OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (14 page)

Something clicked to my right. Addie had the Beretta aimed with knuckled hands. If she fired, the muzzle blast beside my ear would deafen me.

“Sorry,” I told the apparition, like I’d just bumped into him on the bus or something. “Sorry about that. We’re going now—”

The man shuddered again, harder, as though a thousand volts were surging down his spine. A full-body seizure, rattling the metal balcony under our feet.

“Okay,” Addie said. “He’s doing that now.”

“Yeah. Let’s leave.”

“Deal.”

We were just turning to go down the staircase when the Deer Cap Dude spoke to us. The voice was thick, strangled,
inhuman
, like swamp gas bubbling up through heavy mud, pushing blisters of air. And with it, the apparition delivered a message that transcended time and space:

“Dan Rupley, you’re a complete fuckin’ idiot.”

* * *

Addie stopped with her palm on the glass door. She’d heard it, too.

I turned. “What?”

For a long moment, the figure said nothing. The Fresnel lens rotated quietly behind us, throwing light and darkness in alternating waves.

I tried again: “What’d you say?”

Addie shrugged. “I heard him just fine.”

I guess I’d heard him, too; I’d just been expecting a different message. Did we really climb ten stories for this? I’d already been getting an earful from Adelaide, and now the ghosts had to give me shit, too?

Silence.

“He’s got a point,” Addie muttered.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I brought this upon myself when I bought a rifle that’s famous for killing people. I practically stuck my neck in the guillotine and now—”

“—you’re dead,” the Deer Cap Dude finished my sentence.

Silence.

I nodded. “Yeah. I was afraid of that.”

The ghost still didn’t look at us. His voice sounded clotted. And I detected a subtle southern twang — the contagious kind — that didn’t really fit the Pacific Northwest. He sounded like a guy who’d voice a bourbon ad on the radio.

I backpedaled. “Who . . . are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What day is it?” I asked. “Really, what day is it?”

“I don’t know,” the Deer Cap Dude said with a juicy, congested sigh. “It’s every day ever, and it’s the end of the world. If you’re here, it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m here,” Addie said. “And I never touched the stupid rifle—”

“She’s dead, too.”

“No.” She lowered her Beretta. “I don’t remember dying or anything. I went to a New Year’s Party, and then Dan came down the stairs and told me—”

“She’s dead, too, Dan.”

She raised her voice: “Hey, hillbilly. I’m
right here
.”

For some reason the Deer Cap Dude ignored her and spoke only to me, like I was the only one on that lighthouse. It was like buying a car. When we’d gotten her Mercedes, the hairy little salesman had talked over her and only to me, like Addie’s delicate female brain couldn’t comprehend the nuances of gas mileage. It had pissed me off.

BEEP. The EMF meter chimed.

“Why won’t he talk to me?” Addie hissed.

“Dan, she’s just in your head,” the phantom in a deer hat told me. “A chunk of your memory that you uprooted and dragged along with you. Think of her like . . . a goldfish in a plastic bag. She may look like your fiancée, and sound like your fiancée, but she isn’t real. She’s dust. She’s just your recreated memory of Adelaide Radnor, limited to the things you already know. And you’ll discover that, in time, when you realize she can’t offer any new information.”

“Fuck this guy.” She raised her pistol. “And his hat.”

That was an Adelaide-comeback: blunt but effective. Still, I saw tears glimmering in her eyes in the next rotation of light.

“No.” I stepped between them. “No, I
know
she’s real. Because I’ve already learned new information from her. I learned that the night she died at that four-way stop, she actually drove drunk—”

“Buzzed,” she corrected me.

The Deer Cap Dude’s voice lowered. “You already knew that, Dan. You just couldn’t admit it.”

“Bullshit.”

“She’s
not real
, Dan. Let her go—”

BEEP. The EMF meter chirped again, urgently. The air was chilling; the Gasman was approaching. Time was running out, so I asked the big question, maybe the only one that mattered: “How do we stop the man in the gas mask?”

“You don’t.”

Addie threw up her hands. “Well, great. This was productive.”

“You’re already dead,” the Deer Cap Dude told me. “You were dead the second you touched the rifle. But maybe you can disrupt its next meal—”

“Forget disrupting it,” I said. “I want to
kill
it.”

The ghost made that fleshy slapping noise again. This time, it sounded mocking, like a clucking tongue. A thick globule of something thudded to the grate at his feet. “You can’t kill it, Dan. Any more than you can kill bad weather, or poverty. It’s beyond your understanding. The best outcome — the absolute most you can hope for — is to maybe inconvenience it, piss it off, and save its next victim. Trust me. That’s as good as it gets.”

“What if we fight the Gasman?”

“Any weapon you can imagine would just be a three-dimensional solution to a five-dimensional problem.”

“Yeah? He seems to have trouble with one-dimensional doors.”

BEEP.

Now the EMF meter registered an ambient temperature of twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Nineteen. Eighteen. And under the breeze I heard a soft clicking downstairs, back on the lighthouse’s ground level. Low but impatient, like a cane tapping a floor. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but now I knew — it was that heavy door being stupidly jostled by the Gasman. He’d followed us, he’d caught up to us, and now, big door or not, he’d get in. He always did.

That was when I realized the depth of my mistake.

Addie gasped. “We’re cornered up here.”

Oh, shit
.

The Deer Cap Dude made that squelchy tongue-slapping noise again. Amused laughter, maybe. Another dollop of something moist hit the grated floor.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Yes, I’d forgotten — the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse had no exterior stairs or access ladder. Just that dew-glazed spiral staircase we’d climbed, and that arched Middle Earth door the Gasman was currently pounding. We’d combed every inch of this site during our
Haunted
investigation; LJ had even dug up old thirties-era blueprints. There was no other route down. No other way to the blurring edges of this memory and into the next. We were trapped up here.

So far, I was really living up to the Deer Cap Dude’s assessment of me.

“What does it matter?” Addie whispered in a blaze of harsh light. “What does it matter, if we’re both dead?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

BEEP. Ten degrees. I noticed the moisture on the handrails was hardening into pale veins of ice. Frost fractals crept up the glass panes encircling the light. They creaked and groaned.

“We’ll get out of this,” I said. I’m a horrible liar.

But that wasn’t even the part that bothered her. She sniffed, checking her own reflection on the glass. “I’m real, right?”

“You’re real.”

“I’m not imaginary,” she repeated to herself. “I have a soul. I’m
real
—”

I kissed her forehead. A window shattered, startling us, and dumped a shower of shards onto the grated floor. Some of them slipped through and seemed to fall forever, glinting in the blackness like stars. The Pacific surf below us sounded crunchy, and I knew the waves were freezing solid with the Gasman’s arrival. Scales of sea ice, crackling and breaking on the shore.

The storm door splintered downstairs. Chunks of wood crashed down to the cement. The sound roared up the lighthouse and the handrails vibrated.

I looked back at the ghost, holding Addie under my shoulder. “Fine,” I said. “How do I . . . how do I help the next victim?”

“Are you sure you’re even committed to this?” The Deer Cap Dude burbled through what sounded like a mouthful of maple syrup, and another window broke above us, peppering him with chattering pieces. “You obviously wanted to die. Out of dozens of victims, you’re the only one who
actually sought it out
—”

“Just tell me.”

Downstairs, the door crashed down. In seconds I knew we’d hear those terrible footsteps, echoing up the spiral stairs . . .

“This
thing
is . . . well, on its own, it’s deeply stupid,” the Deer Cap Dude said. “I don’t know exactly what it is. But it grows like fungus, like mildew. An infection that learns. And it needs a host. It can’t create. It only knows how to eat and sustain itself . . . and put its long, dirty fingernails inside minds and dig up what it finds. Everything it knows is second-hand. It knows this lighthouse only because you do. It was never here in Seaflats, Washington. Only you were. What do you think would happen if you went to a part of the building that you hadn’t visited? Do you think the parasite that lives in the Head-Scratching Rifle has the imagination . . . or even the intelligence . . . to fill in the blanks?”

CLANG. CLANG. The Gasman’s footsteps, coming fast.

Addie squeezed my arm.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve seen every square inch of this lighthouse—”

Except—

There was, in fact, one part of the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse that the entire production crew had been prohibited from entering (insurance reasons, I think). One tiny space, up here atop the circular summit. A painted-over chain of ladder rungs led up the greenhouse of glass panes, up to a little crow’s nest or something atop the domed roof. A slippery, suicidal climb. I didn’t know exactly what was up there — and that meant the Head-Scratching Rifle didn’t, either. We’d escape the tower.

They were my memories, after all. The Gasman was only a guest here, exploring them on the fly. A five-dimensional entity clumsily navigating my three-dimensional recollection of past events. It was a little empowering.

“Okay,” I said as another window broke. “That’ll work.”

Addie looked at me. “What’ll work?”

I circled the structure and found those ladder rungs with my Maglite — jutting L-shaped handholds, like the things electricians use to climb telephone poles. These were painted white and encrusted with bumpy ice, raised into hard blisters.

She rolled her eyes. “If we can climb it, so can he.”

“Trust me, Addie.”

CLANG. CLANG.

She stuffed her Beretta into her purse and went up first, her boots squealing on the slick surface. An arctic chill raced between us, whipping the edges of her dress taut. It slashed my face and my eyes, a scalding coldness. My ears ached. Instant frostbite.

The Deer Cap Dude clucked: “She’s
not real
, Dan. Why let her climb first?”

“Shut up.”

I followed my fiancée up the rungs, one handhold at a time. The bars clicked and wobbled on loose rivets. Another window blew out and peppered us with glass, and Addie yelped, covering her face.

The lighthouse’s Fresnel lens made a hellish grinding sound — like a car out of oil — and stopped swiveling, as if the moisture in the gears had frozen it in place. It now spotlighted the ghostly Deer Cap Dude where he stood by the railing, still not turning to face us. He didn’t seem bothered that the Gasman was coming up the stairs. Maybe they were old drinking buddies. Another gust of wind flapped his jacket and lifted his hat a few inches. I caught a teasing glance of bristled gray hair. And . . . something red and glistening.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I shouted down at the thing as I climbed. “How do I save the next victim?”

“I can’t . . . tell you exactly how.”

Addie sneered. “Of course he can’t.”

“It’s listening. It’s in your mind now. Learning what you know. Any conventional plan would be like trying to beat yourself at chess.” The Deer Cap Dude paused thoughtfully, bubbles rising in his voice. “So instead . . . I left you a clue. So you’ll recognize your chance when it comes, and seize it, before it can stop you—”

“What’s the clue?”

“Remember your trunk? Coffee house parking lot. March.”

My mind fluttered back to Jitters. I recalled leaving Holden at our table, venturing out into the random blizzard, popping the trunk of my Celica, picking up the Head-Scratching Rifle. The shock and disgust of discovering moist clumps of cat litter sticking to the wood and metal. The sharp odor. The . . . the Kitty Roca rattling in the barrel.

I paused. “Cat shit?”

“Good. You found it.”

“The clue is
cat shit
?”

The Deer Cap Dude turned to face us just as the Fresnel lens fizzled out in a crackle of blue sparks, and the Disappointment Bay Lighthouse plunged into complete darkness. I glimpsed his face for a fraction of a second, but it was enough.