OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (3 page)

“Trying to catch it, yes.”

“Choke on any small parts, too?”

I elbowed past him and carried the heavy thing to the dining table, flicking on the chandelier light and setting it sideways on the wood right by Adelaide’s glass fruit bowl. Like an autopsy slab.

He followed. “What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer and unwrapped the loose end. The bag came crinkling off, clinging and damp, and the rifle’s barrel and circular front sight slipped out. Glistening with moisture. A sharp odor rushed out with it, like an exhaled breath.

Holden stepped back and gagged.

I coughed, my throat tightening. It was awful in a rich, concentrated way, like black centipede musk; the staleness of pungent air concentrated into the plastic vessel for years and finally escaping.

“No wonder he kept it in the bag.”

Holden breathed through his Bigfoot t-shirt. “Are old guns supposed to stink?”

I had no idea. It was like opening a hellish diaper. I unrolled more clammy plastic, peeling it back over itself the way you’d unroll a sweaty gym sock, but it was catching on something. The knobbed bolt, probably. Chemicals glued my fingers together in clots. Half the gun was visible now, from the bayoneted muzzle all the way down to the triangular back-leaf sight, and the rancid odor kept bleeding off the thing in eye-watering waves. I could taste it.

“Man, that bag . . .” Holden watched from a few feet away. “Did the gun take a shit in there or something?”

My eyes blurred with irritated tears, but I didn’t dare rub them. As I tore away the last rumple of plastic, a pool of drained slime squelched between my fingers. A drop squirted on the table — mustard-yellow.

The bag slapped to the floor at my feet. Like moist snakeskin.

Now I held the Second World War-era rifle in one outstretched hand, the stock at my hip, the barrel aimed up at the chandelier. That’s the thing about guns — they’re always aimed at something. It rattled slightly as I hefted it under the light.

“Wow,” Holden said.

I nodded.

Cat-Litter-Breath-Guy at Joe’s Guns had been right; the Mosin Nagant design is both ugly and beautiful. It’s a hand-cranked killing machine, the Soviet sniper’s weapon of choice. You may have seen the Jude Law movie. Of course it’s a genius platform — you don’t engineer one of the most prolific battle rifles of the last century if you’re an idiot — but there was also something . . . I don’t know . . . something
stupid
about this old, single-shot beast. It shoots people, and in close quarters, it can also stab people. That’s it. Nothing fancy to it. The Red Army men and women who carried it into Stalingrad may have accomplished great things with it — true acts of bravery — but without them here, and stripped of context, this Mosin Nagant was just a dumb stick.

I turned it over and the slimy bolt hung open with a slippery KA-CHUNK, revealing an empty chamber. Unloaded. Still, I poked a finger inside, because if there was ever a time to make sure, this was it.

Still unloaded.

I thumbed yellow-brown sludge off the manufacturer’s stamp on the barrel. It was pea-sized but crisply detailed; a five-pointed star pierced by an arrow. Collectors call it the Tula. Under it, the rifle’s serial number: B53066. In the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, the
B
actually has a
V
sound.

I waved a hand in the soupy air, wishing we’d opened the bag in the garage instead of the dining room. The fumes were needling into my sinuses. There wasn’t enough Febreze in the world for this. “Maybe the smell made Dyson kill himself.”

“Dan, what does the odor remind you of?”

“Ass.”

“Break it down.” He circled the table. “Into individual scents.”

I inhaled again and let the fetid air crawl up my nostrils. “It seems biological,” I said, like the world’s unluckiest wine taster. “Like digestion, breaking something down, creating waste. Like gum disease . . . or mildew . . . or yeast.”

Yeast, definitely. I knew yeast. Adelaide and I used to homebrew five-gallon batches of beer in our kitchen pantry, and to trigger the fermentation process, you dump in a little vial of dormant yeast. That stuff
reeks
. Like a grim omen, the weekend Addie died, we’d had our Belgian wheat batch overflow and flood the pantry, and the rank odor had fogged the kitchen windows. Fungal and goatish.

He looked at me. “You can’t smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“Rotten flesh.”

I rolled my eyes so hard I almost saw my own brain.

Don’t get Holden started down that road. At our season-premiere investigation of an abandoned Hostess factory last year, we’d opened the sliding bay doors and immediately gagged at the odor of decaying meat. Kale and I had breathed through our sleeves and soldiered on, but Holden panicked. According to most psychic mediums, he explained breathlessly to camera B as we ventured out into the cavernous production floor, the odor of rotting flesh signals the presence of the most hateful and dangerous force known to ghost hunting. A demon.

Then: a wet crunch. Camera B pans down, and we see Holden has just stepped through the maggoty ribcage of a dead raccoon.

“Smell it?” he asked again.

“No.” I slid the rifle bolt up and down its tracks like a toy train. Oily sludge beaded between contact points, burbling and dripping. Up close, the clockwork of the weapon formed a sinister maze of crannies, crevices, and dark spots. A morbid thought slithered into my mind:
Maybe there are still some year-old chunks of Ben Dyson’s splattered brain in here?

Maybe that’s the decay Holden smells?

That led to another one. This Mosin Nagant was almost eight decades old, and if properly maintained, could survive many more. Centuries, even. Guns aren’t biodegradable like us soft, fleshy humans.

“Well.” Holden clapped his hands with false cheer. “At least it’s not loaded.”

“Yep.”

“And we don’t have any ammunition.”

This made for a convenient segue. I reached into my back pocket and with a guilty flourish, placed a single bullet on the table.

Click.

18 Hours, 55 Minutes

Holden backed against the wall. “Worst. Idea.
Ever
.”

“Hear me out.”

The M91/30 Mosin Nagant fires a 7.62x54R cartridge, sold at most sporting goods outlets for plinking and medium game. It’s a stout thing about the size of a swisher cigar. More missile than bullet. A brass-cased railroad spike with an explosive chemical primer at its base, and accelerated to three thousand feet per second, I couldn’t fathom what it would do to a human skull.

This particular round was special, though. Its pointed tip was slopped with a dollop of bright red candle wax. I palmed it and held it out to Holden, who flinched away as if it were an eyeball. “This is my backup plan,” I said.

“
Really
? Because it looks like a bullet.”

“It is.”

“Dan, this is nuts.”

“Sit down. Let me explain.”

He stayed standing. His hands were raised a little, like he half-expected me to thumb the round into the Mosin’s breech right then. Worse than being merely frightened, he looked deeply sad. Like this whole spectacle was heartbreaking to witness. Maybe it was. It gave me a twisty stomach pang to imagine how utterly, self-destructively crazy I must’ve looked to my closest friend.

I also realized I’d never told him the rifle’s full story. He only knew about Ben Dyson’s suicide last year on that southern-fried afternoon.

“What’s the backup plan?” he deadpanned. “Suicide?”

“Do you really think this gun would be famous for just killing one guy in Georgia?”

“It’s
famous
?”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s work backwards. Before Dyson mail-ordered it, before this rifle even touched North American soil, it was kept mothballed in a government armory in Saint Petersburg. For decades. The building was nicknamed the Kalash, after the philanthropist who invented the AK-47—”

“Can you at least put down the bullet?”

I set it upright on the table. “At the Kalash, they broke down decommissioned military small arms for storage or disposal, and they kept all the parts separated by type and immersed in big tubs of grease. So you’ve got an industrial bathtub of Mosin bolts, and a bathtub full of Mosin magazine springs, and so on. All sitting out there on acres of warehouse floor. Like cryosleep, for obsolete guns.”

Holden nodded absently. He was staring at the red-tipped bullet on the table, and several inches beyond it, that rifle. Like he expected it to grow hands and load itself.

“The Kalash armory was notoriously haunted,” I said. “Pretty much the Russian equivalent of the Winchester house. You can Google it. It could’ve been a pop-culture curiosity over there, if it were a public place like a library or a hotel. But it wasn’t. It was a military complex. The only people who had access were employees, and they
hated
the place.”

“Any suicides?”

“Maybe. Researching Cold War-era Russia is like sticking your head into a black hole. Even if everything wasn’t all redacted to hell, the motherland was too busy shooting dogs into space to keep up the bookkeeping.”

“Is that a joke, or did they literally do that?”

From the counter I grabbed a sloppy heap of papers and let it crash down onto the dining table. Filing cabinets aren’t really my thing. From the bibliography of W. Louis’s book I’d worked upstream — tracing sources of sources — and much of it was clumsily auto-translated from Russian with gaping holes and missing prepositions. I pushed the stack toward him and papers fanned out on the wood like a hand of playing cards. It would’ve been a great cutaway, a perfect segment lead-in after a commercial break, but the cameras weren’t rolling.

Because this wasn’t
Haunted
, and this Mosin Nagant sure as hell wasn’t a lighthouse or hotel. Sure, nothing genuinely paranormal had happened yet, but there was definitely a sort of . . .
malice
to the way the bayonet pierced my thumb. I sensed ill will, somehow. Like the cursed weapon wished to attack me any way it could, and right now it had to settle for drawing blood and denting my kitchen floor (twice). It had only been a few hours since I’d picked it up from Joe’s Guns. What would happen as Dyson’s twenty-four-hour record inched closer? What could happen?

Sure, maybe I’d die. Maybe it had already reached its lucid tendrils into my brain and started to squeeze (which would explain the headache). But as concerned as I was about this allegedly cursed Mosin Nagant on my dining table, I was even more afraid of finding nothing paranormal at all. The ultimate lose/lose situation.

Holden flipped through pages. I’d highlighted the best bits in orange.

I couldn’t hide my enthusiasm here; it bubbled up under my words. “If only a
third
of this is true, the Kalash was the most haunted building in human history. You name it, somebody claimed to see it. Gruesome accidents. Crushed fingers. Exploding lights. Illness, strokes, heart attacks. It was said that if you brought a wristwatch in, it would start to tick backwards. Compasses didn’t work in there; the needle pointed south instead of north. Neither did most recording devices, or radios, or keycards. And cold spots galore — the temperature in the building fluctuated so severely, pipes would freeze while the boiler ran full blast five feet away. A loud voice, too, that spoke to workers at night.”

“Saying what?”

“Weird things. The translations get iffy.”

The stories were wildly different and even contradictory, so I wasn’t going to delve into it. Some claimed to hear references to food (
yeda
) or candy (
konfety
). Others heard premonitions. One guy learned that his pregnant wife would miscarry. The most detailed account was an interview arranged by ParaNews, where two former Kalash guards recounted hearing the same voice echoing up the elevator shaft. First they thought it had originated downstairs, so they chased it, but the source seemed to move freely around the building. They’d described it as
progorklyy
— which loosely translates to ‘spoiled,’ or ‘rancid.’ I imagined a slippery voice, as soggy as a gutter full of dead leaves, like a meth addict chanting through wiggly teeth and ulcerated gums, shivering with breathless glee:
Yes, please, thank you . . . Yes, please, thank you . . .

Yes, please, thank you . . .

Yes, please, thank you . . .

Holden straightened a page. “Visual manifestations?”

“Early eighties,” I said. “One watchman was doing his patrol on the Kalash floor in the middle of the night. Cavernous open space around all the tubs of oily gun parts. And he hears these whispering voices in English. He whirls around, aims his flashlight, and sees two apparitions. A man and a woman. Drenched with blood and ice. Frightened, weary, tired, speaking in English. These two ghosts, this man and woman, they urgently pass him by, and they keep snapping green glow sticks—”

He looked at me. “Glow sticks?”

“Dropping them on the floor. Leaving a trail of them, spaced every twenty feet or so. Like green cave worms in the darkness. And this baffled watchman follows them, because I guess I would, too. Eventually, this path of green lights just leads right into a wall, like these blood-soaked ghosts just . . . walked right through it.”

“And you believe that?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe any single
one
of these accounts. But an entire haystack of them starts to gain credibility.”

“Of course it looks legit,” he said, flipping crinkled pages. “I’m not doubting that something really vicious haunted that armory. I’m just wondering why this rifle is better than any other place we’ve investigated. Why not come with us to Old Briar tomorrow? That mine sounds plenty haunted, too, and—”

He froze. He’d stopped at a page. A black-and-white photo.

I knew which one.

His eyes thinned. “I wish I could un-see that.”

I continued: “The Kalash was also a magnet for transients. Bums, drunks, criminals, the general fringe of society. They were drawn to the building like mosquitos to a zapper. This was a military complex, with guards and barbed-wire fences, and Vlad Six-Pack still wandered right in. There was one story about a homeless guy from Moscow in the seventies. Just cheerfully telling his friends out of the blue one day,
Well, the Gasman has summoned me
, and walking off on his own to—”

“The Gasman?”

“He hitchhiked over three time zones to Saint Petersburg. And when he got inside the Kalash, he climbed up to the metal beams on the ceiling and did the same thing everyone else did.”

Holden set the photo on the table, looking nauseous.

It was a corpse, dangling upside-down from the high ceiling, hung crookedly by one leg. A human Christmas ornament, zebra-striped with drips of black blood. The details were blurry and the lighting was murky, but you could just make out the thorns of barbed wire knotted around his ankle (stolen from the outside perimeter fence). With his limp head and fingertips hanging over the storage tubs below, he looked like a whitetail being drained of blood in someone’s garage.

“Died of blood loss?”

“No. Gravity.”

“
Gravity
?”

“Hanging upside-down. Blood pressure in the brain.”

He swallowed. “I didn’t know that could kill you.”

I thought of that
The More You Know
shooting star.

And even now, I felt my eyes tugging to that black-and-white photo. It was wrong; an illogical and painful way to commit suicide. And then there was the way the corpse seemed to be . . . well, reaching. Hanging by a leg pivots your body weight, so it made sense that one arm would hang a little lower, but it still looked like this poor guy was consciously straining,
reaching
downward for something. Like he’d hung himself from the ankle — instead of the neck — for that very purpose. I guess he’d be reaching forever.

Well, the Gasman has summoned me.

And who the hell was the Gasman? He sounded like an anesthetist, or a gas meter reader, or a superhero with a dismal superpower. W. Louis’s book didn’t know, either. Did it even matter? It was all fiction. I knew it was fiction, just the workings of many separate, overactive imaginations hardened into legend by groupthink, but still I couldn’t help but imagine being alone in the Kalash after midnight. Now
that
would be a ghost hunt. Patrolling acres of interior space, slicing darkness with a cheap-ass flashlight, and suddenly hearing that rotten voice echo from the elevator shaft, giddy with anticipation, like a starved dog watching a food bowl finally arrive:
Yes, please, thank you . . .

Yes, please, thank you . . .

Yes, right up there, please, with the barbed wire. Thank you . . .

Holden couldn’t take his eyes off the photo, either. “How many . . . how many people hung themselves like that?”

“You’re happier not knowing.”

“And . . .” He glanced across the dining table, at the Mosin Nagant. “And this gun was stored there, during the Kalash hauntings, and you suspect it absorbed some of the—”

“No,” I said. “This rifle was believed to be the
culprit
.”

He looked at me.

I lowered my voice, my words cleanly spaced: “Everyone who has ever been issued this rifle has shot themselves with it.”

As if on cue, the chandelier flickered.

“Every. Last. One.” On the kitchen counter, I spread out black-and-white photos — mug shots of flinty, unsmiling farm boys in fox hats with nothing in their futures to smile about. “As an infantry rifle manufactured during World War II, it passed between at least four different enlisted men. Two artilleries, one motor, and one undefined, which probably meant something classified, like a gulag or something. Guess how every last one of them died.”

Holden held an index finger to his temple.

“Twenty-four hours,” I said. “That’s the record.”

“How long have
you
had it?”

“This Mosin Nagant was a legend,” I said. “A sort of Red Army boogeyman that passed from corpse to corpse. Rumor has it the Nazis even captured it on the battlefield — and
gave it back
. Everyone checked the serial numbers of their rifles to make sure it hadn’t gotten to them next. They called it the Head-Scratching Rifle.”

“Why would you scratch your head with it?”

“It’s a joke.”

“Oh.”

“So fast-forward to 1995,” I said. “One of the Kalash’s engineer guys — Nikolai Something-Or-Other — puts two and two together. He suspects that this legendary
Head-Scratching Rifle
from five decades ago was actually one of the outdated guns being stored in the armory, and that’s the cause of the suicides, the nasty voices, et cetera. People believe him. He claims, to a TV station, that his brother works in archives somewhere and that he even knows the serial number of the Head-Scratching Rifle. ‘B3065,’ he tells the camera. And he and his buddies pull some strings and go through the armory and rebuild that Mosin Nagant. And then they take it to a foundry and melt it down.”