Michael Collings - The Slab

It wasn’t the first time that Daniel’s visits had left Miles bleeding, but such occurrences were blissfully rare. Usually Miles tried to remove any evidence of blood-and so far Elayne had not noticed anything untoward. Tonight, though, he simply didn’t care. Let the bastard find me like this and kill me. Let her come in and see me naked and bloody on the flood and then try to pretend that everything’s just hunky-dory, her and Mr. Perfect.

His anger warmed him, even as he realized with a distant, almost disconnected part of his mind that the temperature in the room was dropping precipitously. His exposed skin crawled into goose bumps and he shivered violently. The movement caused a ripple of pain through him.

The blood thinned to a viscous drop that hung suspended at the corner of his mouth before dropping heavily to the carpet. Already the thick pile of the dark brown shag had absorbed most of the blood. Miles realized dimly that no one would even notice the stain by the time the blood dried.

No one but him.

His tongue brushed a cut in the inside of his cheek. The movement stung, but he chose to ignore it. For a moment, he stiffened. He thought he heard something in the hall. He raised his head an inch or two from the carpet and listened. It could be Daniel returning to make sure Miles was “safely in bed.” It might be his mother, although he could count on the fingers of one hand the times she had awakened during the night and come in to check on him. He wasn’t sure which prospect was the more inviting, which the more terrifying.

After a long moment, he decided that there had been no sound. He must have imagined it. He dropped his head to the carpet again. His ear rested on a rough, slight, unseen ridge only partially buffered by the thickness of carpet and pad.

The crack in the slab started in the corner of his room and arced across the center to disappear beneath the closet door. Miles had discovered the irregular edge only a few weeks after they had moved in. He spoke to no one about it. Sometimes he would spend long hours running his fingers along the phantom crack; sometimes he half believed that he could see the precise place where the floor started angling oh so marginally downward toward the far wall.

Tonight, he felt an odd comfort in lying against the crack, feeling its shadowy reality as a jagged line beneath his body. He lay without moving, his eyes closed, his heart thumping.

And finally he fell asleep.

The nightmare intruded almost immediately. It began like all of the others-a phantom Daniel silently opening a phantom door. The phantom-not-phantom hands. The roving and clutching and groping, and the pain. But then…suddenly there was someone else with them in the darkened room. At first Miles couldn’t tell anything about the shadowy figure-not its age or its sex or its size. He just knew without knowing how that someone stood behind Daniel.

At the critical moment in the dream-Daniel’s frenzy, the dream-Miles saw something glistening in a white-lightning arc, and Daniel’s head jerked back as a soundless scream of unutterable agony exploded from between his teeth. A jet of burning blood followed. Daniel threw his head forward, eyes wild with a terror that kindled joy like a raging flame throughout Miles’ whole being. For an instant. Then the dream-Daniel’s head struck the dream-Miles’ forehead, and there was an eternity of exquisite pain and Miles thought he would die for certain, and then Daniel’s head exploded, nearly suffocating Miles in a flood of red blood and grey tissue.

The dream-Miles felt Daniel’s body twisting on top of him, writhing in an intensity of bleak sensation that had nothing to do with sexual passion. Out of one blood-curtained eye, Miles saw a glinting, silver-white thing rise and sweep downward again. Daniel’s body quivered. Another rise and fall. Another quiver, like the legs of the dead frogs Miles galvanized for an experiment in science class earlier that fall. Another sickening rise and fall-this time less silvery white than mottled red…and now Miles felt the first slice of pain across his abdomen.

The dream-Daniel fell away like two halves of a dead, rotten husk, parts of his body propped bloodily on each side of Miles. Now the boy could see clearly the curve of the long knife suspended at the apex of its swing directly above his groin. And he could see the thing that held it.

The blade descended with a deliberateness that must have been the dream equivalent of slow motion but that served only to prolong the terror, the anticipation of the sharp pain it must bring. Miles brought his hands together. They moved in normal time, two fluttering white-stained-red birds rubbing wing to wing as his dream-self pleaded with the monster above him…pleaded for one more minute, one more second of life.

The blade continued inexorably downward. The movement was still horrifyingly slow, but the dream-Miles intuited at once the hideous force behind blow. His dream-hands flew faster and faster, his skin abrading as his palms scored each other, as his fingers flickered long and white, in and out of shadows.

The blade was almost to his groin. The steel glinted wickedly in a light that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then the light transformed from silver to red and he screamed in an agony that transcended any he had ever imagined-his throat tore open with the intensity and blood washed into his lungs and added its fire to his gasping breaths. His hands flared liquid flame, a beam of living fire that scored the blade just as it severed his flesh. His hands flew apart and the raging flames spilled over him, over the rotting remains of the dream-Daniel’s body, over the blood-stained carpet.

He felt tongues of flames licking at his flesh. He twisted his head in anguish as the fire consumed him. Above it all, beyond all the pain and the terror and the torment, the nightmare figure retreated, laughing silently.

Noooo! the dream-Miles screamed, one final burst of life…

…and Miles shuddered violently awake, his skin soaked and sticky with his own sweat, and his arms and legs as rigidly cold as blocks of ice. For an instant he heard the lingering dream-scream. Then he rolled slightly and felt the stiff nap of carpet against his back-even stiffer where his blood had soaked into the fibers and was now part of the carpet itself, perhaps had even filtered through the pad beneath and oozed thickly into the crack and from there descended to the waiting bowels of the earth itself.

He sat up. Big Ben said 2:15. Barely half an hour since Daniel-the real, flesh-and-blood Daniel-had left. Miles struggled to his feet, his body stiff with cold and pain. He shuffled over to his bed and dropped heavily onto the mattress. Still awash with sweat that stank of fear, still naked but for once uncaring, he burrowed into the covers and slept as if dead.

From then on until the end, that nightmare repeated itself nearly every night regardless of whether Daniel visited or not, regardless of whether Miles lay asleep in his bed or (as happened more frequently) curled fetus-like on the carpet. As bedtime approached, Miles would shower, dry off, and dress in his long pajamas, brush his teeth, and then-irregularly at first but with an increasing consistency that even he realized bordered on sheer obsessiveness-walk through the kitchen and the living room before going to his bed.

“What’s the matter?” Daniel asked as Miles walked through the living room early in November. Daniel and Elayne were sitting side by side, his arm over her shoulder, reading. Elayne was reading a Harlequin romance. Miles couldn’t see the cover of Daniel’s book but the volume was thick and the open page crowded with print.

Miles ignored him. He saw in Daniel’s darting glance something that might have been an unspoken threat, might have been a burgeoning fear as the bastard looked up into the eyes of his stepson and perhaps saw intimations of the man Miles was rapidly becoming. Miles straightened his shoulders. After all, he was nearly fifteen, and he already had a couple of inches and possibly even a few pounds on Daniel. Maybe after all this time, Daniel was beginning to worry. The thought was pleasantly exciting.