Tiny Horror

"Did you see that?" Roy jumped back. His flashlight fell to the dirt, the beam hitting a patch of oil-stained gravel. "The damn box moved!"

"Just the wood settlin', Roy," Muskie said. His own voice was thin and shaky. He was committed now. He couldn't stop. He cut the second chain. Then he cut the third.

The padlocks fell to the dirt with heavy thuds. They looked like severed ears in the dust. Muskie took a crowbar and wedged it under the lid. leaning into it with everything he had.

The wood didn't splinter. It peeled back like a scab. Inside, there wasn't any gold. There weren't any jars. The crate was filled with a thick, murky slurry that smelled of ozone and ancient earth. Submerged in the dark fluid was an indistinct, jet-black mass.

"What the hell is it?" Roy whispered. He took the tip of the crowbar and swirled it around the liquid.

For a heartbeat, the slurry remained undisturbed. Then, a thick ripple broke the surface as the mass began to uncoil. It was a slow, wet unfurling of limbs that had been compressed for a century. The creature rose with an agonizing, fluid deliberation, sloughing off ropes of dark slime as it stood up inside the crate. It stood nearly four feet tall, its body roughly humanoid but with impossibly long, spindly arms that hung past its knees. Its head was a smooth, hideous dome, featureless except for two vertical slits that pulsed rhythmically. It held itself very upright and straight, its slick, jet-black skin wetly reflective under the halogen light. The creature remained perfectly still, a rigid and unreadable shape in the flickering light. Neither man knew what it was going to do; it simply stood there, fixed and silent.

Roy stood rooted to the spot, his breathing shallow as he stared at the impossible shape. "What the hell are you?" he whispered. The creature lashed out. A black limb moved with the speed of a whip, catching Roy under the chin. The force of the blow was absolute. His neck snapped with a sharp crack, and his body collapsed into the mud.

Muskie didn't wait to see more. He turned and bolted toward the sorting yard office, his boots slipping in the freezing slurry. He was halfway to the door when a cold weight clamped around his ankle. He looked back and saw one of the creature's arms stretched across the yard, lengthening like a strand of dark taffy. It held his foot in a crushing grip.

The creature gave the elongated limb a violent tug, jerking Muskie off his feet and slamming him face up into the freezing, oil-slicked slush. He tried to scramble away, but the iron grip on his ankle was absolute.

As the creature stepped out of the slurry and onto the workbench, and then down to the mud with a jerky, clicking gait, it walked toward Muskie, closing the distance while its arm retracted back into its shoulder with a wet, slurping sound. Muskie stared up in a cold, silent terror as the slick, black shape approached, its featureless dome silhouetted against the flickering halogen light.

"Please," he whimpered, the word catching in a throat constricted by fear. "I'm sorry. Just let me go. Please." He was begging now, a frantic, high-pitched keening that the creature ignored entirely.

It reached down and gripped his left thigh with a hand that felt like cold, pressurized rubber. With a sudden, casual brutality, the thing wrenched the leg upward, the skin and muscle yielding with a sickening, wet pop as it ripped the limb clean from the hip.

Muskie’s screams tore through the yard, raw and wet, persisting even as the creature dismantled him limb from limb with systematic brutality, spraying the freezing mud and grass with blood and human remains. The yard only fell silent once Muskie was reduced to a scattered ruin in the Wisconsin muck.

The tale continues...