MicroHorror

“Marvin McCullough! Shit! It’s good to see you. How long’s it been?”

“Hell, I cain’t ’member, Hank. I think we’uz playin’ some county fair somewhere. ’Bout like ’is one ’ere, I s’pose. How you been doing?”

“I’m okay. Been working. Giving lessons mostly. How about yourself?”

“Oh, I been a’right, mostly.” Marvin dips his chin down, pushing his bottom lip out as if something deep and personal was trying to bust out of his mouth. But it doesn’t. He shrugs, his right hand out of sight, shoved into the back pocket of his dusty old Levis. “Mostly,” he repeats, then smiles. “How ’bout your mom and ’em. They doing good?”

“I guess you didn’t hear. Mom passed a few years ago.”

“’M’awful sorry to ’ear ’at, Hank. Awful sorry.”

“Yeah. It was rough on Dad. But she went in her sleep, real peaceful. About all you can hope for in the end, I think. Hell, Marvin, she was eighty-nine years old. She lived a good long life.”

“Well, your mama was one of the good’uns. How long ago ’at happen?”

“Mama’s been gone about six years now.”

“Still grieve a little every day, don’t ye?”

“Yeah, sir, I do. Always miss your mama, I suppose.”

Marvin grins a little and looks down at his feet, dragging the toe of his boot through the dirt. He looks to his right where the midway is. Some ugly old geek is hawking cotton candy. Little children with dirty faces run up to him with their quarters and buy some. An old lady drops a scoop of peanuts into a kettle of boiling water and puts out a sign that says “5 cents a bag.” A line forms for the sideshow.

“You still playin’ that old fiddle?” Hank asks. “I need a fiddle player for my band. You certainly were the best damn fiddler I ever heard. Best fiddler this whole state ever heard, for that matter.”

Marvin’s gaze lingers over the fair. A breeze blows past, carrying a small cloud of dust and the smell of food.

“No, I ain’t got that fiddle no more,” he says curtly. “Like not to talk ’bout it, neither. No offense.” There’s dirt in his voice.

“Okay. Okay. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” Hank says. Then he chuckles, “It’s just, well, you used to guard it like it was your sister’s cherry is all. That’s why I…”

“I DON’T WANT TO TALK ‘BOUT THAT FUCKIN’ FIDDLE!” Marvin yells. A crowd of onlookers forms.

“Jesus, Marvin,” Hanks says, his brow scrunched up in confusion. “We used to do good money playin’ around this whole damn state and it was all because of you! Then you up and quit out of nowhere one day with no explanation. I don’t see you for however many years, and you expect me not to ask if you still play? You expect me not to ask why I can’t ask?”

Marvin’s chin is jutting out and his left hand is pulled into a fist.

“What’s the matter?” Hank asks with a shrug. “Did the devil come collect?”

Marvin cocks Hank right across the bridge of his nose. Hank goes down hard with a bump to the ass because both hands are clutching the center of his face and blood is pouring out from under his palms. Marvin stomps away amid the gossiping crowd who do all they can to avoid his attention.

And as Marvin is storming away, Hank sees something very peculiar. Marvin’s right wrist is resting on the entrance of his back pocket. But there’s no bulge in the pocket where a hand would be. Instead, it just lies perfectly flat against Marvin’s body. And through his half closed eyes, watering up with the roaring pain in his nose, Hank sees something very peculiar indeed.

Marvin pulls his right arm away from his back pocket. He wipes his brow with a stump. There is only air where his bowing hand used to be.

Susannah hated the grass. She hated it because it didn’t need anything other than what it already had. Some sunlight, a little water, soil–that was all it needed to live. Susannah needed far more than just light, water, and dirt. What she needed was someone’s arms to wrap around her waist. She needed the smell of her father’s cheek, the taste of real food. She needed the sight of another person. She needed the company of other people’s thoughts. Her own were getting weary and, she feared, a little too close to crazy.

She pulls her knees up to her chest and rocks back and forth on the dirt. Her scarlet red monk’s robe drapes all about her otherwise naked body. She tries not to look to her right, where a single arm lies limp on the ground. She does not want to deal with the blood and the grief, with the rest of the body and the fresh memories. It’s too much for her right now. Right now she needs to sit and stare out at the grass, those tall, hateful, smug little blades, so secure in their infinite company. She couldn’t even guess at the number of blades she’d laid eyes upon in her fifteen years of life. She could count on one finger the number of people she’d ever seen. She could count on a closed fist the number of people she’d ever see again.

The wind is picking up, and it is so cold and fast. Her hair whips around her, smacking her cheeks and eyes. The skyline is growing dark, another cold night is waiting, another hungry dawn. And for the first time ever, Susannah will be completely alone. Her father is dead behind her, his throat ripped out by the beast before it went back to hiding in the infinite field. She closes her eyes and listens for it, out there, somewhere, unseen and patient. She thinks she can almost hear its teeth, its tongue dripping blood and spit on the ground. If she holds her breath and gets very still, she thinks she can hear it hating her.

The sun is minutes away from setting. The wind is howling. Susannah wipes the last of the tears from her eyes and stands up for the first time since morning, since seeing her father’s dead body. She doesn’t look at it, not even now, now that she might be dead herself soon. As sad as she is, as weak as her grip on the world has become, she knows that looking would burn that sight into her mind, and she does not want her father to be a pile of blood and skin. She does not need that right now. Right now she needs to go out there, there among the hateful grass, and hide.

She stands up. She falls right back down. The muscles in her legs are weak from sitting so long, and the cramps that take her calves are horrendous. She cries out in agony and beats on them with her fists, bruising them in the process. Then she tries to stand again, and though her knees shake and buckle, at least she doesn’t fall down again. She puts one wobbly foot in front of the other and goes forward. She decides to just run in one direction for as long as she can, never looking back, stopping only to sleep briefly. Because the beast is stalking tonight. It will be angry. It will be waiting.

Holy shit, the flowers are vomiting blood. The daisies have cartoon eyes that are contorted in agony and blood is literally flowing from their mouths. Out of the corner comes a kitten walking upright, wearing full-on metal knight’s gear. Sword and shield and helmet and everything. He’s chopping all of the flowers down and flower-blood is spraying all over him, soaking his fur and staining his armor. He’s screeching and killing. The daisies keep on puking until he cuts them down. At last, as one single vomiting flower is left alive, the kitten-knight drops his sword and falls to all fours. He gives himself a lick-bath and sheds his armor.

Beneath him and off in the corner, the blood is standing inches deep. The soil beneath this all has formed a great big mouth, sucking and slurping at the carnage, swallowing and loving every stalk, petal and stem. The kitten cleans off the last of his fur and stands on his back legs, grabbing his sword and preparing to sever the last standing flower. The daisy is dry-heaving now, its white petals stained totally red. The kitten lifts the sword…

“What do you think?” She asks me, “Isn’t it lovely? I mean, when I look at it I can just see that cute little kitten romping through the field and having a good time. It makes me kind of homesick, though. What do you think about it?” she asks me with her big wide blue eyes. Eyes that are incapable of comprehending the pain she’ll endure in less than two hours. The crowd at the little art gallery is shuffling around us; a small crowd has formed around our little painting of a kitten in a field.

“Well, I guess I see the same thing as you, I guess.” I shrug my shoulders at her. No way is this bitch gonna know what I’m really thinking.

“Art’s not really your thing is it?” she asks. I imagine her face slit up and disfigured.

“No. Art’s not my thing.”

“Oh, sweetie, that’s why I like you. You’ve put up with all of my interests even though they bore you. That’s so sweet!” she says while I picture her with empty eye sockets, black holes with nerves dangling where there ought to be eyes. “I tell you what, what do you say we go back to my place?”

“I’d like that.” I say.

“All right then, let’s go.” I take her arm in arm and we walk out of the gallery. On the way out we pass another couple that is staring at a painting of abstract geometric shapes. The woman asks the man, “What do you think?” His response: “I think that that circle is trying to fuck that rectangle.”

“Close,” I think to myself. “Close.”

I can say, with some authority, that hell is immobility and constant sameness. I can say this because that is the hell I have endured for a long time. I have been forced to lie here, on my back, facing upward, into never ending darkness for that long. There is never any variation, at all, in what I see or hear or feel. I do not even have the comforting thought of being able to go insane. I will always, now and forever, be forced to deal with this monotony, until the reckoning, eons away, when Christ comes to redeem mankind.

I was involved in labor relations in the ’70s. It’s a dirty secret that the Mafia is involved in unions. Always have been. But there was a change going through us back then that we might be able to do away with it. We were sick of the pensions always being ripped off. Word got around to the wrong people what we were trying to do, however, and I was murdered. I was leaving the job site one evening when I was kidnapped, grabbed from behind and shoved into a car. I was driven to a remote spot where an overpass was under construction. I was blindfolded, a straw was inserted into my mouth and I was told to lie down. My legs and arms were bound and concrete was poured over me, right up to the point of being level with that straw.

I lingered on for some days, before I finally passed away. The road was finished over top of me and my small breathing hole filled up with so much dirt, over time, that my entire lungs, throat, and mouth are now packed with it.

Since then, I have been in a sense of total sensory deprivation.

I see nothing. I hear nothing. I smell nothing. I taste nothing. I feel nothing.

Over and over again.

Forever.

I don’t know if I went to hell and this is my punishment, or if my hell is being stuck in the moment of death for eternity. I do know that I would welcome any change, at all. I would welcome disembowelment and torture. No pain can ever be worse than the total sameness I’ve endured for only God knows how long.

There was something wrong with their eyes. It wasn’t there at the beginning. It had to have changed at some point, but so slowly that I didn’t spot it until it was too late. We were sitting at the rubber-coated picnic table at the front of the warehouse. The checkout lines behind us were humming along as people bought their five-gallon drums of detergent and thirty-six-packs of printer cartridges, handing the cashier their ID to prove that they had a right to the things they bought.

And as we sat, not talking, I started staring at the massive ceiling. And I saw something up there, farther away than it should have been, almost as if the entire building had been slowly expanding ever since we walked into it. The place had somehow expanded in volume to something like that of a football stadium. I stared up, and far off in the distance, there were now catwalks in the ceiling. Rows of men dressed in identical black business suits were walking up and down, surveying the area below.

I looked back down at the round table we were sitting at. The vast warehouse of shopping had become deserted. We were the only ones there now. Our little table sat alone in that ocean of concrete. A few powerful overhead lights created small pools where we could see. I looked behind me and saw a man peek out from behind a wall. A wall that had not been there a few seconds ago. He moved the drywall aside like a curtain. He saw me spot him and he quickly disappeared. I heard a voice behind the wall chastise him, saying, “What are you doing? He’s not supposed to see us!”

I looked back at my family. They were all sitting completely still, their bodies frozen in mannequin poses. Their mouths had contorted in ridiculous smiles that stretched from ear to ear. The pupils of their eyes had turned into vertical slits like snakes eyes. And they gazed directly at me.

My breathing quickened and I looked back up at the ceiling to see that there was only one man in a suit there now. I could tell, even across the vast distance between us, that he was staring directly at me. I saw him raise his arm in a wide arc and bring it back down with index finger extended, pointing directly at me.

My heart rate tripled and I looked back over my shoulder to see that the wall had moved to within three feet of me. It was shaking and bulging now. A small squid tentacle briefly appeared from underneath before recoiling back under. I turned my head and balled up into the fetal position on my bench. My family’s heads had turned into giant smiling cobra faces. I buried my nose into my knees as adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream.

The wall was making noises. The voice screamed out from behind it, “REMEMBER! HE CAN’T SEE YOU! NOT NOW! NOT EVER!” A chorus of snake rattles and growls and screams rose up from behind the wall. A wet and sticky tentacle slithered up and around my neck and started pulling back and down.

Back and Down.

It looked kind of like creamed corn. It was yellow and mushy but tasted very different. Underneath that layer was the real treasure. Red and tender. There was what I had imagined. And it tasted every bit as sweet as I wanted it to. It was good raw. Later on I took a little bit and cooked it. It was more refined but just as good. I had hoped that doing this once would satisfy me. That it would purge these thoughts from me. Now I just want more.

A good fire is a work of art. A painting. A symphony. Consequently I think of myself as an artist. My palette is heat and orange. Ash and gray. I don’t know exactly how much I’ve destroyed over the years, but it’s substantial. Houses. Businesses. Cars. People. My work will be remembered when I’m gone. I’ve no doubt. No doubt at all.

Ahh, at last a good night’s sleep. No noise. Just quiet. I deserve it, too. I put up with that crap all day. He may be a little upset when he finds out his dog’s dead, but oh well. Dogs come and go. This time I’ll get him one that doesn’t annoy the hell out of me so much.

It’s almost like this Wicca shit doesn’t even work. I’ve spent so much money on goddamned candles and incense and all other kind of whatnot. The worst was the dagger and silver plates, not cheap. Not to mention the cuts and other injuries sustained from sacrificing cats and shit. I just don’t undertand, I got all the instructions from one of those girls who dyes her hair black and listens to metal. I mean, she would know, right?

I hope so, because this is the third time I’ve been to her and she keeps giving me more and more things to do. Now, apparently, I need to stand north of the pentagram and the candles and turn around three times counter-clockwise and then dump the chicken blood on my head. She only tells me what I’m doing wrong afterwards. She’s not that great with directions. Sometimes I wonder if she’s leading me wrong on purpose. I don’t know why she would do that though. I apologized for calling her a witchy cunt at the prom in front of everyone.

So anyway, here we go. Candles: lit. Pentagram: drawn. Chicken: ungh, ungh, decapitated. Standing: north. Turn: three times to the left.

Okay, all done. Now I need to find my EPT to see if the damn ceremony worked this time. Getting unpregnant should not be this hard.

Fantasyland is a lost cause. They’ve got it surrounded with lots of guards and whatever is going on in there, whatever they’ve got planned, it’s probably too late for us to do anything about it. They’ve raised the drawbridge into the castle and they have the highest vantage point in the park. They’ve got the high ground and they can keep us under surveillance. We have to move at night and try to stay hidden. Whatever they’re planning in there, it’s probably not going to be good for us.

Our only plan is to try and use the underground tunnels to sneak into the castle and see what they’re up to. We’ve seen them using the character costumes as uniforms of a sort. We found a stash of them hidden in an area behind the Jungle Cruise. Mickeys are the leaders, followed by Goofys and Donalds. We stole the costumes and are going to attempt to get into the castle and see what’s going on in there, in Fantasyland.

The men we are fighting against are other survivors like ourselves; they simply had access to weapons and more people. When they first showed up we tried to make peace with them, we sent a group to talk to them. Those people we sent have never been back and it’s been a couple of days since then. They’ve killed anyone they’ve run across in the park during the day–when they’re not riding a ride, of course. We see them riding the Haunted Mansion over and over all day.  They love that one for some reason. We’ve managed to avoid capture by moving at night and staying hidden in the shops during the day. We’ve seen them moving large boxes up through Main Street and into the castle, great big heavy boxes that need four men to move them. Armed guards usually follow the boxes. Whatever they are up to in Fantasyland, it can’t be pretty and it can’t be good for us.

So our only choice is to sneak into the castle somehow and see if there is anything we can do about it. If not, then we will try to get out without being found out. We’re going in the morning. I’m a Mickey. My wife is a Goofy and her brother is a Donald. Let’s hope the Three Caballeros can do something about this.