Michael R Collings (2 page)

Blood.

Shit, he’d probably sliced his chin open. He rolled onto his side, ignoring pain like a shard of ragged glass slashing his elbow, and sat up. So far so good. He rubbed his knee. His fingers came away stained dark. The thin gabardine of his slacks was shredded along the knee. He flexed his leg and tried to stand. Wobbly but apparently all right, he made it to the doorway separating garage from house.

As he passed through the door way, he instinctively palmed the light switch just inside the kitchen, even though he knew in the back of his mind that he had had the power shut off weeks ago. One of his men had found signs that some bum had been camping out in the back bedroom. No lights, no water, no free hotel, McCall had figured.

With a spine-chilling snap, a light flickered on.

He threw his hands over his eyes, as much out of surprise as out of pain...then winced as the movement twisted his body and his knee threatened to give way.

“What the...?” he began. There shouldn’t be any lights.

There weren’t. The three bulbs in the ceiling fixture stared down, blank and dead. The same with the fixture in the ceiling of the dining area in front of the double windows that looked over the valley.

McCall breathed a tremulous sigh of relief. The pull-shade over the right-hand pane was up. It should have been down. McCall nodded. That explained the sharp snap and the sudden light—the remnants of daylight streaming through the window as the shade popped loose at the instant he touched the light switch. Coincidence, yes. Certainly nothing more.

He swiveled on his good leg and peered into the darkness of the garage. With his body between the jaundiced light and the garage, all he could see was his bulky, dark outline where it had bled across the concrete. He moved to one side.

Even in the dimness he could see clearly the jagged line of a break in the concrete slab of the garage. It looked like it was at least three inches across, but he realized almost immediately that he was seeing a shadow, not the break itself. The concrete was probably offset only a fraction of an inch, but that was enough to send him reeling when he stumbled over it. The crack started along the outer wall, perhaps a dozen feet in from the double-width wooden doors, and twisted like a shadowy rattlesnake across the floor until it disappeared beneath the inside wall that connected with the entryway. Directly in front of him, the edge of the crack glistened wetly.

Blood. His blood. Caught on a crack in the glass-smooth garage floor.

McCall’s mind snapped back to the headlines on the day’s papers, to the calls from investigators and engineers and attorneys. To the threats. And to....

“
Ace
.”

His head jerked up and he whirled around, almost pitching himself headfirst across the kitchen floor. It was a whisper that might have been only the passing wind. Or it might have been something more.

No. It can’t be.

He’s dead!

4.

“Who’s there?” Ace McCall yelled, his voice midway between a scream and a shriek of anger. “You better get the hell out of here. I’m armed!”

He clenched his fist—not as effective as a gun, he knew from a lifetime of experience, not even as good as a nice, heavy white-ash bat or a long sturdy length of two-by-four, but it was all he had and he knew well enough how to use it.

“Who’s there?” He strained to hear any movement.

Nothing.

He crossed the kitchen slowly, uncomfortably aware of the layered shadows of cabinets and alcoves designed to hide nothing more threatening than crockery and silverware but that now had become abysses of darkness and fear. He crossed the dining room as well, angling his body so that the dim light through the open shade fell just to the right. He wasn’t about to give whoever was there a good glimpse of where he was. He glanced out the window. The lights of Tamarind Valley glittered coldly, like bits of silver ore shattered from a larger piece. Further out, strings of white and red from the freeway cut through the valley like twin, thin coping saw blades.

Craaack
!

This time, he knew he had heard it. Deeper in the bowels of the house. A window, perhaps, or a door panel shattering beneath a hammer blow. Something hard and violent. McCall shivered even though beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

He moved into the living room, skirting the double sliding door that opened onto a small covered patio. In most of the houses in Charter Oaks, the patios were already hedged by pyracantha and hibiscus or half-cloaked with newly planted wisteria or grape vines. But the one behind 1066 Oleander Place was stark, awash with white moonlight that turned shadows into prison bars.

McCall breathed deeper as soon as he was on the other side of the doors, safely in the darkness along the living room wall. He followed the smooth plastered surface with one hand as he crept toward the front of the house. At the entryway, he stopped again. He wanted to yell, could feel a screaming “Get the hell out of my house!” billowing over his tongue and pressing against his teeth, but he forced himself to keep still. To his right was the skull-blank wall separating the entry from the garage. To his left and about a foot in front of him was the black mouth of the hall that led past two bedrooms and a bathroom before it made a right angle and continued into deeper darkness, where it opened onto three more bedrooms and the second bath.

Seven rooms.

In the darkness.

For a second, McCall almost took three strides straight forward, where he could wrench the front door open and burst out of the house and run to his car and get far enough down the hill to stop at some nice safe Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia’s place and call the cops.

Almost.

“
McCall
.”

The voice was still less than a whisper. But, he realized, it was far more than just imagination. It chilled Ace McCall to the bone. He recognized it immediately. He knew whose voice it was, and he knew, dammit he
knew
that the throat that made those sounds was crushed and dead and buried where no one
no one
would ever find it.

“
McCall
.”

Now the whisper was less than a breath.

He turned into the dark hallway. Even during the middle of the day, this part of the house was always gloomy. Windows in the bedrooms were offset from the doors just enough that only filtered light penetrated to the hallway even at noon. After nightfall, the blackness was absolute. He literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

For a moment he heard himself thinking,
This can’t be. This isn’t happening. It’s a trick or something.

The best thing to do would be to get the hell back down the hall, rip off the chain lock from the front door and explode out into the night and climb into the waiting Lincoln and drive away from 1066 Oleander forever. Never look back. Never come back. Never think about it again.

“
McCaallll
.”

With that single, guttural sound, the last moment of clear thinking for Ace McCall passed unnoticed into oblivion.

“No!” he shrieked in fear compounded with a fury that drove rationality from him like brittle-dry, skeletal October leaves whirling dervish-like before a madding hurricane.

No one does this to Ace McCall no one tries this kind of game and gets away without broken bones.

He plunged deeper into the darkness of the hall, crashing into the closed door at the corner. His shoulder screamed with the pain of his two hundred and fifty pounds. The door creaked, threatened to give way but finally held and rebounded enough that he fell backwards and slammed into the opposite wall. He shook his head. Kaleidoscopic red stars and yellow lightning bolts and blue whirlwinds appeared, disappeared, re-appeared. Then disappeared again. But not entirely.

He shook his head again to clear his vision, rubbed his hand across his face, and stared down the right-hand branching of the hallway.

The bathroom door was a black abyss, so was the bedroom door opposite and the last door on the left. But the door on the right, at the far end of the hall—the door to the back corner bedroom...that door was open and through it spilled a feeble light tinged pale, gangrenous green, like things once living but now dead and slowly, silently rotting into a putrid luminescence.

McCall swallowed and, more automaton than thinking man, he moved forward.

Get out of here Ace get the hell out of here now
! part of his mind screeched over and over, but his feet weren’t listening. His fisted hand relaxed and dropped to his side, limp and useless.

“No no no no no,” he repeated endlessly, his voice hoarse. It can’t be.

He reached the edge of the doorway and stopped just out of sight of what waited beyond.

“McCall.”

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 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 their apartment.

She seemed to have known that it was also the first apartment for either of them, that they had only been married a week and were just returned from their honeymoon.

She must have imagined the two of them....

Catherine’s cheeks flushed in the darkness.

Her hand strayed over Willard’s shoulder. She turned on her side and moved against him, spoon-fashion. She didn’t know when she had first heard that expression, but it was right on. Spoon to spoon. Her hand strayed further now, along the lines of his chest and stomach, still taut after thirteen years of marriage, and down to his hips. She nuzzled the back of his neck, not really caring whether he was awake or not, half hoping he was, half resigned to the fact that he almost always fell asleep—no, she corrected herself, he always
crashed
, that was more like it, tail-spinning, out-of-control, earth-shattering
crash
—right after they made love.

At first it had bothered her.

She would come back from the bathroom, still warm with passion, her skin alive and so sensitive that the faint movement of the silent night air against it made her light-headed. And Willard would be lying there, stone-still.

Asleep.

Oh well, she sighed, repeating herself for the umpteenth time in thirteen years.

If that’s all I have to worry about, I’m better off than....

Her head snapped up again.

This time she was certain.

She
had
heard something.

She sat up, dragging the covers with her.

Willard shifted and one hand reached back and tugged on the edge of the quilt her grandmother had given them as a wedding present. In his sleep, he burrowed further under its warmth. But Catherine couldn’t ignore this sound.

It was definite.

Not really loud, but definite.

And she couldn’t quite identify it. But it was
something
.

Just the house settling, stupid. Old wooden joints do creak, you know.

She listened more intently. She turned her head from side to side, trying to fix a location for the sound.

There it was. A muted
thump, thump..., thump
, too irregular to be the winter wind splaying a naked branch against a window. Too random for anything else she could imagine.

She slipped out of bed, pulling on her long flannel robe, the high-necked white one Willard hated because he claimed it made her look like someone’s great-great grandmother out of another century...and because (although he would never admit to it) it was infinitely harder to remove in the dark than her others. But it was warm and thick, and the night had promised to be a cold one.

She slipped her feet into scuffs and padded from the room, stopping at the door into the hall. Directly in front of her, the hallway extended past the bathroom and the front bedroom she had requisitioned as a combination sewing-room/all-purpose escape-from-the-children-when-things-got-too-hairy room. Beyond that lay the blackness of the entry and, to the right, the living room and from there the kitchen.

Straight ahead, she could dimly see a reflection through the door the previous owners had built to join the entry hall with what had once been the garage but was now a large, comfortable family room. It was presently chock-full of unopened boxes, but it promised to become the focal point for their lives for years to come.

She strained her eyes.

The reflection focused into a small orange glow, like an unblinking eye studying Catherine Huntley from the darkness. For a moment her skin crawled and her breath halted. Then she exhaled in a long, relieved hiss that echoed in the silence.

Stupid, she thought, not for the first time that evening. Stupid stupid stupid.

It was only the clock. Right.

The electric clock with the luminous dial that she had carefully set to the exact time then placed on a stack of cardboard boxes along the far wall. Not the glowing eye of the cannibal goddess Kali, or anything so exotic.

A stupid clock.

She felt her heart slowly creep back to its steady pace. Her arrested breathing resumed as well, and her goose-fleshed, crawling skin crept coldly back to its rightful place on her arms

Thump thump...thump...thump.

A long pause, then…
thump
.

It was definitely coming from her right, from somewhere along the darkened hallway that led to the second bathroom, past Suze’s room and dead-ended by the doors to the boys’ room on the right and what would probably end up as Willard’s office on the left.

They had intended for Will, Jr., to have his own room—finally, the twelve-year-old’s dream had come true—but both Burt and Samuel (Sams to everyone since the day he had come home from the hospital and Suze tried to say his name and tripped up on the syllables, and everyone laughed and from then on it was just Sams) had unaccountably refused to sleep in the back room without their older brother.

So, for now at least, all three boys were together, the older two in the bunks, Sams in the little box trundle-bed that each of the boys had slept in until they turned four or five. She stepped down the hall.

Thump
.

She stopped, waiting for the sound to return and give her some idea of what it was, where it came from. When it didn’t she continued. There was no sound, no movement in Suze’s room. Catherine flicked the light on, just long enough to see the top of the six-year-old’s head sticking out of a bundle of quilts, blankets, stuffed animals, and favorite clothing that somehow had not gotten hung up that evening and that—Catherine knew ruefully from past experience—would somehow never quite make it to a closet or dresser drawer. Suze was short for Susan; the Huntley’s first girl-child had been named after Catherine’s grandmother.

Catherine breathed in relief.

Suze was fast asleep. And safe.

Catherine turned the light off. The sudden darkness seemed deeper, colder. She shivered. Even though the forced-air furnace was on, the house still felt damp, unlived in.

It would probably be all right in a couple of days, though, she reassured herself.

Thump.

The sound jerked her from her stasis and reminded her that she had a job. Mother’s responsibility number 483—investigating strange but undoubtedly harmless noises in the dead of darkness on cold December nights.

She paused by the bathroom door but heard nothing there. Again she flicked on the light.

And again everything was normal.

The storage bedroom was next to the bathroom. Enough moonlight filtered through the dusty but curtainless windows for her to make out most of the shapes—again, boxes and cartons, things they wouldn’t need for the next few days, pushed into this room as soon as the boys announced their decision that Will was going to have to sleep with them for a while. The room was silent.

That left the boys’ room. She swallowed tightly and looked across the dark hallway. To her imagination, the open door into the back corner bedroom seemed unaccountably threatening, like an open mouth of impenetrable darkness against the faint gray of the hall.

For a frightening instant, she didn’t want to walk through that opening—it would be too much like stalking down a demon’s throat.

Don’t be absurd, Catherine Huntley, she told herself sternly. You’ve play enough mind-games tonight already. It’s just a room.

She crossed the hallway and entered.

2.

A shard of moonlight glowed in the room.

It hadn’t seemed this bright from the hallway, she thought with a tinge of wonder. Then even that suggestion of strangeness disappeared and she returned to the business at hand—being a mother, protecting her boys from..., well, to be honest, she thought, from funny noises in the night—like funny noises in the car, she added mentally, that in the comic strips only wives hear but that husbands must eventually pay for when the funny, imaginary noises suddenly transform into reality and become cracked blocks or stripped brakes or exploding radiators or expiring transmissions.

She stopped.

She didn’t like the direction her thoughts were heading. She looked around.

She could define the outlines of the bunk beds, the box bed against the far wall, the dressers. She crossed to the dresser and turned on a small Mickey Mouse table lamp. It had been Will’s, but he had recently announced that it was “baby-stuff,” and Burt had inherited it by default. In the soft golden glow of the 40-watt bulb, she studied the room.

Sams was curled up against the wall, swaddled in his favorite blanket, the satin edging stuffed into his mouth like a surrogate thumb. It
was
in fact a surrogate thumb, and sometimes he sucked on the edging until it was so wet and filthy and smelly that Catherine wanted to burn it. But each time it went into the wash, Sams would stand solitary guard over the machine until it came out, then transfer his attention to the dryer.

Somehow, she never quite found the courage to get rid of the thing.

She leaned over and pulled the edging out of his mouth, shivering when she felt how clammy the material was. But she knew that even asleep Sams would have it in his mouth again in a matter of seconds.

Sure enough, before she had straightened, his hand flailed for a moment, made contact, and retrieved the grungy satin.

Oh well, she sighed silently.

She turned her attention to the other boys.

Will, Jr., on the top bunk, was nothing more than a heap of bedding. She knew that he must be in there somewhere, but it took a bit of probing to find a scrawny, warm arm connected to an equally scrawny shoulder that led to neck and head. His forehead felt a bit warm, but Catherine put that up to the excitement of moving.

On the lower bunk, Burt presented an opposite picture. Most of him was exposed to the cold. His legs were clearly visible, encased in flannel pjs that had pulled up almost to his knees; his stomach was similarly exposed almost to his chest. But his head was covered. For Burt, that always seemed enough, no matter how cold it might get. She shook her head, tugged his pajama tops to his waist, and pulled the pant legs to his ankles. She unwrapped the mound at his head, straightening the blanket and tucking it around his body and wondering as she did so how the kid had managed to avoid a fatal case of pneumonia during any of his eight winters. But he never even had so much as an ear infection or a light case of croup.

She shrugged.

There was no understanding kids. But then, that was something she had learned long before. She leaned over and planted a kiss on Burt’s forehead, knowing full well that before she was out of the room the bedding would begin its inevitable trek upward, past shin and knee and tummy and chest, to wrap like a friendly serpent around his neck and head. Oh well, as long as....