My headache had intensified, but any more ibuprofen might burn a hole in my stomach lining. And my right thumb still ached under the scotch-taped bandage — but that had been just an unlucky fumble. Nothing paranormal about dropping a gun.
“We each put our fingers on the planchette,” Holden said. “Like this.”
You’re supposed to stare at the Ouija while you operate it, but I just glowered over the table at that stupid rifle, wishing it would suddenly move, or slimy ectoplasm tentacles would sprout from it. Something. Anything. Even more than that, I was wishing I hadn’t poisoned myself with false hope.
Come on, Head-Scratching Rifle.
Do something scary.
I’m waiting.
Holden explained that his grandmother’s board was an Icelandic type called a mirror board, because it allegedly existed on multiple planes of reality at once (good luck proving that to the Better Business Bureau). Really, that’s just a fancy way of saying it functioned like an eighteenth-century walkie-talkie. You spell out your message on the board, and then you move the token to the TURN in the center. That means you’re ready for the spirit, on another realm of existence, to move the planchette and answer. Like ending a radio transmission with over.
“She was a really good phone psychic,” Holden assured me.
I nodded again. “Okay.”
Gently pushing the planchette in unison, we agreed upon and sent our first message to the world behind this one, initiating contact with the entity that inhabited the Head-Scratching Rifle.
HELLO?
AREYOUTHERE?
PLEASESIGNALYOURPRESENCE.
We had no idea what would happen in the next hour . . .
* * *
Again, absolutely nothing.
“God-freaking-damnit.”
We were both exhausted now. Two home-brewed porters sat half-gone on the tabletop between us. Shadows under our eyes. It was well past midnight, technically Saturday now, and I knew he’d have to leave soon so he could hit the park-and-ride for Bozeman early in the morning.
I bent the playing cards and sprayed them, chattering, into the air. Holden jolted in his chair; he’d almost fallen asleep.
Cards click-clacked onto the table. One landed in the Mosin’s bolt, sticking upright, oddly perfect. For some reason it reminded me of the time Holden and I were teenagers — long before meeting Adelaide on that dock — and practicing that Starsky and Hutch hood-slide move on his old Honda Accord. I’d ripped a button from my cargo pants and left it wedged in the seam of the vehicle’s hood, perfectly upright. We’d laughed hysterically. What’re the odds?
My world had lost a lot of its magic since then. I rubbed my eyes.
Holden squinted at me. “Why’s it so hard to believe in ghosts?”
I didn’t answer.
“I know . . . the thermal signature at the lighthouse might’ve just been a glitch, or warm glass.” He plucked the card from the Mosin’s bolt — a Four of Hearts. “But the reasoning behind ghosts? It’s solid, Dan. Millions of people have seen them, across cultures, across centuries. Even if you haven’t, personally. Why can’t you just . . . allow yourself to believe?”
“I don’t want to believe,” I said. “I want to know.”
Silence.
“Okay,” Holden said. “Fine. Screw it. Let’s be hypothetical and say ghosts aren’t real, and Addie’s really gone. And what we call souls is really just energy. And when we die, that energy just . . . scatters, like a shotgun blast of atoms, into a lonely universe of dead stars, and Adelaide is really gone and you’ll never see her again. Ever.”
I couldn’t look at him. I stared at the cursed rifle on my dinner table and pushed the Ouija planchette, hurling idle stones into the void:
HELLO?
HELLO?
BUELLER?
“If that’s the case, Dan, if that’s true — it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still here.” He leaned forward into the light and his voice softened, nearly pleading. “Your life is happening, right now. You’re here. She isn’t, but you are.”
A playing card fluttered to the floor.
Something about his words shot a chill down my spine. I glanced at my own reflection in Adelaide’s gothic little wall mirror and remembered — I was growing older and she wasn’t. Eventually I would be thirty and she would be forever twenty-five. She wasn’t a person anymore; she didn’t age like us. Someday I’d be an old man and even if an afterlife existed, even if I could somehow find her address in Heaven and be reunited with her eternal soul after death — would she even recognize me?
Holden’s voice broke. “Dan, I’ve been praying for you every day. I’ve been asking God so many times, in so many ways, to help you through this. And I’ve had to watch you go to shit before my eyes, and cut ties with your job and friends, and I don’t know how to help, and God’s not telling me anything.” He sighed. “That’s hard for me, Dan.”
I nodded.
For a long moment we sat in silence, sipping our porters. They’d been home-brewed in November; the last complete batch Adelaide and I had made together. We were drinking beers brewed by a dead woman.
I finished mine and decided that my best friend was right. Self-pity is easy, but motion is hard. And motion is life.
I needed to move on.
So I’d start boxing her things tomorrow. I knew her parents were planning to fly in from the UK sometime next month to take what they wanted, and then I’d give away whatever remained. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them again. Her father had always resented me for not finishing college like Adelaide, not making eighty grand a year like Adelaide, and for calling him out on those two things one awkward Christmas in 2011. Some people are gifted at reading maps, some are natural chefs — my talent is ruining Christmases. I’m a man with very particular skills.
Photos, too. I would archive every image from her phone. Ditto for her work laptop. Everything on her Facebook page as well, which had already staged a digital funeral in January and would now only see a slow trickle of remembrance on birthdays and holidays. You could almost see the electronic cobwebs forming. And as for Baby? I hoped Adelaide’s parents would ask for custody of that five-foot salmonella carrier, but they probably wouldn’t. I wondered: is it illegal to drive up to White Bend, open the passenger door, and let a five-foot African savannah monitor loose in the wild? If so, how illegal?
Still, it was progress. Forward motion. Maybe this stupid failed ghost hunt was it — my turning point — and after nine weeks of doggedly attacking rock bottom with a ten-ton excavating machine, I had no choice but to move forward and resume being alive.
I helped Holden pack up our equipment and load the backseats of Dora the Explorer. The Ouija board took the passenger seat. But he halted abruptly in my front doorway. One more thing, whispered through gritted teeth: “Dan.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m taking the rifle, too.”
I understood; he didn’t want to leave me alone with a firearm and an exploding bullet. But I didn’t want him alone with it, either. It didn’t matter. He gave me no time to argue. He doubled back into the dining room to grab the Mosin Nagant . . . and instead ducked into the kitchen pantry to pick up something else.
A broom.
I thought he was joking at first.
But he carried the red broom outside to his car. Carefully, with both hands, conscious to keep the handle aimed skyward, like it actually was a firearm. I followed in surreal silence, hairs prickling on my arms. The night outside was frigid, gray with shadowless starlight. Gravel crunched underfoot. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. We reached Dora the Explorer. He was really drawing out the joke.
It was now almost one-thirty a.m. March 20.
I watched him delicately place my broom in his trunk, shut it, and then we exchanged our goodbyes — I can’t remember our exact words. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I kept waiting for him to reveal that it had been a tasteless joke. It felt like a joke. It had to be
a joke. But he closed his door. Twisted the key. Gunned the engine. And then Holden Hume drove home with my kitchen broom in Dora’s trunk, his headlights splashing down the driveway, his taillights fading into the darkness like a pair of spectral red eyes.
Leaving me alone.
With the real Head-Scratching Rifle.
11 Hours, 59 Minutes
It was still on the dining table.
I lingered at the edge of the kitchen, my fingertips gripping the countertop. Half-fascinated, half-horrified. Without thinking to, I’d stood with my body shielded behind the lower cabinets, like the rifle was emitting radiation. Not Joe had voiced a similar sentiment, earlier that day: Being near it takes away a piece of you.
I cleared my throat, shattering the silence.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “You’ve got my attention.”
I gave the rifle a few moments to respond before considering how crazy that was. But I knew — it had chosen to stay with me. Like a sentient creature, the Head-Scratching Rifle had understood Holden’s intentions and exerted a subtle force to stay in the house. The same way it had forced Nikolai What’s-His-Name to misremember its serial number. It seemed to want me, which was at once exhilarating and terrifying. I should’ve left the house then and there. But, who knows — would it have allowed me to?
“What are you?” I asked.
No answer.
The air curdles around it. Like milk left out in the sun—
“Hey. What happens now?”
I tried to think logically, untainted by the supernatural. But Occam’s razor didn’t really work here. There was zero chance of Holden just coincidentally confusing a broom for a Soviet battle rifle.
I shivered and felt goosebumps rise under a layer of icy sweat. I heard a low creak somewhere in the kitchen — a floorboard, maybe, flexing in the changing temperature — and it was instantly gone.
Silence.
“You stayed with me,” I spoke to the empty kitchen. “Here I am.”
Nothing.
Why do I keep expecting it to speak?
Habit, I guess — on Haunted we’d spend hours calling out to cobwebbed ballrooms and rusted-out hospital wards, politely asking spirits to manifest themselves for our thermal cameras and EVP microphones, but standing alone in my kitchen while addressing an inanimate object felt different. Crazy, even.
Then again, so was spending four hours playing a kids’ go-cart racing videogame by myself. That’d been last Sunday, when I drank too much and exhumed Addie’s childhood Nintendo 64. Stored on the dusty cartridge were her high scores on every racetrack. The game saved the fastest lap time as a semi-transparent ‘ghost’ that you could play against — so I’d seized the opportunity and raced my dead fiancée up and down twenty-four candy-colored racetracks. Until a heart-wrenching moment after midnight, when I’d noticed that her racer’s silhouette seemed to mimic my driving more than hers, and I’d realized that if you ‘beat’ a top time, you overwrote the ghost. I was the new ghost.
On every single track, I’d erased her.
And—
I heard that creaking sound again. Much louder. It wasn’t a floorboard. It was biological. Like bones bending under mummified skin. A chorus of slow, groaning croaks; a multi-limbed, spiderlike body of joints and kneecaps carefully untangling itself. It was in the room with me.
I’ve had these moments before on-camera — these fight-or-flight pauses when you suspect you really are sharing the room with an unknown entity. It’s an addictive rush. Our Haunted mantra was the three S’s — stop, stay calm, and see (Holden used to joke that there’s a fourth: shit your pants) — so I held my breath, swallowed my heartbeat, and like a lighthouse, scanned a wary three hundred and sixty degrees. Inch by cautious inch. The tabletop with the Mosin Nagant, the red-tipped bullet, and the homebrews I’d drunk with Holden. The glass patio door. The slab counter, covered with printed research and a potted ball cactus. Behind me, the empty kitchen. The sink, the dishwasher. My own reflection on Adelaide’s horn-rimmed mirror. Then the pantry door, the fridge, the whiteboard—
Wait.
I froze like an ice sculpture. The lights flickered.
Wait-wait-wait—
My eyes tracked back to the mirror. To my reflection. It was holding the Head-Scratching Rifle.
That’s interesting.
I blinked and glanced into the dining room. The rifle was still on the tabletop.
I looked back.
My reflection still held it, now carefully pivoting the thing in a slow, baton-like twirl. Muzzle aimed upward. Paralyzed, I watched myself lean forward and extend my chin so I could nestle the black barrel under my jaw. Just like Ben Dyson, I realized as my stomach turned. Just like that poor gunsmith in his workshop in Macon, Georgia, seconds before peppering his laptop with red-salsa chunks.
The chandelier flickered twice.
My doppelganger was already reaching for the rifle’s trigger. And I — the real Dan Rupley — was standing empty-handed in my kitchen, staring in agape silence, my thoughts unrolling in panicked tugs: I must’ve fallen asleep.
In the stuttering light, I watched my own thumb slink into the rifle’s safety guard. My knuckle bent ninety degrees. The gauze-wrapped wound burst open, leaking a hot dollop of blood down my wrist—
This is a dream. I’m dreaming.
And my thumb kept bending, and hooked around the trigger and tightened, squeezing it—
This isn’t—
The rifle fired.
THWAP.
A strange, slurping sound. Like a silenced pistol in a Bond movie. I flinched, and a bead of sweat tapped the floor, but my duplicate in the mirror remained unharmed and monotone, gripping the rifle with two hands. What had happened? No explosion. No blood splatter. No real gunshot, even. Just that bizarre misfire, like a firecracker detonating underwater, no louder than a child’s cap pistol—
Then the chandelier went out, dropping the room into darkness.
And a prickly voice spoke behind me:
“Front door is ajar.”
Part II
A TRAIN OF THOUGHTS
. . . Less than a day afterward, Arkady was seen crouching at the bottom of a steep berm. Witnesses described trance-like movements as he removed the Mosin Nagant’s bolt and checked the barrel for obstructions. He studied every inch of the weapon, inside and out, even applying careful blots of oil here and there, before inserting a round, pressing the weapon under his chin, and pulling the trigger.
Three of the four confirmed victims killed themselves in view of others, and all witnesses described this same, eerily ritualistic “safety check” before death. Like a supernatural force was guiding each man’s fingers, first ensuring that the gun wouldn’t damage itself while firing. It’s particularly telling that all victims died crouching over snow, carpet, or insulation . . . a yielding surface for the rifle to land upon.
Excerpt from “Cursed Objects of the New Century” (W. Louis), Haunted Inn Press, 2002.
11 Hours, 53 Minutes
The security system repeated: “Front door is ajar.”
I couldn’t see the door from where I was. I could hear the outside air, though — the deepened ambience of the forest — and felt the chill of the night creeping through the empty house. The doorknob tapped the wall once.
I looked back at the mirror. It now showed only darkness; my doppelganger had left the frame.
The kitchen was pitch black.
It had happened so quickly. It wasn’t just the chandelier; all of the lights were off now — every last one of them — and I didn’t remember switching them off. Despite that, and despite witnessing my own attempted suicide in the mirror, my mind darted to the mundane and took shaky refuge there. Maybe . . . maybe I’d imagined everything? And the front door had been opened by the wind?
It wasn’t windy. Through the window above the kitchen sink I saw paper birch trees standing in darkness beyond the overgrown lawn, pale ghosts with blistered trunks. The branches w
ere still, rigidly fixed, like models on a train set. I crept two paces toward the fridge, to the mouth of the kitchen, and from there I’d be able to see the front doorway. I flattened one palm on the cold wall, feeling my heartbeat in my skin, and peered around the corner.
The front door hung wide open. Doorway empty. Darkness outside.
And I heard footsteps.
Heavy, ponderous footsteps already inside, scuffing on hardwood and softening on carpet. From the other side of the house. As though whoever had pushed open the front door had taken an immediate right, passed in front of the stairs, and walked into the living room. I’d missed them by a second. My blood turned cold.
Someone is inside my house.
I exhaled through my teeth. Cold air came down the hallway and licked my face. The footsteps continued through the living room at a comfortable pace. This intruder was in no hurry, and felt no need for stealth. Even on carpet, the footfalls sounded creaking and leathery. Stiff boots, maybe.
This wasn’t an apparition. This was a real person, wearing real boots, inside my house. And it wasn’t Holden. My first thought was to call 911 — but we had no landline and my iPhone was on the coffee table, in the living room, with my undocumented houseguest. My second thought was Adelaide’s gun safe. Upstairs, under our mattress. The keypad combination was 1024, the date we first met outside that Total Darkness Maze. I considered bolting for the stairs, swinging a hard left around the banister, and racing for that safe — Addie kept a Beretta something-or-other for her range club — but it was unloaded, with a manual safety and a de-cocking lever and a bunch of other crap I wouldn’t remember how to operate. Moving upstairs would also make a lot of noise, so I decided it would be my last resort. If all other exits were compromised—
I realized the footsteps had stopped.
“Front door is ajar.”
I clutched the corner with both hands, head low, listening. The intruder was still in my living room, but he’d stopped walking. He must’ve found something of interest.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 5