OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (23 page)

2 Minutes, 5 Seconds

“There it is.”

The Ouija board was frozen to the dining table. The darkness inside the house was overpowering; a siphoning absence of light, like crawling through a shipwreck on the ocean floor. I held the glow stick out over the table like a lantern, weakly illuminating the debris of our ghost hunt — Holden’s frosted laptop, the EMF meter, the audio recorder, the full-spectrum camera, scattered playing cards and two half-drunk homebrews. And centered on the table, in a rodent nest of oily shipping plastic, the Head-Scratching Rifle.

I touched the Ouija surface. Scorched letters under scaled ice.

Why had the Gasman left it intact? I’d expected to find the mirror board punched into splintered halves. Or to not find it at all. Hell, he’d
known
we were coming. He knew everything in my mind — like playing chess against yourself — and yet he’d politely left the all-important item untouched for us, right where it should be, out in the open. Why?

“Too easy,” Addie said.

“No kidding.”

“The tunnel, too. Like it led us here on purpose—”

I set the glow stick on the table and the dim light revealed a piggish face floating in the darkness. Rubber cheekbones and a snout. The Gasman was seated across the table. He’d been waiting for us. I recoiled with shock, and the goggled head swiveled to look at us. For a dumb moment, I half-expected the thing to speak.

Instead, the glow stick died.

“Oh,
shit
.”

A chair scooted. The Gasman was standing up.

In the pitch-blackness I slapped a hand to my pocket, but I already knew that’d been the last one. I was out of glow sticks. Beside me, I heard frantic jingling. Addie was rummaging through her purse.

I flinched, bracing for the roar of close-range gunshots, but instead heard . . . a soft threading sound. Like a plastic cap, unscrewing urgently in the darkness.

“Addie?”

She threw something. I heard a splash — it sounded like a water bottle thudding off the Gasman’s big chest. The patter of droplets hitting the walls, drenching his wool greatcoat, clicking on his boots, pooling on the frozen floor—

“Addie, we tried that already. Water
doesn’t work—”

She flicked her Pac Man lighter. “That wasn’t water.”

* * *

A supernova of light.

I shielded my eyes, looking down, and recognized the plastic bottle rolling on the warped floor — Kale’s bottle of tiki torch fuel (LJ’s bottle, technically) from the New Year’s Eve party. She must’ve found it back in the tunnel.

“Dan!” she screamed. “Grab the board—”

Her voice vanished under a whooshing roar. The dining room flashed over, a billowing tower of blue-orange flames, of liquid fire splashed onto walls, chairs, the counters and table. The Gasman was somewhere inside it, burning like the nuclear core of the sun, throwing waves of blinding, eye-watering heat. Our entire dining room looked like Kale Wong’s face.

I pried the Ouija board off the tabletop, which was now soaked with burning fuel. “Nice trick. Got any more?”

“Just one.”

“Hope it’s a good one.”

She smiled grimly in the orange light, as if to say:
It is
.

Then the Gasman came stomping through the firestorm at us, a charred shadow wearing a coat of flames. Sheets of frantic orange whipped off him. His breathing mask blistered with boiling paint, sizzling away, revealing cracks of white.

Addie aimed her Beretta, but I tugged her arm. “No. Outside—”

We raced through the kitchen, swinging left around the fridge and down the hallway, now roiling with smoke. The Ouija board clasped tight in my knuckles. My mind was already hurtling to the next phase of this crazy-stupid plan: we’d bolt back outside into the tundra, gain some distance between us and the Gasman, and use the board to contact Holden, to urge him to call 911 before—

Addie screamed.

A figure blocked our front doorway, a tall man in blue warehouse coveralls. The lye-drinking forklift driver. His lips and lower jaw were rotted down to a white mandible bone. His guts drooped out of his exposed ribs, his soured flesh sloughing like molten cheese, a hanging, sloppy mess of loose intestines and soaked fabric.

She slammed the door in its face. “Getting
real
tired
of this shit.”

The Gasman rounded the kitchen corner behind us, his ghoulish mask and shoulders still furiously ablaze. His boots were melting; his footprints were pools of bright fire. Although I don’t think the fire really injured him, it at least made him easier to track. Like being chased by a lighthouse.

“Upstairs,” I said.

“Okay.”

She fired a shot over her shoulder as we raced up the distorted staircase. We took a hard right, coughing on smoke, and crashed into our bedroom. I slammed the door behind us. No lock, so I tipped our oak dresser. It banged on the doorknob.

Addie passed me the lighter. “Hurry.”

We’d bought a few precious seconds. I slammed Holden’s mirror board down to the frozen carpet and flipped it right-side-up. The lighter flame wavered in my fingers, barely illuminating the etched alphabet. I fumbled for the all-important planchette, our last hope to contact Holden, to evacuate Timber Ridge and mobilize the police to—

It wasn’t there.

“Oh, no.”

Addie turned. “What?”

“No,
no, no
—”

The Ouija planchette was missing. It had been missing all along. I hadn’t noticed this back when I’d grabbed the board, but the Gasman must’ve taken it, or destroyed it, long before we’d arrived here. That was the trick. The trap. The Gasman’s insurance plan. It had all seemed too easy
because it
was
—

THUD. THUD. He climbed the stairs, coming for us.

Addie looked at me, clasping her hands to her mouth. “Oh, God, really?”

I punched a wall, hard as granite.

“Really? After
all that
?”

Yes, it was all lost, because the Gasman had reached the Ouija board first. Because he was inside my mind, and the
instant
I’d devised this plan with Addie, he had it, too. You can’t beat yourself at chess. Just like that, in a single chancy instant, our hope had evaporated. I was a murderer, evil had prevailed, and everyone in the Timber Ridge food court was now doomed. About to die by my trigger finger, down the oily sights of that cursed Mosin Nagant.

Just . . . like . . . that.

I remembered her mystery
squi-
word and looked at her. “Please. Tell me your backup plan will—”

“It won’t.”

“
What
?”

“It won’t work.”

“You told me it was a good one—”

“And I’m telling you now it
won’t work
, Dan.” Her voice broke. “We had to save Timber Ridge first.”

And we’d failed.

I imagined the Saturday afternoon murder spree. High-caliber bullets punching through bodies, eye sockets and upraised hands, cracking bone and ripping skin, splattering sandwiches and noodle bowls off tables, kicking up jets of koi water. My own thoughtless hands, cranking the Mosin bolt through wisps of smoke — up, back, forward, down — ejecting hot brass and thumbing fresh rounds by the handful, a grim rhythm of five-round salvos. Fire, load. Fire, load.

Something rattled in the bedroom closet.

Addie raised her Beretta. “Did you hear that?”

The closet door chattered again, urgently. Something thumped inside it like a sack of meat, jangling plastic hangers.

She backed away, her finger on the trigger. “What now?”

I had no idea. But honestly, what did it matter now? I slumped against our bed and watched the bi-fold doors scrape open. First the right, then the left. Then a broken figure slid out of the darkness and came for me, slouching closer in the firelight. I saw blood-drenched denim, sloped shoulders, skin withered to beef jerky. The face was deflated, like an empty Halloween mask. I recognized it from earlier. Yes, Addie’s comparison had been apt; the flaps of unfurled skin definitely did resemble an opened banana peel.

It reached for me with crunchy fingers.

51 Seconds

The corpse turned its hand over. A planchette in its palm.

A Ouija planchette, sludgy with congealed deep-fryer grease from the Basin State Fair. Recovered in secret, perhaps, when the Gasman hadn’t been looking. Offered now on outstretched fingers, held toward me in the wavering orange light. For a stunned half-breath I just stared at it.

Addie poked me. “Grab it, dumbass.”

So I did.

Thank you.

Because this was the ghost of Nikolai What’s-His-Name, the worker from the nineties who’d come within a single serial digit of smelting the Head-Scratching Rifle into a molten puddle. He’d been
so
achingly close, and his reward had been a vodka-soaked nap on railroad tracks. He’d been the closest anyone had ever come to interfering with the Head-Scratching Rifle’s dark plans. Until now, as Addie had said.

Until us.

Thank you, Nikolai. And . . . I’m sorry I never remember your last name.

The Gasman’s gloved fist punched through the bedroom door, showering us with wood chips, and I hit my knees and placed the planchette on the board. As Addie stood up, throwing the hair from her eyes and aiming her Beretta at the door in a bladed shooting stance, I traced a grinding pattern on the Ouija surface, over and over. Just us, just Adelaide and me, two ghosts relaying a final, desperate message to Holden, spelled one frustrating letter at a time:

TIMBERRIDGE

MASSSHOOTING

CALL911—

The lighter flame flickered out in my hands. Darkness again. But as the Gasman’s other hand broke through the door, Addie’s Beretta barked, and like navigating by lightning, I used her muzzle flashes:

EVACUATETIMBERRIDGE

THIRDFLOORBALCONY

EVACUA—

30 Seconds

Pain.

Blinding pain.

I hit my knees, slapping a hand to my throat, pierced by a burning javelin. Blood, boiling hot, squirting between my fingers and drenching my shirt. The Mosin Nagant dropped and clattered on bone-white tile, bouncing once. Twice.

Timber Ridge.

This was Timber Ridge.

This was the real world. March of 2015, present day, just north of Boise, Idaho. Being back in it was like climbing out of a swimming pool after hours of weightless floating. My eardrums pressurized. I recognized the bass echo of a gunshot. It raced a hundred feet from wall to wall of the food court, rattling off plate glass and marble, shivering department store mannequins.

Then came the screams. A rising chorus of terror. Chair legs scraping, shoes squeaking, soft drinks dropping and splashing.

As I fell away from the glass balcony railing (the third floor, near the entrance to JCPenney, just as we’d expected) I caught a blinking freeze-frame of the dispersing crowd below. At least a hundred shoppers, parents, teens, toddlers, employees with nametags, all ducking and panicking, scattering like pigeons. And one cop — standing by the koi pond — with his Glock in two knuckled hands, looking back up at me. It was almost fifty yards between us, a hell of an iffy distance for a pistol shot, but I knew he’d been the one. He’d been the one who spotted me shouldering the Mosin Nagant, drawn his own sidearm, and plugged me in the neck. Only one shot had been fired here today, and it was his. Not mine.

Good job
, I managed to think.
Damn good shot
.

I hope they give you a medal—

I landed on top of the Head-Scratching Rifle and my forehead banged on tile. My skull made a jarring, rattling thud, like a cabinet full of glassware. A concussion of flashbulbs behind my eyes. It didn’t hurt, though. My pain threshold was already occupied. All I felt was that fiery javelin pole under my chin, and a rising swell of blood in my throat.

The cop shouted something downstairs. It sounded vaguely familiar, like dialogue from an action movie.

Okay.

Coppery blood swished between my teeth. I tried to inhale but coughed out a furious red splash. My heartbeat jackhammered in my neck. And more blood raced between my clamped fingers, spurting in rhythmic beats, like hot water. I was draining out, leaking, dying, and that was perfectly fine.

Okay, okay.

I reached for the Head-Scratching Rifle.

Just one last thing.

I lifted the weapon into my lap. Leaving bloody fingerprints, I unlatched the bolt and an intact, store-bought 7.62x54R round twirled out. Plus five in the magazine. All six bullets, unfired. Jesus Christ, we’d really done it. We’d saved them all. The only casualty of 2015’s attempted Timber Ridge shooting would be me, Dan Rupley, local TV ghost hunter, and that was just fine.

Because before I died here on this balcony, I’d take the Head-Scratching Rifle with me. I’d press the barrel to the floor, yank the trigger, and let it explode in my arms. Turn it to shrapnel. Even if yesterday’s red-tipped bullet had been a misfire due to contaminated gunpowder, by God, I wouldn’t fail this time. I’d send it to Hell. I’d be the curse’s final victim.

More voices below. More first-responders flooding into the food court. This was good — Holden had received my Ouija message and called the authorities to Timber Ridge, averting disaster by seconds — but also very, very bad. The cops were closing in and I had to finish this before I died. I had to fire the Mosin into the tile floor, to end this now. Or else the weapon would just be carried away and tagged, and hibernate in a police evidence room somewhere, and grow another lucid tendril to infect someone else’s mind, and continue the decades-long cycle of ruined lives—

“Gun! He’s still got it!”

More shots whip-cracked from downstairs and the balcony railing exploded into kernels of blue-white glass. I rolled over, peppered by shards and gouged plaster. A bullet pinged off the metal handrail by my cheek. A vivid flash of sparks stung my eyes.

“Drop the gun. Drop it!”

Nope.

I closed the Head-Scratching Rifle’s bolt, chambering the next round. The downstairs gunshots sounded so weak and faraway now, like someone down the street was hammering nails. I braced the weapon under my arm, pressing the muzzle flat to create a seal against the crunchy floor, and groped for the trigger. My thoughts almost fell out of my brain but I held on, for just a second or two more. That was all I’d need.

We stopped it, Addie.

For a terrifying moment, I couldn’t find the trigger guard. Then my rubber fingers thudded against it, all pins and needles, and I found the bladed trigger, and pulled it with my thumb, my head lolling back to face Timber Ridge’s Idaho skylight. An indifferent little glimpse of blue sky. My nervous system thickened, my brain depressurized like an airlock emptying its contents into space . . .

We did it.

Pull . . . pull . . . the ancient Russian trigger felt miles long. My joints were spaghetti but I kept pulling, kept outrunning my own failing body, feeling the aged metal creak and contract, less than a millimeter now, just fractions of fractions, a shrinking sliver of a second away from firing a bullet into the floor and exploding the hateful thing in my arms . . .

I’ll find you again, Addie.

At New Year’s Eve.

Because we share the same atoms. I’ll always find you. We’ll always feel that tug that pulls us together—

But I noticed something.

The skylight.

Blinking away sweat, blood, and plaster dust, I squinted up into the cavernous ceiling, wracked my darkening thoughts, and realized . . . yes, that was it . . . the Idaho-shaped skylight was incorrect. It had only been shaped as Idaho (the
Sky-dick
) up until the summer of 2014. That was when, Holden once told me, the mall’s owner finally caved in to public ridicule and redesigned it to include four or five states, the greater inland northwest. I knew this. I was absolutely certain. The skylight was wrong. As the headshot corpse of Ben Dyson once told me atop a freezing lighthouse, everything this entity knows is taken secondhand, because
evil is unimaginative
.

I realized what this meant, and my heart plunged.

Oh, God, no.

This wasn’t real.

This wasn’t the real Timber Ridge. This was just a dream, another car on the train of thoughts, an artificial one assembled from fragments of my memories. A distraction.

The Head-Scratching Rifle had tricked me.