Michael Collings - The Slab

Boring.

He noted with somewhat greater pleasure that the lawn had been re-sodded as well. Vaguely, Abraham wondered what the house must have looked like at the time of the…incident. From all he could see, everything replaceable had been replaced.

But, taken all in all, the place was obviously a good buy. It was perhaps a bit larger than he had originally intended, but that would mean all the more room for the two most important things in his life now that Mattie was gone: his grandchildren, and his collections-definitely in that order. And there was a lot of room for gardening, both in the front and in the deep back yard.

All in all, he repeated, a good buy.

Sold, he said to himself.

He turned to face the realtor, catching the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes-uncertainty coupled with a hungry eagerness to make a sale that he couldn’t miss.

“Well let’s get going,” he said brusquely. “Don’t you have anything else,” he added, knowing full well that any further showings would serve primarily to give him leverage when it came time to bargain for the house on Oleander.

The engine roared as the car backed out of the driveway and negotiated the turn. As they pulled away Abe glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a final glimpse of the house, his house, as he had already started to think of it.

Now for the fun part, he mused silently. Just how hard will this realtor lady bargain to get rid of a death house?

It was going to be entertaining finding out. And then his new life would begin. A new life in a new place, with a new house. He figured he had ten or fifteen good years in front of him.

Even though escrow on the house closed a little over a month and a half later and he moved in two weeks after that, he never saw the woman in yellow again.

Abraham Morris had developed diabetes just after his forty-ninth birthday.

“A mild case,” Dr. Sideko said as unconcernedly as if he had been diagnosing a hangnail or an ingrown body hair. “Should be no trouble at all controlling it.”

For the next eighteen years, Abe Morris religiously followed the prescription for Diabinese. And for eighteen years, the medication did in fact control the disease.

When Abe turned sixty-seven, however, the new doctor in California recommended that he change medication.

“The diabetes has worsened slightly,” he said, his youthful face twisted into what he no doubt considered an appropriate expression of concern for the health of his old-timer patient. Abe snorted to himself and caught himself thinking whippersnapper, a word his grandfather had always applied to wet-behind-the-ears doctors that thought they knew everything. “We could go to insulin,” the kid continued.

We, Abraham thought contemptuously. Yeah, right. You and me shooting up together, sliding needles into our thighs on cue. Junkies in tandem. Junkies on parade. We. Right.

“But I think this will work just as well.” The kid-disguised-as-a-doctor handed Abe a prescription for a different drug, Glucotrol, that would take care of everything. He promised.

Abe knew that blood disease ran in his family. His father and grandfather had died in their early sixties from heart attacks. He hadn’t really figured on being immune to it, but when his first attack came in the spring of 2003, it was more of a shock than he cared to admit.

It was a relatively mild attack. Within six months, the doctor assured him, he would be right back to normal. With care-proper diet, moderate exercise-no one would even know he had suffered the attack.

But still, Abe knew.

The Parkinson’s Disease developed gradually and unobtrusively at first, then finally afflicted his every movement.

The still-a-kid-disguised-as-a-doctor sent him to a neurologist, who prescribed Artane.

“No problem,” Abe said. “Just what the doctor ordered.” He simpered at his own feeble joke.

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

Michael R Collings

As the years slowly rumbled past, the house became more of a burden than Abe had anticipated. He never quite got around to many of the surface repairs he had promised himself he would take care of when he first saw the house. Ruefully, he acknowledged to himself early in 2005 that he was probably going to have to sell the place. He just couldn’t take care of everything himself.

“It’s Grandpa,” Elizabeth Morris called, cupping her hand over the telephone as she yelled the message across the family room to where her father was immersed in a 2,000-piece Big Ben puzzle he and Mom had been working on now for weeks with little overt signs of progress. The thing still looked like the jagged skeleton of a picture. So far they had only managed to fit the edges together, with random bits of connected pieces scattered through the center.

“Just a minute,” Jay said, beginning the complex process of extricating himself from behind the wobbly card table without disturbing any of the pieces so carefully laid out around the promised-but-not-yet-emerging representation of a crumbling European castle surrounded by unbelievable emerald forests and plastic turquoise skies.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Elizabeth said, removing her hand and speaking directly into the phone. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, sugar-plum. And how is everything there?”

“Fine. I won the spelling-bee in school today. I spelled cantankerous.” She giggled.

“That’s just great.”

For an instant, Elizabeth caught an undercurrent in Grandpa’s voice that worried her. She was about to ask again how he was feeling, when Jay finally made it across the room to the telephone. He took it from her, ruffled her hair (which he knew she hated), and spoke to his father.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Jay, how’s everything.”

“Just great. How about you?”

“Can’t complain.”

“You’re sure. No problems?”

“Just the usual,” Abraham said, his voice coming heavily through the telephone. “I’m falling apart and no one can do a damn thing about it but other than that everything’s fine. How’s Linda and the girls?”

They continued in this vein for a few minutes, Abe catching up on events in his son’s household, then sharing the most recent news of Jay’s sister Ellen, her husband Sam, and their three kids. Pretending that Jay actually cared. Finally, though, he came to the meat of the conversation.

“Jay, how about you and the ladies coming out here for Thanksgiving this year?”

“But Dad, that would be too much trouble for you. All that work. Having us all descend on you like that. We couldn’t.”

“Now you listen to me, young man. I’m old and retired, but I can still whip up a turkey dinner like you wouldn’t believe-I had the world’s best teacher, remember? And besides”-here his voice took an edge of seriousness-“besides, you’ve had me out there so many times that I’m beginning to feel guilty. I’d really like to have my children home for the holiday this year. All my children.”

Jay thought for a moment. Dad was right, he realized suddenly. It had been, what…almost two years since Jay and his family had made the four-hour trip from Palm Springs to Tamarind Valley. It hadn’t been that long since they’d seen Abe, of course. He came out for a weekend or so at least three or four times a year. But for the last while, instead of them visiting him on holidays, they’d paid his round-trip bus fare, convincing themselves that the ride in an air conditioned bus would be more comfortable for the old man than having the four of them descending like marauding locusts. Besides, to be honest, there wasn’t really that much to do at Dad’s place.