Michael Collings - The Slab

The shadow-man stood so close that Miles could see the horror that remained of its face. The flesh heaved and writhed with a life of its own. His cheeks were flayed away to reveal twisted knots of muscle and blackened stumps where teeth might once have been. Light burned through the shadow-man’s eyes, a green and baleful and poisonous light that reflected on the sheening blade.

So abruptly that Miles felt as if the breath were being ripped out of his own body, the blade tip withdrew. The shadow-man deliberately reversed the knife, mesmerizing the boy with the flickering of light across its blood-stained metal until finally Miles realized that the haft was pointing at him, that the shadow-man held the gory tip pinioned against his own rotting chest.

For an eternal instant, Miles stared into the hollows where putrescent remnants of eyes glittered coldly, invitingly at him

And somewhere deep in the horror-stricken, fear-raddled recesses of his mind, the boy understood the hideous offer. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he understood and he accepted the final gift and closed his eyes again-willingly descending deeper deeper into the bottomless abyss of the dream-world-and with a sharp intake of breath that rippled pain through his own lungs and heart, he gripped the blood-slick haft with all his strength and thrust the blade home.

Daniel Warren usually slept lightly. Unlike Elayne, who could rarely be raised by anything less than a 10.0 earthquake once she fell asleep (assisted, as always, by a pill or three), Daniel roused easily. And he never dreamed.

Which was why he was so startled when he suddenly became aware that he was dreaming of a ghostly hand clamped tightly over his mouth and nose, suffocating him.

Eyes wild and staring, he struggled to sit up and wrench himself from the grip of the nightmare. Then the nightmare took on entirely new orders of terror for Daniel Warren, when he understood that it was not a dream at all. And that he hadn’t wakened when the bedroom door had opened, in spite of the slight squeal that always always awakened him. His mind spun for a second, then his eyes flew even more widely open and his breath caught in a painful, ragged gasp that left him reeling. Even in the near darkness of the bedroom, he knew at once what he was seeing. He just couldn’t believe it.

He saw the hot blood streaming from wounds all over his stepson’s naked body-arms, shoulders, chest, gut, thighs. He saw with a shudder that threatened to twist his spine the hideous light in Miles’ staring eyes, the flicker of hideous light on black-stained blade, and the single eye of brilliant white that was the tip of the knife as it slid into his belly as easily and as wetly as a red-hot branding iron would slide into a block of ice, consuming as it destroyed.

The instant he finished what had to be done in the master bedroom, Miles’ body began to shake with an intensity that jarred his teeth and blurred his vision.

This is no dream!

He stared at the blade hanging limply from his outstretched hand, at the carnage of what had only moments before been a chastely intimate bedroom scene, husband and wife sleeping side by side. They still lay side by side. But no longer sleeping.

Hardly registering that fact that he was covered with gore-not all of it his own-and naked and bleeding from a dozen wounds ranging from superficial to near-fatal, the boy fled the room, throwing the knife away from him with such force that it spun dervish-like through the open bathroom door and shattered the mirror over the medicine chest.

He ran through the silent house. His feet left a trail of moistness blacker than black behind him. In the kitchen, he paused only long enough to grab a set of keys from the homemade key rack next to the garage door-a cunning bit of his own work in the shape of a large key cut from plywood and painstakingly stained redwood and polished to a flawless gloss as a Mother’s Day gift nearly four years before.

Then without realizing what he was doing or where he was heading, he found himself in the garage and jerking open the door to Daniel’s Corvette. He sank into the seat, numbly registering the icy coldness of leather against the blistering heat of his naked back and legs. In the darkness his right hand scrabbled in the storage compartment between the seats, blindly, frantically, for a long moment before he felt a flood of relief as his hand struck something small and oblong, with two studs protruding from one end. He grabbed it and aimed it over his shoulder and hit the left stud, grateful that Daniel had at least taught him that bit of technological magic.

The garage door whined as the heavy plywood doors ascended on their well-oiled hinges. Cold night air billowed into the garage. There was no fog, not even any clouds. The sterile stars prickled coldly, malevolently against a midnight sky.

The boy jabbed the key viciously into the ignition and cranked it so hard that the key nearly broke in his hand. The engine turned over once, twice, coughed ominously, then with a screaming roar, caught. He jammed the gear into what he hoped was reverse and hit the gas pedal, hoping against hope that all of the time spent watching Daniel manipulate the gears would help him now. The engine roared unevenly and the car jackrabbited out of the garage, tires squealing against the concrete driveway as the boy struggled with the wheel, finally managing to spin the car around on the circle of pavement directly in front of the house, until the ’Vette was facing directly down Oleander.

He jammed the gear shift into another position and depressed the accelerator again. The car jumped forward a dozen feet, shuddered, then jumped forward again. All the time the engine roared as if it were a mob of hungry lions. Or merely an echo of the bloody thrummm behind Miles’ eyes. His head ached horribly, and he felt as if he were going to throw up all over Daniel’s genuine leather sport seats.

In one of the houses just down the street, a light went on and a curtain wavered, but the boy paid no attention to the face that appeared, stared, then abruptly disappeared again. The light flickered out.

The boy slammed the accelerator again, and the car leaped forward. He didn’t try to shift gears-he was in second, which was why the car had started with such difficulty, but at least he could keep going. He let gravity take its course, and the car rolled faster and faster down Oleander. At the far end, where the street dead-ended onto Mariposa, he swung wide, barely trying to see through eyes almost blinded by blood and tears.

He didn’t know if any other cars were coming or not; he didn’t care. He was beginning to chill now. The heat was evaporating from his body in great waves that steamed over the windows, cutting his visibility even more.

A stuttering left onto Reynolds, then a quick right onto Bingham. He grappled with the gears and the clutch again, just enough to jump from second into fourth. Again the car almost stalled, but he managed to keep it going, building up speed as he slipped through the night.

Thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty, sixty, sixty-five.

The speed limit was a well-posted thirty in this part of town. He didn’t care. He slammed through two red lights without braking. Neither time was there another car in the intersection, but Miles didn’t bother to look. He was escaping at last. He had the man’s car. He wore the man’s blood (and his own-and his mother ’s) crusting on his body like a badge of honor…or disgrace. Like armor inviolable and protective, seamless and corrosive. He wore the man’s life encasing his own. And he was escaping at last.

The car slowed slightly as it began the final ascent out of Tamarind Valley toward the north. From there, Reynolds Boulevard’s four wide lanes shrank suddenly to two, pitted and badly in need of repair. What had been a major artery became instead little more than a twisting, rutted roadway that connected Tamarind Valley with the Santa Reina Valley on the other side of the foothills. That part of the road was known simply as Norwegian Grade.