Michael R Collings

All Calm, All Bright: Christmas Offerings

The Art and Craft of Poetry: Twenty Exercises Toward Mastery Brian Aldiss

Dark Transformations: Deadly Visions of Change The Films of Stephen King

GemLore: An Introduction to Precious and Semi-Precious Gemstones The House Beyond the Hill: A Novel of Horror In Endless Morn of Light: Moral Freedom in Milton’s Universe In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, & Horror The Many Facets of Stephen King

Matrix: Echoes of Growing Up West

Naked to the Sun: Dark Visions of Apocalypse The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books

Piers Anthony

Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture Singer of Lies: A Science Fantasy Novel

The Slab: A Novel of Horror

Tales Through Time: Poems, Revised and Enlarged Edition Three Tales of Omne: A Companion to Wordsmith Toward Other Worlds: Perspectives on John Milton, C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, and Others Wer Means Man, and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror Wordsmith, Part One: The Veil of Heaven

Wordsmith, Part Two: The Thousand Eyes of Flame

Copyright © 2011 by Michael R. Collings

Published by Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidebooks.com

For the past quarter-century, three masters of modern supernatural and psychological horror have been virtually constant companions in my life—in my academic studies and publications, in my private reading, and in my creative imagination.

Although I have previously responded to their works in the form of books, articles, and reviews based on their works, in which I endeavored to explore some of their widespread influences on contemporary American literature and culture,
The Slab
hazards treading the harrowing, sinuous paths they pioneered, and follows them into the deepest recesses of fear and terror.

For so many years of fascination, enlightenment, and pleasure—albeit frequently of a darkly gruesome sort—my heart-felt thanks to Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, and Robert R. McCammon.

—Michael R. Collings

Meridian, Idaho

November 2010

…there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had never come.

—Bram Stoker,
Dracula

…but whatever walks at Hill House, walks alone.

—Shirley Jackson,
The

Haunting of Hill House

The House Alone, 29 October 1991

A Time of Reckoning

1.

It was a day made for death.

Brittle shards from the slanting October sunset stabbed at the quiet street. Brassy gold stained shaggy lawns a murky, coppery brown. The dying light fingered naked limbs of rain-blackened elms and fruitless mulberries and peaches and skeletal jacarandas. It rested heavily on the drooping branches of the occasional valley oaks that had survived construction of the subdivision two years earlier. It tinted vibrant stucco walls not yet faded to earth-mud brown by interminable summers of suns, not yet hidden behind luxuriant passion vines or junipers or the creeping jasmine so popular in this part of Southern California.

In the odd, quirky light, the Charter Oaks subdivision became an enigma of striated shadows, dead black pinioned against muted October color in the late evening of a day that had been more cloud-ridden than otherwise.

Ace McCall squinted. The sun sliced through a bank of clouds low over the horizon, as if day were pleading for one last chance at life before giving up and dying painfully into night. Blinking and cursing under his breath, McCall slapped the sun visor down. This place was bad enough in the summer, he grunted to himself, when the sun would sear a man’s naked eyeballs in their sockets like eggs frying on a hot garbage can lid in the hundred degree heat, especially when the glare billowed in waves off the glistening white finish of his year-old Lincoln Mark VII. But you’d think that by this time of year, the damn sun would let up.

He blinked a couple more times, the movement of his eyes unconsciously echoing the rhythm of his turn-signal indicators as he swung off Mariposa Way onto Oleander Place. He didn’t stop, even though the intersection was clearly marked with the standard red octagon. Almost as an afterthought, he slowed just enough to scan the cross street. A California rolling-stop came as close as anything to describing the maneuver—illegal by any account, but Ace McCall didn’t give a damn. There wouldn’t be any cop cars on watch, not here in the middle of Charter Oaks. And there wasn’t any cross traffic, anyway. He wasn’t dumb enough to just pull in front of some snot-nosed kid’s dilapidated Beetle and get sideswiped. There wasn’t a nick on the Linc anywhere, and he’d been driving it for over a year. Even into LA two or three times a month.

If he could survive that cannibalistic traffic, this piddling street counted for less than nothing.

He knew how to handle machines. He straightened the wheel and followed the gentle arc of Oleander Place as it rose gradually to crest the tallest of the small hills that dotted Tamarind Valley. The top marked one of the boundaries of Charter Oaks. The end of Ace McCall’s responsibility.

Responsibility
.

He grimaced. He was beginning to hate that word. He glanced at the passenger seat beside him. An issue of the
Tamarind Valley Times
lay open, accusing him with a white-eyed, blank stare. He caught the edge of a headline and tore his eyes from the roadway just long enough to register three words—“
Construction Fraud Charged
”—before he crumpled the top page and tossed it over his shoulder and returned his eyes to the road.

There was a flicker of movement. McCall glanced sideways, across the lane to one of the tract houses. A solitary ghost stood forlornly in a recently landscaped front yard. It gazed wistfully at the street and clutched a white bag decorated with silhouetted black cats and witches in its sheet-draped hand. Clutched it as tight as death itself.

You’re gonna have to wait kid, McCall thought glumly, oddly touched by the sight. Sorry, kid, no spooks for two more days.

Saturday.

Halloween.

He clenched his teeth in anger.

The day he had to turn over his books to the shyster that paraded as his attorney. The sleazy bastard had offered him a day’s grace. Out of the goodness of his heart. His cast-iron heart that had no more human warmth in it than a lump of rotting, frozen graveyard-clay.

“But they’d better be on my desk by noon Saturday,” Alberts had intoned officiously over the phone in his best intimidation voice. “I’ll wait for you in my office. And I’m going to have to make a special trip to pick them up, so you damn well better be on time.”

McCall grunted. It was pretty rough when your own side started figuring you for a cheat and a thief.

He crumpled another leaf from the
Times
, tossing it over his shoulder into the back seat as well.

Shit.

He glanced in the rear-view mirror. The ghost was gone. For the moment, the shadowed length of Oleander Place was deserted. Cut-outs of bats and pumpkins and witches dangled here and there, construction-paper corpses that festooned door frames and window sills. Scattered clumps of drying leaves whispered beneath bare trees. But he saw no other movement, no people.

Where is everyone? McCall thought. He glanced at his watch.

Dinner time.

He pulled the Lincoln to the curb and jammed the shift into park. The engine roared, then settled into an uncomfortable idle. Everyone was inside—Momma, Poppa, the statistically proper two and a third kiddies—all tucked away from the crisp October wind and the crisp October darkness, shut safely away from the outside world in their safe new homes. Homes
he
had maneuvered and finagled. Homes
he
had busted his ass to get approved by the County board. Homes
he
had built. Homes
he
sweat for and bled for and even....

He twisted in his seat. Now they were trying to get him, trying to take away everything he had worked for, just because he had cut a few corners, made the places a little cheaper than he should have. Hell, in fifteen or twenty years, nobody would even remember his little scams...or so he had figured two years before.

And even now—even after it had all come out and the County was dogging him, slobbering for a head—in a decade the shoddiest house in all of Charter Oaks would still probably sell for at least two hundred thou—twice what they were going for now. He crumpled another sheet of newspaper and pulled away from the curb.

He drove slowly now. He studied the houses as he passed, remembering each one, recalling a sticky problem with the plumbing in that one, a shattered plate glass window in this one. In each, he saw the glow of lights behind closed draperies echoing the sheen of the dying sun.

He felt alone. Miserable and alone.

Slug-like, the pale Lincoln crawled up Oleander Place. To the top of the hill.

And stopped.

In front of 1066 Oleander Place.

The last house.

2.

Even a cursory glance showed that 1066 differed from the rest. It was dark, for one thing, inside and out. No lights gleamed warmly through draped windows or reflected on a tidy, well-tended lawn. Its shadowed stucco was scarred and pitted in half a dozen places from peltings with rocks and sticks. A necklace of broken glass circled the foundations where hot-rodders had tossed their beer bottles on Saturday nights. The lawn was a lawn in name only—instead of grass, dusky grey-green weeds that looked jaundiced in the fading light clustered in harsh knots and hillocks. Even the weeds were scrawny and half-dead from lack of care.

1066 Oleander Place.

McCall angled the Lincoln into the driveway, fully intending just to turn around and get the hell away from the place. With everything else he had on his mind, the last thing he needed was to start thinking about 1066. He closed his eyes. His forehead furrowed as if he had just felt the first hammering assault of a mind-shattering migraine. He shook his head and stared ahead. He refused to let those memories through.

But the next thing he knew, his hand rested on the key dangling from the ignition. In spite of his better judgment, he twisted it and throttled the engine into silence. He opened the door and stood, an angular silhouette with one foot propped on the Lincoln’s glossy frame and the other crushing a straggling weedy morning glory that had wandered halfway across the drive.

He glanced over his shoulder. The sun was gone. The sky still glowed, but now it was mostly an unhealthy yellow glow that was part cloud, part lights from the businesses cropping up like toadstools along the Ventura freeway, just like he figured they would when he started planning the Charter Oaks project five years ago.

Just like he figured.

He shivered and pulled his jacket tighter. After a couple of moments, he almost slid back into the Lincoln, was halfway crouched into the doorway when he stopped. A sound from the house startled him.

Craaack
! Like breaking glass.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Kids again.”

He swept the yard with his eyes. The blood-red McCall/Sidney Realty “For Sale” sign was canting again—how the hell had he missed seeing that. He shook his head. “Gotta get a clean-up crew out here.”

This was a prime lot—probably the best view in all of Charter Oaks, perched as it was at the top of the rise. From the front yard, you could follow the downward sweep of Oleander Place across the northern half of the shallow valley. From the back yard, the southern half opened out, dropping abruptly—almost precipitously—to survey vista on vista as the valley lengthened, then wrinkled to become the foothills of the coastal range. The asking price was good, McCall knew—an easy five thousand below list.

But the “For Sale” sign remained staked steadfastly in the front yard, standing sentry over emptiness and darkness.

Client after client said they liked the deal. They liked the view. They liked the floor plan and the generously sized lot. They liked the quiet neighborhood, with its handy shopping centers a short drive down Bingham Boulevard, its handful of churches of varying denominations scattered nearby, and its three schools almost within walking distance. One after another, they sauntered through the place and
hmmm
-ed and
maybe
-ed approvingly.

But they didn’t buy.

The house at 1066 was the last of the original Charter Oaks subdivision. The only one that had never sold.

McCall shivered again. He listened intently, but the cracking sound wasn’t repeated. “Imagination,” he said to himself. “Too close to Halloween. Too much stress.”

He bent again to slide into the Lincoln. A slit of light, suddenly visible when his head turned to just the right angle, glimmered beneath the garage door. He straightened. As his head moved, the glimmer disappeared. He scowled. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. No one had shown the place for a month.

Irritated, he slammed the car door, fumbled in his pocket for a set of master keys, and walked to the side garage door. His feet crunched dried weeds that needled through his socks and prickled his ankles where his slacks pulled up from his shoes. He slid the key into the door, then stopped, listening.

Nothing.

Wait...what was that?

No, it was just the wind in the naked branches of an elm in the corner of the lot. Or the whisper of cars on the freeway.

Somewhere down the block, a woman’s voice wailed “Mikeeee,” and another voice, high-pitched and piercing, replied with a drawn-out “Commiiinnng Mommm.”

But the house at 1066 lay silent as a white-stucco sepulchre.

3.

McCall’s hand trembled as it held the key. He steadied his fingers with his other hand and thrust the key home. The lock was stiff, tight. When he turned the key, the scrannel grating of metal on metal sent shivers coursing up his spine. The door creaked opened.

Welcoomme, to Inner Sanctumm.

“Gotta get a crew up here,” he said loudly, as if to push the creaking echo away. “The place is going to hell fast.”

The garage smelled musty in spite of the fact that it had never been used. No ground-in grease droppings from split gaskets stained the concrete, no spatters of paint, no stench of gasoline from leaky power mowers. But still the place smelled...bad.

There was no light visible now.

McCall paused. He glanced back at his car. He could just see the edge of the white front fender gleaming against the rapidly darkening sky. He thought about the flashlight he always carried in the trunk. But he didn’t go back for it because just then,

craaaack
!

The sound repeated somewhere inside and he stepped into the garage before he was aware he had and carefully shut the door behind him. It seemed important at the moment that the door be closed. Fatally important. He just didn’t know why.

The place was dark but not pitch black. A hazy light penetrated from somewhere. The kitchen door must be open. He shuffled across the garage. Even though he knew where everything was, including the as yet unused water heater hunkering in the corner to the left of the door, he instinctively held one hand out from his side, the other in front of him, as if he were afraid of running into something unexpected, something sharp that would jab his eyes or gut his stomach. His heart thumped. He smelled the rankness of his own sweat overlaying the stale air. He slid forward. The sound of leather against smooth concrete—a grating
ssshhh
,
ssshhh
,
ssshhh
—made him nervous. He almost wished to hear the sound of breaking glass again.

He stopped.

“What’s going on?” he said out loud, startling himself as the sound echoed from empty walls. “I’m no kid afraid of spooks. This is shit!”

He took a long stride, another. Two more and he would be at the kitchen door and he would....

His toe caught and he went down. He sprawled, stretched out on the concrete. His knee cracked on the smooth surface, then his chest, and then his chin. His teeth snapped together and he came
this
goddam close to losing half an inch of his tongue. The pain in his knee was sharp, burning, moist. For a long instant, he didn’t dare move.

Broken bones, fractures, sprains—all sorts of possibilities flickered through his imagination as he lay sprawled in the darkness. Something hot dripped along his chin. He raised his hand to touch it. It was sticky as well.