I’d find out very soon.
“No. We’ll stop it.” She wiped a splatter of ash from her cheek under another double-flash of lightning. “How much time is left?”
19 Minutes
Behold: the ugliest Christmas tree in recorded history.
In December of 2011, Adelaide’s parents cut down a juvenile Douglas fir by their front porch, and to be practical, elected to lop off the upper seven feet and drag it into their living room. Good idea, awful result. This was an emaciated mockery of a Christmas tree, its gangly branches sagging under only a few ornaments. The golden top star drooped against the wall, like a broken neck. My first mistake, on my very first holiday with Adelaide’s family in Birmingham, had been commenting on it: Your Christmas tree looks like a spider monkey.
“Yes!” Addie raced past me. “This is perfect.”
“What?”
“This is perfect, Dan.” Her eyes gleamed. “My uncle Shaun gave my aunt a Ouija board for Christmas. You know, as a gag gift. What are the odds?”
“I don’t remember it.”
“You weren’t here for the unwrapping.”
There was a twinge of pain in her voice. Because here, on this Christmas Eve of 2011, I’d lost my temper and uttered a certain three-word sentence that she (and her father) still haven’t forgiven me for. Opinions vary on how justified I was, but everyone can agree — with three words, I basically ruined the Radnor family Christmas. Hell, it had taken the Grinch all night.
I still feel awful about it. But Addie’s father, an oh-so-brilliant Bill Murray-lookalike who’d made a fortune designing Boeing 747 rivets or something, was one of those people who can insult you with such incredible subtlety and sniper-like precision, only you detect the barb. To everyone else, his words sound like small talk or even praise. But he knows what he meant, and so do you, and you find yourself locked in a staring match across the dinner table: So, Dan, I watched your ghost show on YouTube. Are you hoping to eventually air it on TV?
In 2011 it had been just a spare-time webcast with a shoestring budget, fuzzy audio, and a fan base in the low hundreds.
And Dan, you work at . . . Quality Foods? Is that right?
Yes, I did.
Her parents were seated in the dining room now, framed by the regal arches of a home that would’ve gotten them beheaded in the French Revolution. Addie’s perfect mother and perfect father, with a perfectly-bred Yorkie napping by the fireplace, silently devastated that their perfect STEM-educated daughter had brought me, the starving artist, into their ivory palace. Everything was just so—
“Perfect,” Addie said, kneeling at the base of that withered tree and shoving aside wrapped gifts. “It’s . . . Shaun’s present, the Ouija board, was one of these rectangular ones—”
“It won’t work.”
“Shut up.” She threw a box aside.
I grabbed her arm. “Addie. It won’t work.”
Dan, you’ve heard of the Scientific Method, right? True evidence of ghosts should be reproducible, but all of your investigations are at nighttime. I mean, why not search during daylight hours? Shouldn’t these alleged supernatural phenomena behave the same, regardless of lighting?
“Yes!” Adelaide slammed an appropriately sized present to the white carpet and tore away the wrapping paper. “Here it is.”
I’m . . . I’m sorry for being so judgmental, Dan. I don’t mean to rain on your hobby. I’m more curious about Quality Foods. How’s that going? Are you a manager?
She ripped off the last layer of artsy wrapping paper, revealing her uncle Shaun’s gag gift underneath — a featureless, generic cardboard box. No markings. No mailing tape. No flaps to open, even. Just cardboard.
“Wait.” She turned it over. “Wait . . . what?”
I mean . . . you have real goals, right, Dan?
Of course.
He’d stirred his green beans. Any that you’ve achieved thus far?
Fucking your daughter is only three words. They take one second to say. Two seconds of petrified silence to sink in. And that, folks, is how you ruin a Christmas.
“What?” Addie turned the impossible box over and over. “I don’t understand—”
“It’s not a Ouija board,” I said, “because I never saw it.”
“But I saw it.”
“We’re in my mind, my memories, Addie. Not yours. We can’t be in your memories because you’re dead.”
She hurled the generic cardboard box to the floor. “Goddamnit—”
I was pissed off too, exhausted, my thoughts slippery and churning. Right now (four years from now), I was driving to the Timber Ridge Mall with a vintage military rifle and over a hundred cigar-sized bullets. And I was helpless to stop it, trapped here in my replaying memories. Locked inside my own head, plunging deeper every second. So I lashed out and said something else I shouldn’t have.
“You’re not real, Addie. You’re in my head. You’re just my . . . my recollection of Adelaide Radnor. You’re what Dyson said you are. A goldfish in a bag. A displaced dream, an imaginary friend that I’ve dragged along with me, and I so badly wish you were real, but you’re not.”
“Fuck you, Dan. I’m real.”
“I wish you were,” I said. “So much.”
Her eyes welled with tears.
“But the real Adelaide is gone. Dead and gone—”
“You will be, too.” Now her voice darkened and trembled, a wounded, bare-knuckle viciousness: “In maybe ten minutes, Dan, give or take, you’ll go up to that Timber Ridge balcony and mow down a bunch of shoppers with that evil thing, and then you can find out for yourself if God exists—”
From the dining room came a series of wet, splashing thuds.
We turned.
Her parents, facing us at the long table, had abruptly stopped chewing. Their mouths hung open, paralyzed. Faces blank, eyes glossy, muscles slack. A stringy clump of half-chewed pork slid from her mother’s mouth and jangled her plate.
Then Addie’s father spoke, a thick echo, multiple voices bubbling up from his windpipe. Like ten people, speaking together in a dank cave:
“There . . . is . . . no . . . God.”
The Gasman stood behind him, his Soviet greatcoat slick with congealing fryer oil, resting one gloved hand on the man’s shoulder. His entourage of corpses were suddenly seated at the long table, too, like a mawkish reference to Christ’s Last Supper, mummified figures of leathery skin, dried-out eye sockets, piano-white teeth. The chandelier dimmed, coloring everything orange.
Her father’s voice burbled and a half-chewed mouthful of green beans plopped into his lap. A soggy, rotten voice: “There is . . . only . . . my tasty treats.”
“Oh, shut up,” Addie snarled. “You’re not my dad.”
“Only . . . my . . . yummy treats.” The old man made an exaggerated chewing motion, grinding his canines together like a rodent. His reading glasses slid off his nose. “Only my . . . yummy, tasty treats . . . yes, please . . . to eat and pull apart and eat—”
“Come on.” I tugged her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
She sniffed. “What’s the point?”
“I don’t know. But we have to go.”
“What’s the point, Dan? If you’re a mass shooter and I’m just a piece of your imagination, what’s the fucking point to even trying?”
I pulled her past that godawful Christmas tree, to the arched front double-door, and the Red Army ghosts stood up in eerie unison, rattling glassware on the table. The Gasman just watched us through the circular holes of his aardvark-like breathing mask as we left, and Addie’s father made another tooth-shattering chomp, as loud as a snapping branch: “I eat and I eat and I eat—”
Addie struggled, her eyeliner running with tears. “I just want to be dead, Dan. Just . . . please, let me go. Let me be dead—”
I kicked open the front door. “Come on—”
“Leave me. Please.”
But I dragged her anyway.
We broke out
through the Radnor’s re-landscaped front lawn, beyond wheelbarrows and dirt piles, and into the frigid blackness of a deserted Edgbaston peppered with snow. The words of the Head-Scratching Rifle echoed out after us, dozens of crowing voices of the dead ringing off burnt-out streetlights and chapped brick, celebrating the Timber Ridge massacre to come:
“—And I eat and I eat and I eat and I’ll eat them all, Dan—”
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727
SENT: 12:35 p.m. Mar 20 2015
Do u have the gun? WHERE R U???
11 Minutes
The Total Darkness Maze.
Halloween FrightFest. October, 2011.
I first saw Adelaide Radnor on the edge of an Anacortes dock, gagging over a handrail into the Puget Sound. Far away from the costumed monsters and giggling teenage crowds. Silence here; just the lap of the water. She’d been a hunched silhouette against harbor lights and a night sky pierced with stars. Following her out of the maze, I’d watched her for a good ten seconds — just clearing her throat and spitting into the black water — before I spoke.
You okay?
She raised a hand. I’m fine.
You sure?
Yeah. I’m just having a panic attack.
“This is it,” I said to her now. “Our Alamo.”
She nodded grimly. “Our Alamo.”
Not that it mattered. Even if the seawater underfoot magically protected us from the Gasman’s oddly specific weakness, we were still trapped in a tiny corner of my mind. Cut off, stranded. Helpless to stop the coming slaughter.
A panic attack? I hadn’t believed her. You’re barfing from a panic attack?
I get these sometimes.
Barfing panic attacks?
Claustrophobia from the stupid maze. Dark, confined spaces make me really anxious and my stomach gets weird. Either way, I’m fine. Stop looking at me. She raised her hand again. You can go now.
Addie sighed. “I can’t believe the first thing you ever saw me do was vomit an entire funnel cake off a dock.”
I grinned. “I wish I could put that on a Hallmark card.”
The doorframe (NOT AN EXIT DOOR) hung in bright yellow splinters where twenty-one-year-old Adelaide had shouldered right through it on her way out of the Total Darkness Maze. Just demolished it. She’d demonstrated better offense than the Dallas Cowboys that year. Hell, I still don’t know how she’d done it.
The off-limits area I’d unwittingly followed this strange girl into seemed to be a staging area for FrightFest, packed with deflated ghoul costumes and rows of neatly stacked synthetic gore. Four gutted torsos, six severed legs, and a dozen bloodied hands. Cigarette butts on the dock where the werewolves and tree monsters had their smoke breaks. Addie lowered her head and spat again into the tidewater, clenching her hair back in a fist. Back then her hair had a crimson streak in it. Called a feather, I think.
When I still hadn’t left, she waved again, harder, like she was swatting a gnat: I said I’m fine. What are you staring at?
I . . . I don’t know. I remember smiling shyly by the broken door, cheap vodka still warm in my throat. It’s just weird hearing a posh British accent from a girl power-puking into the ocean.
Oh, shut up.
We were just college kids. Our courtship dialogue hadn’t been penned by Shakespeare. Here and now, Addie looked at me in a glow of remembered starlight. “It was . . . it was really decent of you, that you didn’t leave.”
“I was concerned.”
“You didn’t know me.”
“I wanted to.”
She smiled, in this time and then, a bashful grin.
This is so embarrassing, she’d said, gripping the thin handrail and wiping her mouth. I don’t even want to know what I look like right now—
An angel.
Oh my God, shut up—
A vomiting angel.
That was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh, on that FrightFest dock in 2011. That sound was now gone from the real world, I realized. It existed only here, in my memory. Only in my thoughts, a deteriorating shadow of the real thing.
“We failed,” she said flatly. “The Gasman, the Head-Scratching Rifle, whatever you want to call the thing. It’s won already.”
“I know.”
“Jeez, Dan, I really wish you’d seen more Ouija boards.”
“Yeah, me too.” Funny how it comes down to the stupidest things. Icelandic mirror boards, doors that open inward, and cell phone chargers.
“I think I’m real,” she said. “I know you think you’re just imagining me, Dan, but for whatever it’s worth . . . I’m certain I’m the real Adelaide.”
I didn’t believe her, but I shrugged. “I was . . . I was just trying to hurt you because I was angry. I’m sorry.”
“Story of us.”
I noticed the Gasman on the shoreline. Standing on another boardwalk, in the fogged glow of the street lamps between the saltwater taffy shop and the Louisiana Blood haunted house. Watching us from a hundred feet. As the current of pedestrians and costumed ghouls fanned around him, he almost looked like he belonged here. Like he was a particularly well-designed FrightFest monster, flecked in Siberian ice and glistening with slimy fryer grease from the Basin State Fair. His boots were muddied with Mount St. Helens ash. We’d led him on quite a chase through remembered times and places. But it was over now.
As I’d anticipated, he couldn’t come any closer, because the Puget Sound water lapped at the dirty sandbanks between us. Waves pushed big knots of kelp in and out, like floating bodies. True enough, this off-limits dock behind the Total Darkness Maze was our Alamo. We were finally safe. I imagined the rest of my mind withering away under the Gasman’s influence, while we’d remain here in this tiny, intact pocket of memory, shivering together in Anacortes circa 2011, wondering how many innocent shoppers died at Timber Ridge by my own possessed hands.
“He can’t get us here,” Addie said. “But he doesn’t need to.”
I hated the Gasman — of course — but really I hated myself. It was my stupidity, my recklessness and arrogance, that had brought the Head-Scratching Rifle into Idaho. I could’ve taken Holden’s advice and moved on after Addie’s death. I could’ve sucked it up, packed her things, and enlisted for the Briar Mine investigation out in Bozeman, chasing shadows and anecdotes with a directional thermometer. Chasing fake spirits, instead of being chased by this very real one. I’d chosen to live in the past, and this was my sentence. I’d be stranded here in this pickled memory, with the too-good-to-be-true shade of my lost fiancée, while unspeakable tragedy unfolded in the Timber Ridge food court. Because of me, people would die. Lots of people.
“Goddamnit.”
I kicked a row of FrightFest’s severed leg props. One flopped under the railing and splashed into the water.
“God-fucking-damnit—”
I took a running start and punted one of the eviscerated torsos. It thudded against the wall of the Total Darkness Maze, coiled intestines slapping.
Addie watched grimly.
It’s hard to throw a tantrum when all you have available to break is rubbery B-movie gore. I hurled a dismembered hand into the ocean, and then another, and then I sat down across from her, catching my breath through my teeth.
“There are more body parts to kick around.” She pointed. “Over there.”
“All those people.”
She winced. “I know.”
“It’s my fault, Addie.”
“I know.”
A furry shadow darted between us on pattering feet. I recognized one of Holden’s grandmother’s cats. The orange one. The Gasman’s number one fan. At first I didn’t think much of it — just an itinerant memory — but then I noticed the napkin crudely tied around its matted collar.
A white napkin.
Our white napkin, from the Timber Ridge fight.
“A truce,” I said.
Addie nodded. “He’s done chasing us. He’s got a mall to
shoot up.”
I glanced over at the Gasman. He watched us expectantly from the adjacent boardwalk, like he was awaiting our response. I’m no good at negotiation, so instead I just flipped him the most hateful middle finger I’ve ever wielded in my entire life.
He just stared back, unbothered.
I closed my eyes and wondered what was happening in the real world of 2015. If I’d reached the Timber Ridge parking lot yet. Maybe I was up on the JCPenney balcony right now, performing the Head-Scratching Rifle’s tedious little pre-firing safety ritual. Checking the barrel for obstructions, scrutinizing the bolt, thumbing in the cartridges. Maybe the killing had already started. Maybe it was already over. Maybe I was in a police holding cell right now, splattered with drying, coppery blood and dead-eyed, while the Mosin Nagant was tagged and filed.
Maybe I’d never find out, I realized.
The orange tabby perked an ear and darted away on soft feet, and we watched it disappear into the coal-black guts of the maze. “I hate cats,” Addie said, for what must’ve been the third or fourth time.
She’d always joked about housecats being servants of evil (granted, this one pretty much was) but I knew the real reason she disliked them so viscerally. One birthday, when she was five or six, her parents had bought her a kitten she named Penny. Late that night, she woke up to go to the bathroom and didn’t see Penny follow her inside. She shut the door on its head. An hour later, they’d all piled into the car and driven to the emergency vet, and she watched her kitten die on a white table.
I guess hating cats was just how Adelaide coped with that.
The Gasman abruptly turned — peace talks concluded, apparently — and walked back into the darkness, vanishing into the fog machine-mist behind Louisiana Blood. Not so much obscured as evaporated. Leaving us alone on our dock.
“There he goes,” I said.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 19