Michael Collings - The Slab

The vinyl floor tile seemed unbroken along the outer wall, but when he knelt down and looked closer, he noticed odd ripples in the tiles next to the baseboards. On a hunch, he grabbed a sharp paring knife and punched the wall-edge of one of the tiles near the middle. The blade easily broke through. He wiggled the handle. The blade moved freely, swinging an inch or so forward and backward before grating against concrete.

He tried another spot midway between that one and the far corner of the kitchen. Same result.

“Shit,” he yelled, reversing the blade and slamming the end of the handle against the brittle, yellowing tile. The vinyl shattered, revealing a foot-long crack. He struck the next tile. The crack continued beneath it as well. Increasingly frustrated and angry, he grabbed another can of Raid and emptied it into the exposed opening.

He could see nothing at the bottom of the crack-the sunlight was too bright through the windows and cast too sharp a shadow at the base of the wall, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.

In the meantime, Catherine had resurrected half a dozen old packing boxes-not yet discarded-and was haphazardly stacking dishware, silverware, cooking utensils, and linens in them, emptying every closet and drawer in the kitchen. Fortunately, some of their things had not yet been unpacked; she was angry enough as it was and didn’t need the added aggravation of breaking china or glasses.

Finally, though, the kitchen was ready-prepared according to the explicit directions on the back of the fogger package.

“Get the pets,” Willard instructed, “while I get these ready.”

Catherine went back through the house and grabbed the double cage containing Yip and Yap, the boys’ hamsters, threw a heavy towel over the cage, and ran it out to the car. On her second trip, she carried Sams out and strapped him into his car seat.

Inside the house, Willard slid the removable plywood door into the doggie door, making sure that Will, Jr.’s dog-officially named Richard Beagle but mostly answering to “Crud,” Will’s favorite expletive-was safely blocked outside.

“A few hours in the cold won’t kill you,” Willard said when he heard the dog scrabbling at the plywood insert with his sharp nails. “It’s not as if you don’t have a perfectly good dog house out there. You just never use it.”

Ignoring any further complaints by Crud, Willard checked the rest of the house: interior doors open, windows closed.

Everything okay.

His last act before leaving the house was to set up four of the foggers: one in the kitchen, one in the family room that had started life as a garage and had been converted by the last owners, one in the intersection of living room and entry hall, and one at the end of the hall by the back bathroom door.

Holding his breath as he activated each of the foggers-and understanding all the while that it was not necessary to do so-he retraced his steps through the house and finally left, locking the front door securely behind him.

In the car, Sams was whining and restless. Yip and Yap were huddled beneath a pile of cedar chips in the corner of the cage. Already the car was assuming the bitingly ammoniac stench Willard associated with hamster cages at least two days beyond scheduled cleaning time. He wondered if he would ever get the smell out of the unpholstery.

Without speaking, he cranked the key and backed out of the driveway. He glanced at his watch.

Eleven fourteen. About two hours until Charter Oaks released classes. Another hour before Will’s school was out for the day. They would have to pick up the older kids from the school yards and find something to do for a good part of the afternoon.

Maybe a quick visit to a park, if it proved warm enough. Or a surprise early dinner at Carl’s Jr. or Burger King. The boys would love a kids’ meal, complete with toy treat. It was an inconvenience to have to stay away so long, Willard thought, but better that than the alternative. Better that than the unending colonies of roaches that seemed suddenly to have infested their house.

Squaring his shoulders and sternly reminding himself to ignore the increasing odor emanating from the hamster cages-now accented by a hauntingly similar odor from Sams-Willard drove away.

By eight thirty that night, the house had returned to a semblance of order. The padding and carpet had been folded back in place, minus the splinters of tackless carpet strips. Willard wasn’t too happy with the slightly rumpled texture the carpet had taken on near the baseboards, but there was little he could do about that. And a few ripples were the least of his problems at the moment.

He stood up and surveyed the carpet, then turned away and began staring at the walls and ceiling, probing in the cracks along the interior baseboards.

“What are you looking for?” Catherine said as she came in from the bedrooms. She sounded worried, as if she were afraid that their attempts to eradicate the roaches had failed. “Are there any more…?”

“No,” Willard said. “No sign of wildlife.” He grinned, trying to lessen Catherine’s lingering horror over the experience.

She grimaced.

“No, I’m just curious.” He pushed the thin blade of a small screwdriver into the back corner, along the juncture of the rear wall and the common wall between the living room and the back bedroom. The plaster resisted for a moment, then the blade disappeared.

“Shit,” Willard muttered as his knuckles scraped abruptly against the plaster.

“What’s wrong?”

“Look.”

He sliced downward with the screwdriver-the blade slit through the plaster as neatly as if it were warm butter. He gestured to the dark opening.

“I’ll bet this whole damn back wall’s separated from the house. The gap’s been plastered over and painted.”

“Willard,” Catherine said sharply. “The children might not be asleep. I don’t want them to hear that kind of…”

But he wasn’t listening. He was already in the kitchen, rummaging through the utility drawer until he came up with a small hand flashlight. He carried it through the living room, knelt in the entry hall, and began examining the shiny Solarium tiles.

“Look,” he said after a few moments. He held the light at a sharp angle to the floor. Small as it was, the bulb was sufficient to cast hairline shadows that zigzagged faintly but definitely from wall to wall across the entryway. “See that.” He pointed with his free hand to the shadows.

“What is it?”

“Another crack. In the foundation slab.” He rose to his feet with a grunt and disappeared into the hallway, the flashlight throwing a faintly orange glow in front of him.

It took less than half an hour to discover that the house-walls and slab alike-seemed laced with cracks, major and minor, each of them carefully retouched with plaster and then artfully repainted to disguise the flaws. The worst of them seemed to be in the northwest corner of the master bedroom, where the plaster split the entire length of the juncture of the two outside walls-another hairline crack, so fine as to be virtually invisible unless one searched for it. In addition, the line separating wall from white popcorn-textured ceiling was ragged and rough.

Obviously the entire side wall of the house was shifting

The more he discovered, the angrier Willard became.

Curiously, he was not so much distressed at the fact of the structural flaws as at the equally obvious fact that the previous owners had clearly known about them and had done everything in their power to hide them. Fresh paint, new coats of texturing, re-plastering in strategic corners, new tiles on the entryway floor-all with the express purpose of hiding the serious problems in the house. Without a word, he stalked back through the house to the wall phone in the kitchen and began ruffling angrily through the phone