Holden made a sour face.
Yes, I was jaded, but I’d never actually seen a ghost before. And eighteen months of televised ghost hunting had given me a healthy disrespect for all the flashy tech vendors that sponsored our website. It’s basically electronic cloud-watching. On Haunted we’d hit our possessed motels and lighthouses fully loaded with full-spectrum cameras for infrared night vision, electromagnetic field detectors for spiritual ‘hot spots,’ and microphones for electronic voice phenomena. Overnight we’d record hours of raw footage and our bafflingly enthusiastic production assistants would then comb through terabytes of digital slush, searching with bloodshot eyes for the odd creak or incongruous shadow. And sure, we’d find them, usually at least one per episode to keep the viewers (and, more importantly, the Nielsen ratings diaries) happy. But anomalies are cheap, and still explainable. I wasn’t after anomalies.
Now that I’d tracked down the Moby Dick of haunted objects, the cursed Soviet rifle that W. Louis’s book had declared to be ‘the single most infamous military relic since the Spear of Destiny,’ I sure as hell wasn’t going to settle for an electronic fart on an EMF meter.
“So . . .” Holden looked guilty and stared up at the warm paper lights hanging from Jitters’ ceiling of exposed ductwork. They looked like CGI pollen from an allergy medicine commercial. “LJ is wondering if you want in on the Old Briar Mine investigation. We’ll meet at the park-and-ride, tomorrow at noon—”
“Old Briar,” I said. “That’s the one with the ghost of the coal miner with the black tar gurgling from his eye sockets. Right?”
“No.” He read off his phone. “It’s the . . . ghost of a screaming baby, carried around the tunnels by a floating, legless man.”
“Meh. I’ll pass.”
He scrolled. “Over a dozen sightings. Sounds legit—”
“They always do.”
“Are we really having this argument now?”
I shrugged. “Want to?”
“Disappointment Bay Lighthouse,” Holden said with a flourish, dropping an invisible microphone. He needn’t say more, because what our thermal camera had recorded on the summit of that rusty little lighthouse in Seaflats, Washington was the highlight of his career. Three orange-yellow splotches in a sea of cold blues.
“Just warm glass,” I said, sipping my coffee.
“Warmed by what?”
“Probably the big-ass rotating light.”
“Dan, I heard footsteps on those stairs.”
“I didn’t.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I was,” I said. “I was everywhere you were. I’ve spent the last eighteen months of my life with you and Kale and LJ, poking through every haunted house, haunted hotel, haunted lumber mill, haunted Hostess factory, haunted library, and haunted water treatment plant in the Pacific Northwest, and I have exactly zero paranormal experiences to show for it. So maybe . . . maybe it’s just you, Holden.”
Dusty snow flurried outside, blowing sideways down the street.
I shouldn’t have said that. It was different when the cameras were on us and we were bickering over creaking floorboards and dust specks on the lens (excuse me, orbs). People watch ghost shows for that. It was part of an act; a contagious good humor powered by sulfurous energy drinks, fun company, and the adrenaline of exploring a deserted locale at night. I love the hunt. But here, right now, we were just old college friends having coffee and the words stung.
He softened. “I wish I could make you see the things I’ve seen.”
I remembered the time he’d claimed to see the Mothman while taking out his trash, and I nodded sincerely. “Me, too.”
When you lose a loved one, everyone else in your life swoops in to support you with hugs and cookies, and paradoxically, that’s the single loneliest feeling I’ve ever experienced. Family and coworkers grin like teary-eyed Cheshire Cats and tell you it’s okay, everything’s okay, you’ll be okay — but that only made me feel guilty for mourning her death. Like I needed to forget her, catch up with everyone else, and climb aboard the Everything’s Okay Train before it left the station. You can’t fast-forward through grief; it’s a multi-stage process and step one is being not okay. Step one is suffering.
Holden understood this. He knew I smelled her old shirts and listened to her old voicemails. Yes, he pressured me in other ways (since I’d been stuck on step one for almost three months now), but he never, ever tried to tell me that everything was okay, because he knew it wasn’t.
Leave it to the guy who believed in Bigfoot, I guess.
He turned now to watch Paul Bunyan’s grinning, severed head drive by, caged by two-by-fours. Holden’s a big guy; he looked a little bit like a blonde giant himself, clutching a teacup of Jitters coffee. “As for your new gun,” he said. “Well, haunted objects are generally bad.”
I gulped my coffee. “So I’ve heard.”
“Evil and matter are entwined, pretty much by definition,” he said. “To accept God means to let go of the material, the tactile. The worldly things. So if you’ve got a spirit clinging to a physical object like a gun, dug into it like a hermit crab . . . well, it’s almost a guarantee that it’s gonna be an asshole.”
“Cool.”
“Yeah, Dan. This . . . thing you just purchased could be a lot more dangerous than some haunted lighthouse.”
“Also, it’s a gun.”
“Hopefully, I wasn’t putting too fine a point on it when I told you this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”
“It’s certainly cracked the top ten.”
His eyes narrowed. “How long since you bought it?”
“One hour.”
“That gives you—”
“Twenty-three.”
Survive the next twenty-three hours to beat Ben Dyson’s record. Easy, right?
“Jesus.” He shuddered, like an electric current had just slithered up his spine. He popped the cap off his keychain inhaler and took a pressurized hit. “And after all of that, you still don’t believe it’s haunted?”
I couldn’t lie. I shrugged.
“Why’d you buy it, then?”
Again, I shrugged. “I . . . I think that if there’s really an afterlife, if we really go somewhere after we die, then that ugly old Mosin Nagant is my best chance at finding proof. Real proof.”
“That’d look funny on your tombstone.”
“Seriously. It’s got the nastiest, most disturbing background story of anything I’ve ever seen. More than any site we’ve ever tapped for Haunted. If the guy at Joe’s Guns knew about the weapon’s history back in Russia, he’d be exorcist-shopping. With all the nightmare fuel I’ve read about this rifle, if I don’t personally witness something paranormal in the next . . .” I checked my cracked iPhone. “. . . Twenty-two hours and fifty-eight minutes, then souls and ghosts don’t exist. Period.”
Someone clicked a microphone stand. I remembered it was Friday; some truly rancid poetry would soon fill the air like tear gas. More Bunyan Days bits and pieces trucked past the windows, heavy tires rattling the glass, but Holden just stared into me, clutching his milkshake coffee with two hands. Call Holden a kook all you want — but don’t you dare call him stupid. He knew what I was really saying: I have to know.
I have to know if I’ll see her again.
“I’m coming,” he finally said.
“Coming where?”
“To your house.”
“Why?”
“I can’t leave you alone with it.”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“Dan, you just bought a suicide gun.”
“Yes, but for a non-suicide purpose.”
“That depends,” he said icily.
At that same moment, a barista was scrawling something on the blackboard menu and the chalk broke. Her thumbnail scraped the blackboard. The hellish squeal made everyone in the coffee shop flinch.
A tumor of strange, irrational fear took hold in my stomach. My mind darted to, of all things,
the censored chunk of Mr. Dyson’s scalp that had plopped onto his laptop keyboard, where he’d typed his last blog post to over six thousand followers. Had he been prone to suicidal thoughts? My phone still obediently counted time in my pocket. The gun was mine now; you can’t put the pin back in the grenade. For a wobbly half-second, I wondered if I was ready to be proven wrong on this.
I have a fail-safe, I reminded myself. And besides—
“Tonight,” Holden said abruptly. “My car’s already loaded for Old Briar tomorrow. So we’ll have the full-spectrum camera, the EMF meter, and audio. We’ll ghost-hunt that little Russian bastard, just you and me, and assuming you found the right rifle, maybe we’ll find your paranormal proof. Obviously no bullets in the house or anything?”
“Obviously,” I lied.
And besides, ghosts aren’t real.
“It’ll be just like the good old days, Dan-O, before we sold out and went Hollywood.”
I smiled. The pitted streets and toothpick trees of Farwell, Idaho were a long way from Tinseltown.
“And speaking of . . .” he checked his phone again. “Gotta beat the dead horse one last time. Motion is life. We need you back on Haunted before the April sweeps. LJ is sick of making it a two-man show. He says you can take all the time you need, I know, but yesterday I saw him interviewing fill-ins for your—”
“Motion is life,” I echoed. “Cute. Did you make that up?”
“No,” he said sourly. “Hippocrates did.”
Something went unsaid, passing between us like electricity. The rush of displaced air following a near miss.
He’d almost mentioned Adelaide.
Sent: 3/19 2:59PM
Sender: dskagit23@webmail
Subject: Viewer Feedback (redirect)
Dear Dan,
So sorry for your loss. Ive been a loyal viewer of haunted ever since that first pilot and I hope to see u on it again soon. Luckily with all the ghosts your team has found, u of all people know that an afterlife really exists, and that your fiancée is waiting for you on the other side.
You’ll see her again.
-ds
21 Hours, 48 Minutes
Grieving isn’t what I expected. You don’t see your loved one’s face wherever you go, haunting you on billboards and strangers. That’s a cliché. The reality is simpler, less melodramatic, and far worse. You just start to forget.
So, in a way, it felt like I was already running out of time.
I unlocked my front door and carried the brown-boxed Mosin Nagant inside. The security system cooed: “Front door is ajar.”
I shut it with my foot.
I was distracted. For weeks I’d been trying (and failing) to dream about her, and to trigger a lucid dream, you’re supposed to focus on a specific thought as you fall asleep. Memories are best. The secret to fish-hooking a memory into your subconscious? Repetition, repetition, repetition.
So a few times a day I’d daydream about the night I first met Adelaide Radnor, back at the 2011 Halloween FrightFest on a boardwalk in Anacortes, Washington. Sense memories are a good start — the sharp odor of low tide, of barnacles and knotted kelp. Among the patrolling monster costumes and funnel cake stands, they had this low-budget version of a haunted house called the Total Darkness Maze, and it was exactly what it sounded like. You and your party fumble through a pitch-black plywood maze, groping your fingertips against walls lined with dangling eyeballs and rubber snakes. It’s as terrifying as a broom closet and costs six dollars. It’s only scary if you’re claustrophobic — which Adelaide was.
No joke. She Incredible-Hulked her way out of that place. In her panic she’d broken down a weak section of plywood and somehow opened a locked maintenance door leading to an off-limits part of the dock. Don’t ask how that’s possible. I like to imagine her crashing through the cheap walls like the Kool-Aid Man.
Meanwhile, from the dark guts of the maze, I’d spotted the glow of outside harbor lights and assumed it was the exit, so I followed this blonde girl’s path of destruction to the dock outside. We ended up in this storage area where all the costumed ghouls and zombies of FrightFest ducked out to smoke, and I remember blinking in the haze of foggy lights and seeing her for the first time; the girl I’d spend the next four years of my life with. She was doubled over the dock railing, hyperventilating into the salty Pacific air. In the harbor lights, her hair looked ash-white. I’m not ashamed that I noticed her legs first. She’d run her first half-marathon that summer, she later told me.
Then something tore in my hands. A ripping snarl—
Adelaide whirled to face me, startled—
The Mosin Nagant box. The mailing tape on the cardboard bottom gave out and the bagged Soviet rifle dropped to the floor—
“Shit—”
Back in my kitchen, circa 2015, I fumbled for it. Too late. The stock banged off the floor and left an eye-shaped bruise. I caught it on the bounce — grabbing the weapon by its birch handguard, knuckles clenched — and I carried it to the dining-room table, cursing through my teeth.
She turned around.
No.
She didn’t. It had been a daydream.
But she turned. Somehow, I saw her turn. It was impossible, but in some weird temporal bubble, a place neither remembered nor imagined, at once real and unreal, I was powerfully certain that my dead fiancée had heard the rifle tear through its box, and spun around and looked at me on that dock—
I was halfway to the table when I noticed the blood.
A spreading warmth in my palm. No pain, no discomfort, just heat where my skin was touching the rifle. Like hot soup, sticking between my fingers and dribbling down my wrist. My first thought was that the rifle’s handguard had cracked open like a hollow clamshell and was leaking some kind of putrid, warm fluid. Even when I blinked and saw the fresh oxygenated blood on my skin, I had a hard time telling myself it was mine.
Mine. My blood.
She turned around. That was new.
Red drops tapped the floor, perfect little circles.
My mind shuttered, dizzy thoughts coming in blinks. I unwrapped my fingers from the weapon and identified the culprit. The Mosin’s sinister bayonet, a whites-of-their-eyes CQB infantry weapon, had pierced the plastic. And the pad of my thumb. Still no pain. I couldn’t see how deep, exactly, the ancient Soviet spike had gone — and then through the semi-transparent part of my thumbnail, I saw a black dot. Okay. Question answered.
The world wobbled. I tasted stomach acid in the back of my throat.
That synthetic voice: “Front door is ajar.”
Our home alarm system does that sometimes — if you don’t fully close the front door, the lock doesn’t engage and it can be pushed open by the slightest change in air pressure. Obviously, I didn’t give two shits about the front door right then.
I gritted my teeth and slid the seventy-year-old Soviet bayonet out of my thumb. Maybe it was the blur of shock, but I swore it took longer than it should have. Inches and inches of black metal kept coming out of me, like an optical illusion, like ribbons unfurling from a magician’s sleeve, before the tip finally slurped out. The pop echoed up the veins in my arm. Still no real pain or discomfort, just the unsettling knowledge that it should hurt and didn’t. My blood stained the Mosin Nagant’s plastic bag in a gratuitous B-movie splash of shiny beads. I couldn’t drop the rifle — that would leave another dent in the wood — so I leaned it against the fridge.
“Stay,” I told it.
“Front door is ajar—”
“Shut up.”
I saw her turn—
I reached the bathroom sink, my mind a churn of half-thoughts, and the first rolling wave of pain hit. Viciously sharp, like a scalpel jammed under my thumbnail. My knees jellied and I grabbed the sink. I hoped the antique bayonet hadn’t left a shard in there, like stabbing yourself with a graphite pencil. I ran the faucet full blast, filling the sink bowl with pink water.
Tetanus? I doubted it. The blade wasn’t rusty; too much So
viet preservative slopped on it. But I wondered what sorts of decades-old industrial solvents and chemicals had sloughed off inside my thumb. Circulating in my bloodstream right now.
A bang reverberated from the kitchen, startling me. The rifle must’ve fallen over anyway. Another dent.
“Front door is ajar.”
From the living room I heard a reptilian hiss. Adelaide’s pet lizard sometimes reacted to commotion.
In the fogging bathroom mirror I fought a stupid, crooked smile. It was kind of funny. I hadn’t even taken the Mosin Nagant out of its mailing bag yet and it had already ruined my kitchen flooring and cost me half a thumbnail. Of course, I knew it was an accident and nothing supernatural. And, obviously, I’d only imagined Adelaide turning to face me on that dock; you can’t affect a memory of 2011 with a loud noise from 2015. I was depressed, not crazy. But the adrenaline was intoxicating, and maybe — just maybe — this could turn into an interesting twenty-four hours.
What were Holden’s words, back at Jitters?
Let’s ghost-hunt this little Russian bastard.
Amen to that.
And as for my very first encounter with Adelaide Radnor, back on that FrightFest dock? The little area had no other exit, so I’d taken her hand and led her back into the claustrophobic plywood maze. She’d been reluctant but there was no other way. We had to backtrack. Backward is forward, I’d told her.
Backward is forward.
Outside, I heard the lope of a motor and gravel crunching underneath tires. Holden was here now.
* * *
“What happened to your hand?”
I’d mummified my thumb in a hasty bandage of gauze and scotch tape before coming out to meet him in my driveway. I didn’t answer his question. I watched him pull something from his back seat, and it wasn’t a camera bag. “What’s that?”
He hoisted a weighty cardboard box over his shoulder. “A surprise.”
He’d accidentally parked his Ford Explorer (affectionately nicknamed Dora, as in Dora the Explorer) on the planter where Adelaide had planned on growing pumpkins this spring. It was full of dry weeds. The eastern sky was cloudless, bruising purple through scraggly trees. My breath curled in the porch light. It was cold enough out here to kill you, but it would take a while.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 2
