OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (19 page)

I sighed. “Well, this sucks.”

“Look at that one.” Addie pointed. “His head looks like a banana peel.”

“Gross.”

But I recognized the one by the mailbox, his skull an empty, exploded grape skin. He must’ve been Nikolai What’s-His-Name, the Kalash worker who’d tried to destroy the Head-Scratching Rifle back in the nineties, but biffed the serial number, melted down the wrong rifle, and taken a vodka-soaked nap with his ear on a railroad rail. He’d been so close, I realized bitterly. Just one digit off. Just a letter.

“He’s the closest anyone’s ever gotten,” I said. “To stopping it.”

Addie squeezed my hand. “Until now. Until us.”

“We’ll see.”

The Ouija board scraped again behind us — finally, a reply. An answer for my question of whom (or what) we were speaking to. I whirled away from the window, just in time to see the pale planchette trace:

THISISHOLDEN.

* * *

Holden saw it, too, and looked at me. “What did you ask it?”

“I asked it who I’m talking to.”

“But it gave
my name
.”

Yes, and the puzzle pieces were already snapping together. The mirror board was a two-way conduit, simultaneously the input and output, existing in two realities at once. “Because I’m talking to you, Holden,” I told him. “You, in 2015.”

His eyes widened. It would take hours to explain.

“Hurry up!” Addie shouted from the window. “The Gasman is coming up to the front door—”

“Wait.” I grabbed the planchette again and traced: TELLMEEVERYTHING.

This was too important. Never mind the icy phantoms surrounding us in Butte, Montana in 2012; I needed to know what was happening in Farwell, Idaho in 2015. In my world, in the real one, where Addie was dead, where I’d purchased the Head-Scratching Rifle from Joe’s Guns, taken it home, and performed a fruitless paranormal investigation on it shortly before . . . before it possessed me, I guess? Was I possessed?

Somewhere, 2015 was happening without my consciousness. If my red-tipped bullet had really been a dud, then I guess I was still alive. Still somewhere with the cursed Mosin Nagant. Where? And doing what?

The front door squealed open.

We all turned.

The Gasman stood in the thin doorway, one gloved hand outstretched, head cocked in bewilderment, as if he hadn’t expected it to work on his first try, either. The doorknob banged on the wall. The insectoid face swiveled to us.

“Okay, mental note,” Addie whispered. “He’s gotten better at doors.”

“And . . . that’s our cue to leave.” I grabbed the Ouija board off the shelved debris — the conversation would have to wait.

I raced to the back exit and twisted the knob, but the door thudded against something outside. A green yard rake, wedged tightly between the outer doorknob and the siding. A 2.0-version of the recycling bin trick from New Year’s Eve.

“Shit.”

“He’s learning,” Addie said.

I grabbed her hand and tugged her to the stairs leading to the underground garage — the only exit we had left. The Gasman came trudging in through the front doorway, lifting his icy boots over a shallow sea of hoarded crap. I heard a crackle of claws in carpet, caught blurs of racing motion underfoot, and realized the old lady’s half-dozen cats were running at the creature. They tripped over each other to clamor at his boots like feline groupies, pawing at the flaps of his greatcoat, rubbing and purring.

I opened the staircase door. “Of course . . .
of course
cats love him.”

“See? Cats are evil.”

“You called it.”

The Gasman crashed through the small house after us, knocking over glassware and trash, all elbows and knees. The kitchen lights died behind us as we raced down the dark stairs. Like entering a coalmine; a tight funnel of creaking steps. I took two at a time, carrying the Ouija board, with Addie stomping behind me. Through claustrophobic breaths she asked: “What’s happening in 2015?”

“I don’t know. Holden hasn’t answered.”

“Are you still alive?”

That was a damn good question and I didn’t know. All that mattered right now was the Ouija board. Ben Dyson’s desperate gift, and our one chance to do . . . something. To save the rifle’s next victim, hopefully. I didn’t have a plan yet. Upstairs, a piercing scream rang through the cramped house as another version of Holden was murdered by the Gasman. At the moment I felt nothing, because I knew that past-copy of my best friend wasn’t real. Right?

. . . Right?

We stumbled into the windowless basement garage. Our shoes squealed on smooth cement foundation. The sour odor of mold and mothballs, which was at least better than the upstairs odor of cat litter. It was too dark; I couldn’t even see the mountains of half-excavated crap Holden’s grandmother stored down here like a pharaoh’s tomb. The only light was behind us; a wan glow from the top of the staircase.

I gripped the board. “Not good.”

“Are we trapped?”

The glow behind us dimmed. It was blocked by the broad shoulders of the Gasman, his gloves slick with blood. An orange cat rubbed its chin against his ankle but he ignored it. He started to descend the narrow stairway to us, hunching his shoulders to barely fit like a circle peg down a square hole. A clumsy, scraping shuffle. The last light bulb popped behind him, a firework splash of sizzling sparks. The garage was suddenly in perfect darkness.

I heard urgent clicking beside me. “Addie?”

“My flashlight’s out.”

Heat, electricity, light — all energies absorbed by the Gasman. But I knew from my two-day project of cleaning out Holden’s grandmother’s house in 2012 — this garage had one exit, and it wasn’t the garage doors (those were blocked with thousand-pound pallets of junk). I’d need light to find it — and I recalled a light bulb near the stairs with a scratchy pull string. Tucking the all-important Ouija board under one arm, I groped with the other, sweeping my palm through the cold blackness . . .

“Dan—”

“I’m trying the lights—”

“
Dan
.” Her voice heaved with panic. “Something just touched my arm.”

It couldn’t have been the Gasman; he was still behind us, squeezing his refrigerator-sized ass down the narrow 1920s stairs. But I heard something else in the garage, something down here with us already.

Something moving.

To my left, a whisper of motion. A breath of displaced air on my cheek. And a . . . crackling, crunching sound, like an ice tray being slowly twisted. The source of this brittle sound seemed to hover mid-air. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was nearby. Too close.

My outstretched fingers found the light bulb string — a wisp in the darkness, like a strand of spider silk — and gave it a hard tug.

The string snapped.

“Oh,
come on
.”

“What? What happened?”

That clicking sound again. Closer. It was moving.

“Dan. Do you hear that?”

I fumbled for my own Maglite and clicked the spongy button. I hadn’t expected it to turn on, since Adelaide’s hadn’t, but it did — barely — and burnt a dim yellow circle on the bare foundation at our feet. At that same moment, something cold stroked the back of my neck.

I dropped the flashlight.

“
Dan
!”

The Maglite banged off cement. I hit my knees, following the twirling beam, but something else swooped in from above me. Something big, reaching. It wasn’t spectral or ghostlike; this was a physical
thing
with solid mass that pushed cold air as it moved, still crackle-crunching. I imagined beetle mandibles, hairy and chittering.

With unfurling arms, it grabbed the Ouija board. Ripping it up and away.

I reached, but it lifted further. “Oh, shit—”

“What?”

“
Shit
. I lost the board—”

I scooped up the dying Maglite and aimed the flickering yellow beam up into the darkness. At the floating, rising
thing
that had stolen the board.

Addie gasped.

It was a hanging body. Dangling bat-like, upside-down from the ceiling by a knot of barbed wire tangled cruelly around one ankle. At first I thought its upper body bristled with twenty-inch porcupine quills, but they were spiny dripstones of frozen blood, the dead color of rust, growing off his shoulders and face like inverted toadstools. The corpse clutched Holden’s Ouija board with a tightening arm, bladed with bloodsicles. I couldn’t see its face, and didn’t want to. I hoped I’d live long enough to be traumatized by it.

Well, the Gasman has summoned me.

Addie screamed. “What
is
that?”

“The board!” My voice came in panicked tugs. “It stole the board. We need it—”

“The Gasman’s coming—”

“We need the board, Addie. It’s our only chance.”

I jumped for the hanging creature, but it was too high. My fingertips swished empty air. Suddenly the basement ceiling had morphed thirty feet higher; a crisscross of beams I recognized from murky photos of the Kalash armory. The body contracted defensively, cocoon-like, and pulled higher and higher, squeezing its chest up to its knees with a crackle-pop of frozen vertebrae. Too high to reach, an inhuman shape curling away to vanish into the 1970s-Kalash ceiling with Holden’s board, going, going—

CRACK. CRACK.

Two orange flashes, and the corpse’s wrist exploded into crystals of icy red meat. A sprinkle of bloody chunks. The Ouija board dropped.

I caught it.

Addie stuffed her smoking Beretta back into her purse just as our second Maglite flickered and died. I left it clattering on the floor.

“Nice shot. Again.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “But we’re still trapped.”

On cue, the Gasman’s footsteps hollowed on cement foundation. He’d squeezed down the stairs. I heard the swish of his wool greatcoat, the biomechanical creak of flexing leather, plastic, and rubber.

“He’s down here with us.” Her voice rattled. “And we’re trapped—”

“No, we’re not.” I clasped the Ouija board to my chest, feeling a surge of shivery adrenaline. Reckless glee. We’d mightily pissed the entity off. The Head-Scratching Rifle and its vast backlog of murdered victims — all were after us now, zeroing in on Adelaide and I like antibodies. Hell, the barbed-wire hobo hanging from the ceiling like an inverted Venus flytrap had been
seventy years
in the making. And it failed. The Head-Scratching Rifle needed to stop us. It needed that Ouija board.

The fight might have been suicidal, the odds impossible, the battleground morphing beneath our feet, but at least it wanted to catch us and hadn’t yet. I’m told I have a talent for disappointing people.

And I still had Addie.

Flicking her Pac Man lighter for illumination (appropriate, since we, too, were fleeing ghosts), I found drywall in the glow of orange light, and groped behind boxed clothing and hanging gowns to find a brass doorknob. The brass doorknob I only barely,
barely
remembered from the long weekend of unpacking this foul house with Holden, because I’d only seen it. And never actually touched it.

“Thank God for closets I never opened.”

“Evil is unimaginative,” Addie echoed.

“Damn straight.”

The Gasman was just a step behind us, so I swung the door open and pushed Addie through first. As I followed, a gloved hand pawed at my back, dumb cigar fingers tightening, almost gripping a fistful of my sweatshirt. Almost.

“Too slow.”

I have no idea what Holden’s grandmother kept in her garage closet in real life, but it sure as hell wasn’t the 2012 Basin State Fair.

NEW TEXT MESSAGE

SENDER:
“Holden” (509) 555-8727

SENT:
12:21 p.m. Mar 20 2015

Dan my Ouija board was moving by itself in the box. Answered it, says its U?!

36 Minutes

“Yes!” Adelaide fist-pumped. “I
love
the Basin State Fair.”

“Close call,” I gasped.

We’d entered a world of halogen lights, carnival games, and drunk teenagers. Livestock barns to the north, creaky rides to the south, and food trailers up the middle. Straw, axle grease, and kettle corn. Hand-painted signs advertised scones, German dogs, and deep fried butter. Against a dusk sky pinpricked with stars stood the oily black trestlework of the “Widowmaker” roller coaster; a rattling behemoth built in 1932. It was perhaps one medium-sized gust of wind from fulfilling its name.

I still had the Ouija board and planchette. I elbowed past a throng of kids and slammed the thing onto a picnic table. It had a splintered chip on the edge where one of Addie’s bullets had grazed it.

“Come on, Holden.” I dropped the token on the board and repeated my question with quaking fingertips: WHEREISDAN?

“What if it’s not Holden?” Addie asked again.

“Least of our worries.”

A falling chorus of faraway screams — I flinched — but it was just the Panic Plunge dropping a cartload of riders.

“I’m just saying.” She grabbed an unattended beer and took a swig. “The rifle — the Gasman, the demon, whatever — it’s getting smarter. How can you be so certain that
this isn’t a trick?”

The planchette scraped: YOURNOTHOMECARGONE.

“My car’s gone,” I said.

A pause.

Then, urgently: KALESAWYOUONMAIN—

“Too fast.” Addie circled the table. “I can’t—”

“Kale saw me downtown . . .”

The planchette darted again: SAIDYOUBOT—

“Said I bought . . .”

The token stopped. Circled once, then: BOUHGT.

“Bought. I get it.”

BOUTGH.

“Jesus Christ, Holden.”

BOUHGT.

Addie groaned. “He already tried that one.”

BOUGHT.

“Yes!” I said. “Good job. What did I buy?”

But Addie glanced up sharply, whipping her hair in my face, looking toward the deep-fried butter trailer and gasping: “Oh, crap.”

SAIDYOUBOUGHT—

I dug my fingernails into the dusty wood. “Hurry up, Holden—”

“Oh, crap,” she hissed in my ear, rising panic: “Dan.”

BOUGHTBOXESOFBULLETS—

“
Dan
!”

“Wait.” I watched the planchette. “Just wait—”

DRIVING—

“Driving to—”

She grabbed my shoulder and wrenched me backwards, off the picnic bench. I saw a whirl of carnival lights, stars in a rotten purple sky, and then we both slammed into the grass. Like being tackled. Dirt clods in my teeth, the taste of yellow grass. Something metallic and heavy crashed down on the table behind us. A warbling BANG, like a deafening, five-foot gong.

My mind raced in the chaos:
I bought bullets, and I’m driving to—

I tried to stand but Addie tugged me again, into a bruising sidewinder roll . . .

The thunderous splash came next; gallons and gallons of liquid. I heard sludgy raindrops plopping to the grass around us, sizzling and hissing, drawing curls of steam. Scorching hot droplets, peppering the air like shrapnel from a nail bomb. The unmistakable odor of tater tots, elephant ears, and fryer grease.

Fryer grease?

The aluminum deep-fryer tank tumbled past us, spraying more scalding droplets, and bounced off another picnic table. The first screams came, a crescendo of horror, as fairgoers scattered under a mist of acid rain. Most in terror, some in blistering pain.

Someone threw a
deep fryer
at us.

I blinked, my eyes watering in the hot air. The picnic table we’d occupied — and Holden’s Ouija board — was now dripping sizzling brown oil. Four hundred degrees of artery-clogging deliciousness. Like it had been dipped in magma.

Addie blew hair from her face. “You’re welcome. Again.”

Stupidly, I dug my fingers into the patchy grass and scrambled back toward our table. Even drenched in smoking oil, the Ouija planchette was moving — Holden was transmitting critical details from the world of 2015 — but Addie grabbed my wrist and stopped me, her breath in my ear. “No—”

“I have to know—”

“Dan, stop.”

At the funnel cake stand, the Gasman was stooping to pick up another deep-fryer vat, wrapping his arms around the ten-gallon tub in a bear hug. Frothy grease splashed on the counter and poured copper waterfalls over the DEEP FRIED TWINKIES sign.

And that scorched Ouija planchette kept moving, kept racing urgently from letter to letter, too far away to see—

“I have to know,” I gasped.

“Too late,” Addie screamed, digging her heels into the grass.

I tugged but she was right. Nothing to do.

The Gasman hefted the second vat to his chest and the cooking basket fell out, clattering to the ground like a birdcage full of limp French fries. His gloves and greatcoat smoked with spilled oil. He lowered his masked head, firmed up his stance, and whirled like an Olympic log thrower, hurling a lethal payload our way—

She gasped. “Go. Go. Go—”

We vaulted another picnic table and raced past the Mystizmo fortune-teller booth with the second fryer tank incoming. It crashed down somewhere close and we outran a shower of sizzling oil, droplets splashing down just moments behind us. All I could think about was that all-important Ouija board behind us, drenched in scalding grease. Our weapon. Our only chance, lost.

Everything. Lost.

By the scone trailer I halted and chanced a look over my shoulder — “Dan, don’t stop!” — and for just a frozen half-second, I saw one of the Head-Scratching Rifle’s mummified Red Army ghosts standing over Holden’s four hundred degree Ouija board, lifting it from the table with nerveless brown hands. Raising it over a knee.

As we raced through the emptying Basin State Fair, I heard a single CRACK echo behind us. Like a wooden gunshot. So much for that.

And as for the real world?

My exploding bullet misfired.

So I drove into town.

I bought more bullets. And I’m driving to—

Where was I driving? And how close was I to getting there? The stakes had changed. It wasn’t just a suicide anymore. Why hadn’t I suspected it from the start? The Head-Scratching Rifle likes to kill. It’s a dumb hunger, a spiritual disease. Why would it settle for just one meager suicide in my sad little house in rural Farwell, Idaho, when it could use my body like a vehicle and go on an indulgent murder spree? A house-to-house slaughter? How many people would die now, because of my recklessness?

And worst of all, Holden’s Ouija board, our single tether to the real world of 2015, was out of action. Our lightning was out of the bottle. My spine chilled and I tasted stomach acid, climbing my throat like salty tidewater.

This was bad.

“You were almost a six-foot chicken nugget,” Addie said.

“Thank you,” I said weakly.

“Next time, can you save
me
for a change?”

I was barely listening. My stomach coiled, snakelike. This was so bad . . .

As we raced down the carnival game alley, holding hands under a blur of hot lights and colored tarp, I recognized that asshole clown stepping in from the right to cut us off. Red nose, green ponytail, yellow firefighter jacket with saucer buttons. An artificial smile slathered on with white greasepaint, and under it, a real one, gawking with adolescent scorn at our clasped hands.

“Oh, how cute,” he said as we passed. “But you’ll never—”

I punched him in the face.