OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (20 page)

Sent:
3/20 12:30PM

Sender:
[email protected]

Subject:
Thank You!

Dear DANIEL J. RUPLEY,

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$26.99

20PK 7.62x54R NC00292

$26.99

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27 Minutes

Lurching from the Basin State fairgrounds to the sludgy soil of the Mount St. Helens blast zone was a shock, like a fifty-yard dash straight into quicksand. Addie hit her knees behind me and I pulled her upright. Even on the Spirit Lake hiking loop, the sloped ground was an ankle-breaking trellis of bleached logs, half-buried in volcanic soil turned gray and sludgy by recent rain showers. Recent, as of 2012.

“Oh,
no
. He’s right behind us,” she gasped, her shoes slurping in gritty mud. “He’s still coming.”

Fifty feet back, the Gasman scaled the crest of Johnston Ridge, silhouetted against a pewter sky. He missed a step, dumping a small landslide of rocks. Something about his stumbling pose, his gas mask, the scarred land around him — he looked like an astronaut on some barren planet. A space-suited, five-dimensional creature navigating the uncharted terrain of my mind. This came like an odd epiphany. Perhaps this was why he had so much difficulty opening doors — he’d come from some indescribable plane of existence where doors didn’t exist.

More figures rose into view behind him. His icy flock. His unhallowed crowd of burlap flesh, shattered skulls, and empty eye sockets. Trench coats in gray, brown, and black. Fox fur hats and Waffen-SS helmets. I saw bright red, the wet glisten of freshly opened meat, and recognized the destroyed cavity of Ben Dyson’s face, the gunsmith falling obediently into line with the older corpses. You can resist all you want, but sooner or later everyone joins the Gasman’s frozen parade.

Including . . . that one orange tabby cat from Holden’s grandmother’s house, still affectionately mewing and pawing at the Gasman’s boots. I don’t think the cat was actually dead like the others; I think he was just a big fan.

I tugged Addie’s hand as she sighed: “Man,
fuck
cats.”

“Come on.”

“I told you they’re evil.”

We kept running along the slanted trail, up and over rising waves of cracked trees, their bark scorched away decades ago by pyroclastic fire. Like running over a river of rolling logs. It was dreamlike in a futile way, a desperate pursuit over churning earth. A chunk of driftwood tumbled downhill and splashed into the gray stillness of pond water, thirty feet below.

“He’s trying now,” Addie panted. “He’s really
trying
to catch us—”

“Good. It means we still have a chance to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

I grabbed her wrist and helped her up a massive log, chapped and bone-white, like a dinosaur femur. “A mass shooting,” I said. “That’s what the Head-Scratching Rifle is going to use me for. Not a suicide — not yet, at least. First, a mass shooting. A horrific, nightmarish killing spree with that Mosin Nagant—”

Her jaw hung open.

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “This . . . explains everything.”

“How?”

Muddy ash shifted under my feet, like stepping on water. I crashed down hard on one kneecap but recovered and kept running. Over a shoulder, I glimpsed the Gasman and his friends trudging through the ash and crunchy underbrush. A grim march. Soldiers on the move. Thunder rolled behind them, a hollow rumble.

She grabbed my arm. “That explains why we’re here, Dan. That’s why we’re traveling back in time. The rifle — the Gasman, whatever — it was going through your memories, flipping pages through your brain. Searching your mind for a location it likes. A place to stage its massacre in the real world. In March of 2015.”

“So,” I said, “what did it find?”

She looked at me, something on the edge of her tongue.

I had it, too.

The Gasman sure loved that third-floor balcony at Timber Ridge, hadn’t he? Sweeping the Mosin Nagant up and over the crowd at the food court in a weird moment of childish play. Now we knew it wasn’t play. It was a cold, witless mind assessing a target-rich environment. We’d witnessed a dry run. A rehearsal.

Oh, God.

“Timber Ridge,” I said. “That’s where I’m driving. Right now.”

On Saturday, March 20, 2015. With the Head-Scratching Rifle in my trunk and a half-dozen boxes of 7.62x54R ammunition grocery-bagged in the back seat.

Another crash of thunder. She didn’t flinch. “How do we stop it?”

“If we still had that Ouija board, I’d just tell Holden to call the police and tell them to come to Timber Ridge.” I hesitated and let the next uncomfortable thought go unsaid —
so they can see me strolling in from the parking lot with a bolt-action Soviet rifle and shoot me on sight.
“But we . . . we lost it.”

“So we’ll find another one—”

“There aren’t any Ouija boards left in my brain,” I said. “That was the first one I’d ever seen in person, in Holden’s grandmother’s house in Butte, spring of 2012, and it’s gone now. That was our link to 2015. Our only link.”

“We’ll stop it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“
How
, Addie?” I snapped, my voice a hoarse rattle.

A fork of purple lightning slithered across the sky, striking somewhere behind Mount St. Helens’ destroyed caldera.

“Oh my God.” She looked back at the pursuing Gasman and it seemed to fully hit her, her lip quivering in realized horror. “Oh my God. Oh my God . . .”

I imagined myself, thoughtless and glass-eyed, shouldering that slimy old Mosin Nagant on the third-floor balcony in front of JCPenney. Aligning the notched Russian sights, click-clacking the heavy bolt, and opening fire on a food court full of teenagers, baristas, book club members, young couples with babies in strollers. You always watch news coverage of the latest tragedy and wonder what goes through the insect-brain of a mass shooter; what disgusting force could pervert a human mind into willfully and carefully murdering strangers. It truly horrified me that maybe I’d find out.

I’d find out
very
soon.

“No. We’ll stop it.” She wiped a splatter of ash from her cheek under another double-flash of lightning. “How much time is left?”

19 Minutes

Behold: the ugliest Christmas tree in recorded history.

In December of 2011, Adelaide’s parents cut down a juvenile Douglas fir by their front porch, and to be practical, elected to lop off the upper seven feet and drag it into their living room. Good idea, awful result. This was an emaciated mockery of a Christmas tree, its gangly branches sagging under only a few ornaments. The golden top star drooped against the wall, like a broken neck. My first mistake, on my very first holiday with Adelaide’s family in Birmingham, had been commenting on it:
Your Christmas tree looks like a spider monkey.

“Yes!” Addie raced past me. “This is perfect.”

“What?”

“This is perfect, Dan.” Her eyes gleamed. “My uncle Shaun gave my aunt a Ouija board for Christmas. You know, as a gag gift. What are the
odds
?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“You weren’t here for the unwrapping.”

There was a twinge of pain in her voice. Because here, on this Christmas Eve of 2011, I’d lost my temper and uttered a certain three-word sentence that she (and her father) still haven’t forgiven me for. Opinions vary on how justified I was, but everyone can agree — with three words, I basically ruined the Radnor family Christmas. Hell, it had taken the Grinch all night.

I still feel awful about it. But Addie’s father, an oh-so-brilliant Bill Murray-lookalike who’d made a fortune designing Boeing 747 rivets or something, was one of those people who can insult you with such incredible subtlety and sniper-like precision, only you detect the barb. To everyone else, his words sound like small talk or even praise. But he knows what he meant, and so do you, and you find yourself locked in a staring match across the dinner table:
So, Dan, I watched your ghost show on YouTube. Are you hoping to eventually air it on TV?

In 2011 it had been just a spare-time webcast with a shoestring budget, fuzzy audio, and a fan base in the low hundreds.

And Dan, you work at . . . Quality Foods? Is that right?

Yes, I did.

Her parents were seated in the dining room now, framed by the regal arches of a home that would’ve gotten them beheaded in the French Revolution. Addie’s perfect mother and perfect father, with a perfectly-bred Yorkie napping by the fireplace, silently devastated that their perfect STEM-educated daughter had brought me, the starving artist, into their ivory palace. Everything was just so—

“Perfect,” Addie said, kneeling at the base of that withered tree and shoving aside wrapped gifts. “It’s . . . Shaun’s present, the Ouija board, was one of these rectangular ones—”

“It won’t work.”

“Shut up.” She threw a box aside.

I grabbed her arm. “Addie. It won’t work.”

Dan, you’ve heard of the Scientific Method, right? True evidence of ghosts should be reproducible, but all of your investigations are at nighttime. I mean, why not search during daylight hours? Shouldn’t these alleged supernatural phenomena behave the same, regardless of lighting?

“Yes!” Adelaide slammed an appropriately sized present to the white carpet and tore away the wrapping paper. “Here it is.”

I’m . . . I’m sorry for being so judgmental, Dan. I don’t mean to rain on your hobby. I’m more curious about Quality Foods. How’s that going? Are you a manager?

She ripped off the last layer of artsy wrapping paper, revealing her uncle Shaun’s gag gift underneath — a featureless, generic cardboard box. No markings. No mailing tape. No flaps to open, even. Just cardboard.

“Wait.” She turned it over. “Wait . . . what?”

I mean . . . you have real goals, right, Dan?

Of course.

He’d stirred his green beans.
Any that you’ve achieved thus far?

Fucking your daughter
is only three words. They take one second to say. Two seconds of petrified silence to sink in. And that, folks, is how you ruin a Christmas.

“What?” Addie turned the impossible box over and over. “I don’t understand—”

“It’s not a Ouija board,” I said, “because I never
saw
it.”

“But I saw it.”

“We’re in my mind, my memories, Addie. Not yours. We can’t be in your memories because you’re
dead
.”

She hurled the generic cardboard box to the floor. “Goddamnit—”

I was pissed off too, exhausted, my thoughts slippery and churning. Right now (four years from now), I was driving to the Timber Ridge Mall with a vintage military rifle and over a hundred cigar-sized bullets. And I was helpless to stop it, trapped here in my replaying memories. Locked inside my own head, plunging deeper every second. So I lashed out and said something else I shouldn’t have.

“You’re
not real
, Addie. You’re in my head. You’re just my . . . my recollection of Adelaide Radnor. You’re what Dyson said you are. A goldfish in a bag. A displaced dream, an imaginary friend that I’ve dragged along with me, and I
so badly
wish you were real, but you’re not.”

“Fuck you, Dan. I’m real.”

“I wish you were,” I said. “So much.”

Her eyes welled with tears.

“But the real Adelaide is gone. Dead and gone—”

“You will be, too.” Now her voice darkened and trembled, a wounded, bare-knuckle viciousness: “In maybe ten minutes, Dan, give or take, you’ll go up to that Timber Ridge balcony and mow down a bunch of shoppers with that evil thing, and then you can find out for yourself if God exists—”

From the dining room came a series of wet, splashing thuds.

We turned.

Her parents, facing us at the long table, had abruptly stopped chewing. Their mouths hung open, paralyzed. Faces blank, eyes glossy, muscles slack. A stringy clump of half-chewed pork slid from her mother’s mouth and jangled her plate.

Then Addie’s father spoke, a thick echo, multiple voices bubbling up from his windpipe. Like ten people, speaking together in a dank cave:

“There . . . is . . . no . . . God.”

The Gasman stood behind him, his Soviet greatcoat slick with congealing fryer oil, resting one gloved hand on the man’s shoulder. His entourage of corpses were suddenly seated at the long table, too, like a mawkish reference to Christ’s Last Supper, mummified figures of leathery skin, dried-out eye sockets, piano-white teeth. The chandelier dimmed, coloring everything orange.

Her father’s voice burbled and a half-chewed mouthful of green beans plopped into his lap. A soggy, rotten voice: “There is . . . only . . . my tasty treats.”

“Oh,
shut up
,” Addie snarled. “You’re not my dad.”

“Only . . . my . . . yummy treats.” The old man made an exaggerated chewing motion, grinding his canines together like a rodent. His reading glasses slid off his nose. “Only my . . . yummy, tasty treats . . . yes, please . . . to eat and pull apart and eat—”

“Come on.” I tugged her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

She sniffed. “What’s the point?”

“I don’t know. But we have to go.”

“What’s the point, Dan? If you’re a mass shooter and I’m just a piece of your imagination, what’s the
fucking point
to even trying?”

I pulled her past that godawful Christmas tree, to the arched front double-door, and the Red Army ghosts stood up in eerie unison, rattling glassware on the table. The Gasman just watched us through the circular holes of his aardvark-like breathing mask as we left, and Addie’s father made another tooth-shattering chomp, as loud as a snapping branch: “I eat and I eat and I eat—”

Addie struggled, her eyeliner running with tears. “I just want to be dead, Dan. Just . . . please, let me go. Let me be dead—”

I kicked open the front door. “Come on—”

“Leave me. Please.”

But I dragged her anyway.

We broke out through the Radnor’s re-landscaped front lawn, beyond wheelbarrows and dirt piles, and into the frigid blackness of a deserted Edgbaston peppered with snow. The words of the Head-Scratching Rifle echoed out after us, dozens of crowing voices of the dead ringing off burnt-out streetlights and chapped brick, celebrating the Timber Ridge massacre to come:

“—And I eat and I eat and I eat and I’ll
eat them all, Dan—”

NEW TEXT MESSAGE

SENDER:
“Holden” (509) 555-8727

SENT:
12:35 p.m. Mar 20 2015

Do u have the gun? WHERE R U???