OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (17 page)

“Just blend in,” I whispered.

Addie studied the Gasman on the ledge, her fingers tightening on the rim of the table. She’d scooted her legs beneath her so she could spring upright when the first gunshot whip-cracked through the dull roar.

But it didn’t.

Because the Gasman wasn’t firing. Bafflingly, he just tracked the old Mosin Nagant over the churning crowd of summer shoppers. He inched the muzzle right to left. Left to right. Then up and down, from the AMC Cinemas ticket line, over the frozen yogurt stand, to the Starbucks and the first-floor entrance to Sears.

“He likes that spot,” Addie murmured.

“No kidding.”

“Why would he like that spot?”

Fragments of our 2013 argument echoed between us, like radio bleed-through:
I can’t take it. You’re a miserable person, Dan. And you make me miserable—

The Gasman abruptly slung the Mosin Nagant back over his shoulder and backpedaled from the balcony handrail. In two seconds he was gone, vanished behind white pillars. Like a sniper scoping out enemy territory and then returning to base to make a report. Around us, 2013-era Timber Ridge kept humming with mundane life, like nothing had happened at all.

Addie looked at me.

I shrugged. “Playtime’s over, I guess.”

“This is different,” she echoed.

Yes, it was. Maybe the Gasman was using my mind as a lens, combing the past for something. Maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle nurtured bigger goals than just blowing my head off. Without a human brain to play with, it was just a gun, just a dumb piece of wood and metal. It was deeply frightening — and a little empowering — to suppose that maybe the Head-Scratching Rifle
needed
me for something.

Again, the past whispered between us:
You’re selfish, Dan.

You’re so self-absorbed. You obsess over things, and chase them to the gates of Hell. Like the stupid Nielsen ratings for your show. Holy Christ, Dan, I have never seen anyone punch a wall over a fifth of a decimal point. One dumbass viewer comment about the lighting and you mope for hours. You’re miserable, because you make yourself miserable. I think, deep down, you’re a sociopath.

“I forgot I called you a sociopath,” Addie said. “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “I deserved it.”

And that’s what hurts me most, Dan. Realizing that I . . . I kind of hate you. Realizing that sometimes I wish I could just move back to England. That sometimes when I’m driving home, I realize I’d rather stay at work, at a job I loathe, than spend an evening with you.

Addie winced at her own words. I think I remembered the fight better than she did. It went on and on. If we sat still at this little table and concentrated, we could relive every last second of our vicious back-and-forth here in the Timber Ridge food court . . . if we wanted to. If there wasn’t a gas-masked predator coming for us.

I pointed. “He’s back.”

The Gasman entered the food court. He’d descended the staircase and now approached from the theater admission line. The crowd milled around the gas-masked figure like a school of dumb fish, not even noticing. One salesman in a charcoal business suit almost walked right into him, but hastily apologized and veered past. The Gasman didn’t mind; he was coming for us. Only us. Maybe he’d learned to not get distracted with tearing the scalps off of bystanders; they were just extras populating my memories. The idea gave me a chill — this intruder was learning from his errors at the New Year’s Eve party. He was adapting to my mental terrain. Hopefully I could, too.

Addie stood, squeaking her chair. “Well, shall we?”

“This memory blows. He can have it.”

She tossed me the EMF meter. “Adios, Timber Ridge.”

Onward, to the next memory on this finite train of thoughts. It was only a retreat, but it felt like surrender. Another time and place claimed by the Head-Scratching Rifle, like the geography of my mind was blown up on a Risk game board, and every memory we abandoned was marked with a growing sea of red tokens. I was land, and I was being conquered. Possessed. What would happen when there was nowhere left to run? One small silver lining — it probably wouldn’t involve tedious dice-throwing.

I started to run but Addie held my shoulder. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Just
wait
.”

Excitement trembled her voice. I turned. The Gasman had halted at the outer perimeter of the food court, maybe ten feet from our white table. Right by the koi pond. Those eyeholes were still locked on us, buried in that snouted Soviet mask that revealed nothing of the face underneath — if a face even existed. But the entity wasn’t coming any closer. He stood there, stymied, like he’d been boxed out by an invisible wall.

“See?”

“What’s he waiting for?”

This was the closest I’d ever been to the Gasman in full daylight. The odor was predictably awful. Like decaying fruit, decaying meat, decaying
everything.
Back when
Haunted
was a basement-project webcast, I’d worked night shifts at Farwell’s Quality Foods, and one of the more unglamorous responsibilities of an already unglamorous job was hurling trash down a twenty-foot chute crusted with food waste. The Gasman smelled like that chute, like the green-and-red shit that coated the duct walls. Rotten lettuce bits, hardened cow blood, salty oyster sludge.

His boots and double-flapped greatcoat were glazed with shards of ice. Snow stuck to the wool in cottony globs, like dryer lint. He looked like he’d just trudged through a frigid Siberian tundra, through miles of waist-deep snow, before arriving here in Idaho’s Timber Ridge Mall, circa summer of 2013. Hell, maybe he had. Like the corpse of Ben Dyson had supposed, it didn’t seem to experience time the way we did.

His proportions were wrong, too. I was now certain of it. The Gasman’s forearms were longer than his biceps, hooking at the elbow like a praying mantis. His legs were too skinny and vaulted, stilt-like, while his midsection sagged like an insect abdomen. His belly could’ve been full of spider eggs. The mask’s breathing hose dangled like a rubber proboscis. If all the wool, fabric, and rubber was just a human-shaped spacesuit, I was terrified of the four- or five-dimensional creature that shambled inside it.

“He can’t cross water,” Adelaide gasped.

“What?”

She pointed.

Sure enough, he had halted at the edge of the raised footbridge over the Timber Ridge koi pond. The toes of his snow-crusted boots were planted exactly where the fish tank began. Not an inch further. Something about his pose — the way he’d rigidly frozen mid-step at the very,
very
edge, told me Addie was correct. He’d stopped at the water. A blade of ice slid off his thigh and shattered on the phony wood.

“Like a vampire,” she said. “He can’t cross water.”

I looked at her. “Vampires can cross water.”

“No.
Really
?”

“Vampires can totally cross water.”

“Well,” she said, pointing with her Maglite. “This asshole can’t.”

My
mind shuttered to what Holden had told me back in Jitters, under those warm paper lanterns, two years in the future:
Some mediums believe that unclean spirits can’t cross bodies of—

The Gasman abruptly pivoted, one boot squeaking, and paced along the koi pond. The water encircled our food court on three sides, and was just a few feet wide in spots — just a step across — but he didn’t even try. For all the aesthetic failings of the Timber Ridge Mall (the three-edged koi pond had been ridiculed as ‘C-World’ by the Inland Voice), the layout was giving the Gasman at least as much trouble as a closed door. His anteater face tracked us as his angle changed.

“He can’t cross water.” I remembered Ben Dyson’s clue. “Does that relate to cat litter somehow?”

She watched the thing circle us, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “Cat litter looks . . . like sand. A beach has sand. A beach has water.”

“Nah. Too obtuse.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right, Dan. Because a
cat turd
is so clear and literal—”

She was interrupted by a jagged scream. Someone — finally — had noticed the Mosin Nagant belted on the Gasman’s back. Chairs scooted, drinks spilled, breaths gasped, and a panicked crowd heaved in all directions. The Gasman approached from the direction of the A&W burger stand; he’d taken the long way around to reach the one side of the food court that didn’t bridge over pond water.

In the chaos, Addie snapped her fingers. “Ah! He hates water. Like a
cat
.”

That seemed pretty tangential, too, but it did give me an idea. The Gasman couldn’t seem to cross bodies of water . . . but what about contact with it? You never know if you don’t try, so I grabbed a cup of water from a table and hurled it at the advancing figure. It splashed harmlessly off his chest.

Addie slow-clapped. “Nice, Dan.”

As we retreated through the thinning crowd, I scooped another cup off the next table and threw it, too. It thudded off his snout, splashing brown soda. “Crap. I think that was Dr. Pepper—”

“What’s he supposed to do? Melt?”

“Worth a try.” I grabbed a third and hurled it. By now I’d figured Holden’s weird little demonology rule only applied to bodies of water, but I didn’t like proving Addie right. Sometimes she’s such a know-it-all. Like her constantly correcting me that contrary to common belief, Velociraptors were actually only two feet tall, like clawed chickens, and the six-foot Utahraptor is the species I’m really remembering from
Jurassic Park
. Her little smartass jabs had a way of turning me stubborn, of making me dig into an illogical position and defend it to the death—

The water cup struck the Gasman’s forehead, and one eyehole exploded.

The gunshot exploded beside me, answered by a rising crescendo of screams. Addie stood to my right, that Beretta up and out in clenched hands, teeth bared, a brass casing pinging off tile somewhere. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes.

The Gasman didn’t even flinch. One eyehole was blown out, encircled with daggers of splintered glass, but I still saw nothing inside. Only blackness. With the accuracy of a brain surgeon, Addie had drilled a .40-caliber tunnel right into the creature’s left eye socket — only it didn’t have a left eye socket. It just kept walking toward us, flipping a chair.

I looked at her. “See? Told you that wouldn’t work.”

“Says the guy throwing
water
.”

“Nice shot, though.”

She beamed, stuffing the handgun back in her purse as we ran. “Thanks. I practiced every Monday for this.”

That made me laugh, a hoarse rattle in the thinning air.

Dan, I think I hate you.

We kept running. Yes, we were doomed, running out of time and memories, but so what? We jumped the pond together — the surface now crystalizing into ice, orange koi trapped and dying underneath — and raced through the emptying mall, our fingers locked and our footsteps echoing. Past RadioShack, around a cluster of massage chairs, alongside a row of Jurassic-looking ferns. I’d visited this shopping center dozens of times and had most of the megacomplex committed to memory, so it would be awhile before the edges started to blur. Addie giggled beside me, breathless and rattled and somehow giddy.

“Most eventful mall trip,” she said. “Ever.”

“Way better than shopping.”

We slowed near Yankee Candle to catch our breaths and suddenly she was holding my arm, looking at me dead-on, her eyes impossibly big and clear as quartz: “Dan, you traveled through time just for me. That’s weirdly romantic.”

“I’m a sucker for British accents.”

“Yeah? Have I told you yours sounds stupid?”

“Many times.”

“It’s really drawly. Like . . . Yee-haw, let’s go watch the NASCAR—”

“
The
NASCAR?” I laughed. “What the hell are you, an alien?”

I’m sorry, Dan, but I hate you. Everything about you. You’re clever and funny and kind of brilliant, but you’re also a deeply ugly, obsessive person—

I kissed her there. In front of a green GameStop poster for the not-yet-released Xbox One, in an evacuated shopping mall in 2013, with the Gasman pursuing us from the food court like a masked terminator. I touched her cheekbone, and it must’ve tickled because she turned sharply, her breath curling in the air like smoke. Jesus, she was so real. She couldn’t just be my imagination.

You can’t let things go, Dan, and it’s killing us—

“Addie,” I said. “Do you think we would’ve made it?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you hadn’t died on New Year’s Eve. You think we would’ve lasted to the next one in 2016? And after?”

“Who’s to say?”

“I’m asking what you
think
.”

She shrugged, her voice wavering through chattering teeth. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s best that you just remember me like this. And we never find out.”

I kissed her again. It felt rebellious, dancing on our own fault lines. Somehow, a fatalistic corner of my mind had always assumed we’d prove that stupid clown right (
How cute — but you’ll never make it
). We’d end up fighting for child custody, maybe, or held hostage by a loveless yuppie marriage. We may have been born of the same atoms, sure, but our pieces were mismatched. Somewhere behind us, I heard the Gasman’s black boots squeaking on tile, the very embodiment of our dwindling time.