OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller by TAYLOR ADAMS
Book: OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller by TAYLOR ADAMS
Read Free Book Online
Authors: TAYLOR ADAMS
Ads: Link
an Ikea, through room after room of dioramas, all unnaturally conjoined.
The Farwell Thrift Mart led to Holden’s driveway.
Holden’s driveway led to the cemetery.
The cemetery led to that church on Pine, where we’d held Addie’s funeral service. Her stateside one, at least (her parents had put on a much fancier burial in the Edgbaston suburb of Birmingham, far beyond the reach of us American yokels). So this was Farwell Methodist, a small-town church with peeling paint, a yellow lawn, and amusingly snarky signboard messages. Addie and I used to pass it on our workday carpool, and every Monday we’d crane our necks to see the week’s new message: THAT CARRIE UNDERWOOD SONG IS A METAPHOR, DON’T EXPECT JESUS TO LITERALLY TAKE THE WHEEL.
I came in through the side entrance, from the restrooms, dodging the bottleneck of mourners. I didn’t want to be seen — this time or the last. I passed a folding table stocked with untouched lemon bars and four carafes of room-temperature coffee. The auditorium hummed with murmured voices and creaking chairs, all hushing in unison. Before Adelaide’s parents spoke, they put on an iMovie slideshow and scored it to Green Day’s Time of Your Life , because she wasn’t alive to point out how much of a cliché that was. I knew the funeral’s exact date because I’d helped circulate the e-invites — January sixth. I was almost back to her. I only had to free-fall six more days into the past.
Keep on falling . . .
It occurred to me then, as the first guitar strums crackled through the cheapo speakers — when I returned to 2014, would I find the real Adelaide? When I finally reached her, before the accident, at LJ’s lake house on New Year’s Eve — would it really be her? Her soul, I mean. I suppose that was the million-dollar question: would she be a ghost, a memory, or something else?
I was afraid of the answer.
And the Gasman. That bulbous face and ragged greatcoat would always be a step behind me, like an inescapable figure from a nightmare. But I’d worry about all of that later, because I couldn’t stop now. I was too close to her.
Keep going . . .
Green Day was mourning tattoos, memories, and dead skin on trial when I passed through the assembly. Rows of gray folding chairs loaded with friends, coworkers, distant family. Someone sobbed in the back, and someone else munched chips (who eats chips at a funeral?). Photos of Adelaide clicked through the blue-tinted projector at fifteen-second intervals, and I was conspicuously absent from each one. Yes, whenever possible, her parents had cropped me out.
I crept behind the back row, trying to remain unseen — but heard a collective gasp from the crowd. Shock. I turned around, expecting to see the Gasman’s insectoid face looming in the hallway behind me.
The hall was empty.
And I realized that on the pull-down screen, the projector had clicked to that photo. I remembered it because I’d taken it. A dumb-luck accident, shot from the hip at the Mount St. Helens National Monument. Addie and I were hiking inside the volcanic blast zone, on that ridge where some poor volcanologist was made famous in 1980 for his last words, breathlessly cried into his radio: Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it! The mountain loomed in our background; a sad, cavernous shell cloaked in rainclouds. Even after decades of recovery, the land was still a beaten slurry of logs and damp mud. There’s regrowth and foliage, but it’s clumpy, scrubby, like the stuff you’d find in the Mojave. Millions of fallen trees, bleached as white as exposed bones.
And here’s Adelaide Radnor, stepping over a particularly thick trunk, profiled against the gray ruin and dome of churned clouds, in her sundress and hiking boots, her sunglasses on her forehead and her blonde hair whipped up by a sudden breeze. She was about to turn to face the camera — face me, as I snapped the spontaneous picture — but the image had frozen her in this moment, this fragile
The Farwell Thrift Mart led to Holden’s driveway.
Holden’s driveway led to the cemetery.
The cemetery led to that church on Pine, where we’d held Addie’s funeral service. Her stateside one, at least (her parents had put on a much fancier burial in the Edgbaston suburb of Birmingham, far beyond the reach of us American yokels). So this was Farwell Methodist, a small-town church with peeling paint, a yellow lawn, and amusingly snarky signboard messages. Addie and I used to pass it on our workday carpool, and every Monday we’d crane our necks to see the week’s new message: THAT CARRIE UNDERWOOD SONG IS A METAPHOR, DON’T EXPECT JESUS TO LITERALLY TAKE THE WHEEL.
I came in through the side entrance, from the restrooms, dodging the bottleneck of mourners. I didn’t want to be seen — this time or the last. I passed a folding table stocked with untouched lemon bars and four carafes of room-temperature coffee. The auditorium hummed with murmured voices and creaking chairs, all hushing in unison. Before Adelaide’s parents spoke, they put on an iMovie slideshow and scored it to Green Day’s Time of Your Life , because she wasn’t alive to point out how much of a cliché that was. I knew the funeral’s exact date because I’d helped circulate the e-invites — January sixth. I was almost back to her. I only had to free-fall six more days into the past.
Keep on falling . . .
It occurred to me then, as the first guitar strums crackled through the cheapo speakers — when I returned to 2014, would I find the real Adelaide? When I finally reached her, before the accident, at LJ’s lake house on New Year’s Eve — would it really be her? Her soul, I mean. I suppose that was the million-dollar question: would she be a ghost, a memory, or something else?
I was afraid of the answer.
And the Gasman. That bulbous face and ragged greatcoat would always be a step behind me, like an inescapable figure from a nightmare. But I’d worry about all of that later, because I couldn’t stop now. I was too close to her.
Keep going . . .
Green Day was mourning tattoos, memories, and dead skin on trial when I passed through the assembly. Rows of gray folding chairs loaded with friends, coworkers, distant family. Someone sobbed in the back, and someone else munched chips (who eats chips at a funeral?). Photos of Adelaide clicked through the blue-tinted projector at fifteen-second intervals, and I was conspicuously absent from each one. Yes, whenever possible, her parents had cropped me out.
I crept behind the back row, trying to remain unseen — but heard a collective gasp from the crowd. Shock. I turned around, expecting to see the Gasman’s insectoid face looming in the hallway behind me.
The hall was empty.
And I realized that on the pull-down screen, the projector had clicked to that photo. I remembered it because I’d taken it. A dumb-luck accident, shot from the hip at the Mount St. Helens National Monument. Addie and I were hiking inside the volcanic blast zone, on that ridge where some poor volcanologist was made famous in 1980 for his last words, breathlessly cried into his radio: Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it! The mountain loomed in our background; a sad, cavernous shell cloaked in rainclouds. Even after decades of recovery, the land was still a beaten slurry of logs and damp mud. There’s regrowth and foliage, but it’s clumpy, scrubby, like the stuff you’d find in the Mojave. Millions of fallen trees, bleached as white as exposed bones.
And here’s Adelaide Radnor, stepping over a particularly thick trunk, profiled against the gray ruin and dome of churned clouds, in her sundress and hiking boots, her sunglasses on her forehead and her blonde hair whipped up by a sudden breeze. She was about to turn to face the camera — face me, as I snapped the spontaneous picture — but the image had frozen her in this moment, this fragile