“Nope.”
“Is he, like, the Grim Reaper?”
I remembered the Gasman standing dumbly outside Joe’s Guns, pushing a door clearly marked PULL. “God, I sure hope not.”
She was stuck on the idea. “I think he’s Death. Chasing us.”
I studied our cloaked pursuer and strained to find human features — exposed hair, ears, or skin — but the gas mask was airtight. The seven-foot walking figure was entirely sealed in plastic and wool, gloves and boots. As faceless and impersonal as a spacesuit, coming ever closer. Shambling at us at Romero zombie-speed — slow enough to lull you into dropping your guard, and steady enough to punish you for it.
“Creepy,” Addie said.
“Let’s go.” I took her hand and we ran together.
But over my shoulder I noticed — as he strode after us, the BullsEye’s overhead lights hissing and sparking out behind him — something didn’t seem quite right about the Gasman’s proportions. His legs were just a little too long; his arms just a little too short. Like a child’s drawing of a human body, where the biceps are longer than the forearms. Coming down the hall at us, it was a little like being chased by a fat man on stilts.
Addie stopped under the electric EXIT sign. “What happens if he catches us?”
“Nothing good,” I said, tugging her on.
We bolted out of BullsEye’s, and into . . .
* * *
. . . A log cabin.
“Leavenworth?” Addie gasped.
I slammed the solid wood door behind us. “Yeah. Oktoberfest.”
The cabin was tiny. We’d rented a one-roomer up in the Cascade Mountains last year with three of Addie’s work pals. Even without the beer, I don’t remember much of the weekend — just duffel bags, toothbrushes, and hair curlers crammed into every inch of shelf space. The morning after, Addie and I had stayed entwined under the sleeping bag, hiding our faces from the growing daylight in the windows, just our whispered breaths under the taut blue nylon, her eyelashes touching my cheek:
I have a theory, Dan.
Yeah?
They say that before the Big Bang, the entire universe was compressed into one single point. Right? All atoms, all matter, squished up together—
Here and now, Addie tugged my hand. “Which way?”
She didn’t yet understand — the direction wasn’t important. Any direction seemed to work. Any direction away from the Gasman. But I wished we weren’t being chased and we could stay here, in this cramped little cabin, in the aftermath of 2014’s Oktoberfest. I liked this memory. I liked what she’d said to me here under the sleeping bag, her hushed, sleepy hangover-poetry:
I think our atoms were together. Side by side, before the Big Bang happened—
The Gasman rattled the cabin doorknob.
So that’s why, through all our problems, all our fights, we’re always pulled back together. We share the same atoms, Dan. We’ll always . . . feel that pull, I guess.
“I can’t believe you never cried,” Addie huffed. “After I died.”
“We’ll discuss it later.”
I took her wrist and led her out of Oktoberfest, on and on, backward through our memories, shutting every door behind us. Overturning objects to block doorways, twisting locks wherever they existed. Anything to delay the Gasman, to buy us time. That’s what this was all about. Time.
“I think he’s Fate,” Addie said as we ran. “I think he’s—”
I kissed my dead fiancée before taking the plunge into the next unknown place. White zinfandel from New Year’s Eve still on her lips, her teeth chattering—
“Maybe he is,” I said. “Maybe he isn’t. But I sure hope the next memory takes place in the door section of a Home Depot.”
She laughed.
God, I’d missed that sound.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727
SENT: 9:11 a.m. Mar 20 2015
DAN ANSWER UR PHONE. Something is wrong I have a bad feeling about this.
3 Hours, 29 Minutes
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Holden told me as we unpacked the Haunted production van under a sky of puffy red clouds. Citrus energy drinks on his breath, his pale hair matted with sweat from the five-hour drive.
I helped him lift an Arri crate. “How so?”
“There’s just a . . . weirdness to that lighthouse. Like another dimension is pressing in from behind it. You don’t feel it?”
“Nope.”
From this parking lot we could see the (allegedly) haunted Disappointment Bay Lighthouse, towering over the nautical museum and keeper’s quarters. A stout pillar of painted brick, with a signal light caged behind dirty glass panes and wire handrails. It was banded red and white, like a hundred-foot barber’s pole. Somehow, in some intangible way, I’ll admit that it didn’t quite match the burnt sky or the clumped coastal evergreens around it. If this were a movie, I’d have sworn the lighthouse was CGI’d in. Maybe that’s what Holden had meant.
We set the crate on the curb with a leaden thud and the soft-box light jingled inside. Fun fact: of all the moving parts to a guerilla film shoot, the lighting is always the most expensive, the most time-consuming, and comes in the heaviest damn boxes.
“Dan,” Adelaide whispered. “When is this?”
“The Disappointment Bay Lighthouse investigation,” I told her. “You weren’t here. This is by Seaflats, Washington.”
“Yeah, but when?”
“August, I think.”
“Wait.” Holden wiped his brow. “How’d she get here?”
Addie smiled shyly. “Hi.”
“She carpooled with Kale,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s . . . yes. I definitely did that.”
Holden looked between us. “Kale’s van was full.”
“She sat in the back.”
“The back was full, too—”
“Magic,” Addie snapped. “I got here by magic.”
He shrugged and grabbed another box. “Whatever.”
Production was already racing at double time. Up a slope of fresh-cut grass, LJ, Kale, and our crew were in the museum lobby, clasping lavalier microphones and propping up tripods. It would be our command center, since the ground floor of the lighthouse was too wet and cramped. One assistant with an HD-DVC camera was already prowling the grounds for daytime cutaways, but I’d already seen the episode and knew none of it would make the final cut. His shot compositions sucked.
Addie looked out into the gray ocean. “Why’s it called Disappointment Bay?”
“Because it’s near Disappointment Beach.”
“Why’s it called Disappointment Beach?”
“Because it’s in Washington.”
Spoiler alert: our Haunted investigation wouldn’t find any actual ghosts tonight. Not for lack of trying, though. Holden would claim to hear spectral footsteps every five minutes or so, and Kale would be perplexed by an electromagnetic glitch that seemed to move up the spiral stairs. Plus, the thermal signature on the balcony that would become Holden’s Exhibit A for the next seven months — three panels of warm glass.
“I . . .” Addie chewed her lip. “Wait. I think I’ve heard of this lighthouse.”
“It’s famous.” I shrugged. “By lighthouse standards, at least.”
She snapped her fingers. “The Deer Cap Dude. Right?”
I nodded. Yes, the lighthouse (and the nearby eight-dollar nautical museum) was famous for a collective apparition known as the Deer Cap Dude.
Seriously.
According to several decades of local legend, the Deer Cap Dude was a middle-aged, pot-bellied figure in red flannel and a camouflaged hat who frequently appeared atop the balcony. He’d been spotted from the museum, the coastal hiking trail, and by the occasional trucker via Highway 101. Even once from the sea. It was always the same account — a black silhouette against the rotating light, with that signature ear-flapped hat giving his head a square profile, sitting or standing by
the handrail. Like he was waiting for something (and he’d been waiting for well over forty years now). A boarded-up tourist trap we’d passed down by the Shell station still had t-shirts in the windows that read: I Saw The Deer Cap Dude.
“Or, you know, it could just be an actual dude in a hunting cap,” I said. “Just throwing that out there.”
Addie smirked. “You’re no fun, Dan.”
I unzipped one of the duffel bags in the van’s back seat and tossed her a black flashlight. She caught it backhand. These were heavy Maglites with checkered steel bodies. You could club someone to death with one of these.
“What’s this for?”
“The Gasman,” I said. “When he’s close, lights burn out.”
She clicked hers on. Fiery blue-white.
I tossed her a black Haunted hoodie. “For the cold.”
“Thanks.”
I slipped one on, too. Mine was personalized; the back read RUPLEY in yellow stencil. I leaned back into the van and grabbed a smaller plastic box, popped the shoulder clasps, and pulled out an EMF meter. Like a little walkie-talkie, marked #3 with Sharpie on duct tape. Resisting a sick little shiver, I realized this was the same one Holden had brought to my house in March of 2015. To investigate the Head-Scratching Rifle. Seven months in the future.
“What’s that?”
“Electromagnetic field meter.” I showed it to her. “Also a directional thermometer. Anything more than a three-degree change, and it beeps.”
“Right, so we’ll know when the Gasman is close.” She checked the back of the production van and wrinkled her nose. “No proton packs?”
“What’s a proton pack?”
“Man, you really need to watch Ghostbusters.” She swung back out through the van’s sliding door. “I’m thinking self-defense. Weapons.”
“Not unless you brought any—”
She pulled a handgun from her purse. It looked comically oversized in her tiny hands. But I recognized it — the Beretta something-or-other she kept in a keypad safe under the bed. She must’ve snatched it from my memory of BullsEye’s. She smiled now, in a teasing way, like she’d just drilled another .40 caliber round between the vacuous eyes of Jar Jar Binks. Her Cubek friends called her Annie, like Annie Oakley.
“You’re such a showoff.”
“Just once,” she said. “I need to try shooting the gas mask guy. To see what happens.”
“Nothing. Nothing will happen.”
“I’m just saying, I’ve never shot a ghost before.” She stuffed the pistol back in her purse. “So, this is time travel?”
“I’m not sure.”
She watched Holden and Kale scurry uphill from the parking lot to the museum, hauling the last load of duffel bags and heavy light boxes. The sky was red now, slowly bruising blue as the sun dipped behind the ocean. “But we’re . . . what, six months back in time now?”
“I don’t think we’re rewriting the past or anything,” I said. “We’re just in my memory. My thoughts. My recollection of the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse—”
“And we’re going backward?”
I shrugged. “Backward is forward.”
She forced a sickly half-grin. Our little throwaway joke from the night we first met outside the Total Darkness Maze — now coming literally true. And for how long? I read it in her eyes; she was wondering what would happen when we ran out of memories for the Gasman to chase us through.
Instead, she asked an equally terrifying question: “What’s really happening? Right now, in the real world?”
I felt for my iPhone, but my pockets were empty. I must’ve lost it back during our merry chase. Whether you’re having a normal day or being pursued backwards through time by a nightmarish gas-masked demon, rest assured — that stomach-fluttery feeling you get when you lose your cell phone is still the same.
“Shit.”
Had I left it on the counter at Joe’s Guns? Not that it mattered. I was afraid of the answer to her question, too, and I only had a few jigsaw fragments of it. If my iPhone had been telling the truth, it was almost ten o’clock on Saturday morning now. Last I’d heard, 2015-Holden was struggling to contact me. And I couldn’t answer, because I was currently out time-traveling with my dead fiancée.
But in the real world?
It was Saturday morning, March of 2015, and I was alone in my house.
With the Head-Scratching Rifle.
“Uh, Dan?” Addie tapped my shoulder. “You guys never actually found any concrete evidence of the Deer Cap Dude, right?”
“Right.”
She pointed up at the lighthouse. “Well, uh . . . there he is.”
* * *
The apparition on the balcony didn’t move. It just stared a hundred feet down at us with both hands on the railing. Every ten seconds or so, the beacon swiveled behind him and turned him into a black silhouette. A human sunspot. A standing shadow wearing an unmistakable, ear-flapped hat.
“So far I’ve seen two ghosts,” Addie said behind me. “And they both have atrocious taste in headwear.”
It took me a second to grasp what she meant — I didn’t really see the Gasman as a ghost in the traditional sense. He was not human, certainly, but he was too real to be a phantom. He left footprints. Snow stuck to his coat. He punched down doors. He tore bodies apart and threw ears and teeth at us. He was too brutal, too material to be a spirit. And he was somewhere in the future behind us, a door or two back, drawing closer every second.
Meanwhile, the famous Deer Cap Dude just stared ten stories down at us. Neither interested nor disinterested. Just sort of there, motionless, like a JCPenney’s mannequin propped up atop the lighthouse, backlit by a rotating brightness. I guess he fit the description perfectly. He sure as hell wasn’t the Walking Deer Cap Dude.
I waved at him. No response.
I threw a rock. No response.
Addie reached for her Beretta but I stopped her. “No. Please don’t do that.”
I looked around the grounds to see if anyone else — Kale, Holden, LJ, or any of the crew or production assistants — had noticed the specter, but the team was indoors, busy consolidating equipment for the first huddle. I also checked the EMF meter. The temperature held steady at a realistic fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The Gasman was still trailing far behind us, for now.
Addie squinted at the museum, then the lighthouse. “Man, you guys suck at finding ghosts. He’s right there.”
“He wasn’t there last time.”
“Yeah? We should go up to him,” she said abruptly, eyeing the EMF meter in my hand. “While there’s still time.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” She shielded her eyes from the turning light, which felt brighter as the cloudy sky darkened. “Come on, Dan. I thought you were a ghost hunter.”
“Yeah. On TV.”
“Well, ta-da! There’s a real ghost.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to go up there — not with the Gasman still chasing us.
“Come on,” she said. “He looks friendly.”
“He looks like he should be haunting a Big 5.”
She stepped back and missed the curb, catching herself against the van’s taillight. She brushed her hair from her face with a palm. “Wow. I think I’m still tipsy.”
“Tipsy?”
From the New Year’s Eve party, I realized. A half-year in the future. She still had the leftover remnants of the buzz that might’ve killed her.
I was still furious about that. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and yell at her. I’d never seen her drive impaired before, but I guess she’d picked a bad night to try it. It couldn’t have been much wine, but maybe that was all she would have needed — an extra tenth of a second or so — to react to the incoming pickup. Not enough to avoid the wreck altogether, but enough to flinch away and brace, maybe, so her head wouldn’t have whiplashed into the truck’s grill through a hail of shattered glass. Enough to survive.
But what did that matter here and now? I wondered if
she’d ever sober up or if the alcohol would linger in her forever, held captive in her Mobius strip of a bloodstream. How much longer could all this last? How many train cars left, until I ran out of memories? And when I did, the Gasman would corner us, and we’d be forced to draw a line, make our stand, and fight. I didn’t anticipate that going well.
That settled it. Maybe the Deer Cap Dude would speak to us. Maybe he’d kill us. At the time I called it a calculated risk, but it was really closer to desperation. We were screwed if we couldn’t learn something here.
She looked at me. “We’re doing this?”
I tested my Maglite. “Lock and load.”
She reached into her purse and racked the slide of her pistol. It click-clacked like a deadbolt, jingling amid makeup, keys and receipts.
“Jesus, Addie, I didn’t mean literally.”
“Don’t be so specific with your figures of speech, then.”
3 Hours, 20 Minutes
We approached the lighthouse’s arched oak door — it looked like leftover set design from Lord of the Rings. Holden, Kale, and LJ didn’t notice us pass the museum, and even if they had, we looked the part with our Haunted hoodies and Maglites. A second camera operator prowled the grounds now for exterior shots, and she paused to film Adelaide and I entering, and then panned up the red and white brick for an ominous Dutch angle against a darkening sky. Nice.
The big door closed behind us.
The Disappointment Bay Lighthouse felt like a cave — chilly, damp, dripping. Every surface was beaded with raindrops. You could feel the mildew growing on your skin. Falling droplets echoed strangely against the walls, like sonar pings. Above us, the spiral staircase — a creaking iron latticework — seemed to climb up and up forever.
Adelaide looked at me. “Like you remember?”
“Exactly.”
Every detail was the same. Rubber galoshes and a yellow coat by the door. A radio desk with rumpled nautical maps, binoculars, and headphones. A Dell laptop, wrapped in a freezer bag. Every bizarre sound and musty, dripstone odor was exactly as I recalled from our investigation. Everything except the Deer Cap Dude, who was hopefully still waiting for us up top.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 12