MicroHorror

They came into the open area of the warehouse where two men scurried about. One of these men fiddled with a video camera while the other tended a chair placed in the center of the room. It was an electric chair. Carter said, “Is that it?”

“Yep, that’s her,” said the director. “Nice, huh?”

They walked over to the chair, and the director tapped the man on the shoulder. He looked up. “This is Hanley, our special effects man,” the director said. Hanley nodded, shook Carter’s hand, and then returned to his business. The director pointed to the cameraman.

“That’s Lewis. Lewis, this is Carter.” Lewis looked up, mildly annoyed at the interruption, and waved. The director shrugged. “And that’s it,” he said. “That’s the crew. As I explained earlier, we only have Hanley for about an hour today, so I want to get the special effects shot finished. How’s that costume feelin’ on ya?”

Carter looked down at his pinstriped prison uniform, circa 1920. “Feels good.”

“Good. Go ahead and take a seat.” Carter sat down in the chair. Hanley appeared before him and secured his ankles and wrists to it with leather straps. The wrist restraints were tight. Carter grimaced. “I know they’re snug,” the director said, “but I want to start with a close-up before we widen to an establishing shot. After we get the take, we’ll loosen them up.”

“All right.”

Hanley slid the metal cap down on Carter’s head and secured it. He said, “That was easy.”

“This could end up being the easiest one yet,” said the director.

“How would you like me to act in this take?” Carter said. “Violently? You want a struggle?”

The director grinned. “Do whatever comes naturally.”

Lewis drew near, instrument in hand, and when the director called for action, he swooped low over the restraints for several seconds as Carter flexed his fingers. “Cut,” the director said. “Nice.”

“Can you loosen these straps now?” Carter said. He laughed uneasily.

“Sure, just one second.” The director looked up as Hanley rolled a small control panel adorned with levers and knobs into the room. He plugged the chair into it.

“Okay, so how do you want to do this?” he said.

“What’s the normal voltage they use? Two thousand? We probably want something more dramatic than that, so let’s go with four thousand.”

“Hey, guys,” Carter said in a louder voice. “The straps. My hands are turning blue.” No one looked at him. They seemed to have forgotten his existence entirely.

“Four thousand it is. You want to tape his eyes?”

“No, he wants to see if they pop out, and at the very least, he wants to see the blood. He was specific about that.”

“All right, fuck this. I quit. Let me out of this chair. Now.” Carter’s voice cracked a little despite his efforts to speak firmly. He was squirming in the chair and had begun to sweat.

Hanley said, “You want to put a wet sponge under his cap?”

“No. If his head catches fire, that will be even more of a bonus.”

“Let me out of this goddamn chair right now!” Carter was fighting the restraints, his face flushed and dripping with sweat.

Hanley looked at him dispassionately. “Maybe we should record this, too. He might like all this struggling.”

The director considered. “You’re right. He likes to see a struggle. He might pay us more than fifty thousand dollars. Lewis?”

“I’m already gettin’ it,” Lewis said from behind his camera.

The director nodded. “Okay, positions, everybody. Get that microphone in close. I want to hear the sizzling clearly.”

“Holy God, holy Jesus! Wait a second! Jesus Christ!”

The director looked at the screaming, sweating, struggling figure in the chair, and then he nodded at Hanley, who stood with his hand poised over a lever on the control board. “Action,” he said.

Hanley pulled the lever.

• Copyright: © 2009 Trinity Martin

He lived in a giant hole in the mountainside like a human gopher, and a makeshift blanket fashioned from bear hide comprised the door. When the kid staggered up, the hermit emerged from behind the ragged cloth flap and eyed him warily. They were a wretched pair in the blistering sunlight–the hermit dirty, bearded, and clothed in the skin of dead animals like a prehistoric caveman and the kid draped with torn and bloodstained shoddy clothes. They both stank.

“Mister,” said the kid, “ye think you could spare a man a sip of water?”

The hermit watched him with his black eyes and scratched himself. He nodded. “I reckon,” he said. He jerked a thumb at the hut and the kid staggered inside.

He sat down in the corner while the hermit slid a bucket to him, and the kid took three great dippers of water and gulped them. The liquid was coarse and brown. The kid coughed, spat, and wiped his mouth. “I thank ye.”

“You runnin’ from somethin’,” said the hermit.

“Ye askin’ me or tellin’ me?”

“You runnin’,” said the hermit as he twisted with his shabby beard. He eyed the kid’s shirt. It was stained red and there was blood running from it, and the kid reached a hand to the spot and pressed down. He grimaced as he looked around the ragged tenement.

“Ye ain’t got nothin’ to eat? I ain’t eat nothin’ in two days.”

“I might,” said the hermit, “Stay with me. Stay here with me and ye can eat. Rest up. Tend yer wounds and such. Supper’s later.”

“Ye ain’t got nothin’ I can eat now?”

“Naw,” cried the hermit. “Naw, I ain’t.” He crouched on his haunches and began to rock back and forth rapidly as he eyed the kid.

The kid nodded. “All right, then. Ye don’t mind if I stay here a while?”

“No, I don’t. You lay on down. I’ll wake ye for supper.”

“Well, I thank ye.”

The kid lay down on the ground and closed his eyes as the bullet hole in his chest throbbed. He had just settled in with the rhythm of his heart when the hermit produced a massive club from somewhere in the corner and brought it down across the kid’s forehead. There came a cracking sound, and the kid saw a flash of light then everything went dark. All was black for what seemed to be a long time, and then he felt a shard of pain as pure as new fallen snow rip through his shoulder. He sat up and screamed until the hermit clubbed him down again.

Some time passed, and the kid began to stir once more. His head throbbed as if it had been kicked by a mule and his shoulder pulsated with agony as he lay there blinking in his delirium. Slowly the room began to come into focus, and he saw the hermit before him, hairy and blood-soaked, stoking a fire. The kid tried to sit up, but pain drove him back down. Smoke filled the place, and the kid groaned and coughed raggedly.

“Ye son of a bitch,” he wheezed. “What’d you do to me?” The hermit turned and grinned, revealing a mouth so devoid of teeth it looked like a blackened mineshaft.

“About time ye woke up,” said the hermit. He pointed a stick at the kid. “How’s yer head?”

The kid tried to sit up again, and again he failed. “I’m goin’ to kill you,” he said. He looked past the hermit to the fire and drew a sharp breath. Skewered on a stick there and rotating above the flames was a severed human arm, sizzling and smoking. The fingers were curled and blackened like an enormous dead spider, and the stump of the arm dripped cold drops of blood that sizzled in the fire. The kid looked down and screamed. His arm was gone.

“Supper’s on,” said the hermit.

• Copyright: © 2009 Trinity Martin

They were one day into the mountains when Charlie snatched the sack of gold coins and ran off. McCluskie and Baker had been asleep on their mounts, and by the time the jingle of coins awoke them, Charlie was almost out of sight. They turned and gave chase until the terrain forced them to leave their horses and continue on foot while their gunshots and curses filled the foggy air. There was a cave ahead, and Charlie went in; only a gargled scream came out. They stood about the entrance with their pistols still smoking in their hands. McCluskie pointed.

“Get on down there. And don’t ya come out unless that gold’s in yer hand. I’ll keep watch in case he slips past ya.”

Baker looked down into the cave. The blackness of that place almost seemed physical, like a vat of ink, and the whole of the scene lay draped with fog. He shook his head. “Hell no, I ain’t goin’ down there.”

“Yeah, ya are, ’cause you was supposed to be watchin’ the sumbitch. Now go get my gold.”

“Damn that gold. I ain’t goin’ down there.”

McCluskie leveled his pistol at Baker’s forehead. It was a Walker Colt .45–an enormous weapon with a barrel the size of a tent pole, and the pistol did not just put bullet holes in things; the things just disappeared. Baker eyed the blackened barrel as McCluskie said, “You’re either walkin’ down that hole or you’re fallin’ down it. You pick.”  

Baker scratched his ragged beard and climbed into the cave.

It seemed darker yet once he was inside, and he stepped carefully down its black throat with one hand on the soft wall and the other holding his pistol. After a moment, his eyes adjusted to the light and he called out to Charlie. There was no answer. The air was moist and stank of something he could not identify. Something dead. He paused as he felt a tremor run through the floor. He was sweating.

“What d’ya see?” called McCluskie from somewhere above him.

“I cain’t see a damn thing!”

“Get on down there and be quick about it!”

Baker heard the roar of the Walker Colt from the cave entrance and felt the whiz of one of the huge rounds zipping past his head. It hit the cave’s wall with a fleshy thud, and then tremors rocked the place so violently that Baker fell over. He hit the ground and began to slide downwards into the blackness. He reached out to grab something, anything, but there was nothing beneath him except a slimy and slightly bumpy surface.

He slid into a cavern and stood up, dizzy and covered with slime. Strange stalactites jutted from the walls, white and pointy like teeth. What was left of Charlie lay in the corner. His body was mangled and strewn about as if set upon by a pack of crazed wolves. Baker saw the bag of gold coins still clutched in Charlie’s severed hand, and he snatched it free as he suppressed a shudder.

He began to run up the dark slope toward the pinpoint of light that marked the cave’s entrance when the floor flexed suddenly and flung him down. He tried to rise, but the ground itself swelled under his legs and enveloped them. The rumblings began again, and he saw the bizarre stalactites elongate and the walls themselves seem to draw in on him like a blackened boa constrictor. He screamed until his throat was raw, and he fired his pistol indiscriminately, but each shot only brought on more rumbling and strange guttural sounds that seeped from the walls themselves.

He pulled desperately at the ground, but each attempt only tightened the grip. A moment later, the first of the stalactite teeth pierced the small of his back, and he watched the pinpoint of sunlight dim until there was nothing there but darkness.

• Copyright: © 2009 Trinity Martin

Pierson lay on the desert floor naked save long underwear, and he thrashed and gibbered under the afternoon sun as Roland attended him. He poured a few drops of water on Pierson’s head, and then he turned to Gail.

“That’s the last of it. He’s liable to die if he don’t get more water.”

Gail nodded. “Likely.”

Pierson had been riding sick two days, and around noon on the third, he fell from his horse and did not get back up again. He fidgeted and screamed in his delirium. On their first day’s ride out of town they had happened upon the thing–a rock half-buried and smoking in the dirt like an immense coal. Blackened. Shimmering green in the sunlight as if set with a thousand tiny emeralds. Pierson saw it first, and he rode over and tried to pry the shiny stones free with his knife while his companions stayed behind, cagey and impatient.

A posse pursued them.

Pierson was unable to loose a single stone from its mount, but when he rejoined the company there was something wrong with his head. He sweated as if his blood had been set ablaze, and he spoke madness and laughed like the chained occupants of padded cells. He drooled on himself and reeled in the saddle as if punch-drunk until finally he could ride no more.

“We best get movin’,” said Gail. “Posse, remember?”

“We need to get into town. Get Pierson to a doctor.”

“I ain’t ridin’ into no town. They’ll be after us with whips and guns and I don’t know what all. I’m ridin’ out. You comin’ or ain’t ye?”

“I’ll catch up to ye.”

“You suit yourself then.” And with that, Gail turned his horse and rode off into the sun’s declining.

Darkness fell like a thunderclap in that place, and sounds of screams roused Gail in the night. He leapt to his feet with his pistol drawn and looked east where he saw Roland dashing on foot across the desert floor and waving his arms about his head like a man beset with wasps. He was screaming at Gail to run, run for God’s sake. The thing’s coming. I cain’t stop it. More words indecipherable amongst the chilly desert winds.

Behind the fleeing man was Pierson. He ran across the desert with arms spread wide like a spectral Jesus Christ charlatan, and with each step he took, he seemed to cover the space of three. Roland was still screaming and gesturing when Pierson began to glow, and Gail watched slack-jawed as the light intensified and poured from Pierson’s skin as if the sun itself sat in his belly. The light engulfed Roland mid-stride and his screams ascended crazily in pitch as his body began to fall apart as if someone pulled loose the stitching of a scarecrow. It simply came to pieces, each running step jarring yet more hunks from his body until the screaming stopped. They fell to the ground awash with gore like morbid rain drops and then sat motionless and smoking in the blood-slaked dust.

“Oh my God.”

Gail raised his pistol and began to fire. Through the gray smoke, he saw the bullets disappear into Pierson’s vast body light, one, two, three, but Pierson never broke stride. He only quickened his pace, a nightmare creature emerging from the desert night like a runaway sun intent to burn the world. As he neared, Gail could see a smile stretched across Pierson’s face–elongated, clown-like–and the face itself was as pale and translucent like moonlit moth wings and his eyes glowed green like the stones that had cursed him.

The light was growing again. Gail mouthed a prayer to an unfamiliar god, and then he kept firing until the clicking of the empty cylinder sounded across the desert like an elegy penned by his own hand.

• Copyright: © 2009 Trinity Martin