Michael Collings - The Slab

He looked closely at her. “Think?”

“Will… No, everything’s fine. Will was just mumbling in his sleep. A dream, probably. It’s been a stressful few days around here.”

Willard nodded absently and kept on reading.

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

Michael R Collings

The next days and weeks proved that things were indeed not fine.

Catherine figured that things would settle down. But by the beginning of April, she admitted to herself that she was becoming concerned.

First, Sams seemed to end up sleeping on the floor every night, almost in the middle of the room. She would go in first thing in the morning to get the older boys up for school, and there he would be, nose pressed to the carpet, blanket resting on his cheek, with no covers over him at all, fast asleep.

Then both Will, Jr., and Burt began having bouts of sleeplessness. Initially, it was only Burt. Catherine would wake suddenly, frequently from unusually vivid dreams that, while they seemed to carry over for a few moments into the waking world, she could never recall. Her eyes would abruptly open, she would undergo a few seconds of utter confusion as to who she was and where she was, then she would roll over, her back to Willard, to face the wall.

And see Burt standing there, silent, eyes wide and fearful.

“I woke up,” he would say.

When she checked the clock on the night stand, it would read 2:00, or 3: 23, or 4:05-never quite the same time but always in the deepest, darkest part of the night.

“Go back to bed, honey, and you’ll go back to sleep.”

“Can’t.”

“Can’t get to sleep?”

“Can’t go back to bed.”

When Burt said this the first time, so softly that she had trouble hearing him, she sat up and half-lifted him up to the bed with her. “What’s the matter?”

“I been trying to sleep for a long, long time. But I can’t. Now I can’t go back to bed either.”

“Why not?”

But already his eyes were fluttering, his head nodding. And before she could say anything else, he was asleep.

She carried him to his bed and tucked him in, conscious of how heavy and how tall he was becoming. His feet thumped lightly against her shins as she walked, and she could barely manage to lean over and lay him on the lower bunk.

The next time she woke to see him standing beside her-it was only a day or two later-she didn’t invite him up. She let him talk for a couple of minutes, mostly repetitions of “I can’t sleep” or “I can’t go to bed,” then she would gently say, “All right, Burt. Everything is all right. You can go to bed now.”

And-amazingly, considering how adamant he had seemed the first night-he would toddle off. She followed him once or twice to make sure he got in bed all right. Then she would pick Sams up off the floor and settle him into his bed as well, and return to her own.

Sometimes, she went right to sleep herself. Sometimes she was still awake when the alarm jangled and Willard stumbled up at 5:00 to get ready for work.

After a week or so of that, she woke up in the middle of the night, rolled onto her side and saw…Will, Jr.

“Can’t you sleep, either?” she whispered.

He shook his head solemnly.

She let him sit on the edge of the bed for a few moments, stroking her hand up and down his arm, soothing him in the way that had worked so well when he was younger.

Then he stood, leaned over and kissed her, and went on his own back to bed.

That continued for a few more days, with Burt and Will alternating their deep night visits. They never came at the same time or on the same night.

That phase came to a head at the beginning of the third week in April.

For four days in a row, all three boys visited their parent’s bedroom. Only this time, they did more than just stand by Catherine’s side until she woke.

“Mom! Mom!” Will was half-whispering, half-shouting in her ear, his voice urgent with fear and need. “Mom, wake up!”

She sat bold upright.

“Shhh. Don’t wake your father.”

“Too late,” Willard rumbled from the other side of the bed. “What’s going on?” He felt for his own alarm clock next to his side of the bed, and lifted it up close to his face. “Two-fifteen? What…?”

“It’s all right, Willard. Will just had a bad dream or something.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” Will whispered, as if afraid that someone else, someone not his father or his mother would hear. “I thought I saw…something…some one in my bedroom. A shadow by the closet. It moved. I’m scared.”

By this time Willard was sitting up as well. “There’s no one there, son, you must have been dreaming or…”

“No, I wasn’t asleep. I haven’t been asleep for…for the longest time now. I was just laying my bed looking up at the ceiling. Sometimes I see birds up there, I think. And I like to watch them fly in little circles. In little circles.” His voice too on a dreamy, muffled quality that Catherine found unsettling.

“Then that was it,” Willard said, laying back down and hunching under the covers. “You were dreaming. Go back to bed. I’ve got to get to sleep now.”

“Mom,” Will whispered again. “It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t like before, with the birds”-at the mention of the phantom birds, Catherine felt a chill along her spine-“this time there was something in there.”

“All right.” Catherine got out of bed, threw on her robe, and stepped into her slippers. “Let’s go see.”

As the two of them left the bedroom, she carefully, quietly closed the door. Willard really did need his sleep. The drive into L.A. was hard enough without doing it half-awake.

In the boys’ room, she picked up Sams and put him back in his bed, then flicked on the Mickey Mouse lamp. The dim light cast shadows across the room, shadows that danced with each movement she or Will made. She padded to the closet-there hadn’t been a door on the closet when they moved into the house and, in spite of his promises, Willard hadn’t yet installed a new one. She slid the row of shirts and coats back and forth, showing Will that there was nothing behind them. She even lifted some of the fallen clothing from the floor and stacked them onto the upper shelves.

“Nothing here.”

“No. Not now.”

“All right, then. Up you go.” She waited for Will to climb into the upper bunk and settle himself, then returned to her own bed.

She was still awake when she heard another whisper in her ear.

“Mommy?”

It was Burt this time, standing so close to her that she could smell his warmth and the slightly acrid sweat on his pajamas.

“Yes?”

“I saw something in my room. A monster, I think.”

Catherine sighed. It much be contagious. Monster-itis, or Something-spooky-in-the-dark-itis. And both boys had caught it.

“Catherine.” Willard didn’t move or say anything else, but she understood his message. Get him back to bed and let me sleep!

“Come on, Burt.”

Together they walked the length of the hallway and entered the back bedroom. Then she went through the same routine. Pick up Sams and put him in his bed. Turn on the light. Check the closet. Reassure Burt that everything was okay. Get him bundled into his bed. Check on Will, Jr., retrace her steps to the master bedroom. Slide into bed as quietly as possible so she didn’t disturb Willard again.

This time she had slipped into sleep, had even begun to dream-another of those vivid, surrealistically realistic, unmemorable dreams, even though she didn’t realize it, since the dream seemed merely an extension of the night’s alarms-when her eyes opened yet again.

Sams.

He didn’t speak