by Barbie Wilde
Mikey’s left hand descended upon the woman’s head and images of Eileen’s sad and pathetic life flooded into his consciousness. Mikey didn’t know much, or even care about the reasons why women have abortions. In his mother’s more cruelly drunken moments, she’d tell him straight out how she wished that she’d gotten rid of Mikey before he’d grown into the problem child that he was. But Eileen’s stupidity and ignorance had caused her to have three abortions. Yet, all her regret at terminating her children hadn’t stopped her from having yet another unfortunate, unprotected liaison with some no-hope, pizza-brained guy who’d left her in the lurch.
However, Mikey’s true feelings about abortion and their moral convolutions did not concern him, because what was flowing from Eileen was not her remorse, or sadness, but the angry, howling, unbearable screams of the unborn fetuses, demanding retribution. The rage flooded Mikey’s brain and he was almost knocked backwards with the force of it.
Between the furious fetuses, the naked dead women and the twisted faces of Brian and Eileen filling his head, Mikey was feeling pretty wretched.
He opened his eyes and that’s when he noticed the noise. He looked down from the podium at Eileen, her head lolling back, her bleeding eyes looking into his, pleading for him to make it stop. He whipped his left hand off the top of her head and then laid on his right hand, hoping to channel some good into this ghastly woman. Eileen jerked and jumped straight up into the air as soon as Mikey made contact, then fell down on the ground in a steaming heap. Pork Chop whisked her up in his arms and hurried for the ambulance.
The audience was again dumbstruck. What was this kid doing to these people, cooking their brains like popcorn? Was he a healer, or just a dangerous freak?
Mikey looked into the camera again: “The sad truth about Eileen is that although she is a good person, her ignorance put her at odds with the new hopeful lives that grew within her. Her lost children scream to me. I speak for them. I speak for the dead. They are crying in the wilderness.”
Mikey raised his arms again and Billy Bob noticed with a stab of horror that the insectile blackness of Mikey’s “Bad Hand” was creeping up his arm almost to his elbow. The attractiveness of his “Good Hand” was diminishing: not so golden, not so compelling. The evil (and now Billy Bob believed in it, oh yes) was growing and the good retreating. And at what cost to his son?
Mikey had sunk back down into his Knights Templar pose. The woman who had fainted and vomited before now began to scream and Billy Bob decided that the insanity must cease. He signaled the bodyguards to slowly clear the audience out of the studio.
Billy Bob walked to the front of the podium and said, “My friends, today you saw two miracles. I must admit, I didn’t know what to expect, certainly not this. But Michael is compelled to do the Lord’s work and that is what he has done. He has transmogrified the evil in people’s souls into something good.
“Michael needs your help, so please send five dollars or more for his ministry today without delay, to the address that you can see right now on your TV screens, so he can help more sinners. Thank you and God Bless.”
Billy Bob didn’t see Mikey rise up behind him. He had removed his white linen jacket and ripped off his shirt, showing his thin boyish freckled chest. Mikey raised his arms again. The creeping darkness was now visibly slithering up Mikey’s left arm and across his upper torso. Thin tendrils curled up his neck, creating a Maori-like tattoo effect, which soon took over his face. This was no CGI, no magic from the lighting guy. This was really happening.
Mikey opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out: a pointed, lizard-like, bile green horror. It was at this precise moment that Billy Bob turned around to take in the sight of his blackened, wasted, ruined son, whose frail body now contained the evil remnants of Brian’s crimes and the wrath of Eileen’s unborn children. Mikey’s bloodshot eyes met Billy Bob’s baby blues and Billy Bob realized too late that his fabulous idea of capitalizing on his son’s “talent” was a big mistake.
But Mikey was a survivor. Deep down in the reptilian part of his brain (the eat-shit-fight-fuck part), something was stirring. He needed to live on, to continue his work, so Mikey did what most animals do when they ingest something poisonous: he vomited. But it wasn’t just a polite little retch; it was a colossal projectile vomit that would have entered the Guinness World Records, if there were an entry for such a thing. And Mikey’s power puke was so vile, so noxious, so putrid that the flow, when it hit the unfortunate Billy Bob full in the face, was a lethal cocktail that burned and blinded him in an instant.
Billy Bob dropped to the floor, writhing and howling in agony. Everyone in the studio was screaming, but Mikey didn’t stop. The rancid turgid blackness continued to gush from his mouth and other people were hit. They also fell shrieking to the ground, as if burned by acid. Pandemonium and fear gripped the crowd.
If it hadn’t been for the bravery of Pork Chop and Duffle, it would have been an even bigger bloodbath than it actually turned out to be. From either side of the soundstage, they sprinted up to the podium, tackled Mikey and brought him down to the floor. However, Mikey continued to spew out his evil vomit of death. Pork Chop—having served in the Special Forces—instantly accessed the danger and took action, realizing that it was a “him or us” situation. He put Mikey’s noggin in a headlock and then wrenched it sharply to the right, hearing the telltale “click” of a neck being broken. The geyser of horror stopped, but Pork Chop could have sworn he heard a child’s voice whispering in his ear, “You can’t kill me.”
“Did you hear that?” a startled Pork Chop said to Duffle, but Duffle was already up on his feet and moving to Billy Bob’s side. Pork Chop turned back to look into Mikey’s staring, glassy eyes. He knew the kid had to be dead. The evil darkness was already fading from Mikey’s face.
Duffle turned Billy Bob over. His face was burned beyond recognition and the insufferable pain had caused a massive coronary. Billy Bob was well on his way to meet his Maker.
Duffle was a man of few words, but he knew his Bible. He turned to the jostling crowd and the TV cameras, and announced: “‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’ Genesis 2:17.”
The remaining audience dropped to their knees as one and cried, “Amen!” Duffle was a bit surprised and gratified. What power do words possess!
* * *
After he recovered, Brian happily confessed to all his crimes. He was extradited to a Red State and summarily executed. He had a smile on his face when the lethal injection finally hit his blood stream. Eileen joined a convent and became renowned as a talented singer-songwriter in the “Singing Nun” mode.
Pork Chop and Duffle managed to avoid any charges in the Mikey affair and started up a ministry of their own.
* * *
Billy Bob and Mikey were buried in Spokane’s Riverside Memorial Park cemetery side by side. Tiffany came to pay her respects and wept, wondering if she’d only kept her mouth shut maybe both her boys would still be alive. But being a hard-bitten broad, she was soon over it and bellying up to the bar at the nearby Riverside Tavern for a few comforting margaritas.
Later that night, after all the grave diggers had gone home, the dirt shifted above Mikey’s grave, as if some powerful creature was trying to free himself from his boxy prison. The next day, Harvey Mention, the cemetery gardener, was astounded to see that Mikey’s grave had been opened and desecrated: the coffin empty, the body gone.
Harvey thought he could hear a boyish voice murmuring from the shadows: “And the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and ... he put forth his HAND, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’ Genesis 3:22.”
The Alpdrücke
“Sleep Tight and Don’t Let the Demons Bite!”
“Pock!”<
br />
The noise startled Jim awake. He opened his eyes and it was deathly dark, with just a hint of moonlight coming in through the curtained windows. The high-ceilinged room was unfamiliar, bluish and vast. Gripped by fear, he could barely breathe. Then there was the sound of a ball slow bouncing towards him.
“Pock!”
Where the hell was that noise coming from? Then he heard a monstrous “thwack!” of something hitting the wall above his head. Ricochet ... followed by the bouncing sound.
He tried to get up, but he was frozen, unable to move, incapable of protecting himself from whatever was toying with him. In the left-hand, logical side of his brain, he knew it must be some kind of nightmarish sleep paralysis, a complaint that he’d been suffering from for the last couple of weeks, but it didn’t stop the horror of knowing that there was something in the room with him.
“Pock!”
He finally recognized the sound as a tennis racket hitting a ball. Then a “thwack!” above his head again—the ball smashing against the headboard at great velocity. The slow bouncing sound. Whoever, or whatever, was lobbing the ball at him was coming closer, he could sense it.
His breathing became frantic. He had to wake up, but it was impossible. Then, through the gloom, he perceived a darker darkness moving towards him. For the first time, he could see the luminous green ball being tossed up and then a tennis racket whooshing through the air.
“Pock!”
The brutalizer zoomed directly at his head, but at the last minute it veered up and hit the headboard again. He was hyperventilating now—moaning with fear. The figure scurried to the foot of the bed—raising up the racket once more—and that’s when Jim caught sight of the strings gleaming in the moonlight. Strings made of cheese-wire, sharp as hell. He knew in his gut that if the racket made contact with his face, it would be cubed into a hundred bloody pieces.
Jim tried to scream out loud, but the only noise he could make was a girlish, high-pitched wheezing. That’s when he sensed a cockroach on his pillow at ear level, tickling his earlobe with its antennae, screeching in a tinny, David-Hedison-as-The-Fly-caught-in-the-spider-web voice: “Wake up, wake up!”
The small figure of darker than darkness was at his bedside now. The horrifying thing was that even standing up, it was tiny. Was it some kind of satanic child perhaps? A mad, diseased ape? That concept was much worse than a grown-up monster. What was even stranger was that it seemed to be wearing some kind of ludicrous hat. However, instead of making Jim laugh, it only heightened his terror.
Suddenly, it jumped up and landed on his chest. He couldn’t breathe. The gleaming racket was hovering just over his face—the blood from some previous unfortunate victim dripping off the glistening cheese wire strings—and the most hideous aspect of something peering through the racket, as if the thing was checking its reflection in a hand mirror. A glimpse of a demonic, grinning face floating above him.
Then the creature rasped: “Anyone for tennis?”
Jim finally managed to scream.
The demon’s hand gripped his shoulder and shook him, as if to rouse him from his trance, so he could experience the true nastiness of his impending diced death, but then the pillow cockroach squeaked “wake up!” so loudly in his ear that real life came thundering back.
Bam! He was awake: heart racing; legs jumping; flesh goose-bumped and ice-cold; gasping for air like a dying goldfish. Marney, his girlfriend, was shaking him awake.
“Jesus, I thought you were dying,” Marney said, in not a very friendly manner.
“I thought I was,” wheezed Jim.
“I couldn’t wake you up. Do you know how scary that is!?” Marney demanded and Jim tried to be sympathetic and failed. She attempted to pry his dream out of him, and he finally spilled the beans on the recurrent nightmare that had been keeping them both awake.
Marney said, “You’re joking, right? A tennis-playing, silly hat-wearing dwarf? That’s the thing that’s been terrifying you for the last few weeks? Why don’t you just get out of bed and squish him for goodness’ sake.”
Jim sighed. He was too tired to reply. Marney turned around and eventually grumbled herself back to sleep, while he lay awake, afraid to return to that unpleasant dreamland where he was so vulnerable. Eventually though, a groggy tiredness dragged him down to the pit of unconsciousness like a quagmire of quicksand and he was helpless to stop it.
He was in a deep, crystal clear, natural pool in the jungle that looked like one of those Mayan sacrificial wells where they used to gaily toss in their virgins—trying to ward off whatever fate that had eventually destroyed their civilization. A shaft of moonlight pierced the water and he could see he was at least 20 feet below the surface. He looked down and it was as if he was poised at the edge of an abyss filled with cold, black, oily water. He started to swim upwards. His heart began to race again and he was fearful that he wouldn’t have enough breath to get to the top. He glanced down and that’s when he saw them: white shapely arms floating up out of the depths like sea snakes beckoning to him, trying to grab his legs and drag him back down to oblivion.
He screamed and the air bubbled out of his mouth. He was drowning. The ghostly arms of a thousand dead maidens drifted up, grabbed him and held him in place.
“Pock!”
Sailing through the water was another nightmare luminous green tennis ball—zeroing in at his head. The evil dark dwarf thing had followed him here to the inky pool. He frantically thrashed his limbs to free himself from the wraithlike arms and managed to make his way up to the surface, his lungs bursting.
The wet cockroach hanging onto his shoulder for dear life shrieked in his ear: “Wake up, damn you!”
“Oh, fuck,” Jim shuddered and sat up. No more sleep for him tonight.
“That’s it!” Marney said. “You’re going to see a doctor about this, or I’m moving out.”
Jim was still trembling from the after-effects of his dream. “What’s the point? It’s just a dream. It’s not like they can crawl into my head and slay the monster.”
“Well, maybe they can give you some drugs so you can sleep. You’ve got to do something. You’re going to have a heart attack one night if this keeps going on.”
For once, Jim agreed with her.
* * *
A few days later, he was sitting in Dr Gardner’s office, where he was getting the lowdown on attending a sleep clinic. Although the doctor was pretty sure that Jim was suffering from sleep paralysis—in particular, the more uncommon Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis (RISP)—he felt that it was best to confirm the diagnosis by performing a multi-parametric test at a sleep clinic.
Called a Polysomnography (PSG), the test would make a comprehensive recording of the biophysiological changes that occur during sleep. The PSG would monitor many of Jim’s body functions including the brain (EEG), eye movements (EOG), muscle activity or skeletal muscle activation (EMG) and heart rhythm (ECG) during sleep. The clinic’s technicians would also monitor respiratory airflow and respiratory effort, along with peripheral pulse oximetry (the saturation of Jim’s hemoglobin).
How the hell Jim was supposed to sleep with gizmos stuck on his head, chest and fingers, as well as up his nose was beyond him. On the other hand, perhaps all those distractions might keep his death dwarf from bothering him.
* * *
It was just a few hours before his appointment and Jim went to the local café to calm his nerves and try to finish the graphic novel he was struggling to design. Lack of sleep was making his creative life a mess. The waitress brought over his usual order of a decaf black coffee and apple pie, and he was about to tuck in when a hand descended on his shoulder. Jim nearly jumped out of his socks, but it was just Marney, on a cigarette break from her law office around the corner. There was someone with her, a tall, distinguished-looking, older man with twinkling blue eyes and a heavy
German accent. He looked a little bit like the alien guy, Klaatu, from the original 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, except his strong eyebrows, as black as his hair was white, met in the middle. She introduced him as Mr. Zeiner, a friend of hers from the accounting department of her law firm.
They both sat down at his table and Jim wondered why Zeiner had joined them.
Marney: “Jim, I’ve been chatting to Mr. Zeiner about your sleep paralysis. He thinks he may know what’s bothering you.”
Jim was baffled and annoyed, but he didn’t show it. He hated it when Marney talked to strangers about his problems.
Jim: “Listen, I’m visiting the sleep clinic tonight. Until I get the telemetry, no one’s going to know what the diagnosis really is. Unless Mr. Zeiner here is a doctor?”
Mr. Zeiner: “No, my young friend, I am not a doctor. However, I am familiar with these demons of the night.”
Jim: “Whoah, buddy. I suffer from nightmares and sleep paralysis. That’s it.”
Mr. Zeiner: “Nightmares cannot possibly explain the extreme terrors you are experiencing. Tell me, have you ever been to Germany?”
Jim: “No.”
Mr. Zeiner: “You see, the fact that your demon dwarf wore a hat is very significant. It serves as his cloak of invisibility, if you like. This particular demon is called an Alp and it is very well known in Germanic folklore. What you experienced was an Alpdrücke, an ‘Alp attack,’ where an Alp jumps on your chest and tries to suffocate you. You are very lucky that it did not try to suck blood from your nipples as well, or even strangle you. As for the tennis racket ...”
Jim: “... sorry, I gotta go to the john.”
Jim got up from the table and walked briskly to the toilets, rapidly followed by Marney. She grabbed his arm and he shook her off.