And now it seemed as if the whisper were nearer, monstrously intimate, as if corrosive words were filtering through the mad rush of fevered blood in McCall’s ears. “I’ve been waiting,” it seemed to say, each syllable echoing with horror and threat. “A long time.”
Ace McCall’s face blanched white, although in the hellish light his stark, fleshy features were stained the sickly, mottled red-grey-green of an oozing wound, suppurating and inflamed. His heart thudded. He pressed his back against the wall, the light spilling over his right shoulder and reflecting on him from the wall opposite.
“I didn’t…,” he began. Answering the sound suddenly made it worse. It was as if his acknowledging it out loud had enfleshed what might just have been imagination. Suddenly, he felt the presence coalesce into something more, felt a sudden, pressing, frightening physicality, felt it with a surety that stunned him and left his limbs as weak as unwanted newborn kittens destined to be drowned in a dank, fetid gunnysack before too many more minutes of painful life had passed. His voice choked off as if invisible hands had constricted around his throat. He tried again.
“I mean, I thought… It was an accident!
“Noooo!”
The unseen presence whipped out and grasped McCall’s mind and yanked. He stumbled into the back bedroom, fell hard on the carpet-shrouded concrete. His knees scraped against rough carpet and the blood flowed freely again. His shoulder banged against the door casement, and then his head struck something rough and cutting and he vaguely felt the skin on his temple slice away as the thing (can’t be can’t be you’re not real) spun him around with the ease of a child playing with a Christmas toy and raised him effortlessly to his full height and stared him in the eyes and laughed.
Ace McCall tried to speak, tried to cry out, had to struggle even to breath. His eyes narrowed with pain. The loathsome green light faded to coppery, dusky brown and then to blood red.
Or perhaps it wasn’t so much a change in the light as it was the fiery blood…his own fiery blood…shrouding his eyes and gouting onto the carpet at his feet not six inches from the faint shadow that marked the sinuous twining of yet another crack in the foundation slab in the house at 1066 Oleander Place.
“ McCall.”
From the Tamarind Valley Times, 15 June 1989:
HOUSING STARTS SCHEDULED
Construction will begin by the end of June on a proposed 60-site development to be called Charter Oaks, reported a County Planning Commission spokesman today. The development, bounded on the west by Bingham Boulevard and on the north by the newly completed Reynolds Avenue, represents the single largest housing project in the history of Tamarind Valley.
Ace-High Construction submitted the lowest bid and was formally awarded the contract at last night’s Council meeting. The homes, when completed, will form the heart of what is envisioned by some as a new city nestled in the foothills of the coastal range, with easy freeway access to…
The Slab- A Novel of Horror (retail) (epub)
Michael R Collings
Chapter Two
The Huntleys, 21/22 December 2009
Moving Day
1
Catherine Huntley stiffened. She turned her head slightly, angling toward the sound she thought she had heard. She relaxed…marginally. It was nothing, she argued with herself, as she had been doing most of the night.
Just your silly imagination.
She dropped her head back into the pillow’s embrace and tried to persuade her over-active mind to accept sleep. But she knew that it was useless.
She felt her legs beginning to twitch nervously, a sign she easily recognized. She wouldn’t get to sleep for a long time tonight.
At her side, Willard snored lightly-not enough to have awakened her if she had been asleep but enough to help keep her from getting there.
The snore stuttered into a muffled snort as he turned onto his side, flopping heavily on the mattress and pulling most of the last of her grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts-a delicate Wedding Ring pattern in rose and palest blue-with him as he turned.
She smiled.
As if he were awake to her smile, he snuggled against her, his curving back and buttocks nestling against her side. His spine caressed her ribs. She smiled again. Part of her felt warm and tingly tonight, in spite of the light rain that had begun late that afternoon, in spite of the prediction of near freezing temperatures by morning-a rarity in near-tropical Coastal Southern California.
The faint draft from the windows touched her cheek with a chilling briskness, and the air in the bedroom was both cold and faintly damp, almost musty, even though the previous owners had only been out three days before the Huntleys began moving in.
That morning, in fact.
Willard had put the bed up first thing, with a grin and an unspoken promise that he had more than fulfilled tonight.
Catherine smiled again.
She still felt his fluid warmth inside of her.
She still tingled with the memory of his touch, his body pressed against hers, his lips seeking hers, his tongue penetrating. Loving Willard had always been special. But tonight it seemed even more so.
Because they were doing it in their house.
Their very own.
Catherine raised her head, the tendons in her neck straining and streaking her flesh with knife-sharp shadows.
There it came again.
A low murmur.
Like water rustling through pipes.
Or the toilet tank in the back bathroom running.
Or…
Get a hold of yourself, she thought sternly, it’s nothing. Remember the first night in the apartment in Riverside, thirteen long years ago, when you made poor Willard get up and tramp through the house barefoot, not even letting him have enough time to throw a robe over his nakedness, then him stubbing his toes on every box and carton in every room, all because you knew you heard someone pounding on the back door.
Well, she thought in her own defense, there had been a pounding.
Right.
And she remembered how embarrassed she was when they drove away from the manager’s office first thing the next morning.
“Pounding,” the woman had said, leaning back in her chair. “Probably just the pipes. You turned the hot water on, right?”
Willard had nodded.
“Just the pipes expanding and contracting.” She had turned away, the action eloquently expressing her mixture of contempt and humor at the couple sitting stiffly before her, already complaining after only one day in
