OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (22 page)

Agreed. This maze blows.

She looked at me quizzically. “How?”

“We’ve been going backward in time, because we’ve been moving away from the Gasman. This entire chase, we’ve been retreating, avoiding him. Running the opposite way. So, to go forward in time, maybe all we need to do is retrace our steps.”

“Toward the Gasman?”

I don’t know if I can go back in, Dan.

We’ll make it. Take my hand.

“Backward is forward,” I said, holding out a hand. For a second, present and past achieved a strange synchronicity:

Backward is forward.

She took my hand, then and now. Forcing a weak smile.

In the dying starlight, I noticed something down on the floorboards, by her ankle. It was just an object, an object with no special powers or real significance, but seeing it froze the air in my lungs. Addie glanced down, too.

A bundle of FrightFest glow sticks. Green glow sticks.

She looked back at me, breathless.

Yes, we were doomed. I know. But we had to try.

“We’ll return to that first memory in 2015.” I knelt, scooped up the glow sticks and tore off their crinkling plastic wrappers. “We’ll grab that Ouija board. We’ll contact Holden, tell him to call the police and evacuate Timber Ridge. And we’ll stop the mass shooting. We’ll
stop it
, Addie. We’ll save them.”

“Dan, I don’t know if—”

“We have to try.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions—”

“We have to try, Addie.”

We have to try.

Okay. Let’s do it.

With the glow sticks in hand, I reopened the busted access door to the Total Darkness Maze. A splinter of wood labeled NOT AN EXIT DOOR clattered to the floor at our feet. A sprinkle of paint chips. Inky darkness within. In my original memory, the maze had been crowded with groping people and the firefly glow of cell phone lights — Holden was back there somewhere, and so was the sorority group Addie had come with — but now it was empty and silent. Like an airlock into the vacuum of space. An icy coldness exhaled through the doorway, and I shivered.

“Retrace our steps,” I echoed.

“Alright, Dan.” She shrugged. “Let’s . . . save Timber Ridge.”

We shared a smile — a knowing one. Even if there was still time, even if another copy of that spirit board was still back there, we didn’t stand a chance. Our fates were already written. We were already a ghost story. We’d even been immortalized in W. Louis’ book; we were the famous glow stick-carrying wraiths spotted by a Russian watchman in the Kalash armory—

We have to try.

“The Gasman,” Addie fretted behind me. “He knows what you know. He’ll backtrack. He’ll destroy the Ouija board.”

“So we’ll hurry.”

“Or he’ll lay a trap—”

“We’ll outsmart him.”

“He lives in five dimensions.”

“And he just recently figured out how to operate a
door
.” I took the first tentative steps into the Total Darkness Maze, into the vicious coldness, with her fingers gripping my back. “Come on, Addie. Let’s stop the shooting. And for Dyson, let’s give the Head-Scratching Rifle something it’s never had before.”

“An easy meal?”

I kissed her, my teeth chattering. “A fight.”

She smiled wearily.

Just hold my hand. Don’t let go.

Okay.

I led us back into the stupid maze. Like before, I felt with one outstretched palm, touching the dangling rubber snakes and fake eyeballs, the patchwork of dollar-store Halloween nostalgia, and she followed with her hand on my back. Squeezing a fistful of my
Haunted
hoodie. I reminded her again not to let go, but I knew she wouldn’t.

Keep breathing.

Walls, edges, and corners became indistinct, and the temperature plunged into something otherworldly, excruciating, hardening the moisture to scales on our eyes and lips. I could already tell it was working — backward was indeed forward — but there wasn’t much time left. Minutes, maybe seconds. Maybe not enough.

What did you say your name was?

Dan.

Nice to meet you, Dan. I’m Adelaide.

Part III

THE BLOOD GUN

. . . Was it a ghost? A demon? A djinn or pagan deity? The real question isn’t what kind of supernatural force was attached to the M91/30 Mosin Nagant known in some circles as the “Head-Scratching Rifle.” Some, this author included, speculate that such answers exist beyond the edge of human comprehension.

The real question we should ask is this: what were its goals? Had it achieved them? What if its victims killed themselves willingly, out of selflessness, to render themselves useless to the machinations of this vicious and hateful entity? To spare the world from something much worse?

Excerpt from “Cursed Objects of the New Century” (W. Louis), published by Haunted Inn Press in 2002.

5 Minutes, 38 Seconds

I snapped the first glow stick, a hollow pop.

Addie gasped. “Oh my God.”

My memories didn’t all link up neatly like coupled cars on a train anymore. The Gasman must have terraformed them as he chased us, crushing times and places together to his liking. It was a claustrophobic mental meat grinder, a tunnel in perfect blackness and only now illuminated by the green glow I’d brought with us. A sickly whisper of light.

“Oh, God, oh, God . . .”

“Keep going.”

The tunnel’s floor was a flash-frozen stew of mismatched locales. I recognized the slippery bones of Mount St. Helens logs sealed in gray ash. Rumpled Basin State Fair stands, glazed and crunchy with ice. That spider monkey Christmas tree touched us with prickly fingers as we passed. Every memory was compressed into a landslide of jagged debris, and that debris formed walls and a descending ceiling, shrinking deeper and deeper into a cramped nightmare. A corridor of knife-edges. This was no environment for humans. Even the air was thin and hostile. I whiffed an alien sourness, like formaldehyde.

Addie clenched up behind me and gagged.

I pulled her along, holding the green stick forward like a lantern. “Don’t stop. We can’t stop.”

“I can’t do this, Dan.”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, you’re already dead.”

“That does
not
help.”

A deep-fryer vat banged at my feet, startling us. It was the one the Gasman had hurled at us, but it wasn’t boiling hot anymore. Corndog grease congealed to the sides in brown warts. The cold had transformed everything. It pierced our clothes. Every inch of exposed skin stung. When I opened my mouth, my tongue froze to the back of my teeth.

“Dan,” Addie said. “The light—”

The glow stick was already dimming in my hand. Absorbed by the frigid darkness enclosing from all sides—

I dropped it and snapped another. A fresh burst of green illuminated a narrowing passage, lined with crooked teeth of shattered wood. Hanging roof tiles, drenched in glittering icicles. A blocky GameStop sign from the mall, crumpled like an accordion.

“You always take me to the nicest places, Dan.”

“You’re welcome.”

Boards creaked and popped underfoot. We stooped under the lowering ceiling, really an unnatural amalgamation of ceilings, leaking handfuls of gravel and plaster. A fluorescent light dangled by a veined cord. A Disappointment Bay Lighthouse pane warped somewhere like a big drum, and glass shards sprinkled on bathroom tile. Darkness ahead and darkness behind us, like we were carrying a weak lantern down a mine tunnel.

I glanced back to ensure we weren’t being followed and realized with a sour tequila-shot of fear — we were on the wall, somehow. The mangled pathway had gradually corkscrewed, and the floor was now a wall, and still rotating up to the ceiling. Gravity was distorting. We followed this downward spiral the way captured matter encircles a black hole.

You’ve heard of the Scientific Method, right, Dan?

Echoes whispered in the darkness, cobwebs of memory. Like walking through rainclouds of half-remembered dialogue:
Oh my God. They’re defenseless down there, handcuffed in the wild. They can’t even pick up food—

Cruelty is its language—

“I’m scared.” Addie tightened her grip on my back, a hard squeeze. Her breath fogged the glow stick, diffusing the green light. Her whisper in my ear. “I guess . . . I guess I’m just afraid to be dead. I’m afraid of what it’ll be like.”

“Me, too,” I admitted.

“How much time do we have?”

“Minutes. Maybe less.”

We clambered over a glass retail counter, exploded by the temperature change, bristling with tagged pistols and revolvers. A bent jail-bar door hanging to the left, still holding a few crooked signs. I recognized that bumper sticker with the ghillie-suited sniper: REACH OUT AND TAPP SOMEONE. This was good. Joe’s Guns was close to where it all began.

It’s a blood gun. It’s killed someone.

“I hope we die at the same time,” Addie said. “Like, I hope it gets us at the same time. I don’t want to die alone.”

“You won’t.”

“It’s just . . . dying always looked so
lonely
to me.” She sniffed in the dimming green light, and I remembered her limp body in the crushed Mercedes, her skull deflated, the tubes hooked under her skin, the glimmering blue-white cubes of safety glass in her hair. “Because . . . because I know there’s no God.”

I snapped another glow stick. “Addie, there’s a God.”

“Stop, Dan. You heard it, too—”

“You believe that thing? Really?”

“Got a better source?”

“Addie, it’s a bottom feeder.” I ducked under a smashed car door sparkling with crystals. “It’s bacteria. Growing on an antique rifle. For all we know, it’s just one of the roaches that skittered under the fridge when God said
let there be light
. There’s nothing to learn from it. It’s a stupid, mindless piece of shit that only knows how to eat, and together, we’re going to stop it.”

She smiled as we went through the Gasman’s playground, groping and pushing through a collage of destroyed memories. To our right, I glimpsed coffin-like forms in the darkness. Bathtubs of gun parts submerged in oil. A yellow flashlight strobed at us, and I saw the terrified eyes of a Soviet guard. Watching us detour right through his patrol at the Kalash armory in 1981.

I waved at the poor Russian. “Don’t mind us. We’re just passing through.”

“You’re doing a great job,” Adelaide added.

Now the tunnel tightened into a crawlspace and I recognized wooden chairs thudding at my feet, white coffee mugs from Jitters. Dropped paper lanterns. Paul Bunyan’s grinning, severed head, caged by two-by-fours. We were almost there. Almost.

I hoped there was still time.

I hate you, Dan. I’m sorry, but I hate you.

“Whatever happens, we’ll go together,” I told her. “You won’t die alone. And afterward, I’ll meet you at New Year’s Eve. Okay?”

She nodded rapidly in the green light. “Okay.”

“I’ll see you there, Addie. In 2014.”

“Deal.”

Maybe I was lying, but it sounded right. If Hell was the past, maybe Heaven could be, too. I had no idea what we were in for. I didn’t know if we could possibly halt the Timber Ridge shooting, or if it was already written into our tangled fates — but all you can do is try. I hoped to God we could save them.

“And Addie?”

“Yeah?”

“First, we’re going to kick its ass.”

NEW TEXT MESSAGE

SENDER:
Unknown

SENT:
12:39 p.m. Mar 20 2015

TASTYTASTYTREATSFORMETASTYYESTHANKYOUTASTYTASTYTASTYYESYUMTHANKYOU

3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

The tunnel opened on all sides into a vast emptiness. The ground panned and flattened under our feet, morphing into snow. Knee-deep snow, whipped into rolling permafrost waves. I couldn’t see anything beyond our small radius of green light, but I could tell from how our voices thinned and carried; we’d entered a massive expanse of open ground. I heard distant winds, a throaty howl, but felt no breeze.

My mind scrambled — where was our house on the night of March 19, 2015? With the Ouija board? Had we missed that very first memory?

Addie shivered. “What is this place?”

“I don’t know.”

“The edge of the world?”

“I don’t know.”

I snapped another glow stick — my second-to-last — and hurled it high into the darkness. It arced a hundred feet, piercing the black like tracer fire, and . . . unexpectedly thudded off something.

Something huge.

Addie gasped.

As the glow stick dropped straight down, it threw green shadows, drawing contours of some hellish industrial machine, of struts, truss beams, and rigging cables, of rivets and plated joints pitted with rust. A towering metal creature that lived in this dark tundra. In the plunging green light I glimpsed the thing’s long, railroad-trestle neck, and at the end, its ‘head’ — a massive, circular saw blade. Like a forty-foot band saw, lined with clawed steel buckets.

The glow stick landed in the snow with a soft plop.

It revealed a building at the foot of the eight-story industrial monster; a modest blue house frosted with ice. It was our home. Uprooted and carefully displaced here in a bleak arctic winter. And, if we stood the barest chance of contacting Holden before the Timber Ridge shooting, that Ouija board would still be inside. On the dining table.

“Trap,” I said.

She nodded wearily. “
Totally
a trap.”

But we kept going. No time for fear. There was enough space out here to run, but the snow was glazed with a thin skin of glittering ice, like an eggshell, and underneath it was strangely thick and sludgy. Molasses-like. Our shoes sank and slurped, as if jogging through a tar pit. My toes were numb, my calves burning. Every step was a heave.

“That’s an excavating machine.” Addie pointed up at the skeletal structure. “They used them at quarries, to dig tunnels for mines. I’ve seen photos of them.”

I had, too. Most of it was cloaked in darkness; the surreal thing could’ve stretched on forever for all I knew. I had one final glow stick in my pocket, but I knew we’d need it inside the black memory of our house, coming closer with every step.

“Maybe . . . maybe the Soviets dug the demon up accidentally,” Addie supposed. “In a gulag, a work-camp mine. It crawled out of the frozen earth and attached itself to a guard’s Mosin Nagant—”

“Maybe.”

“That explains the gas mask. Miners wear gas masks to—”

“Maybe,” I said again. At this point, I didn’t give a crap about the origin story. This thing was an asshole, and it wanted to murder a lot of people at Timber Ridge very soon. That was all I could be bothered to know.

Addie fell silent.

We came up to the memory of our house, a shadow lurking in the grim light of my half-buried glow stick. It was a blown-out wreck of the real thing; the roof sunken, the windows shattered, the siding peeling off like burnt skin. The front door hung ajar from a frost-warped doorframe, half-obscured by churned waves of snow. To our right, I spotted two lumped masses. My Celica and beside it, Holden’s car. Dora the Explorer.

“Home, sweet home.”

This was it. Our house, circa March 2015. The moment the Head-Scratching Rifle first dug its icy claws into my brain. The entry wound, you could call it.

“Wow.” Addie touched the gutter, hanging like a chewed fingernail. “You really let the house go to hell after I died.”

“You should see the dishes.”

I pushed the front door, glazed with white bumps. It croaked open on squealing hinges, shedding flecks of ice. A claws-on-chalkboard squeal of audio static made us jump, and then the familiar home security system gasped through phlegm-clogged speakers: “Front . . . door . . . is . . . ajar.”

She looked at me now, steeling herself before entering our own haunted house, taking in a shivering breath. “Murdered by an extra-dimensional monster. Better than a drunk driver, I guess.”

“It’s no Velociraptor-mauling, but it’ll do.”

“
Utahraptor
, Dan.”

“Whatever.”

We went inside.

What’s left to lose, right? I snapped my final glow stick there in our doorway. The doorway where we’d kissed goodbye every weekday before work, where I’d dented a wall moving a TV stand, where she’d told me with tears in her eyes that her grandfather had pneumonia. As we ventured into this alien mockery of that place, our footsteps creaking on deformed hardwood, my mind wandered back to Adelaide’s half-spoken word back at Timber Ridge. Her mysterious little idea — something about my red-tipped cartridge — that she couldn’t tell me, lest the Gasman find out.

An ammunition malfunction called a squi—

“Addie . . . you have a backup plan, don’t you?”

She smiled guiltily in the green light. “A girl’s got to have her secrets.”