OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (21 page)

11 Minutes

The Total Darkness Maze.

Halloween FrightFest. October, 2011.

I first saw Adelaide Radnor on the edge of an Anacortes dock, gagging over a handrail into the Puget Sound. Far away from the costumed monsters and giggling teenage crowds. Silence here; just the lap of the water. She’d been a hunched silhouette against harbor lights and a night sky pierced with stars. Following her out of the maze, I’d watched her for a good ten seconds — just clearing her throat and spitting into the black water — before I spoke.

You okay?

She raised a hand.
I’m fine
.

You sure?

Yeah. I’m just having a panic attack.

“This is it,” I said to her now. “Our Alamo.”

She nodded grimly. “Our Alamo.”

Not that it mattered. Even if the seawater underfoot magically protected us from the Gasman’s oddly specific weakness, we were still trapped in a tiny corner of my mind. Cut off, stranded. Helpless to stop the coming slaughter.

A panic attack?
I hadn’t believed her.
You’re barfing from a panic attack?

I get these sometimes.

Barfing panic attacks?

Claustrophobia from the stupid maze. Dark, confined spaces make me really anxious and my stomach gets weird. Either way, I’m fine. Stop looking at me.
She raised her hand again.
You can go now.

Addie sighed. “I can’t believe the first thing you ever saw me do was vomit an entire funnel cake off a dock.”

I grinned. “I wish I could put that on a Hallmark card.”

The doorframe (NOT AN EXIT DOOR) hung in bright yellow splinters where twenty-one-year-old Adelaide had shouldered right through it on her way out of the Total Darkness Maze. Just demolished it. She’d demonstrated better offense than the Dallas Cowboys that year. Hell, I still don’t know how she’d done it.

The off-limits area I’d unwittingly followed this strange girl into seemed to be a staging area for FrightFest, packed with deflated ghoul costumes and rows of neatly stacked synthetic gore. Four gutted torsos, six severed legs, and a dozen bloodied hands. Cigarette butts on the dock where the werewolves and tree monsters had their smoke breaks. Addie lowered her head and spat again into the tidewater, clenching her hair back in a fist. Back then her hair had a crimson streak in it. Called a feather, I think.

When I still hadn’t left, she waved again, harder, like she was swatting a gnat:
I said I’m fine. What are you staring at?

I . . . I don’t know.
I remember smiling shyly by the broken door, cheap vodka still warm in my throat.
It’s just weird hearing a posh British accent from a girl power-puking into the ocean.

Oh, shut up.

We were just college kids. Our courtship dialogue hadn’t been penned by Shakespeare. Here and now, Addie looked at me in a glow of remembered starlight. “It was . . . it was really decent of you, that you didn’t leave.”

“I was concerned.”

“You didn’t know me.”

“I wanted to.”

She smiled, in this time and then, a bashful grin.

This is so embarrassing,
she’d said, gripping the thin handrail and wiping her mouth.
I don’t even want to know what I look like right now—

An angel.

Oh my God, shut up—

A vomiting angel.

That was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh, on that FrightFest dock in 2011. That sound was now gone from the real world, I realized. It existed only here, in my memory. Only in my thoughts, a deteriorating shadow of the real thing.

“We failed,” she said flatly. “The Gasman, the Head-Scratching Rifle, whatever you want to call the thing. It’s won already.”

“I know.”

“Jeez, Dan, I
really
wish you’d seen more Ouija boards.”

“Yeah, me too.” Funny how it comes down to the stupidest things. Icelandic mirror boards, doors that open inward, and cell phone chargers.

“I think I’m real,” she said. “I know you think you’re just imagining me, Dan, but for whatever it’s worth . . . I’m certain I’m the real Adelaide.”

I didn’t believe her, but I shrugged. “I was . . . I was just trying to hurt you because I was angry. I’m sorry.”

“Story of us.”

I noticed the Gasman on the shoreline. Standing on another boardwalk, in the fogged glow of the street lamps between the saltwater taffy shop and the Louisiana Blood haunted house. Watching us from a hundred feet. As the current of pedestrians and costumed ghouls fanned around him, he almost looked like he belonged here. Like he was a particularly well-designed FrightFest monster, flecked in Siberian ice and glistening with slimy fryer grease from the Basin State Fair. His boots were muddied with Mount St. Helens ash. We’d led him on quite a chase through remembered times and places. But it was over now.

As I’d anticipated, he couldn’t come any closer, because the Puget Sound water lapped at the dirty sandbanks between us. Waves pushed big knots of kelp in and out, like floating bodies. True enough, this off-limits dock behind the Total Darkness Maze was our Alamo. We were finally safe. I imagined the rest of my mind withering away under the Gasman’s influence, while we’d remain here in this tiny, intact pocket of memory, shivering together in Anacortes circa 2011, wondering how many innocent shoppers died at Timber Ridge by my own possessed hands.

“He can’t get us here,” Addie said. “But he doesn’t need to.”

I hated the Gasman — of course — but really I hated myself. It was my stupidity, my recklessness and arrogance, that had brought the Head-Scratching Rifle into Idaho. I could’ve taken Holden’s advice and moved on after Addie’s death. I could’ve sucked it up, packed her things, and enlisted for the Briar Mine investigation out in Bozeman, chasing shadows and anecdotes with a directional thermometer. Chasing fake spirits, instead of being chased by this very real one. I’d chosen to live in the past, and this was my sentence. I’d be stranded here in this pickled memory, with the too-good-to-be-true shade of my lost fiancée, while unspeakable tragedy unfolded in the Timber Ridge food court. Because of me, people would die.
Lots
of people.

“Goddamnit.”

I kicked a row of FrightFest’s severed leg props. One flopped under the railing and splashed into the water.

“God-fucking-damnit—”

I took a running start and punted one of the eviscerated torsos. It thudded against the wall of the Total Darkness Maze, coiled intestines slapping.

Addie watched grimly.

It’s hard to throw a tantrum when all you have available to break is rubbery B-movie gore. I hurled a dismembered hand into the ocean, and then another, and then I sat down across from her, catching my breath through my teeth.

“There are more body parts to kick around.” She pointed. “Over there.”

“All those people.”

She winced. “I know.”

“It’s my fault, Addie.”

“I know.”

A furry shadow darted between us on pattering feet. I recognized one of Holden’s grandmother’s cats. The orange one. The Gasman’s number one fan. At first I didn’t think much of it — just an itinerant memory — but then I noticed the napkin crudely tied around its matted collar.

A white napkin.

Our
white napkin, from the Timber Ridge fight.

“A truce,” I said.

Addie nodded. “He’s done chasing us. He’s got a mall to shoot up.”

I glanced over at the Gasman. He watched us expectantly from the adjacent boardwalk, like he was awaiting our response. I’m no good at negotiation, so instead I just flipped him the most hateful middle finger I’ve ever wielded in my entire life.

He just stared back, unbothered.

I closed my eyes and wondered what was happening in the real world of 2015. If I’d reached the Timber Ridge parking lot yet. Maybe I was up on the JCPenney balcony right now, performing the Head-Scratching Rifle’s tedious little pre-firing safety ritual. Checking the barrel for obstructions, scrutinizing the bolt, thumbing in the cartridges. Maybe the killing had already started. Maybe it was already over. Maybe I was in a police holding cell right now, splattered with drying, coppery blood and dead-eyed, while the Mosin Nagant was tagged and filed.

Maybe I’d never find out, I realized.

The orange tabby perked an ear and darted away on soft feet, and we watched it disappear into the coal-black guts of the maze. “I hate cats,” Addie said, for what must’ve been the third or fourth time.

She’d always joked about housecats being servants of evil (granted, this one pretty much was) but I knew the real reason she disliked them so viscerally. One birthday, when she was five or six, her parents had bought her a kitten she named Penny. Late that night, she woke up to go to the bathroom and didn’t see Penny follow her inside. She shut the door on its head. An hour later, they’d all piled into the car and driven to the emergency vet, and she watched her kitten die on a white table.

I guess hating cats was just how Adelaide coped with that.

The Gasman abruptly turned — peace talks concluded, apparently — and walked back into the darkness, vanishing into the fog machine-mist behind Louisiana Blood. Not so much obscured as evaporated. Leaving us alone on our dock.

“There he goes,” I said.

She sagged against the wall beside me, deflating with a hopeless sigh. “Maybe we’ll be here forever. You and me, Dan, at FrightFest 2011 forever. This’d be our Limbo, for all of God’s eternity.”

That used to be all I wanted. Be careful what you wish for, right?

“I don’t really believe in it anyway,” she added quickly.

“Really?”

“The rifle said so. No God.”

“Doesn’t the existence of a demonic rifle sort of . . .
imply
a God?”

“Not really,” she said, her eyes glimmering with orange harbor lights, staring out at where the Gasman had disappeared. “It’s just an extra-dimensional carnivore. Like a . . . a pitcher plant with tendrils that grow out into five dimensions, I guess. We can’t even comprehend the shape of it, and it seemed pretty certain that there’s no God. And I’m inclined to believe it.”

“So what, then?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffed, resting her forehead on my shoulder. “Let’s just . . . I don’t know. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy meeting each other for the first time.”

What’s your name?

Dan.

Okay, Dan, for the record, the Total Darkness Maze is the stupidest Halloween attraction ever. It would have been cheaper to lock yourself in a coat closet while groping for a light switch. I’m not going back in there.

One by one, the Victorian streetlights on the shore fizzled out. Then the boardwalk’s electricity cut out and the swamp-netted Louisiana Blood house went dark. The sky seemed to collapse in on us, a lowering ceiling, and I noticed the stars were dimming, graying out. Like sinking into deep water. My own shrinking universe.

I’m not going back into that maze. I’ll puke again.

We have to. It’s the only way back.

“I missed you,” I said. “After New Year’s, I mean.”

She winced. “Sorry I drove drunk.”

“It’s okay.”

The tidewater crackled below us and through the gaps in the floorboards I saw shingles of growing ice, thickening the waves into scales. They crunched and broke against the boardwalk piers, vibrating the wood under our feet.

“Dan?” She chewed her lip, watching the stars die above us. “You . . . mentioned that the little house in Butte was the first time you’d seen Holden’s magic, multi-dimensional Ouija board. Right?”

“It sounds stupid when you say it like that, but yes.”

“When did you see it next?”

“Only once.”

“When?”

“2015. Our house. After you died. Holden brought it for my ghost hunt.”

“So . . . it’s a memory?”

I froze. Had it been?

I tried to recall my very first encounter with the Gasman, where reality and recollection first diverged, where the Head-Scratching Rifle first invaded my thoughts and wormed into my nervous system. I’d put the rifle to my chin and the insidious rifle made me pull the trigger, but my red-tipped round had misfired, ironically sparing us both. The front door opening itself. The footsteps into my dark living room. Flicking on the dining-room lights. And . . . seeing Holden’s Ouija board on the table.

“It was the very first memory,” I said. “I just didn’t realize it.”

“Not that it matters,” she shrugged. “We can’t go back.”

I’m not going back into that maze.

It’s the only way back. I’ll lead you through. We’ll retrace our steps through the stupid-ass Total Darkness Maze, feel our way back to the entrance, and we’ll get you some water. Backward is forward.

I looked at her now. “Backward is forward.”

“What?”

A slow, revelatory grin crept over my face. “We’ll retrace our steps, Addie, because backward is forward.”