Forest of Shadows

by Hunter Shea

  He’d done his homework and researched all he could on Native American legends. There were plenty to choose from. He burned out a printer from printing up hundreds of pages from various websites on the subject. It was now a matter of gleaning a history of the house, if that was possible, and cataloging their experiences.

  A haunting and a murder mystery. Two separate intrigues in the same house.

  It was possible. In his line of work, if you could call it work, wasn’t anything within the realm of possibility?

  And speaking of matters of the impossible, here he was, day two going cold turkey on his anxiety meds and he was feeling nothing but calm. In fact, he was downright sleepy. Liam started to snore, a tiny, high pitched rumble like a hypnotic, Lilliputian buzz saw. John felt his eyes grow heavy.

  As he drifted off, he kept thinking, can this house that feels so benign really be plagued by things that go bump in the night?

  Can it?

  The sound of tires skidding along the gravel driveway jarred him awake. They were out in the middle of nowhere. Who would bring a car to a skidding halt just outside their door?

  He gently laid Liam onto the couch. Eve and Jess came running down the stairs.

  “John, there’s a car outside,” Eve said. Her eyes were wide and wary. It was late, though not as dark as it would be back in New York at this time of night, and welcome wagons didn’t come calling like thieves in the night, especially burning rubber.

  John’s pulse quickened. Their first night here and they weren’t beset by spiritual beings but flesh and blood strangers in a strange place. He was of the firm belief that people were far more frightening than phantoms. Alert citizens didn’t keep guns and bats by their bedside to ward off spooky apparitions.

  “I’ll go outside and take a look.” He eyed the mess in the living room for some sort of weapon, just in case, and settled for Jessica’s baton.

  He paused for a moment when a wave of dread swept over him, delivering a powerful blow to his chest. Not now, dammit. He closed his eyes, took a few breaths and felt it pass.

  “I think I see a girl,” Jessica said as she peered out the window.

  Eve pulled her away and held her arms across the little girl’s chest. “Just stay with me while your daddy sees who it is.”

  They thought they heard voices, then the slam of a door.

  John placed his hand on the knob, twisted it and threw the door open.

  What he saw was a dark-colored car tearing ass down the driveway in reverse. Someone was standing by the Jeep. His eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark, so he couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman. The figure stood there in the shade staring after the departed car.

  John thought he heard something, like distant voices carried on a summer breeze. It couldn’t have been the mystery shadow in the driveway. It sounded like several people talking at once, a heated discussion in hushed tones somewhere out of sight.

  Before he could further contemplate just how that could be when their nearest neighbor was miles away, the figure made a sudden move towards the house, all pumping legs and arms in a sprint to his front door. Locking his jaw, he gripped the baton and braced himself.

  The next fifteen minutes were a complete blur. Eve saw John’s entire body tense at the same time she detected the slap of footsteps on the ground outside. That was followed by a woman’s voice, breathless, upset, then sobbing. John’s body in the doorway blocked her view of the hysterical visitor. She did see him casually move the baton behind his back and flip it back into the room.

  Then he was leading her inside, a girl, maybe late teens, early twenties, average looking, made unattractive by the overdone makeup and streetwalker clothes.

  Don’t tell me they have hookers here, was her first thought.

  “Here, have a seat,” John said as he led her into the living room, mindful not to touch her. She was all tears and heaving shoulders now with her head buried in her hands.

  John walked over to Eve and Jessica and leaned into Eve’s ear. “She said she got in a fight with her boyfriend and he left her here. You think you could find out where she lives while I get her a glass of water? Somehow I think dealing with a guy is the last thing she’d want to do right now.”

  “Sure.” Eve squeezed his arm and watched him take Jess into the kitchen.

  It didn’t take long to learn that their unexpected visitor was Mai Smith, a local girl who lived on the other side of town. According to her, she’d been out cruising when she and her boyfriend had gotten into an argument. Now she was here without a way to get home.

  “I’d tell you to use the phone to call your family or a friend but we just moved in today. The phone company was supposed to have everything connected but it looks like they’re the same no matter what state you live in.” She willed herself not to stare at Mai’s stripper school girl outfit. For all she knew, the girl was a stripper and on her way to work.

  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, she reminded herself. At the moment, she had an upset, stranded girl on her hands, more like Jessica than an adult.

  “I’m Eve, and that’s John and Jessica,” she said, nodding towards the pair as they entered the room with a glass of water. Jessica gave a slight wave before lifting Liam off the couch and taking him upstairs.

  “Hi,” Mai managed between her dying sobs.

  “John, would you mind driving Mai home?”

  The girl looked up from the glass of water in her hands with a nervous look. Eve took that as her cue to calm the girl’s fears.

  “John’s been here before, and he may not be an expert, but he has a better shot of making it back here at night than I do.”

  “I’m pretty good with directions. You show me how to get to your house and I’ll be able to find my way back okay.”

  It took Mai a while to make her decision, though Eve sincerely doubted the girl was considering walking home. She had only been outside the car for a couple of minutes before bounding into a stranger’s house for help. Hardly the type to brave it down dark roads.

  “I don’t live that far. Just about five miles east,” Mai said to John.

  “Piece of cake. Hey, it’s getting chilly outside. You want to borrow a jacket or something?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “It’s not a bother,” John said and turned around to rummage through a box by the stairs. He pulled out an old Mets sweat jacket with a hood and handed it to her. “I apologize if you’re not a Mets fan.”

  She took it and draped it over her shoulders. “I like the Dodgers.” The faintest smile crossed her face before she cast her eyes back down to the floor in embarrassment.

  “We’re off, then. I’ll be back in a few.”

  Mai walked out ahead of him, thanking Eve profusely.

  “You’re welcome. It’s the least we can do. Just don’t let your boyfriend off the hook too easy for pulling this stunt,” she said, rubbing Mai’s arm.

  “I won’t,” Mai said timidly.

  “Leave a light on for me,” John said.

  “You’re leaving me and the kids in the middle of nowhere. Every light in the house will be on,” Eve said and smiled.

  John headed out, paused for a moment on the porch before escorting Mai to the Jeep. The Jeep’s headlights sliced an arc across the yard and past the front of the house, briefly blinding Eve as she watched them go. Once they were out of sight and earshot, the night sounds of the country crept in until they surrounded the house. She shivered, pulling her arms tightly across her chest.

  It sure sounded awful loud out there. It was going to take a while to learn how to sleep with all this racket outside. Crickets that sounded like marching bands whistled against a backdrop of strange birds and the occasional rustling in the grass or shaking of a tree branch.

  Their first night here and already they were in the middle of a domestic dispute. Now Eve and the kids were left in a supposed haunted house while God knows what was gathering outside their door.

&nbs
p; Better lock the door, she thought. Yeah. So what if that was city girl thinking?

  As she was closing the door, she thought she heard someone whispering outside by the trees. She waited without exhaling, holding the door open just a crack. A slight breeze blew in, bringing with it the smells of damp earth and pine.

  Muuuhhh Shhuuuuhhhhhhh.

  Eve stood there a while longer, until she was sure it was a combination of the wind and first night jitters. She felt a light tickle at the small of her back, like something stood waiting just inches behind her. She shivered as she closed the door and quickly snapped the locks shut.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Eve and the kids were playing out back in a yard that was almost the size of John’s entire neighborhood back home. This yard wasn’t fenced in or surrounded by well- trimmed hedges. Some of the trees had been cut back to make a large clearing big enough to hold an Italian wedding. It was a gorgeous summer day. A few gray clouds drifted amongst the white cumulous cotton balls. It would probably rain later tonight.

  They’d been in the house for three days without incident, aside from the unexpected appearance of the girl from town. She had barely spoken on the way home and looked nervous when John dropped her off at her house, muttering thanks as she closed the Jeep’s door.

  As he was setting up his dark room, he found a large index card lying on the floor. Written in big block letters was, MISCREANTS BORN OF MISCREANTS. He spotted another card tacked to a beam that said, THEY FEED OFF US. Weird.

  All in all, he found six cards, though the others were far less intelligible. He would have liked to study them some more but since placing them aside to finish his darkroom, he couldn’t find them. Like most odd bits, he was sure they’d turn up later.

  They all went to town the next morning to get food, managing to solicit a fair share of odd stares. Jessica, thankfully, was oblivious to the fact that they were such rare commodities up in these parts.

  Shida’s downtown area was two blocks long and featured a market (not of the super variety that they were used to back home), the diner, a post office that was actually in a little white house, very unlike the ugly brick government properties in New York, a fishing/hunting supply store, two bars, a library, the real estate office that was more like a cubby hole, a stationery store and finally an everything goes kind of store, just like an old time mercantile. With so few commercial buildings, it struck him as odd that one of the few would belong to a real estate agent. This was not a place in the midst of an economic boom. It didn’t even have a stoplight. Just a few yield and stop signs seemingly placed at random, the metal rapidly giving in to rust. If it weren’t for the few lights in the windows and the occasional pedestrian, you would swear it was a ghost town.

  Once you drove through Main Street, you were into the residential section, with houses becoming farther spaced apart and in most cases more run down as you left the center. As they toured Shida, they spotted houses erected haphazardly amidst the brush. Many, Judas had informed him, were off the beaten path and out of sight, very much like the one they were in now. An hour in town provided a lifetime of culture shock for John and Eve. Everywhere they went they were met with silence and cold stares.

  “I’m never going to town without you,” Eve said during the ride back. “That was worse than walking past a bunch of construction workers undressing me with their eyes.”

  “Just a little reverse discrimination in action,” John said flippantly. “Maybe it’ll do us good to walk in someone else’s shoes for a while.”

  “That still doesn’t make it right,” Eve scolded. “Did you notice there wasn’t one single Native American object throughout the entire town?”

  “What were you expecting, teepees and totem poles?”

  “No, but I thought there might be something, considering the entire town is Native American.”

  “I guess tourism isn’t their thing. No sense marketing an image when you have no one to sell it to.”

  Eve watched the trees flash by the window. “Maybe you’re right. It just seems to me like they’re, I don’t know, hiding something.”

  “Suspicious New Yorkers,” John chuckled. “You can’t take us anywhere.”

  Now that most of the unpacking had been done, John could take some time to get better acquainted with the house. First, he took some simple pictures and a few Polaroids of each room. Later he’d use a professional SLR camera with special high speed film. He’d made part of the basement his developing lab and was anxious to break it in.

  When he’d done investigations in other houses, people tended to be awed by the big gadgets and hi-tech video cameras. Over the years, he found that simple snapshots usually yielded the richest results.

  Most things in life were pretty good at following the golden rule: Keep It Simple Stupid.

  After all of the money that he had invested in infrared video cameras, EMF, Trifield and Ion detectors, motion sensors and thermal scanners, his fifteen-year-old Canon single lens reflex camera was still his most trusted ally in the hunt for all things paranormal. It was scuffed, dinged and chipped, but it was a hell of a ghost detector. Over the years, John had snapped dozens of photographs that at the time of their taking seemed ordinary enough. As they developed, otherworldly images appeared, bleeding ever so slowly onto the photos, tiny postcards from the other side of death. Were they really glimpses to a reality largely unseen by the naked eye? Or were they strange effects of light and shadows? Or better yet, were they the end results of a chemical reaction by his developing material?

  Aside from his own pictures, he had been sent thousands of others from visitors to his website. There was a consistency to many of them that ruled out the developing process or tricks of light. How could so many people take the exact same pictures at all times of the day and night, inside, outside, even in different countries?

  No, John was convinced that this was absolute proof that something existed in tandem with the living.

  But the million dollar question was: is there anything here, in this house, at this moment in time?

  He had a working theory that in some cases, you needed the actual residents who were beset by strange goings on in order to properly assess the situation. Something in a particular person or an entire family acts as a lightning rod for the supernatural, or in some instances, a spark for the ire of those that have passed on or never lived. Other times, physical manifestations such as objects moving or strange sounds could be brought about by the living, an uncontrollable offshoot of their very own subconscious. At least with that theory, he had Carl Jung to back him up.

  He didn’t have that luxury here. The Bolsters were gone and there wasn’t a soul on this earth who knew where.

  There were a lot of questions, though he wasn’t sure he was really looking for definitive answers. Since he was a kid, he just wanted to see. To bear witness to the unknown. To glimpse the stuff of nightmares and come back to say, it wasn’t so bad after all. That desire only intensified after he lost Anne.

  He set a trifield meter in a stationary position so it could establish the normal electromagnetic readings of its surroundings. When something new would enter its range, bringing its own EMF charge, the meter would make an audible alert to the change.

  He also used his thermal scanner to chart the various temperatures of each room (since unseen entities tended to generate cold and occasionally hot spots) and was just about to set up his second video camera when Jessica came to him.

  “Daddy, there’s a man here to see you.”

  “That must be Judas. You can let him in, honey, thanks.”

  He was nervous about Eve meeting Judas for the first time. He was afraid she might think he was out of his mind for uprooting them and traveling across North America because of his extended communications with a guy who looked like an extra from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

  Jessica skipped out and he heard Judas’s heavy boots slowly clunk against the great room floor. John squeezed off a few
more shots of the dining room and turned to greet him.

  “Hey Judas, good to see you.”

  “Same here,” Judas replied. He was wide-eyed and fidgety, looking for a reason to bolt from the house. “So, anything weird happen since you got here?”

  John shook his head. “Nope. It’s been pretty quiet. So far.”

  “Was that your wife outside?”

  “No, just a very good friend.”

  “She seems real nice.”

  “I take it you two spoke outside.”

  Judas kept stealing glances at the ceiling. After what he claimed to have experienced, John couldn’t blame him. “Yeah, she kinda introduced herself to me when I pulled up. Cute kids. They yours or hers?”

  “The boy is hers, Jessica is mine.”

  “Cool.”

  “Okay,” John said clapping his hands. “Why don’t you walk me through what happened the day you came here.”

  Judas’s eyes darted towards the open front door.

  He’s scared, John thought. He’s already looking to jackrabbit.

  “Man, I have not been looking forward to this,” he said with resignation.

  “If you can, try to retrace your steps. I hope you don’t mind if I record this.”

  “Nah, no problemo.”

  John turned on his mini audio recorder.

  “Ahhh, I started here in the living room,” Judas leaned into the recorder in John’s hand.

  “Just talk naturally. It’ll pick everything up.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Duh. Yeah, man, I dragged all my stuff in here and started to do the dusting and shit.”

  Judas did a pretty good job recounting his every move. It came easily because he couldn’t help replaying it in his mind night after night. John followed him upstairs and through the bedrooms. Judas was going at a pretty good clip, even mentioning his joint break and extended nap outside. He studied John when he mentioned the pot but there wasn’t any judgment in his eyes.