She winced. You don’t need to have a comeback to everything, Dan.
But I always did, I guess.
For a moment we just stared out to sea together as salt water lapped barnacled rocks. The rain came in indecisive spurts, pattering the rocks and soaking our hair. We were going back to my Celica, crossing the crest of gravel and dandelions, when she sucked in a sharp breath, slapping a hand to her mouth.
I stopped. What?
She sat down on the shoulder, shaking her head. Disbelief.
What, Addie?
She pulled something from her pocket — a pair of yellow scissors — and let them drop. She looked up at me with big eyes. The rubber bands, she said. We . . . we forgot to cut off the rubber bands.
That’s right. The blue rubber bands the grocery store had bundled the lobsters’ pincers with, to keep them from attacking each other in captivity. Or injuring the cook. Or, you know, catching food.
I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did.
Oh my God. She buried her face in her hands. They’re . . . . they’re defenseless down there, handcuffed in the wild. They can’t even pick up food—
I sat beside her. Yeah, they weren’t Pacific lobsters, either.
For a moment I thought she’d cry, but she laughed instead; one of those miserable barks that cuts your throat on the way up. Pitch-black chuckles. The wind blew in handfuls of gritty rain, stinging our eyes and forcing our faces down, and I realized she was pressing her head on my shoulder. Her jaw shivered with pained giggles, and I joined her, as natural as sneezing. It felt good to laugh together. For a few minutes, we could just be two people laughing together, and we could forget about the growing fault lines in our relationship, the cracks in the supports, all the stupid little things we couldn’t fix that might someday doom us. We’d just accidentally murdered twenty-six lobsters, and it was hilarious. That was it.
The EMF meter beeped.
I looked at her now — in this now. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Tell me something I don’t already know. So I know you’re not imaginary.”
She shrugged. “I . . . I don’t know—”
“Anything, Addie. The capital of Guam?”
“I don’t know.”
“The location of Guam?”
“Well, that’s the problem.” She shrugged bleakly, brushing damp hair from her eyes. “I could tell you anything, and it could just be your imagination making facts up. The real challenge is: how do you prove something I say is true?”
Since we were trapped within the finite horizons of my own memories, I guess that was the real problem. It was an awful feeling. A mix of claustrophobia and loneliness. Who knows — maybe Laika had imaginary friends, too, in her cramped aluminum tomb miles above the stratosphere.
“For what it’s worth,” she said with a small, sad smile, “I think I’m real.”
I wish that was enough. It wasn’t.
The EMF meter beeped again, so we took in one last glimpse of the gray ocean, now twenty-six Atlantic lobsters richer, and I helped her to her feet. We got the hell out of there, before the raindrops started to freeze in the air, the sun began to dim red, and the Gasman came to claim more of my soul.
“Wait,” she said as we raced further back in time. “Do you seriously not know where Guam is?”
Sent: 3/20 10:32PM
Sender: jeffmckee89@webmail
Subject: Viewer Feedback (redirect)
Hi,
First off, BIG fan of the show. Bought the first two seasons on DVD. Was watching the WA Lighthouse episode with the Deer Cap Dude and I noticed something.
Fifth segment, pause at 32:53 on the wide shot of the lighthouse. Look at the far left corner. It’s grainy and you’ll have to increase the brightness, but you can see a tall guy standing by the door. He’s wearing a gas mask.
WTF is this guy? HOW DID NO ONE NOTICE HIM?????
Jeff McKee
1 Hour, 55 Minutes
“A cat turd? We’re up against an ancient, five-dimensional demonic entity, and the only clue Mr. Dyson left you was a cat turd?”
I shrugged. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“Did you keep it?”
“Why would I keep it?”
“Is the Gasman’s weakness cat turds or something?”
“I really doubt that.”
“I hate cats.” She crossed her arms. “Why couldn’t Dyson just tell you upfront?”
“Because . . . because the Head-Scratching Rifle is already in my head,” I said. “Following me through my memories. It’s learning everything. Like he said, it would be like trying to beat yourself at chess.”
She sighed. “And . . . I might be a figment of your imagination.”
“Yep.”
“Let’s wait for the Gasman this time.” She lowered her voice, like a quarterback in a huddle, her Beretta discreetly tucked in her lap. “Let’s watch him. Study him. I want to know what we’re up against.”
We were seated on wobbly white furniture in the Timber Ridge Mall, a three-story shopping complex just north of Boise. Walled on three sides by ferns, footbridges and smelly koi ponds, the food court was a blinding ocean of sunlight, cast by a twenty-yard skylight cut into the shape of Idaho. Or at least that’s what they’d intended, but they’d botched the panhandle’s eastern border, creating a major PR headache that had plagued the mall for years. Between the shape of the silhouette, and the unfortunate sunbeam it traced at certain times of the year, local teenagers had come to know it as the Sky-dick.
Timber Ridge’s owners would recut the skylight eventually — Holden told me that it’s now a bigger chunk of the inland northwest, including Montana, Washington, and Oregon — but that hadn’t happened yet. This was 2013, and the Sky-dick cast a proud, phallic sunbeam.
Summer. This had to be summer. The sunlight was too fierce; the crowd’s clothing was too sparse. The red board over the theater ticket booth was thirty percent superhero movies and fifty percent superhero movie sequels. Near the Subway sandwich line, a toddler was crying over a dropped ice cream cone which was melting into the tile like a squished head. I knew where we were . . . but why were we back here?
Addie poked me. “Dan?”
“I’m just wondering why we’re here at Timber Ridge,” I thought aloud. “Why are we jumping back months at a time, skipping hundreds of memories?”
“Well, what happened here?”
“I told you I hated your dad,” I said. “And we had a fight.”
Calling it a fight was like calling Star Wars: The Phantom Menace a mild disappointment. She’d stormed out past the Japanese noodle place and taken her still-new Mercedes. I’d spent the next six hours in the mall, too stubborn to call a cab or Holden. I bought a movie ticket and theater-hopped until nightfall. We slept in separate houses for four days — Addie shacked with her Cubek friend Jamie, while I claimed Holden’s couch — because each of us assumed the other would be taking the house. Tragically, Baby missed her weekly dead rat feeding.
I recognized a balled napkin on the table between us. During our milder tiffs, I used to puncture the tension by waving a napkin like a white flag. It only works so many times.
Our argument even lingered in the air, aching fragments: Fuck you, Dan.
You’re so selfish.
But I realized I’d answered my own question.
“I think it’s the big moments,” I told her. “It’s the big events, the ups and downs, the landmarks of the mental landscape.”
She nodded slowly. “So . . . how does it end? We get chased through your high school prom, then you’re playing tag in kindergarten, then you’re in diapers and building sandcastles on the beach. We’re out of memories. Then what?”
“The Gasman . . . kills me, I guess.”
But my morbid imagination went a little further. I envisioned a bullet bursting out of someone as it punched through their other side. The entry wound is always so small and subtle — just a
modest hole, like being jabbed with a nail — but the exit wound is the apocalyptic payoff. All that pressurized blood and flesh, blowing out the back like a balloon full of raw meat. Explosive, violent, irreversible.
Addie was staring at the ceiling. “The skylight looks like a dong.”
“It does.”
“Not related. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
The EMF meter beeped on the tabletop between us. Sixty-six degrees.
We each agreed on a direction and watched it. We were waiting for the Gasman to catch up, because . . . well, I don’t know. Studying our enemy was better than just fleeing him. I was sick of running. And there were only so many memories left.
The mall hummed with Saturday activity. Teenagers gathered in tight circles, heads hunched over phones. A swirl of fire leapt from one of the woks at the Japanese noodle place. The new Captain America movie was showing at 3:10 p.m. and looked ready to sell out. I whiffed an algae odor; the koi ponds hadn’t been cleaned in a while. It smelled like the aquarium aisle of a pet store.
It was all fake, I knew. It was a dream, or a reenactment; something conjured up by the Head-Scratching Rifle digging through my brain and exploring my recollection of the Timber Ridge Mall. Just set design of stunning detail and depth. None of it was real, but I still brushed my palm over the wired tabletop and marveled at the subtleties I’d thought myself incapable of imagining — the warbling vibrations, the crooked leg, the dings and irregularities in the meshwork where the tables had been stacked together so the janitors could buff the floors. All convincing, but all synthetic.
And Addie, across the table from me. Most convincing of all.
BEEP. She checked the EMF meter. “He’s getting closer.”
I hoped to God she was real. She couldn’t be a bagged goldfish, like Ben Dyson had claimed, as imaginary as the Timber Ridge table between us. I’d found her — I’d reached into the past and found her. She was the ghost of Adelaide Radnor, her spirit, her soul; whatever you wanted to call it. Yes, she was real.
BEEP. Sixty-five degrees.
Addie noticed a placemat. “Wow.”
“What?”
She scooted it toward me. A child’s dining mat with a colorized map of the world. The Mercator projection, so Greenland and Antarctica were bloated. The countries were sharply defined and labeled — but only the big, identifiable ones. The US, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, China. Most others were blurred out; their names smeared, their borders mushy and indistinct. Europe was a projectile-vomit splatter of primary colors. The Philippines didn’t exist.
“It’s like a parody map,” Addie said, “of how Americans see the world.”
“We’re in my head.”
“And you can’t remember a single country in Africa?”
I glanced up at the eateries lining the food court. The restaurant titles were all there — Subway, Edo, A&W, Carl’s Jr. — but the menu items were blurred. The generalities were there but not the specifics. Apparently the subtleties of my imagination had a limit, because there was no way of knowing the exact price of a Meatball Sub. I felt stranded, submerged deep inside my own head, like poor Laika.
BEEP. Fifty-nine degrees.
The Sears lights fizzled out, darkening the storefront.
I was worried about the Gasman. “We should see him by now.”
“Where is he?”
We craned our necks and scanned all approaches to the food court. Throngs of people, coming and going, but no snouted gas mask. No tattered greatcoat. Seated there in the Timber Ridge food court with my fiancée, I felt like bait, staked to the ground, waiting for the predator. And the predator was running late.
I shivered. “Is he stuck in traffic?”
The seconds ticked by. No Gasman.
“Dan, something’s been on my mind.” She rubbed her arms. “About how you worded that exploding-bullet thing. The burp sound it made—”
“Doesn’t matter. It was a dud.”
“Exactly,” she said, her breath fogging. “The gunpowder didn’t burn. You contaminated it, maybe, when you were pouring it into the casing. Sweat from your fingers, or oil. Or maybe it was just crappy Nixon-era ammunition that spent too long on a warehouse shelf.”
I nodded. All possible explanations.
“Right, Dan?”
“Right. What’s your point?”
BEEP. Fifty degrees.
Addie’s eyes darted busily, full of sunlight. “Okay, how’s this for ‘something you don’t know?’ Gun safety for dummies: if a round doesn’t fire due to bad powder, there’s still some explosive force from the primer. Just not enough to push the bullet down the barrel. So you get a malfunction called a squi—”
She froze.
Squi—
“What?”
Her eyes snapped down to the Dan Rupley edition placemat between us.
I leaned forward. “. . . A malfunction called a what?”
“I’m . . . I’m not sure I should tell you this.” She looked up at me crookedly, a ghost of a smile on her face. “If the Head-Scratching Rifle is really . . . you know. Inside your brain. Learning what you know.”
Like Ben Dyson said. I shrugged tiredly, neither agreeing or disagreeing. It gets old fast, having people tell you they have an important and possibly life-saving idea . . . but they can’t actually tell you what it is.
She softened. “Sorry, Dan.”
But I was too curious to let it go. Like a high-stakes Scrabble match, my mind kept hurling letters at her half-spoken squi- word, struggling to complete it. . . . Squiggle? . . . Squish? . . . .Squirt?
BEEP. Forty-seven degrees.
Still no Gasman.
Addie exhaled impatiently and scanned the koi pond perimeter again. “He should be here by now,” she said. “Something’s different.”
“What changed?”
“I don’t know.”
I rose too, half-standing, searching the milling crowd for any sign of our gas-masked friend. Maybe he was stooping low, hunching his seven-foot frame to blend in and then ambush us up close. Maybe he was waiting around a corner. Or maybe he’d just grow out of the floor beneath us. Who knows? Physics didn’t quite work here; we’d recently escaped a lighthouse by climbing up to its roof.
And still, my mind gnawed on Adelaide’s mystery squi— word. What was the malfunction called? What’d she meant to say?
. . . Squid?
. . . Squirrel?
. . . Squire?
All unlikely names for firearm malfunctions.
“Maybe we should go,” she said. “Maybe we—”
I’m not sure why I glanced up.
But I did, and my blood froze in my veins when I spotted the Gasman on the third-floor balcony above us. A hundred feet away, on the north end of the disastrously misconceived Idaho skylight. Standing by the upper entrance to JCPenney in a harsh band of sunlight; a moth-like, tattered shadow against white walls. Staring down at us. He’d been watching us the entire time.
He had something in his hands.
* * *
It was jolting, seeing the Head-Scratching Rifle again.
But I knew the antique Russian weapon intimately now. Its subtleties were burnt into my mind; its heft, its little clicks and rattles, its rancid odors. The yellow slug-slime that made it sticky to the touch. The coffin-nail bayonet, the weathered birch, the clunky analog feel of the Mosin Nagant’s patent-dodging design. It had been in my hands.
Now it was in the Gasman’s hands.
The tall man in the greatcoat turned it over, dutifully inspecting every inch with those rimmed glass eyes. Even up on that balcony, his motions were broad enough that I could discern exactly what he was doing. He checked the trigger, fiddled with the rear sights, unlatched the bolt, and peered down the barrel.
Addie tapped my arm. “What’s he doing?”
“It’s like a . . . a pre-firing safety check.” I didn’t know how else to put it. “According to the legend, everyone who shot themselv
es with the Head-Scratching Rifle did that first. Like a little ritual, to make sure the rifle was ready.”
“To fire without damaging itself?”
“Exactly.”
Addie looked disappointed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
The Gasman click-clacked the Mosin bolt back in place, shouldered the firearm, and aimed it down at the Idaho lunch crowd. Down at us. My stomach heaved against my ribs, but my mind knew better.
“Don’t stand up,” I whispered to her. “Or he’ll see us.”
“You think he’s testing us?”
“Maybe.”
No one noticed the Gasman up on the third-floor ledge. The summer-2013 Timber Ridge Mall scene continued around us obliviously, like the background activity of a film set. People sat and stood, chewing, slurping, crumpling sandwich bags and pocketing phones. A chair squealed. A woman guffawed sharply at something and the laugh thumped off the tall ceiling. The smell of koi, barbecue sauce, and baby wipes. All fake, I reminded myself. All bits of a shrinking universe.
“Just blend in,” I whispered.
Addie studied the Gasman on the ledge, her fingers tightening on the rim of the table. She’d scooted her legs beneath her so she could spring upright when the first gunshot whip-cracked through the dull roar.
But it didn’t.
Because the Gasman wasn’t firing. Bafflingly, he just tracked the old Mosin Nagant over the churning crowd of summer shoppers. He inched the muzzle right to left. Left to right. Then up and down, from the AMC Cinemas ticket line, over the frozen yogurt stand, to the Starbucks and the first-floor entrance to Sears.
“He likes that spot,” Addie murmured.
“No kidding.”
“Why would he like that spot?”
Fragments of our 2013 argument echoed between us, like radio bleed-through: I can’t take it. You’re a miserable person, Dan. And you make me miserable—
The Gasman abruptly slung the Mosin Nagant back over his shoulder and backpedaled from the balcony handrail. In two seconds he was gone, vanished behind white pillars. Like a sniper scoping out enemy territory and then returning to base to make a report. Around us, 2013-era Timber Ridge kept humming with mundane life, like nothing had happened at all.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 15