Michael Collings - The Slab

She slipped her feet into scuffs and padded from the room, stopping at the door into the hall. Directly in front of her, the hallway extended past the bathroom and the front bedroom she had requisitioned as a combination sewing-room/all-purpose escape-from-the-children-when-things-got-too-hairy room. Beyond that lay the blackness of the entry and, to the right, the living room and from there the kitchen.

Straight ahead, she could dimly see a reflection through the door the previous owners had built to join the entry hall with what had once been the garage but was now a large, comfortable family room. It was presently chock-full of unopened boxes, but it promised to become the focal point for their lives for years to come.

She strained her eyes.

The reflection focused into a small orange glow, like an unblinking eye studying Catherine Huntley from the darkness. For a moment her skin crawled and her breath halted. Then she exhaled in a long, relieved hiss that echoed in the silence.

Stupid, she thought, not for the first time that evening. Stupid stupid stupid.

It was only the clock. Right.

The electric clock with the luminous dial that she had carefully set to the exact time then placed on a stack of cardboard boxes along the far wall. Not the glowing eye of the cannibal goddess Kali, or anything so exotic.

A stupid clock.

She felt her heart slowly creep back to its steady pace. Her arrested breathing resumed as well, and her goose-fleshed, crawling skin crept coldly back to its rightful place on her arms

Thump thump…thump…thump.

A long pause, then… thump.

It was definitely coming from her right, from somewhere along the darkened hallway that led to the second bathroom, past Suze’s room and dead-ended by the doors to the boys’ room on the right and what would probably end up as Willard’s office on the left.

They had intended for Will, Jr., to have his own room-finally, the twelve-year-old’s dream had come true-but both Burt and Samuel (Sams to everyone since the day he had come home from the hospital and Suze tried to say his name and tripped up on the syllables, and everyone laughed and from then on it was just Sams) had unaccountably refused to sleep in the back room without their older brother.

So, for now at least, all three boys were together, the older two in the bunks, Sams in the little box trundle-bed that each of the boys had slept in until they turned four or five. She stepped down the hall.

Thump.

She stopped, waiting for the sound to return and give her some idea of what it was, where it came from. When it didn’t she continued. There was no sound, no movement in Suze’s room. Catherine flicked the light on, just long enough to see the top of the six-year-old’s head sticking out of a bundle of quilts, blankets, stuffed animals, and favorite clothing that somehow had not gotten hung up that evening and that-Catherine knew ruefully from past experience-would somehow never quite make it to a closet or dresser drawer. Suze was short for Susan; the Huntley’s first girl-child had been named after Catherine’s grandmother.

Catherine breathed in relief.

Suze was fast asleep. And safe.

Catherine turned the light off. The sudden darkness seemed deeper, colder. She shivered. Even though the forced-air furnace was on, the house still felt damp, unlived in.

It would probably be all right in a couple of days, though, she reassured herself.

Thump.

The sound jerked her from her stasis and reminded her that she had a job. Mother’s responsibility number 483-investigating strange but undoubtedly harmless noises in the dead of darkness on cold December nights.

She paused by the bathroom door but heard nothing there. Again she flicked on the light.

And again everything was normal.

The storage bedroom was next to the bathroom. Enough moonlight filtered through the dusty but curtainless windows for her to make out most of the shapes-again, boxes and cartons, things they wouldn’t need for the next few days, pushed into this room as soon as the boys announced their decision that Will was going to have to sleep with them for a while. The room was silent.

That left the boys’ room. She swallowed tightly and looked across the dark hallway. To her imagination, the open door into the back corner bedroom seemed unaccountably threatening, like an open mouth of impenetrable darkness against the faint gray of the hall.

For a frightening instant, she didn’t want to walk through that opening-it would be too much like stalking down a demon’s throat.

Don’t be absurd, Catherine Huntley, she told herself sternly. You’ve play enough mind-games tonight already. It’s just a room.

She crossed the hallway and entered.

A shard of moonlight glowed in the room.

It hadn’t seemed this bright from the hallway, she thought with a tinge of wonder. Then even that suggestion of strangeness disappeared and she returned to the business at hand-being a mother, protecting her boys from…, well, to be honest, she thought, from funny noises in the night-like funny noises in the car, she added mentally, that in the comic strips only wives hear but that husbands must eventually pay for when the funny, imaginary noises suddenly transform into reality and become cracked blocks or stripped brakes or exploding radiators or expiring transmissions.

She stopped.

She didn’t like the direction her thoughts were heading. She looked around.

She could define the outlines of the bunk beds, the box bed against the far wall, the dressers. She crossed to the dresser and turned on a small Mickey Mouse table lamp. It had been Will’s, but he had recently announced that it was “baby-stuff,” and Burt had inherited it by default. In the soft golden glow of the 40-watt bulb, she studied the room.

Sams was curled up against the wall, swaddled in his favorite blanket, the satin edging stuffed into his mouth like a surrogate thumb. It was in fact a surrogate thumb, and sometimes he sucked on the edging until it was so wet and filthy and smelly that Catherine wanted to burn it. But each time it went into the wash, Sams would stand solitary guard over the machine until it came out, then transfer his attention to the dryer.

Somehow, she never quite found the courage to get rid of the thing.

She leaned over and pulled the edging out of his mouth, shivering when she felt how clammy the material was. But she knew that even asleep Sams would have it in his mouth again in a matter of seconds.

Sure enough, before she had straightened, his hand flailed for a moment, made contact, and retrieved the grungy satin.

Oh well, she sighed silently.

She turned her attention to the other boys.

Will, Jr., on the top bunk, was nothing more than a heap of bedding. She knew that he must be in there somewhere, but it took a bit of probing to find a scrawny, warm arm connected to an equally scrawny shoulder that led to neck and head. His forehead felt a bit warm, but Catherine put that up to the excitement of moving.

On the lower bunk, Burt presented an opposite picture. Most of him was exposed to the cold. His legs were clearly visible, encased in flannel pjs that had pulled up almost to his knees; his stomach was similarly exposed almost to his chest. But his head was covered. For Burt, that always seemed enough, no matter how cold it might get. She shook her head, tugged his pajama tops to his waist, and pulled the pant legs to his ankles. She unwrapped the mound at his head, straightening the blanket and tucking it around his body and wondering as she did so how the kid had managed to avoid a fatal case of pneumonia during any of his eight winters. But he never even had so much as an ear infection or a light case of croup.