Eerie by Blake Crouch Jordan Crouch Read Free Book Online Page B

dream.”
    “So?”
    “So cut yourself a little slack, all right?”
    “I don’t want to be crazy.”
    In their entire lives, Grant couldn’t think of anything his sister had said to him—even during her drugged-out ravings—that hit him so hard. It was a killshot, and he could feel his heart breaking as she stared at him. Yet another moment of Paige in agony, and not a damn thing he could do to make it better.
    “Do you trust me?” he asked.
    “I’m trying.”
    “Will you let me help you get help?”
    For a long time, she didn’t say anything. Just stared at him as her eyes glistened with a reinforcement of tears.
    At last she said, “I will, Grant.”
    He leaned in, kissed her cheek.
    The room had grown dark and cold.
    All that remained of the fire was a single log with glowing ember veins.
    “Is there more wood?” he asked.
    “There’s a wrap in the pantry.”
    Grant went to the kitchen and dug three logs out of the bundle. He carried them into the living room and dragged away the screen. The bed of coals put out the faintest purple glow.
    He arranged the logs on the grate, blew the embers back to life.
    The new wood caught easily.
    Grant turned, letting the heat lap at his back as he watched the firelight play across Paige’s face. She looked beyond tired. Like she could sleep for months.
    What was taking Don so long? Had he found drugs?
    “Remember when we squatted in that abandoned house for a few weeks?” he said. “No electricity. Just a fireplace.”
    “Yeah. We burned wooden crates that you found behind a grocery store.”
    “Things have been worse than this, Paige.”
    “But I don’t look back on that and call it a low point.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Those were the moments when I knew we’d be okay. Life could get shitty but we were in it together.”
    “We’re in this together too.”
    Grant heard footsteps on the second floor.
    Finally—Don on his way down.
    The footfalls accelerated.
    Was he running?
    Grant instinctively looked up at the ceiling as if he could see through it.
    Something crashed to the floor.
    A door closed hard enough to shake the walls.
    Grant looked at Paige.
    She’d sat up, arms crossed over her chest and her face screwed up like she was going to vomit.
    “Stay here,” he said.
    “Don’t go up there. Don’t leave me.”
    “I’ll be right back.”
    Grant crossed to the foot of the stairs and jogged up as his sister called after him.
    At the top, he rounded the corner.
    Stopped.
    “Don? Everything okay?”
    The table had been knocked over and the lamp lay on its side, bulb still intact, casting an uneasy triangle of light across the ancient carpeting.
    Stepping over the debris, he moved quickly down the hall, the darkness growing as he strayed from the lamp.
    The door to Paige’s bedroom was still closed.
    He stopped in front of it.
    Tried the knob.
    It wouldn’t turn.
    He pounded on the door.
    “Don? You okay?”
    Nothing.
    Grant reared back, on the brink of digging his shoulder into the door, when the bright chinkle of breaking glass stopped him.
    The sound had come from another hallway.
    He rushed through in near-darkness, and only as he approached a door at the end did he notice the faintest thread of light along the bottom of its frame.
    He burst through into a sparse bedroom. The duvet was pristine and the air musty and redolent of a rarely-used guestroom.
    “Don?”
    A splash of light spilled onto the hardwood floor through a cracked door in the far wall.
    Four steps and he was standing in front of it.
    Grant pushed the door open all the way with the tip of his boot.
    The mirror was shattered, a web of fractures expanding out from the center.
    Shards of crimson glass lay in the sink.
    Don sat on the floor facing the doorway, his legs spread out, back against the clawfoot bathtub.
    He was staring at Grant and holding a piece of the mirror to his own throat.
    “Don? What are you doing?”
    Don’s eyes looked so strange—roiling with an