Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (109 page)

“I don’t know what to think.”

She reorganized the covers and tucked them under her feet.

Shut her eyes.

“Don’t get your hopes up. You don’t wake up from this.”

Chapter 15

Two years ago on Thanksgiving night, Grant had questioned a man charged with manslaughter in the death of his wife and children. He’d driven them home drunk from a family dinner and veered head-on into a tow truck. Somehow managed to escape without a scratch.

Grant never forgot how the man had sat in the hard, remorseless light of Interview 3, his head buried in his hands, still fragrant with booze. He wasn’t a bad guy. No priors. Had only been moderately drunk. And up until that evening, he’d always been a model family man.

He’d just happened to make a bad choice, catch a tough piece of luck, and ruin his life.

He wouldn’t answer questions, wouldn’t look at Grant, just kept saying over and over, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening.”

Grant had been disturbed by it for a lot reasons, but mostly because he’d driven when he shouldn’t have plenty of times.

But for the grace ...

But lying in the firelight as sleep stalked him, he realized he’d never truly understood the sentiment, the horror running through that poor man’s mind, until now.

I can’t believe this is happening.

Exactly.

It was the feeling, the desperate wish, to go back. To hit undo. To have never walked up the steps to this—haunted?—brownstone. To have never seen Paige’s eyes on Facebook. To be anywhere but here—lying on this couch in this cold house under these conditions and Don dead upstairs.

Don is dead.

He hadn’t put those words together yet. Hadn’t had a chance to.

Now, in the dark with Paige asleep beside him, they came upon him like a freight train out of nowhere, arriving all at once with a truth so big it tripped his breakers.

He felt dizzy, sick.

Don is dead.

It kept repeating in his head—such small words—and yet they were the sound of a lynchpin sliding out. Of Rachel, Don’s wife of fifteen years, washing the dinner dishes alone at night in the kitchen before going up to an empty bed.

A new gust of nausea swept over him.

He’d
convinced Don to come here.

Grant couldn’t handle the stillness any more.

Needed a drink
now
.

He swung his legs over the edge of the sofa and leveraged his weight up, carefully stepping over Paige.

The dying fire provided just enough glow to see the flashlight on the coffee table. He grabbed it and picked his way through the living room, testing each floor plank for noise before committing.

At the wet bar, he reached for the Macallan. Pulled the cork, took a long drink straight from the bottle. It didn’t touch his ravenous thirst, but it quenched something so much deeper.

Grant moved through the living room toward the front door.

At the edge of the foyer, he stopped, turned on the flashlight.

Canvassed the room.

Everything in its right place.

Further on in the dining area, the table and ladder-back chairs made a strange geometry of shadows on the wall as the beam passed over them.

Grant stepped into the entryway.

The chill hit him flush on.

What little heat the fire still produced hadn’t made it this far.

The staircase loomed just ahead.

Pausing at the bottom, he shined the flashlight up toward the second floor. It didn’t quite reach the top, leaving the last few steps in a pool of darkness.

A wash of uneasiness turned his stomach, Grant beginning to second-guess that drink.

He moved closer to the staircase, compelled to scatter the darkness at the top, but just as his foot touched the first step, a thump like a bowling ball dropping on the floor above him shook the house.

He froze, heartbeat thudding in his ears.

Still couldn’t see the top of the stairs.

The dining room chandelier swayed in the wake of the noise, tiny glass prisms clinking.

Grant shot a sidelong glance toward Paige in the living room, unwilling to completely tear his eyes or the flashlight away from the staircase.

The firelight was too weak to see her face, but she lay in the same position.

Grant began to climb, each step groaning, and he kept climbing and kept climbing. Knew it wasn’t possible—perhaps a symptom of sleep deprivation—but it seemed as if there were twice as many steps as before.

As he approached the top, the floral print of the wallpaper slowly emerged out of the black.

He stepped onto the old carpeting of the second floor and stopped.

The beam of light just a tight circle on the wall straight ahead.

Pure darkness on either side.

He twisted the face cap, hoping for a wider coverage of light, but it only dimmed what little it had to offer.

Grant brandished the flashlight over his shoulder as he moved on and rounded the corner, the hallway illuminating unevenly.

He exhaled.

All quiet.

Paige’s bedroom door still closed.

He went on, past the cramped closet where he’d hidden from Jude several hours before, past the table, past Paige’s door, and down to the end of the hall where he turned to find the guest bedroom still open, just as he’d left it.

At the doorway, he stopped, resisting an inexplicable urge to enter.

He shined the anemic light into the room.

The stripped bed.

Bits of Don’s phone still scattered on the floor.

The bloody footprints.

Horror again at the thought of what had happened in here.

At what lay sprawled across the checkerboard floor of the bathroom.

So why was he walking toward it?

Why was he following those bloody footprints back to their source?

He wanted to stop but didn’t.

Couldn’t.

The interior of the bathroom swung into view, and he tried to look away, knowing he should just turn off the flashlight, spare himself from seeing this scene again. The images from before had already left an indelible mark. The kind of imprint that would never leave.

But he was already standing in the doorway.

He steadied the light.

The pool of blood where the man had once sat was empty and beginning to congeal imperfectly, like a cracked mirror, black in the feeble illumination of his light.

Don was gone, a sudden confluence of terror and relief flooding through him at the possibility that Don might still be alive.

Grant stepped into the bathroom and crouched down at the edge of the dark puddle.

Passed the light over it.

That’s not right, is it?

If Don had somehow gotten up or been moved, the blood would have smeared.

And let’s be honest—that is a shit-ton of blood.

Grant stood and traced the floor from the puddle to the doorway with his light. Just the one set of footprints from before—Jude’s.

He put his light on the shower curtain.

A prickling sensation dropped down the length of his spine.

Had it been open earlier?

He thought back to his first time in this bathroom, but he couldn’t recover the detail. He’d been too focused on his friend.

Grant cocked the flashlight back like a baton as he turned toward the bathtub.

No sound came from behind the curtain.

He stepped forward onto a blood-free section of tile, reached out, caught a fold of fabric between his thumb and forefinger.

He ripped it back.

An empty tub.

The bunched muscles in his shoulders relaxed, but an explosion of footsteps out in the corridor spun him around.

He stepped over the blood, bolted out of the bathroom, and shot through the bedroom toward the open door.

The footsteps pounded down the staircase, shaking the house.

Grant sprinted through the hall above the foyer, screaming his sister’s name, screaming for her to wake up.

When he turned the corner, he stopped.

Paige’s bedroom door was open.

Blackness inside like he’d never seen.

He felt the mysterious pull.

The rush of air behind him.

He needed his legs to work, to propel him in the opposite direction, but they’d gone lame, and now his knees failed him too.

He was sinking down onto the floor as the room sucked him in, but it wasn’t just a physical undertow. He was suddenly aware of something lurking on the outskirts of his consciousness. A concentrated intellect studying the framework of his mind. Searching for a way in. The intensity of its attention like a furnace.

Grant sat up on the living room couch.

His chest billowing.

It took him a moment to recalibrate.

The fire had gone out and the room was freezing.

He reached down and felt for Paige, found her back.

It rose and fell with the unhurried pace of a deep and restful sleep.

Bittersweet reality.

He lay back down and drew the covers up to his neck. The pillow was soaked in sweat and so was he.

Waking up from that nightmare into this one was a small relief, but he’d take it.

He’d take it wherever he could find it.

His pulse rate was falling back toward baseline, and sleep was creeping up on him again like a welcome predator.

No more dreams.

As if he could will such a thing away.

Grant closed his eyes, and they had been shut for less than a second when a sound like a gunshot filled the house.

His eyes opened.

He didn’t move because he couldn’t.

Frozen with liquid fear.

He stared into the ashen bed of coals beneath the grate, glowing the same subdued color as the brownish-purple dawnlight that was filtering in through the windows.

His heart banged inside his chest with a relentless fury, and he was on the borderline of hyperventilation, his vision sparkling with pulsating specks of black.

That sound.

He knew exactly what it was.

The door to Paige’s room had just slammed shut.

Chapter 16

You’ve reached Grant Moreton. I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you’ll—

Sophie Benington shelved the handset.

Her sergeant, Joseph Wanger, walked over, looking every bit like the terrifying slob he was—big and broad, his white, button-down oxford hanging out of his waistband, his collar stained with duck sauce the color of radioactivity.

He was tearing through a carton of Chinese food from Grant’s second favorite restaurant in the world—the Northgate Panda Express.

When he reached her desk, he rapped his knuckles on the particleboard.

Sophie shook her head.

Wanger sighed heavily and stabbed a plastic fork into the carton.

The rippled surface of his shaved head was sweating from the handful of hot mustard packets he’d undoubtedly squeezed onto his meal.

“I’ve been calling him all morning,” Sophie said. “It rings, but he’s not picking up.”

“You guys are close, right?” His voice pure gravitas and boom. Sophie had seen it break more than a handful suspects, blundering unis who’d muddied the chain of evidence, and even the occasional detective.

“I don’t know if I’d say—”

“Come on, Benington. What’s going on with your boy?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know Grant’s got a taste for scotch. I mean, that don’t require any sort of special training to deduce.”

“I’m aware, sir.”

“He’s been fine the last year or two, but he’s has not always been the straight and narrow. Any chance he’s going through a thirsty spell, and you just don’t have the heart to rat him out? It’s not a part of your job to protect him, you know.”

“I’m not protecting him.”

Wanger shoveled a pile of lo mein noodles into his mouth, his massive black mustache glistening with MSG.

“Look, I’ve known Grant for two years,” Sophie said. “He’s shown up for work hung-over a few times.”

“A few?”

“A few times a week. Rolled in still drunk once or twice. But he’s never
not
shown up.”

“Boy could be going through some shit not on your radar.”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you guys
are
all cuddly then?”

She imagined lifting the paperweight off her desk—a viceroy butterfly enclosed in a clear globe—and smashing it into Wanger’s ball sack.

“No, but I do sit across from the man every day. I wouldn’t be a good detective if I couldn’t tell if something was bothering my own partner, would I?”

“So does this mean you’re worried?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve tried him at home?”

“His cell is the only way to reach him. I also texted him and sent him an e-mail. No response. I was thinking of driving over to his apartment in Fremont.”

Wanger was already nodding as he chewed.

“Do it,” he said. “Right now.”

# # #

Sophie stood at Grant’s door on the third floor of his townhome walkup. The building was nice, but Grant had about as much design sense as a monk.

She pounded on his door again.

“Grant!
You in there?
”

No answer.

Turning away, she pushed the thought out of her mind that he was lying dead in there. She had circled the surrounding blocks several times, but couldn’t find his black Crown Vic. At least that was something.

Halfway down the last flight of stairs, her phone rang—Detective Dobbs calling. She answered as she moved past the mailboxes and toward the front door.

“What’s up, Art?”

“I just got a strange call. A groundskeeper spotted a man in the Japanese garden at the Washington Park Arboretum.”

“So what?”

“Silver responded. Turns out it’s Benjamin Seymour, your missing lawyer.”

“So Seymour’s okay?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just go see for yourself.”

Sophie pushed open the front door and headed down the concrete steps toward her silver TrailBlazer which she’d double-parked in front of the building.