OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (9 page)

NEW TEXT MESSAGE

SENDER:
“Holden” (509) 555-8727

SENT:
7:18 a.m. Mar 20 2015

Dan wake up turn on the news. Clerk at joes guns shot himself with pistol last night. They’re showing a photo was he the one who sold u that mosinnagant????

5 Hours, 9 Minutes

Burning skin.

I smelled burning skin. It’s a dense, unmistakable odor. It turns the air solid, burns your eyes, and congeals on your tongue. Most disturbingly, it smells just a little bit like food. Like a hamburger thrown into a fireplace.

Burnt skin. Burnt hair. Burnt chemicals.

A guttural scream right beside me, loud enough to rupture eardrums. It exploded inside the confined space, a pressure-cooker roar ringing off tile walls, cut off by a wheezing gasp. Something ice-cold splashed my face.

I was in a bathroom. A man was doubled over the sink faucet beside me, hurling cupped handfuls of water into his beet-red face. Dirty smoke curled in the air. Black whiskers, scorched dead, fluttered to the sink like bugs. This was all okay. This was Kale Wong, and five seconds ago Kale’s face had been on fire. Because on this New Year’s Eve, he’d attempted ‘fire breathing’ out on the
Haunted
production manager’s back porch. Apparently there’s a special chemical that the professionals use, and it’s not a water bottle of tiki torch fuel. No one had captured it on video, but they say that for a few transcendent seconds, Kale Wong looked just like the Ghost Rider.

He screamed a four-letter word into the sink, with sixteen extra vowels.

A crowd bottlenecked by the bathroom door. “Kale. You okay?”

He grabbed a fluffy white towel and mashed it to his face. It came back smeared muddy black. “I regret nothing.”

“He’s okay.” I brushed soot from his shoulder.

He spat in the sink and looked up at me, the lower half of his face a mask of furious red. “How bad is it?”

“Not awful,” I said. “Like a sunburn.”

“Will it scar?”

As a time traveler, I knew it wouldn’t. It would peel in crispy sheets — he’d look like an Asian Freddy Krueger at Addie’s funeral — but the long-term damage was minimal. The real issue would be
Haunted
’s production schedule. Between my absence and his blistered face, LJ’s financiers at the station would be biting their nails all January.

Kale rubbed his temple and an eyebrow came off.

“He’s alright!” someone shouted in the hall, and good news passed through LJ’s lake house one voice at a time. This would have become the story of the evening — if not for Adelaide’s car accident. That happened an hour later, give or take.

Kale slapped a blackened towel to the floor and grabbed another. “I want to know where LJ bought these little towels, man. They’re heavenly soft. Like baby butts—”

“I’m going to see her,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m . . . I’m going to see Addie.”

He nodded, dropping more burnt whiskers.

Oh my God.
I felt a pull in my stomach. I hadn’t thought about it — I’d just blurted it out, because memories seemed to have a strange, subtle momentum to them, like stepping into a waist-deep river current — but yes, I would see Adelaide now. She was here, at the party. She was downstairs.

Right now
.

I pushed through the gathering crowd at the bathroom doorway, like elbowing through the ground floor of a concert. The acrid smell of scorched chemicals hung in the hall, a foggy haze of trapped smoke—

“Tell LJ he’s out of tiki torch fuel!” Kale shouted behind me.

Down the hall. Gaining speed. I rounded a corner and side-scooted past Holden, drunk and happy. This Holden knew nothing of the Head-Scratching Rifle, Addie’s death, or any of the bitter realities 2015 would bring. This Holden was still in 2014, and 2014 was the best year we’d ever had. It was the year we’d made it, the year
Haunted
indexed on the Nielsen ratings book (three times!), the year the Boise-based TV affiliate ordered a third season, the year the paychecks became regular. What a year 2014 had been.

I bumped his beer as I passed, splashing the wall. He was talking to some girl I didn’t recognize. “Dan! Yes, Dan can verify. Remember the Deer Cap Dude? Three thermal signatures, on top of the lighthouse—”

“Warm glass,” I said.

At the top of the stairs I passed Sarah/Amy/Casey, coming up with a fruity blue drink. She shouted in my ear — a question about Kale’s face, I think — but I pretended not to hear her and kept going. My feet turned sideways, clomping down carpeted stairs, my hand squealing on the banister. Still chalky with sawdust, like the entire house was built yesterday.

Kale’s voice boomed from upstairs: “KALE WONG REQUIRES ANOTHER DRINK!”

I descended fast, and LJ’s first floor living room came into view, stretching up from the bottom like a stage revealed by a rising curtain. I saw sneakers, heels, jeans, legs in skirts — down, down the stairs — and then hands in pockets, hands nursing beers, sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Then faces, a sea of mixed faces, some turning to look at me as I stomped down the L-shaped staircase.

“Kale’s okay, right?”

I scanned from face to face. I had to find her.

An iPod on the mantel played something by Snow Patrol; drowned out by a surge of hard laughter from LJ’s dining room. They were playing Apples to Apples in there, and someone had just turned over the Hitler card. The Hitler card always wins.

A hand slapped my back.

It was Holden, wobbling downstairs: “Dan!”

I gripped the banister and craned my neck; from here I could see the red and green playing cards on the dining table. No Adelaide. If she wasn’t in the dining room or the living room, that left the backyard. Plus the patio where Kale had attempted his disastrous fire breathing stunt. Or maybe she—

Holden’s warm breath in my ear: “
Dan
!”

“Yeah?”

He took another swaying step downstairs, gripping my collarbone for balance. “I just . . . I just want you to know you’re my best friend.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

“And . . . whatever happens. Whatever you need. I’m here for you. I will
fight a demon
for you, if you ask me to—”

I grabbed his wrist and squeezed, a sort of drunk Roman handshake. His words were oddly prophetic. Oddly loaded. He hadn’t said this last time — in the original timeline of our New Year’s party, I’d remained upstairs with Kale while he dabbed his face and some smartass handed him a shot glass burbling with Fireball whiskey — but Holden’s words were real. The emotions behind them were real. Memories or not, this all felt
real
, somehow, and that gave me hope.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Holden lurched past. “I must go outside and seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pee in my boss’s birdbath.”

It wasn’t LJ’s birdbath. It belonged to a neighbor. Property lines are messy around Lake Paiute; houses, yards, and bark gardens blend together. But on that time-locked staircase I watched past-Holden leave, feeling a strange melancholy wash over me. A strange sense of heartbreak. This world had no idea what was coming. No year would ever be better than 2014. And it was almost over.

Upstairs, through a cloud of laughter. “THE JUDGMENT OF KALE WONG IS NOT SUFFICIENTLY IMPAIRED! BRING ME A DRINK!”

That was when I saw her.

She’d materialized in the living room, backlit by LJ’s fireplace full of candles. Suddenly, impossibly, she was just there. Like a
ghost
, if we’re being ironic. Maybe she’d stepped out from behind someone taller. Maybe she’d been in the guest bedroom, or kneeling behind the sectional couch to fidget with her heel. But if she’d been visible, I would’ve seen her.

I couldn’t have missed her.

4 Hours, 59 Minutes

Adelaide Lynne Radnor has a timid smile that flickers over her face like lightning. It’s there, and then it’s gone. Her eyes are big, open, alert; windows to a fierce intelligence. That’d been my first read on her, on that closed-off dock outside the Total Darkness Maze in Anacortes — this girl’s eyes were always open. She was always looking, scanning, calculating. Running contingencies. She always knew where she was. I used to marvel at how someone could appear so vulnerable — and so frighteningly smart.

She’d curled her hair in wisps. One bang slid over her brow and required constant, self-conscious adjustment. She wore a yellow sundress that she’d fidgeted with the entire drive here. The birthmark on her shoulder was visible; a brown, inverted C the size of a quarter. This was a big deal. She hated that birthmark. This was only the second or third time she’d ever worn clothing that revealed it.

The entire party moved, a shifting blur of arms and legs, spilling drinks, all grins and guffaws, but I stood still on that staircase, and she stood still by the fireplace loaded with candles, and we both saw each other at the same time.

She smiled — that cautious lightning flash.

I smiled, too — dumb and puppyish.

She was here. She was real. All of this was real, as sharp as nails. And nothing, not even the Gasman, could take this moment away from me.

“Did Kale set his face on fire?” she asked over the crowd.

Kind of a mood-killer, I know.

I don’t remember closing the distance. I just sort of freight-trained into her, squeezing her into a bear hug, and she entwined her fingers on the back of my neck as she always did. I was over a foot taller than her. She’d stand on her toes when we kissed. She smelled like perfume, shampoo, cigarette smoke from the patio outside. I felt her push into me, all soft skin and the fragile bones beneath, and realized she would be dead in forty minutes. Give or take.

“I love you,” I whispered into her hair.

“That’s nice,” she said. “But what happened to Kale?”

Her voice was both familiar and chillingly alien. Six years in the states and she’d still kept her angular British accent, as sharp and poised as she was. I’d thought I’d never hear it again, outside of the voicemails I kept on my phone. My eyes blurred with tears — she was warm, alive, generating heat and wit. I wasn’t imagining her. I’d tried, of course. I’d tried for weeks to relive our first meeting outside the Total Darkness Maze, where I’d taken her hand and guided her back through it (
Backward is forward
, I’d told her. How eerily right I’d been). But my imagination wasn’t fertile enough for the vivid details I marveled at now — the way she kneaded her fingers on the back of my neck, kitten-like. The way her blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, tickling my wrists. The way she pushed upright, angled her head back, and surprised me with a spontaneous kiss. White zinfandel on her lips.

She drew back and saw tears in my eyes. “Are you okay?”

I nodded.

“Dan—”

“I’m okay.”

“Is
he
okay?” She wrestled past but I held her. “What happened to Kale?”

“He’s okay,” I said, my voice coming in shallow breaths. “I’m okay, and you’re okay. Everything is okay right now.”

A brief window of expectant silence — the iPod was loading the next song. For a moment, the world turned unstable, and she looked at me, blinking, and I had to marvel at the IMAX depth of her eyes. Freckles of green on brown, melding in firework splashes of hazel. There’s no way I could be imagining this, or remembering this. It was too real.

Then the next song triggered — Green Day’s
Time of Your Life
. The song her parents had picked for her funeral slideshow. It knocked the wind out of me. It was a coincidence, but a coincidence you’d only notice from the future. Here we were, on the jagged edge of 2014, lovers out of time.

“Dan. What’s going on?”

“A SHOT OF
FIREBALL
?” Kale bellowed from the second floor. “WHAT IS THIS, FUCKING KINDERGARTEN? KALE WONG REQUIRES BOURBON!”

“Addie,” I whispered. “What day is it?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Answer me. Please.”

“It’s . . . December thirty-first.”

“What year?”

“2014.” She checked the ebony clock on LJ’s mantel. “For one more hour.”

“How’d we meet?”

“Halloween Fright Fest. October twenty-fourth. The Total Darkness Maze.” She smiled crookedly. “Backward is forward.”

Backward is forward.

Yes, yes, it really is.

“I have to explain something to you.” My mouth dried up. “It’s going to sound crazy, like an acid trip. I’m not sure . . . I’m not even sure if I believe it yet—”

An explosion thumped outside and I flinched. No one else did.

She looked at me.

It was . . . thank God, it was just pre-celebratory fireworks over the lake. LJ’s neighbors had a whole crate of illegal Indian reservation stuff on their dock. I remembered seeing it. So far, so good. The hollow report rattled through pine trees, and a fireball of orange and white bloomed outside the bay windows, embers sinking to the glittering water in slow motion.

She pulled in close. “What, Dan?”

Someone flicked off the living-room lights to better appreciate the show, and for a frightening second I couldn’t see her. It was irrational but it terrified me. She’d been gone almost three months, and I’d bent time and space to find her, and I couldn’t lose her again. I couldn’t lose sight of her, or she’d cease being real. She’d crumble to bones and dust. I squeezed her hand, all knuckles, a trembling promise. If this were all a dream to be woken up from, by God, I’d take her with me. Somehow. I felt her exhaled breath in the darkness, and her voice, rising with alarm: “What’s wrong?”

“You were dead,” I whispered. “I dreamt you were dead.”

“I’m right here.”

Another firework exploded over Lake Pauite, scanning the room with an X-ray of purple light. Shadows skittered across the carpet, raced along paneled walls and bookshelves lined with model battleships. I saw her face again, sharp as daylight, shadowed in incendiary violet, those scary-smart eyes locked on mine. She was so real.

“You ate breakfast?” she asked me.

“What?”

“You ate breakfast this morning. Right?”

Her question hit me between the eyes. I strained. From almost three months in the future, that was a tough detail to remember. “I . . . I think so—”

“This is life and death, Dan. How
sure
are you?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Bad dreams only come true if you talk about them before eating breakfast,” she said matter-of-factly in the sinking darkness. “So, nicely done. There’s a fifty-fifty chance you doomed me.”

That’s right. Addie never walked under ladders, opened umbrellas indoors, or shared a table with parties of twelve. Whenever she spilled salt, she threw a handful over her left shoulder. She was a mathlete software engineer who co-owned a pending patent, but she was also as superstitious as the Dark Ages. God, I love her.

I kissed the top of her head as two more illegal fireworks launched off the neighbor’s dock. Twin bursts of neon lit up the house. Then a white one, almost as bright as the sun, filled the living room with synthetic daylight. I saw stains on the carpet. In another instant, it was all gone, and I remembered LJ once telling me that as gorgeous as this house was, he’d gotten a hell of a deal for it, because the hill was limestone. In fifty years, give or take, it’ll slough into the lake. I could remember his toothy grin, inside his red Corvette pocked with cigarette burns, as he said:
But until then? Frickin’ gorgeous.

“How’d I die?” Adelaide asked me.

I didn’t want to talk about it.

The warmth drained from the room. I could almost feel it exhaling between us. The overhead light in the kitchen buzzed and dimmed orange, and everyone at the table squinted into their Apples to Apples cards. Something was already here, absorbing the energy from LJ’s lake house. I thought of parasites, suckerfish, leeches; slimy things that grip you, puncture your skin with needle-teeth, and suck. Addie moved closer to me, drawing in a breath.

“You feel that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe someone left the back door open?”

I held back a bitter laugh.
If only
.

Murmuring behind us. Doug, one of the show’s camera operators, complaining to his wife about a piercing migraine. A beer clanked against a glass coffee table; a nerve-jangling sound that rattled through the house. Another firework ignited the sky, flooding the room with a new color. Blood red.

She was looking at me. “Why? What else could it be?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I spoke softly, my words carefully spaced, like a surgeon delivering bad news: “We have to leave the party. We have to leave now.”

“Right now?”

“Yep.” I pulled her by the elbow to the foyer.

“Can you drive?”

Strange question, but I nodded.

“Good,” she said with a bashful shrug. “I can’t.”

I looked at her.

Outside, a string of firecrackers rattled like machine gun fire.

She cocked her head. “What, Dan?”

“How many drinks have you had?”

“You explain first. Why we’re leaving all of sudden—”

A ceiling light exploded in LJ’s kitchen, and the walls flattened the report into something like a champagne cork popping. The jingle of glass shards hitting the floor. Someone yelped and dropped a handful of cards.

In another fireburst of arterial red, I saw it in Addie’s eyes. A slight glaze. Only a highway patrolman would have detected it. She didn’t seem drunk — she never,
ever
seemed drunk, just sleepy — but it was there. She might have skated through a breathalyzer, but she wasn’t good to drive. Except she did. Twenty minutes later, to retrieve her cell phone charger from our house, five miles away.

The idiot who’d hit her? He was sloshed. It was New Year’s Eve — if you believe the PSAs, the entire highway system of Idaho was one booze-soaked bumper car arena. His pickup had barreled right through a four-way stop as she crossed it, less than a half-mile from our house, and rammed her driver-side door, concentrating the full kinetic force of the impact into the left side of Addie’s face and body. A hit like that, and airbags don’t even factor in the equation. The trauma doctor likened it to falling onto a cement sidewalk from a ten-story building. Even reduced to a turnip with a shaved head two floors above us, I’d always hated the guy, and quietly wished for a janitor’s vacuum to accidentally unplug his breathing machine. I guess I’d imagined him as this roving, destructive force, a two-ton meteorite powered by vodka, Red Bull, and stupidity, as impossible to anticipate as blue-sky lightning. I’d imagined there was no earthly way Addie could’ve avoided the grill of that truck racing toward her window.

But she’d been drinking, too.

The report had mentioned alcohol in her system, but I’d never seen the BAC or cared to find out. I’d assumed there’d be a trace amount, since I’d seen her sip a wineglass with her Cubek friends, Corey and Jamie, when we’d arrived at eight. But that was it. Adelaide was too smart, too responsible, too in-control, to drive drunk. Or buzzed.

So? They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. It isn’t.

She gripped my shoulder and I whiffed the fruity-aspirin smell of white zinfandel on her breath again. I guess that explained that. “Dan. You’re acting weird.”

I tugged her arm. “Come on.”

“It was just a dream—”

A woman screamed in the dining room.

It echoed off the bay windows, harsh as a buzz saw, shrill and utterly out of place here. It sounded prerecorded, like a radio sound bite. It couldn’t be real, but I knew it was. The crowd in the living room parted, arms and legs and elbows staggering backwards and dropping beers. Someone fell ass-first over an end table. A chorus of terrified gasps. The firework embers over the lake faded and for a moment the house fell into a perfect darkness. The kitchen and dining-room lights were both out, their electricity sapped. The candles in the fireplace, too.

The Gasman was inside the house with us.

I groped behind me, finding Addie’s slender wrist with one hand and LJ’s front door with the other. I pulled her but she planted her feet into the hardwood. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Oh
my God—”

She’d seen him.

Her night vision had always been sharper than mine.

Then a brilliant green fireball lit the house and I saw him, too. The Gasman was standing where the living room meets the dining room, silhouetted as a black shadow against sparkling green water. I saw everything — that tattered wool greatcoat, the pudgy skinhead boots, the bulging gear belt, that nonsensical gas mask. The dangling hose that connected to nothing. Here he was, a transplanted nightmare, a beer-bellied bottom feeder with a snouted face.

Addie panicked behind me. “Who is he?”