithful servant. Many hundreds of children had been brought to Ironoak and clothed and feasted there and kept warm. Now that job was given to another, and Malak devoted himself to more domestic duties. The kitchen was his domain, with the great feasting hall and the wine cellar.

Malak paused at the last ramp leading to the lowermost cells. His memory was playing tricks on him. He was supposed to say something. “The Master…” Malak strained, steadying himself against the wall. “The Master requests…” he stammered. He could not recall. Was it the wine he was supposed to bring? Was it some message for the steward? No, those things he could remember. The Master had made him commit it to memory, had made him repeat it. Now it was gone, flown down some neglected passageway of his mind.

Malak trudged on. He would not fail the Master. He would remember, come the moment. “The Master requests,” he repeated, “your presents.” No, that did not seem right.

He came to the bottom landing and chose one of the five doors at random and flung it open. Inside, the torches burned brightly, hurting his old eyes. He shielded his face, waddling into the room and standing there, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Children were playing all around him, running back and forth, squealing. Some were intent on the juggler tossing balls and bottles. Some sat hypnotized at the puppet show. Others brought empty plates to the banquet table, skipping away with full ones.

“The Master requests your presence!” Malak said. He grinned triumphantly. One child stopped and stared. A scowl overshadowed Malak’s face. He stared back at the child. There was something else. Something more. He pounded his flabby thigh with a wrinkled fist. He could not remember.

“May I help you, sir?” asked the child, who put down his plate and took Malak by the elbow, steadying him. He was all of nine years, with a brown mop of hair and clear brown eyes.

“Come with me,” Malak said. The boy complied. Malak brought him up the first ramp. The boy helped him along the way, his small soft hand nestled inside Malak’s claw. They reached the next landing, outside the wine cellar door on the kitchen level. Malak struggled to say what he was commanded to say, grimacing with the effort to remember.

“The Master requests your presence,” he said. Then he added, “At dinner! The Master requests your presence at dinner.” He shuddered with glee.

“But I am quite full, sir,” the boy replied. “I have already eaten breakfast, brunch, lunch, and mid-afternoon snack.” Malak looked down at him tenderly.

“No matter,” Malak answered. “Worry not.” Yes, Malak thought. Do not worry, little one. We can’t have you all tense and tough when you get to the table. Malak pushed open the door to the wine cellar and brought the boy in.

All that remained was to start the pots boiling and to find a nice vintage with which to serve the meal. Malak studied the boy’s neck, reached down with both hands and snapped it right above the Adam’s apple.

He tossed the limp body over his shoulder. It was the humane thing to do. Boiling water was scalding. He didn’t want the boy to have to suffer.