Eerie

Don crossed the living room, which had fallen into near-darkness now that the fire was dying.
He stopped at the bottom of the staircase.
“Which room, Paige?”
“Please don’t.”
“Which room?”
“Turn right at the top of the stairs, round the corner, and go down to the end of the hall. My bedroom is the door at the end.”
“Grant, would you come with me?”
Grant followed Don.
The staircase lifted out of the foyer into darkness.
“She’s cracked,” Grant whispered as they climbed.
Each step creaked like the hull of an old ship.
“She doesn’t look well, and this paranoid delusion about something keeping her in the house is disturbing.”
“So what do I do?”
“Consider an involuntary commitment.”
“Seriously?”
“I can help you with the paperwork.”
“Great. Maybe she can room with Dad.”
The meager light that warmed the foyer fell away behind them.
They climbed the last few steps into complete darkness and stopped, waiting for their eyes to adjust.
Grant looked over to where Don stood, but could make out nothing of his shape.
“Let’s find a light switch,” Don said.
Grant heard him shuffle over to the wall and begin feeling his way along it. Grant followed suit, groping across wallpaper but his fingers only grazed a few picture frames. He continued down the hall and then around a corner, both hands guiding him along like a caver without a light. At last, he barked his shin against the leg of a table, rattling its contents.
“You okay?” Don called from the other side.
“Yeah.”
Grant’s fingers moved across the surface of the table until they came to what felt like the base of a lamp.
He followed it up, found the switch.
Weak yellow light filled the hallway, barely enough to reach the far end.
The ceiling was high and the walls so close together it almost looked like an optical illusion. Grant was struck with a fleeting imbalance, like standing in a funhouse, the proportions all wrong.
The carpeting was thick, burgundy, and old.
The wallpaper peeled in places, the Plaster of Paris underneath far more appealing than the maudlin floral print. Along the opposite wall, a cast-iron radiator belched out waves of heat that did little against the chill. Grant had fumbled down the hallway farther than he realized. The bedroom door loomed straight ahead, its thick frame detailed with scrollwork that matched the wainscoting.
It sounded like Paige had begun to cry down on the first floor.
Johnny Cash punctuated the moment with a muffled rendition of “Ring of Fire.”
Grant’s heart jolted.
He turned to find Don staring down at the wailing cell phone in his hand.
“It’s just Rachel,” Don said.
“I think Paige is crying. I’m going to head back down.”
“Sounds good. Let me deal with this call, and then I’ll handle things up here.”
Grant walked quickly back toward the staircase, secretly glad to be leaving that drafty hallway.
Chapter 10
Paige was curled up on the couch, and as soon as she saw him, she turned away and wiped the mascara stains from her cheeks.
Grant sat down on the hardwood floor at eye level with his sister.
Laid his hand carefully on her shoulder.
“I don’t know how I got to this point,” she said. “You ever feel that way?”
“Absolutely. I’ve had my share of spinouts. All that matters is you’re moving forward. Things are going to get better.”
“I sound like a crazy person.”
“You should’ve seen me a few years back.”
She wiped her cheeks again and rolled over to face him.
“But did you ever feel like you didn’t know what was real?”
He shook his head.
“It sucks.”
“You and I have never been crybabies about anything, but we haven’t exactly lived the nuclear family 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.