Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 41

Dawn.

They were in the clouds, moving along wet pavement, the fir trees rushing past.

Occasionally, he glimpsed a mountain—dark, wet rock, swaths of snow across the higher terrain.

There was no more rain, only mist, but it was thick enough at this elevation to keep the windshield wipers in perpetual motion.

Grant swallowed.

His ears popped.

The engine groaned, the CR-V struggling up the steepest pitch of road so far, the double yellow winding endlessly ahead of them.

His right hand was inside the blanket, as it had been for the last hour, a tiny, warm appendage gripping his pinkie finger. He stared out the window. Saw everything and nothing. A kind of dual consciousness.

All up the mountainsides, the clouds were catching in the branches of the dark, epic trees. Their sharp, clean scent so strong he could smell them through the glass.

Paige watched him in the rearview mirror. He could feel her stare. The intensity of it.

He said, “We’re almost there.”

She said, “I know.”

# # #

They turned off of Highway 2.

A gravel road shot ahead through the forest, badly overgrown, but still navigable.

Just ahead, recent tire marks made paths through the undergrowth that peaked up through the loose rock.

They rolled slowly between giant hemlocks, the CR-V tilting and swaying across the uneven ground.

Grant could feel the blanket growing hotter, the shuddering intensifying, its grip around his finger tightening.

It was a minute past six a.m.

In the narrow corridor below the trees, Paige had punched on the high beams.

After a quarter of a mile, they broke out of the forest.

He had come here once since that last family vacation when it had been the four of them. Several years ago, a case had taken him out to Nason Creek, and he’d stopped by the old homestead; driven in as far as the clearing, but he’d never shut the car off, never even gotten out. Just sat in his Crown Vic for five minutes, hands clenched around the steering wheel, knuckles blanching, as if he could steel himself against the storm he’d been fighting all of his life.

So much pain caught. So much joy missed.

And there was no better embodiment than this decrepit place.

The cabin stood in the middle of a small clearing that had become considerably less clear in the years since his last visit.

It was a log-frame house, single story, with a steeply-sloping roof of rusted tin.

The front porch was covered, and even though the light was bad, Grant could make out Vincent, Talbert, and Grazer sitting in the rocking chairs.

Paige pulled into the grass beside the black van and cut the engine.

“Are we safe?” Paige asked.

“Why don’t you wait in the car for a minute,” Grant said.

He opened the door and stepped out.

It was freezing, the forest dripping, everything wet.

The hemlocks leaned in above them.

Their smell like a time machine.

He saw Paige—a little girl—running across the sunlit clearing on a summer day. Their mother reading on the porch. His father chopping wood. Their own private oasis.

The smell of Talbert’s cigarette dragged him back to this cold, gray morning.

Grant moved through the waist-high weeds and stopped at the foot of the steps.

Talbert stood.

Dropped his cigarette on the rotting wood of the porch.

Stamped it out.

Vincent and Grazer rose to their feet, the chairs rocking in the sudden wake of their absence. Their suits mud-stained, torn in places, sodden. Dried blood down the front of Talbert’s pinstripe shirt.

Grant said, “Where is he?”

“Inside.”

Grant nodded and Talbert moved across the porch, came down the steps with his cohorts in tow.

He stopped in front of Grant.

Put a hand on both shoulders, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

“We’re glad you made it,” Talbert said. “It’s almost over.”

Pats on Grant’s back as the others passed.

Talbert released his shoulders and continued on.

Grant turned and watched them climb into the van.

Vincent in the driver seat.

Grazer rode shotgun and Talbert disappeared through the sliding door.

The engine cranked and the van circled through the clearing and headed back toward the road.

A hundred feet in, it vanished into the darkness between the hemlocks, nothing but a pair of brake lights dwindling into the gloom.

Paige got out of the CR-V and walked over.

“What’d he say?”

“That it’s almost over.”

Grant heard the distant revving of the van’s engine as it pulled out onto the highway. Within ten seconds, it was out of earshot. The only note left was the wind moving through the top of the forest and the hemlock branches groaning against its force.

Grant and Paige climbed the steps to the porch.

There were beer bottles and cans strewn across the floorboards. Empty packs of cigarettes. Rounds of Skoal dipping tobacco. Old and shriveled condoms. Spent twelve gauge shells. A Penthouse magazine, waterlogged and faded.

Their old vacation home had become a Friday night hangout for teenagers from the surrounding towns.

The front door stood ajar and sagging, attached to the frame by its lowest hinge.

Grant reached for it with his free hand.

It swung inward, arcing toward the floor until it came to a scraping halt after two feet.

He glanced at Paige. “Hang back a second.”

Grant turned sideways with the blanket and stepped through the narrow opening.

The air inside was redolent of pine and smoke and mildew.

There was a small fire in the hearth, illuminating the room with a pulsating light that made the rafters cast a ribcage of shadows on the vaulted ceiling.

Graffiti covered the walls.

Dates and genitalia.

Names preceded by fuck or love.

In the back corner, rotten railing separated the rest of the room from what had been the kitchenette. It was now unrecognizable, buried under the debris of a failed roof, cabinets and counters long-since disintegrated under seasons of rain and snow. Nothing to suggest its prior status beyond a doorless refrigerator peppered with buckshot.

Grant walked over to the fireplace, the glass-littered floor crunching under his boots.

Two generations’ worth of faded Bud Light cans lined the railroad tie that served as a mantle. It was the only place in the cabin that seemed to command some level of order and respect, if nothing more than a nod by the collective consciousness of those who came here to the passage of time.

He stared at the bare wall above the mantle where a painting of his mother’s—an acrylic of the pond out back—used to hang three decades ago. He could still see the nail hole in the cracking drywall that the picture frame’s wire had rested upon.

He reached up and touched it, then turned and leveled his gaze on the two doors in the wall across the room.

The first led into the bedroom he and Paige had shared as children, but Grant made his way through the detritus of a thousand Friday nights toward the second.

Their parent’s room.

He pushed it open, the hinges screeching.

Could no longer feel the heat of the fire, and its glow didn’t come close to lighting these walls whose wood-paneling had buckled and peeled like the diseased bark of a dying birch tree.

He stepped inside.

All the furniture was gone save for a single mattress pushed into the corner.

His father lay on it, writhing in a straightjacket.

Grant crossed the room and lowered himself slowly to his knees. When he set the blanket on the filthy mattress, his father became perfectly still, lying on his stomach, his back heaving as he panted for breath.

There were four straps going across the back of the straightjacket. Grant reached over and unbuckled them.

Then he turned his father onto his back.

His old man’s eyes were huge. They stared at the ceiling, blinking several times a second.

Grant pulled his arms out of the straightjacket sleeves and arranged them at his sides.

He was coming out of himself, out of that deep well. Felt strange to be in proximity to his father, unrestrained and unmedicated. More so to see him lying still, not thrashing around.

Grant unwrapped the blanket, the heat becoming more evident with each layer.

As he peeled back the last fold, he could feel it lapping at his face like a hot breeze.

Its eyes seemed to catch light that wasn’t even in the room. They had changed—now infinitely-faceted, and with the wet sheen of a river-polished stone.

His father’s respirations slowed.

Grant lifted the creature, set it on his old man’s chest like a newborn.

As it began to sink into him, he turned away and walked out of the room.

Paige was by the fire, holding her hands to the heat.

The sound of the door shutting pulled her attention to Grant.

He moved across the room and stood beside her.

“Is Dad in there?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did they hurt him?”

“No.”

“And he’s in there ... with it?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Just doing what you’re told, huh?” She didn’t say it maliciously.

“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.”

“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.”