“Oh, shit—”
I lurched backward, off-balance, bumping a rack of blue gun manuals—
THUNK. The front door clicked.
Not Joe rolled his eyes.
I looked back and the door was still shut. The apparition was still outside. It took me a moment to realize — the Gasman had pushed it with his gloved hand. It hadn’t budged. So he adjusted his hulking stance, reached, and pushed again.
THUNK.
“Pull the door,” Not Joe said. “Don’t push it.”
The Gasman pushed again, harder.
THUNK.
“Pull the damn door. It’s on the sign—”
THUNK. THUNK.
The old man sighed. “Jesus Christ—”
“Don’t let him in,” I whispered.
“Son, he seems to be not letting himself in.”
“If he gets inside, shoot him.”
THUNK. THUNK. THUNK.
The Gasman kept forcing the door — the same identical motion, each time a little harder. A little rougher. The frame creaked. His head didn’t move; his mask stayed focused on us, studying us. Maybe just studying me. This thing had followed me, stalked me — from Saturday morning to Friday afternoon, from the twentieth of March to the nineteenth, like an extra-dimensional predator.
Who was, at the moment, baffled by a door.
THUNK-THUNK.
There was a frightening stupidity to those flat eyes. Maybe it was the way the eyeholes seemed to stare out in slightly opposite directions. Maybe it was the goofy snout-like profile of the mask, like a sports mascot. Or maybe it was the simple fact that it had spent the last ninety seconds pushing a door clearly marked PULL. But morbidly, I wondered if a human face even existed underneath that shaped rubber. My arms prickled and my next breath fogged the air.
The coldness, I realized. The Gasman brings it.
Like rancid meat brings flies.
Not Joe bunched up his flannel shirt to reveal a holstered pistol on his hip. “Hey!”
The Gasman paused.
“Yeah, you.” The old man’s voice boomed. “Take a big step back.”
The Gasman did. Then he kicked the door.
CRUNCH. The glass spider-webbed with icy cracks and the dangling open/closed sign clattered to the linoleum.
I backed up to the counter. “Now can you shoot him?”
“Not unless you’re gonna help me drag a giant-ass corpse inside.” It took me a second to grasp what Not Joe meant by that. His pistol was out now, held at his side, a boxy little automatic with a checkered grip. Through the corner of his mouth he hissed: “Go out the back and call 911.”
“What?”
“The fire exit. Take it—”
THUNK-CRASH.
The Gasman punched the door with his gloved fists. An exploding circle of cracks. The door sagged and a hinge blew out.
Not Joe aimed, his finger on trigger. “Go!”
It was about to get loud. I vaulted the gun counter, kicking over a cup of Don’t Tread on Me pens, and bolted for the back office, my eardrums pressurizing, my veins surging with blood. Another ice-tray light fizzled overhead.
His raw voice chased me: “Go, go, go!”
CRUNCH-THUNK—
I hurtled through the back room, a dingy little office with a Windows 95 box monitor and last year’s wall calendar swarmed with yellow Post-its. I pivoted, tripping over a surge protector, my shoes squealing on bare cement foundation (where is it, where is it?) and found the emergency exit door behind two flattened cardboard boxes. ALARM WILL SOUND, said a red stencil. I wrenched it open, a ponderous thing that squealed on gritty hinges. Alarm didn’t sound.
Also, it didn’t lead outside.
It led into another building, miles away.
* * *
At my feet, the floor morphed from cement foundation to itchy blue carpet. The back exit of the gun shop looked out into the Haunted production office.
Where I worked.
Our show’s base of operations is the Ferguson complex, a dried-out corpse of a building. A cavernous hollow of vacant office suites; a mega-corporate office without a mega-corporation — chopped up and divvied among local businesses so we could squat under its giant bones. Plastic plants, fake skylights, and a drained water fountain in the lobby that stank of bug spray. I was looking down the long hallway into our cubicle farm.
To reiterate — from the back exit of Joe’s Guns, I could see my work desk. This was problematic.
Free-falling through time . . .
I hesitated there, between times and places, my fingers tightly gripping the doorframe and brick exterior wall. In the gun store behind me, I heard the cymbal crash of disintegrating glass. The Gasman was coming in.
Down the hallway ahead of me, a ponytailed head prairie-dogged up from the gray cube walls. A production assistant (usually a community college intern because they’ll work for free). This one’s name was either Sarah, Amy, or Casey. She stared agape at me, and at the gun store I’d apparently brought in with me. She dropped something — I heard papers fluttering onto carpet. Then the chattering thud of a stapler.
I waved. “Hi.”
I knew what this was. When this was. This was last Tuesday, a few days before I’d purchased the Head-Scratching Rifle from Joe’s Guns. I’d skulked into the production office to grab a paycheck from my inbox. I’d planned to take the freight doors and discreetly SEAL-Team-Six my way in and out, but of course I’d been immediately spotted by Sarah/Amy/Casey, whose corner cube guarded the hallway. At least that time, I hadn’t brought a gun store into the office with me. This was much more awkward.
She clasped her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God—”
CRUNCH-THUD. The front door to Joe’s Guns crashed down flat somewhere behind me, the sound wobbling strangely between dimensions. An echo trapped forever between Friday and Tuesday. I expected to hear the pop of Not Joe’s gunshots — but heard only the Gasman’s incoming footsteps, boots crunching kernels of glass . . .
I stepped forward, into the Haunted production office, and slammed the emergency exit door to Joe’s Guns. Doors seemed to give the Gasman momentary trouble, but somehow I knew — he’d always get through. He’d always follow.
“Oh my God,” the intern gasped again.
“Uh . . .” I pressed the door, making sure it clicked shut. “Yeah, don’t go in there.”
But Sarah/Amy/Casey just stared, shaking her head in slow disbelief. Now that I was fully inside the production office I could see it, too — the brick exterior wall of (Friday’s) Joe’s Guns was crammed into the hallway of (Tuesday’s) Ferguson building, like two dollhouses violently mashed into the same space. The office walls were bowed, exploding windows and exposing rebar bones. The floor sagged under my feet. Ceiling tiles dropped and a sprinkler pipe leaked overhead, drizzling gray water. I was pretty sure I’d either proven or disproven Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Not sure which.
I pointed weakly. “Sorry about . . . all that.”
Her eyes welled with shocked tears. Fingertips raking against her cheeks: “You . . . oh, holy shit, is that a building?”
I brushed drywall powder from my hair. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Is that Discount Guns?”
“Joe’s Guns.”
“How did you . . . do that?”
I almost laughed. I didn’t do it. I had no control over this. If I did, I would’ve parked Joe’s Guns somewhere else. And I had to keep moving. The Gasman was coming. So I raced on through the Haunted production office, grabbing a handful of M&M’s from the Sasquatch bowl on Holden’s desk.
“Don’t stay here,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Something really bad is going to come through that door after me.”
Her eyes followed me over cubicle walls. “Where . . . where are you going?”
I passed my empty desk, passed the crooked doorway to LJ’s office marked UNIT PRODUCTION MANAGER, and elbowed through the fire escape door. For the first time in a long t
ime (I couldn’t specify exactly how long, since time had become so bizarrely malleable), I had a plan. An objective. A relentless, pulsing thought that crowded out all others. All paths lead backwards in time, right? Never mind the gas-masked creature behind me — I felt a strange excitement building in my guts. A shivery, reckless glee.
“Dan, where are you going?” Sarah/Amy/Casey shouted after me, but I’d left the fire door swinging and I was already going, going, gone. Vanishing over the next event horizon, deeper into the rabbit hole. Hell, I’ve always had a self-destructive streak.
Adelaide.
Yep, she was my goal. My race against time. Before the dream dissipated, before the salvia trip burned off, before the Gasman caught me.
Oh my God, I can actually see Addie again.
If I hurry.
8 Hours, 4 Minutes
The Haunted production office led to my kitchen, where I’d found Addie’s soured coffee creamer in the fridge.
My kitchen led to my parents’ rancher in Astoria.
My parents’ living room led to the cramped interior of a Greyhound bus, bumping shoulders with greasy strangers and runaways.
I hurtled from locale to locale, memory to memory, as if I were running down a passenger train. Bolting down the center aisle, crashing through each connecting door, on to the next car down. A literal train of thoughts. Somehow I knew this bizarre suspension of physics could evaporate at any moment, that my time was running out.
The Greyhound’s side exit led to the post office lobby, where I’d waited in line to fill out a yellow form to update Adelaide’s mailing address to dead.
The post office led to my dining room (I think we’re back to late February now) where I’d gritted my teeth and pried bullets from their casings with needle-nose pliers, pouring gunpowder in a black hourglass heap on the table. The rifle itself was still in bureaucratic limbo, awaiting its transfer from Ben Dyson’s widow to Joe’s Guns, but in the meantime I’d mail-ordered a cheap box of Czechoslovakian 7.62x54R ammo to engineer my backup plan. Because backup plan sounded more rational than bullet bomb.
This led to more nights of research, of lying belly-down on the living-room carpet, submerged in the wan blue glow of my laptop. Frozen pizzas, Wild Turkey, and sinus headaches. Hunting the Russian legend of the Head-Scratching Rifle (which was now, ironically, hunting me), hacking through a tedious snarl of Creepypasta myths and serial number databases while missed calls and well-meaning voicemails accumulated on my phone.
Now reliving all of it in reverse, I couldn’t believe I’d worked so hard to track down this obscure evil and willfully introduce it into my already fractured life. Like turning a hurricane loose against a sandcastle. I pretty much deserved this. Adelaide would’ve laughed.
She will. She will laugh. When I tell her.
Maybe I was losing it. But I kept running, kept barreling down my own train of thoughts, rewinding the depressing movie of Dan J. Rupley’s life, and the Gasman was always a car or two behind me. I saw his circular glass eyes approaching from the darkness of my backyard, glinting in the porch light like cat irises, and before the rest of his body came into view he’d looked like a floating head. I saw him again in my parents’ kitchen. He nearly cornered me in the Farwell Thrift Mart, coming down the frozen food aisle. He followed. He never stopped. He was always there, the slow tsunami at my back, pursuing me deeper and deeper into my past. To stand still was to die. Motion is life, right?
Adelaide died an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve. If I could push through the rest of January and break into 2014, I could see her again. Before the accident. That was all I wanted. To find her, to see her again, to smell the mango shampoo in her hair, to hear her laugh, to feel her fingertips on my shoulder, to live a moment with her one last time. Any moment. It’s chillingly convenient when you think about it — my goal with the Head-Scratching Rifle had been to find evidence of the afterlife, so I’d know that I might someday be reunited with Addie’s eternal soul. Now, I was on my way to see her right now. I practically had her address. Almost too easy, right? Just a few cars to go . . .
Maybe Addie was onto something when she’d said my brain was over-compartmentalized; filled with Tupperware. We’re into early January now. Like being funneled through an Ikea, through room after room of dioramas, all unnaturally conjoined.
The Farwell Thrift Mart led to Holden’s driveway.
Holden’s driveway led to the cemetery.
The cemetery led to that church on Pine, where we’d held Addie’s funeral service. Her stateside one, at least (her parents had put on a much fancier burial in the Edgbaston suburb of Birmingham, far beyond the reach of us American yokels). So this was Farwell Methodist, a small-town church with peeling paint, a yellow lawn, and amusingly snarky signboard messages. Addie and I used to pass it on our workday carpool, and every Monday we’d crane our necks to see the week’s new message: THAT CARRIE UNDERWOOD SONG IS A METAPHOR, DON’T EXPECT JESUS TO LITERALLY TAKE THE WHEEL.
I came in through the side entrance, from the restrooms, dodging the bottleneck of mourners. I didn’t want to be seen — this time or the last. I passed a folding table stocked with untouched lemon bars and four carafes of room-temperature coffee. The auditorium hummed with murmured voices and creaking chairs, all hushing in unison. Before Adelaide’s parents spoke, they put on an iMovie slideshow and scored it to Green Day’s Time of Your Life, because she wasn’t alive to point out how much of a cliché that was. I knew the funeral’s exact date because I’d helped circulate the e-invites — January sixth. I was almost back to her. I only had to free-fall six more days into the past.
Keep on falling . . .
It occurred to me then, as the first guitar strums crackled through the cheapo speakers — when I returned to 2014, would I find the real Adelaide? When I finally reached her, before the accident, at LJ’s lake house on New Year’s Eve — would it really be her? Her soul, I mean. I suppose that was the million-dollar question: would she be a ghost, a memory, or something else?
I was afraid of the answer.
And the Gasman. That bulbous face and ragged greatcoat would always be a step behind me, like an inescapable figure from a nightmare. But I’d worry about all of that later, because I couldn’t stop now. I was too close to her.
Keep going . . .
Green Day was mourning tattoos, memories, and dead skin on trial when I passed through the assembly. Rows of gray folding chairs loaded with friends, coworkers, distant family. Someone sobbed in the back, and someone else munched chips (who eats chips at a funeral?). Photos of Adelaide clicked through the blue-tinted projector at fifteen-second intervals, and I was conspicuously absent from each one. Yes, whenever possible, her parents had cropped me out.
I crept behind the back row, trying to remain unseen — but heard a collective gasp from the crowd. Shock. I turned around, expecting to see the Gasman’s insectoid face looming in the hallway behind me.
The hall was empty.
And I realized that on the pull-down screen, the projector had clicked to that photo. I remembered it because I’d taken it. A dumb-luck accident, shot from the hip at the Mount St. Helens National Monument. Addie and I were hiking inside the volcanic blast zone, on that ridge where some poor volcanologist was made famous in 1980 for his last words, breathlessly cried into his radio: Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it! The mountain loomed in our background; a sad, cavernous shell cloaked in rainclouds. Even after decades of recovery, the land was still a beaten slurry of logs and damp mud. There’s regrowth and foliage, but it’s clumpy, scrubby, like the stuff you’d find in the Mojave. Millions of fallen trees, bleached as white as exposed bones.
And here’s Adelaide Radnor, stepping over a particularly thick trunk, profiled against the gray ruin and dome of churned clouds, in her sundress and hiking boots, her sunglasses on her forehead and her blonde hair whipped up by a sudden breeze. She was about to turn to face the camera — face me, as I snapped the spontaneous picture —
but the image had frozen her in this moment, this fragile half-second of almost. We could almost see her face. She could almost see us. Almost, forever.
It shattered me. It hurt worse than a million preppy yearbook photos, because she was real in it. She’s not smiling, she’s not posing, she’s not wearing mascara, she’s not even aware she’s being immortalized for her own funeral slideshow. She’s just Addie, just the woman I wanted to marry, with the sun in her eyes and a red zit on her cheek, leaning to step over a dead tree.
I’ll find you, I promised her.
I’ll see you again.
Someone blew his nose, an abrupt goose honk.
Now Green Day closed the final chorus about hoping you’ve had the time of your life, and sure enough, that haunting Mount St. Helens pic was the one her parents had chosen to end the slideshow on. Fading in, stenciled in white Tahoma font: ADELAIDE LYNNE RADNOR. ALIVE IN OUR MEMORY.
As I kept going and crashed through the church’s double doors, on to the next train car down, I realized that was literally the plan. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Alive in memory? Let’s hope so.
Keep going . . .
But I looked back — one final sidelong glance at Addie’s funeral, to see if the Gasman’s snouted face had joined the grieving crowd behind me — and I noticed another message had appeared on the projector screen, below the original. Same Tahoma font. But this one was new, unpunctuated, shouting in breathless caps-lock:
DAN TURN AROUND DON’T GO ANY FURTHER—
Nope. I let the heavy church doors swing shut behind me.
I’m coming, Addie.
I’ll see you again.
* * *
From the funeral on, times and places smear together. I didn’t stop for anything. I couldn’t. The emotions were too fresh, too new. I just kept sprinting from place to place, kept hurtling forward (which was really backward); no time to examine my surroundings, no time to think or even change direction. The past is sticky. Like a basilisk running on water, you have to keep going or you sink.
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 8
