“—Uh, died.”
He clapped his hands together. “Thank you — both of you — for making the drive. I really appreciate it, more than you know—”
I elbowed past Holden mid-sentence, venturing deeper into the stagnant house, and Addie followed. Cats skittered underfoot, feral tabbies and torbies with matted fur.
“What are we looking for?”
“The litterbox,” I guessed.
It wasn’t hard to find. It was a giant bin, scooted to the center of the living room by a perimeter of looming trash. It was every bit as horrifying as I remembered; a damp mountain range of sand under a fuzzy carpet of black mold. The box looked like it hadn’t been scooped since the Bush administration.
Addie gagged through a sleeve. “I hate cats.”
Covering my nose, I looked around at the room of towering clutter — Aquafina bottles, paperbacks with bent spines, German porcelain figurines. ‘Needle in a haystack’ doesn’t do it justice, because at least in that situation you know you’re looking for a damn needle. What was the objective here? I tried to recall what Dyson told us atop that lighthouse: I left you a clue. So you’ll know your chance when it arises, and seize it.
Before the Gasman realizes.
Realizes what?
And . . . what chance?
Addie sighed. “He couldn’t have been more specific than a cat turd?”
“It had to be a clue.”
“Well, he must suck at charades.” She stared into the litterbox. “Think he . . . uh, buried a weapon for us in there?”
“God, I hope not.”
She grabbed something white off a nearby trash pile, hit her knees, and started digging into the disgusting box. Chipping like an icepick.
“Wait—” Holden snatched the token away. I didn’t see what it was.
I joined Addie on the floor; she’d rolled up the black sleeves of her Haunted hoodie and now dug with her bare hands, lifting and breaking bricks of cement-like sludge. No time to be repulsed. The Gasman was coming.
It’s got all the time in the world. You don’t, Dan.
“Could Dyson have left us a message?”
“Why?”
She pointed at a black turd. “That one is shaped like a P.”
“Dump it out. Maybe they spell something.”
They didn’t. We tried. I’d started to suspect it was futile about halfway through, but once you start arranging cat shit on the floor, you kind of have to see it through. We found a P, six C’s, two L’s, and an S. Everything else was an I. For a long, bleak moment we scrutinized a floor full of Kitty Rocas, trying to decode an intelligent design where none existed. Like finding EVPs in audio slush, or incongruous shadows in photos. Stare hard enough into the random, and you might eventually find something, but is it worth it?
Holden watched us, mortified. “What the hell—”
“I can explain,” Addie said, wiping her hands.
I didn’t bother. This version of Holden was just a memory — like the extras populating the Timber Ridge Mall, or the partygoers at LJ’s lake house — but still, I couldn’t help but notice how young my best friend looked. This was 2012. Three full years in the past. You don’t really notice aging in yourself or your family until you stumble across an old photo, and this Holden was a living, breathing photograph. His hair was thicker. His bald spot smaller. His face was rounder, newer. He was also sixty pounds heavier; he hadn’t yet been exposed to the anonymous venom of Haunted’s viewer comment board.
And I realized, with an icy jolt — what if he’s dead, too?
Like me?
For all I knew, the Head-Scratching Rifle could’ve already gotten him. This evil thing, whatever it is, spreads indiscriminately, quietly reaching in all directions, like exploratory fungus stalks. It grows on anything within touching distance. Whether you’re a forklift driver or a transient — if you’re breathing, you’re potential food. I should have known this from the start, but I’d been convinced I could contain it; limit the risk to myself. I’d thought I could trick it with something so remedial as a bullet with too much gunpowder — hell, W. Louis’s book even warned me that the Head-Scratching Rifle diligently remembers to perform a safety check before firing.
“Holden,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He looked at me.
“I . . . I was selfish, Holden. I was incredibly selfish, and did something stupid. And I allowed you to drag yourself along with me, because I was lonely. And now you’re in danger, too. You might already be dead. It . . . whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to experience time the way we do.”
My best friend stared, eyes wide.
God, I must’ve sounded like Dyson already. A ghost lost in time, speaking in grim riddles. And really, what did it matter anyway?
“I know . . . I know you’re not real.” I let out a breath, my shoulders sagging. “I know I’m just imagining you. You’re not the real Holden — the real Holden is somewhere else — so it doesn’t matter what I say.”
Behind him I saw Addie looking at me, her eyes crystalline, pierced with heartbreak. She sensed that I was really speaking to her. And truthfully? I guess I kind of was. Like Laika, I was trapped in this tiny world, bottled up inside an echo chamber with my imaginary friends. It’s a lonely feeling.
After a long silence, Holden asked, “Dan, are you . . . having a stroke?”
Under his voice, I heard something.
A . . . faint, dry scratching. A whisper of friction, of gently grinding wood. Something was in the room with us, and it wasn’t a cat.
We all turned.
At first I only saw the white token — the thing Addie had used to dig cat litter before Holden snatched it from her. It was moving, by itself, as if tugged by invisible strings, atop a shelf of piled detritus.
“Oh my God—”
Then I recognized what it was — the pale plastic, the arrowhead shape, the dirty glass lens — because I’d seen it before. It was a Ouija planchette. On Holden’s grandmother’s Icelandic mirror board. Scraping over the aged wood before our eyes like a movie special effect, a slow, deliberate zigzag across the alphabet. Letter to letter.
Spelling a message.
* * *
IDENTIFYYOURSELF.
Addie read aloud. “Uh . . . identify ourselves?”
“That’s wrong,” Holden said.
“You think?”
“No, not just that.” He stumbled closer to his grandmother’s vintage board, tipping a heap of books. “See, on this kind of mirror board, ‘identify yourself’ is what we — the human operators — are supposed to ask the spirit. Not the other way around.”
The planchette slid to the TURN tile and stopped.
We all stared at it again in another slow drip of bewilderment. I tried to remember what Holden had told me, in another time and place, about the significance of that special TURN spot on his grandmother’s ancient board. Like when you’re on a walkie-talkie and you say ‘over.’ So you don’t talk over each other, because this mirror board exists in two dimensions at once. It’s both the input and the output.
It was waiting for us to answer.
Addie huffed. “I wish we’d seen this before digging into the litterbox.”
I grabbed the planchette — surprisingly light, like it was made of bird bones — and traced from letter to letter on the sticky surface, answering the spirit’s question with another question. The ultimate question: WHATDAYISIT?
I pushed the token back to TURN and waited.
“Dan.” Holden came up behind me. “This is dangerous.”
“I know.”
“You could be talking to a demon—”
“Believe me, buddy, I know.”
The planchette darted, startling us both: MAR202015.
March 20, 2015. The day after I bought the Head-Scratching Rifle from Joe’s Guns. Okay. I reached again for the token, but Holden grabbed my wrist with a big hand, his fingernails digging into my skin. “Stop, Dan. Stop—”
/> “Let go of me—”
“You don’t know what evil you could be screwing with—”
“Actually, at this point, I could draw you a detailed picture.”
“Holden,” Addie said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I used your grandmother’s magic Ouija board to dig up cat shit.”
But somehow I suspected that was what set things in motion. She’d triggered the Ouija board, awakened it in some way, when she grabbed the planchette and plunged it into the litterbox. Had that been Dyson’s plan all along?
Now she craned her neck and looked out the half-blocked window, over a heap of bubble-wrapped porcelain. “Uh . . . Dan?”
The planchette scraped: WHEREISDAN?
“Dan.” Addie’s voice pitched. “The Gasman is outside. He brought friends.”
Holden turned. “Who’s the Gasman?”
I ignored them both, answering: THISISDAN. Then I asked: WHOAMITALKINGTO?
“Dan!” Addie screamed from the window. “Come here now—”
But I couldn’t. I stared at that antique mirror board, waiting for an answer. I needed to know who or what was on the other end of the supernatural channel, and why it wanted to speak to me. This was Ben Dyson’s plan. This was my one fleeting chance to save the Head-Scratching Rifle’s next victim, whoever it was.
Then I realized what Addie had said. “Wait . . . he brought friends?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice low with terror. “Come see.”
I stumbled to the window.
I saw trash bins, spindly trees, and a yellow lawn scaled with snow. And of course, the Gasman, standing by my black Celica. His left eyehole was still shattered from Adelaide’s bullet back at Timber Ridge. A thin stream of fluid — something pale and milky yellow — leaked from the broken aperture. It wasn’t blood; I knew we hadn’t really hurt it. It was just a utility fluid the creature stored inside itself, not unlike oil in a car.
And like Addie had said, our pursuer was now flanked by frozen corpses. Toothpick skeletons in baggy flaps of Red Army clothing. Like freeze-dried stick figures. I saw sunken cheeks, calcified teeth, eyeless faces with skin pulled taut and browned like dead climbers in old photos from Mount Everest, express-delivered from somewhere hopeless and frigid. Jesus, I saw dozens now, creeping in from the corners of the suburban Butte neighborhood like termites wriggling out of wood. Every face was a gory portrait of 7.62x54R destruction. Each was unique, in the way that every car accident is. They congregated around him; the Gasman’s morbid, icy flock.
I sighed. “Well, this sucks.”
“Look at that one.” Addie pointed. “His head looks like a banana peel.”
“Gross.”
But I recognized the one by the mailbox, his skull an empty, exploded grape skin. He must’ve been Nikolai What’s-His-Name, the Kalash worker who’d tried to destroy the Head-Scratching Rifle back in the nineties, but biffed the serial number, melted down the wrong rifle, and taken a vodka-soaked nap with his ear on a railroad rail. He’d been so close, I realized bitterly. Just one digit off. Just a letter.
“He’s the closest anyone’s ever gotten,” I said. “To stopping it.”
Addie squeezed my hand. “Until now. Until us.”
“We’ll see.”
The Ouija board scraped again behind us — finally, a reply. An answer for my question of whom (or what) we were speaking to. I whirled away from the window, just in time to see the pale planchette trace:
THISISHOLDEN.
* * *
Holden saw it, too, and looked at me. “What did you ask it?”
“I asked it who I’m talking to.”
“But it gave my name.”
Yes, and the puzzle pieces were already snapping together. The mirror board was a two-way conduit, simultaneously the input and output, existing in two realities at once. “Because I’m talking to you, Holden,” I told him. “You, in 2015.”
His eyes widened. It would take hours to explain.
“Hurry up!” Addie shouted from the window. “The Gasman is coming up to the front door—”
“Wait.” I grabbed the planchette again and traced: TELLMEEVERYTHING.
This was too important. Never mind the icy phantoms surrounding us in Butte, Montana in 2012; I needed to know what was happening in Farwell, Idaho in 2015. In my world, in the real one, where Addie was dead, where I’d purchased the Head-Scratching Rifle from Joe’s Guns, taken it home, and performed a fruitless paranormal investigation on it shortly before . . . before it possessed me, I guess? Was I possessed?
Somewhere, 2015 was happening without my consciousness. If my red-tipped bullet had really been a dud, then I guess I was still alive. Still somewhere with the cursed Mosin Nagant. Where? And doing what?
The front door squealed open.
We all turned.
The Gasman stood in the thin doorway, one gloved hand outstretched, head cocked in bewilderment, as if he hadn’t expected it to work on his first try, either. The doorknob banged on the wall. The insectoid face swiveled to us.
“Okay, mental note,” Addie whispered. “He’s gotten better at doors.”
“And . . . that’s our cue to leave.” I grabbed the Ouija board off the shelved debris — the conversation would have to wait.
I raced to the back exit and twisted the knob, but the door thudded against something outside. A green yard rake, wedged tightly between the outer doorknob and the siding. A 2.0-version of the recycling bin trick from New Year’s Eve.
“Shit.”
“He’s learning,” Addie said.
I grabbed her hand and tugged her to the stairs leading to the underground garage — the only exit we had left. The Gasman came trudging in through the front doorway, lifting his icy boots over a shallow sea of hoarded crap. I heard a crackle of claws in carpet, caught blurs of racing motion underfoot, and realized the old lady’s half-dozen cats were running at the creature. They tripped over each other to clamor at his boots like feline groupies, pawing at the flaps of his greatcoat, rubbing and purring.
I opened the staircase door. “Of course . . . of course cats love him.”
“See? Cats are evil.”
“You called it.”
The Gasman crashed through the small house after us, knocking over glassware and trash, all elbows and knees. The kitchen lights died behind us as we raced down the dark stairs. Like entering a coalmine; a tight funnel of creaking steps. I took two at a time, carrying the Ouija board, with Addie stomping behind me. Through claustrophobic breaths she asked: “What’s happening in 2015?”
“I don’t know. Holden hasn’t answered.”
“Are you still alive?”
That was a damn good question and I didn’t know. All that mattered right now was the Ouija board. Ben Dyson’s desperate gift, and our one chance to do . . . something. To save the rifle’s next victim, hopefully. I didn’t have a plan yet. Upstairs, a piercing scream rang through the cramped house as another version of Holden was murdered by the Gasman. At the moment I felt nothing, because I knew that past-copy of my best friend wasn’t real. Right?
. . . Right?
We stumbled into the windowless basement garage. Our shoes squealed on smooth cement foundation. The sour odor of mold and mothballs, which was at least better than the upstairs odor of cat litter. It was too dark; I couldn’t even see the mountains of half-excavated crap Holden’s grandmother stored down here like a pharaoh’s tomb. The only light was behind us; a wan glow from the top of the staircase.
I gripped the board. “Not good.”
“Are we trapped?”
The glow behind us dimmed. It was blocked by the broad shoulders of the Gasman, his gloves slick with blood. An orange cat rubbed its chin against his ankle but he ignored it. He started to descend the narrow stairway to us, hunching his shoulders to barely fit like a circle peg down a square hole. A clumsy, scraping shuffle. The last light bulb popped behind him, a firework splash of sizzling sparks. The garage was suddenly in perfe
ct darkness.
I heard urgent clicking beside me. “Addie?”
“My flashlight’s out.”
Heat, electricity, light — all energies absorbed by the Gasman. But I knew from my two-day project of cleaning out Holden’s grandmother’s house in 2012 — this garage had one exit, and it wasn’t the garage doors (those were blocked with thousand-pound pallets of junk). I’d need light to find it — and I recalled a light bulb near the stairs with a scratchy pull string. Tucking the all-important Ouija board under one arm, I groped with the other, sweeping my palm through the cold blackness . . .
“Dan—”
“I’m trying the lights—”
“Dan.” Her voice heaved with panic. “Something just touched my arm.”
It couldn’t have been the Gasman; he was still behind us, squeezing his refrigerator-sized ass down the narrow 1920s stairs. But I heard something else in the garage, something down here with us already.
Something moving.
To my left, a whisper of motion. A breath of displaced air on my cheek. And a . . . crackling, crunching sound, like an ice tray being slowly twisted. The source of this brittle sound seemed to hover mid-air. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was nearby. Too close.
My outstretched fingers found the light bulb string — a wisp in the darkness, like a strand of spider silk — and gave it a hard tug.
The string snapped.
“Oh, come on.”
“What? What happened?”
That clicking sound again. Closer. It was moving.
“Dan. Do you hear that?”
I fumbled for my own Maglite and clicked the spongy button. I hadn’t expected it to turn on, since Adelaide’s hadn’t, but it did — barely — and burnt a dim yellow circle on the bare foundation at our feet. At that same moment, something cold stroked the back of my neck.
I dropped the flashlight.
“Dan!”
The Maglite banged off cement. I hit my knees, following the twirling beam, but something else swooped in from above me. Something big, reaching. It wasn’t spectral or ghostlike; this was a physical thing with solid mass that pushed cold air as it moved, still crackle-crunching. I imagined beetle mandibles, hairy and chittering.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 17