“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 Slab- A Novel of Horror (retail) (epub)
Michael R Collings