“What does anymore?”
As Grant reached for his water glass, he heard Paige gasp in the kitchen.
“Paige?” he called out. “Everything okay?”
The door to the kitchen swung open.
Paige stood in the threshold. Even in the firelight, Grant could see that her face had lost all color, the tremors in her hands so violent they extended up into her shoulders.
He rose out of his seat and went to her.
Paige pushed her phone into his chest.
“What happened?” he asked.
She shook her head, eyes welling.
He took her by the arm and helped her into the chair.
Grant set the phone on the table and looked at Sophie, a knot tightening deep in his gut.
He turned the phone lengthwise, revived the touchscreen.
The video was cued.
Eleven minutes, forty-one seconds.
# # #
For a second, Paige’s face fills the lens.
She pulls back, walks out of frame.
The view is level.
It shows a bedroom from a wide angle, three or four feet up off the floor.
Left-hand side of the frame: floor to ceiling drapes hide a window.
Right-hand side: double doors, presently closed, open into a closet.
The bed is centered almost perfectly in the shot.
Four posts reach for the ceiling.
The headboard is hidden behind a rampart of pillows.
Paige and Steve Vincent walk into frame, Paige holding his hand and guiding him toward the bed.
At least a dozen candles populate each bedside table, but still the light is poor and the picture grainy.
Paige unties the cloth belt and lets her kimono slide down her shoulders into a pool of silk around her feet.
Grant said, “How am I supposed to watch this?”
Sophie said, “Suck it up, you big baby.”
“That’s my sister.”
Grant looked at his sister.
Paige was staring hard into the table like it was a visual sanctuary.
In that moment, he felt the strangest mix of anger and compassion toward her.
A conflicting yet simultaneous desire to hold her, to love her, to hurt her.
Vincent begins to moan.
Grant glanced down at the phone.
Took his eyes a moment to piece together what he saw.
The man is on his back, spread-eagle, with Paige between his legs, her head bobbing up and down.
Grant shut his eyes, and Paige must have caught a waft of the heat coming off him, because she said, “What did you think happened up in that room?”
“One thing to know. Another to see.”
“Disapproval noted.”
He forced himself to look back at the screen.
Vincent on top now. Missionary. Riding hard.
Sophie said, “Oh my God.”
Grant’s eyes cut to the closet doors, but he couldn’t see that anything had changed.
“What? I don’t see it.”
She touched the screen.
At first, Grant didn’t think it was real.
A trick of light and shadow perhaps.
A byproduct of the grainy picture.
The shadow keeps lengthening, a long, thin arm stretching out from the darkness under Paige’s bed.
Vincent humps away unawares.
Faster and faster.
Getting loud.
He yells as he comes, an unmistakable component of rage in his voice that drowns out Paige.
And then ...
One minute, the man is on top of her, pounding away.
The next, Paige lies alone and motionless on the sheets as the last vestige of Vincent—his foot—slides under the bed.
For thirty seconds, the room is still.
Grant looked at Sophie, and then Paige.
“Did that just happen?”
“Yes,” Sophie said.
“How is that—”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at Paige. She finally met his eyes. He said, “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“This isn’t lightbulbs exploding or some unidentified illness. Something just dragged that man under your bed.”
“I saw it.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know!”
“It’s in your room. Under your bed.”
“Grant.” Sophie nudged him and pointed at the screen.
A hand reaches out.
Then a head emerges.
Vincent wriggles out from under the bed and struggles slowly onto his feet.
For what seems ages, he stands motionless on the floor beside the bed, naked save for his dress socks, arms hanging straight down his sides, fingers twitching. The picture quality is too poor to see his eyes with any clarity, but they resemble gaping black holes on a blank white face that has been purged of any expression.
Slowly, and with great care, he begins to pick up his clothes which lie scattered across the floor.
He sits down on the end of the bed.
Pulls on his boxer shorts. His pants.
Then he’s standing directly in front of the phone, pot belly taking up most of the frame.
Vincent leaves the room.
There is Paige, still motionless on the bed, and nothing else.
Finally, she sits up and looks around, bewildered.
Paige climbs down off the bed and walks over to the camera.
The picture swings up toward the ceiling.
The video ends.
“You okay, Paige?” he asked.
She gave a short, unconvincing nod, said, “A shame nobody from the church even bothered to call us back.”
He powered off his sister’s phone and looked at Sophie.
“What do you think?”
“I think I don’t want to be inside this house anymore.”
“Believe me now?”
“Believe what?”
“That something beyond our understanding is happening here.”
“Yeah, and I want to leave, Grant. Does that strike you as a crazy request after what we just watched?”
“No, but—”
“But you don’t trust me.”
“I feel better with you here right now.”
“And I just told you I don’t want to be here. So are you going to continue to hold me against my will?”
Chapter 29
Paige blew out the candles and cleared the table while Grant moved Sophie into the living room. It was Friday night, and outside the street was busy with traffic heading downtown for the evening.
In an hour, Queen Anne would become a ghost town.
“It’s getting cold in here,” Sophie said, rubbing her shoulder with her free hand. “I can see my breath.”
Grant exhaled and squinted into the air in front of him. “No you can’t.”
“It’s still cold.” She was right about that. The temperature was dropping fast. “Guess you haven’t seen any of the weather reports.”
“No, why?”
“First night below freezing.”
“Awesome.”
Through the window, the outline of a house appeared in soft, white Christmas lights. It was already mid-December, but the season had yet to see its first truly cold night. Terrible weather in return for a mild climate and a month of perfect summer—that was the Seattle contract. Wasn’t for everyone, but Grant grooved on it. The cloudy skies jived with his ascetic inner-monk.
He surveyed the living room, eyes coming to rest on a mission-style rolling chair parked in front of a writing desk beside the fireplace. He pulled Sophie toward it, and then dragged the chair out and spun it around to face them.
Grant fished the key from his pocket and unlocked the bracelet around his wrist while keeping Sophie’s from popping open.
He snapped it around the armrest of the rolling chair.
“Still think I’m a fligh
t risk, huh?” she asked.
“I would be.”
“And what if I looked you in the eyes and told you I wouldn’t try to leave?”
“I couldn’t live with myself putting you in a position to betray my trust.”
She rolled her eyes and plopped down in the chair, rocked it back-and-forth.
Said, “What now?”
“I’m going to find something to burn. In the meantime ...” he tugged the afghan he’d slept under the night before off the couch and flagged it open, “... try to stay warm.”
He brought it down over Sophie.
“You’re just going to leave me here with these wheels?”
“Knock yourself out. Take it for a spin.”
Grant walked into the kitchen where Paige was still washing up.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“Water’s cold,” she said without turning around.
He walked up to the sink beside her, grabbed a plate.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said as he submerged it in the frigid water.
Paige made no response.
“You were quiet,” he said.
“Didn’t want to incriminate myself anymore than you already have.”
“Sophie’s on our side.”
“That why she’s in handcuffs?”
Silence crept in between them.
Paige turned the water on again.
Grant could feel the tension in his sister like a living thing. Could see it in the furious concentric circles she made with the sponge across the surface of the plate.
“I heard you in the basement,” she said at last.
Grant stopped scrubbing. Let the plate sink into the dishwater.
“Then you know I don’t blame you for any of this.”
“I know that if it comes down to my word against your partner’s, I’m fucked.”
“Hey, who’s chained to a chair in your living room? You’re my sister, all right? You get the benefit of the doubt.”
“Why even bother? I’m a wreck, right? That’s the word you used. A drug addict. A prostitute who fucked her own life from every position.”
He said, “I was defending you, Paige,” but it even sounded weak to him.
Her plate dropped into the water with a violent splash.
She put both hands on the edge of the sink.
“You’ve never defended me,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I raised you.”
“Not the same thing.”
“That hurts more than you mean it to.”
“Your crusade to fix me has always been about what I need, but never about what I need from you.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Paige.”
“It means that I didn’t need to be your project. I needed your support. I needed you to stand beside me.”
“All I’ve ever wanted is to help you.”
“I believe you think that. Just like any good doctor. But I’m not your patient. Want to know why I left the first time and why I kept leaving every time you found me?”
“Been asking myself that question for years.”
“That’s the problem. You don’t have the answer, but you could never see that. I left because I got tired of watching you fumble with my problems like they were yours. Like you had the first clue about how to fix them. You’re sicker than I am, Grant. All I wanted was a brother and all you wanted to be was a mechanic. We were both addicts.”
“That’s what family does. They try to help each other.”
She turned to him.
“I got clean on my own, Grant. You show up and now we have a dead body upstairs and a police officer handcuffed in the living room. What exactly have you fixed?”
He grabbed the damp dishtowel from the counter and dried his hands.
“You make it sound like you’ve got your whole life sorted out. I just watched some guy use you, Paige. Maybe you’re off drugs, but you’re a helluva long way from clean.”
The words were out before he could stop them. He was shocked by their venom, their precision. They had come from a place he didn’t know existed, a place where there was no love for his sister. Just anger and disappointment.
Utter devastation arrived on her face.
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Fuck. You.”
Chapter 30
“Everything okay?” Sophie called from her chair as Grant stormed through the foyer and into the living room.
“Fine,” he said, selecting a short, squat candle that smelled like lavender from the flickering legion on the coffee table.
Grant went back into the foyer and made his way down the hall beside the stairs, stopping at the door to the basement. The tap continued to run in the kitchen. He listened for the clink of plates and glassware but there was no other sound. Imagined Paige standing frozen by the sink, the same mosaic of hurt across her face.
During that last intervention in Phoenix, when Paige was in the throes of a spectacular crash and burn, she had leaned over to Grant with tears in her eyes and whispered that she wished the car accident had left him a vegetable too. Then she’d kissed him on the cheek. That was Paige at her worst. Paige out of her mind. It hadn’t made it any easier, but at least he’d known it wasn’t his little sister saying those things.
So what’s your excuse, pal? Around what can you hang the blame for your poison?
And yet still, it was there.
Unquenchable rage.
He stared across the kitchen at Paige’s back.
Knew he shouldn’t say it. Knew he should just let it go. Walk away. Punch a wall in private, but he couldn’t stop himself. He never could. The acid wanted out, and it was coming.
He said, “Did you ever think for a minute that maybe I needed you? That maybe I needed a sister? Instead of a train wreck of a child who has not for one single day since I’ve known her had control of her own life? Has that thought ever crossed your mind? I guess I’m lucky I’ve never really needed you.”
He opened the door and headed downstairs.
The candleflame faltered.
In the weak light, a few fragile stairs offered the way down before disappearing into darkness. Grant remembered how easily they had flexed under his weight before and placed his feet gingerly on the first step.
It bowed.
He could hear Paige crying in the kitchen. He hated it, but he wanted it.
He started down the stairs, staying at their edge and spending as little time on each step as possible without rushing the descent.
The darkness at the bottom was even thicker than he remembered. It seemed to congeal with the dank air like a viscous ether, cold and clammy on his skin.
Grant held the candle up and squinted, realizing that his eyes had already done all the adjusting they were going to do.
In the corner, the piano loomed, barely visible in the feeble illumination.
Something about its presence unsettled Grant, a part of him actually afraid that the darkness might blurt out some old rag time, the keys moving but no one at the helm. Sour notes where the hammers were missing or lame.
Grant put the brakes on that train of thought.
All those nights lying awake in bed, just a kid and no adult in the house, afraid to close his eyes—it was the same fear. He always thought he’d grow out of it. Still hoped he might. Hell, wasn’t owning that fear part of the reason he’d been drawn to law enforcement? But adulthood had a way of making him feel like more of a child than when he’d actually been one.
Thirty-eight years old and still afraid of basements.
He took a moment to gather himself, and then made his way across the uneven stones to the window Sophie had smashed.
The fluorescent orb of a streetlight peered down at him through what remained of the glass.
Hunkered in the dark below it lay the buckled mass of the workbench. It was crudely made, a sheet of particleboard nailed to a pair of wooden sawhorses. The crew who’d done the remodel had probably
left it behind. When Sophie had fallen through, she’d split the table top so that the two halves now met at a ninety degree angle. He didn’t know if it would be enough, but it looked like perfect firewood.
Grant gave one of the halves a kick, hoping the wood might be soft enough to split with his foot.
The particleboard barely flexed.
A tremor of pain shot up his leg.
He turned and scanned the rest of the room for something he could use to break it up.
In the corner beneath the stairs, a cluster of long-handled tools rested against the wall.
He walked over and picked through the pile, finally selecting a sledgehammer which he hoisted and carried back to the workbench.
Grant set the candle on the floor beside him, and with his free hand, pulled both halves of the table away from the wall.
On the exposed brick in front of him, the unsteady light made his shadow tremble and curl onto the ceiling, the sledgehammer grotesquely elongated like a malformed limb.
The silhouette moved when he moved but it didn’t feel like it belonged to him.
He threw an impulsive look back over his shoulder at the piano, but it was lost somewhere in darkness behind him.
He squared himself up in front of the bench.
Got a solid, two-handed grip—right hand under the head, left down toward the end of the handle—and raised the sledgehammer over his head.
The blow fell with such force that he didn’t even feel it pass through the bench, splinters of wood exploding as the head crushed into the stone floor and sent a jarring shockwave up through his arms that rattled the fillings in his molars.
Eight more swings and the workbench had been reduced to a pile of kindling.
Panting, he leaned on the handle of the sledgehammer and examined the damage.
A good start, but not enough to burn through the night.
More importantly, not enough resistance to fill his need to destroy something.
Grant picked the candle up, threw the sledgehammer over his shoulder, and approached the corner where the piano sulked.
Up close, it was a gorgeous instrument. An upright Steinway of mahogany construction with brass gilding on the bass and treble ends. Must have been exquisite in its youth. Now, decades of exposure to the elements had stripped away most of the varnish and rusted its fixtures.
Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set Page 93