MicroHorror

The Loved One had been sequestered for two days now. The basement was long ago fortified by blood, sweat and cement, yet still he could hear the pitiful murmurings from everywhere upstairs. The lone basement door had been assaulted by languished raps from the fists of those unloved and he wondered if they searched for blood, flesh, or just an attentive ear. The Loved One lowered himself down on his haunches and cradled his head in a net of fingers formed by his bloodstained hands.

The twisted, broken remains of an Unloved lay motionless in the corner. The look on its masculine face was one not of pain or horror, but of despair. Its features remained in death as they had been when animated with life. The Loved One concluded that the Unloved were not the same as the Undead; there was a different imperative at play here, it seemed. The Unloved had to be dispatched, though. He assured himself of that. It might have turned away from its presented nature and smashed through his bones with an unknown rage. The mallet partnered in delivering the crushing blow lay silently at the thing’s feet. The Loved One cast a defeated glance upward and suddenly heard the murmurings from beyond his confinement transform into words, then sentences; the eloquence of the new chattering pulled him up and moving.

The Loved One kneeled and listened: “You have it all, don’t you? The words and deeds of those held most dear, while we rot with the decay of indifference, cast upon us by all we’ve encountered.” There was a pause here, and the Loved One was frightened to respond. How could he? He had never known a loss such as this, bereft of everything so as to one day become–“Are you there?” it said. Its feminine voice clear like a glass of water, each syllable and every word, formed and delivered perfectly. He looked around the expanse of the cellar. He deduced that soon, without any presentment of a helping hand, he was next to become one of them.

This is what will happen to you tomorrow. You’ll walk to your mailbox and glance right. Not intentionally, but one of those “automatic” things you do, things like swinging your arms, licking your lips, breathing, blinking, thinking absurd things and being comfortable with that.

You will see a small hole in the lawn. A thin, rustic chain is poured in with about eight inches left exposed. Several links have small, jagged protrusions that’ll surely cut anyone who grabs hold. You’ve never seen it before and don’t know how it got there. Intuition moves your thoughts closer though you stand fast, unmoving. Subconscious, ancient wisdom identifies what you see as a presentiment. You don’t know how to proceed.

You realize this at 10:37 a.m.

One minute and nineteen seconds later, you will be on your way back from the mailbox, this time searching left. A nervous chuckle, laughing at yourself for thinking the scene would disappear if only you subtracted your gaze and thoughts from it. This next part is very important: At that moment you will recall the most terrible thing you’ve never said. A dagger of malice you at one time held close, neatly tucked away upstairs that you may have acted on, but never told a soul. The knowledge of that escorts you over.

You will naturally survey the area, certain this is all a bad joke. Then you will remember this and conclude that it’s not. The chain does nothing supernatural when you kick it. It slides over like any other. A dumb, soulless, lifeless thing made for things both practical and cruel. Why should you fear it? It was poured in, so it can be pulled out, right? Your intellect tells you this. Will you trust it?

Moments later, your gloved hands wrap around the chain. You feel the prickles through the cowhide as you start to pull. Surprisingly, with little effort, it moves. You pull. Soon, a growing pool of chain is at your feet. It’ll feel like you’ve been tugging at this thing forever, but actually two minutes and fifteen seconds have elapsed. You know this scene has to end and an unnamed dread knots your stomach. But you can’t stop now. There is some kind of treasure at the end of this rainbow, however marvelous or terrible.

You will pull for another six minutes and three seconds. Then: the end. Fastened to the end of the chain is a padlock looped through the penultimate link, unfastened. You know it’s a padlock, but have never seen anything before like it. It is gold surfaced and oddly shaped. It will strongly call to mind a trapezoid but you know it’s not that. You’ll examine it, sliding it around with palm and fingers, ultimately realizing there is no–

What was that? You’d just heard something from below. The hole in your lawn. Without further thought, you’ll kneel and bend. Doubling over from half your height you will incline your ear to hear.

For the next eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds, you’ll listen to a nondescript voice detail the remainder of your life. During that time you’ll laugh out loud, shed three tears and shake your head in disappointment, smooth down your eyebrows with thumb and index, cry.

Twenty-three minutes later, you’ll step out next to a gray Honda Civic stopped behind the caution arm of a railroad crossing. The approaching train will be traveling at forty-five miles an hour, a good head of steam. You’ll think about your horrible secrets that are so loud you’ll drown out the admonishing cries of the passengers in the car beside you. Should you walk or run? Either way is preferable to life with new information. The train is coming.

You will start to walk, but the Honda’s driver is after you now so you run. You calculate six point five seconds to impact, but soon discover that was three seconds too lo–

I lick my lips to taste the blood. There’s more there. I’m still alive. The blindfold is fastened tight around my head and across my eyes. I smell… something. It’s a smell that calls to mind the concept of… falling away. Something once sweet now descending, spiraling toward decay. This smell is strong. It must be Wednesday.

My wrists are tied together; palms together like I’m posing a prayer. I haven’t prayed today. After five… I mean eight… it doesn’t… well, after so many weeks I think all the gods know I’m here by now. Wherever here is.

It’s happening again. It’s going on right now. The incision for today is across the small of my back, near the kidneys. It hurts so much but I can’t scream at all. I just… wail. I do this like a wounded beast, unable to understand why I became hunted in the first place. My whole body is a scabrous grid now. Cut up into sections. I know my blood is staining the floor. I feel it flowing still. I must be still alive. But that means something different to me now.

I feel his breath on my face. It is fetid, horribly wrong. When it slaps my face it just… stays there. The breath clings to my face and I know if I ever get out of here, on my face it will remain. But I know I’ll never know for certain.

The tip of a tongue flutters on my earlobe. Is it of man or creature? I hope the latter, so it will eat me up and out of this world. While I still bleed with life, I think I’ll make time to wonder what I’ve done to deserve this fate.

Tomorrow is Thursday.

Thursdays are worst of all.

Edna couldn’t sleep. She opened one lazy, sleep-encrusted eye to stare at the prosaic brown paneled wall across the way. She thought she heard the drain beckon her again, this time more insistent. Edna tossed and tumbled about, searching for a position that offered rest, respite.

She raged a mighty struggle inside her head whether to answer the call, or remain where she lay, tormented. This instance was the third in as many hours and each time Edna denied the impulse to rise.

It was too direct, too detailed with its chatter. The scenes tumbled over and over in her head.

Angered, Edna swiveled out of bed and plodded to the bathroom. She plucked the light switch upward, drowning her eyes in light. She looked over to the bathtub, her eyes focused on the small oval beneath the spout. Edna felt her face changing, twisting with revulsion in anticipation of whatever new nightmare soon to be revealed.

Edna kneeled down on the square brown rug next to the tub. She rested her elbows on the edge, leaning in with an attentive ear. Tears beat at the gates of her lashes, threatening to spill forth.

She lowered. Angled. Stretched.

What would be this new thing, realized?

Information received: “He’s just finished. He crept into Meagan’s room while she was asleep. Well, dreaming, in fact; something about Polar Bears and meadows. What juxtaposition, right? The wounds from earlier in the evening were still painful, but lessening in their heat. She must have thought his attention would now be centered elsewhere, but no. He laser beamed his intentions toward her once again, his darling of all her eleven years. She looked too much like an angel. He loves her so much. He would do anything…”

Edna thrust herself backward, banging the left side of her head on the cold floor. She hoped to lose consciousness. She wanted to relinquish any responsibility that coherence and understanding demanded of her. It was not to be so. She processed the details, was bonused with a throbbing noggin and a heavy heart.

What could she do? She was forty-five years old, five-foot-five at 110 pounds. Foul language was the only offensive she had at her disposal. That and another important question loomed: How could any information transmitted via drain be trusted? She certainly wasn’t crazy. She knew, intellectually, that bathroom drains can’t send forth information.

Edna shuffled over to the opposite wall, resting her head on the sink. She glowered at the bathtub, silently cursing whatever it was that lived inside it. It was a disrupter, but was it malign?

Losing the internal debate on whether to hear more, Edna crawled back toward the tub.

After hearing the latest horror, Edna got to her feet. She went to her closet and pulled down the large metal box secured by a Master combination lock. It was the first time she had opened it since first storing it there two years ago. She just looked at it a long moment, finally bringing it down and setting it on the bed.

The drain was right.

Though she was about to do the right thing, what Edna didn’t know, could not possibly understand, was the source of the drain’s voice.

Sandra Thomas, mother of Meagan Thomas and next door neighbor to Edna Davis, was bound by leather straps, her ankles, thighs, and wrists restrained. She was lying naked, face down in her bath tub, the exit wound from the pile driving force of a .45 caliber shell blooming like a flower; her lips were so close to the drain, in this repose she looked prepared for the softest kiss.

Christmas Eve, Alissa threw down the cordless phone before she heard the flatline on the other end. She thundered down the hall and into her parents’ room, tears and distress altering her eight-year-old face.

“Mommy, Daddy, an angel just called and told me Santa Claus was the devil and he’s going to come eat me!” Her eyes were wide and searching, bouncing from one grownup to the other; she used their impossibly crystal blue seduction to drag a soothing response from either of them. Alissa wanted, no, needed a refutation from those she trusted most.

Daddy was first at bat. “Honey, no. I don’t know who told you that, but it’s not true.” He scooped her up and brushed back the curly blond locks that had spilled from her yellow bow. Daddy pinched down her nose, wiping away fresh mucous. He raked her hair with his fingers, defusing this bomb with the tactile reassurance only a good parent can provide.

“His voice was all scary. He said you and Mommy were in on it. What does that mean?”

“It’s just someone playing a joke on little girls at Christmas time, sweetie.” Vanessa reached for her daughter. Alissa jumped in the king-size bed and wrapped her limbs like a bow around her mommy who was crying now too; she buried her face between her neck and shoulder, sobbing softly.

Alissa looked over her shoulder to see her daddy pick up the cordless phone, cycling through the caller ID. He pressed a single button twice, two beeps then a pause. Vanessa looked at him questioningly, her eyes swelling to the size of saucers.

“Mitch? What is it?” Vanessa swiveled Alissa around; now they were both alarmed.

“Nothing. Probably a wrong number. I don’t recognize it.” Mitchell returned the phone to its cradle like it was, indeed, a baby. His entire face was strained, skin pulled taut. Alissa thought the thick vein running from his scalp to his left eyebrow looked like a worm lying very still.

“What’s the number? What name?” Vanessa’s voice cracked during the first sentence, a cough to regroup, then the second.

In response, Mitchell scooped up Alissa and spirited her away down the hall.

“It’s okay, honey.” Mitchell eased Alissa back into her bed. “Look.” He cocked his head toward the phone on her bedside table. He picked it up, disconnected it. Mitchell held up the cord in triumph, and now Alissa thought his worm-like vein more resembled this gray thing unceremoniously tossed to the floor. “No more calls tonight. ’Kay? If that mean ol’ prankster calls again, he’ll have to deal with your daddy.”

She extended her arms for a send-off hug and Mitchell happily obliged; a squeeze; a forehead kiss. He closed the door halfway.

Minutes later, Mitchell and Vanessa’s precocious little girl skulked down the hall and crouched furtively by her parents’ cracked bedroom door.

Daddy, chuckling. “It was Judas. Damn it.”

Mommy, snickering. “Are you sure? Last I checked, he wasn’t allowed contact with us on this side. “

“If someone else calls from that infernal area code, I’ll inquire further.”

Infernal. She’d never had that word on a spelling test, but it didn’t sound like a good thing. Alissa then knew the angel was right. No need to hear more; Mommy and daddy knew all about it. She padded into the kitchen and withdrew a large kitchen knife from the utensil drawer closest to the sink. If Santa came and tried to harm her, she’d be ready.

Christmas Morning, Mitchell blinked away the oblivion of sleep to stare into Alissa’s smiling, blood smattered face.

He and Vanessa burst into her bedroom to find a man, clad in a Santa costume, lying dead and twisted on the floor. The bloody knife was buried into Ryan’s stomach, his life turned liquid as copious amounts of blood escaped his new cavity. Mitchell always told his brother, newly released from the state prison, that he joked a little too much at times.

The knife point hovered above her wrist. She never thought she could ever do such a thing, but it had to come out. It was wriggling beneath the surface of her flesh; it explored everything it seemed here lately.

Amanda migrated to the bathroom sink, sidestepping the tiny corpse. The pounding that began outside her front door grew louder with every heartbeat that drummed through her chest. Was this how it would end? She wasn’t sure. Not yet. She looked up and into the mirror above the faucet to see the same haggard features: an aquiline nose, black, deep set eyes, and a chiseled jaw that should belong to the opposite gender. She loathed the entire image so much that she once again set about the task of opening herself and dragging the thing out of her.

The fierce pounding began, thunderous. It was a steady cadence machine-gun-like in its consistency. Amanda ignored the hammering and raised the blade. Never averting her gaze from her reflection, she slowly brought the knife down to her forearm. She sliced. Slowly, patiently, Amanda ran the knife back and forth across her flesh like a logger earning his wages. She didn’t scream or wail, but they fell; tears cascaded down her blocky cheeks to co-mingle with blood rapidly filling the sink. The sound of her efforts was like tearing all the paper in the world, never an end in sight.

She stopped when the pounding ceased. It was only a moment, then it resumed. Louder, more intense and, Amanda thought, angry. She couldn’t worry about that now. There was still more work to do. She broke her concentration to glance over to the wall above the toilet.

“Think of God’s goodness,” the picture spoke. The words were displayed in cloud-like configurations ironically beneath a cloudy blue sky. Amanda returned to her task and worked even as she feared the front door may explode at any moment.

Forty-five minutes later, Amanda gathered the courage to peek down at herself now. She had managed to sever three fingers, remove the entire flesh from one forearm, and had started on her upper thigh. She was becoming the creature she knew she was while attempting to destroy the one within. It moves, she thought. It meanders and hides so quickly.

Suddenly, the knocking stopped. Amanda waited a few minutes, but there was no reassertion of its presence, filling her ears and falling in step with her own troubled heart rate.

She’d never find it. There were too many pathways within the body for it to hide. She left her mirrored self and limped out of the bathroom. She dragged her wounded leg, leaking blood and other liquids from the hole picked out by the knife. Her thumb and pinky finger rested alone and abandoned on her stomach which would have been next. The exposed bone of her forearm seemed to curse her for the coming infections, but despite the silent madness of her physical processes, Amanda somehow realized that the Worm could be explained, and understanding rested on the outside.

Amanda reached out her two-fingered hand and swept open the front door. Of course, she thought. No one was there to help her get it out. The Worm might possibly stay buried inside her until she died. Amanda backed away from the door, collapsing onto her couch, blood soaking the fabric turning the furniture into a sponge.

Amanda felt the life drain away in degrees. It was a steady leak that reduced the world’s dimensions until there was oblivion; sweet, sweet nothingness as she heard only one thunderous ring.

Downstairs, Dr. Robert Hardaway was on the phone.

“Amanda, I’ve been at your door for the last hour; will you please let me in?” The doctor paused, exasperated. He continued, “Amanda, there is no monster living inside you. Whatever you did, I’m sure it was a mistake. Amanda! I’m coming back up. Please let me in!”