Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (120 page)

Grant flipped it.

“It was in her purse.”

Grant stared at Sophie.

“Why do you have this?”

“That’s the receipt I found in Seymour’s hand. I told you about it on the phone, remember?”

“Benjamin Seymour was holding this?”

“Yes, at the Japanese garden in the arboretum. What am I missing? Why is your sister going through my purse?”

“This is our father.”

“What does this mean, Grant?” Paige asked.

Grant stared at the portrait. “I don’t know.”

Sophie said, “I wasn’t trying to keep it from you. I had no idea.”

The cell in Grant’s pocket vibrated.

He jammed the Glock into the back of his waistband, grabbed the phone, swiped the screen.

A series of texts from Art Dobbs had just uploaded.

10:06 p.m.

diner closing, they’re leaving

10:13 p.m.

they went across street to bar

12:01 a.m.

still here, you so owe me

2:02 a.m.

last call, they’re leaving

Grant glanced at the current time—2:37 a.m.

Paige said, “Sophie, I can’t explain why I even opened your purse. When the power came on, I woke up and I was just standing here. The receipt was already in my hand. I wasn’t snooping, I swear. What were you guys doing upstairs?”

Grant said, “I heard something. We went up to check.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. The power came on, you screamed, I ran back down.”

Sophie’s phone buzzed again.

Grant glanced down—Dobbs calling.

“Here.” He tossed Sophie her phone.

“He’s gonna be pissed,” she said. “Probably thinks I just bailed on him.”

“Blame me.”

Sophie answered on speakerphone: “Hey, superstar, what’s up?”

“Oh, not too much. Just doing your job at two thirty-seven in the morning when I should be home in bed with my wife. Hope I didn’t interrupt
your
beauty sleep.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m at Grant’s. He’s having a real hard time. Major bender.”

The sarcasm vanished. “Sorry to hear that. I don’t mean to be an asshole. I’m just exhausted.”

“What’s the news?”

“You see my texts?”

“No.”

“Our boys are on the move. They left a bar in North Bend about thirty minutes ago after sitting at a table for four hours, drinking nothing but water and barely even speaking to each other. Grazer and the new guy arrived separately, but they all left together in a black GMC Savana. New model. In all my free time, I ran the plates. Car was rented yesterday morning in Bellevue on Talbert’s Visa.”

“Where are you right now?” Sophie asked.

“They just turned north onto the four-oh-five.”

Grant looked at Paige.

He could see it in her eyes. She’d made the connection too.

“Thanks, Art. Keep me posted.”

When Sophie had ended the call, Grant said, “I know where they’re going.”

“Where?” Sophie asked.

“Kirkland.”

“What’s in Kirkland?”

Grant held up the receipt.

“Our father,” Paige said.

Chapter 34

For ten seconds, no one spoke.

Sophie finally broke the silence, “Are you sure?”

“A hundred percent? No. But his hospital is in Kirkland.”

“Why would they be going to see your father?”

“I couldn’t begin to answer that.” Grant pulled out Sophie’s Glock, crossed the room, gave it to her. “He’s at Evergreen Psychiatric Hospital. His name is James Moreton. Call Art on your way, tell him what’s going on. Please stop whatever is about to happen, since there’s not a damn thing I can do, stuck in this house.”

Sophie went to the chair and pulled on her boots and jacket, took her purse back from Paige.

“Let me have your phone,” Grant said, the helplessness and frustration beginning to ferment into rage.

She handed it over, and he typed in a number.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Programming my sister’s number so you can reach us.”

At the front door, Grant unlocked the dead bolts and the chain.

It couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing, their breath steaming as they stepped out onto the porch.

At the bottom of the steps, Grant felt something like a shiv slide in at the base of his skull.

Sophie said, “The pain’s back?”

“I’m not going to be able to leave. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Then go while you can.”

She embraced him.

“I’ll call you. Be careful, Grant.”

“You too.”

She rushed off into the rain and turned left when she hit the sidewalk. Grant watched her cross the empty street and climb into her TrailBlazer.

The engine growled to life, the tires screeched against the wet pavement, and Sophie roared off down the street.

He forced himself to take another step.

Pain ignited in the pit of his stomach and flashed through the rest of his body with the velocity of a shaped charge.

He doubled over.

Only when he staggered back did the agony wane.

In its place, that molten rage poured in.

By the time he reached the top of the steps, Grant had gone supernova.

He moved through the door, back into the house.

Paige stood in the foyer, arms crossed as if they were the only thing holding her together.

She was crying, trembling.

She said, “Now what?”

He went past her into the kitchen, liberated a knife from the cutlery block.

Rushed back down the hallway.

Up the stairs.

Paige calling after him.

He didn’t answer.

As he reached the top, he heard her footsteps climbing toward him.

He rounded the corner.

Turned down the hallway.

Wasn’t that he didn’t care or feel the fear. But as had happened a handful of times in his life, everything—absolutely everything—had been overridden by a pure and blinding need to break something. To destroy. There was something inside of him that had formed when his mother died and grown when his father was incapacitated, and had just kept festering and rotting through his orphaned childhood, while he struggled to provide for and raise Paige, into adolescence as he watched his sister derail, into adulthood when their estrangement solidified. It was the rage of a life frustrated, lonely, unfair, and devoid of anything approaching a single stroke of luck or good fortune.

It was why he got blackout drunk.

Why he went to bars in the sticks to get in fights.

Why he fucked prostitutes.

And why he was about to kick in the goddamn door to Paige’s room and once inside, tear whatever he found apart with his bare hands.

“Grant!”

He stopped halfway down the corridor, looked back at his sister.

She said, “Don’t do this.”

“Why? Because something bad might happen to me? That’d be a real change of pace, wouldn’t it?”

“Please. Come downstairs. We’ll talk this through. We’ll figure out our next step. I need you.”

Grant smiled. He felt electrified. Amped on methamphetamines. Like he could punch through brick.

He said, “I’m done talking.”

Then he turned and ran at Paige’s door, the pressure mounting in his head, a small voice asking if he was sure he wanted to do this but it was too late.

Inside of three feet, he raised his right leg and snapped his heel into the center of the door.

It exploded back.

Paige screaming his name.

His foot throbbing.

He crossed the threshold, and the moment he was standing fully inside, the door slammed shut behind him.

Chapter 35

The pressure in his head was enormous. Like sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

He couldn’t hear Paige anymore.

Couldn’t hear the rain on the roof.

Not even the mad thumping of his heart.

There was a single source of illumination—a salt lamp resting atop a chest of drawers at the foot of Paige’s bed. The fractured crystal put out a soft orange glow that failed to reach the corners of the room.

Grant’s vision doubled.

The lamp split into two orbs of light.

He blinked and they came back together.

The pressure swelled inside his eyes, his lungs struggling with each breath to inflate.

A stabbing pain thrummed through his inner ear in time with his pulse.

Fighting the disorientation, he tried to tune back into the rage that had brought him here.

He grabbed the salt lamp and tightened his grip on the knife.

A dust ruffle skirted the bed, an inch of blackness between the hem and the floor.

Grant stumbled toward it and dropped to his hands and knees, the fog in his head thickening fast, thoughts and intentions flattening under the pressure.

He put the side of his head on the floor and reached for the dust ruffle.

Some remote part of his brain screaming at him to stand up, turn around, get out, but its voice was growing quieter every second.

Under the bed.

He was staring under the bed.

He’d walked into his sister’s house thirty hours ago, and since then he’d been fighting this moment. Why had he resisted?

The light in his hand spilled into the darkness.

Dusty hardwood floor.

A pile of blankets.

Grant pushed the light forward, dragging himself behind it.

As his head passed beneath the bed frame, he registered a peculiar smell.

Vinegar and electrical burn.

The blankets shifted.

Grant reached out, took hold, pulled them aside.

The light eked onto two sacs of spider eggs—rust colored clusters that resembled the overripe drupelets of blackberries.

As Grant stared at them, a translucent membrane slid over one, and then the other, and retracted simultaneously.

The pressure in his head vanished. He dropped the knife.

Not spider eggs. Eyes. He was staring into a pair of eyes.

From behind the blankets, a long, slender arm shot out, and fingers encircled his neck.

# # #

It is dark and he is not alone.

There is nothing before, nothing after.

It is all and only now.

The floor beneath him rushes away. His stomach lifts. He’s gripped with the sensation of falling at an inconceivable speed, hurtling through darkness at what has been pulling him toward this room since he first set foot in the house.

He crashes into a terrible intellect.

For the first time in his life, he is aware—truly aware—of his mind. Its weakness and vulnerability. His skull is a pitiful firewall. The invasion effortless. Everything he loves and hates and fears is unhoused, his private circuitry torn out and laid bare.

Before Grant can even wonder what it wants, it is unrolling his mind like a parchment.

He feels the synaptic structure of his brain changing, being rebuilt, reprogrammed.

The tingle of neuron fire.

Thoughts he’s never had materialize as if they’ve always been.

A sequence of directions take shape.

Right turns and left turns.

Street names.

All at once, his mind cauterizes shut, and he is left with the absolute knowledge of what he must do next.

The eyes blink again.

The floor returns.

He is no longer under the bed but standing beside it and cradling something in a tangle of blankets.

Chapter 36

At three o’clock in the morning, Mercer was empty enough for Sophie to burn through red lights at full speed.

She hit the I-5 and screamed north to 520.

Dialed Art halfway across Lake Washington and stuck him on speaker so she could keep two hands on the wheel while she did ninety-five over wet concrete, the windshield wipers frantically whipping across the glass.

Art answered with, “Hey, Sophie.”

“Where are you?”

“Still on the four-oh-five, couple miles south of Kirkland.”

“They may be going to the Evergreen Psychiatric Hospital.”

“How do you know that?”

“Long story, but I’m on my way, about five minutes behind you.”

“Why are they going to this hospital?”

“No idea, but Grant’s father lives there. Seymour had drawn a weird picture of him on a receipt. Didn’t connect the dots until a few minutes ago.”

“And you think they’re going after him?”

“Possibly. I’m calling the hospital right now and putting them on notice so they can scramble security.”

“I’ll call for backup.”

Sophie depressed the brake pedal as she veered onto an exit ramp, nearly lost control of the TrailBlazer at the end as she whipped it around, tires skidding on the wet road, the SUV tipping up on two wheels for a terrifying instant.

She managed to right the car and stomp the gas, now accelerating north up Lake Washington Boulevard.

The city just a foggy glow across the water.

“Art,” she said. “I have no idea what these men are all about.”

“You and me both.”

“So do me a favor, huh?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t get yourself shot.”

Chapter 37

Grant opened the door and walked out into the corridor.

Paige stood several feet away, tears streaming down her face.

“I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. I thought something had—”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

She looked down at the blanket in Grant’s arms.

“Is that what I think it is?”

He nodded.

She brought her hand to her mouth.

When she reached toward the blanket, Grant took a step back.

“I just want to see,” she said.

She took hold of the end of the blanket.

Raised it.