“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.”
10 Hours, 2 Minutes
I’d entered a coffee shop and ended up in a gun store six miles away. So, yes, this was definitely getting worse.
“I have it,” Not Joe said.
I jolted.
“I have it, I have it,” he echoed, ducking
into the back room to get something. I knew what it was. I knew exactly what he was talking about, because we’d had this conversation before. All of it. Even his annoyed grunt as I entered the store — “Well, shit” — because that was exactly what he’d said the first time. He knew I was here to pick up the Mosin Nagant that killed Mr. Dyson last year in Georgia. The creepy blood gun. Déjà vu didn’t even begin to describe it.
The jail-barred front door whooshed shut behind me, with JOE’S GUNS stenciled backwards on the glass. Under it, accompanied by a silhouette of a ghillied sniper shouldering his rifle: REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE. Outside, the blizzard was gone. No pelting waves of snow, no arctic winds. Just the same watery sky I remembered from Friday morning, dumping sporadic handfuls of slush. And my black Toyota Celica, now with no snow on the windshield, parked beside a blue Ford pickup.
This is time travel, I thought numbly.
Like wristwatches running backwards in the Kalash. I’m falling back in time—
Something clanked harshly on glass and I whirled, my throat tightening. Not Joe was back at the counter, setting the rifle on the surface. The Head-Scratching Rifle was once again bundled in its slimy, skin-like cocoon, because Not Joe couldn’t bring himself to touch it with his bare skin. Because, as he would shortly explain to me, it had just felt wrong, radioactive somehow.
At least there was no cat piss on it this time.
He looked up at me again. “You know what this is?”
Last time, I’d played dumb and said: An M44? This time I just hesitated dumbly on the spot, words lumping on my tongue. My brain was a squirming coil of loose thoughts.
Free-falling backwards in time . . .
Time travel is always so clean in movies — our heroes punch a precise time and date into their magic device and away they go. Like selecting floors on an elevator. It was never like this; sporadic, uncontrolled, like plunging down a dark shaft to an unknown dark floor. I tasted slippery terror. I’d already barfed in the bathroom sink at Jitters two hours in the future, but who knows how this worked? Maybe my stomach was full again.
“I asked you a question.” Not Joe pointed at the rifle with two fingers, hooked in an arthritic claw. “Do you know what this is?”
Oh, God, I sure don’t.
I’d thought I did. But I’d been wrong.
The rifle lay between us like a bagged corpse. Smeared with those gummy clots of yellow-brown sludge I knew all too well. I could smell it again, that familiar stew of yeast and insect musk, and under it — yes, maybe Holden had been right — the sharp stench of decay? Putrid flesh, souring and bulging with trapped bacterial gases. Had it been hiding from me before? How did I miss it the first time? More importantly, when was the first time? Like a snake eating its tail, time was a dizzying loop.
“It’s a blood gun,” Not Joe answered his own question.
“Yeah. I know. It’s killed someone.” This was a deviation from Friday’s first timeline; I’d jumped the dialogue forward a few beats and stolen his line.
He didn’t seem to mind. “Do I know you?”
I didn’t have time to recite the script. “What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty.”
I checked my cell phone: 4:01 a.m.
Yep. Time and space is still broken.
“I . . . I don’t want to buy the gun,” I blurted out. “I changed my mind.”
The air thickened between us.
Not Joe eyed me crookedly, like I was an alien wrapped in human skin. He was right to be suspicious; I was an imposter in this world of Friday, March 19. I looked the part, I sounded the part, I literally was the part, but I felt stranded on the moon. Wearing my body as a spacesuit. In the corner of the store, a fluorescent light buzzed like a hornet, then flickered and died.
“Just now?” he asked. “You changed your mind?”
I shrugged aimlessly and leaned on the counter, as chilly as lake ice. “Like you said. It just feels . . . wrong, somehow.”
He looked puzzled. “I didn’t say that.”
“Believe me, you did.”
If this really was time travel, I supposed wishfully, perhaps I could just rewrite the past here by not purchasing that damn thing and simply leaving the store empty-handed. Maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle would retcon itself out of my life. Like entering the Cretaceous period and stomping on the right butterfly — squish — and then I could stand back and let Ray Bradbury’s temporal physics do the rest—
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Sure?”
“But you still owe the transfer fee. To reimburse us for—”
“Deal.” I scooted my debit card across the glass. He punched buttons and tore a receipt. Thirty-nine dollars. I signed with a half-assed Nike swoosh and threw the pen down, glancing over at the rifle. “Done?”
“Done.”
“Transaction canceled?”
He nodded, making a sour face. “Something smells like cat pee.”
I wiped my hands on my jeans. I remembered that leering customer — the guy with cat piss on his breath who’d told me the story of Laika, the Soviet Union’s unlucky first cosmonaut — and wondered with a nervous tremor if that had been his breath after all. Time seemed to be porous; maybe odors seeped through. Was that even the first time I’d been here?
I stepped back, away from the Mosin Nagant on the counter. Technically, it wasn’t mine — not anymore — but that didn’t make me feel any better. Demonic evil probably doesn’t abide by Federal Firearms License paperwork. Somehow I knew with a grim certainty; I could flee Joe’s Guns right now and never look back, but the Head-Scratching Rifle would remain with me, its tendrils hooked inside me, its alien cells quietly multiplying in my brain like cancer.
I glanced up at a wall bristling with cutting-edge tech — P90’s, SCAR’s, F2000’s decked out with red lasers and holographic sights — and found it darkly amusing that the most dangerous thing in this room full of assault rifles was a wooden, single-shot clunker. Then again, I remembered, assault rifle is a misnomer. Adelaide had corrected me once, in this very same gun store: Those are just scary-looking semi-automatics, Dan. Real military “assault weapons” have fire selectors for automatic fire, and they’ve been illegal in the US since the 1930s. So when you hear people wring their hands about how we need to ban those evil “assault rifles,” it tells you that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Yes, she’d been a bit of a know-it-all. But her words stuck in my mind; an American gun nut with an oh-so-proper English accent. Sometimes I wondered if she ever felt like a cultural orphan, forsaken by both sides of the pond.
I shivered.
The temperature in Joe’s Guns was now plunging. I could feel the air change around us; a gathering chill that seemed to originate on the floor and rise in drafts. Cold pillows. Not as bad as the subzero heat-death of the Jitters parking lot, or the woods outside my house, but it was getting there. Fast. Like something else, something not of this world, was greedily siphoning the warmth.
I wondered: why is it always so cold?
“You look familiar,” Not Joe said, his breath fogging the air between us. “You on TV?”
I wasn’t listening. Something else had occurred to me, something monumentally terrifying. Just one sentence. But the most terrifying sentence I’d ever read, because now I understood its meaning. The last thing Ben Dyson ever typed on that sweltering July afternoon in Macon, Georgia, via a WordPress post on his laptop, seconds before blowing his face off with the cursed Mosin Nagant I’d so willingly introduced into my life.
SO COLD IN HERE.
Not Joe paused and looked over my shoulder.
As I turned around, my mind whispered: The ghost in the Soviet greatcoat. He’s here.
* * *
He was standing at the door.
Perfectly still, statuesque, as if he’d been out there for hours, peering eagerly into Joe’s Guns like a Black Friday shopper. Today’s milky daylight exposed every inch of him in crisp
detail. I’d been right; that greatcoat was definitely Russian military-issue, worn in patches to reveal tufts of decayed yellow. So was the leather-brown utility belt encircling his belly, bulging with flapped pouches, pockets, and a dirty oilcan. All things I’d only seen before in black and white.
He wore a gas mask. It encircled his head in flattened walls like a half-crushed beer can, and two round eye apertures gave it a vaguely insectoid look. The nose of the mask was protracted, snout-like, and from it dangled a flaccid air tube. About a foot and a half of corrugated black rubber, attached to nothing. It looked like the design of the apparatus — some antique trench-warfare thing designed to guard against mustard gas or blister agents — called for the breathing tube to coil around the cheek, into a goiter-like filter box on the neck. This creature was wearing the mask incorrectly, but it hardly seemed to matter. I don’t think it breathed.
And it was standing outside the door. Staring at us, through the jail-barred glass, right over the REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE sniper sticker.
I shivered.
Not Joe regarded the man in the gas mask with dull suspicion, like he’d seen much worse, and glanced at me. “You know this guy?”
My throat dried up.
“Hey. You know him?”
“Kinda,” I managed.
“You don’t kinda know someone. Yes or no?”
I hesitated — actually, this could be the literal definition of kinda.
“I think he’s here for you,” Not Joe said.
I remembered the poor homeless guy who’d hitchhiked three time zones just to hang himself upside-down from the Kalash ceiling with barbed wire. And his nonsensical final words to his buddies: Well, the Gasman has summoned me.
This was the Gasman.
He still held the severed upper half of Adelaide’s savannah monitor in one fist, like a toddler clutching a favorite toy. I recognized Baby’s front legs, her toe claws hanging limp. Several inches of bloody spine dangled from her torso, making her resemble a two-foot tadpole. With his other hand, the Gasman reached for the door.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 7