Eerie (7 page)

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.