OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (6 page)

He’s going to say Friday, he’s going to say Friday, he’s going to say—

“Friday.”

I stood up, my thoughts running together. I didn’t feel it but my knee must’ve bumped the edge of the table; our coffees splashed. Holden guarded his paperwork. My eardrums rang and the little java house seemed to fall silent, like a theatre after the curtain rises. A horrible, pressurizing silence.

“Dan—”

“I have to go the bathroom.”

He pointed.

Jitters’ unisex bathroom had a perfectly good toilet but I took the liberty of vomiting in the sink. It was just more convenient. I was still in shock; still in shaky, post-car accident mode, assessing damage and counting fingers. I needed to stay alert and on my feet. Besides, the sink drain could handle it.

I slurped from the faucet and caught my face in the mirror. I looked like I felt, my eye sockets shadowing like bruises under the buzzing electric light. I could’ve passed for ten years older. But — according to Holden, and the blazing sunlight outside — I was really
twelve hours
younger.

Friday.

It’s Friday afternoon, March 19
.

Which meant Friday night’s ghost hunt hadn’t happened yet. I hadn’t even brought the Mosin Nagant home yet. It was still in my trunk. Everything — Holden’s antique Ouija board, myself attempting suicide in the mirror, the late-night visitor in the winter coat — had all been a dream. An intricately detailed,
twelve-hour
nightmare. Even the part where the Head-Scratching Rifle’s spike bayonet had pierced under my thumbnail.

I checked my thumb.

Intact.

The Jitters bathroom seemed to wobble. The checkerboard floor was slick; recently mopped. An air-conditioner kicked on. Outside I heard muffled voices — a stranger asking Holden if I was okay. I took another swig of metallic sink water and knew my best friend would come in and check on me in thirty seconds, tops. He’s dependable. He’s the guy who texts you after a night of dollar beers to ensure you got home safe.

I cupped a cold handful of water and splashed it in my face. All a dream, right? I’d never had one like that before. I rarely dreamt at all, and when I did it was usually about locations, not events. My dreams were never
plot-driven
, you could say. Just nonsense dreamscapes — vast Jerusalem catacombs sculpted of sand, mile-wide warehouses with illogical conveyer belts, titanic ocean storm walls guarding nothing.

But this? This had been real. As vivid as an HD camera. Tactile in awful ways. I could still hear the twisting tear of Baby ripping in half, the detailed pop of those little reptile vertebrae, the rip of sinew and tendons. There was something disturbing about the way the man in the gray coat had just pulled and pulled, applying more and more pressure, like a curious child testing the physical limits of a savannah monitor’s skeleton until he broke them. He wasn’t there to kill. He was there to
play
.

But Addie’s stupid lizard was fine. Safe at home. In her enclosure. Right?

Right.

I twisted off the faucet.

Just a nightmare.

It’s jarring, trying to write off half a day of detailed memories. Your body resists it, like jet lag. I couldn’t believe it was Friday afternoon again; it
felt
like early Saturday morning. What if it had been a flash-forward of some sort? A premonition? Or something knottier and more complex, like time travel?

Time travel. I recalled the urban legend Holden once told me of the young honeymooning couple driving through the New Mexico scablands, right through some sort of temporal blister. Their watches stopped working. They fell five hours out of synch with the rest of the world. So when they stopped for food at some trucker diner, they were horrified when the waitress who seated them was just empty skin. A hollow bag of dried-out skin and nothing else — no bones or tissue inside. The entire diner had been like that, a crowd of grinning human taxidermies, gaping eye sockets and mouths, seated in their booths. Moral of the story? Don’t fall out of synch with time, I guess. I don’t know what happened to the couple afterward.

Hell, I didn’t know what was happening to me
right now
.

Shadows moved under the door. Holden tapped twice. “Dan, you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Heroin.”

Muffled voices outside, and I heard Holden again: “No, no, he’s joking; he’s not actually doing heroin in there—”

I checked my phone out of mindless habit — and promptly wished I hadn’t. Because according to my iPhone, it wasn’t Friday at all. It was Saturday, March 20. The time was 3:36 a.m. I even had an hour-old text message from Holden, sent after he took my broom home at the conclusion of our Friday night ghost hunt.

The screen trembled in my hands.

The twenty-four hour countdown was still ticking.

NEW TEXT MESSAGE

SENDER:
“Holden” (509) 555-8727

SENT:
2:01 a.m. Mar 20 2015

Glad you’re OK. Still got the rifle in my trunk will destroy it tomorrow just to be safe. Get some sleep buddy see u tomorrow for briar mine.

10 Hours, 31 Minutes

I returned to my seat, taking careful steps.

Everyone in Jitters seemed to be watching me. Even the baristas fell silent, eyeing me between stacked cups on the counter. I was hyper-aware of my own heartbeat, the mechanical push and pull of my breathing, the scuff of my footsteps on hardwood. Not frightened or panicked, because those were unproductive emotions. Just . . . alert. Aware. Like a deer that may — or may
not
— have just heard the distant snick of a rifle’s disengaging safety.

I sat back down with Holden, squealing my chair, and sipped my coffee with shaky hands. As cold as tap water.

“Second thoughts?” he asked me.

“About what?”

“Your new gun.”

Right. I remembered that although I’d jumped back twelve hours in time, the Head-Scratching Rifle was still in my possession. In the trunk of my Celica parked outside. I’d just detailed my intentions to Holden, and he’d invited himself along. I’d been too gentle — or maybe too lonely — to sway him. He’d show up at my house with
Haunted
equipment and his Ouija board. History was set to repeat itself.

Outside, Paul Bunyan’s grinning head trucked past on an eighteen-wheeler. A chug of diesel fumes and a flash of piano-white teeth in the sunlight. Just like before.

“Creepy,” Holden murmured this time, watching it go.

Maybe I’d wake up again, I supposed. This would turn out to be another blistering salvia-trip of a dream. That was the only way to describe it. My cell phone said it was Saturday morning, the rest of the world said it was Friday afternoon, and I was in the throes of another mind-bending nightmare.

But the big man who killed Baby did make some sort of sense. I recognized the greatcoat; it was trademark winter-wear for the armed forces of the Soviet Union. I’d thumbed over hundreds of black and white photos of men cloaked in these things, warming their wrapped hands over barrel fires, fiddling with their Mosins and SKS’s, grinning for impromptu group shots. You can buy Russian greatcoats at army surplus stores; stiff, itchy robes that chafe your skin and reek of mildew and spray-on mite killer. They weren’t pretty, but they’d keep you alive when the wind chill hit the negatives.

So that was it. I’d dreamt a uniformed Red Army ghost walked into my house and tore Adelaide’s savannah monitor in half. One of the Head-Scratching Rifle’s prior victims, maybe? Trapped in a hateful, mind-melting eternity, seeking gory revenge on all living creatures, great and small? Sure, sounded good.

Step one complete. Ghost seen.

Step two: how do I avoid becoming one, myself?

“Holden, I have a hypothetical question.” I ran out of air and remembered to breathe, sucking in a coldness that stung my throat. “In theory, if we . . . if we proceed with this investigation tonight and we do find a demonic entity attached to the Mosin Nagant, how would we fight it?”

He put down his pen. “You don’t
fight
demons, Dan.”

Rookie mistake. I adjusted my goals. “How would we . . . survive it, then?”

“We’d destroy the rifle, obviously, because that’s the demon’s vessel. The physical object that anchors it in our world. We’d bury the pieces, or better yet, drive up to White Bend and throw them in the river—”

“Why is that better?”

“Some mediums believe . . .” He looked embarrassed. “Well, that unclean spirits can’t cross bodies of water.”

I shook my head. “It already did. It’s from Russia.”

“Surviving it, though . . .” He sipped his coffee and stared out at the teriyaki place across the street. “There’s a lot of popular misconception about demons, Dan. People think that they’re just asshole ghosts. They’re not. They’re not even human. Never have been. They don’t just regard us the way we regard insects, because . . . well, we don’t dump salt on slugs for fun. Cruelty is their language. They feed off human pain, weakness, sin . . .”

“Well, excellent.” That pretty much summed up my life after Addie died.

“The biggest mistake you can make is trying to understand one,” he said. “Don’t even try to wrap your mind around them. Your mind will stretch, rip and bleed. They exist outside of time, on lower dimensions, in dark, cold places incompatible with human life. Places far from God. If a demon, well,
has
you, it’s like crossing the event horizon of a black hole. Doesn’t matter if you move up, forward, back, or even go
backward in time
, because when you’re in it, all routes take you in the same direction. Down.”

“To Hell?”

“Like I said, your brain will bleed—”

“Do you believe in Hell?”

“I believe in God.” He finished his coffee. “And I covered all this demon stuff at the Hostess factory. Remember?”

I didn’t. But it had been one of our highest-rated episodes, raccoon corpse and all. I stood up, wobbling on slushy knees. “I . . . I left my wallet in my car.”

I was lying, of course. I told myself that my migraine was pounding and I just needed fresh air, but that was also a lie. My headache had vanished. I really just wanted to pop my trunk and get another look at that Mosin Nagant. I needed to see it with my own eyes, to verify that the rancid, plastic-wrapped thing was here in my trunk on Friday afternoon and not on my dining-room table on Saturday morning. It was my link, a sinister thread connecting dream and reality.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

I pushed through Jitters’ front door and out into the parking lot. The coldness pierced my hoodie and my skin erupted in goose bumps. Gritty snowflakes stung my eyes. The afternoon sun burned lantern-like, lost behind a thick cataract of clouds.

I checked my phone again. 3:45 a.m.

Not good.

Apparently I’d broken time and space so severely that the sun was shining at three in the morning. I tried to laugh but couldn’t.

My black Toyota was alone in the parking lot, just a shadow behind sheets of falling static. A film of dry snow had already overtaken the slope of my windshield.

I opened the trunk but the metal surface scalded my bare fingers. I tore my hand away, gasping gray mist. This wasn’t a normal coldness for early spring in the inland northwest. This was something else. I found myself wishing for that Soviet ghost’s ass-ugly wool coat.

I propped the trunk open with my elbows.

There it was.

The infamous Head-Scratching Rifle was still in its cardboard mailing box. I opened the top flap and peered inside at the gooey, wrapped rifle. I could see the pointed barrel and front sight, and underneath, the tucked bayonet. The ancient bolt-action weapon was dormant, still slumbering in its cocoon of jellied chemicals.

“This is all real,” I said aloud.

I’m not dreaming.

“It’s Friday afternoon. And I’m in the Jitters parking lot.”

Because this is real—

But I noticed something.

Inside the bag, a powdery substance was caked on the Mosin Nagant, raising the plastic in gray clumps. All over it, from barrel to stock. This was new. This strange powder — whatever it was — hadn’t been on the rifle when I’d opened the bag in my house with Holden. In my dream.

So I peeled off the skin-like plastic (again) for a closer look. Handling a firearm in a public place is Darwin Award-worthy, yes, but I was alone in the parking lot. The snowy whiteout had reduced visibility to silhouettes. Keeping the weapon in the trunk, I palmed off a clump of sludgy powder, like wet sand, and recoiled at the pungent odor — ammonia. Like cat urine.

It was cat litter.

The Mosin Nagant was coated in cat litter.

Like it had been buried for two weeks in a neglected litterbox. Clumps of sand hardened to the rifle’s seams in damp globs. Something rattled inside the barrel and dropped out, bouncing off my foot — a blackened cat turd, bumpy with grains of litter. Adelaide called them Kitty Rocas.

I suppressed a violent gag. The ammonia odor was so dense, I was almost nostalgic for the yeasty foulness from before. I dropped the Head-Scratching Rifle back in my trunk, but my fingers were already slick with acrid cat piss. Seriously, to hell with that thing. I wished it had a face so I could punch it. And I knew it was attacking me, in whatever ways it could. Big or small. Any way it could get to me — by being repulsive, by being eerie, by stabbing my thumb, by warping time — it was going to work on me, busily attacking my sanity. Bleeding out my willpower with a thousand little papercuts.

That Kitty Roca in the barrel? Just one more mental papercut, I guess.

I slammed the trunk.

Another blade of freezing wind slashed at me. Plates of snow crunched under my footsteps as I returned to Jitters, one hand raised against the sudden blizzard. Scabs of cat litter stuck between my fingers, crunchy and moist.

Cruelty is its language
.

When I got back inside Jitters, I’d wash my hands about fifty times, order another coffee, and tell Holden everything. I’d describe the twelve-hour dream, or premonition, or whatever it was. And this time, on this bizarrely reset version of Friday, I wouldn’t investigate the rifle or risk Holden’s life by stupidly permitting him to drag himself into it. I’d destroy the thing, and hurl the pieces into the White River, just like he’d suggested, and that’d be that. Right?

What if I just wake up in Jitters again? With the rifle in my trunk?

Hell, I’d already lost twelve hours.

. . . Or somewhere worse?

I shivered and pushed open Jitters’ front door with both hands, leaving a butterfly pattern of smears on the glass. Maybe this wasn’t really a Groundhog Day-esque temporal nightmare, and I was just losing my mind. Detaching from reality, like an untethered astronaut falling into the void. That’s what happened to everyone else, right? Ben Dyson and the others? Maybe right now, it was really Saturday morning and I was pressing the Head-Scratching Rifle to my chin and reaching for the trigger—

I froze in the doorway.

I’d entered Jitters. But I wasn’t inside Jitters.

I saw a different room entirely. No Holden. No baristas. No paper lights. Just a squared storefront with prison-gray walls. Center aisles lined with red solvent bottles, leather holsters, and little square patches. A long glass counter packed with tagged semi-automatics and revolvers. Behind it, a back wall bristling with shotguns and rifles. And the sudden, disarming comfort of room temperature. This place ran its thermostat much hotter than Jitters.

I was back in Joe’s Guns.

My stomach turned to water and tugged my throat in contracting pulls. I felt ants crawling on my skin. The prickle of millions of insect feet. And a powerful wrongness somewhere deep inside me; a wrenching dislocation between time and space. I didn’t even notice the old man standing by the cash register, eyeballing me — it was Not Joe, the tired old guy who’d sold me the Mosin Nagant on behalf of Ben Dyson’s surviving family — until he exhaled and muttered something under his breath.

It sounded like: “Well,
shit
.”