Read OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Online
Authors: TAYLOR ADAMS
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (5 page)
It was still on the dining table.
I lingered at the edge of the kitchen, my fingertips gripping the countertop. Half-fascinated, half-horrified. Without thinking to, I’d stood with my body shielded behind the lower cabinets, like the rifle was emitting radiation. Not Joe had voiced a similar sentiment, earlier that day:
Being near it takes away a piece of you.
I cleared my throat, shattering the silence.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “You’ve got my attention.”
I gave the rifle a few moments to respond before considering how crazy that was. But I knew — it had chosen to stay with me. Like a sentient creature, the Head-Scratching Rifle had understood Holden’s intentions and exerted a subtle force to stay in the house. The same way it had forced Nikolai What’s-His-Name to misremember its serial number. It seemed to
want
me, which was at once exhilarating and terrifying. I should’ve left the house then and there. But, who knows — would it have allowed me to?
“What are you?” I asked.
No answer.
The air curdles around it. Like milk left out in the sun—
“Hey. What happens now?”
I tried to think logically, untainted by the supernatural. But Occam’s razor didn’t really work here. There was zero chance of Holden just coincidentally confusing a broom for a Soviet battle rifle.
I shivered and felt goosebumps rise under a layer of icy sweat. I heard a low creak somewhere in the kitchen — a floorboard, maybe, flexing in the changing temperature — and it was instantly gone.
Silence.
“You stayed with me,” I spoke to the empty kitchen. “Here I am.”
Nothing.
Why do I keep expecting it to speak?
Habit, I guess — on
Haunted
we’d spend hours calling out to cobwebbed ballrooms and rusted-out hospital wards, politely asking spirits to manifest themselves for our thermal cameras and EVP microphones, but standing alone in my kitchen while addressing an inanimate object felt different. Crazy, even.
Then again, so was spending four hours playing a kids’ go-cart racing videogame by myself. That’d been last Sunday, when I drank too much and exhumed Addie’s childhood Nintendo 64. Stored on the dusty cartridge were her high scores on every racetrack. The game saved the fastest lap time as a semi-transparent ‘ghost’ that you could play against — so I’d seized the opportunity and raced my dead fiancée up and down twenty-four candy-colored racetracks. Until a heart-wrenching moment after midnight, when I’d noticed that her racer’s silhouette seemed to mimic my driving more than hers, and I’d realized that if you ‘beat’ a top time, you overwrote the ghost. I was the new ghost.
On every single track, I’d erased her.
And—
I heard that creaking sound again. Much louder. It wasn’t a floorboard. It was biological. Like bones bending under mummified skin. A chorus of slow, groaning croaks; a multi-limbed, spiderlike body of joints and kneecaps carefully untangling itself. It was in the room with me.
I’ve had these moments before on-camera — these fight-or-flight pauses when you suspect you really are sharing the room with an unknown entity. It’s an addictive rush. Our
Haunted
mantra was the three S’s —
stop
,
stay calm
, and
see
(Holden used to joke that there’s a fourth:
shit your pants
) — so I held my breath, swallowed my heartbeat, and like a lighthouse, scanned a wary three hundred and sixty degrees. Inch by cautious inch. The tabletop with the Mosin Nagant, the red-tipped bullet, and the homebrews I’d drunk with Holden. The glass patio door. The slab counter, covered with printed research and a potted ball cactus. Behind me, the empty kitchen. The sink, the dishwasher. My own reflection on Adelaide’s horn-rimmed mirror. Then the pantry door, the fridge, the whiteboard—
Wait
.
I froze like an ice sculpture. The lights flickered.
Wait-wait-wait—
My eyes tracked back to the mirror. To my reflection. It was holding the Head-Scratching Rifle.
That’s interesting.
I blinked and glanced into the dining room. The rifle was still on the tabletop.
I looked back.
My reflection still held it, now carefully pivoting the thing in a slow, baton-like twirl. Muzzle aimed upward. Paralyzed, I watched myself lean forward and extend my chin so I could nestle the black barrel under my jaw. Just like Ben Dyson, I realized as my stomach turned. Just like that poor gunsmith in his workshop in Macon, Georgia, seconds before peppering his laptop with red-salsa chunks.
The chandelier flickered twice.
My doppelganger was already reaching for the rifle’s trigger. And I — the real Dan Rupley — was standing empty-handed in my kitchen, staring in agape silence, my thoughts unrolling in panicked tugs:
I must’ve fallen asleep.
In the stuttering light, I watched my own thumb slink into the rifle’s safety guard. My knuckle bent ninety degrees. The gauze-wrapped wound burst open, leaking a hot dollop of blood down my wrist—
This is a dream. I’m dreaming.
And my thumb kept bending, and hooked around the trigger and tightened, squeezing it—
This isn’t—
The rifle fired.
THWAP.
A strange, slurping sound. Like a silenced pistol in a Bond movie. I flinched, and a bead of sweat tapped the floor, but my duplicate in the mirror remained unharmed and monotone, gripping the rifle with two hands. What had happened? No explosion. No blood splatter. No real gunshot, even. Just that bizarre misfire, like a firecracker detonating underwater, no louder than a child’s cap pistol—
Then the chandelier went out, dropping the room into darkness.
And a prickly voice spoke behind me:
“Front door is ajar.”
. . . Less than a day afterward, Arkady was seen crouching at the bottom of a steep berm. Witnesses described trance-like movements as he removed the Mosin Nagant’s bolt and checked the barrel for obstructions. He studied every inch of the weapon, inside and out, even applying careful blots of oil here and there, before inserting a round, pressing the weapon under his chin, and pulling the trigger.
Three of the four confirmed victims killed themselves in view of others, and all witnesses described this same, eerily ritualistic “safety check” before death. Like a supernatural force was guiding each man’s fingers, first ensuring that the gun wouldn’t damage itself while firing. It’s particularly telling that all victims died crouching over snow, carpet, or insulation . . . a yielding surface for the rifle to land upon.
Excerpt from “Cursed Objects of the New Century” (W. Louis), Haunted Inn Press, 2002.
The security system repeated: “Front door is ajar.”
I couldn’t see the door from where I was. I could hear the outside air, though — the deepened ambience of the forest — and felt the chill of the night creeping through the empty house. The doorknob tapped the wall once.
I looked back at the mirror. It now showed only darkness; my doppelganger had left the frame.
The kitchen was pitch black.
It had happened so quickly. It wasn’t just the chandelier; all of the lights were off now — every last one of them — and I didn’t remember switching them off. Despite that, and despite witnessing my own attempted suicide in the mirror, my mind darted to the mundane and took shaky refuge there. Maybe . . . maybe I’d imagined everything? And the front door had been opened by the wind?
It wasn’t windy. Through the window above the kitchen sink I saw paper birch trees standing in darkness beyond the overgrown lawn, pale ghosts with blistered trunks. The branches were still, rigidly fixed, like models on a train set. I crept two paces toward the fridge, to the mouth of the kitchen, and from there I’d be able to see the front doorway. I flattened one palm on the cold wall, feeling my heartbeat in my skin, and peered around the corner.
The front door hung wide open. Doorway empty. Darkness outside.
And I heard footsteps.
Heavy, ponderous footsteps already inside, scuffing on hardwood and softening on carpet. From the other side of the house. As though whoever had pushed open the front door had taken an immediate right, passed in front of the stairs, and walked into the living room. I’d missed them by a second. My blood turned cold.
Someone is inside my house.
I exhaled through my teeth. Cold air came down the hallway and licked my face. The footsteps continued through the living room at a comfortable pace. This intruder was in no hurry, and felt no need for stealth. Even on carpet, the footfalls sounded creaking and leathery. Stiff boots, maybe.
This wasn’t an apparition. This was a real person, wearing real boots, inside my house. And it wasn’t Holden. My first thought was to call 911 — but we had no landline and my iPhone was on the coffee table, in the living room, with my undocumented houseguest. My second thought was Adelaide’s gun safe. Upstairs, under our mattress. The keypad combination was 1024, the date we first met outside that Total Darkness Maze. I considered bolting for the stairs, swinging a hard left around the banister, and racing for that safe — Addie kept a Beretta something-or-other for her range club — but it was unloaded, with a manual safety and a de-cocking lever and a bunch of other crap I wouldn’t remember how to operate. Moving upstairs would also make a lot of noise, so I decided it would be my last resort. If all other exits were compromised—
I realized the footsteps had stopped.
“Front door is ajar.”
I clutched the corner with both hands, head low, listening. The intruder was still in my living room, but he’d stopped walking. He must’ve found something of interest.
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 face, 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.