Chapter 35
The pressure in his head was enormous. Like sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
He couldn’t hear Paige anymore.
Couldn’t hear the rain on the roof.
Not even the mad thumping of his heart.
There was a single source of illumination—a salt lamp resting atop a chest of drawers at the foot of Paige’s bed. The fractured crystal put out a soft orange glow that failed to reach the corners of the room.
Grant’s vision doubled.
The lamp split into two orbs of light.
He blinked and they came back together.
The pressure swelled inside his eyes, his lungs struggling with each breath to inflate.
A stabbing pain thrummed through his inner ear in time with his pulse.
Fighting the disorientation, he tried to tune back into the rage that had brought him here.
He grabbed the salt lamp and tightened his grip on the knife.
A dust ruffle skirted the bed, an inch of blackness between the hem and the floor.
Grant stumbled toward it and dropped to his hands and knees, the fog in his head thickening fast, thoughts and intentions flattening under the pressure.
He put the side of his head on the floor and reached for the dust ruffle.
Some remote part of his brain screaming at him to stand up, turn around, get out, but its voice was growing quieter every second.
Under the bed.
He was staring under the bed.
He’d walked into his sister’s house thirty hours ago, and since then he’d been fighting this moment. Why had he resisted?
The light in his hand spilled into the darkness.
Dusty hardwood floor.
A pile of blankets.
Grant pushed the light forward, dragging himself behind it.
As his head passed beneath the bed frame, he registered a peculiar smell.
Vinegar and electrical burn.
The blankets shifted.
Grant reached out, took hold, pulled them aside.
The light eked onto two sacs of spider eggs—rust colored clusters that resembled the overripe drupelets of blackberries.
As Grant stared at them, a translucent membrane slid over one, and then the other, and retracted simultaneously.
The pressure in his head vanished. He dropped the knife.
Not spider eggs. Eyes. He was staring into a pair of eyes.
From behind the blankets, a long, slender arm shot out, and fingers encircled his neck.
• • •
It is dark and he is not alone.
There is nothing before, nothing after.
It is all and only now.
The floor beneath him rushes away. His stomach lifts. He’s gripped with the sensation of falling at an inconceivable speed, hurtling through darkness at what has been pulling him toward this room since he first set foot in the house.
He crashes into a terrible intellect.
For the first time in his life, he is aware—truly aware—of his mind. Its weakness and vulnerability. His skull is a pitiful firewall. The invasion effortless. Everything he loves and hates and fears is unhoused, his private circuitry torn out and laid bare.
Before Grant can even wonder what it wants, it is unrolling his mind like a parchment.
He feels the synaptic structure of his brain changing, being rebuilt, reprogrammed.
The tingle of neuron fire.
Thoughts he’s never had materialize as if they’ve always been.
A sequence of directions take shape.
Right turns and left turns.
Street names.
All at once, his mind cauterizes shut, and he is left with the absolute knowledge of what he must do next.
The eyes blink again.
The floor returns.
He is no longer under the bed but standing beside it and cradling something in a tangle of blankets.
Chapter 36
At three o’clock in the morning, Mercer was empty enough for Sophie to burn through red lights at full speed.
She hit the I-5 and screamed north to 520.
Dialed Art halfway across Lake Washington and stuck him on speaker so she could keep two hands on the wheel while she did ninety-five over wet concrete, the windshield wipers frantically whipping across the glass.
Art answered with, “Hey, Sophie.”
“Where are you?”
“Still on the four-oh-five, couple miles south of Kirkland.”
“They may be going to the Evergreen Psychiatric Hospital.”
“How do you know that?”
“Long story, but I’m on my way, about five minutes behind you.”
“Why are they going to this hospital?”
“No idea, but Grant’s father lives there. Seymour had drawn a weird picture of him on a receipt. Didn’t connect the dots until a few minutes ago.”
“And you think they’re going after him?”
“Possibly. I’m calling the hospital right now and putting them on notice so they can scramble security.”
“I’ll call for backup.”
Sophie depressed the brake pedal as she veered onto an exit ramp, nearly lost control of the TrailBlazer at the end as she whipped it around, tires skidding on the wet road, the SUV tipping up on two wheels for a terrifying instant.
She managed to right the car and stomp the gas, now accelerating north up Lake Washington Boulevard.
The city just a foggy glow across the water.
“Art,” she said. “I have no idea what these men are all about.”
“You and me both.”
“So do me a favor, huh?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t get yourself shot.”
Chapter 37
Grant opened the door and walked out into the corridor.
Paige stood several feet away, tears streaming down her face.
“I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. I thought something had—”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
She looked down at the blanket in Grant’s arms.
“Is that what I think it is?”
He nodded.
She brought her hand to her mouth.
When she reached toward the blanket, Grant took a step back.
“I just want to see,” she said.
She took hold of the end of the blanket.
Raised it.
“Oh my God.”
Chapter 38
The Evergreen Psychiatric Hospital on the outskirts of Kirkland was a four-story brick monstrosity that stretched across twenty acres of conifer-studded lawns.
Sophie’s TrailBlazer raced up the narrow drive.
The buildings appeared in the distance.
Through the rain-streaked windshield, she could see a smattering of glowing windows, but most of the facade stood dark.
She whipped into the circle drive at the front entrance, killed the engine.
3:13 a.m.
She pulled her Glock, checked the load.
Out into the cold and pouring rain.
She jogged over to Art’s Dodge Diplomat—a pimped-out relic from the old days. The driver’s side door was open, the interior dome light on, but the car empty.
Just prior to the roundabout, the driveway had branched into a vast parking lot, and on the far side, under the dripping branches of a Douglas-fir, she spotted the black van.
She ran toward it. The rain had escalated from a drizzle to a downpour since she’d left the house, gusting sideways across the desolate parking lot, the light poles swaying.
She moved along the edge where the eastern perimeter of Douglas-firs offered cover from the streetlights.