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.
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!
2
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.
3
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.
She jerked her hand away, the action simultaneously rousing her out of her threatened faint and intensifying her disgust and revulsion.
They were climbing her hand and arm!
Shuddering beyond conscious control, she screamed
again and sliced frantically at her arm with her other hand, fingers stiffened into knives, palm slapping viciously against her own flesh, oblivious to pain, oblivious to anything but a burgeoning horror.
Roaches.
Roaches!
She might have been able to handle one. Perhaps. But even one was generally enough to send her screaming for help-please Willard get it out of the tub please Willard flush it down the sink please Willard please Willard.
She might have been able to handle one. On an extraordinary day, two.
Three? Never.
But now the floor seemed alive with them, flooding in and out of the darkness to scuttle with their hideous dry, raspy click from darkness to the eerily distorted square of light from the living room, then back again to the darkness. They jittered across the white plate on the table, they danced in mindless pagan circles around the white plastic cup, they slithered like animated nightmares in and out of the red-and-blue printed plastic bread wrapper that should have been tied with the little yellow metal twist-tie but that Willard had left open. In and out. In and out.
Feeling the hot press of vomit in her stomach, Catherine moved. Unthinking, responsive only to her body’s single command get out of here now! she stepped back into the safety of the living room. Her foot touched carpet, reveled in the sudden sensation of shag loops tickling the sensitive skin. Her hand slapped the dimmer switch and unconsciously twisted it to full. The four bulbs in the kitchen’s overhead fixture glared down balefully, and Catherine took a single long look and screamed for a fourth time and closed her eyes.
4
By the time Willard reached the living room, Catherine had screamed three more times, each cry short, sharp, pitching upward into registers he had never heard from her. Only seconds had passed, but from the sounds coming from the other end of the house, Willard understood at once that an eternity of subjective time must have separated them.
He careened around the corner.
Catherine was standing on the coffee table-impossibly, on the coffee table, and she wouldn’t even let the boys put their school bags there for fear of scratching it.
Dressed only in her nightgown, dancing barefoot up and down, she flicked at her arms, her neck, her breasts. Willard flashed to a scene he had seen as a child of some English actress-Dame Someone-Or-Other-playing Lady Macbeth in the throes of madness. Her bony fingers had seemed to stretch for miles as she held them rigidly, like radiating spokes from the central hub of her palm, and rubbed hand to hand trying to remove imaginary blood. The image had disturbed him as a child; he had dreamed of it for days. Seeing the image made flesh in his own wife chilled and horrified him.
He rushed to her, grabbed her arms, and tried to lift her down from the table.
She screamed again, flailing out at him and staring with unseeing eyes at the wall behind him. One hand connected with his cheek, hard, and his head rocked back and he saw bright flashes of stars and comets.
Then suddenly, as if someone had turned off a control switch, she slumped. Her dead weight almost threw him off balance, but he managed to stop her from falling. Half carrying her, he swung her around the end of the coffee table and laid her on the sofa. He reached down and lifted her legs onto the cushions as well. For a moment, he thought she had fainted, but when he looked back at her face, her eyes were open. Her lips were bluish, her skin whiter than he had ever seen it. She was clearly in shock of some kind, but at least she was conscious.
“What’s wrong with Mommy?” piped a small voice behind Willard.
He whirled.
The kids-all but Sams-were lined up across the entryway. At any other time, Willard would have been bemused to see that they had automatically arranged themselves by size-Will, then Burt, then Suze. But right now that was the last thing he noted.
“Nothing. Go on back to bed,” he said, trying to keep his own panic out of his voice. No use getting the kids more frightened than they already were.
“But…”
That was from Will. He considered himself pretty much a man, and all too often irritated Willard by offering to help in situations he would do best to stay out of.
“Now,” Willard said.
“Yes, Dad.” The boy’s voice was low and frightened, but Willard was too concerned with Catherine to pay much attention. Her skin felt cold and papery, and she was starting to shake. Willard suddenly became aware as well that he was bare-legged and barefoot, that the air was frighteningly cold in spite of the hummm that told him Catherine had turned the heater on.
He twisted his head around. The kids hadn’t moved.
“Wait,” he said quietly. “Will, get me some blankets from the linen closet.”
Will nodded and ducked into the darkened hallway. A second later, a light glowed from somewhere, and a second after that, Willard heard a door open with a hollow squeak.
“Burt.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Get me Mommy’s pillow.”
Burt disappeared as well. Suze took a step or two closer. Her thumb was in her mouth, and her wide-staring eyes seemed the size of quarters, large and innocent and frightened.
“It’s okay, sugar. Mommy’s just…she’s just real tired.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, hon.” He answered absently, not taking his eyes from Catherine’s face.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what, hon?” After living for so long with four children, Willard could handle this kind of question-answer dialogue without even hesitating.
“There.”
“Where?”
“There.” Suze’s voice had that oh-Daddy-you-can-be-so-silly-sometimes lilt that he liked to hear when they were teasing each other but that now seemed horribly out of place.
“Where?” he repeated, not taking his eyes off his wife’s still face, her sallow cheeks, her dry lips that had begun moving as if she were trying to murmur something.
“There. On Mommy’s foot.”
Catherine screamed. She sat bolt upright, her foot extended so stiffly that Willard half believed he heard tendons and bones shatter from the pressure. Suze screamed as well, and Will and Burt burst into the room as if they knew Nazi hordes had descended on the Huntley home and only they could combat them…with maybe just a little help from Superman or Spiderman or Iron Man or even Indiana Jones. Willard grabbed at Catherine’s foot.
There was a sticky-looking smudge of something dark and crushed and partly fluid pasted on her instep.
An insect.
No, he realized with a flash of understanding that answered Suze’s question as well as many unspoken ones of his own. It was not an insect, no.
It was a cockroach.
He grabbed a tissue from the box on the end table and swiped at the sole of Catherine’s foot, wiped again and again to remove all of the squashed guts he could, then folded the thin white tissue in on itself to hide as much of the oily dark brown stain as possible, and thrust the soiled mess at Will.
“Toss this.” Will took it gingerly between finger and thumb. Willard watched his son disappear into the dark kitchen, all the while holding Catherine tightly.
He whispered reassuringly to her, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. Everything’s under control. Relax.”
He felt weirdly as if he were coaching her through the Lamaze births of each of their four children-all the stress and fear and pain compressed into a single trauma that he was only now beginning to comprehend. “Relax, Catherine,” he whispered soothingly.
“But…, ” she whimpered once. Her eyes had lost their fixed, glazed-over look. Her breathing sounded more regular. Normal color was returning to her face.
“Shhh,” Willard whispered. “Not now. It was just a bug. Don’t worry.”
She closed her eyes and allowed her head to slump against his shoulder. Then she jerked rigid again. “No, there were…”
Will, Jr., emerged from the kitchen. She saw him come through the darkened doorway, saw him move with a madden
ing slowness that more than anything convinced her that whatever she had seen in there-had thought she had seen in there-was no longer visible.
“…More,” she finished lamely. “There were…more.”
“Shhh.”
Burt and Suze moved closer. Burt handed Suze Catherine’s pillow-it was almost bigger than she was, and in other circumstances it would have been comic to watch her struggle with it. Burt picked up the blanket Will had dropped and began spreading it over Catherine’s legs.
“Mommy.” This was a new voice. Sams stood alone in the entry hall, one hand balled up and wiping sleepily at his heavy-lidded eyes. His voice stirred Catherine out of her shock.
“Come here,” she said, sitting up and opening her arms to all four of the children. Will stepped closer but didn’t try to get too near. Burt and Suze crowded alongside Willard, their small hands touching their mother’s legs tentatively as if to make sure she was really there, that the white screamy thing that had only sort of looked like Mommy was gone and that Mommy-the real Mommy this time-was back again, leaning on the arm of the couch and reaching out to touch their hair. Sams crawled onto the end of the couch and made his way up Catherine’s legs, as he always did when she was lying down. He couldn’t seem to get near enough to her any other way. He perched cross-legged just below her stomach and studied her, a blue-eyed, tow-headed Buddha staring innocently at her and absently sucking on the matted, stained, sour-smelling satin edging of his blanket. He didn’t speak.
No one spoke.
Finally, as if he had abruptly decided that things were somehow wrong and that only he could take the one action that would set them right, Sams moved. He took the blanket in one hand, careful to grasp it so the damp satin ribbon was folded out, and extended it toward Catherine.
The Slab Page 4
