EERIE

by Blake Crouch Jordan Crouch

  From the angle of the camera, it was impossible to tell which direction they had turned as the van left the parking lot, and no amount of coaxing could jog the cashier’s memory.

  Sophie had spent the next forty-five minutes canvassing the area, checking motel parking lots, restaurants, and drive-thrus, her strategy ultimately disintegrating into blind Hail Mary turns down empty side streets.

  She’d finally pulled back into the gas station and parked in the spot where she now sat, staring up at the ceiling of her car as if someone had scrawled the answers there.

  Sophie shut her eyes.

  The rain had tapered off into drizzle again, padding softly against the windshield.

  Her phone rang beside her in her passenger seat.

  She grabbed it.

  Not Grant.

  Officer Silver.

  She answered, “Hey, Bobby.”

  “I’m just leaving the brownstone in Queen Anne.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody home.”

  Sophie’s heart lurched.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Empty as the warm, comfy spot beside my wife where I was soundly sleeping thirty minutes ago.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “No. Just banged on the front door and then peered through the windows. Lights are on downstairs but it’s a ghost town.”

  Sophie exhaled.

  “Thanks, Bobby. I owe you big time for tonight. Apologize to Lynette for me.”

  For a long beat, all she could hear was the acceleration of Bobby’s engine bleeding through the speaker.

  She said, “You there, Bobby?”

  “You know I got your back, right?”

  “I know that.”

  “There anything you want to tell me?”

  She could feel the corners of her mouth beginning to quiver, her eyes blurring with tears. In this moment, there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to tell everything.

  “Sophie?”

  She squeezed the phone.

  Steadied her voice as best she could.

  “Everything’s fine. Go home, Bobby.”

  The frequency of passing cars was increasing—early commuters heading toward the interstate to beat the rush into Seattle.

  It felt like years since she’d seen her last clear day, one of those rare cloudless beauties when every horizon looms with mountains and the Puget sparkles and Rainier threatens to the south like the badass stratovolcano that it is.

  What had she really seen, really experienced in Paige’s brownstone?

  Grant had told her some whacked-out things. He’d certainly acted crazy.

  But …

  What had she actually experienced that verified a goddamn thing?

  A bad dream and a power surge.

  That was it.

  Hadn’t seen any creepy twin girls who wanted to play forever.

  No one crawling across the ceiling.

  There had been the phone video from Paige’s room, but it was just that. A video.

  So let’s talk about what you did see. Something you could actually write down in a report that wouldn’t get you laughed at and fired …

  —Her partner had lied to her repeatedly about his whereabouts and absence.

  —When she finally found him, Grant had overpowered her, taken her gun, cuffed her to a banister.

  —She’d been held against her will in what was for all intents and purposes a modern-day bordello.

  —A good man had died violently more than thirty hours ago in a bathroom upstairs, and her partner, as of yet, had failed to report his death, even to his wife.

  —And when the shit really hit the fan with Art and their father at the asylum, brother and sister had vanished.

  Yes, things had felt off inside the house, but now, with a little distance and perspective, the cold, dispassionate facts were rising out of the mire. And when it came time to sort things out—the actions of Paige’s clients, of Paige and Grant themselves, the death of Don—it was only those facts that would matter.

  You covered for them, Sophie.

  Lied for them.

  And maybe she would’ve continued to. Maybe she would’ve extended her partner’s credit just a little longer, given him a chance to sort things out … but for Don.

  Don overshadowed all.

  Because when you stripped everything away, the simple fact of the matter was that a good man was dead. And his memory, his wife, deserved an accounting.

  She scrolled through contacts.

  Sorry, Grant.

  Pressed dial.

  It only rang once, and the voice of the woman who answered sounded a far cry from the person Sophie knew.

  All she said was, “Hello?” but it carried the ragged weariness of a soul in torment.

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sophie Benington.”

  “Are you calling about Don?”

  Sophie could feel the tears coming, the emotion dislodging in the center of her chest like a giant piece of ice calving off from her berg of grief.

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  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.