Michael Collings - The Slab

Again.

The mundanity of a small white plastic cup, a plate and butter-and-jam-covered knife crossing it, and a loaf of bread with its plastic sleeve still open to the air penetrated her fear.

She shook her head in a gesture at once accusatory and forgiving and stepped into the kitchen

At the same instant, she realized with a panicky thrummm — ing in her veins that there was something wrong with the table. It was a relic from Willard’s family’s pioneer past, purchased by his great-grandparents at the turn of the century and handed down from generation to generation since, and finally officially his on the day of their wedding. But now, the once solid oak planking wavered and heaved as if it were undergoing its own California temblor.

And then her foot touched the cold linoleum floor…or rather, what should have been cold linoleum but was in fact even colder, frenetic and scuttering and dry and husky and cold and moving moving and the floor rose up to brush the sole of her foot and lap over like an incoming wave at Zuma Beach and rise higher, onto the arch of her foot, and then the foot was down before her mind could assimilate the shock and the horror, and her weight was on it and something somethings crushed beneath her and the floor was frenetic and scuttering and husky and cold and slimy-wet… And Catherine Huntley screamed!

For Willard Huntley, getting to sleep had become a real chore lately. Even with the younger kids in bed by 8:00 and Will, Jr., down by 8:30, even by staying up half an hour or so later than Catherine and watching the 11:00 news and then getting something to eat before padding down the hallway, even by consciously trying to wear himself out at work each day, he was finding it harder and harder to get to sleep. Except, he would have reminded himself wryly had he been awake at the moment Catherine screamed, and languidly contemplating his life, except after he and Catherine made love

But those occasions were rare enough. She was often tired nowadays, and there was always the chance-no, make that the high probability-of one of the kids waking up and calling “Mommy” at just the wrong moment, like they were all endowed with some kind of alien your-parents-are-having-sex radar. Or, worse, either he or Catherine might glance up at a moment of passion and see a pair of wide, dark eyes staring at them in sleepy bewilderment. That had already happened at least once (that they knew of), and now Catherine was wary of simply indulging in raw passion.

She had to check the kids first, she had to close the bedroom door (that always made Willard feel slightly constrained, slightly confined, slightly guilty), she had to remind him half a dozen times to be quiet, she had to do this or that. And the upshot was that since moving in, they had really made love only once-passionately, wildly, satisfyingly, that first night. Since then, a little touching, a little playing around- hell, he had seen more action in the back seat of his ’73 Chevy convertible when he was a kid than he had seen in his own bed for the past few weeks.

One consequence was that he had been sleeping less lately, growing more exhausted, more touchy with each passing night…lying awake, listening to the subtle noises of the house, listening to the less subtle sounds of Catherine breathing beside him. But the good part, if there was a good part, was that once he finally made it to sleep-whether on his own or through pure, physical, sexual exhaustion-he slept, sometimes jaws agape, like the mouth of one newly dead, until his alarm clanged him awake at 5:00.

He had been known to sleep through minor household catastrophes that included tummy aches and croup and ear infections and the million other ailments that set kids from infants to teens wailing in the night. He had heard about them often enough from Catherine, more than often enough from his mother-in-law who, after thirteen years was still not sure her daughter had chosen either wisely or well enough. So he didn’t notice when the bed shook a little, or when the mattress shook substantially more as Catherine slipped out of bed.

He might have registered hearing her yelling at him to get up, but the part of his brain responsible for timekeeping and schedules seemed to realize intuitively that the hour was wrong, so it shunted her voice to another part of Willard’s brain, and in the next ten seconds he endured a nightmare of cries of terror and weirdly surrealistic situations that in the cold light of day would seem totally unfrightening as they swiftly passed from experience to memory to intimation to simply a feeling of slight discomfort. He didn’t hear the whispered conversations between his wife and his older sons. He didn’t hear Catherine pass by the bedroom, and he certainly didn’t hear the faint click of the living room lamp or the inaudible scrape of plastic against plastic as she turned the thermostat up.

He did, however, react to the soft whuump when the gas heater kicked in. He winced slightly, and his closed eyes flickered. Within a moment or two, the first wisps of heated air emerged through the vent above the open door and feathered into the coolness. In spite of Catherine’s sometimes lax, sometimes almost aggressive attitude about his responses to heated air at night, Willard was not simply being contentious. Within seconds of the heater’s firing up, his head began to feel sluggish, heavy, the blood to pound fractionally more stridently against his temples. Even in his sleep-no longer quite as deep or as complete as a moment before-he was preparing to wake sick, edgy, slightly nauseated.

But finally, of all the sensations that conspired to destroy Willard Huntley’s sleep that night, one succeeded where all else had failed.

Willard jerked fully awake, sat straight up in bed, and then was out the door and down the hall, wearing only an old, faded T-shirt and his boxers in spite of the iciness heavy in the air, before Catherine’s frantic scream had even begun to die away.

Catherine was not afraid of many things. Oh, she cringed at the occasional snake or lizard or frog Will or Burt might bring home. But generally she handled the zoological traumas of motherhood with amazing aplomb. She had somehow even found the reserves-deep, deep reserves, to be sure-to hold up a nearly complete lizard skin shed by some long-forgotten denizen of an overgrown vine that crept along the back fence in their apartment in Riverside. Burt had found it one July and brought it to her with all the pride and triumph of Sir Francis Drake presenting the treasure-laden Golden Hind to Her Majesty the Queen.

“How nice. How interesting,” she had murmured to Burt’s breathless, “Gosh, Mom, isn’t this neat” as he dropped the thing into her hand. Somehow she managed not to crush the monstrosity…at least not until Burt was long out of sight and she could safely deposit the treasure in the garbage. Fortunately, he had never wondered why she was not wearing the paper-thin, transparently scaled skin as a brooch to church or as a hat on special days.

No, she could handle most things.

But not this!

Her scream echoed even louder in her own head than in the silent air. Long and harsh and painful. Her throat felt on fire. Her lungs screamed their own counterpoint, demanding air air air.

For a moment-a blessed moment that she hoped would come but feared even more because then she might lose control and fall to the cold tile floor and become one with the rustling, scabrous, heaving movement-she nearly fainted.

She caught herself at the last instant and thrust her hand out to the counter to steady herself. And felt more dryness and frenetic movement. She passed beyond startlement and fear into horror as the things crossed her fingers, their legs burning into her skin like infinitesimal points of acid.