MicroHorror

I mean, really, with a name like Grendel (Grendel, for crying out loud!), what else could I turn out to be but a freakin’ monster? What was wrong with Jack? Or Bill? Or Tom, Dick or Harry? But no, no nice, normal, regular name for me; instead I get Grendel the Gruesome (well, I added the Gruesome for effect, but you get the idea).

Of course, being seven-foot-tall, with spindly, bent legs, claw hands, a ratty mass of hair, a lumpy, misshapen body and a face that missed being attractive by oh, just a kilometer or two, didn’t help either. And this was when I was still a child, my supposedly “cute years.” Some kids grow like a weed; me, I grew like a deformed, noxious one in some forgotten corner of the devil’s garden. My hygiene wasn’t good either, and the circle of flies that hovered around me all the time didn’t help my popularity in school.

Kids can be so cruel, you know. Calling me horrid names became an art form for them, each brat trying to outdo the previous one. So what could I do? I killed them all on the playground one cloudy afternoon at recess. I mean, they shouldn’t have made fun of me during my awkward adolescence; even a monster has his limits. To hide my crime, I ate as many and much of them as I could hold (they were delicious in a steak tartare sort of way).

Well, school and police authorities are so quick to judge, although as the only one left standing and covered in their blood, I guess the evidence did sort of point toward me, so I took off to hide in the nearby swamps until the scandal blew over and everybody forgot about it.

Which no one did, so I remained in the swamps, growing up alone (except for my nut job of a mother), just another nasty and vengeful young punk with a taste for senseless violence and human flesh. My mother blamed it on the heavy metal music and Internet porn.

One day, while tooling through the swamps, I discovered a fancy castle on the edge of the bog, which turned out to be just full of tasty warriors and handmaidens (I had been working out daily in my room, lots of time on my hands you know, so I was dangerously powerful by then and even taller I think; hygiene and appearance remained about the same). Nighttime was the right time for my little search-kill-and-gorge missions.

I was finally happy for the first time in my life, hitting my stride as a tough young punk (well, tough young punk monster), tasting the good life (pun very much intended), and scaring the hell out of the castle dwellers. I was finally somebody, respected (well, feared) and noticed (actually reviled, but still, some attention is better than no attention after years in the swamp).

Then, just when things were rocking along, this pretty-boy Geat comes striding in and decides to play hero, casting me as the monster in his little melodrama (no surprise there).

So one night as I’m tiptoeing around the sleeping warriors (as best I can tiptoe) and peeking under the handmaidens’ bed clothes, this self-deputized Geat (I prefer to call him Geek), leaps up like some undercover cop and proceeds–now get this–to rip my arm off! (What kind of fighting strategy is that? And this guy is the hero?)

Now if that doesn’t just ruin your day, I don’t know what does, and, get this, while I’m bleeding like crazy, he’s beating on me mercilessly with the bloody stump of my own arm! And they call me a monster.

So there was nothing left to do but run like hell and tell my mother on him before I pass out and boy, will he ever be sorry, because my mother is a real monster.

Everyone told me that Lara was poison. I didn’t know how right they were.

“But such pretty poison,” I joked. How could those perfect lips of Lara’s be anything but sweet pleasure? They were all jealous, I decided. They thought that Lara was just using her potent sex appeal to get close to me, so she could weasel company secrets out of me and sell them to the highest bidder. And they would go for a huge sum, in the millions most likely.

I gave her idle tidbits here and there, probably more than I should have, but really, Lara was erotic beauty personified. I was totally captivated by her, and our age difference only made the attraction stronger. And she knew expertly how to make me feel young and alive. It seemed like a good tradeoff.

Lara really liked kissing, doing it often during the work day when we could and constantly during sex. She was very skilled at it, and now I know why. The French kissing eventually built up the toxicity from her saliva inside me as she had planned from the beginning of our relationship.

One night, after a “working late” session at the office, I collapsed, feeling something burning all through me, paralyzing me. By then I’d revealed too much confidential company information to Lara, the lovely Lara.

Lara slowly got dressed, letting me watch her one last time, and it was always a good show. She had a virulent poison that coursed through her veins; it was part of her biology, she told me. Maybe some mutant gene at work, or the result of growing up near a closed secret government site where biological warfare had been tested back in the 1960s.

Lara had developed an immunity to the unknown, deadly strain of poison as she grew up. Much like a black widow’s poison doesn’t affect the spider itself, but it sure does her mate.

“Why?” I gasped, hardly able to speak coherently, my body rigid and rapidly going numb. “I… told you… what you wanted… to know.”

“Why not?” Lara laughed, and I knew the poison had affected more than just her metabolism. Then she bent over, took my face in her hands and gave me one last kiss.

As a child, Peter had always been told that those strange, frightening noises at bedtime were just “things that go bump in the night” and that had satisfied him. He didn’t ask what those things were as most trembling little children would have done. Or beg to sleep with mommy and daddy. He wasn’t really scared, as his imagination was fairly limited and practical, so monsters and beasties weren’t something he thought about. Noises were noises, and that was it.

Now those curious sounds were back, some twenty years later, in a different house, a different bedroom, and Peter was a grown man. But they were the same noises, rumbling through his expensive Bel-Air home, awakening him. Peter sighed, got up, walked in into his dark bathroom and flicked on the light where he accidentally encountered the source of the noises, the “things that go bump in the night.”

It was an odd creature with a misshapen head and mushed, nonhuman face. One of its arms was way out of proportion, too heavily muscled and so long that it dragged on the ground offsetting its balance while the other arm was tiny and serpentine. Small, short, bandied legs ended in petite feet while a massive barrel chest was barely supported by those weak legs. Sprouts of wild hair grew here and there, and its eyes were orange and magenta. The creature, top-heavy and thus clumsy, stumbled hard into the bathroom’s tile wall at Peter’s surprise entrance.

Peter, however, was not frightened in the least; momentarily startled, yes, as one would be in seeing a large spider on the wall, but that was all. His practical mind kicked into gear and Peter saw an opportunity. Calmly, he greeted the panicked creature in his slickest, smoothest, talent agent manner. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. No problem; it’s just me, Peter. That… shoulder of yours okay? You took quite a hit there. Course, big, strong guy like you, that’s probably nothing, nothing at all, right? Let’s go into the kitchen, sit down, have a nice chat, maybe some coffee; that sound good?”

The creature followed him meekly like a family dog. In the kitchen, Peter learned its name was Ort. Peter began peppering Ort with endless questions about show business experience, acting lessons, telling him what a big star he could become, with the right representation, of course, and stressing how the film industry was just perfect for a guy like Ort. Ort liked Peter’s enthusiasm.

Peter assured Ort that he would be the biggest thing to hit horror movies since, well, ever. And Ort could stay right here, in Peter’s house, until all the contracts were signed after which, Peter pounded home, Ort would be the talk of Tinseltown. Ort wondered how a town could be made out of tinsel.

By breakfast they were fast friends, eating Captain Crunch cereal together while Peter talked on the phone, setting up meetings with John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Rob Zombie and countless others. After all, Peter said in his best salesman voice, a real monster who didn’t need make-up or CGI enhancement and had a unique look in Hollywood was a real find, one who wouldn’t be without a starring vehicle for long.

All Ort needed, Peter reassured him as he guided those gnarly, nubby fingers to sign a representation document, was a sharp and motivated talent agent, and Ort had that now. A lifetime management contract with Peter, who had an imagination only for business. As dawn broke, it was difficult to tell who the real monster in the kitchen was.

“The phone call is coming from inside the house.”

Those words from the police officer on the other end of the phone sent an electric shock through Michelle’s nervous system. The lunatic who had been frightening her with phone calls all night was right here in the house with her.

Michelle was sixteen and on her first babysitting job for this new family to the neighborhood, the Woodhouses. Their four-year-old son, Nicholas, was sleeping upstairs. Otherwise the house was empty. Well, apparently not.

The officer on the phone said he was dispatching a car and told Michelle to get out of the house immediately, but Michelle wasn’t really listening at this point. She hung up the phone while the officer was still talking, took a deep, cleansing breath, steadied her nerves and rushed into the immaculate kitchen, looking for a weapon. Michelle grabbed the biggest knife she could find in the cutlery block. She had to go upstairs and get Nicholas before she could flee the house.

The phone rang again, and Michelle knew it was him, the stalker, the maniac, maybe the killer, who wanted to prolong her torture before he finally revealed himself and did God-knows-what to her. Was he hiding upstairs or downstairs in some dark corner, Michelle wondered, shaking despite her attempts at self-control.

The second floor was pitch black and so far away from the end of the grand stairway as Michelle slowly began to climb the steps, hugging the wall for support, holding the knife out in front of her. Then, she heard a noise; did it come from Nicholas’s room? Michelle couldn’t determine, but it fueled her desire to get Nicholas and run out of this house as fast as her legs could carry the both of them.

A scream, well, a gurgling kind of sound, came from the second floor, and it propelled Michelle to run up the rest of the steps, stumbling in the darkness, then bursting into Nicholas’s room, which had its lights on now, waving the knife wildly about like a mad woman, hoping she might hit the stalker. But she found something very different from what she had expected.

The stalker lay dead on the carpet, blood oozing from a thousand separate, wicked, deep cuts. His eyes were frozen open in unbelieving horror.

Nicholas, his little eyes glowing red like a demon’s, hovered two feet over his bed in a sitting posture, a chilling smile on his pretty face. He telekinetically continued juggling a dozen dripping razor blades, circling them in the air with a tiny finger. He turned to Michelle and said, “I don’t like strangers in my house.” Michelle dropped the knife and began trembling uncontrollably.

“I’m thirsty,” Nicholas continued calmly. ”Bloodletting always makes me thirsty. How about some juice?”

A serial killer had San Francisco in his bloody grip. Six young girls had been slain in a telltale ghastly fashion over the last seven weeks, one every week. The seventh week wasn’t over yet, so police were frantic to prevent number seven from happening.

The serial killer, dubbed the Drainer by the press, was very methodical in his murders. Always white girls in their twenties, always abducted on the streets at night, always sexually tortured, and last, his motif, always drained of every ounce of blood in their bodies. The girls were conscious during it, so they were no doubt acutely aware as their life was slowly pumped out of them, drop by drop. The vats of blood were then left on the doorsteps of blood banks throughout the city.

Somewhere near Geary Street, the Drainer found victim number seven. Pretty, dark hair, nice body, very pale. He smiled to himself. Soon she would be even paler. White as a corpse, in fact. This girl was foolish to be walking alone on the dark, deserted streets this late at night. She was asking for it. And he would be glad to give it to her.

When Rachel Heywood came to, she was bound securely and spread-eagled to a stark metal bed frame in a dingy one-room dive. Naked, of course.

Marvin–the Drainer’s real name–stood creepily at the foot of the bed, apparently waiting for her to wake up. “Ready for some fun?” he asked in a low, monotonous voice, a sickly smile on his face.

“You have some nerve,” Rachel shot back angrily.

This was new. ”Girly, you can scream or beg, but no dialogues,” Marv replied harshly.

Rachel continued unaffected. “We don’t like what you are doing. Moving in on our territory. And draining those poor girls for nothing.”

“Look–” Marv moved to the head of the bed. “It’s your turn now, and I can promise you won’t enjoy this. And there is nothing you can do, no way to stop me.”

“Really?” Rachel cocked an eyebrow at him. “Last chance to give up and turn yourself into the police.”

“Girly,” Marv took off his belt, doubling it over carefully. “You’re a real nutcase. You’re tied up and helpless, and about to be tortured like you have no idea. You’ll scream for death soon enough.”

“Helpless?” Rachel replied. “You mean this?” With a slight tug, she snapped the nylon cord that bound her wrists to the bed frame. Then she freed her legs the same way.

“What the–” Marv began, but Rachel sat up and, grabbing his dirty T-shirt, flung him across the small room, hard into the wall, cracking the plaster.

Marv groaned as he collapsed to the floor, plaster crumbling down on him. Rachel stood up and tossed Marv up on the bed like he was a rag doll.

She slipped quickly back into her clothes. “I gave you the option to give yourself up. But you didn’t. So now, we take care of you.”

Marv could feel two of his ribs were broken. “Who is ‘we?’ You’re alone.”

Rachel leaned down, just inches from his face. Her eyes were blood red, and she had long fangs. “My friends are outside. They’ll come inside in just a moment. We will all have our turn on you.”

“Who–what–are you?” Marv sputtered in sudden panic.

Rachel smiled a horrible smile with her sharp fangs. “A vampire. We drain victims because we need to survive. You did it for no reason, just your own sick sport. We don’t like competition or attention to our habits. And you wasted all that delicious, young, warm blood.” She held him forcefully down on the bed, her fangs now at his neck. “It’s your turn now, and I can promise you won’t enjoy this,” she mimicked.

As she tore into his throat, other dark shapes came into the room, eyes glittering red.

Rumor had it that a werewolf was terrorizing Kent county, down near the English Channel. That was what Dr. Pierpont Rumor, noted demonologist, scholar and monster slayer, decided after examining the grisly remains of a young female.

“Yes,” Rumor commented to his trusty, towering, silent manservant, Innuendo Jones. “This lycanthrope is left-handed, favors his right leg, an old injury, no doubt, and attacks his prey in a very telling way.”

Jones nodded slowly, impassively.

They both knew who it was. Keller. Keller was back. You just can’t keep a good, or bad, werewolf down.

The following night a full harvest moon rose huge over the foggy countryside. Everything was still, even the crickets were silent. A long female figure came walking down a winding, gravel road. Somewhere in the woods the scent of prey was picked up. The beast began his loping run, on the hunt, bloodlust rising.

The solitary walker paused, adjusted her pony tail, hearing the rustlings in the thicket. As though fired from a cannon, the werewolf exploded from the forest, lunging forward, claws and fangs extended, ready for the savage kill.

But then things took a decidedly different turn. The young woman didn’t move, didn’t flee, scream or express any panic or terror. She just quietly turned from flesh and blood into silver metal.

The werewolf slammed into her as though he had struck a brick wall, which in one sense he had, except this unmovable wall was a living being made of solid metal. The werewolf was hurled backwards, bruised, with his fur burning where he had made contact with the figure.

Silver. The metal girl was made of silver. Deadly to werewolves, vampires and witches.

She leaned over and slapped the werewolf on the snout several times, like a bad dog, which caused his fur to smolder. The force of the blows knocked him face down hard to the gravel. “Your killing spree is over, Keller,” said the girl with a slight metallic quality in her voice.

“Indeed.” Dr. Rumor suddenly appeared on the road, Innuendo Jones at his side. “Thank you, Emily, for delivering this monster to us.”

Emily Scandal, the third member of Dr. Rumor’s team, had the ability to transform herself from flesh to any metal she had touched. An odd Nazi experiment had caused this to happen, something Third Reich science had not envisioned, but now cursed themselves for creating such a powerful being who was their sworn enemy in October of 1940. It was child’s play for Emily to escape them then.

Keller was an SS terror agent, using his werewolf curse to kill and unnerve English civilians. Put the Englanders on edge with the thought of centuries-old monsters roaming their homeland.

The werewolf looked up at the trio. In pain and trapped, he snarled angrily and leaped forward for Dr. Rumor, desperate to rip flesh and taste blood.

But Innuendo Jones raised and fired the antique revolver he held, sending a silver, blessed bullet cleanly through the werewolf’s heart. The beast collapsed without a sound, slowly transforming back into a bloody and very dead Hans Keller.

Emily changed back to flesh, and Innuendo blew away the smoke from the gun’s barrel.

“One Nazi agent stopped in his tracks for good this time,” Dr. Rumor commented.

“His very hairy tracks,” Emily added wryly.

Innuendo Jones just smiled.

Kevin had never seen anything like this on eBay before. It was a soul. A human soul. Someone was offering a soul, trapped apparently in an ancient-looking green bottle according to the posted photo. He could see a wispy figure peering out of the bottle, a pale, female face, pretty, young, with long hair. The description said it was the soul of a nineteen-year-old Irish girl from the 17th Century.

The bidding had been furious among several bidders obviously in competition. BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 were in desperate one-upmanship now; the others were probably just horny guys hoping to purchase a hot naked chick in a bottle, even one in a ghostly state. They had dropped out early when the bidding go too intense and too high. BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 were into the tens of thousands of dollars at this point. Kevin decided to get in on this before the time ran out, which was soon. Kevin had plenty of money, trust fund, but very little sense.

He entered a quick bid, a very high one just to declare his winning intentions. He seldom lost at money contests. Counter bids from BEEZ666 and GODBOY3 came in nearly immediately, and it became a tight race until the Time Left finally ran out. Kevin’s final bid of $80,001 won.

Cool, he thought to himself. Now he owned a real, honest-to-goodness human soul, captured in a bottle since the 1600s. This was something worth a lot of money, something really special. Not that money meant very much to Kevin, except that he could get whatever he wanted, whatever momentarily caught his fancy, with it.

Soon the package arrived from UPS. Kevin excitedly torn it open and carefully unwrapped the musty-smelling, heavy emerald bottle. The ghostly girl swam around inside it, pressing the sides with her pale, sweet face and tiny palms. Kevin turned it around and around, and the soul kept moving to stay focused on him.

She was beautiful in a phantom sort of way and naked which aroused Kevin a little. She smiled attractively at him and pushed uselessly against the wax spout at the bottle’s top, obviously wanting Kevin to remove it. She mouthed ‘please’ and clasped her hands to her heart, begging to be set free.

Kevin considered the request and the bottle for a long while, watching her naked body pressed tightly against the smooth green glass. “All right,” Kevin said, “but if I let you out, do you promise not to fly away and to go back into the bottle when I tell you to?”

The soul girl nodded earnestly, crossing her heart, and it looked like translucent tears streamed down her cheeks. Kevin broke the centuries-old wax, and the little white wisp flew quickly out. As soon as she cleared the bottle’s rim, and new air from the 21st Century struck her, she transformed in size, color and hideousness into a massive red demon.

“Who–” Kevin stuttered, stumbling backwards, stunned and suddenly fearful. “Who are you?”

“My name is Legion,” the demon bellowed in a hellish voice, “for we are many.” And then it bit off Kevin’s head.

Nikki found the old butcher knife, a long, heavy one with a worn handle, stabbed deeply into the countertop in the old, long-deserted shack on her grandmother’s property, down near the chicken coop and faded storage sheds. It must have been there for decades, ever since the shack was shut up after something bad happened when grandmother was just a little girl.

Since Nikki was only 14 and slender, it took some real work to pull it lose. But after she finally got the knife free, Nikki waved it around, letting the light from the single window bounce off it.  It gleamed and glowed in the shaft of sunlight like something come to life.

Nikki began to feel different as she held the knife, and she gripped its handle tighter. The knife felt really good in her hand; heavy, dangerous, but right somehow. It made her feel powerful.  And very sure of herself, for the first time in her young life. Her controlling older boyfriend certainly didn’t. Josh just forced her do things she didn’t want to do, sexual things usually, and she did them because, well, he was a senior, and Nikki was lucky to have Josh as a boyfriend, he constantly reminded her.

She walked out of the shed into the sunshine, swishing the knife like a sword, which in comparison to her size, it nearly was. Nikki felt invincible; it was like the knife was filling her with hot, raw energy. She liked the feeling. Nikki liked it a lot.

A marmalade cat slinked over and circled around Nikki’s bare legs, meowing for attention. Nikki reached down and cut the cat’s tail off in one quick slice. The cat shrieked and took off running, blood pumping from the wound where its tail had been. The tail twitched on the ground. Nikki didn’t feel bad about it. She knew she should, but she didn’t. Nikki just smiled and squeezed the knife handle tighter.

Then Bradley, the annoying eight-year old who lived across the road, showed up, saying, “You’re in trouble now, Sickie Nikki. I’m telling your grandma what you did; I saw you do it. You’re gonna go to jail, maybe juvie, for years, I bet.”

Nikki lashed out with the knife and cut Bradley’s nose off. He stood there stunned for a moment until blood gushed out of the hole in his face and spilled down his T-shirt. He screamed like a gurgling banshee and took off running home, a blood trail marking his hasty retreat. He ran from the back yard to the front, and then started across the road before collapsing to the gravel.

Nikki felt even better this time. Stronger. In complete control. Brimming with authority. The knife seemed an extension of her arm, of herself. She could hear it, feel it, in her head, praising her, coaxing her on, making her feel warm and happy. She liked how she felt.

An idea popped into her head, or maybe the knife voice spoke it to her. She found her bicycle and rode off towards town, just a half-mile down the road, still clutching the knife as she steered the bike. She would find Mrs. Handley, her earth science teacher, who gave Nikki a C last semester and kept her off the honor roll. Let’s see how well Mrs. Handley could demonstrate her stupid science experiments with four, maybe six, fingers missing

Then she laughed to herself at what she thought of to do next. Josh would never guess what she was going to cut off of him. But he certainly wouldn’t be forcing her to do sex things anymore.

Nikki realized that she had a lot of stops to make.

About the twelfth time he stabbed his now-dead girlfriend Gwen, Gary wondered at what point he should stop. It had to be a special number, a number that would have meaning to him. Let’s see, he mused, continuing to stab Gwen routinely, his anger spent after the first four or five killing jabs. Gwen was twenty, so that could be an appropriate number; oops, too late, up to twenty-two already. How about twenty-six, for October 26, the day they first met. No, too corny, Gary decided. Maybe twenty-nine, for November 29, the day he saw her having lunch with James, the handsome guy in her office. Laughing and touching his arm like intimate friends. Gary knew how to deal with her duplicitous betrayal. How could she? He loved Gwen completely, totally, compulsively. And this was how she treated his all-consuming devotion. Passed twenty-nine now and heading towards thirty-three. Then the right number occurred to Gary. With a smile, he hacked seven more savage wounds and stopped. Forty. Twice Gwen’s age, which represented her two-faced nature. Perfect. Time to clean up and head home for some television maybe. Gary remembered Babe was on cable tonight. 

“Tie her wrists to the punishment pole.” Two men secured the struggling slip of a girl to the stake and stepped away. “On this day, the tenth of October, 1692, I, Jonathan Binder, witchfinder, do decree Bethany Pells to be a witch and sentence her to death by stoning.”

The village’s population stood around Bethany in a great circle, afraid to get any closer. Binder walked bravely to the stake and whispered in Bethany’s ear, “You should have given yourself to me when you I requested it; then your painful fate, this witchcraft lie, could have been avoided.”

Bethany looked up at his smug face and spit in it.

Binder stomped away in anger, wiping his face and yelling, “Pass sentence. Stone her!”

Hands picked up stones, rocks and pebbles from the rough ground and flung them with good accuracy at the captive girl. Bethany was bleeding and bruised, hanging now from the leather thong. Her weight was too much for the old thong, cut by stones hitting it as well, and it snapped. Bethany tumbled to the ground, groaning as she fell on the rocks.

Then, miraculously, Bethany struggled to her feet. The village murmured as one, and Binder glared furiously at her. “Finish the sentence!” he roared.

But now Bethany’s hands were free. Crooking her arms, she spread her witching fingers wide and chanted low, summoning an ancient power. The stones all around her began to vibrate, then rose inexplicitly into the air and flew with savage speed and killing force into the astonished villagers.

Many dropped dead outright, while others fell gravely hurt or crippled. A handful hobbled off as fast they could, howling in pain. Bethany faltered, falling against the pole for support. She smiled a bloody smile through cut lips, and using the last of her fading strength and power, hurled a pumpkin-sized rock to cave in Binder’s head.

Then Bethany collapsed dead on the killing field.