Eerie (25 page)

A long, breathless beat of silence.

The fire had burned itself out—the blackened log venting smoke up the chimney and the early morning cold flooding in, driving out what little warmth the flames had given.

“At first, I thought I had died. My spirit cut loose, adrift in the emptiness of space. But then …” he drew a trembling breath, “… those first moments. The stars moving. Inconceivable velocity. The knowledge that I wasn’t alone.

“They took me through the pinnacle of a young nebula whose light won’t touch earth for another million years. A spire of dust and hydrogen gas four light years tall.

“We traveled, my guides intent on my reaction to things. To understanding my attachments—the constraints of emotion—which they perceived as weakness. Barriers to advancement. These beings were pure mind, stripped of emotion, evolved beyond the need to wrap themselves in matter. They were benevolent, but their intelligence was terrifying. They exist outside the jurisdiction of space and time.

“I saw stars born. I watched them die. I saw things that will never have names in our lifetimes. That Shakespeare and Van Gogh couldn’t have begun to do justice. Sun-sized worlds patchworked with bioelectric grids more intricate than the human eye. I witnessed the shockwave from a supernova destroy a solar system, and then stood on the surface of what was left—a neutron star no bigger than Manhattan. They took me to the brink of an event horizon, let me gaze into the abyss while it devoured a sun. Even as I say the words, your mind attempts to draw a picture, but it can’t. Whatever you imagine fails.

“They wanted to purge my humanity with the sheer grandeur of things, but it persisted. The resilience of my hope and love and fear fascinated them. They asked what I most wanted to experience. I told them …” here, his voice broke, “… my wife. They took me to a place where your mother never died. Where we never went off the side of a mountain. Where we never knew separation. You both brought your children to this cabin. I chased them through the meadow. We swam in the pond. I got drunk with your wife, Grant. And with your husband, Paige. We all sat on the front porch of a summer evening and filled this clearing with our laughter. I was holding Julia’s hand. To breathe the air of a world where our family thrived, where we were happy … it was something … and I could have stayed, I could’ve stayed forever … but it wasn’t mine.

“No matter where they took me, no matter what I saw, my heart was here. This cabin. This world. This reality. The two of you. They couldn’t grasp it. They’d chosen me for this revelation. The universe unveiled. They had undocked my mind from this frail shell so I could become like them—pure conscious energy—and I wanted to come back.”

“Why?” Grant asked.

“Why.” His father laughed. “‘Why?’ asks a man who has never had a child. Because I’m tethered to you. To both of you, as you exist right here. You’re the only thing that’s real to me. That gives my existence meaning.”

Grant motioned toward the bedroom.

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing now. I absorbed it.”

“What
was
in there?”

“Returning, inhabiting my physical form—” Jim opened his hands and stared at them “—this antiquated piece of engineering … was an uncertain proposition. It’s not as simple as just plugging back into my old body. That thing in there was created to serve as a conduit, a flash drive for lack of a better analogy. But it needed to make physical contact with my body to effect the download.”

“What if you’d been killed in the wreck?”

“They would have taken me just the same. I just wouldn’t have been able to come back and make contact with the two of you.” He turned to Paige and patted her knee. “My darling, you wore that same look on your face when you were five. I see you’ve not let it gather dust.”

“What look, Daddy?”

“Like I’m bullshitting you.”

“You’re saying that was you under my bed?”

“Something went wrong on my return. It was my fault. I let myself get drawn to your energy instead of my shell at the hospital. I came to consciousness in your backyard. That thing is barely mobile, ill-equipped for earth’s gravitational and atmospheric demands. It was all I could do to crawl up the steps of your brownstone. I hid under your bed while you slept. The weeks I spent there, I was slowly dying. Desperate to find some way to reunite with my earth form.”

“I thought you were a ghost. Or a demon. Do you have any idea of the hell you put us through?”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I couldn’t communicate with you, Paige. At least not like this.”

“But you had this incredible power. There were times you were in my head. In my dreams. I couldn’t leave the house.”

“I was trying to talk to you. I couldn’t
let
you leave. I needed you. I reached out to you the only way I could, but it was awkward—like riding a bicycle backward and blindfolded. In that form, the one Grant carried in here, I was so weak, so vulnerable, and running out of time.”

“What did you do to those men?” she asked.

“Think of it as installing a program. You see why I needed them.”

“Will they have any memory of this?”

“I imagine their experience will be similar to Grant’s.” Jim glanced at his son.

“Like waking after a dream,” Grant said.

“Exactly. And as time passes, the memory of it will fade away.”

“You had them break into a hospital,” Paige said. “There will be—”

“Consequences?” He smiled. “Are you really going to ask me if I’m concerned that four men who have been using my little girl will have some explaining to do? I would’ve done anything to be with the two of you again.”

“A good man died,” Grant said. “Don.”

“I know, and I’m sick about it. The others were vulnerable. Their guards were down when I broke inside their minds.”

“What do you mean?”

“The region of the brain behind the left eye—the lateral orbitofrontal cortex—shuts down during orgasm. This is our center for reason and behavioral control. It gave me an opening.”

Paige blushed deeply and stared at the floor.

Jim’s eyes darkened. “I don’t know what happened with your friend. He was suddenly in the room. He saw me. I tried to make him leave, but I could barely get inside. It was just a handhold, but it devastated him. None of this has been easy or gone like I’d hoped. But we’re here now, aren’t we? Together again.”

“You still have this power?” Grant asked.

“Only to an extent. I’m still adjusting to life back in this skin. It’s awkward.”

Paige held her head in her hands.

Still staring at the floor.

“But how do we know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“That this is really you? Our father. We’ve been through hell the last two days. For me, it’s been even longer. Scared out of my mind. Thinking I’m going crazy. And then suddenly this?”

“I know it’s difficult, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. But you know it’s me, don’t you? Can’t you feel it? Haven’t you, in some way that maybe you only now recognize, known it all along?”

“Assuming everything you’ve said is true, what did you think? That after all this time, all you say you experienced, you could just come back and it would all be okay again? You were gone for thirty years.”

“And yet to me it was only a month. I didn’t know what to expect, Paige. That’s the truth, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with the two of you. To make things right for us again. I know it’s been hard, darling.” He reached out, touched his daughter’s face with a trembling hand. “This isn’t the life I wanted for you.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t look away from him this time.

“You could’ve been anything you wanted, Paige.”

He turned to Grant. “And you’re coming apart on the inside, son. I felt it under the bed. Your rage. Your loneliness. The urge you sometimes have to just end it. You’re still that little boy and girl to me, and now to see you both grown and struggling like this … it kills me.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” Grant said. “We had no one.”

“So what now?” Paige asked. “As you say, nothing went as planned. We’re in a big mess here, Daddy.”

“I know, but I have a way to fix things.”

The sound had been slowly building in Grant’s subconscious, and for the first time, he was aware of its presence.

Jim had started to say something, but he stopped when Grant rose to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Paige asked.

Grant moved quickly across the room to one of the windows that looked out across the porch into the meadow.

The sound was the crunch of tires rolling over gravel.

Sophie’s TrailBlazer emerged out of the forest and moved through the clearing toward the cabin. A few seconds behind, he spotted a white Chevy Caprice topped with a light bar.

Didn’t even need to see the emblem on the doors.

“What is it, Grant?” Paige asked again.

“Sophie. And she’s brought along a Statie.”

Chapter 42

Loose gravel pinged the undercarriage of Sophie’s Trailblazer as it slid to a stop next to a black CR-V.

A derelict cabin loomed straight ahead, surrounded by hemlocks.

Front windows busted out.

Too dark to tell if anyone was inside.

Sophie killed the engine and watched the Caprice approach in the rearview mirror. When she’d asked for backup, she’d envisioned more force than one lonely Statie. Then again, what could you expect in the sticks?

The Caprice pulled up beside her.

She grabbed a fresh magazine from the glove box and climbed out.

Slammed her door as the trooper stepped out of his cruiser.

Crisp blue suit.

Flat-brimmed hat.

Tall, rail-thin, blinding smile.

“Sophie Benington,” Sophie said. “So it’s just you?”

“Trooper Todd. But Bob’s plenty. What’s the dealio?”

“There was supposed to be a black van here. Three men abducted a fifty-nine-year-old patient from a psychiatric hospital in Kirkland. He’s violent. They brought him here was my understanding.”

“In the black van?”

“Exactly.”

“And how did you come by this information?”

“One of the other suspects called me when they arrived. That’s her car.”

“What’d she do?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

“We gonna go say hello?”

Sophie studied the cabin.

Curls of smoke plumed out of the chimney and up into the branches.

“I am.”

“I got a shotgun in my trunk.”

“This isn’t gonna end that way.”

“No offense, ma’am, but that’s not always up to us.”

“Why don’t you go around back. Make sure the van’s not there. Cover the back door.”

“When do I bust in?”

“You don’t. Not unless you see my gun. We clear on that, Bob?”

He released the button snap on his holster, grinned.

“It was a joke.”

Bob high-stepped his way through the overgrowth and disappeared around the corner of the cabin.

Sophie thumbed off the snap on her holster and started toward the covered porch.

Mist was forming across the clearing.

She’d been drive-off-the-side-of-the-road tired just moments ago, but now she was fully awake, all systems go.

As she climbed the steps onto the porch, she remembered Grant telling her about this place. It wasn’t the rose-tinted family retreat she’d expected. Or the weekend fixer-upper Grant had played it off as. If it hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere, the county would have condemned it years ago.

The front door stood open a half-inch, but she knocked anyway, her palm resting on her Glock.

“Seattle Police.”

She heard footsteps approaching.

They stopped on the other side, but the door didn’t open.

“Sophie?”

He sounded so tired.

“It’s me, Grant. Everyone okay?”

“We’re fine. How’d you find this place?”

“Who’s in there with you?” she asked through the door.

“Just the three of us—Paige, me, my father.”

“What about our other friends?”

“Gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeah, they left a little while ago.”

“Would you open the door please?”

Nothing happened.

“Grant.”

The door swung open, but it caught on the floor and stopped after only a foot.

Grant looked burnt-out, confused, on edge.

The dim interior trembled in the firelight behind him. Sophie craned her neck to see inside, but he blocked her line of sight.

“Gonna invite me in?” Sophie asked.

Grant took a step back.

She squeezed through the opening.

Eyes slow to adjust.

Paige by the hearth.

Old man who was a dead ringer for Seymour’s receipt portrait sitting on a disgusting couch.

“This your father?” she asked.

“Yeah. Hey, Dad, meet my partner, Sophie Benington.”

Jim Moreton said, “A pleasure.”

“Are you injured, sir?”

Jim shook his head.

“I was at the hospital,” she said. “I tried to stop those men from taking you. I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

“It’s quite all right. I’m with my children now. How could things get any better?”

“Your condition isn’t exactly what I expected,” she said.

“He’s had a remarkable recovery,” Grant said.

“I’m sorry, I’m just confused. Those four men kidnapped you from the hospital just to bring you back to the old family cabin. Didn’t harm you in any way. And once they delivered you here … they just
left
?”

Grant said, “Sophie, relax—”

“I’m all done relaxing. I’m ready for answers now.”

She moved past Grant into the gloom of the cabin, fixed her stare on Paige, said, “You called me here, honey, said—”

Grant fired a look at his sister.

“—you were scared. That the van was here, and you didn’t know what was going to happen. You asked me to come. I came. So could you or somebody at least extend me the courtesy of explaining what the fuck is going on?”

Paige said, “Grant, I’m sorry, I didn’t know what was waiting for us in this cabin. You weren’t talking to me. Those men were here. I didn’t know what else to do.”