Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set (124 page)

“Something like that.”

“God, it feels so weird to be here.”

Grant went to the only piece of furniture in the room—a sofa covered in shredded upholstery.

The springs groaned and the cushion released a mushroom cloud of dust as he sat.

He swatted it away.

Old chimes clanged on the back porch.

The walls of the cabin strained against a blast of wind.

Being indoors somehow made the cold feel colder.

Paige looked around the cabin.

“Haven’t thought about this place in ages,” she said. “It’s like something from someone else’s life. I do love what they’ve done with the place.”

Grant glanced at the ceiling.

The names
Mike + Tara
stared down at him in faded, billowy letters.

“I always thought the ceiling was so much higher,” Grant said. “I think I could touch the rafters now if I jumped.”

For a long time, neither of them spoke. Grant tried to hear any noises coming from the room, but the only sound in the cabin was the brittle crackling of the fire. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was slowly waking up, the last several hours steadily descending into a subconscious fog like the memory of a dream, or a nightmare. The taste of it fading. Fragments gone missing or out of sequence. The flat-out strangeness of this moment, and all that had come before, beginning to register.

At first, he thought it was the work of the wind—something blown loose and knocking against the cabin. But as it continued, he identified the noise as footsteps on weakened floorboards.

The door to what had been their parents’ room creaked open.

Paige had already turned away from the fire.

She drew in a sharp breath.

James Moreton stood barefoot in the doorway wearing the same light blue pajama bottoms and button-down shirt he had been drugged and put to bed in by the hospital staff. It looked as though he’d attempted to smooth down the chaos of his hair, but most of it was still frazzled, sticking out to one side in wild tangles of white. A boney shoulder peaked through where the shirt slipped down.

Standing under his own steam, Jim Moreton looked impossibly frail.

A lifetime in the acute ward had aged him well beyond his fifty-nine years.

Grant stood up.

Paige said, “Daddy?”

Jim was looking right at them. Even from across the room, Grant could see the bright clarity in his father’s eyes.

And their focus—

His father hadn’t looked him in the eye with anything approaching recognition since he was a child.

Jim smiled, said, “My children.” He looked at Grant. “You did great, kiddo. Come on back now.”

It was like being pulled from deep water. Grant’s ear popped, and he was suddenly keenly aware that he was standing in the old family cabin with his sister nearby and his father upright and alert in the doorway. His recollection of Paige’s room, the car ride, unwrapping the creature—it all retained its vivid detail, but held no immediacy. As if the last three hours were something he’d seen on a TV show.

Jim took a wobbly step forward but then clutched the doorframe.

Grant rushed over and grabbed his father under his arms, kept him upright. He could feel the tremor in his old man’s legs—atrophied muscles already maxed. He reeked of the hospital.

Jim said, “Been a little while since I stood on these feet.”

Two days of strange happenings could not compete with the shock of hearing his father speak. Not groans or sighs or the ravings of a man whose mind was gone, but the sound of his actual voice powered by lucid thought. It contained the soft, raspy element of an instrument that hadn’t seen use in decades.

“Son, would you help me over to the sofa?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant let his old man lean against him for support. He was light as paper. They took slow and shuffling steps together, Grant doing his best to guide him around the broken glass.

When they reached the sofa, Grant eased his father back onto the center cushion and took a seat beside him.

“Hi, princess.” Jim was smiling up at Paige. He patted the cushion beside him. “Come here. I want to be near you.”

She walked over and sat with him, wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered as she buried her face into his shoulder. “You have absolutely no reason to cry.”

Jim looked down at his hands. Turned them over. They were long and gnarled, the joints swollen, nails trimmed to nothing.

“How old am I?” he asked.

Grant answered, “Fifty-nine.”

Jim laughed. “So this is what old age looks like. God, I could use a smoke.”

For a moment, the cabin clung to the stiffest silence.

Nothing but Paige’s muffled sobs.

Even the wind had died away.

“Dad,” Grant finally said, “I’ve been visiting you every two weeks for the last twenty years. They keep you drugged and restrained. The few times they haven’t you’ve injured others and yourself. They said your brain suffered so much trauma in the accident that you barely retained cognitive function. Said you’d never recover.”

“I’ve been gone,” Jim said.

“I know.”

“No.” His father’s lips curled into a small smile that Grant hadn’t seen in thirty-one years. “You don’t.”

Jim raised his arms and put them around his children, pulled them both in close.

He said, “You cannot imagine what it feels like to touch you again. To speak to you and hear your voice. To see the color of your eyes. I’ve seen so much, but nothing can touch this.”

“What do you mean you’ve seen so much?” Grant said. “You’ve been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the accident.”

Jim shook his head.

Again with that sly little smile.

“I’ve been everywhere, son.”

Paige lifted her head off Jim’s shoulder.

“What are you talking about, Daddy?”

“How much do you kids remember about the night of the accident?”

Paige said, “I was five, Grant was seven. He probably remembers more than I do. For me, it’s just a few images. Light coming through the windshield. The guardrail. And then after ... you not moving.”

“I remember a lot of it,” Grant said. “Most clearly talking to Paige when the car was upside down and she was hurt and scared.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to help you,” Jim said. “Not only for that night, but for every moment of your lives leading up to this one.”

“It’s okay,” Grant said. “You were hurt. There was nothing you could do.”

“I wasn’t hurt that night.”

“Of course you were. I can rattle off ten symptoms and behavioral manifestations associated with your traumatic brain injury.”

“What you visited in the hospital wasn’t me. It was just my hardware.”

“What are you talking about?” Paige asked.

Jim sighed.

“That night, we were on our way here. It was late. I was tired. Lights blinded me—I thought it was a semi. I over-steered, took us through the guardrail. We were in the air forever. You guys weren’t screaming and I remember thinking how strange that was. I guess you didn’t understand what was happening. We hit the side of the mountain and rolled and rolled and rolled.

“When we finally stopped, I knew I was bad-off. I could feel my ribs in places they shouldn’t be. Breathing was excruciating. I couldn’t move. Neither of you were making noise in the backseat and the rearview was busted so I didn’t even know if you guys were alive. I called out to you, but you didn’t answer. I just hung there from the seat and cried. I don’t know for how long.

“At some point, I realized I had missed the end of the game, and somehow I convinced myself that if the Phillies had won, you kids were alive. I can’t explain it. It just made perfect sense in the moment. I’m sure the blood loss had gone to my head. So I started praying, ‘Dear God, let the Phillies win.’ Not ‘Dear God, save us’ or ‘Dear God, please don’t let my kids be hurt.’ The Phillies were our ticket out of there.

“The pain grew unbearable—the physical, the psychological, worrying about the two of you. I remember seeing a light coming through the trees. At first, I thought it was our rescue party, but the light kept getting brighter. It wasn’t a solitary beam or even a collection of them, but all-encompassing. It intensified until everything—the car, the trees—was bathed in a blinding white radiance. My pain vanished, and everything I am—my consciousness, the unbreakable essence you would think of as a soul—was taken.”

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.”