OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller

by ADAMS, TAYLOR

  Addie looked at me.

  I shrugged. “Playtime’s over, I guess.”

  “This is different,” she echoed.

  Yes, it was. Maybe the Gasman was using my mind as a lens, combing the past for something. Maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle nurtured bigger goals than just blowing my head off. Without a human brain to play with, it was just a gun, just a dumb piece of wood and metal. It was deeply frightening — and a little empowering — to suppose that maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle needed me for something.

  Again, the past whispered between us: You’re selfish, Dan.

  You’re so self-absorbed. You obsess over things, and chase them to the gates of Hell. Like the stupid Nielsen ratings for your show. Holy Christ, Dan, I have never seen anyone punch a wall over a fifth of a decimal point. One dumbass viewer comment about the lighting and you mope for hours. You’re miserable, because you make yourself miserable. I think, deep down, you’re a sociopath.

  “I forgot I called you a sociopath,” Addie said. “Sorry.”

  I shrugged. “I deserved it.”

  And that’s what hurts me most, Dan. Realizing that I . . . I kind of hate you. Realizing that sometimes I wish I could just move back to England. That sometimes when I’m driving home, I realize I’d rather stay at work, at a job I loathe, than spend an evening with you.

  Addie winced at her own words. I think I remembered the fight better than she did. It went on and on. If we sat still at this little table and concentrated, we could relive every last second of our vicious back-and-forth here in the Timber Ridge food court . . . if we wanted to. If there wasn’t a gas-masked predator coming for us.

  I pointed. “He’s back.”

  The Gasman entered the food court. He’d descended the staircase and now approached from the theater admission line. The crowd milled around the gas-masked figure like a school of dumb fish, not even noticing. One salesman in a charcoal business suit almost walked right into him, but hastily apologized and veered past. The Gasman didn’t mind; he was coming for us. Only us. Maybe he’d learned to not get distracted with tearing the scalps off of bystanders; they were just extras populating my memories. The idea gave me a chill — this intruder was learning from his errors at the New Year’s Eve party. He was adapting to my mental terrain. Hopefully I could, too.

  Addie stood, squeaking her chair. “Well, shall we?”

  “This memory blows. He can have it.”

  She tossed me the EMF meter. “Adios, Timber Ridge.”

  Onward, to the next memory on this finite train of thoughts. It was only a retreat, but it felt like surrender. Another time and place claimed by the Head-Scratching Rifle, like the geography of my mind was blown up on a Risk game board, and every memory we abandoned was marked with a growing sea of red tokens. I was land, and I was being conquered. Possessed. What would happen when there was nowhere left to run? One small silver lining — it probably wouldn’t involve tedious dice-throwing.

  I started to run but Addie held my shoulder. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Just wait.”

  Excitement trembled her voice. I turned. The Gasman had halted at the outer perimeter of the food court, maybe ten feet from our white table. Right by the koi pond. Those eyeholes were still locked on us, buried in that snouted Soviet mask that revealed nothing of the face underneath — if a face even existed. But the entity wasn’t coming any closer. He stood there, stymied, like he’d been boxed out by an invisible wall.

  “See?”

  “What’s he waiting for?”

  This was the closest I’d ever been to the Gasman in full daylight. The odor was predictably awful. Like decaying fruit, decaying meat, decaying everything. Back when Haunted was a basement-project webcast, I’d worked night shifts at Farwell’s Quality Foods, and one of the more unglamorous responsibilities of an already unglamorous job was hurling trash down a twenty-foot chute crusted with food waste. The Gasman smelled like that chute, like the green-and-red shit that coated the duct walls. Rotten lettuce bits, hardened cow blood, salty oyster sludge.

  His boots and double-flapped greatcoat were glazed with shards of ice. Snow stuck to the wool in cottony globs, like dryer lint. He looked like he’d just trudged through a frigid Siberian tundra, through miles of waist-deep snow, before arriving here in Idaho’s Timber Ridge Mall, circa summer of 2013. Hell, maybe he had. Like the corpse of Ben Dyson had supposed, it didn’t seem to experience time the way we did.

  His proportions were wrong, too. I was now certain of it. The Gasman’s forearms were longer than his biceps, hooking at the elbow like a praying mantis. His legs were too skinny and vaulted, stilt-like, while his midsection sagged like an insect abdomen. His belly could’ve been full of spider eggs. The mask’s breathing hose dangled like a rubber proboscis. If all the wool, fabric, and rubber was just a human-shaped spacesuit, I was terrified of the four- or five-dimensional creature that shambled inside it.

  “He can’t cross water,” Adelaide gasped.

  “What?”

  She pointed.

  Sure enough, he had halted at the edge of the raised footbridge over the Timber Ridge koi pond. The toes of his snow-crusted boots were planted exactly where the fish tank began. Not an inch further. Something about his pose — the way he’d rigidly frozen mid-step at the very, very edge, told me Addie was correct. He’d stopped at the water. A blade of ice slid off his thigh and shattered on the phony wood.

  “Like a vampire,” she said. “He can’t cross water.”

  I looked at her. “Vampires can cross water.”

  “No. Really?”

  “Vampires can totally cross water.”

  “Well,” she said, pointing with her Maglite. “This asshole can’t.”

  My mind shuttered to what Holden had told me back in Jitters, under those warm paper lanterns, two years in the future: Some mediums believe that unclean spirits can’t cross bodies of—

  The Gasman abruptly pivoted, one boot squeaking, and paced along the koi pond. The water encircled our food court on three sides, and was just a few feet wide in spots — just a step across — but he didn’t even try. For all the aesthetic failings of the Timber Ridge Mall (the three-edged koi pond had been ridiculed as ‘C-World’ by the Inland Voice), the layout was giving the Gasman at least as much trouble as a closed door. His anteater face tracked us as his angle changed.

  “He can’t cross water.” I remembered Ben Dyson’s clue. “Does that relate to cat litter somehow?”

  She watched the thing circle us, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “Cat litter looks . . . like sand. A beach has sand. A beach has water.”

  “Nah. Too obtuse.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right, Dan. Because a cat turd is so clear and literal—”

  She was interrupted by a jagged scream. Someone — finally — had noticed the Mosin Nagant belted on the Gasman’s back. Chairs scooted, drinks spilled, breaths gasped, and a panicked crowd heaved in all directions. The Gasman approached from the direction of the A&W burger stand; he’d taken the long way around to reach the one side of the food court that didn’t bridge over pond water.

  In the chaos, Addie snapped her fingers. “Ah! He hates water. Like a cat.”

  That seemed pretty tangential, too, but it did give me an idea. The Gasman couldn’t seem to cross bodies of water . . . but what about contact with it? You never know if you don’t try, so I grabbed a cup of water from a table and hurled it at the advancing figure. It splashed harmlessly off his chest.

  Addie slow-clapped. “Nice, Dan.”

  As we retreated through the thinning crowd, I scooped another cup off the next table and threw it, too. It thudded off his snout, splashing brown soda. “Crap. I think that was Dr. Pepper—”

  “What’s he supposed to do? Melt?”

  “Worth a try.” I grabbed a third and hurled it. By now I’d figured Holden’s weird little demonology rule only applied to bodies of water, but I didn’t like proving Addie right. Sometimes
she’s such a know-it-all. Like her constantly correcting me that contrary to common belief, Velociraptors were actually only two feet tall, like clawed chickens, and the six-foot Utahraptor is the species I’m really remembering from Jurassic Park. Her little smartass jabs had a way of turning me stubborn, of making me dig into an illogical position and defend it to the death—

  The water cup struck the Gasman’s forehead, and one eyehole exploded.

  The gunshot exploded beside me, answered by a rising crescendo of screams. Addie stood to my right, that Beretta up and out in clenched hands, teeth bared, a brass casing pinging off tile somewhere. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes.

  The Gasman didn’t even flinch. One eyehole was blown out, encircled with daggers of splintered glass, but I still saw nothing inside. Only blackness. With the accuracy of a brain surgeon, Addie had drilled a .40-caliber tunnel right into the creature’s left eye socket — only it didn’t have a left eye socket. It just kept walking toward us, flipping a chair.

  I looked at her. “See? Told you that wouldn’t work.”

  “Says the guy throwing water.”

  “Nice shot, though.”

  She beamed, stuffing the handgun back in her purse as we ran. “Thanks. I practiced every Monday for this.”

  That made me laugh, a hoarse rattle in the thinning air.

  Dan, I think I hate you.

  We kept running. Yes, we were doomed, running out of time and memories, but so what? We jumped the pond together — the surface now crystalizing into ice, orange koi trapped and dying underneath — and raced through the emptying mall, our fingers locked and our footsteps echoing. Past RadioShack, around a cluster of massage chairs, alongside a row of Jurassic-looking ferns. I’d visited this shopping center dozens of times and had most of the megacomplex committed to memory, so it would be awhile before the edges started to blur. Addie giggled beside me, breathless and rattled and somehow giddy.

  “Most eventful mall trip,” she said. “Ever.”

  “Way better than shopping.”

  We slowed near Yankee Candle to catch our breaths and suddenly she was holding my arm, looking at me dead-on, her eyes impossibly big and clear as quartz: “Dan, you traveled through time just for me. That’s weirdly romantic.”

  “I’m a sucker for British accents.”

  “Yeah? Have I told you yours sounds stupid?”

  “Many times.”

  “It’s really drawly. Like . . . Yee-haw, let’s go watch the NASCAR—”

  “The NASCAR?” I laughed. “What the hell are you, an alien?”

  I’m sorry, Dan, but I hate you. Everything about you. You’re clever and funny and kind of brilliant, but you’re also a deeply ugly, obsessive person—

  I kissed her there. In front of a green GameStop poster for the not-yet-released Xbox One, in an evacuated shopping mall in 2013, with the Gasman pursuing us from the food court like a masked terminator. I touched her cheekbone, and it must’ve tickled because she turned sharply, her breath curling in the air like smoke. Jesus, she was so real. She couldn’t just be my imagination.

  You can’t let things go, Dan, and it’s killing us—

  “Addie,” I said. “Do you think we would’ve made it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you hadn’t died on New Year’s Eve. You think we would’ve lasted to the next one in 2016? And after?”

  “Who’s to say?”

  “I’m asking what you think.”

  She shrugged, her voice wavering through chattering teeth. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s best that you just remember me like this. And we never find out.”

  I kissed her again. It felt rebellious, dancing on our own fault lines. Somehow, a fatalistic corner of my mind had always assumed we’d prove that stupid clown right (How cute — but you’ll never make it). We’d end up fighting for child custody, maybe, or held hostage by a loveless yuppie marriage. We may have been born of the same atoms, sure, but our pieces were mismatched. Somewhere behind us, I heard the Gasman’s black boots squeaking on tile, the very embodiment of our dwindling time.

  She rubbed her eye. “Let’s just . . . try to enjoy these memories. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Being together. That’s all life is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  I stroked her hair. “Alright.”

  Snow fluttered around us. It was shocking; it literally came from nowhere. A frigid arctic winter imported direct from Siberia, forming now in Idaho’s Timber Ridge Mall as a surreal indoor blizzard. It was as cold as the vacuum of space; a godless void that blackens your fingertips and ruptures the blood vessels in your eyes. But it was also bizarrely, achingly beautiful to see snow drizzling from the ductwork of the ceiling, collecting on the red blocks of the GameStop sign, cresting the fronds of potted ferns, and swirling across the floor on breezes that shouldn’t exist.

  Addie smiled, catching snowflakes in her palm. She was three months from twenty-six but I saw her as a little girl stepping outdoors for the first time, marveling at the things the world is capable of. “I’ll admit,” she said, crunching crystals between her fingers. “It’s . . . kinda cool.”

  “Kinda.”

  “You’re sure vampires can’t cross water?”

  “Positive,” I said. “You’re thinking of being invited in. They can’t come into your house without you first inviting them in.”

  “Ah.” She glanced back at the Gasman, following twenty yards down the shopping corridor, silhouetted behind a screen of impossible snow. “Bummer that isn’t his weakness. That would’ve been handy.”

  But I had an even better idea now. It had slipped into my mind like a daydream; a way the Gasman’s inability to cross water could potentially save us both. But I’d be counting on a few things. A few big things.

  “Dan, it’s snowing inside the mall,” she gasped aloud as we cut through the men’s section of Macy’s, past rows of posed mannequins collecting white on their shoulders. She scooped up a handful of fresh snow from the khaki pants display. “How often can you say that?”

  “Hopefully never again.”

  As we passed the last mannequin — a dude-bro in denim — Addie beaned it in the face with her snowball.

  So, yes, I had an idea. But also a pool of dread in my stomach, growing as my dead fiancée and I raced through the freezing memories of our summer of 2013, and into whatever came before. Fluorescent lights sparked and fizzled as storefronts bulldozed themselves around us; plate glass disintegrated and the floor writhed in rolling waves of shattered tile. Through this storm of snow and plaster, we kept running, barreling deeper into the past with the Gasman at our heels. If this new plan of mine failed, I couldn’t stand to lose Addie a second time. I’d already lost her once on New Year’s Eve, and it broke me.

  I couldn’t lose her again.

  NEW TEXT MESSAGE

  SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727

  SENT: 11:41 a.m. Mar 20 2015

  I drove by ur house WTF are you? Ur car is gone.

  NEW TEXT MESSAGE

  SENDER: “LJ” (509) 555-5622

  SENT: 12:01 p.m. Mar 20 2015

  Holden says you’re MIA. Last chance for Old Briar. We’re at the park-n-ride, leaving at 1300. Call by then or don’t call at all. Running outta time . . .

  59 Minutes

  “The dock,” I said, “where we first met back in 2011. That’ll be our Alamo.”

  “Our Alamo?”

  “You know. Our Alamo. Our last stand. The place we stop running. The Gasman won’t be able to cross the water. We’ll be safe there.”

  “So . . . the exact opposite of the real Alamo?”

  “Hopefully, yes.”

  It all seemed convenient, but yes, in theory, we’d be safe back there on that FrightFest boardwalk over lapping tidewater. The place I’d first found her, stumbling out the broken door of the Total Darkness Maze on October 24, 2011. The place our lives had collided. For weeks after
she’d died, I’d struggled vainly to relive that moment. How ironic, then, that it might just save us.

  Let her go, Dyson whispered in the back of my mind.

  But I squeezed her fingers and led her further back in time. Timber Ridge led to the Hostess factory investigation. Those catacombs of rusted-out ovens and peeling paint led to the candy-colored beanbag chairs in the Cubek lobby, where Addie interned for a summer. Man-children, energy drinks, and keyboards speckled with crumbs. Every memory folds into another; daytime in one room, midnight the next. A floor leads to a wall. Gravity bends ninety degrees in a nauseous twist.

  And still I worried as we fled the gas-masked creature through time. Like Dyson had told us, the Head-Scratching Rifle was digging through my mind and memories, learning my secrets. Adapting to my mental architecture. What if it was only feigning an aversion to water? To trick us into going where it wanted us?

  Let go of your imaginary Adelaide, or the Gasman will use her against you—

  Abruptly she halted, a whiplash of blonde hair, yanking my wrist backward.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “Do you smell that?”

  “Smell what?”

  But I did, too. An ammonia odor, acrid and thick. Dyson’s clue.

  Cat litter.

  * * *

  “Where are we?”

  My first thought was landfill, but I knew better. We were in the foyer of an early-century rancher, absolutely crammed with hoarded junk, reeking of stale cat urine. Tons of heaped debris packed into every square inch. The floor was crunchy with yellowed newspaper, soda bottles, and grocery bags. Sunbeams caught updrafts of frizzy cat hair. Boxes stacked to the ceiling, leaning precariously on mildewing cardboard.

  “This is . . . Montana. Out by Butte,” I told Addie. “I drove out here one weekend to help Holden clean out his grandmother’s house after she croaked—”

  I realized Holden was in the room.