Michael Collings - The Slab

“Yes, honey,” his mother added. “You’ve been wandering around like this every night for a while now. Is something wrong?”

“No,” Miles said. “Just checking. Making sure I turned the stove off after dinner.” It wasn’t a lie. Dinner had been over for three hours already, the dishes washed and dried and stacked away, the counters and cabinets cleared. But Miles knew that he would not be able to sleep (if he slept at all) until he was sure that the four rings of blue flame were safely extinguished. Until he was sure that the house was safe from a sudden fire that might tear through its bowels burning and destroying and consuming.

“But…,” his mother began. Daniel laid his arm on hers and she fell quiet. Miles stared at the two of them for a moment, then left. As he turned the corner into the hallway, he heard Daniel say, in a voice he probably assumed Miles would not be able to hear, “It’s just a phase. You know, teenage jitters. I was just like that, always wandering around when I should have been in bed. Worrying about nothing.”

Miles waited in the hall for a moment to see if he could hear anything more.

“Elayne,” Daniel said suddenly, softly, “you almost forgot your medicine.”

“I don’t think I need to…”

“You know you do. I think that if you ever really did forget to take it, you’d have as much trouble sleeping as Miles does.”

The boy heard Daniel get up. He hurried down the hall, reaching his bedroom only an instant before he heard the click of the bathroom light and then Daniel opening and closing the medicine chest.

Standing in the darkness, his back again his door, he watched and listened until he heard the bathroom light flick off and then the unintelligible rumble of Daniel’s voice from the living room.

That night (and every night thereafter), Miles did not even look at his bed. He walked into his room, careful not to touch the light switch. Feeling his way in the dark, he meticulously unplugged every electrical appliance in the room: stereo, lamp, even the electric clock his mother had given him for Christmas when she decided that the loud tick tick tick of the Big Ben might be keeping him from sleeping. Satisfied that nothing remained that could be a fire hazard-remembering even in waking the intense pain as flames blossomed from his hands-he pulled the cast-off Big Ben from the nightstand drawer, wound it as tightly as he could with fingers that felt corpse-like, cold and stiff and awkward. He wound it so tightly that he could feel the tension in the spring. He sat it on the nightstand and dropped to the floor, curling up on the carpet and hoping not to sleep.

From Daniel’s insistence about the medicine, Miles knew that this would be a hard, difficult night.

The visit was indeed rather longer than usual. And substantially more painful

By November 20, Miles knew that the situation was coming to a head. Daniel was subdued but Miles could detect a smoldering anger in the man, a volcano of violence waiting to erupt. Miles knew now that his mother was deeply asleep each night in the corner room at the far end of the hall, heavily drugged. Daniel was taking no chances.

But Miles also knew that Daniel was not impervious. Daniel was not longer the towering, distanced adult telling the innocent child what to do, how to act, what to say…and what not to say. Daniel could be hurt. The dream had told him that.

On the night of November 20, Miles went through his normal ritual. Shower. Dress. Brush teeth. Check stove. Unplug everything in the room. Drop exhausted to the floor and hope against hope that the door would remain closed, that the dream would not come that night.

But in spite of his efforts at staying awake, including stabbing the palm of his hand repeatedly with a needle taken from his mother’s sewing room, he slept.

And, irresistibly, the nightmare came.

This time it was different. This time, the dream-Daniel did not appear. Instead, Miles seemed to awaken to a frightening greenish glow in his room. It made his hands and arms look swollen and dead where they thrust from the long, thick sleeves of his pajamas.

The room was hot. That fact alone startled the dream-Miles. Usually the dream-world was cold, freezing at times, growing steadily colder until he was forced to move his hands faster and faster, and the air heated and burst into flame that consumed and destroyed. But this time, even though it was foggy and cold outside, with the temperature hovering around 40 degrees, Miles dreamed that he was stifling. Sweat furrowed along the crease of his spine, oozed beneath his arms, down his back, and in his groin. He blinked constantly to keep the burning moisture from his eyes. His hair was matted against his forehead and temples and neck, thick curls of heavy, sodden darkness.

He slid the window open. Whispers of fog roiled through and blended with the subtle green glow until the room was awash with light that seemed to have no single source but rather to emanate from every possible surface-walls, ceiling, furniture, even the rough, shadow-dark carpet.

Opening the window made no appreciable difference in the temperature, however. Miles was hot, boiling. He felt as if his brains were frying, his skin curling from his body in long strips like fresh bacon. He ripped his pajama tops off without bothering to unbutton them; the small white, pellet-like buttons shot across the room with the force of bullets and clattered against the wall.

Now the tendrils of greenish fog brushed against his naked chest like icy fingers, burning with their coldness, but still the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter. He unsnapped his pajama bottoms. They dropped unnoticed to the floor. And still the air was stifling. His lungs were about to explode. The agony intensified as he writhed against the volatile air; his body would combust in an instant and incinerate himself and his room and Daniel and the house and…

Something moved in the closet.

His heart thumping with panic, Miles watched as absolute darkness-within-darkness swirled and coalesced into the shadowy dream-figure. This time he knew immediately that it was male, knew it was old-older than himself, older than Daniel.

And he knew it was evil.

The figure glided like a shroud into the room. Miles stood naked before it, his body a sheen of greenish light as the shadow figure moved closer. It was taller than Miles, bulkier, dark with dread and horror.

It carried the knife.

Faster than thought, the blade slashed toward him. This time, the dream-Miles saw the blade coming. No Daniel lay atop him to intercept its deadly edge. The tip caught the flesh on his upper arm and sliced to his elbow. The wound, while not especially deep, was deep enough that the blood flowed freely and the pain coursed like an electric current through his body.

He tried to jerk back, tried to raise his other arm and cradle the wound, but he could not move. The blade returned.

Swish.

It sliced like liquid fire the length of his other arm.

Again. His belly this time. Then his thighs. And then…

He closed his eyes, expecting the fatal thrust…and a distant, abstracted part of his mind wondered absently-with the objectivity of a scientist observing the progress of a particularly interesting lab experiment-whether the real-time Miles would die at the same instant the dream-Miles died.

The point of the blade touched his chest, directly over his heart. The metal was icy; his blood was hot. The point touched, pressed. He felt it puncture the top layers of flesh, felt the first drops of blood as they wandered like errant streams down the contours of his chest and abdomen. He waited for the final thrust.

That never came.

He waited, waited, and finally opened his eyes.