She was looking at me. “Why? What else could it be?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I spoke softly, my words carefully spaced, like a surgeon delivering bad news: “We have to leave the party. We have to leave now.”
“Right now?”
“Yep.” I pulled her by the elbow to the foyer.
“Can you drive?”
Strange question, but I nodded.
“Good,” she said with a bashful shrug. “I can’t.”
I looked at her.
Outside, a string of firecrackers rattled like machine gun fire.
She cocked her head. “What, Dan?”
“How many drinks have you had?”
“You explain first. Why we’re leaving all of sudden—”
A ceiling light exploded in LJ’s kitchen, and the walls flattened the report into something like a champagne cork popping. The jingle of glass shards hitting the floor. Someone yelped and dropped a handful of cards.
In another fireburst of arterial red, I saw it in Addie’s eyes. A slight glaze. Only a highway patrolman would have detected it. She didn’t seem drunk — she never, ever seemed drunk, just sleepy — but it was there. She might have skated through a breathalyzer, but she wasn’t good to drive. Except she did. Twenty minutes later, to retrieve her cell phone charger from our house, five miles away.
The idiot who’d hit her? He was sloshed. It was New Year’s Eve — if you believe the PSAs, the entire highway system of Idaho was one booze-soaked bumper car arena. His pickup had barreled right through a four-way stop as she crossed it, less than a half-mile from our house, and rammed her driver-side door, concentrating the full kinetic force of the impact into the left side of Addie’s face and body. A hit like that, and airbags don’t even factor in the equation. The trauma doctor likened it to falling onto a cement sidewalk from a ten-story building. Even reduced to a turnip with a shaved head two floors above us, I’d always hated the guy, and quietly wished for a janitor’s vacuum to accidentally unplug his breathing machine. I guess I’d imagined him as this roving, destructive force, a two-ton meteorite powered by vodka, Red Bull, and stupidity, as impossible to anticipate as blue-sky lightning. I’d imagined there was no earthly way Addie could’ve avoided the grill of that truck racing toward her window.
But she’d been drinking, too.
The report had mentioned alcohol in her system, but I’d never seen the BAC or cared to find out. I’d assumed there’d be a trace amount, since I’d seen her sip a wineglass with her Cubek friends, Corey and Jamie, when we’d arrived at eight. But that was it. Adelaide was too smart, too responsible, too in-control, to drive drunk. Or buzzed.
So? They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. It isn’t.
She gripped my shoulder and I whiffed the fruity-aspirin smell of white zinfandel on her breath again. I guess that explained that. “Dan. You’re acting weird.”
I tugged her arm. “Come on.”
“It was just a dream—”
A woman screamed in the dining room.
It echoed off the bay windows, harsh as a buzz saw, shrill and utterly out of place here. It sounded prerecorded, like a radio sound bite. It couldn’t be real, but I knew it was. The crowd in the living room parted, arms and legs and elbows staggering backwards and dropping beers. Someone fell ass-first over an end table. A chorus of terrified gasps. The firework embers over the lake faded and for a moment the house fell into a perfect darkness. The kitchen and dining-room lights were both out, their electricity sapped. The candles in the fireplace, too.
The Gasman was inside the house with us.
I groped behind me, finding Addie’s slender wrist with one hand and LJ’s front door with the other. I pulled her but she planted her feet into the hardwood. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Oh my God—”
She’d seen him.
Her night vision had always been sharper than mine.
Then a brilliant green fireball lit the house and I saw him, too. The Gasman was standing where the living room meets the dining room, silhouetted as a black shadow against sparkling green water. I saw everything — that tattered wool greatcoat, the pudgy skinhead boots, the bulging gear belt, that nonsensical gas mask. The dangling hose that connected to nothing. Here he was, a transplanted nightmare, a beer-bellied bottom feeder with a snouted face.
Addie panicked behind me. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But he’s an asshole.”
Green shadows deepened and stretched as embers wafted down to the water. In the swirl of moving light I didn’t even notice the woman crouched beside the Gasman until he raised one thick arm, his gloved hand clenched, squeezing a fistful of her hair. She screamed again — another buzz-saw shriek — and wobbled upright on her tiptoes, punching and kicking to no effect. I couldn’t tell who she was. The Gasman held her there for a moment, like an angler studying a hooked fish, and then fastened his other hand around the nape of her neck. For leverage, I realized.
“Let her go!” I shouted. “I’m here. You don’t want her—”
Oh, but he did. The green backlight died just as the seven-foot Gasman started to pull out a gripping handful of her hair, and I heard her wailing in agony, the horrified group scream of onlookers, and worst of all, the rip of her scalp tearing off. It sounded like old carpet being pulled up.
Addie clasped her hands to her face.
“Hey! I’m right here.” But all I heard was that nauseating carpet sound. The Gasman was just tearing and tearing, ignoring me, like a fussy child occupied with a favorite toy.
I pulled Addie to the front door. I’d spent much too long here already, and given the Gasman enough time to ambush us. This was a stupid mistake, and it was time to leave New Year’s Eve. But Addie struggled every inch of the way, fighting me, bumping over a coat rack with her shoulder—
“Stop him,” she hissed in my ear. “Someone has to—”
“He won’t.”
“What?”
“He won’t stop.”
Her eyes widened in an orange flash. “How? How do you—”
“PUT HER DOWN.” I whirled just in time to see red-faced Kale Wong stomping down the stairs, hurling a shot glass over the bannister. It shattered off the Gasman’s chest. The hulking thing dropped the woman, wobbled on those big boots, and leveled those circular eyes on Haunted’s third co-host. The creature behind the gas mask wasn’t injured, frightened, or even really all that surprised. Just deeply curious, like an astronaut navigating a foreign planet, still clutching a fistful of bloody hair. The last shards of glass chattered on the floor as darkness reclaimed the room.
I realized what was going to happen. “Kale, no! Don’t touch him!”
He didn’t hear.
Adelaide stepped out behind me, too — she’d already ducked into LJ’s coat closet and wheeled back out with an aluminum baseball bat. Even buzzed, she could think and act fast — but action was useless here. I know it sounds like an excuse, but whatever ancient evil lived behind that bug-eyed Soviet mask wasn’t going to be beaten to death with sports equipment.
I grabbed the bat — bracingly cold — and stopped her. Her heels squeaked. Then I spun back to face the dining room, my voice raw: “Kale!”
The crowd shoved into the foyer, blocking my view. Half-retreating, half-spectating, boxing Adelaide and I against the front door with a wall of bodies. I couldn’t see the Gasman. Or Kale. I heard grunts, shouts, furious scuffling. The dining-room table legs scraping tile, overturning, spilling cards and breaking glass. Then a bloodcurdling shriek. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
Addie wrenched the baseball bat from my grip. “What is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he even human?”
Three wet pops from the dining room. Like someone was cracking knuckles, but much louder and meatier. Then a second scream, strangled and hoarse, muffled by gloved, gripping hands—
“Oh, God—”
The party expl
oded toward us. A frenzied crowd pummeling us against the front door. The Gasman had made a few horrific examples — Kale probably among them — and now everyone wanted to get out at once. The foyer became a mosh pit. Someone elbowed me in the teeth and I tasted blood. Addie yelped and the aluminum bat clanged to the hardwood, lost in a forest of knees and legs. “Dan!” I heard her scream, at once very close and very far.
I felt for the doorknob, pinned against the door by squirming bodies. It was our escape — but it opened inward. Against the human tide. I thought of that nightclub fire in Brazil, where faulty lights ignited the stage and hundreds of partygoers burned alive in a charred heap because the goddamn emergency doors opened inward. A perfectly functional pair of doors. If everyone had just taken one orderly step back, the doors could’ve opened and the entire nightclub could’ve been evacuated in seconds. It’s the stupid things that kill you. Like drunk-driving for a cell phone charger.
“The door,” Addie cried out—
I wrenched it open a few gasping inches, but someone else pile-drove into my spine and smashed me into it, slamming it back shut. Too many people, crushed too tight. My lungs squished inside my ribs. The doorframe creaked under our combined weight — under this human landslide — and the stained glass broke out of the porthole above the door, raining colored shards. A big one bounced off my shoulder. Someone screamed to my right — I think they caught a piece in the eye.
Another surge of purple light, and over the crowd, I glimpsed the Gasman’s first victim, staggering toward us with her shell-shocked hands clasped to the crown of her skull. Most of her hair was gone. She wore a helmet of scalp meat, shadowed deep violet in the wash of fireworks light, her cheeks running with blood and tears.
It was the intern. Sarah/Amy/Casey.
Heavy footsteps. Boots. Too calm to be anyone else. The Gasman came up behind her like a towering shadow as the firelight dimmed again—
Someone screamed: “Darby, behind you!”
Darby, I managed to think. I wasn’t even close—
Panicked voices: “He’s coming—”
“Open the door—”
This time I planted one foot against the wall, forced it open six inches, and wedged my other foot inside the frame. When the next body crashed into the pile, the door slipped free but stopped on my shoe. Someone else’s arms folded around my face, grabbing the door and pulling, and I realized it was Adelaide. She screamed something in my ear; I couldn’t tell what. Panicked breaths clouded the air, blinding us with gray mist. The cold air stung my throat.
“Pull!”
Another pitched scream behind us — it sounded like Darby — but cut raggedly short by a bass thud, a skull slammed into hardwood. A new voice screamed, and a bone cracked like a gunshot. Another fresh voice, and another, and I felt a hot splash of droplets on the back of my neck. Blood.
“Oh, holy shit—”
“Pull the door—”
“He’s right behind us—”
Something hard, like a pebble, pinged off my scalp. Another clacked off the door. One landed in my mouth and chattered between my teeth like gravel. I spat it out immediately but somehow I knew — from the bladed earwig shape of it, maybe — that it was someone’s tooth. Something else bigger, squishier, landed in the crowd behind us, and I realized the floor was suddenly slick, wet, our shoes slip-sliding. More blood. Gallons of it.
“Dan,” Addie snarled in the chaos, her forehead pressed to mine. “Pull—”
But pulling wasn’t working. Hell, pulling got those partygoers in Brazil killed. So I repositioned myself, wedging my shoulder into the six inches of guillotine-space between the door and the doorframe, and this time I braced my elbows and pushed.
“Yes!”
“Door’s open!”
Halfway, at least. Someone slipped out under my wedged arms, and another, and another, like kids on a playground playing bridge. The first few to escape.
Addie went next and I followed. I didn’t have a choice; the crowd drove us through the tight space. Through the front door, to safety — and then immediately tumbling over an unexpected object lying on the porch. A heavy, rectangular thing. I rolled free of the current of escaping bodies, somersaulted hard on my back, and Addie’s hand was in my face, pulling me to my feet.
“Get up. Get up—”
Behind us, more partygoers crashed through the propped door and stumbled over the obstacle — a green yard waste bin. A hundred-pound bin, wheeled up onto LJ’s front porch and laid down flat against the door. Compost oozed from the lidded top, sludgy and thick as wet cement. I recognized that familiar, yeasty scent of digestion, of bacteria breaking down matter into hot gas, the scent of the Head-Scratching Rifle, implanted here in my New Year’s Eve memory.
I blinked in the freezing air. How did the recycling bin get here?
Now it was Adelaide tugging me by the arm. “Come on!”
The Gasman. I knew it had been him. Hauling that heavy-ass recycling bin up five steps onto the porch was quite a physical feat for anyone normal. And it made sense. The Gasman had entered the house from the back, breaking through the patio doors overlooking the lake, but first he’d set up a neighbor’s recycling bin to block off the front door and seal the exit route. To trap the crowd (or maybe just me) in the living room. Only problem: he was too stupid to understand that LJ’s front door opened inward, not outward. So instead of dooming us, he only inconvenienced us on our way out, because even after our encounter at Joe’s Guns, the Gasman still couldn’t quite grasp the subtle nuances to how doors work.
“Dan,” Adelaide screamed. “Come on!”
I glanced back at her, gathering my thoughts. I noticed a knot of blood in her wisped hair and my heart seized with panic — but it was just an ear. A severed, blood-soaked ear, belonging to someone who no longer needed it, that had landed in her hair and stuck there. I don’t think she’d noticed it.
The last person — LJ’s wife, it looked like — cartwheeled through the front door and over the recycling bin. Then the Gasman’s broad shoulders filled the gap, a ragged shadow against another splash of fireworks light. In one clenched hand, I saw a dark piece of gore — a jawbone, maybe. His snouted face swiveled and found us. Maybe he was disappointed that his recycling bin ruse hadn’t worked. Maybe he was enjoying the chase. Maybe he wasn’t really thinking at all, and only a sentient mold colony lived behind those dumb glass eyes.
Now he shouldered through the doorframe and gave the recycling bin a monstrous kick, scooting it across the porch and splintering the Victorian railing. A hummingbird feeder dropped and shattered. Someone screamed.
Addie and I staggered down the front steps as the railing broke behind us. Hand in hand, we bolted down LJ’s sloped front lawn, the grass blades turned brittle by the sudden, unnatural cold. It was like running on a field of crunchy glass. Flecks of snow peppered my face, as dry and abrasive as sand. Of course it was snowing now, because the Gasman brings the cold with him—
“He’s not going to stop,” I said.
She ran alongside me, huffing: “We need to call the police.”
Others had the same idea. Throngs of traumatized survivors, blood-drenched and wide-eyed, congregated by the motor pool of cars in LJ’s driveway, warily counting heads and swapping horror stories. I saw cell phones held skyward in the universal sign for no signal.
“We have to drive—”
“Driving won’t work,” I said.
We ran past the crowd, into the street. Our palms sliced the frigid air like track runners. Our scraping breaths echoed into the stillness and vanished. There were more houses to our left and right — bloated McMansions, doctors and lawyers perched all along Overlook Drive — but every last one was dark and silent, like a block of dollhouses. Not even the porch lights or driveway lamps burned. Just as the Gasman brought coldness, he brought darkness. I remembered the champagne-cork pop of LJ’s kitchen lights going out, darkening the lake house for his arrival.
“What do
you mean driving won’t work?”
“He’s . . . he’s not real,” I said. “None of this is real. It’s not really New Year’s Eve. And you’re not real. Because you’re dead.”
“What?”
“You’re dead, Addie.”
We stopped to catch our breaths a few blocks from LJ’s house. Racking gasps, mouthfuls of icy air. My eyelids stuck together. Neither of us had coats.
Her fingers dug into my arm. “Dan, you’re making no sense.”
“None of this makes sense. It’s actually March of 2015, and you’re actually dead.” I spat it at her like it was an insult, and my words rattled down the deserted street. I hadn’t meant to raise my voice. “You’ll . . . Addie, you’ll get killed by a drunk driver twenty minutes from now, because you leave LJ’s party to grab your cell phone charger. So you can drink more and we can spend the night. That’s it. There’s no higher meaning, no JFK conspiracy. It’s just a stupid mistake, and it kills you. And it happened already, almost three months ago.”
She blinked. She was realizing that she had, in fact, forgotten her charger.
“You don’t need it now,” I said. “Trust me.”
Not even brilliant Adelaide could keep up with this. “Why . . . why would I leave the party for a stupid charger? After all that happened?”
I could’ve explained that the Gasman was new, an unwanted tourist following my time travels, but I just didn’t have the energy. Too much talk, too much wasted time already. The Gasman was still pursuing us. I hugged her again in this miserable little snowstorm on a deserted Garage-Majal block, our teeth chattering in unison. Everything was awful, this was a terrible obscenity of time and physics, and I’d just had someone’s bloody tooth in my mouth, but I had her. I had beautiful Adelaide Radnor back, and I would fight to keep her. I wouldn’t lose her again.
A sad corner of my mind was still certain that this was a dream. She was still dead, and rescuing her from her appointed death on New Year’s Eve wouldn’t really change a thing. Because it was really March, or maybe even later now, and she was still rotting in a wooden box, buried in dirt. Like a toxic little seed planted in my mind, I started to wonder: What is actually real anymore?
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 10
