Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 10

Paige was curled up on the couch, and as soon as she saw him, she turned away and wiped the mascara stains from her cheeks.

Grant sat down on the hardwood floor at eye level with his sister.

Laid his hand carefully on her shoulder.

“I don’t know how I got to this point,” she said. “You ever feel that way?”

“Absolutely. I’ve had my share of spinouts. All that matters is you’re moving forward. Things are going to get better.”

“I sound like a crazy person.”

“You should’ve seen me a few years back.”

She wiped her cheeks again and rolled over to face him.

“But did you ever feel like you didn’t know what was real?”

He shook his head.

“It sucks.”

“You and I have never been crybabies about anything, but we haven’t exactly lived the nuclear family dream.”

“So?”

“So cut yourself a little slack, all right?”

“I don’t want to be crazy.”

In their entire lives, Grant couldn’t think of anything his sister had said to him—even during her drugged-out ravings—that hit him so hard. It was a killshot, and he could feel his heart breaking as she stared at him. Yet another moment of Paige in agony, and not a damn thing he could do to make it better.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“I’m trying.”

“Will you let me help you get help?”

For a long time, she didn’t say anything. Just stared at him as her eyes glistened with a reinforcement of tears.

At last she said, “I will, Grant.”

He leaned in, kissed her cheek.

The room had grown dark and cold.

All that remained of the fire was a single log with glowing ember veins.

“Is there more wood?” he asked.

“There’s a wrap in the pantry.”

Grant went to the kitchen and dug three logs out of the bundle. He carried them into the living room and dragged away the screen. The bed of coals put out the faintest purple glow.

He arranged the logs on the grate, blew the embers back to life.

The new wood caught easily.

Grant turned, letting the heat lap at his back as he watched the firelight play across Paige’s face. She looked beyond tired. Like she could sleep for months.

What was taking Don so long? Had he found drugs?

“Remember when we squatted in that abandoned house for a few weeks?” he said. “No electricity. Just a fireplace.”

“Yeah. We burned wooden crates that you found behind a grocery store.”

“Things have been worse than this, Paige.”

“But I don’t look back on that and call it a low point.”

“Seriously?”

“Those were the moments when I knew we’d be okay. Life could get shitty but we were in it together.”

“We’re in this together too.”

Grant heard footsteps on the second floor.

Finally—Don on his way down.

The footfalls accelerated.

Was he running?

Grant instinctively looked up at the ceiling as if he could see through it.

Something crashed to the floor.

A door closed hard enough to shake the walls.

Grant looked at Paige.

She’d sat up, arms crossed over her chest and her face screwed up like she was going to vomit.

“Stay here,” he said.

“Don’t go up there. Don’t leave me.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Grant crossed to the foot of the stairs and jogged up as his sister called after him.

At the top, he rounded the corner.

Stopped.

“Don? Everything okay?”

The table had been knocked over and the lamp lay on its side, bulb still intact, casting an uneasy triangle of light across the ancient carpeting.

Stepping over the debris, he moved quickly down the hall, the darkness growing as he strayed from the lamp.

The door to Paige’s bedroom was still closed.

He stopped in front of it.

Tried the knob.

It wouldn’t turn.

He pounded on the door.

“Don? You okay?”

Nothing.

Grant reared back, on the brink of digging his shoulder into the door, when the bright chinkle of breaking glass stopped him.

The sound had come from another hallway.

He rushed through in near-darkness, and only as he approached a door at the end did he notice the faintest thread of light along the bottom of its frame.

He burst through into a sparse bedroom. The duvet was pristine and the air musty and redolent of a rarely-used guestroom.

“Don?”

A splash of light spilled onto the hardwood floor through a cracked door in the far wall.

Four steps and he was standing in front of it.

Grant pushed the door open all the way with the tip of his boot.

The mirror was shattered, a web of fractures expanding out from the center.

Shards of crimson glass lay in the sink.

Don sat on the floor facing the doorway, his legs spread out, back against the clawfoot bathtub.

He was staring at Grant and holding a piece of the mirror to his own throat.

“Don? What are you doing?”

Don’s eyes looked so strange—roiling with an incomprehensible intensity.

“Don.”

Don spoke softly, “All your life you believe certain things about the world, only to learn how wrong you were.”

“You went into Paige’s room?”

Don nodded slowly. “I looked under the bed.” He shut his eyes fiercely for a second and tears slipped down the sides of his face. “And now it’s in my head, Grant.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can feel it pushing me to ... do things.”

“What things?”

Don shook his head.

“Put that piece of glass down,” Grant said.

“You don’t understand.”

“I know who you are, Don. I know your kindness. Your strength. I know that you couldn’t walk into a room, see something, and decide to hurt yourself. You’re stronger than this.”

“You believe that, Grant? Really?”

“With all my heart.”

“You don’t know anything. Don’t ever go in there.”

Grant edged toward him. “Don—”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. Now give me the—”

Tension flashed across Don’s face—a burst of sudden resolve—and then he pulled the glass through his neck.

It was like a velvet curtain falling out of his throat, streams and tributaries branching down his plaid button-up and flooding out onto the checkerboard tile.

“No!”

Grant rushed toward him and ripped the triangle of glass out of Don’s hand. He knelt beside him and held his palm across his friend’s throat, trying to stem the tide, but the cut was too deep, too wide, and smiling from ear to ear.

Don’s eyes were still open but settling more and more with every passing second into a permanent vacancy. His chest barely rising and falling.

“Oh God, Don. Oh, God.”

The man’s right leg twitched.

The quantity of blood inching toward Grant was tremendous.

Don’s jaw worked up and down, but no sound issued except for a soft gurgle in his windpipe.

The change in Don’s eyes was both infinitesimal and epic.

His body sagged to the side, his chest fell, and never rose again.

“Don? Don?”

There was so much blood, and he was gone.

Grant sat down on the toilet.

He put his head in his hands and tried to think, but there was too much competition—too many questions, too much fear and sadness, and a part of him still not fully committed to believing that any of this was actually happening.

Grant shut his eyes.

Walking blindly into murder scenes was a part of his job description, and emotional survival depended upon his ability to detach, no matter how horrific the carnage.

But there was no detaching from this. From what his friend had just done to himself.

Grant stood, and as he left the bathroom, he heard Paige calling up to him from the first floor.

He walked out into the dark hallway, his boots tracking blood across the floor.

Paige’s bedroom door was still closed. Not even a scintilla of light sneaking out from beneath it. Nothing to suggest that a man had just killed himself after leaving that room.

There’s something deeply wrong with this brownstone. On some level, he’d known it the moment he set foot inside, but the knowledge was crushing him now, a wellspring of fear expanding inside of him accompanied by a burning, physical need to leave this place, to get outside. Now.

Grant walked past Paige’s room without breaking stride, turned the corner, descended the stairs.

“Where’s your friend?” Paige asked as he emerged from the bottom of the staircase into the living room. She was still sitting on the couch, her legs drawn into her chest, arms wrapped around her knees.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Get your stuff.”

“Where’s Don?”

“Upstairs.”

“What happ— Oh my God, your hands.”

He’d been in too much of a state of shock to notice—they were covered in blood.

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

Paige didn’t move.

He pulled his North Face off the coat rack and shot his arms through the sleeves.

“Paige. Get up. We’re leaving.”

“What happened to your friend?”

“It doesn’t—”

“Is he dead?”

Grant hesitated, gave a short nod, tears misting in the corners of his eyes.

Paige brought her hand to her mouth.

“We’re not staying here,” Grant said.

“I can’t leave.”

Grant crossed to where she sat and grabbed her arm, jerking her up from the couch onto her feet and propelling her through the living room toward the front door.

“Stop! You don’t understand!”

“You’re right. I don’t understand the mindfuck I just witnessed upstairs.”

Grant opened the door and pushed her out onto the front porch.

The temperature had dropped and the steady pinpricks of rain had given way to a rare Seattle torrential.

Paige threw her weight into him, trying to claw her way back inside.

“I can’t be out here!” she screamed.

Grant pulled the door shut and held Paige so tightly by her arms that his knuckles blanched.

“We’re going to walk to my car, get inside, and drive away from this house. While we’re doing that, I’m going to call the station and tell them there’s a dead man in your bathroom. And do you know what you’re going to do while all that’s happening?”

The way she stared at him, her eyes glazing, made him wonder if she was comprehending a word.

He went on, “You’re going to sit there quietly and let me handle this.”

Paige dropped her head.

“All right,” she said.

Grant let go of her and started down the steps.

Halfway to the bottom, he heard a shuffle behind him, swung around to see Paige dashing toward the front door.

He went after her.

Paige grabbed the doorknob as he hooked his arm around her waist.

She bucked against him, jutting the back of her head into his face.

His nose and eyes burned and he tasted blood on the back of his tongue.

For a second he stood there dazed, arm encircling her midsection as she tried to wrench herself loose. He bent down, hoisted her up and over his shoulder.

She felt impossibly light.

“Stop!” she screamed, pounding her fists against his back.

Grant carried her down the steps and onto the hexagonal flagstones that comprised the walkway.

With each step, Paige’s thrashing became more violent.

A throb of pain bubbled up behind his eyes, a pressure more intense than the deepest water he’d ever experienced.

Grant stopped, the pain so sudden and vibrant it wiped his focus.

He was completely disoriented, a dull mud unfolding over his brain.

He looked around, standing in the rain with Paige’s now-limp body slung over his shoulder.

Grant took another step forward.

The pressure in his head intensified, like someone turning a crank.

A core of white-hot agony blooming in his gut.

He managed one more step before his knees buckled and hit concrete, Paige’s body thudding to the ground in front of him.

Everything buzzed, the world electrified.

He wanted to crack his head open right there on the flagstone, let the pain spill out and wash away in the rain.

Grant threw up on the stone—a violent, spewing rope of alcoholic bile—and his forehead came to rest on the wet rock. He’d let one of the beat cops tase him as a result of a bet gone wrong—this was worse by a factor of five.

Was this what Don had felt?

A whisper, barely audible, found its way to him through the downpour.

He lifted his head, saw Paige on her side, staring at him through wild, desperate eyes, her face inexplicably thinner, degenerating right in front of him as she convulsed.

“What?” he groaned.

“Get us ... inside.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s gonna kill us.”

Her words cut through the gauze that packed his head and sparked a moment of blinding clarity.

We’re going to die out here.

Grant struggled up, half-standing, hands braced on his knees.

It felt like his brain was peeling away from the walls of his skull.

“Can you stand?” he asked.

No answer.

Grant pushed Paige onto her back and grabbed her wrists.

Her eyes threatening to roll up into her head.

“Push with your feet,” he groaned.

They made it six inches on the first pull, Grant lunging back toward the steps while Paige kicked at the slick stones.

Even less the second.

It went on like this, their progress measured in inches, Grant pausing between each effort to catch his breath and wince through the pain.

The rain added what felt like pounds to her body. He could hear the thin fabric of her pajama bottoms tearing as her legs slid across the concrete.

By the time he reached the first step, their clothes were soaked and hanging like lead drapes.

“Almost there, Paige.”

He dragged her up the steps.

The last pull sent him sprawling back onto the porch, where he lay for a minute, staring up at the light, trying to catch his breath.

“Paige, you okay?”

She coughed and rolled over to face him.

“Better,” she said.

The pain in Grant’s head had relented, but the fog lingered. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d just dragged what looked like a dead body across the front yard in a crowded neighborhood at God knows what time of night. The thought was enough to give him the final shock of adrenaline he needed to throw Paige’s shivering body over his shoulder again and haul her inside.

Grant shut the door behind them and stumbled into the living room.

Fell to his knees, lay Paige on the warm hardwood in front of the fire.

He sprawled across the floor beside her.

They lay shivering in a silence broken only by the crackling logs and the ticking of rain against the windowglass.

In the stillness, Grant noticed the same pressure in his head that he’d felt at the beginning of the evening as he walked up the steps to Paige’s front door—a stuffy tightness, like sitting in the canned atmosphere of a fuselage at cruising altitude. He held his nose and tried to pop his ears but nothing happened.

Paige said, “I wanted so bad to be crazy.”

“I thought you were.”

“I know.”

“When I walked in here tonight it looked like you hadn’t left this house in a long time.”

Grant’s pulse rate was dropping out of the red.

“Not in two weeks.”

“Is that when this started?”

“No, it started a month ago, every day intensifying until I couldn’t even go beyond the front steps. Until I was confined to my house like a prisoner. You went in my room, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me, Grant.”

“I swear.”

“Then why is it affecting you?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. Don’s really dead?”

“He is.”

“How?”

“He broke the mirror in the guest bathroom and used it to cut his throat. He was a great man, Paige.” Grant could feel the emotion pressing in. “A great friend. Oh God, his wife.” A tidal wave of grief was bearing down, but he pushed it back.

Not the time. Need to think.

Grant shuffled closer to the fire. His cold, drenched clothing still clung to him, but waves of heat were washing over his face.

“I woke up one night,” Paige said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “and it was just there.”

“What was?”

“A presence.”

“In your room?”

“Under the bed. Remember tag? How when you were it you’d sneak up on me while I was hiding? Get real close. Scare the shit out of me.”

“Sure.”

“Whenever you did that, a split second before you grabbed me, I’d get this premonition that you were there. That’s what it feels like everywhere I go in this house.” She was becoming emotional again. “Like something is right behind me all the time. I swear I can almost feel its breath on the back of my neck. I dream about it constantly.”

“You’re certain this isn’t just in your mind?”

“Are you imagining this? Was Don?”

“And you sleep down here now?”

“When I’m able to sleep at all. Whatever it is, it’s made my bedroom home.”

“You’ve never seen it?”

“No.”

“And all those leftovers in your fridge?”

“I’ve been living off delivery for two week. I’d have starved to death if I didn’t run a cash business.”

“How often do you try to leave?”

“I test it every day.”

“And the same thing always happens?”

“Yeah. In the beginning, I could make it to the street. Tonight, the pain started the moment I stepped out on the porch.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s worse than that, Grant.”

“This seems pretty bad all by itself.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I know what it wants.”

“What’s that?”

“People. My clients. And the longer I hold out, the sicker I get.”

“Are you telling me there’s more than one dead man upstairs?”

“I don’t know what happens to them.” Paige rolled over and faced him. “I tried not to. Tried to resist. But the longer I did, the sicker I got. I was dying.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I take a client upstairs. While we’re doing our thing, I black out. When I wake up, they’re gone. I have no idea what it does with them.”

“How many men have you taken up there?” Grant asked.

“Two.”

Two.

“But it wants another one. It wants it now. You’re the first appointment I took in three days, and I took it with no referral because I’m desperate and couldn’t reach any of my core clients. I didn’t want to, but this thing ... it’s killing me.”

Are these Sophie’s and my missing men?

Seymour and Talbert?

The cases that brought me to Paige’s doorstep in the first place?

Maybe better to sit on that piece of news for the time being.

Grant forced himself to sit up. “I should make some calls.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Do you understand what’s happening here?” she asked.

“No.”

“So what makes you think someone else will? You’ll just get them, or us, or everyone killed.”

Paige struggled to her feet.

“Where are you going?” Grant asked.

“My little black book.”

Grant managed to stand. He reached into his inner pocket, took out his phone.

“Are you crazy?” Paige said.

He was already scrolling contacts for Sophie’s cell.

“Grant, did you hear what I said?”

“What exactly do you propose we do here, Paige? ‘Cause I’m at a loss.”

“Call a client.”

“Come on.”

“It doesn’t kill them.”

“You don’t know what it does. Taking more people into your room isn’t a solution.”

“I’m not looking for a solution, Grant. I’m just looking to survive the night. I just want this pain to stop.”

“Paige—”

“Do I look well to you? If I don’t get someone upstairs tonight, I won’t be alive in the—”

Paige bent over cradling her stomach.

“Paige?”

As Grant moved toward her, she turned and ran.

He limped after her, shouting her name, and as he passed under the archway into the kitchen, he spotted her hunched over the toilet in the bathroom, puking her guts out.

He stepped inside and stood behind her, holding her hair back as she retched into the toilet.

Wasn’t the first time.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re gonna feel better after this.”

She shook her head. She was spitting now, her back heaving up and down as she clambered for a decent breath.

She said, “Hit the light.”

Grant did.

The inside of the toilet bowl and everything in the vicinity was dotted with specks of deep burgundy, and over the pungent reek of bile, Grant caught another smell.

Copper.

Blood.

“I’m calling nine-one-one,” he said.

“No.” Her face was still in the bowl. “They’ll try to take me to the hospital. I can’t leave the house.”

“You just vomited blood.”

“Help me get cleaned up.”

“Paige—”

“It’s either me or someone else. Do you get that yet?”

“We can’t go down that road.”

“We’re there.”

Paige sat up and fell back into the wall. She said, “It’s that white knight complex that killed your friend. Listen to me for once. Please. You and I are not in control here. I call a client, they come over, I get better. If you bring people to this house, they’re going to die. Let me handle this.”

Grant looked down at the gore in the toilet. Hard to believe that his sister, small as she was, had that much inside her. Sprawled on the bathroom floor, sheet-white and still dripping with rain and sweat, she looked like a full-on heroin addict.

“All right,” he said. “Until I figure out what we’re dealing with.”

“Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“So I’ll know you’re one hundred percent with me. So I don’t have any more surprise guests showing up at my door.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“After that stunt you pulled with Don?”

“I’m not giving you my phone.”

“Why? Planning on making some calls?”

“It’ll make you feel better?”

“Yes.”

He tugged his phone out of his pocket, dropped it in Paige’s lap.

“Thank you,” she said.

She tried to stand, but her arms didn’t have the strength to push her onto her feet.

Grant reached down and pulled her up by her hands.

“You know, there’s an upside to this approach,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Now that you’re here, you can see what happens to my clients after I black out.”

Paige left the bathroom, and Grant stood at the sink, holding his hands under steaming hot water while he scrubbed every last speck of blood off his hands with a furious focus.

He finally shut off the tap and looked up into the mirror.

He flinched.

Don stared back at him—his face frozen in that moment of grimacing purpose just before he’d opened his throat. His lips didn’t move, but Grant heard his voice as clearly as if his friend had been standing beside him, whispering into his ear.

You don’t know anything.

You don’t know anything.