The Slab

by Michael R Collings

  The neighbors on both sides of Oleander were curious, of course. After all, how often does one get to live right next to an honest-to-God murder house. But none of them ventured up to the front door. None rapped lightly on the wooden doorjamb where, for a long time, a bloody, smudged handprint had lingered untouched until one kid on the crew, a part-time helper from the High School, couldn’t stand it any longer and washed the whole doorway down. No one asked what was going on inside.

  But by the end of January, it was pretty evident. The construction truck disappeared, replaced the next day by a landscaping truck. Over the next weeks, a deep-pile green lawn appeared, along with a line of yew trees along the eastern edge of the property and a similar row of hibiscus along the western. The sidewalk leading from the drive to the front door was bordered with annuals that by the middle of May would become a solid bed of scarlet and pink and purple and yellow and blue-petunias, pansies, puffs of sky-blue ageratum, masses of purple and white Royal alyssum.

  “Alyssum,” the woman next door snorted when a weekend visitor from San Francisco later commented on the vibrant white mounds blooming in the yard at the top of the hill.

  “Alyssum! That’s called madwort where I come from-and rightly so!” And then she invited her visitor to share a cup of tea and began telling the story of the Murder House.

  By April, shiny new cars with magnetized realtors’ signs on the doors began parking on the drive. Couples, occasionally accompanied by a child or two, would get out, survey the view from the top of Oleander, then disappear into the house. It might have seemed unusual that none of the families were ever outside without a realtor hovering around as well…that none of the prospective buyers ever actually talked to the neighbors on either side.

  It might have seemed unusual, except for the fact that no one really wanted the house left empty. Things happened in empty houses. So the neighbors peeped from behind drawn curtains at bright shiny faces that entered the house. The realtors spoke persuasively of increasing property values and spectacular views and convenient schools and the brand-new shopping center going up not half a mile away.

  And on a bright sunny day during the first week in May, 1992, almost three years after the house at 1066 Oleander was begun, the For Sale sign stuck in the front lawn was plastered over with another sign that simply read “Sold.”

  From the Tamarind Valley Times, 1 November 1991:

  SAFE HALLOWEEN REPORTED

  Tamarind Valley safety officials announced today that yesterday a long-standing record was not just broken but shattered-Halloween, 1991, was the safest in Valley history.

  At a time when pranks can sometimes get out of hand, when so many little ghosties and beasties are on the streets, when parents are urged to accompany their children as they Trick-or-Treat just to be on the safe side, last night was exceptional in the few number of incidents responded to by the TVPD.

  No injuries, other than tummy-aches from too much candy, were reported, and no significant property damage resulting from over-enthusiastic revelers…

  Chapter Five

  The Huntleys, January 2010

  Settling In (Cont’d.)

  1

  It took more than an hour for everyone to settle down. By the time Willard looked at the children with his unmistakable “time to get to bed” expression, even Will, Jr., was red-eyed and nodding. Sams had fallen asleep curled against his mother’s shoulder. Willard roused the older children and herded them shuffling and sleepy down the hall, waiting to tuck in Will and Burt in spite of Will’s muffled objections that he was too old for baby things like that. Suze was already asleep when Willard slipped into her darkened room and looked down at her. He returned to the living room and picked Sams up out of Catherine’s lap. He grunted at the sudden weight.

  “He’s growing up, isn’t he,” Willard said quietly as he shouldered his youngest son and made a second trip down the hallway to deposit Sams on his bed.

  By then the other two boys were fast asleep also. Willard paused for a second outside Suze’s door, his hand poised over the switch for the hall light. His first inclination was to turn the light out; even Sams was used to sleeping without a night light, and there was enough filtered light from the full moon and cloudless skies should any of them wake.

  Then he dropped his hand without shutting off the light. The kids had been startled from sleep once tonight. Best not to take any chances.

  His shadow preceding him like a sentry, he headed out for the living room. Catherine was almost asleep as well. For a second time, he was tempted to leave things as they were, to cover her with an additional blanket or two and let her finish the night on the couch. It was comfortable, she would be warm enough, and she really needed the rest she was already getting.

  But after a couple moments of thought, Willard crossed the room and gently shook her shoulder.

  “What!” she yelped as she startled awake. Her voice was midway between normal tone and scream, and Willard immediately took her in his arms to calm her. “Hey, hon, it’s okay. The kids are in bed. Everything’s all.”

  “The bugs!” Catherine’s eyes were wide open and darting around the living room as if they could penetrate the solid patches of darkness behind and beneath furniture. “There were thousands…”

  Willard patted her shoulder. His back ached from the awkward position he found himself in, neither standing nor kneeling but halfway between, his arm around Catherine’s shoulder and supporting much of her weight. He dropped to one knee and shifted his arm. “They’re gone, too. Don’t worry.”

  She sat upright and turned her glance on him. He was startled by the depth of fear in her eyes.

  “But…”

  “Shhhh. Don’t think about it.”

  She relaxed against his arm.

  “I was so frightened, Willard,” she said finally. Her voice sounded hollow and lonely in the echoing room. A moment later, the furnace flicked on with its usual low whuump. He felt her body tense beneath him. Her breathing stopped, held, then finally resumed-ragged, shallow, and much faster than normal.

  “Look,” he said, “give me a minute and I’ll take care of things.” He got up, aware of her hand trailing along his arm, as if unwilling to relinquish his physical presence. He turned on the light over the kitchen table, waiting in the living room until the glare flooded through the open kitchen door. He thrust his head into the kitchen and made a clear show of looking it over.

  “Nothing here now,” he said over his shoulder. Catherine breathed a sigh of relief. “Just to be on the safe side, though,” he continued, “I’ll give the place a shot of Raid.”

  He crossed to the pantry and took down an aerosol can from the top shelf-carefully stored out of reach of the children, and as far away from foodstuffs as possible. Chattering all the time-not saying much of anything but fully aware of how important it was to Catherine that she hear his voice-he sprayed the baseboards in the kitchen.

  He glanced around. A body or two remained on the tile floor, and a couple more were squashed on the counter where Catherine had apparently pressed her hand down on them. He shuddered, knowing the intensity of her fear of roaches and how she must have felt when she realized that she had actually crushed several beneath her bare hand and feet.

  “No wonder she freaked out,” he said under his breath. “A few would seem like a hundred to her under those conditions.”

  He ran hot water over a cloth and washed down the counters and the table, then threw the cloth in the garbage.

  “Okay, now for in here” he said, returning to the living room with the can of Raid. As much as a precaution as to further reassure Catherine, he sprayed around the baseboards there as well.

  By the time he was finished, Catherine looked more her normal self. Her color was better. She was sitting up, her feet squarely on the carpet. Still, Willard was taken by the sheer magnitude of her terror and horror and, doing something he had not even though of trying since the first year of their marriage, he leaned o
ver and gently picked her up. She curled her arms around his shoulder and allowed him to carry her down the hall toward their bedroom.

  Under any other circumstances, the action would have struck him as unbearably if not idiotically romantic, but tonight it just seemed the best thing to do.

  “Wait,” Catherine said as they passed the open bathroom door. “Let me take a shower before I get back into bed.”

  Willard started to argue, fully aware of how late it was, how soon he would have to get up and head into LA. But he thought better of it and nodded.

  Catherine waited outside in the brightly lit hall while Willard stuck his head into the bathroom and checked things out.

  “Just a minute,” he called to her as he yanked a wad of toilet paper from the roll and used it to trap an inch-long roach skittering around the bottom of the tub. He cringed as he felt the horny carapace crush beneath his fingers, and again he felt a shudder of empathy for what Catherine must have experienced.

  He flushed the wad of paper-and the remains of the roach-down the toilet and turned the hot water on in the shower, drawing the curtain enough across the tub to prevent water from spattering onto the floor.

  “Okay, everything’s ready.”

  Catherine entered without speaking and, even though the bathroom was really too small for two people, said nothing as Willard waited just inside and watched her undress. He wanted to reach out and touch her body-her breasts and thighs and stomach, the cool softness of the skin along her shoulders. But he knew instinctively that it would be a mistake. Instead, he watched as she ducked around the half-drawn curtains and disappeared.

  He returned to the bedroom and waited, his head propped on the pillow. It was a long time before Catherine finally reappeared, her hair matted against her head and her skin red and flushed. Apparently unconcerned that the door was still open and one of the kids might conceivably rouse and come in at the wrong moment, she dropped the towel she was wearing and pulled on a fresh nightgown from her drawer. As she got into bed, Willard noticed that the skin on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands was roughened and inflamed as if it were just this side of bleeding.

  He reached up and turned the overhead light out. The light from the hall spilled into the room. Catherine shivered-whether from cold or a residue of her terror, he couldn’t tell. He circled her with his arms and held her without speaking until the smoothness of the rise and fall of her breasts assured him that she was finally asleep.

  Only moments after that, Willard was asleep as well.

  2

  Briiinnnggg.

  Briiinnnggg.

  Willard slapped at the alarm button and stared groggily at the luminescent face confronting him.

  Five o’clock.

  He sat upright in bed, staring from side to side, wondering why five o’clock seemed so much earlier than it ever had before. Then he remembered. All told, he had gotten maybe four and a half or five hours of sleep.

  He groaned.

  That wasn’t enough any more. When he was in college, he had thought nothing of staying up until two or three a.m. shooting the bull, then rousing at six to head out for a full schedule of classes. And when he and Catherine were first married, they might have gotten to bed by eleven or twelve each night, but that didn’t mean that they went right to sleep-and somehow he had made it up each morning, bright and ready.

  But now…

  He groaned again. I’m too old for this kind of thing, he thought as he forced himself out of bed and into the bathroom.

  Half an hour later, showered, shaved, dressed for the office, he stuck his head into the bedroom to check on Catherine.

  “Willard?” Her voice sounded ghostly and thin as it emerged from the relative darkness. He switched on the lamp by the door-it was far enough away and low enough wattage that it shouldn’t bother Catherine’s eyes.

  “I’m just getting ready to head in to work.”

  “Don’t.”

  “But…”

  “Please don’t. I need you here today. Please.”

  He wanted to refuse. There wasn’t really anything he could do to help her, other than stand around and reassure here that everything was all right. And he did need to get going on a couple of projects that had come his way over the past couple of days.

  “Honey, I really have to…

  “Please.”

  The third please did it. There was an unfamiliar note of pleading in the word that Willard could barely connect with his mental image of his solid, competent wife. Catherine rarely asked for anything; she never begged. But that was what her voice was doing now. Begging. The sound made Willard feel even more uncomfortable

  “But…”

  “Please.”

  He had no choice.

  “Okay, I can call and say I’m sick or something. Okay.”

  “Hmmmm,” came Catherine’s voice, dulled by sleep and now incoherent.

  He crossed the room and looked down at here. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed much paler than usual, even in the dim light. He pulled the covers tighter over her, remembering her constant joking whenever he did that with one of the kids.

  More covers cures all sickness, huh? Well, this time it might.

  He slipped out of the room, turning off the lights and shutting the door behind him. He stood for a moment, then walked a few feet toward the kids’ bedrooms and shut off the hall light, too. The hall was lit only by a reflection from the bathroom, where he had left the light over the sink burning.

  The house was silent.

  He listened intently but could hear nothing beyond his own breathing and the beating of his own heart.

  After a long while, he went on into the living room, switching on lights and turning up the furnace as he went. To all appearances, the living room was unchanged, except for a used tissue lying in a lump a few feet from the sofa.

  He picked it up, feeling his back creak as he bent over. He checked to make sure that there were no roach-remains embedded in the folds-that it was just damp from Catherine’s hysterical tears-then he wadded it more tightly in his fist and went into the kitchen to toss it away.

  As soon as he turned the light on, he saw the bodies. There must have been two dozen roaches lying feet up on the tile floor. The smallest was a field roach, barely more than half an inch long and thin, looking more like a large grain of wild rice than anything else. The largest, half hidden in the shadow cast by one of the dinette chairs, came close to measuring an inch and a quarter-maybe an inch and a half, but Willard was in no mood to worry about particulars.

  Grimacing, he gingerly crossed the kitchen, cringing when he inadvertently stepped on one of the corpses. The dry crackling crunch seemed to echo throughout the room. He noticed that not all of the things were dead. Maybe every fourth or fifth one was flailing its legs wildly, as if trying desperately to right itself and scuttle for the safety of cracks and darkness.

  He grabbed the broom from its niche between the refrigerator and the wall by the family room-formerly the garage-and began disposing of the remains. Usually a sloppy housekeeper on the rare occasions when necessity called on him to fill that role, this time he took sedulous care to sweep beneath all of the counters, to remove the trashcan and push the bristles into each corner. He swept the debris to the center of the room and, masking his disgust at the pile of quivering husks, brushed the roaches into the dustpan and dumped them into the trash. Before the last one hit the bottom of the plastic garbage can, he had the Hefty-bag liner out, cinched at the top, and tied with a connected twist-tie. And a moment later, the bag-only half full of Huntley garbage, with a thin sprinkling of roach-remains scattered throughout-was stuffed inside one of the big brown outdoor garbage cans that lined the fence between the backyard and the garage.

  Only then, when Willard stepped back into the kitchen, his nose frosted by the January chill and the sudden discovery that he had forgotten to put on a jacket-only then did he breathe easily.

  He gave the counters an
d tables a quick once-over with a steaming hot washcloth, then looked over at the clock.

  Six-fifteen. Time to get the kids up.

  Waking Will and Burt was every bit as frustrating as he had feared it would be. They were deeply asleep, and when they finally sat up in bed, they were cranky and sullen.

  “I don’t feel good, Daddy,” Burt whimpered, trying vainly to slip back between the inviting covers.

  “Are you bleeding or throwing up?” Willard asked, echoing his mother’s litany, remembered from almost three decades before.

  “No,” came Burt’s reply.

  “Then up and at ‘em. Breakfast in fifteen minutes.” He swatted Will, Jr.’s rump and yelled out a final, “Out of bed, right now,” before he left the boys’ room and went into Suze’s.

  Suze always woke more easily than the boys-Willard didn’t mind trying to get her out of bed on the rare days that the duty devolved onto him. This morning was no exception.

  Apparently he had made enough commotion that when he opened her door a slit and stuck his head in, she was already sitting up.

  “I’m awake, Daddy,” she said quietly

  “That’s my girl,” he answered. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes. Don’t forget to make your bed.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  Just as a matter of course, Willard retraced his steps and glanced into the boys’ room.

  Will was up and staggering around the room, his eyes half closed as he struggled to pull on shirt and pants in the crisp air. Burt was snuggled back in bed. Willard yanked the blankets off the bunk bed, pulling so hard that they ended up a mash of rumpled blankets and quilts at his feet.

  “Up and at ‘em, I said.”

  Burt sat up groggily and rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles.