Michael R Collings

by The Slab- A Novel of Horror (retail) (epub)

  “How about swimming? Do you like swimming?”

  There...finally, there was something.

  The boy glanced up, for an instant his face a flash of eagerness. Then, as if afraid that he had given himself away, and that by doing so he had lost any chance of ever going swimming again, he looked down to the floor. His thin shoulders rose, lowered in a shrug.

  But Daniel had caught the glimmer of interest. He swiveled around until he was sitting on the bench next to the boy. He was sweaty from the basketball game. His T-shirt clung clammily to his back and the nylon of his sweat-stained shorts felt sticky and uncomfortable. But he sat there for a few moments anyway.

  Finally he glanced up at Marty and nodded. I’ll take it from here, the gesture said. Marty left.

  “I liked swimming a lot when I was your age,” Daniel continued, as if there had been no break in the one-sided conversation. “But I didn’t get to go very much. We lived in Maine and it was pretty cold most of the year. And we didn’t have heated pools back then. My mother didn’t let me swimming out much—she was always afraid I’d get polio or something from the water.”

  The boy looked at him questioningly.

  “Polio,” Daniel said, “that was a real kid-killer when my Mom was younger. They had a vaccine for it by the time I was born, but Mom still worried. You know how Moms are.”

  The boy nodded gravely.

  “Anyway,” Daniel continued, “sometimes I would sneak away to a creek a couple of miles away and my buddies and me would strip down and go skinny-dipping. It was great.

  “Now I can swim anytime I want, though. There’s a great pool back there.” He gestured to the doorway that led through the changing room and from there to an indoor pool.

  The boy stared at the floor.

  “Want to try it?”

  Again, there was a slight movement.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go in for a swim. We just played a hot, tiring game, and a cool dip sounds perfect right now.” He stood and walked a few steps toward the changing room. “Come on if you want.”

  Daniel didn’t bother to look back, but by the time he entered the changing room, he could hear the boy’s soft tread only a few steps behind him. Daniel reached into an open cabinet just inside the door and pulled out a suit. Boy’s medium. He tossed it to the kid. The kid caught it with one hand, his fingers snapping like small wires around the fabric.

  “You guys change over there.” He pointed to a partitioned section of the changing room. “We older guys have to use that side. Meet you right here as soon as you’re dressed.” He grinned at Miles, and for the first time Miles grinned back. It was fleeting, but it was an authentic grin.

  “Okay.” The kid’s voice was a little deeper than Daniel had expected. “Okay...Mr. Warren.” He disappeared around the partition, already tugging at his jersey top.

  Daniel went to his locker on the adults-only side of the partition and changed into his trunks. He moved quickly, stuffing damp gym shorts, T-shirt, and socks into the basket at the bottom of the locker, then slamming the door and spinning the combination. He grabbed his towel from the bench and hurried back to the center of the room.

  The boy was already there waiting. He looked even thinner in the trunks, which were large on him, barely hanging on his narrow hips, it seemed, and so full in the legs that they made Miles look as if he were perched on two knobby stilts instead of on legs. But the kid was still smiling, and in his eyes Daniel saw intelligence, eagerness, and interest.

  “Come on, Miles. Last one in’s a rotten egg.”

  They swam for nearly an hour, doing laps at first, then just horsing around in the water, ducking and splashing each other and playing a kind of two-man tag in which Daniel always seemed to be ‘it’, leaping in the water and trying to tackle Daniel, who would twist and spin and swivel away. To Miles, it seemed like only moments before Marty came in to yell at them through the noise that Miles’ mother was waiting in the foyer to pick him up.

  3.

  By the end of February, Miles Stanton and Daniel Warren were officially partners at the Helping-Hands. They swam together for at least an hour two or three times a week. They played basketball and racquetball and handball. They went on an all-day field trip to the L.A. Zoo on one Saturday that was unseasonably warm and too perfectly glorious not to be doing something outside. They had shared hamburgers and fries at McDonalds and pizza with everything at Straw Hat.

  And sometime during that interval, Daniel Warren had met Miles’ mother, Elayne.

  Divorced for eight years, Elayne was bright, vivacious, intelligent, witty. And beautiful. Once free from a husband who had turned alcoholic and vicious at the same time, she had struggled hard to provide for her son and herself, and had done a remarkable job. She had waitressed at half a dozen restaurants, sometimes working two shifts to bring back enough money to keep their small household going. She had taught Miles self-reliance and responsibility—he had to have both in unusual concentrations, she knew from the beginning, because sometimes she had to be gone for hours at a time, even when he was only seven or eight years old.

  He was self-reliant and responsible, all right. He also had no friends to speak of. He preferred staying in the apartment and reading or watching TV to rough-housing with other guys his age. Guys who had Dads that blustered through the door in the evenings and gave them hugs and tickles and took them neat places. Guys who had Moms that baked cakes and cookies and played games with them when it was too rainy to play outside or when they didn’t feel good.

  In spite of Elayne’s best efforts to be both a Mom and a Dad, Miles effectively had neither. He was a true latchkey kid, and he responded to his enforced isolation by withdrawing into his own world of imagination. It was safer there than on the outside. No one could hurt you there.

  For a long while, Elayne Stanton wasn’t particularly aware of how withdrawn her son was becoming. When she did finally notice, she didn’t know quite what to do. She was working double shifts again—the rent had spiraled another $75 a month, and the car was making funny noises that in her limited experience with mechanics usually translated into major bucks, and Miles was starting to outgrow his clothes almost before she could get them home from the store. He needed help, she realized, but she couldn’t give it to him.

  Then, just after Christmas the previous year, she heard about Helping Hands. She checked it out, was pleased with what she saw, and decided that the Club might be just the thing for Miles. But it took a while for her to convince Miles to leave the apartment and try it out

  When he went into the Helping-Hands building that first afternoon, his eyes were fixed on the ground and his shoulders were slumped so much that it looked like his raincoat would slide right off and lay in a bright orange puddle at his feet. To Elayne’s worried mother-eyes, he didn’t look like a little boy on his way to an exciting afternoon of male bonding; he looked like a condemned prisoner on his way to be involuntary guest of honor at an electrocution.

  When he came out that night, though, everything had changed. His hair curled damp and tousled against his head. His cheeks flushed red with excitement. His eyes snapped with an electricity that she could not remember ever having seen before. And all he could talk about was Daniel Warren.

  Daniel did this. Daniel did that. Daniel said this. And Daniel said that. Miles chattered so constantly about Daniel Warren that by the time they entered their tiny apartment that night, Elayne had both a headache and an frighteningly yearning desire to meet this man who had so abruptly become the solitary focus of her child’s universe.

  Elayne met Daniel for the first time two weeks later. They had their first official date in the middle of March—they took Miles to a dollar-a-car drive-in to see Home Alone. Even though it was raining so hard that neither of them could see through the front window, and Miles fell asleep fifteen minutes into the film, they counted the date a huge success.

  And a week after Daniel Warren’s thirty-second bir
thday, accompanied to the Chapel of the Roses in Las Vegas only by Miles and by a still stunned Amanda Warren, Daniel and Elayne were married.

  4.

  The new family lived for another couple of weeks in Daniel’s apartment, but it had been clear from the beginning that that arrangement was only temporary. The apartment was spacious enough, but there was only one bedroom, and even though Miles insisted repeatedly that he thought sleeping in the living room on Daniel’s overstuffed sofa was “real cool,” both Daniel and Elayne realized that the boy needed a home, a real home.

  They began looking at possibilities.

  From the beginning, Daniel had insisted that they not even consider anything right in the San Fernando Valley.

  “It’s already too expensive to buy here, too crowded for a family,” he explained to Elayne late one evening. “In another few years, it will be like living in the middle of a fishbowl. There’re some new places going up farther north, between here and Ventura, that look pretty nice.” Besides, he continued, he had begun negotiations to take over an ailing Ford dealership in a rapidly developing area called Coastal Crest. So far there wasn’t much there, but what there was had been building up fast. Daniel could imagine it as it would be in ten years or so—an exclusive, high-priced neighborhood where the people would have plenty of money to spend on things like second or third cars.

  So they began looking near Coastal Crest, in the hollow tucked comfortably into the Coastal Range that was generally known as Tamarind Valley.

  It didn’t take long to find the perfect place.

  On a beautiful, summery day early in May, Daniel took a day off from work. Miles was still in school, but Elayne had already quit her jobs, so the two of them drove the thirty minutes by freeway out to Tamarind Valley. The further they went, the more Elayne liked what she saw—gently sloping hills crowned with bright green grass and patches of vivid yellow, thigh-high mustard. They met the realtor at his office on Tamarind Boulevard, just off the 101 Freeway between one knot of developments that was Coastal Crest and a second, maybe five miles further north, that was Tamarind Valley.

  Half an hour later, they were comfortably seated in the back seat of a brand new, air-conditioned 1992 Ford Taurus wagon and heading out to look at listings.

  Elayne fell immediately in love with the third house they viewed. It was certainly big enough for the three of them. “And for more children, if you want more,” she added in a whisper to Daniel. Diplomatically, the realtor chose that moment to turn on the kitchen tap and blither on about the high water-flow.

  The house had five bedrooms, a huge open-beamed living room that looked even larger than it really was, and a comfy kitchen/dining room combination overlooking a deep back yard and beyond that the Coastal Range further to the south. The two-car garage was roomy as well, and even though there was a small crack in the cement slab that threaded its way aimlessly on a rough diagonal from one corner to the opposite—recently sanded down so that it was less obvious and, more importantly, presented less potential for tripping—the place seemed just right. The yard was beautifully, professionally landscaped, with trees and shrubs and blossoming geraniums that nodded brightly in the sunlight.

  “I just love it,” Elayne whispered to Daniel as Fred Land ushered them back to his waiting Taurus and drove them past the long lines of houses on Oleander. “It’s a great house, and there are lots of kids for Miles to play with.”

  That at least was true. There seemed to be three or four kids per house all along the block.

  “How about it?” she asked again an hour later when Fred Land stepped out of his office at Lyons Realty for a moment to get them coffee. “Please.”

  “We should check things out a little more, first, shouldn’t we?” Daniel said. “We should talk to some of the neighbors, find out about the area. We should....”

  “Please,” Elayne repeated.

  And because there was a certain texture to her voice that for an instant sounded startlingly like Amanda Warren’s, and because the exact details of the house were less important than the simple fact of who would be living in it with him...and because he recognized that land values in Tamarind Valley could only go up, he agreed.

  Elayne never quite noticed that Daniel had not said anything at all about the house itself. When Fred Land returned with tray supporting three cups of steaming coffee and a half a dozen doughnuts on a paper plate, Daniel Warren said simply and directly, “We want it. Get started.”

  The deal closed thirty days later, on June 17, 1992. The next day, June 18, Daniel Warren, Elayne Warren, and Miles Stanton moved in (they hadn’t gotten around to legally changing Miles’ last name, although Daniel assured Elayne and Miles that he intended to—Miles giggled happily at the idea). They rented a U-Haul truck and began moving from his apartment just off Sepulveda to the house at 1066 Oleander.

  To their house.

  That night, Daniel Warren waited until his wife of just under two months was soundly asleep, worn out by the rigors of moving and nudged further into deep sleep by medication that he knew she took nightly…only this time she didn’t know that she had already taken another pill carefully pulverized and mixed with a glass of fine white wine after dinner.

  Then he got out of bed, careful not to disturb her just in case, and left the room. He closed the door silently and securely behind him.

  For the first time—but not for the last time—Daniel Warren tiptoed naked down the hall, trying to calm his racing pulse and steady his shaking hands. He had waited for so long, planned so carefully, put up with so much, just to reach this moment.

  He stopped at the closed door at the end of the hall, breathed deeply two or three times, then swung the door open and stepped into the early summer-night warmth of the back bedroom where his ten-year-old stepson Miles lay sleeping. He stood next to the boy’s bed, his legs almost touching the bed clothing that had fallen halfway to the floor, his toes digging nervously into the carpeting.

  In spite of everything he had felt for all of his adult life, for a long time he dared not move. Then he silently drew back the single sheet that covered the boy’s bare chest and bare legs. Holding one hand ready to clamp tightly across the boy’s mouth if Miles should wake up screaming, he extended his other hand, trembling with anticipation, and began tugging at the inch-wide elastic waistband of the boy’s stark white underpants.

  5.

  By the time Miles Stanton turned fifteen, he still had not changed his surname from Stanton to Warren. He adamantly refused to allow the change, even though his mother pressured him again and again to do it. She could get no reason from him, simply his stony rejection of the idea. Daniel never pushed the issue.

  In addition, the boy had learned a number of important things.

  He had learned how to keep frightening secrets from everyone, even—especially—from his mother. He had learned to pretend that he loved someone that he did not love. He had learned to keep to himself just in case he should let something slip during an idle moment of play or relaxation. He had learned to accept pain without making a sound. He had learned to give pleasure that was, for him, torture. He had learned fear.

  Yes, he had learned much.

  But most importantly, he had learned one more crucial thing.

  Hatred.

  Hatred of himself.

  And hatred of the monster that Daniel Warren had kept so carefully hidden during the months he and Miles had been partners and friends at Helping-Hands, during the weeks the three of them had lived lovingly together in Warren’s apartment. Those few weeks were now the only time Miles could remember feeling like part of a family; he felt a nostalgic, yearning warmth for that cramped apartment and his lumpy bed on Daniel’s sofa that sometimes frightened him with its intensity.

  When he had first seen the house at the top of the hill, first chosen which of the four smaller bedrooms would be his very own, first carried his brand-new suitcase (a gift from Daniel) packed with his clothing across the threshold his ho
use and into his very own room and hung his things in his very own closet, it had seemed as if his wildest dreams were coming true. He would live there with his mother, the woman he loved more than any other person in the world. He would live there with Daniel, his only buddy, his only real friend, and now—unbelievably—his father as well. They would be a family, together forever. For a lonely, often frightened ten-year-old, it truly was a dream come true.

  The dream became a wildly distorted nightmare that very night, when Miles woke from a deep dreamless sleep to feel a hand constricting over his mouth and nose. For a horrifying instant he wondered frantically if someone—robber mugger thief murderer—had broken into the house and was trying to suffocate him. But at that instant, his numbed, terrified mind registered the movements of another hand, and then more horrifying movements, and in the hour it took for his brand-new Big Ben alarm clock on the nightstand next to his bed to tick tick tick tick slowly through the attack and tick tick tick tick even more slowly back into reality, he learned more about Daniel Warren—the real Daniel Warren, the repulsive, brutal skeleton hidden so carefully beneath the smooth, handsome skin—than he ever wanted to know.

  Daniel’s did not visit the back bedroom every night. That much the boy was spared. Sometimes Miles would lay in his own bed, straining to hear the first faint sounds of steps on the carpet in the hallway outside, and he would hear other sounds instead, muffled moans and murmurs coming from the master bedroom at the far end of the hall. Sometimes he could hear them even though the doors to both bedrooms might be closed. He could hear them even though the intervening room sat empty except for Elayne’s sewing machine, stacks of patterns and folded material waiting to be transformed into clothing, and her dressmaker’s form standing on its single leg in the corner like a headless, deformed, shrouded corpse. He could hear them even though the heater might be on in the winter, or the air conditioner in the summer. In spite of everything, sometimes he could hear the panting, animal gasps his mother made when Daniel did to her willing body what he also did to her son’s unwilling one; and then, only then, Miles could relax slightly, maybe even fall asleep without staining his pillow with tears or grinding his teeth in impotent fury and humiliation until his jaws ached.