Michael Collings - The Slab

“I mean, I thought… It was an accident!

“Noooo!”

The unseen presence whipped out and grasped McCall’s mind and yanked. He stumbled into the back bedroom, fell hard on the carpet-shrouded concrete. His knees scraped against rough carpet and the blood flowed freely again. His shoulder banged against the door casement, and then his head struck something rough and cutting and he vaguely felt the skin on his temple slice away as the thing (can’t be can’t be you’re not real) spun him around with the ease of a child playing with a Christmas toy and raised him effortlessly to his full height and stared him in the eyes and laughed.

Ace McCall tried to speak, tried to cry out, had to struggle even to breath. His eyes narrowed with pain. The loathsome green light faded to coppery, dusky brown and then to blood red.

Or perhaps it wasn’t so much a change in the light as it was the fiery blood…his own fiery blood…shrouding his eyes and gouting onto the carpet at his feet not six inches from the faint shadow that marked the sinuous twining of yet another crack in the foundation slab in the house at 1066 Oleander Place.

“ McCall.”

From the Tamarind Valley Times, 15 June 1989:

HOUSING STARTS SCHEDULED

Construction will begin by the end of June on a proposed 60-site development to be called Charter Oaks, reported a County Planning Commission spokesman today. The development, bounded on the west by Bingham Boulevard and on the north by the newly completed Reynolds Avenue, represents the single largest housing project in the history of Tamarind Valley.

Ace-High Construction submitted the lowest bid and was formally awarded the contract at last night’s Council meeting. The homes, when completed, will form the heart of what is envisioned by some as a new city nestled in the foothills of the coastal range, with easy freeway access to…

The Slab- A Novel of Horror (retail) (epub)

Michael R Collings

The Huntleys, 21/22 December 2009

Moving Day

Catherine Huntley stiffened. She turned her head slightly, angling toward the sound she thought she had heard. She relaxed…marginally. It was nothing, she argued with herself, as she had been doing most of the night.

Just your silly imagination.

She dropped her head back into the pillow’s embrace and tried to persuade her over-active mind to accept sleep. But she knew that it was useless.

She felt her legs beginning to twitch nervously, a sign she easily recognized. She wouldn’t get to sleep for a long time tonight.

At her side, Willard snored lightly-not enough to have awakened her if she had been asleep but enough to help keep her from getting there.

The snore stuttered into a muffled snort as he turned onto his side, flopping heavily on the mattress and pulling most of the last of her grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts-a delicate Wedding Ring pattern in rose and palest blue-with him as he turned.

She smiled.

As if he were awake to her smile, he snuggled against her, his curving back and buttocks nestling against her side. His spine caressed her ribs. She smiled again. Part of her felt warm and tingly tonight, in spite of the light rain that had begun late that afternoon, in spite of the prediction of near freezing temperatures by morning-a rarity in near-tropical Coastal Southern California.

The faint draft from the windows touched her cheek with a chilling briskness, and the air in the bedroom was both cold and faintly damp, almost musty, even though the previous owners had only been out three days before the Huntleys began moving in.

That morning, in fact.

Willard had put the bed up first thing, with a grin and an unspoken promise that he had more than fulfilled tonight.

Catherine smiled again.

She still felt his fluid warmth inside of her.

She still tingled with the memory of his touch, his body pressed against hers, his lips seeking hers, his tongue penetrating. Loving Willard had always been special. But tonight it seemed even more so.

Because they were doing it in their house.

Their very own.

Catherine raised her head, the tendons in her neck straining and streaking her flesh with knife-sharp shadows.

There it came again.

A low murmur.

Like water rustling through pipes.

Or the toilet tank in the back bathroom running.

Or…

Get a hold of yourself, she thought sternly, it’s nothing. Remember the first night in the apartment in Riverside, thirteen long years ago, when you made poor Willard get up and tramp through the house barefoot, not even letting him have enough time to throw a robe over his nakedness, then him stubbing his toes on every box and carton in every room, all because you knew you heard someone pounding on the back door.

Well, she thought in her own defense, there had been a pounding.

Right.

And she remembered how embarrassed she was when they drove away from the manager’s office first thing the next morning.

“Pounding,” the woman had said, leaning back in her chair. “Probably just the pipes. You turned the hot water on, right?”

Willard had nodded.

“Just the pipes expanding and contracting.” She had turned away, the action eloquently expressing her mixture of contempt and humor at the couple sitting stiffly before her, already complaining after only one day in their apartment.

She seemed to have known that it was also the first apartment for either of them, that they had only been married a week and were just returned from their honeymoon.

She must have imagined the two of them…

Catherine’s cheeks flushed in the darkness.

Her hand strayed over Willard’s shoulder. She turned on her side and moved against him, spoon-fashion. She didn’t know when she had first heard that expression, but it was right on. Spoon to spoon. Her hand strayed further now, along the lines of his chest and stomach, still taut after thirteen years of marriage, and down to his hips. She nuzzled the back of his neck, not really caring whether he was awake or not, half hoping he was, half resigned to the fact that he almost always fell asleep-no, she corrected herself, he always crashed, that was more like it, tail-spinning, out-of-control, earth-shattering crash — right after they made love.

At first it had bothered her.

She would come back from the bathroom, still warm with passion, her skin alive and so sensitive that the faint movement of the silent night air against it made her light-headed. And Willard would be lying there, stone-still.

Asleep.

Oh well, she sighed, repeating herself for the umpteenth time in thirteen years.

If that’s all I have to worry about, I’m better off than…

Her head snapped up again.

This time she was certain.

She had heard something.

She sat up, dragging the covers with her.

Willard shifted and one hand reached back and tugged on the edge of the quilt her grandmother had given them as a wedding present. In his sleep, he burrowed further under its warmth. But Catherine couldn’t ignore this sound.

It was definite.

Not really loud, but definite.

And she couldn’t quite identify it. But it was something.

Just the house settling, stupid. Old wooden joints do creak, you know.

She listened more intently. She turned her head from side to side, trying to fix a location for the sound.

There it was. A muted thump, thump…, thump, too irregular to be the winter wind splaying a naked branch against a window. Too random for anything else she could imagine.

She slipped out of bed, pulling on her long flannel robe, the high-necked white one Willard hated because he claimed it made her look like someone’s great-great grandmother out of another century…and because (although he would never admit to it) it was infinitely harder to remove in the dark than her others. But it was warm and thick, and the night had promised to be a cold one.