Silence.
I waited with swollen lungs. I held each breath until my chest burned, and let each one in and out through my teeth. Like an airlock. A careful build and release, to minimize noise, so the man in my living room wouldn’t hear me.
Nothing happened.
I peered and checked the front door again. Still open. Another current of night air breathed in, bracingly cold, and my arms goose-bumped again. It’s tough to judge minutes and seconds on an adrenaline high, but after at least a minute of silence from the living room, I started to wonder . . . had I really heard those footsteps? Had I really seen myself in the mirror?
I spoke: “Hello?”
My voice rattled through the dark house. No answer.
“I called the cops,” I said weakly.
Nothing.
From the living room, I heard a scraping hiss and recognized Baby, shuffling around in her enclosure on disjointed little claws. I’d forgotten about her. In the haze of panic, could I have been mistaking her sounds for footprints? That thirty-pound creature made all sorts of bizarre noises. Lately she’d been fond of nuzzling her head under her big water bowl, raising it forty-five degrees, and letting it crash down flat. To a steady rhythm . . . maybe that could sound like a footprint?
“Front door is ajar,” the security system helpfully reminded me.
I counted to fifty. Nothing else moved in the living room.
I kept counting and reached a hundred.
There’s no one in my house.
A hundred and fifty. My heart rate was back to normal.
To hell with it; let there be light. I was tired of waiting and second-guessing. I backtracked to the dining room and palmed all of the lights switches in a row. CLICK — the kitchen fluorescents triggered first, bathing the room in scalding light. Then — CLICK, CLICK — the dining room and living room went nuclear. I had to squint and lower my eyes, so at first all I saw was the dented wood floor, which looked much worse in the unforgiving brightness—
Holden’s Ouija board was on the dining table.
I jolted.
Not just the board. Everything was back. The EMF meter. The audio recorder, its little gearbox spokes quietly turning. I bumped something with my hip — the tripod. The Haunted production’s full-spectrum camera, worth over a thousand dollars, wobbled precariously but I caught it. The red light blinked; its HD tape was still recording.
Everything’s back.
Everything’s back, just as it was.
I’d carried all of these things to Holden’s car before he’d left, twenty minutes ago. But everything had been restored, defaulted, to the start of Friday night’s ghost hunt. Like a reset video game.
I was so taken by this brazen violation of physics that it took a good second for me to remember my initial reason for flicking on the lights — to ensure there wasn’t a man in the living room — and turn my head to check.
Yeah, there was also definitely a man in the living room.
* * *
He was seven feet tall, draped in a charcoal-gray greatcoat that hung off his shoulders and fanned behind his legs like a wool superhero cape. Pale buttons. Black boots. I couldn’t see his face. He was hunched over, his gloved hands on his knees, peering intently into Baby’s plywood enclosure.
My stomach coiled. I stood rigidly still, a breath trapped in my throat like a hot bubble, terrified to make a sound. The intruder hadn’t noticed me yet, but he would if he glanced to his left. Even turned away from me, I could tell something about his face was wrong. The shape of his head seemed off, in a lumpy, jack-o-lantern way.
He touched Baby’s sliding glass door.
Not a tap, like a kid at a zoo exhibit. He was testing it, exploring every inch, listening to it creak under the pressure of his fingertips. Like the transparent surface was an unknown force field to him, and he was searching for the edges. In another moment he found them — the sliding metal frame — and tugged the door out. It shattered, spraying the living room with shards.
The report echoed twice.
A chunk of glass skittered past my foot, into the dining room.
He crouched now, coat flaps touching the carpet, and reached inside with both hands to scoop Adelaide’s savannah monitor up and out. Baby struggled; her tail flopped against the wall and one crocodile foot kicked in the air. There’s no graceful way to pick up a lizard that big. Not even Addie could do it.
The man — or ghost, whatever — fumbled with Baby for a second, still facing away from me. He hefted her from one hand to the other, then back, and then raised the thirty-pound savannah monitor to his mountainous chest. I saw one cloaked elbow rise, like he was about to try and pet her, which was inadvisable. You don’t pet most monitor lizards, any more than you’d pet a landmine. Addie had a special way with her, of course, but for everyone else, Baby doesn’t really have moods — just a sliding gradient of how likely she is to bite your hand.
But, by all means, try.
The man’s elbow raised higher—
Go ahead. This’ll be fun to watch—
But he made a gripping, twisting motion, like he was opening a pickle jar, and I realized with a nauseous jolt what was really happening. And it happened fast. Adelaide’s lizard made a strangled, gurgling hiss, like air escaping a wet balloon, and I saw her hind legs flailing harder now, desperately, her toes scratching and slicing. Her tail whipped right and left, knocking a lamp to the floor, filling the room with strange shadows.
The first sound was a wet pop.
Then . . . a tearing. Like fabric, stretched and ripping in a long, slow schism. The man’s elbow rose higher, and higher, and then he snapped through some final knot of meat and sinew. The animal came apart. The hissing stopped. I could see Baby’s back legs still kicking and her tail still thrashing, but slower now, in contracting jerks.
The intruder spun to face me, with two bloodied halves of Baby flopping in his gloved hands, and the lamp’s light bulb exploded. The room went black.
Well, holy shit.
I stepped backward and with cat-like grace, tripped over a chair. The world inverted. I crashed down on my back, staring up at the chandelier, sucking in a mouthful of displaced air. The full-spectrum Haunted camera toppled over and broke beside my head. Plastic bits skittered on the floor.
Move.
Footsteps from the darkened living room . . .
Move. He’s coming.
I rolled over, socks slipping on wood, and thrashed upright on my elbows and knees, my eardrums filling with blood. The kitchen lights fizzled out, too. I heard the man’s heavy footsteps approaching from the living room. Boots on carpet. No time for shock or horror; he’d killed our pet and he was coming for me. I heard a squishy thump on the carpet as he dropped one half of Baby.
Up. On my feet. Escape—
Back door.
His next footstep clicked on parquet floor. He was inside the dining room with me, towering over me, turning the room small, a reaching shadow with blood-slick fingers—
Backdoorbackdoorbackdoor—
I scrambled away, shouldered hard into the back door, feeling the glass bend in its frame, and flicked the lock, twisting a doorknob slippery with gun oil and panic sweat—
“Rear door is ajar—”
Sausage-fingers clawed at my back. They didn’t feel human. They felt boneless, jellylike, like a gloved hand made of slugs, squeezing my shirt—
I tore free, hurled myself outside. The back porch wasn’t finished yet, so I dropped through a plywood skeleton and hit my knees on crunchy frozen weeds. The coldness of the night air lashed my skin, shocking and powerful. Like breaking through lake ice, being immersed in frigid water. It physically hurt.
The dining room light died behind me. My shadow vanished.
I didn’t look back. I scrambled to my feet and bolted into the starlit woods, hearing the back door swing shut behind me. The paper birch trees came fast, white and peeling, whooshing past me. Dry sticks broke against my palms and fa
ce, slashing skin. I staggered and stumbled in the general direction of our nearest neighbors (the Mullins, at the end of the cul-de-sac) but I couldn’t find their porch light in the darkness. Had theirs burned out, too?
Mostly I was just moving for the sake of movement, without a true plan or tactics, because motion is life. I forgot about Adelaide, about Baby, about the Head-Scratching Rifle, about everything, and Holden’s little offhand Hippocrates quote became a chant in my mind, underlining every raw breath, every crackling step, every skeletal chill of subzero air.
Motion is life. Motion is life. Motion is—
Twenty feet back, I heard the back door break in two hard impacts.
* * *
I woke up.
Sitting in a chair.
I was back at Jitters. Back at Farwell’s premier coffee shop with the best house blend in the panhandle and bay windows peppered with dusty snow. It was daytime and the little place vibrated with life. A cappuccino machine gurgled. A barista laughed. The smell of apple fritters, Windex, ground coffee beans. My chair leg must’ve squealed when I’d jerked awake; an old couple glanced up at me from another table.
“You okay?”
I whipped back to face Holden, seated across from me. Looking at me sideways in the warm glow of those stupid paper lanterns, sipping his familiar milkshake-coffee.
I froze.
“Dan. Are you okay?”
“I . . .” My lips stuck together.
“You dozed off.”
I blinked, my eyelids dry as paper, and recognized my black coffee on the tabletop, half-gone and cold. “Just now?”
“Yep.”
“What . . . what day is it?”
He misunderstood. “About three.”
“What day is it?”
One table over, a conversation hushed. Had I raised my voice? I hadn’t meant to. The windows were a bright gray headache, filling my brain with afternoon sunlight. Holden leaned forward on his creaking chair, as if bracing to deliver bad news.
He’s going to say Friday, he’s going to say Friday, he’s going to say—
“Friday.”
I stood up, my thoughts running together. I didn’t feel it but my knee must’ve bumped the edge of the table; our coffees splashed. Holden guarded his paperwork. My eardrums rang and the little java house seemed to fall silent, like a theatre after the curtain rises. A horrible, pressurizing silence.
“Dan—”
“I have to go the bathroom.”
He pointed.
Jitters’ unisex bathroom had a perfectly good toilet but I took the liberty of vomiting in the sink. It was just more convenient. I was still in shock; still in shaky, post-car accident mode, assessing damage and counting fingers. I needed to stay alert and on my feet. Besides, the sink drain could handle it.
I slurped from the faucet and caught my face in the mirror. I looked like I felt, my eye sockets shadowing like bruises under the buzzing electric light. I could’ve passed for ten years older. But — according to Holden, and the blazing sunlight outside — I was really twelve hours younger.
Friday.
It’s Friday afternoon, March 19.
Which meant Friday night’s ghost hunt hadn’t happened yet. I hadn’t even brought the Mosin Nagant home yet. It was still in my trunk. Everything — Holden’s antique Ouija board, myself attempting suicide in the mirror, the late-night visitor in the winter coat — had all been a dream. An intricately detailed, twelve-hour nightmare. Even the part where the Head-Scratching Rifle’s spike bayonet had pierced under my thumbnail.
I checked my thumb.
Intact.
The Jitters bathroom seemed to wobble. The checkerboard floor was slick; recently mopped. An air-conditioner kicked on. Outside I heard muffled voices — a stranger asking Holden if I was okay. I took another swig of metallic sink water and knew my best friend would come in and check on me in thirty seconds, tops. He’s dependable. He’s the guy who texts you after a night of dollar beers to ensure you got home safe.
I cupped a cold handful of water and splashed it in my face. All a dream, right? I’d never had one like that before. I rarely dreamt at all, and when I did it was usually about locations, not events. My dreams were never plot-driven, you could say. Just nonsense dreamscapes — vast Jerusalem catacombs sculpted of sand, mile-wide warehouses with illogical conveyer belts, titanic ocean storm walls guarding nothing.
But this? This had been real. As vivid as an HD camera. Tactile in awful ways. I could still hear the twisting tear of Baby ripping in half, the detailed pop of those little reptile vertebrae, the rip of sinew and tendons. There was something disturbing about the way the man in the gray coat had just pulled and pulled, applying more and more pressure, like a curious child testing the physical limits of a savannah monitor’s skeleton until he broke them. He wasn’t there to kill. He was there to play.
But Addie’s stupid lizard was fine. Safe at home. In her enclosure. Right?
Right.
I twisted off the faucet.
Just a nightmare.
It’s jarring, trying to write off half a day of detailed memories. Your body resists it, like jet lag. I couldn’t believe it was Friday afternoon again; it felt like early Saturday morning. What if it had been a flash-forward of some sort? A premonition? Or something knottier and more complex, like time travel?
Time travel. I recalled the urban legend Holden once told me of the young honeymooning couple driving through the New Mexico scablands, right through some sort of temporal blister. Their watches stopped working. They fell five hours out of synch with the rest of the world. So when they stopped for food at some trucker diner, they were horrified when the waitress who seated them was just empty skin. A hollow bag of dried-out skin and nothing else — no bones or tissue inside. The entire diner had been like that, a crowd of grinning human taxidermies, gaping eye sockets and mouths, seated in their booths. Moral of the story? Don’t fall out of synch with time, I guess. I don’t know what happened to the couple afterward.
Hell, I didn’t know what was happening to me right now.
Shadows moved under the door. Holden tapped twice. “Dan, you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Heroin.”
Muffled voices outside, and I heard Holden again: “No, no, he’s joking; he’s not actually doing heroin in there—”
I checked my phone out of mindless habit — and promptly wished I hadn’t. Because according to my iPhone, it wasn’t Friday at all. It was Saturday, March 20. The time was 3:36 a.m. I even had an hour-old text message from Holden, sent after he took my broom home at the conclusion of our Friday night ghost hunt.
The screen trembled in my hands.
The twenty-four hour countdown was still ticking.
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727
SENT: 2:01 a.m. Mar 20 2015
Glad you’re OK. Still got the rifle in my trunk will destroy it tomorrow just to be safe. Get some sleep buddy see u tomorrow for briar mine.
10 Hours, 31 Minutes
I returned to my seat, taking careful steps.
Everyone in Jitters seemed to be watching me. Even the baristas fell silent, eyeing me between stacked cups on the counter. I was hyper-aware of my own heartbeat, the mechanical push and pull of my breathing, the scuff of my footsteps on hardwood. Not frightened or panicked, because those were unproductive emotions. Just . . . alert. Aware. Like a deer that may — or may not — have just heard the distant snick of a rifle’s disengaging safety.
I sat back down with Holden, squealing my chair, and sipped my coffee with shaky hands. As cold as tap water.
“Second thoughts?” he asked me.
“About what?”
“Your new gun.”
Right. I remembered that although I’d jumped back twelve hours in time, the Head-Scratching Rifle was still in my possession. In the trunk of my Celica parked outside. I’d just de
tailed my intentions to Holden, and he’d invited himself along. I’d been too gentle — or maybe too lonely — to sway him. He’d show up at my house with Haunted equipment and his Ouija board. History was set to repeat itself.
Outside, Paul Bunyan’s grinning head trucked past on an eighteen-wheeler. A chug of diesel fumes and a flash of piano-white teeth in the sunlight. Just like before.
“Creepy,” Holden murmured this time, watching it go.
Maybe I’d wake up again, I supposed. This would turn out to be another blistering salvia-trip of a dream. That was the only way to describe it. My cell phone said it was Saturday morning, the rest of the world said it was Friday afternoon, and I was in the throes of another mind-bending nightmare.
But the big man who killed Baby did make some sort of sense. I recognized the greatcoat; it was trademark winter-wear for the armed forces of the Soviet Union. I’d thumbed over hundreds of black and white photos of men cloaked in these things, warming their wrapped hands over barrel fires, fiddling with their Mosins and SKS’s, grinning for impromptu group shots. You can buy Russian greatcoats at army surplus stores; stiff, itchy robes that chafe your skin and reek of mildew and spray-on mite killer. They weren’t pretty, but they’d keep you alive when the wind chill hit the negatives.
So that was it. I’d dreamt a uniformed Red Army ghost walked into my house and tore Adelaide’s savannah monitor in half. One of the Head-Scratching Rifle’s prior victims, maybe? Trapped in a hateful, mind-melting eternity, seeking gory revenge on all living creatures, great and small? Sure, sounded good.
Step one complete. Ghost seen.
Step two: how do I avoid becoming one, myself?
“Holden, I have a hypothetical question.” I ran out of air and remembered to breathe, sucking in a coldness that stung my throat. “In theory, if we . . . if we proceed with this investigation tonight and we do find a demonic entity attached to the Mosin Nagant, how would we fight it?”
He put down his pen. “You don’t fight demons, Dan.”
Rookie mistake. I adjusted my goals. “How would we . . . survive it, then?”
“We’d destroy the rifle, obviously, because that’s the demon’s vessel. The physical object that anchors it in our world. We’d bury the pieces, or better yet, drive up to White Bend and throw them in the river—”
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 6
