It wasn’t until Willard actually laid Sams in the little box bed and settled the blanket next to him that Sams reached out for it, touched it several times as if to remind himself of what it was, and pulled it toward his face.
When Willard left the room, the baby was half asleep, worn out by the intense emotions of the past half hour.
Later that night, long after Willard and Catherine figured the children should be asleep, they heard an odd, snuffling sound from the back of the house. Catherine went to check.
By the time she reached the end of the hall, the noise had stopped.
She looked first in Suze’s room. Nothing. Suze was curled up, a sweet smile on her lips, deeply asleep.
Catherine continued on into the boys’ room. Sams was asleep as well, his face covered by his blanket. As usual, the satin edging was again sodden and sour-smelling, but beneath it his chest was moving up and down with clock-like regularity. She felt his cheek. Warm, but not too warm. He was fine.
She turned toward the bunk beds.
“Don’t…don’t…leave me alone. No…”
It was Will, Jr., in the top bunk, talking in his sleep so quietly that the sounds came out more like an extended moan than meaningful, articulate words.
“Will,” Catherine whispered, shaking him gently by the shoulder. “Will, honey, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
“Leave me alone…alone… What?” He sat up so suddenly that he nearly struck Catherine’s nose with his forehead. “What do you…?”
“Will,” she whispered again.
“Mommy?”
Catherine was startled. Will hadn’t called her that for a couple of years. He considered the word the ultimate in baby-talk and refused to use anything but Mom.
“You’re all right, sweetie.”
Mommy… Mom…bad dream. There was a…man…bloody…”
“Shhhhh.” She laid a hand on his chest and gently pressed back. His heart was thudding like a captive bird’s, throbbing more rapidly than she had ever felt it. Still, he settled without further murmuring into his bed again, asleep before his head even touched the pillow.
Catherine leaned down to check on Burt. Stomach and legs bare as usual, covers swathing his head as usual. She straightened the sheet and tucked it around him. He didn’t move, beyond a small twitch with one hand when she touched it.
“Everything all right back there?” Willard was engrossed in the paper and barely looked up as she entered the room.
“I…I think so.”
He looked closely at her. “Think?”
“Will… No, everything’s fine. Will was just mumbling in his sleep. A dream, probably. It’s been a stressful few days around here.”
Willard nodded absently and kept on reading.
The Slab- A Novel of Horror (retail) (epub)
Michael R Collings
3
The next days and weeks proved that things were indeed not fine.
Catherine figured that things would settle down. But by the beginning of April, she admitted to herself that she was becoming concerned.
First, Sams seemed to end up sleeping on the floor every night, almost in the middle of the room. She would go in first thing in the morning to get the older boys up for school, and there he would be, nose pressed to the carpet, blanket resting on his cheek, with no covers over him at all, fast asleep.
Then both Will, Jr., and Burt began having bouts of sleeplessness. Initially, it was only Burt. Catherine would wake suddenly, frequently from unusually vivid dreams that, while they seemed to carry over for a few moments into the waking world, she could never recall. Her eyes would abruptly open, she would undergo a few seconds of utter confusion as to who she was and where she was, then she would roll over, her back to Willard, to face the wall.
And see Burt standing there, silent, eyes wide and fearful.
“I woke up,” he would say.
When she checked the clock on the night stand, it would read 2:00, or 3: 23, or 4:05-never quite the same time but always in the deepest, darkest part of the night.
“Go back to bed, honey, and you’ll go back to sleep.”
“Can’t.”
“Can’t get to sleep?”
“Can’t go back to bed.”
When Burt said this the first time, so softly that she had trouble hearing him, she sat up and half-lifted him up to the bed with her. “What’s the matter?”
“I been trying to sleep for a long, long time. But I can’t. Now I can’t go back to bed either.”
“Why not?”
But already his eyes were fluttering, his head nodding. And before she could say anything else, he was asleep.
She carried him to his bed and tucked him in, conscious of how heavy and how tall he was becoming. His feet thumped lightly against her shins as she walked, and she could barely manage to lean over and lay him on the lower bunk.
The next time she woke to see him standing beside her-it was only a day or two later-she didn’t invite him up. She let him talk for a couple of minutes, mostly repetitions of “I can’t sleep” or “I can’t go to bed,” then she would gently say, “All right, Burt. Everything is all right. You can go to bed now.”
And-amazingly, considering how adamant he had seemed the first night-he would toddle off. She followed him once or twice to make sure he got in bed all right. Then she would pick Sams up off the floor and settle him into his bed as well, and return to her own.
Sometimes, she went right to sleep herself. Sometimes she was still awake when the alarm jangled and Willard stumbled up at 5:00 to get ready for work.
After a week or so of that, she woke up in the middle of the night, rolled onto her side and saw…Will, Jr.
“Can’t you sleep, either?” she whispered.
He shook his head solemnly.
She let him sit on the edge of the bed for a few moments, stroking her hand up and down his arm, soothing him in the way that had worked so well when he was younger.
Then he stood, leaned over and kissed her, and went on his own back to bed.
That continued for a few more days, with Burt and Will alternating their deep night visits. They never came at the same time or on the same night.
4
That phase came to a head at the beginning of the third week in April.
For four days in a row, all three boys visited their parent’s bedroom. Only this time, they did more than just stand by Catherine’s side until she woke.
“Mom! Mom!” Will was half-whispering, half-shouting in her ear, his voice urgent with fear and need. “Mom, wake up!”
She sat bold upright.
“Shhh. Don’t wake your father.”
“Too late,” Willard rumbled from the other side of the bed. “What’s going on?” He felt for his own alarm clock next to his side of the bed, and lifted it up close to his face. “Two-fifteen? What…?”
“It’s all right, Willard. Will just had a bad dream or something.”
“No, it wasn’t that,” Will whispered, as if afraid that someone else, someone not his father or his mother would hear. “I thought I saw…something…some one in my bedroom. A shadow by the closet. It moved. I’m scared.”
By this time Willard was sitting up as well. “There’s no one there, son, you must have been dreaming or…”
“No, I wasn’t asleep. I haven’t been asleep for…for the longest time now. I was just laying my bed looking up at the ceiling. Sometimes I see birds up there, I think. And I like to watch them fly in little circles. In little circles.” His voice too on a dreamy, muffled quality that Catherine found unsettling.
“Then that was it,” Willard said, laying back down and hunching under the covers. “You were dreaming. Go back to bed. I’ve got to get to sleep now.”
“Mom,” Will whispered again. “It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t like before, with the birds”-at the mention of the phantom birds, Catherine felt a chill along her spine-“this time there was something in there.”
“All right.” Catherine got out of bed, threw on her robe, and stepped into her slippers. “Let’s go see.”