Michael Collings - The Slab

She bent over Burt’s bedding-swathed head. She touched his bare stomach. The skin was cold and damp, sweaty almost. She pulled the blankets away from his face and was startled to see that his hair was plastered to his forehead, thick and dark even in the filtered light from the bathroom. He tossed his head several times, his eyes flickering up and down beneath their lids.

“Mmmnnhhh,” he murmured, as if trying to articulate a word.

“Burt,” Catherine said, whispering so as not to wake the others. “Burt, honey.” She shook him gently. “Wake up.”

“Mommy?” His voice was dark and thick with sleep, deep and disturbing, not at all like his usual boy’s treble. “Mommy?”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“Dream?”

Catherine recognized the signs. He was awake and not awake. But she hoped that she had roused him enough to dispel whatever was frightening him in his sleep.

“It’s okay,” she said, putting as much motherly soothing and reassurance as she could in her voice. “Go back to sleep.”

“’Kay,” Burt murmured, then: “’Night.”

“Goodnight, honey.” She kissed him and, careful to avoid the edge of the upper bunk, stood up.

And gasped.

Will was staring straight at her.

For an instant, the dim light in the room had caught his face, sharpening planes and ridges and reflecting from eyes so dark as to seem black even in midday. For an instant he seemed a stranger, piercing her with eyes that burned cold and deep. For an instant, he looked dead.

“Mommy?” he said, and the instant faded and it was just her son watching her from his bed.

“Yes, dear.”

“I dreamed I was at Disneyland. On the roller-coaster.”

Catherine smiled. Let him think that it was a dream. Tomorrow would be time enough to discover-in the reassuring light of day-that he had just experienced an honest-to-goodness California quake. If she told him that now, he would probably want to stay up all night waiting for the inevitable after shocks.

“Just a dream,” she said.

“And the man tried to pull me out of the car,” he continued, slowly but without a noticeable break, as if he was finishing his thought without being aware that she had interrupted. “And then I tried to run away but he chased me.”

She rubbed his arm the way she knew he liked. “It was just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

He closed his eyes. She felt a twinge of relief when the blackness disappeared beneath eyelids drained of color by the dim light. She tucked the covers around him, noticing for the first time that his skin seemed cooler than usual-just the opposite of Burt’s. She shivered. The room was cold as well. There was no cloud cover tonight, and that meant that there was a real chance of temperatures dipping to the teens.

Welcome to sunny California, and turn on the hot-air fans in the orange groves, folks. Come to think of it, turn up the heater as well.

Willard insisted that they set the thermostat as low as it would go at night. On the twenty-year-old furnace in this house, that meant somewhere in the forties. If it dipped below that, well, there were always more blankets and quilts, he insisted. But at around nineteen degrees, even quilts and blankets had a limited usefulness.

So in spite of the probability that Willard would wake up grumpy and complaining of a mild headache from the heated air (they were real headaches, she knew, and she usually tried to accommodate to his need for cool air at night), she decided to turn on the heater. After all, it was nearly 3:00, and Willard had only another couple of hours of sleep. And anyway, she thought as she made her way down the hallway, she could always open the window in their room a crack and close the door and turn off the vent. At least that way the kids would sleep a bit more warmly.

She followed the turn in the hall, already familiar with the feeling of the stiff-piled carpet beneath her bare toes. Their last place had been tiled, with only occasional throw rugs that rumpled so easily that were more bother than they were worth.

In the living room, she turned on the lamp by the thermostat, gave the circular dial a twist that re-set it to fifty, waited for a second to hear the reassuring whoomp of the gas heater kicking in and, with a clarity that made her mouth convulse, suddenly realized how extraordinarily good a cup of steaming hot Sleepy Time tea would taste.

It was the last time she ever associated Sleepy Time tea with pleasure.

She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill, wishing that she had thought to put on a robe, wishing that the heater was more efficient, wishing that the press releases for Southern California would include the fact that on the rare occasions when it got really cold-sub-freezing cold-the humidity coupled with the woefully insulated housing made it seem much worse than winter had been when she was a child in Montana. At least there, she thought ruefully, the cold was honest, and everyone knew it was coming and what to expect, and dressed warmly and built sturdily to keep the cold out and the warm in. Here the houses were cracker boxes, with no insulation to speak of.

But wishing didn’t make it so. At least with a cup of hot tea in her, she would be a little warmer when she returned to bed. At the closed folding doors that separated the kitchen from the living room, she could have reached out and turned the dimmer switch on the living room wall next to the switch that controlled the patio light. She could have done so, and then pulled the folding doors open, and the kitchen would have been well lit and what happened next might never have happened, or if it did, it might not have been so horrifying.

Or perhaps it would have happened anyway.

But regardless of the infinite maybe- s and perhaps — s that infest and destroy so many lives like God-sent plagues, she did not touch the dimmer.

The dimmer was connected to a four-bulb light-and-fan affair in the dining room half of the kitchen, and she was still worried about the electrical costs in a house this size. Heaven knew that Willard’s salary was undergoing enough trauma with the sudden pressures of a mortgage frighteningly larger than their apartment rent. She was sure that they would grow into it eventually, just as she was sure that the way rents were spiraling in the area their house payment would seem increasingly small in comparison over the next couple of years. But right now, after only a little less than a month as homeowners, she was trying for frugality, systematically replacing 100-watt bulbs with 60-watters wherever possible, trailing after Willard and the kids to turn off lights left burning in empty rooms.

So instead of simply reaching out and turning the dial and flooding the kitchen with light, she decided to cross the dark kitchen. She knew where everything was, and anyway there would be some spillage from the living room lamp. If necessary, she could always turn on the swag lamp Willard had hung over the sink. She started to open the folding doors.

Most of the kitchen was still cloaked in darkness. She had drawn the curtains over both windows before she turned in the evening before, hoping that the thin material might help keep out even a bit of the cold. She blinked at the pocket of darkness that opened before her. For an instant, memories of dank cellars and musty attics in her Grandmother’s place flitted through her mind. Memories of childhood fears of things in the dark, of things that go bump-thump-thump in the dark almost overcame her good resolves to be a conscientiously cost-aware householder.

For an instant she trembled with a fear that froze the marrow of her bones, a terror triggered unaccountably by the angular wedge of light that cut across the table. She blinked, and the complex of light and shadow resolved into hauntingly familiar forms. In spite of his promise to clean up after himself, Willard had left his late-night snack things out for her to take care of.