Michael R Collings (34 page)

She
knew
all of that.

She knew it, and
knew
that Sams could not possibly be inside the house…and
knew
that Willard had to find him, bring him out, rescue him and return him to her.

She sank to her knees and clutched feverishly at her older children. The pulled closer to her, trembling and crying in hope and terror and confusion and despair.

“Willard!” she screamed. Then: “No, Willard!” just as somewhere within the bowels of the house, beneath the remains of slab that had shattered and disintegrated under the force of the earthquake, a gas line ruptured, two bits of metal collided with sudden violence, struck a spark, and—even as the side wall of the house began crumbling and sloughing away, detached from the rest of the structure by the earthquake’s fury—sheets of fire erupted from every window, every doorway, every crack, and the house burst into flames.

From the
Tamarind Valley Times
, 30 August 2010:

TEMBLOR STRIKES VALLEY;

SEVERAL INJURED, ONE DEAD

The 4.5 quake that rumbled across Tamarind Valley yesterday left minor structural damage behind, although several injuries were reported and one death resulted.

Willard Huntley, 38, was killed when the gas line beneath his home burst, presumably as a result of the temblor, and exploded, destroying the house. He is survived by his wife, Catherine, and three children.

The Huntley home was the only one seriously damaged in the quake which, though mild according to the Richter scale, nevertheless continued for over a minute, causing pictures to fall from walls and items to tumble from shelves in stores across the Valley. Authorities are unsure why the Huntley home was so severely effected when others nearby were not. In one home not a block away, a single vase fell unbroken from a piano, the only result of the quake.

Tragically, the Huntleys were still recovering from the sudden death of their youngest child a month earlier. Samuel ‘Sams’ Huntley, 2 ½, was found….

The Day After, 30 August 2010

If Only….

1.

Catherine and the children were not present the next day when investigative units from police, fire, and county inspectors’ departments sifted through the wreckage of 1066 Oleander Place. The family had been driven away a few hours after the quake by her parents, Howard and Eleanor Prinz, and were now in her childhood home in Santa Barbara, physically unharmed but in deep shock. Two physicians remained in the house rest of that afternoon and well into the evening.

The police team, led by forensic specialist Emily Naples, arrived first on Monday morning. A short time later, Jorge Garces and his group, representing the Tamarind Valley Fire Department, drove up Oleander Place and, watched by small clusters of neighbors in front yards along the way, parked behind the police vehicle.

As luck would have it, Edgar Sai was assigned by the city engineers’ department to represent them. He parked several housed further down Oleander and walked slowly up the hill toward the remains of 1066. He stood for a moment just outside the police tape surrounding the front yard, then shook his head sadly, sighed, lifted up the tape, and moved toward the blackened skeleton of wood and ashes.

“How’s it going Em?” he asked as he was greeted by Naples.

“Not much left of the place, is there?” she gestured to the fire scorched concrete and the scattered clumps of what once were roof beams, interior wall supports, and outer walls. “Fire department says it was a gas leak but it sure must have burned hot. Nearly everything inside’s destroyed.”

“They got Huntley out yet?”

“Just left in the coroner’s van. What was left of him. A few bones mostly. It must have been like an incinerator in there.”

“What about the others?”

“What…?” Naples, shook her head as if to clear a moment of confusion. “Oh, yeah, the child.”

“And the dog.”

“That was the first report,” Naples said, “immediately after the first squad arrived yesterday. Mrs. Huntley was nearly hysterical—which makes perfect sense, considering what had just happened—and rambled on for a while, something about a child. And the oldest kid was crying about his dog, said he knew the dog was trapped in the house.”

Sai shook his head sadly. “Must have been tough.”

“Yeah, anyway, the squad found the husband right away, he must have gotten trapped in the back of the house. They searched but didn’t find any other remains.

“Then it turns out that the family had lost a kid about a month ago, SIDS or something, so apparently Mrs. Huntley imagined that she heard the child’s cry, or hallucinated it in the fear of the moment. Something like that.

“The kid’s dog will probably turn up. It must have been terrified by the earthquake and ran away. Someone will track it down.”

Sai didn’t answer, except to say, “Let’s get on with it, all right?”

They shuffled through what had been the family room, observing, measuring, picking up a bit of litter here and there and sniffing it.

“Morning, Em, Ed,” Garces said as he ducked under a couple of charred beams and approached them.

They returned his greeting. Tamarind Valley was a small place. The various investigators knew each other well enough from meeting at scenes of fires, murders, burglaries, and the rest.

“Found anything unusual?” Em asked, mostly
pro forma
, since it was pretty clear already that the true culprit behind the death and the conflagration had been Nature in the form of an earthquake.

“Actually, yes. I was just coming out to see if Ed had arrived yet. You both should see this.”

The trio threaded their way down the burned-out shell of the hallway, careful not to stumble where the concrete slab had twisted and buckled from the force of the temblor. They could see into remains of a bathroom, two bedrooms—all gutted. Carpet, drywall and most of the wooden structural supports, everything of the furniture except the metal bits and pieces left over from bed frames and dressers, melted, twisted, scored and blackened.

“Hell of a fire,” Garces said. “Though from the bits and pieces of wiring I’ve seen, this place should have gone up years ago. Looks like the builder jury-rigged all of the wiring in the house, connecting whatever scraps he had on hand. So far, we’ve found no single piece longer than a couple of feet. And they vary in gauge as well.

“If it hadn’t been the gas line, an electrical spark in the studs would have done the trick.

“The people that lived here all these years, whoever they were, those people don’t know how lucky they were.”

There was nothing more in the third bedroom or the back bathroom. In the back corner room, however, they found half a dozen police and fire personnel blocking the shattered doorway.

“Make way,” Garces ordered. The uniformed figures parted, letting the trio enter.

If the rest of the house had been burned beyond recognition, this room was devastated. Even though the plans indicated that the gas line had run beneath the converted garage/family room and into the kitchen, it looked as if the focus of the blast area had been the middle of this room.

The side wall had been forced outward from the bottom, crushed against the slump-stone fence that separated this property from the neighbors’—and which, miraculously, had not fallen over when the fragments of wood, plaster, and stucco had struck it. The roof—what was left of it—lay piled on top of the wall, heaped as neatly as if some monstrous hand had positioned it there.

In the room itself, the concrete slab had erupted. It looked as if some gigantic behemoth had shouldered its way from underground, lifting wide portions of the slab up and outward, leaving a pit in the center of the room. Two men were in the pit, bent over something.

“Find anything more?” Garces called out to them.

One of the men straightened, swiped at his brow with an ash-blackened hand.

“You’re not going to believe this, sir.”

He motioned the trio closer.

They stood as near the pit as they could get, behind a buckled hunk of scarred concrete. The upper edges were jagged and worn, almost eroded, suggesting that this break had occurred long before the earthquake had forced this portion of the foundation upward.

The other man hauled himself out of the hole.

Revealing…on the far side of the break, a long, rounded extrusion of concrete that arced beneath the rest of the slab. Originally, it must have been a solid structure, eight feet long, four feet across, three feet deep, where the original excavation for the house had been deepened before the concrete was poured. In shape, it looked almost like a roughened mummy case, slightly wider at one end, narrowing at the other.

The quake had lifted it almost level with the rest of the slab, canted it until its entire length was visible from where the trio stood, and shattered portions of it. Where the old cement had blistered away, bones protruded into the open air.

“I think there’s a complete skeleton in there, sir. Must be as old as the house, though. It’s certainly not fresh.”

2.

It took only a short while to photograph the remains
in situ
, then carefully remove the bones, reconstructing their original open-air arrangement on a blue-black tarp spread over the nearest nearly level bit of floor. One by one the stained, fire-blackened bones emerged into the light.

Little else was found. Whatever clothes the unknown victim might have been wearing had decayed or dissolved or otherwise deteriorated to little more than patches of muck along the bottom of the case. There was a belt buckle, unadorned and functional. A watch face but no band—perhaps the band had been leather, since a small buckle lay beneath the corroded watch. Some indefinable sludge that must have been shoes, since it still covered portions of the feet.

“No idea what would have cause this kind of damage,” one of the investigators ventured. “Usually, even after decades, more would survive. Leather. Synthetics. It looks almost as if some kind of acid or something had been poured over everything. But there’s no trace of any damage from corrosives on the bones themselves. Other than having not a trace of flesh on them, they are almost pristine.” He shook his head. “No idea at all.”

Finally, at the bottom of the concrete tomb, they located a single clue. Two bits of metal, thin and rectangular, that looked like a set of dog-tags, or a pair of medic-alert pendants.

It took some cleaning and a strong magnifying glass to read anything through the accumulated layers of grime, sludge, and almost rock-hard sediment.

Medic-alert tags.

The name on one of them was still legible, although any mention of medical disorders had been totally eradicated.

“Bryan Sidney.”

“I know that name from somewhere,” Edgar Sai said. “Give me a minute.” He placed a call on his cell phone, stepped away from the small group for several minutes, then returned.

His face was pale, and he looked shaken.

“Bryan Sidney. Disappeared November, 1989. Police figure he’d skipped town. He and a partner built this original subdivision, then got caught cutting to many corners. Talk was they were both in deep shit, probably were going to be arrested, maybe serve some time in jail.

“Then Sidney disappeared. No trace. The talk settled down for a while.

“The it re-surfaced a two years later, stronger. More evidence, I guess, or something. Indictment actually came down.

“The night before he would have been arrested, Sidney’s partner, Andrew McCall was found murdered.”

Sai stared around at the wreckage from the fire, the gutted rooms, the shattered foundation slab, the black pit lying open and revealed just a few feet away.

“He was found murdered,” he continued, “in
this
house.”

3.

Later, after most of the official presence had departed, and he was alone with two men from the coroner’s office and the recovered bones, Edgar Sai stared down at the remains of Bryan Sidney, hidden for over two decades in a silent sarcophagus of cold concrete.

“If only,” he muttered, “if only these walls could talk….”

From the
Tamarind Valley Times,
12 June, 2012

NEIGHBORHOOD PARK ANNOUNCED

The Tamarind Valley Planning Commission publicly announced today the planned construction of a small neighborhood park in the Charter Oaks Subdivision.

The property, which has stood vacant since September of 2010, defaulted to the city after a legal contest in which the previous owners relinquished all claims of ownership.

In an arrangement with the family, the new park will be named the Willard and Samuel Huntley Memorial Park, after Willard Huntley, a valley resident who perished in the fire that consumed the home during a small earthquake that rattled the valley on August 29, 2010. A freak gas-line fire lead to Huntley’s death. The remainder of the family survived.

A month earlier, Huntley’s 2 ½ year old son Samuel died suddenly of a SIDS-like event.

The Planning Commission intends to dedicate the park on August 29 of this year, in memory of….

Michael R. Collings
is an Emeritus Professor of English at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, where he directed the Creative Writing Program for over two decades. He has published multiple volumes of poetry, novels, short fiction, and scholarly studies of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Dean R. Koontz, and Piers Anthony. Recent works include
The Art and Craft of Poetry
;
In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror;
and a Book of Mormon epic,
The Nephiad.

His previous fiction, also published through Wildside, includes:
The House Beyond the Hill: A Novel of Fear
;
Wordsmith, Volume One: The Thousand Eyes of Flame
and
Wordsmith, Volume Two: The Veil of Heaven
;
Singer of Lies
; Wer
Means
Man,
and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror
; and
Three Tales of Omne: A Companion to
Wordsmith.

He is now retired and lives in his native state of Idaho.