OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (4 page)

“So . . . did the Kalash’s paranormal activity stop?”

“No way to tell,” I said. “The depot shut down pretty soon afterward, and the Mosins were imported into the US surplus market.”

Holden leaned over the rifle, squinting in the light, and studied the stenciled numbers on the receiver, just under the five-pointed Tula star. He read aloud: “B3066.”

I nodded.

He looked up at me. “One digit off.”

“Exactly. I think they screwed up.” I felt a grin tighten my face. “I think Nikolai What’s-His-Name had the right idea, but then he reassembled and destroyed the wrong gun. And the real Head-Scratching Rifle got imported to America with the others. Just ask Ben Dyson.”

Or that unfortunate forklift driver in West Virginia.

I caught another whiff of the Mosin Nagant’s stench — that yeasty odor of digestion — and nearly gagged. It seemed to come and go, like a sentient cloud, scouting the rest of the house and returning. It had a way of creeping up your nostrils and ambushing you. My headache was intensifying; I plucked an ibuprofen bottle from the junk drawer and swallowed two.

“Well.” Holden glanced at the red-tipped bullet on the table. “You’re right, Dan. That makes me feel much better about the live ammunition resting a few inches from the demonic gun.”

I picked the round up with my good hand and rolled it over my palm. It should’ve felt subtly heavier than the other 7.62x54R rounds I’d handled last week, but I just couldn’t tell. The difference was fractions of an ounce. “Like I said, this is my backup plan.”

“How so?”

“You don’t have to be a part of this—”

“Yeah, well, I am now. What’s with the bullet, Dan?”

“Addie showed me this once.” I held the brass cartridge up to the dining-room chandelier, which flickered again. “The casing is full of explosive gunpowder, which is ignited by the little circular primer here, at the base. The pointed metal tip is the actual projectile. The true
bullet
; the part that flies out and kills Bambi’s mom. Everything else is just the delivery system—”

I paused. I thought I’d detected motion in the corner of my eye. In the decorative mirror Adelaide hung by the pantry door—

“Dan?”

It had been nothing, I decided. Just a shadow, or reflected glint.

“You can pull the bullet out.” I looked back at Holden and brushed my thumb over the marred copper jacketing where my pliers had left ugly divots. “And the gunpowder just pours right out, like black sand. I cannibalized a few, and consolidated their powder into this one. This special cartridge, Holden, contains almost
twice
as much explosive force as the Mosin Nagant is designed to handle.”

I’d been careful to avoid the phrase
bullet bomb
. But I think he got it. He sat down, shoulders sagging, rubbing his eyes. “Jesus, Dan.”

The blot of red candle wax was just to mark the cartridge, since black Sharpie kept rubbing off the curved metal. Still, I thought as I rolled it between my fingers, it did give the round an oddly fatalistic quality. The wax was a brilliant tomato-red, as red as freshly splashed blood, still hot and pulsing with oxygenated life.

“I’m not going to load it into the Mosin Nagant,” I felt the need to clarify. “I never will. But in the million-to-one event that this rifle really is cursed, possessed, self-aware,
whatever
— if it makes me shoot myself, it’ll also blow itself into shrapnel and split the barrel like a banana peel. I can die satisfied that the Head-Scratching Rifle won’t take any more lives. And again, Holden, I’m okay with risking my own ass, but I don’t like having you here. This is my stupid ghost hunt. Not yours.”

I set the red-tipped bullet back on the table for emphasis. Click.

Holden eyed it like it was a grenade.

I wished he’d go home. I felt guilty for allowing him into this. And in the descending silence, I wondered again exactly how crazy I must’ve sounded. It’s tough to appear rational when your backup plan involves an explosion. Being an on-air ghost hunter requires a special, reckless curiosity — we all had it — but this was something darker. More desperate, more self-destructive. Emotions were tangled up in it.

And worse, I’d already made a cardinal error. I’d allowed myself to believe in the Head-Scratching Rifle’s intoxicating little legend. I would’ve called BS an hour ago if we’d been scouting this rifle for an episode of
Haunted
, because nothing in real life was ever this clear-cut. From the soldier-suicides in the Siberian district, to the bizarre manifestations at the Kalash, to Mr. Dyson’s blood-splattered workshop — it all felt as tidy and plotted as a movie script. Hell, there was even a sadistic little cherry on top that I’d forgotten to mention: Nikolai What’s-His-Name, the aforementioned worker who believed he’d ended the curse and melted the rifle into a glowing puddle, killed himself in 1996. The year afterward. Apparently he’d gotten shit-the-bed-drunk one night, staggered outside, and passed out with his head on some railroad tracks. Not a pretty photo (in color, of course). By that time, the murderous rifle was six pallets deep into a West Virginian warehouse, but like the Corleone family, it didn’t forgive or forget. Convenient, right? Like a movie script, it all just felt too good (bad?) to be true.

And I needed it to be true.

Yes, I know it was crazy. And stupid, and selfish, and beyond reckless. But in a way, this was also my first honest ghost hunt in years.

Holden huffed. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just buy blanks?”

“Blanks can still kill you.”

“Jesus Christ—”

“It takes free will to load a bullet,” I said. “I’m not loading it. Are you?”

He shook his head rapidly.

“Terrific. We’ll be fine.”

He had a sad look in his eyes. I recognized it. I’d seen it in my parents, my coworkers, and my boss. Like they’re watching me adrift in space. Everyone wanted to rescue me, but no one knew how to build the rocket.

Finally, he spoke. “I don’t think Ben Dyson or those Russian soldiers shot themselves out of their own free will,” he hissed. “I think that’s pretty much
the point
.”

I forced a grin.

After all, that was what I hoped to find out.

* * *

Holden and I started the proper investigation just after eight o’clock. After nineteen webcasts and two seasons of televised ghost hunting, it was all muscle memory. We unzipped the same duffel bags, clacked in the same batteries, and double-checked the same digital cassette tapes and thumb drives. For electronic voice phenomena (EVP) capture, we placed an analog microphone on the table. For apparitions, we telescoped a tripod and ran a full-spectrum DVC camera. Last, we powered up the EMF meter to detect any electromagnetic or thermal fluctuations.

Like I told Holden, I wasn’t interested in mere anomalies tonight. But, I supposed, there was no harm in being ready to capture them for our fans.

Haunted
had a surprisingly active online forum, and you could learn a lot from the anonymous viewer comments. Apparently I was a dead ringer for Jim from the sitcom
The Office
(the American version). Our John Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack was almost universally mocked. And they were especially vicious about Holden’s weight:

Maybe Holden should ghost-hunt a gym next.

Do they have to pick haunted places without much stairs?

Hey holden hume, maybe theres a ghost in that CHEESBURGER!

My best friend had always laughed these off, saying that the world is full of critics and short on artists, but since last season he’d switched to a low-carb diet and lost almost sixty pounds. Not that it helped:

Hey anyone notice that the fat one looks slightly less fat now?

As we set up our equipment in my dining room, he only spoke twice. The first was his customary
Haunted
prayer, but with a minor addition on my account: “Dear Lord in Heaven, in Your infinite wisdom and grace, please bless our investigation, protect us from unclean and hateful spirits, and forgive Dan here . . . for being a complete idiot.”

I’d nodded absently, staring at the cursed Mosin Nagant and my wax-tipped, exploding bullet on the table. If God existed, He’d probably agree.

I hoped He existed.

The second thing Holden said was barely a whisper, exhaled through his teeth as he thumbed tiny buttons to white-balance the camera, but the words hung in the air like smoke: “That’s a nice idea and a cute little backup plan, Dan. But it won’t un-splatter your brains from the ceiling.”

I ignored him and popped two more ibuprofen.

For a second, it had sounded like he was going to say something different.

That’s a cute little backup plan, Dan. But it won’t bring Adelaide back.

Sent:
3/19 7:09PM

Sender:
kale@haunted

Subject:
FYI

Hi Dan,

Hope you’re okay. Sorry to bother you but apparently you have a new #1 fan.

Jake says a guy wearing a gas mask came into the production office this afternoon looking for you. Like one of those full-face, bulgy HazMat masks, for poison gas or radiation. He didn’t give a name. He just asked to see DAN RUPLEY on the courtesy phone, over and over.

The receptionist didn’t let him inside, and Jake couldn’t see the man’s face (due to said gas mask) and the outdoor footage is too grainy to be any good. But I had them make a police report.

A really weird police report.

Stay safe. Holden said we might see you at Old Briar tomorrow?

Kale Wong

Talent/Tech Coordinator

Haunted (Sundays at 11pm and Wednesdays at 2am, only on KSPM)

14 Hours, 15 Minutes

Nothing happened for the next four hours.

Well, technically, lots of things happened. I went to the bathroom. Holden scribbled up shot lists for tomorrow’s Old Briar investigation. The Keurig burbled and made Italian Roast. We played War with a deck of fifty-one and speculated about LJ’s podcast plans for the third season. The baseboard heater popped. Baby scurried inside her enclosure. A barred owl screamed outside.

But nothing paranormal happened.

The audio recorder? Just our voices.

The full-spectrum camera? Just us.

The EMF meter? Don’t even ask.

As for Holden’s surprise in the moth-eaten cardboard box? It was a last-ditch attempt to contact the entity — a Ouija board. Our production manager LJ never allowed them on
Haunted
— “too occulty,” he’d said — but I’ve never believed in them, anyway. They’re powered by unconscious movement. Like dowsing rods. People love to pretend the Ouija board is a dangerous portal to a writhing, Lovecraftian darkness beyond our known world, while conveniently forgetting it’s a party game manufactured by Mattel. Like Mousetrap. Is Mousetrap also a gateway to unknowable horror? If it is, I’ve been playing it wrong.

But I’d seen Holden’s Ouija board once before, and it had some history. It was a dense wooden slab, walnut-colored, like my uncle’s antique poker table. Veneered with a gray film of ancient dust, as sticky as tree sap in spots. It smelled like old people. The black letters were scorched into the grain; a YES and a NO on the top, a HELLO and GOODBYE on the bottom, and in the exact center of the board, between two lines of alphabet: TURN. The planchette was the size of a hockey puck, a pale arrowhead with a cloudy glass lens. Mostly just the same standard-issue Ouija board you might recognize from your own misspent youth. But, I admit — the TURN was unique.

“It belonged to my grandmother,” Holden said. “She was a medium. A claircognizant.”

“A
what
?”

“A claircognizant.”

“What’s that?”

He lowered his eyes. “A phone psychic.”

I nodded. At least there was no Mattel logo on the board.

And the Mosin Nagant just sat there, like the dumb, inanimate object it was. The legendary Soviet rifle that had punched a 7.62x54R round through the skull of every last man who’d possessed it, here and abroad. The cursed relic that summoned innocents from thousands of miles to hang inverted from the ceiling of the Kalash like pagan offerings, and compelled some poor West Virginian man to chug industrial lye. The most infamous object since the Spear of Destiny had been sitting on my dining-room table for four uneventful hours now. Was there an on/off switch?

My headache had intensified, but any more ibuprofen might burn a hole in my stomach lining. And my right thumb still ached under the scotch-taped bandage — but that had been just an unlucky fumble. Nothing paranormal about dropping a gun.

“We each put our fingers on the planchette,” Holden said. “Like this.”

You’re supposed to stare at the Ouija while you operate it, but I just glowered over the table at that stupid rifle, wishing it would suddenly move, or slimy ectoplasm tentacles would sprout from it. Something. Anything. Even more than that, I was wishing I hadn’t poisoned myself with false hope.

Come on, Head-Scratching Rifle.

Do something scary.

I’m waiting.

Holden explained that his grandmother’s board was an Icelandic type called a
mirror board,
because it allegedly existed on multiple planes of reality at once (good luck proving that to the Better Business Bureau). Really, that’s just a fancy way of saying it functioned like an eighteenth-century walkie-talkie. You spell out your message on the board, and then you move the token to the TURN in the center. That means you’re ready for the spirit, on another realm of existence, to move the planchette and answer. Like ending a radio transmission with
over.

“She was a
really
good phone psychic,” Holden assured me.

I nodded again. “Okay.”

Gently pushing the planchette in unison, we agreed upon and sent our first message to the world behind this one, initiating contact with the entity that inhabited the Head-Scratching Rifle.

HELLO?

AREYOUTHERE?

PLEASESIGNALYOURPRESENCE.

We had no idea what would happen in the next hour . . .

* * *

Again, absolutely nothing.

“God-freaking-damnit.”

We were both exhausted now. Two home-brewed porters sat half-gone on the tabletop between us. Shadows under our eyes. It was well past midnight, technically Saturday now, and I knew he’d have to leave soon so he could hit the park-and-ride for Bozeman early in the morning.

I bent the playing cards and sprayed them, chattering, into the air. Holden jolted in his chair; he’d almost fallen asleep.

Cards click-clacked onto the table. One landed in the Mosin’s bolt, sticking upright, oddly perfect. For some reason it reminded me of the time Holden and I were teenagers — long before meeting Adelaide on that dock — and practicing that Starsky and Hutch hood-slide move on his old Honda Accord. I’d ripped a button from my cargo pants and left it wedged in the seam of the vehicle’s hood, perfectly upright. We’d laughed hysterically. What’re the odds?

My world had lost a lot of its magic since then. I rubbed my eyes.

Holden squinted at me. “Why’s it so hard to believe in ghosts?”

I didn’t answer.

“I know . . . the thermal signature at the lighthouse might’ve just been a glitch, or warm glass.” He plucked the card from the Mosin’s bolt — a Four of Hearts. “But the reasoning behind ghosts? It’s solid, Dan. Millions of people have seen them, across cultures, across centuries. Even if you haven’t, personally. Why can’t you just . . . allow yourself to believe?”

“I don’t want to believe,” I said. “I want to
know
.”

Silence.

“Okay,” Holden said. “Fine. Screw it. Let’s be hypothetical and say ghosts aren’t real, and Addie’s really gone. And what we call
souls
is really just energy. And when we die, that energy just . . . scatters, like a shotgun blast of atoms, into a lonely universe of dead stars, and Adelaide is really gone and you’ll never see her again. Ever.”

I couldn’t look at him. I stared at the cursed rifle on my dinner table and pushed the Ouija planchette, hurling idle stones into the void:

HELLO?

HELLO?

BUELLER?

“If that’s the case, Dan, if that’s true — it doesn’t change the fact that
you’re still here
.” He leaned forward into the light and his voice softened, nearly pleading. “Your life is happening, right now. You’re here. She isn’t, but you are.”

A playing card fluttered to the floor.

Something about his words shot a chill down my spine. I glanced at my own reflection in Adelaide’s gothic little wall mirror and remembered — I was growing older and she wasn’t. Eventually I would be thirty and she would be forever twenty-five. She wasn’t a person anymore; she didn’t age like us. Someday I’d be an old man and even if an afterlife existed, even if I could somehow find her address in Heaven and be reunited with her eternal soul after death — would she even recognize me?

Holden’s voice broke. “Dan, I’ve been praying for you every day. I’ve been asking God so many times, in so many ways, to help you through this. And I’ve had to watch you go to shit before my eyes, and cut ties with your job and friends, and I don’t know how to help, and God’s not telling me
anything
.” He sighed. “That’s hard for me, Dan.”

I nodded.

For a long moment we sat in silence, sipping our porters. They’d been home-brewed in November; the last complete batch Adelaide and I had made together. We were drinking beers brewed by a dead woman.

I finished mine and decided that my best friend was right. Self-pity is easy, but motion is hard. And motion is life.

I needed to move on.

So I’d start boxing her things tomorrow. I knew her parents were planning to fly in from the UK sometime next month to take what they wanted, and then I’d give away whatever remained. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them again. Her father had always resented me for not finishing college like Adelaide, not making eighty grand a year like Adelaide, and for calling him out on those two things one awkward Christmas in 2011. Some people are gifted at reading maps, some are natural chefs — my talent is ruining Christmases. I’m a man with very particular skills.

Photos, too. I would archive every image from her phone. Ditto for her work laptop. Everything on her Facebook page as well, which had already staged a digital funeral in January and would now only see a slow trickle of remembrance on birthdays and holidays. You could almost see the electronic cobwebs forming. And as for Baby? I hoped Adelaide’s parents would ask for custody of that five-foot salmonella carrier, but they probably wouldn’t. I wondered: is it illegal to drive up to White Bend, open the passenger door, and let a five-foot African savannah monitor loose in the wild? If so, how illegal?

Still, it was progress. Forward motion. Maybe this stupid failed ghost hunt was it — my turning point — and after nine weeks of doggedly attacking rock bottom with a ten-ton excavating machine, I had no choice but to move forward and resume being alive.

I helped Holden pack up our equipment and load the backseats of Dora the Explorer. The Ouija board took the passenger seat. But he halted abruptly in my front doorway. One more thing, whispered through gritted teeth: “Dan.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m taking the rifle, too.”

I understood; he didn’t want to leave me alone with a firearm and an exploding bullet. But I didn’t want him alone with it, either. It didn’t matter. He gave me no time to argue. He doubled back into the dining room to grab the Mosin Nagant . . . and instead ducked into the kitchen pantry to pick up something else.

A broom.

I thought he was joking at first.

But he carried the red broom outside to his car. Carefully, with both hands, conscious to keep the handle aimed skyward, like it actually was a firearm. I followed in surreal silence, hairs prickling on my arms. The night outside was frigid, gray with shadowless starlight. Gravel crunched underfoot. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. We reached Dora the Explorer. He was really drawing out the joke.

It was now almost one-thirty a.m. March 20.

I watched him delicately place my broom in his trunk, shut it, and then we exchanged our goodbyes — I can’t remember our exact words. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I kept waiting for him to reveal that it had been a tasteless joke. It felt like a joke. It had to be a joke. But he closed his door. Twisted the key. Gunned the engine. And then Holden Hume drove home with my kitchen broom in Dora’s trunk, his headlights splashing down the driveway, his taillights fading into the darkness like a pair of spectral red eyes.

Leaving me alone.

With the real Head-Scratching Rifle.