“I don’t know why,” she said. “But it still bothers me that they served lemon bars at my funeral. I hate lemon bars. I thought everyone knew that.”
“You hate a lot of foods.”
“Yeah, but especially lemon bars.”
Her parents had organized the service; they probably should’ve known. But they’d always been a mystery to me; a strange, aloof family that respected one another at a distance; never hugging or touching. Like human oil paintings. She’d confided in me once that she used to smoke as a teenager, in Birmingham, England, and it took her dear mom and dad two full years to notice. By then she’d kicked the habit but kept a reminder: a yellow Zippo lighter with Pac Man on the side. Always in her purse, just in case she decided to relapse. Or commit arson, I guess.
Our footsteps echoed up the grated stairs; a wobbling twang that rang up and down the tube-shaped building. It was almost musical, like a cat walking on piano keys. There was a handrail, but it was too loose and screechy to trust.
“So.” She followed me closely. “You bought the cursed rifle in February.”
“March.”
“After I’d been dead for three months.”
“Yep.”
“What was your plan? Point cameras at the rifle until it did something scary? You didn’t have live ammunition in the house, right?”
I smiled guiltily.
“Jesus, Dan.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“You basically deserve this, you know.”
Yes, I absolutely did, but assigning blame was unproductive now. I explained: “I kept one Mosin Nagant round and cannibalized the gunpowder from the others. So the one cartridge in the house was over-loaded. Explosive. So if somehow the rifle was actually haunted — which now seems to be the case—”
“Sure looks that way, huh?”
“Basically, I’d stop it. The gun would still kill me, but it wouldn’t survive to kill anyone else. That was my backup plan.”
Admittedly, most backup plans don’t end with you blowing yourself up in your house, but I’d never really planned on being right about the Head-Scratching Rifle. It was probably time to start worrying.
We passed a porthole window; we were halfway up the spiral stairs. The reverberation of our footsteps grew tinny, hollow, the way a passing ambulance siren changes pitch. I hoped the Deer Cap Dude was still up there waiting for us on the balcony. What if he’d been just an illusion, to lure us up here?
“Dan . . . that was so, phenomenally stupid.”
“It worked.”
“Well done. You found a horrifying, demonic spirit—”
“No,” I said. “I meant I found you.”
She smiled, embarrassed, and we climbed up a few jangling steps in silence. “That’s . . . very sweet, Dan. But you’re somewhere, alone, with that rifle. With a round of live ammunition—”
“An exploding bullet,” I corrected her.
“That won’t change anything, except maybe the kind of mop the paramedics will use when they find your body—”
“I think I already fired it.”
“You what?”
“Before the Gasman, right before time started running backwards. I saw my reflection in a mirror, holding the rifle to my chin like the other victims. I pulled the trigger, but it only clicked. The cartridge . . . well, it must’ve misfired. It made a weird underwater sound, like a burp. My exploding bullet was a dud.”
She stared, aghast.
“Yeah. I forgot to mention that part. Sorry.”
She was silent for another few steps, flicking her Maglite on and off absentmindedly. She kept building up to say something. It took her a few tries to get it out, her words a slow drip of icy dread: “What if . . . what if it wasn’t a dud?”
All I could do was shrug.
“Dan, what if the rifle fired, and you already killed yourself? You saw it in the mirror, and you already blew your head off in your kitchen? And this, all this ‘time-travel,’ is really . . . I don’t know . . .”
. . . The afterlife?
Limbo?
Hell?
What’s that cliché about your life flashing before your eyes when you die? Maybe it’s a slower process than that, more of a guided tour, like walking through your memories in reverse.
Or maybe this really was something darker. Maybe Hell isn’t a literal place with fire and sulfur and pitchforks — maybe it’s just the things we bring with us. Our negative feelings, our mistakes, our memories. Maybe Perdition is actually a black void, as inert and empty as the gulf of outer space, utterly removed from God, and we populate it ourselves. If so — man, I’d sure done my part.
Addie was still staring at me as we climbed, shaking her head. She looked utterly offended. “You dumb shit,” she snarled, her cheeks red. “Maybe my dad was right about you. When he told me that—”
“You killed yourself driving drunk,” I blurted out.
“I did not.”
“Just throwing that out there—”
“I didn’t do anything, Dan.” She grabbed my shoulder and halted me on the stairs, her voice a wounded hiss, her English accent intensifying: “Everything was status quo for me. I woke up on the morning of December thirty-first, we toweled up a gallon of wort in the kitchen, and we went to LJ’s party. I had wine with Jamie and Corey. You were upstairs, and someone said something about Kale lighting his face on fire, and then you came back down and everything changed . . .”
I don’t know why I was so upset about the driving-buzzed thing. It had already happened (or maybe it hadn’t) and it changed nothing. I had her back, somehow, and as previously stated, assigning blame is unproductive in a world where time runs backwards. I guess I just liked the narrative better when she was completely innocent, blind-sided by a white pickup, her head crushed by the whim of random, neutral chance. The truth is always so much more complicated.
We ascended the last few steps without speaking.
I checked the EMF meter, which held steady at fifty-six degrees, and peered back down the hypnosis-spiral stairs for any sign of the Gasman. So far, so good.
“I’m sorry,” she said as we reached the summit.
“Me, too.”
This is what we always did: Band-Aid up our fights with cheap apologies and move on. It feels nice, but the wound is infected underneath. It always resurfaces later. It reminded me that during this investigation — at the real Disappointment Bay Lighthouse in 2014 — I’d been sick of Adelaide. Grateful to be a state away from her. I hadn’t even called her that weekend; I just appeared in the driveway afterward and found her in the dining room, quietly cutting celery. She can have a coldness, an icy prickle to her voice, an evolved response to being female in an industry dominated by neckbeards. And as for her side? Well, I’m awful with showing emotions. Mental Tupperware.
Were we doomed, long-term? I’d always feared it. Years ago, we’d been at a state fair and a grease-painted clown had noticed us holding hands, and said something that lingered in my memory like a curse: Aw, how cute. But you’ll never make it.
“Let’s not fight,” Addie whispered. “Not now.”
I climbed the final step. We were inside a greenhouse of paned glass now, and outside it looped a circular balcony. Slick and beaded with condensation. The sky was deep blue and the Fresnel lens was now blinding; a caged sun in a kaleidoscopic dome of mirrors. Up close, it looked a little like a spaceship’s warp drive. I shielded my eyes and followed the rotating light as it swept along the outer handrail, a clockwise sweep . . . and splashed over the shoulders of the enigmatic Deer Cap Dude, standing by the edge. Still staring inland. Facing away from us.
I sighed. “Well . . . there he is.”
She nudged me. “Go.”
“Go what?”
“Go outside and talk to him.”
“Just like that?”
“You’re the pro.” She glanced fretfully down the stairs. “You always bitch about not finding ghosts. Well, here you go.”
<
br /> I exhaled through my teeth. Adelaide can sometimes be abrasive (we’ve fought about that, too), but here and now, she was absolutely right. This needed to happen fast; whatever this was. Somewhere behind us, the Gasman was gaining on us. I approached the floor-to-ceiling windows — like standing in an aquarium — and tapped my fingertips twice against the dew-splattered glass to get the ghost’s attention. He didn’t turn.
I knocked. Hard. The window creaked in its old frame.
Another sweep of light revealed the Deer Cap Dude was still facing away, blithely unaware of us, staring out into the darkening Washington coastline like a sentry in a guard tower. A visual echo frozen in time.
“Go outside,” Addie whispered in my ear. “Ghost hunter.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
She grinned, all teeth. “Just a little.”
I groped for the glass door built into the greenhouse wall — it had a cheap plastic latch, like the kind you’d find on a porta-potty. The entire pane swung outward, squeaking on hinges half-eaten by sea salt. Pacific air breathed over the lighthouse, flapping our clothes. I heard faraway waves pounding barnacled rocks. I took slow steps outside, my soles squealing on the wet grate. Slippery as oil. Through the gaps in it, I could see the cement walkway and mowed grass a hundred feet below. The mossy roof of the nautical museum.
I approached to within five feet of the apparition. I was about to tell Addie to stay back in the safety of the light room, but she was already behind me, one hand hooked to my elbow. The Beretta was in her other hand.
I cleared my throat. “Uh . . . hi.”
The Deer Cap Dude didn’t answer.
“Excuse me?”
Nothing.
I reached out and touched the phantom’s left shoulder. Just a touch, not a tap. I half-expected my quaking fingertips to just sink right through like a hologram, but no such luck. Apparently you can touch ghosts. The red and burgundy flannel was cold, and underneath it the man’s flesh was firm and solid. Like a block of ice.
The Deer Cap Dude still said nothing. A terrifying thought slipped into my mind — what if he turned around and revealed a bulgy gas mask?
Addie reconsidered: “Maybe we should go.”
But now that we were all the way up here, I at least wanted to see the apparition’s face. Maybe I was finally rediscovering my ghost-hunting courage. After all, we’d driven five hours and spent two days searching for the damn thing back in August, and all we had to show for it were a few EMF anomalies and Holden’s three stupid thermal blobs—
Oh my God.
I froze there in another pulse of light. My mind shuttered.
Three figures.
We were it.
Me, Addie, and the Deer Cap Dude. Standing here on the lighthouse balcony, the three of us had combined like puzzle pieces to form Holden’s ghost story. The thermal camera must have been recording us. His ever-hyped Exhibit A, which I’d always dismissed as warmed glass. I hoped I’d live long enough to hear him gloat about it.
I thought about freewill, predestination, the grandfather paradox (the one about going back in time and murdering your grandpa), and wondered what would happen if, right now, I raised a hand and waved. Would the universe rupture? Would I suddenly, magically, remember one of our captured orange blurs doing the same thing?
I lifted my arm to try—
But Addie hissed in my ear: “Okay, I was wrong. This was a bad idea—”
The Deer Cap Dude shuddered violently, head to toe, and made a squelching noise. I jolted backward, into Addie, nearly knocking her over. It was a wet, fleshy sound — instantly nauseating — like squeezing a fistful of cottage cheese and letting it spurt between your fingers. Suddenly my stomach was squirming, my skin crawling. Suddenly I didn’t want to see his face anymore.
Something clicked to my right. Addie had the Beretta aimed with knuckled hands. If she fired, the muzzle blast beside my ear would deafen me.
“Sorry,” I told the apparition, like I’d just bumped into him on the bus or something. “Sorry about that. We’re going now—”
The man shuddered again, harder, as though a thousand volts were surging down his spine. A full-body seizure, rattling the metal balcony under our feet.
“Okay,” Addie said. “He’s doing that now.”
“Yeah. Let’s leave.”
“Deal.”
We were just turning to go down the staircase when the Deer Cap Dude spoke to us. The voice was thick, strangled, inhuman, like swamp gas bubbling up through heavy mud, pushing blisters of air. And with it, the apparition delivered a message that transcended time and space:
“Dan Rupley, you’re a complete fuckin’ idiot.”
* * *
Addie stopped with her palm on the glass door. She’d heard it, too.
I turned. “What?”
For a long moment, the figure said nothing. The Fresnel lens rotated quietly behind us, throwing light and darkness in alternating waves.
I tried again: “What’d you say?”
Addie shrugged. “I heard him just fine.”
I guess I’d heard him, too; I’d just been expecting a different message. Did we really climb ten stories for this? I’d already been getting an earful from Adelaide, and now the ghosts had to give me shit, too?
Silence.
“He’s got a point,” Addie muttered.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I brought this upon myself when I bought a rifle that’s famous for killing people. I practically stuck my neck in the guillotine and now—”
“—you’re dead,” the Deer Cap Dude finished my sentence.
Silence.
I nodded. “Yeah. I was afraid of that.”
The ghost still didn’t look at us. His voice sounded clotted. And I detected a subtle southern twang — the contagious kind — that didn’t really fit the Pacific Northwest. He sounded like a guy who’d voice a bourbon ad on the radio.
I backpedaled. “Who . . . are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What day is it?” I asked. “Really, what day is it?”
“I don’t know,” the Deer Cap Dude said with a juicy, congested sigh. “It’s every day ever, and it’s the end of the world. If you’re here, it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m here,” Addie said. “And I never touched the stupid rifle—”
“She’s dead, too.”
“No.” She lowered her Beretta. “I don’t remember dying or anything. I went to a New Year’s Party, and then Dan came down the stairs and told me—”
“She’s dead, too, Dan.”
She raised her voice: “Hey, hillbilly. I’m right here.”
For some reason the Deer Cap Dude ignored her and spoke only to me, like I was the only one on that lighthouse. It was like buying a car. When we’d gotten her Mercedes, the hairy little salesman had talked over her and only to me, like Addie’s delicate female brain couldn’t comprehend the nuances of gas mileage. It had pissed me off.
BEEP. The EMF meter chimed.
“Why won’t he talk to me?” Addie hissed.
“Dan, she’s just in your head,” the phantom in a deer hat told me. “A chunk of your memory that you uprooted and dragged along with you. Think of her like . . . a goldfish in a plastic bag. She may look like your fiancée, and sound like your fiancée, but she isn’t real. She’s dust. She’s just your recreated memory of Adelaide Radnor, limited to the things you already know. And you’ll discover that, in time, when you realize she can’t offer any new information.”
“Fuck this guy.” She raised her pistol. “And his hat.”
That was an Adelaide-comeback: blunt but effective. Still, I saw tears glimmering in her eyes in the next rotation of light.
“No.” I stepped between them. “No, I know she’s real. Because I’ve already learned new information from her. I learned that the night she died at that four-way stop, she actually drove drunk—”
“Buzzed,” she corrected me.
T
he Deer Cap Dude’s voice lowered. “You already knew that, Dan. You just couldn’t admit it.”
“Bullshit.”
“She’s not real, Dan. Let her go—”
BEEP. The EMF meter chirped again, urgently. The air was chilling; the Gasman was approaching. Time was running out, so I asked the big question, maybe the only one that mattered: “How do we stop the man in the gas mask?”
“You don’t.”
Addie threw up her hands. “Well, great. This was productive.”
“You’re already dead,” the Deer Cap Dude told me. “You were dead the second you touched the rifle. But maybe you can disrupt its next meal—”
“Forget disrupting it,” I said. “I want to kill it.”
The ghost made that fleshy slapping noise again. This time, it sounded mocking, like a clucking tongue. A thick globule of something thudded to the grate at his feet. “You can’t kill it, Dan. Any more than you can kill bad weather, or poverty. It’s beyond your understanding. The best outcome — the absolute most you can hope for — is to maybe inconvenience it, piss it off, and save its next victim. Trust me. That’s as good as it gets.”
“What if we fight the Gasman?”
“Any weapon you can imagine would just be a three-dimensional solution to a five-dimensional problem.”
“Yeah? He seems to have trouble with one-dimensional doors.”
BEEP.
Now the EMF meter registered an ambient temperature of twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Nineteen. Eighteen. And under the breeze I heard a soft clicking downstairs, back on the lighthouse’s ground level. Low but impatient, like a cane tapping a floor. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but now I knew — it was that heavy door being stupidly jostled by the Gasman. He’d followed us, he’d caught up to us, and now, big door or not, he’d get in. He always did.
That was when I realized the depth of my mistake.
Addie gasped. “We’re cornered up here.”
Oh, shit.
The Deer Cap Dude made that squelchy tongue-slapping noise again. Amused laughter, maybe. Another dollop of something moist hit the grated floor.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Yes, I’d forgotten — the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse had no exterior stairs or access ladder. Just that dew-glazed spiral staircase we’d climbed, and that arched Middle Earth door the Gasman was currently pounding. We’d combed every inch of this site during our Haunted investigation; LJ had even dug up old thirties-era blueprints. There was no other route down. No other way to the blurring edges of this memory and into the next. We were trapped up here.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 13