So far, I was really living up to the Deer Cap Dude’s assessment of me.
“What does it matter?” Addie whispered in a blaze of harsh light. “What does it matter, if we’re both dead?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
BEEP. Ten degrees. I noticed the moisture on the handrails was hardening into pale veins of ice. Frost fractals crept up the glass panes encircling the light. They creaked and groaned.
“We’ll get out of this,” I said. I’m a horrible liar.
But that wasn’t even the part that bothered her. She sniffed, checking her own reflection on the glass. “I’m real, right?”
“You’re real.”
“I’m not imaginary,” she repeated to herself. “I have a soul. I’m real—”
I kissed her forehead. A window shattered, startling us, and dumped a shower of shards onto the grated floor. Some of them slipped through and seemed to fall forever, glinting in the blackness like stars. The Pacific surf below us sounded crunchy, and I knew the waves were freezing solid with the Gasman’s arrival. Scales of sea ice, crackling and breaking on the shore.
The storm door splintered downstairs. Chunks of wood crashed down to the cement. The sound roared up the lighthouse and the handrails vibrated.
I looked back at the ghost, holding Addie under my shoulder. “Fine,” I said. “How do I . . . how do I help the next victim?”
“Are you sure you’re even committed to this?” The Deer Cap Dude burbled through what sounded like a mouthful of maple syrup, and another window broke above us, peppering him with chattering pieces. “You obviously wanted to die. Out of dozens of victims, you’re the only one who actually sought it out—”
“Just tell me.”
Downstairs, the door crashed down. In seconds I knew we’d hear those terrible footsteps, echoing up the spiral stairs . . .
“This thing is . . . well, on its own, it’s deeply stupid,” the Deer Cap Dude said. “I don’t know exactly what it is. But it grows like fungus, like mildew. An infection that learns. And it needs a host. It can’t create. It only knows how to eat and sustain itself . . . and put its long, dirty fingernails inside minds and dig up what it finds. Everything it knows is second-hand. It knows this lighthouse only because you do. It was never here in Seaflats, Washington. Only you were. What do you think would happen if you went to a part of the building that you hadn’t visited? Do you think the parasite that lives in the Head-Scratching Rifle has the imagination . . . or even the intelligence . . . to fill in the blanks?”
CLANG. CLANG. The Gasman’s footsteps, coming fast.
Addie squeezed my arm.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve seen every square inch of this lighthouse—”
Except—
There was, in fact, one part of the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse that the entire production crew had been prohibited from entering (insurance reasons, I think). One tiny space, up here atop the circular summit. A painted-over chain of ladder rungs led up the greenhouse of glass panes, up to a little crow’s nest or something atop the domed roof. A slippery, suicidal climb. I didn’t know exactly what was up there — and that meant the Head-Scratching Rifle didn’t, either. We’d escape the tower.
They were my memories, after all. The Gasman was only a guest here, exploring them on the fly. A five-dimensional entity clumsily navigating my three-dimensional recollection of past events. It was a little empowering.
“Okay,” I said as another window broke. “That’ll work.”
Addie looked at me. “What’ll work?”
I circled the structure and found those ladder rungs with my Maglite — jutting L-shaped handholds, like the things electricians use to climb telephone poles. These were painted white and encrusted with bumpy ice, raised into hard blisters.
She rolled her eyes. “If we can climb it, so can he.”
“Trust me, Addie.”
CLANG. CLANG.
She stuffed her Beretta into her purse and went up first, her boots squealing on the slick surface. An arctic chill raced between us, whipping the edges of her dress taut. It slashed my face and my eyes, a scalding coldness. My ears ached. Instant frostbite.
The Deer Cap Dude clucked: “She’s not real, Dan. Why let her climb first?”
“Shut up.”
I followed my fiancée up the rungs, one handhold at a time. The bars clicked and wobbled on loose rivets. Another window blew out and peppered us with glass, and Addie yelped, covering her face.
The lighthouse’s Fresnel lens made a hellish grinding sound — like a car out of oil — and stopped swiveling, as if the moisture in the gears had frozen it in place. It now spotlighted the ghostly Deer Cap Dude where he stood by the railing, still not turning to face us. He didn’t seem bothered that the Gasman was coming up the stairs. Maybe they were old drinking buddies. Another gust of wind flapped his jacket and lifted his hat a few inches. I caught a teasing glance of bristled gray hair. And . . . something red and glistening.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I shouted down at the thing as I climbed. “How do I save the next victim?”
“I can’t . . . tell you exactly how.”
Addie sneered. “Of course he can’t.”
“It’s listening. It’s in your mind now. Learning what you know. Any conventional plan would be like trying to beat yourself at chess.” The Deer Cap Dude paused thoughtfully, bubbles rising in his voice. “So instead . . . I left you a clue. So you’ll recognize your chance when it comes, and seize it, before it can stop you—”
“What’s the clue?”
“Remember your trunk? Coffee house parking lot. March.”
My mind fluttered back to Jitters. I recalled leaving Holden at our table, venturing out into the random blizzard, popping the trunk of my Celica, picking up the Head-Scratching Rifle. The shock and disgust of discovering moist clumps of cat litter sticking to the wood and metal. The sharp odor. The . . . the Kitty Roca rattling in the barrel.
I paused. “Cat shit?”
“Good. You found it.”
“The clue is cat shit?”
The Deer Cap Dude turned to face us just as the Fresnel lens fizzled out in a crackle of blue sparks, and the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse plunged into complete darkness. I glimpsed his face for a fraction of a second, but it was enough.
His cottage-cheese voice: “It’s got all the time in the world. You don’t, Dan.”
His face was a concave, blown-out shell, as if a firework had gone off behind his sinuses. His scalp was peeled like the blossoming of an awful, meaty flower. No eye sockets, no forehead, maybe a hint of a nose, but crushed off to the side in a chunky-salsa-tangle of cartilage. No upper jaw remained. But his lower jaw was intact, his white teeth and chin protruding to form a Neanderthal underbite because there was no face to compare it with. I saw a pink tongue nestled in his half-ruined mouth, and recognized the slapping noises we’d heard. Another chunk dropped to the grate, and I realized—
Ben Dyson.
Ben “SO COLD IN HERE” Dyson. The rifle’s second American victim after it had been imported stateside. The WordPress-blogging gunsmith from Georgia who, without warning, stuck the Mosin Nagant under his chin and blew his face all over his workshop on that scorching August afternoon.
The Deer Cap Dude was Ben Dyson. Or maybe Ben Dyson was the Deer Cap Dude. Time was a hairball. Had I seen a blood-soaked hunting hat on the floor in one of those fuzzy photos? When had the narrative even begun? The sheer weight of it came down on me like a rockslide.
It’s listening.
“Dan,” Addie urged above me. “Keep climbing—”
But I froze there, clinging to the rungs. Guts heaving. It made no sense at all.
It’s in your mind.
CLANG. CLANG—
“Dan. The Gasman’s coming—”
Somehow I forced myself to keep going. Up, up, up. One warty rung after another, so frigidly cold they felt searing hot. My hands froze to the metal, suctionin
g free of every bar with a dry, tearing Velcro sound. Like licking a frozen pole. I flinched at a flare of hot pain on my left palm, and then a sticky snap. I’d left a postage stamp of bloodied skin on that one. No time to stop.
It knows what I know.
My mind was racing. I don’t think I really grasped the true malevolence of this thing — attached to this bolt-action rifle that came to me in an oily skin of plastic, reeking of centipede musk and yeast — until I personally witnessed what it had done to Ben Dyson’s face. That made it real, somehow. No censor pixels here. Evil is just a word. But faces are personal. And this gun destroys them.
And it would be mine next. For maybe the first time since I’d lost Adelaide, I experienced true existential terror. I was utterly screwed. I was trapped in the orbit of a gangrenous evil that existed outside of time; it was already rooted in my past and future. I was already dead, and it would keep killing, passing from corpse to corpse on the American gun market like an invisible predator. An unstoppable cycle of violence.
Unless I could decode the riddle of Ben Dyson’s secret message.
A goddamn cat turd.
Last rung. Addie grabbed my wrist and tugged. I kneed up onto the lighthouse roof, groping blindly in the freezing darkness. I expected rough tile, or coned roofing, or whatever the hell the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse roof was built of. Because I didn’t know what this little crow’s nest looked like, and neither did the Head-Scratching Rifle, and that meant we weren’t on top of the lighthouse at all.
As we slipped into the next memory, the Deer Cap Dude’s wormy voice rattled up from below: “Leave your imaginary Adelaide behind, Dan. Let her go, or the Gasman will use her against you—”
“Dan,” she breathed, gripping my arm. “It worked.”
Sent: 3/19 6:09PM
Sender: LJ@haunted
Subject: OMFG!
Hey Dan-O,
Holden tells me you found the ancient Soviet Head-Scratching Rifle of Infinite Sadness or whatever it’s called. Nice detective work, man. So drop by Ferguson and we’ll chat about maybe doing a segment on that haunted gun, maybe a B-story to run with the Old Briar Mine. Or just come by the office. Seriously.
Production isn’t the same without you. I’m really worried about you. I’m so sorry for your loss. Take care, friend.
-LJ
PS: But seriously let me know if you’re dropping by with that cursed gun. Too f’ing cool!!!
LJ Baxter
Unit Production Manager
Haunted (Sundays at 11pm and Wednesdays at 2am, only on KSPM)
2 Hours, 40 Minutes
I watched Adelaide closely after what Ben Dyson’s corpse said to me. For some reason I was fine with being already doomed — I pretty much deserved it — but the idea of Addie being imaginary? That terrified me.
So I studied the way she moved as we hitchhiked through our past: her small hands fidgeting at her sides, her New Year’s Eve dress gliding over her legs. The little things she did — the birdlike way she bobbed her head to throw her bangs from her eyes, the way her British accent intensified under stress and relaxed when she did, and always, that cautious flash of a smile. New or remembered? Real or imagined?
Disturbingly, I began to wonder: what’s the difference, anymore?
“Aw, crap.” Addie recognized the next memory. “The lobster disaster.”
I grinned. “I like this one.”
Yes, lobsters.
Twenty-six lobsters. The warty brown ones that sold for $12.99 a pound and skittered around the floor of a hundred-gallon aquarium. All knuckles, claws, and rubber-banded pincers. This was in a grocery store in Astoria, under the flamingo struts of a mile-long bridge joining Washington and Oregon over the mouth of the Columbia River. September or October, I think it was, when we’d driven out to help my parents move out of my childhood house. With an icepick-jab of fear, I realized — we’d already dropped from 2014 to 2013. Was the train of thoughts accelerating?
I’m going to save you, Addie had whispered with her nose squished to the glass. I’m going to save every last one of you.
I remember glancing up at the whiteboard and wishing we’d done this on Sunday, when the lobsters were $11.95 a pound. But it was her money, not mine.
The entire tank, she told the clerk. I wish to purchase the entire tank.
The tank isn’t for sale.
No, not literally the tank. The lobsters in it. All of them.
Four hundred and fifty-one dollars. The cashier had to call in a fussy little manager to swipe a red override card. Normally, I guess they box them up for you, but we just bought a Rubbermaid bin and stuffed them in a writhing heap with six inches of tank water. From the grocery store it was a four-minute drive west, past a mothballed arcade and boarded-up VHS rental place, to a coastline of slippery black rocks.
In the rearview mirror I glimpsed the Gasman, stepping out into the road to follow us at a walking pace. We left him behind.
Addie was giggling in the passenger seat. Is this crazy?
I sighed. Not by our standards.
We reached the coastline with time to spare. From growing up in this seaside town, I’d learned there were basically two kinds of weather in Astoria: ‘raining’ and ‘almost raining.’ Cold drizzle pinpricked the air.
We carried the sloshing bin to the cliff’s edge and Addie winced, rubbing a shiny sore on her palm. Mine ached too; a paradoxical blister from climbing the subzero rungs of the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse, where we’d learned that I was dead, the Gasman was un-killable, and that Addie didn’t exist. Shitty revelations, all-around. But she didn’t want to talk about it, and neither did I, so we just let this lobster memory play for a few minutes, like a television in a darkened room that we were too exhausted to switch off. This time and that one tangled together, like ribbons of mixing paint.
Twenty-six lobsters, I’d said. I thought we’d just save one or two.
What would the other twenty-four think?
Probably nothing. They’re lobsters.
I knew I’d regret it, she told me atop that rock berm, looking out into the choppy water with her hair clumping and her cheeks rash-red. I’d have an Oskar Schindler breakdown. I’d go home and look at the MacBook Air, and the pretentious bullshit on the walls, and I’d wonder how many lobsters I could’ve saved. The little glass fruit bowl on the table is, like, ten lobsters. I could’ve saved ten more.
She’d just signed her soul over to the tech startup Cubek. Any chance of vet school was, of course, years in the rearview mirror, but this had been the point-of-no-return for her. The event horizon of her career. Who doesn’t feel the pain of letting go of their dreams? I’d always wanted to be a screenwriter or film director, and instead I walked around on TV with a flashlight and a restaurant-issue thermometer gun. Life twists your dreams, but in subtle and painless ways, until one morning you wake up and you’re out of time.
She picked up the first lobster. It blew furious bubbles and whipped its antennae, clicking in her fingers. You’re free, she whispered. You were going to be dropped into boiling water, cooked alive, but you’re free now.
This contrasted nicely with each clumsy splash. I held back laughter. Something about the way the little critters flailed in confused panic; it must’ve been like being liberated from a prison camp via circus canon.
Addie’s frost-burnt hand had started to bleed and she rubbed a smear of red on her dress, her hair windswept, her eyes bloodshot. I know, Dan. I know how stupid and pointless this is—
It’s fine, I said.
I just needed this—
It’s fine, Addie.
She turned away. She had always been ashamed of these little outbursts. She never knew how to be vulnerable around me. I made it difficult, I think. Even after her savannah monitor had disintegrated in her arms, she’d been embarrassed to cry in front of me back at BullsEye’s, like I would judge her or mock her for it.
She chewed her lip. I know . . . I know this is stupid.
Yeah, I thought so, too. And I didn’t have the energy to pretend to disagree.
At this point, circa 2013, we kind of hated each other. The drive from Farwell to Astoria had been deeply tedious — you can only have the same argument so many times, in so many forms, before it turns into a recital, and then what? Hell, skip the recital. Silence is easier. The drive back was looking like six more hours of eggshell quiet, so Addie had decided to skim off the top of her embarrassingly disposable bank account and do something ‘productive.’ Not donating to a homeless shelter, or leukemia research, or paying it forward and picking up a stranger’s grocery bill — nope. Twenty-six lobsters.
I hurled another one like a football, giving it backspin. He splashed down a hundred feet out, barely missing a red buoy.
Wait, Dan. She grabbed my elbow, her voice pitching with alarm. These are Pacific lobsters, right?
Yeah, I said. Of course.
You’re sure?
Nope. That whiteboard had definitely said Maine lobsters. I’m not even sure lobsters are native to the Pacific at all — if they had been, they probably wouldn’t have been so damn expensive. But I’d lied, because back then, I was sick of her stunts and hadn’t wanted to drag this farce out any longer. There were just a few stragglers left, and then we could get back on the road. The horizon had darkened with clouds.
In silence, we threw the rest. But she studied the final one and turned it over, like there might be a product code on its belly. Are you . . . are you really sure, Dan? Or are you just saying that?
Addie. They’re sea spiders—
She looked heartbroken. You don’t care.
I threw the last one extra hard, and we listened to the distant splash. I’m just saying, we can save twenty-six lobsters here in Oregon, and that’s nice, but on the drive back home we’ll straight-up murder four hundred bugs with our windshield.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 14