Michael R Collings (13 page)

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.

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
house 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.

No, Daniel did not visit nightly. Not even weekly. But somehow the stuttering irregularity of the boy’s nighttime degradation ultimately made the situation worse rather than better.

As Miles grew older—reaching eleven, twelve, thirteen—there would be erratic breaks in the sequence of Daniel’s visits. Each might last as long as a week or two. Once Miles enjoyed a respite of almost a month; by the end of the third week Miles had nearly convinced himself that he could believe (although it took little forcing) that the visits were finally over...that the “games” Daniel wanted him to play were finally, mercifully over forever. That Daniel had finally decided that he preferred playing the games with Elayne’s body.

Almost-a-month extended with a frightening slowness into a full month. Then to six weeks. Seven. For the first time since he moved into the house on Oleander Place, Miles found himself drifting easily to sleep. It became gradually easier to keep the secret—he had promised Daniel that first time that he would never tell anyone what they did, what games they played, partly because Daniel had made him promise and Daniel was an adult, but mostly because Daniel had made it frighteningly clear what would happen to Elayne’s love for her shameless, deviant son if she should ever find out. If Daniel treated Miles like he did (and Miles instinctively knew that most fathers—even most stepfathers—did not treat
their
sons like Daniel treated him) then there must be something wrong with Miles as well, something twisted and deeply, deeply perverse. The boy’s inner fear and terror and humiliation that someone might discover exactly what
he
was became more of a guardian over the secret than Miles’ naive boyhood promise had ever been.

Then, at the beginning of the eighth week...the whispered movement of the door, so quiet as to have been almost silent but even so more than enough to awaken Miles to a panicky tightness in his chest and a clammy sweat oozing through his pores. Then he felt the familiar, hated hand tightening over his mouth. The other hand (even more familiar, even more hated, if that were possible) scrabbling at the waistband of his pajamas.

Miles had refused to wear only underpants to bed for nearly three years, regardless of how hot it might be. No matter how much Elayne had argued about it as she bathed swathes of prickly heat rash along his shoulders and stomach during the frequent 100+ temperatures of July and August, he refused to sleep in anything lighter than full-length, long-sleeved, winter-weight flannel pajamas. Elayne could not understand why. Miles himself could probably not have explained why. Perhaps somewhere, deep in his mind where the horror remained submerged hour upon hour, he held out the frantic hope that the thick flannel might somehow protect him.

But it never did.

Now, after almost two months of blessed loneliness, when the soft, damp hand touched his quivering skin he knew that everything he had hoped to believe had been a lie. The visits were beginning again.

Only now, it was much worse for the boy. Since turning thirteen, Miles’ unwanted but undeniable physical reactions to Daniel’s depredations had intensified. He didn’t want them to; God knew that he despised himself more each time, condemned himself to a deeper level of his own private hell every time his body leaped from his conscious control and responded wildly, almost eagerly to the man’s filthy touch.

But it did respond.

Now even his always fragile sleep was infected by the nightmare visits. He would awaken to hear Daniel closing the door. Knowing that this was real, that he could not awaken from this nightmare, Miles would look up to see Daniel glowing ghostly in the leaden moonlight, leaning over his bed. He would feel Daniel’s rapid touches like a million insects crawling across his naked skin.

And then later—hours later sometimes, each tolled second by wearisome second by Miles’ Big Ben alarm clock ticking metronomically on the nightstand—Miles would finally stumble into fevered sleep....

And in that sleep, something new, a phantom Daniel, ghastly and loathsome in the stark shadows of slanting moonlight in the corner bedroom, would return.