Tiny Horror

Julian woke at 3:15 AM, coughing.

His throat burned as if he had drawn a breath of dirty water. The master bedroom was freezing; the temperature had plunged forty degrees, turning the air raw and damp. The sheets felt clammy against his chest. Valerie lay beside him, curled into a tight knot under the quilt, shivering in her sleep.

The room smelled of ditch bottom, wet dog, and the raw metallic reek of an open electrical socket.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. When his bare soles hit the hardwood, a low vibration buzzed through the timber, rattling his jaw.

He stood up, walked to the sliding glass door leading to the second-floor balcony, and looked out.

The halogen security lights on the eaves clicked on with a hard snap, flooding the lawn with harsh white glare.

Down at the shoreline, the plywood was ruined.

The lag screws hadn't pulled free. The three-quarter-inch sheet had been blown outward from the water side, splintered down the center like a shipping crate stepped on by a work boot. Heavy shards of pine stuck out toward the grass, their fractured edges wet.

The iron archway was bowed. The vertical pillars were bent outward at an unnatural angle, the wrought-iron cross-members snapped like brittle wire. From the screw holes Julian had drilled, a dark, viscous fluid leaked into the shallows, heavy and black with a reddish cast, pooling on the weed-choked mud.

Leading away from the ruptured frame was a glistening furrow of black silt, tearing straight through the manicured turf.

Julian tracked the trail up the lawn toward the house.

It ended twenty feet from the deck stairs.

The thing was resting on the grass.

It was a swollen, undulating mound of pale, hairless tissue—a larval heap of blind muscle dragged from the bottom of a limestone quarry. The hide had the translucent, jaundiced color of a dead perch, glistening under the halogens with a greasy sheen. Along its lower bulge, a ring of dark, crimson-rimmed breathing vents sat sunken into the flesh, weeping into the turf. At its crown, the mass tapered up into a vertical, raw red aperture that flexed against the air like a wet, unblinking wound.

Julian stepped back against the balcony railing, his throat clamping shut before he could draw air to scream.

"Valerie," he rasped. It came out a dry wheeze. He grabbed the doorframe and shoved it open. "Valerie, get up!"

She stirred, blinking against the floodlights, then sat up shivering. "Julian? What is that smell—"

"Get up. Look at the grass."

Valerie swung out of bed, her bare feet padding across the boards. She reached the glass, looked down, and clamped both hands over her mouth, stumbling back against the dresser. A thin, jagged cry tore out of her throat.

On the lawn, the thing shifted.

The movement was slow, accompanied by a sound like wet canvas dragging over gravel. Along its pale flanks, a row of circular breathing vents dilated and shrank in an irregular rhythm, weeping a yellowish slime that dissolved the grass beneath it into black slush. Short, jointed appendages—thick as fence posts, tipped with blunt, horn-like nails—dug into the sod, dragging its bulk an inch forward.

Then the center of the mass split.

With a sound like tearing wet cardboard, the top of the tissue peeled back, opening a wide, toothless throat that gaped toward the house. The bedroom windows rattled in their vinyl casings as a low, sub-audible hum pulsed from the opening, rolling over the lawn and washing against the house with the stench of anaerobic rot.

Julian couldn't move. He stood on the deck boards, watching his lawn turn to grease.

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