Forest of Shadows

by Hunter Shea

  “Why?” The panic and anger in Teddy’s eyes had been replaced with concern and a touch of fear.

  “I don’t know.” He resumed his walk up the drive.

  The night air was cool and the breeze brought with it the sour smell of the woods. He paused to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the dark and soon found himself face to face with the empty house. Jessica’s bicycle was in the front yard along with a plastic slide set that both of the kids used every day. Even the youthful signs of habitation couldn’t erase the emptiness and malevolence that now radiated from the house. He stood alone in the yard and the house stared back at him, its inky windows a pair of soulless eyes that chilled him to his burning guts.

  All of the booze and weed in the world couldn’t ease the creeping dread that shimmied up the back of his legs and straight to every follicle on his head. Up here, away from his idling truck below, it was completely soundless, like he’d stepped into a sensory deprivation chamber. Even the night wind had ceased.

  He expected to see Millie, surrounded by some kind of unearthly aura, step out from beyond the shadows, the dead flesh of her face pinched into a rictus, ready to pounce on him.

  His heart pumped so hard it was difficult to swallow.

  “I’m here,” he called out with far less authority than he had wished. His voice cracked and he swallowed off the last syllable as he gulped for air.

  With the normal night sounds silenced, his ragged breathing sounded like the whoosh of an incoming breaker.

  He caught movement behind the window leading to the great room. A flash of something pale and alive. He blinked hard.

  The face of a boy was pressed against the glass. But there was no body beneath it.

  Judas stifled a scream and felt a strong urge to empty his suddenly swollen bladder right there and then. He watched the face, with its benign expression, indifferent to the terror stricken man in the front yard, as it pushed forward through the glass without breaking it. As the head hovered on the porch, a prepubescent body dressed in a dirty T-shirt and shorts slowly materialized. His neck came into focus last, forming the bridge between head and torso.

  No way! No freakin’ way! Judas turned on his heels and started to run.

  Shadows were seeping out of the trees like spilled molasses, coiling through the grass and sweeping up their trunks. The deathly quiet was broken by the hum of incoherent murmurings. Dozens of whispered voices swirled around him as the shadows continued their steady march towards the driveway and his only means of escape.

  He swung back around and the boy was only a few feet from him, his body more corporeal. In fact, if Judas hadn’t seen him materialize from a wafting head he would have sworn he was face to face with your average ten-year-old boy out for a late night sneak.

  This time Judas gasped aloud.

  The boy narrowed his cold gray eyes, raised a rigid arm and pointed at the advancing shades.

  Even though he wanted to run mad and screaming from this place, something compelled him to stay. Slowly and with great fear, he turned his head.

  The shadows were now pools of oil in a perfect row along the driveway. All at once, they began to rise, twisting and heaving in ever increasing spirals, forming wispy appendages that danced like smoke in the breeze. Judas looked back but the boy remained mute and pointing.

  He sucked air audibly through his teeth as the shadows took on the shape and form of people, an eerie queue of obsidian men and women without faces. His bladder finally released itself and he cursed his legs for their paralysis. He was going to die. If not at the hands of this devilish army then surely the overwhelming swell of terror itself would do him in.

  Suddenly, the boy spoke in a high, steady voice. “Shadows,” he whispered.

  When Judas swiveled to face the boy he was gone.

  “Shadows…murder.”

  The commands of multiple tongues called out to him as the shadow people fell back into themselves and seeped into the ground like rainwater.

  “Murder!”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The trip to Denali Park had been nothing short of wonderful. The sights, sounds and even smells were as intoxicating as any drug to their big city sensibilities.

  Jessica had spotted an eagle on their very first day and was in heaven from that point on.

  The legendary mosquitoes were out in abundance. They weren’t as big as cats with wings but they did look like they had been drinking from the cooling pools of a nuclear reactor. Every morning John and the others bathed in insect repellant and every night they washed it off.

  The crowds were a bit startling, especially after spending the last few weeks in Shida’s quiet solitude. Thanks to Eve’s careful planning, they were able to take both the wildlife and historic bus tours. People who didn’t buy advance tickets were told there was a four day wait.

  Their original plan was to drive to Fairbanks after three days and see the town for a day or two. Catching a crisp breeze that morning off the rain drenched trees reminded them of Shida, so they turned the car around on the George Parks Highway and headed back to their temporary home. Besides, they’d had enough crowds for one trip. Pulling into the driveway, John had an odd sense of belonging.

  He said to Eve as they unpacked the car, “You know, despite the fact that everything here is so temporary, the house, the car, even the furniture is rented and doesn’t belong to us, I feel comfortable here.” He failed to mention he was also excited to renew his investigation of the house that was starting to take on a new life.

  “I feel the same way too,” Eve said and tossed a backpack his way. “There was actually a moment during our trip, when we were standing on that line for lunch after the first tour and that lady kept stepping on the back of my heel, that I was actually homesick, except the home wasn’t Long Island.”

  “Looks like we done been countrified,” John said with a huge grin on his face.

  When they first set out for Denali, he had been nervous that some of the old anxiety may return. That was the thing about anxiety and panic attacks. They spent so much time hitting you out of the blue, you could spend the rest of your life worrying and waiting for the next assault. Worst of all was moments like this big trip where you consciously and subconsciously did not want anything to destroy the moment, which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy ending with hyperventilation, trembling hands forcing pharmaceuticals down your throat and an all encompassing self-concern that precluded those around you from enjoying themselves.

  The unfortunate prayer of every person with anxiety syndrome was Please don’t fuck this up.

  Once they were on the road, he’d completely forgotten about it and had the time of his life. It was a disease of the mind, so it should stand that if you keep your mind busy, you won’t spiral into thoughts of impending doom. It was easier said than done.

  Except up here in Alaska.

  “You know how some people have to move to Arizona for their health?” he asked Liam who was busy tugging at his shoelace and rolling backwards in the process. “Maybe I’m the anti-Arizona guy. Sure I’ll get bad arthritis up here and whatever else extreme cold does to you, but at least I won’t be obsessing on needless things.”

  He scooped Liam up and tossed him in the air. When he caught him, he rubbed his nose in the baby’s belly to make him laugh. It was good here.

  If I’d only done something like this years ago, the crap I could have saved Jessica and Eve from, he thought.

  There was a knock on the front door and he saw Judas dressed in a leather jacket with fringes on the sleeves standing on the other end of the screen with his head cast down at the floor.

  “Come on in.”

  When Judas looked up he nearly had to take a step back. The kid looked like hell. The whites of his eyes were deep red, like a major artery had burst in his brain. Dark circles stood out on his pale face and his hair was matted and greasy.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  John called Eve to watch th
e kids and they went into the basement.

  “Would you mind going through it again?” John asked. They were seated opposite each other with a small table between them. He reached over to a cardboard box and retrieved his digital recorder, placing it on the table. After clicking the record button, he said, “Testimony of Judas Graves recorded at five-oh-five on August thirtieth. Go ahead.”

  Judas reiterated his story, from finding Millie’s body in the library to following what he was sure was her ghost to the house and finally his confrontation with the boy and the shadow people. By the second time around, he was more coherent and sure of himself. John had found when interviewing people about supernatural events, it was best to start taking notes after you had given them a chance to settle down.

  “What did the boy look like?”

  Judas described him. John tried to hide his own shock. He was talking about the same boy that Jessica had seen.

  “And tell me again what he said.”

  “He said, ‘shadows murder’.” Judas leaned back and rubbed his hands across his face. “They all said the same thing.”

  John’s stomach quivered.

  “Do you know what they meant?”

  “Shit, I thought you would.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why is all this stuff happening to me? I mean, you live here twenty-four-seven and it’s like spending the week at grandma’s house. Whenever I come around here without you nearby the place turns into nightmare city.”

  John leaned forward and hit the stop button on the tape recorder.

  “I never said that nothing happens here.”

  For the first time since his arrival, Judas looked animated. He rose from the chair and paced to the table with all of John’s developed pictures and basins.

  “So, what did you see?” he asked.

  John shook his head. “I shouldn’t tell you. At least not now. It might influence your thinking and the way you interpret the things you see here.”

  “What makes you think I’m ever coming back?”

  Judas picked up a picture, studied it for a moment, placed it back in the pile and breezed past John and up the stairs. He heard his footsteps overhead followed by the bang of the screen door against the frame.

  The kid was spooked, and he had every right to be. Now there were two people seeing a small boy, and in Judas’s case he incorporated before his very eyes. John had to be rational. Perhaps Jessica had told Judas about the boy and his mind had conjured him up out of fear. There was also a good chance Judas had been stoned. No matter how much he liked him and used his word to move them all up to the middle of nowhere, he still had to face facts that Shida’s resident outcast more than dabbled with something that put him in another state of consciousness. And after discovering Millie’s body, he had every right to seek escape.

  Even if only some of what he saw was true, shadow people whispering in the dark, it was a sign that things were stepping up, the bar being raised by some unseen hand. Their dream vacation could in fact bear more fruit than he could have hoped.

  “Something wrong with Judas?” Eve said as she descended the stairs. “He walked right past us without saying goodbye.”

  “He’s a little freaked out right now. He pretty much said that he won’t be coming back to the house.”

  John fingered the photo that Judas had eyed before he left. It was a picture of Jessica’s bedroom with a vague white blur down at the right corner of her bed. It sat atop a pile of about twenty pictures all showing off-white blurs or balls of light. He wasn’t about to claim them to be proof positive of a phantasm or ectoplasm. Shapeless anomalies caught on film were nothing to tout, so he kept them to himself. He had a couple of shoeboxes full of photos just like these back home from previous investigations or from people who had taken their own and sent them in. As far as he was concerned, they proved nothing, hence their home in unmarked Payless Shoe boxes.

  “Freaked out? Why?” Eve asked.

  John deposited the pictures in an envelope and tossed it into the open valise beside the desk that also contained his notes and an audio disk with the strange voice he’d recorded in the empty room upstairs.

  He repressed the consternation from his face and said, “How about we finish unpacking, have some dinner and put the kids to bed. Once they’re asleep, I’ll fill you in on everything.”

  “Is it bad news?” Eve said warily.

  “Bad for Judas, yes. And maybe some validation for my bringing us up here.”

  John made dinner while Eve unpacked and they both gave the kids a bath. Jessica was asleep before Liam for a change and they were both out by eight o’clock. Eve brought out a beer for each of them and five minutes later they were ready for a second round. While she went to the kitchen, he retrieved his valise from the basement and laid the photos out on the dining room table.

  While she studied the pictures, he recounted Judas’s initial story that caught his attention, then brought her up to date from his strange encounter with the ball of heat in the hallway to the sightings of the small boy, the shadow people in the front yard and the death of the librarian, though the last part in all likelihood had nothing to do with the rest but it did account for Judas’s current state of mind. When he was done, John leaned back and downed the last of his beer. Eve worked her female Houdini act and took off her bra without removing her shirt, pulling it from her right sleeve and tossing it onto the couch behind them.

  “That’s better,” she exhaled.

  He had expected some tension, maybe even apprehension, but she reacted like he’d just told her about a trip to the mall.

  “Okay, what do we do now? And please note I said we.”

  John shook his head in amazement.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  This just wasn’t Muraco’s week. Sheriff High-Dick swung by his house to ask him some questions about the librarian that turned up dead in the library basement. Shida was a small town and word of her demise reached every ear within hours. And naturally the sheriff’s first suspect was him, even though he never had a history of murder or even assault with a weapon. Sure, he’d kicked a few asses in his time but never a chick.

  It was total bullshit. Now the word was out that he was a suspect and everyone in the town would stand up and say, “I told you so.”

  Well screw them.

  Bunch of inbred, dumb ass, indigenous low-lives. Who were they to judge him? It’s not like he was living in a town of saints. The people of Shida had so many skeletons in their closets, they had to buy extra storage space just to keep it all under lock and key. Even his own father was once put away for—

  “Hey dude. I got something to cheer you up.”

  Wadi came waltzing up the trail waving a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a six pack in the other. His long hair was tied up in three braids and one of them had recently been dyed day-glo red. He tossed the bourbon Muraco’s way.

  “Thanks.”

  Muraco flicked the cap off with his thumb into the grass and knocked back a giant shot. He winced, took a breath and went for a second.

  “Save some for me, man.”

  “You’re not the one whose ass is on the line, again.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m living a life of royalty,” Wadi replied with a game show flourish of his hands across his thrift store ensemble.

  Muraco leaned back against a graffiti-covered rock and sank down to the dirt. “When Sheriff High Bear comes knocking on your door and accuses you of some bullshit, then you can come crying to me. Right now all I want to do is get piss drunk.”

  They each grabbed a beer and took turns taking pulls from the bourbon, chasing each shot with a mouthful of warm beer. It was the end of summer and the dark of the night was creeping back to its rightful place. There was a chill in the air that hadn’t been there just a couple of nights ago. Maybe winter was coming early, not that it much mattered. When you lived in the Alaskan inte
rior, winter was just a state of mind.

  They were halfway through the bottle when Muraco asked, “Who did that shit to your hair?”

  “This?” Wadi lifted the long red braid. “I was hanging around Erica Standish’s house yesterday, you know, just having a smoke and watching some TV. She got this idea to dye my hair, so I said what the hell. I was hoping maybe it would lead to her taking off some clothes but she passed out after our second joint.”

  “On anyone else it would look stupid, but on you, man, it fits.” Muraco cracked his first smile in days.

  “You’ve seen Erica’s tits. You’d do it too if you thought you had a crack at them.”

  “You know people are saying she’s High Bear’s girl.”

  Wadi snorted. “Right. Like a hot piece like Erica’s gonna waste her time with an old fossil like him. I think he spread that rumor just to make people think he’s not an over the hill geezer.”

  Something crashed in the brush behind them and they waited to see if Ahanu or Ciqala were making an appearance. Must have just been an animal.

  “Hey, speaking of chicks, you talk to Mai lately?”

  Muraco snapped the twig he’d been twirling in his fingers. “I haven’t seen that mess since I dumped her at the white guy’s place. She tried to call me a few times but I didn’t pick up. She wants a white man, she can have him.”

  “I heard the guy drove her back to her place. She was telling my sister all about him for days. You know, shit like how good looking he was, how nice he was to her, how rich he must be to afford that place. You’d think he was a movie star or something they way she went on.”

  “She say if he made a move on her or not?” Wadi had Muraco’s full attention now.

  Wadi shook his head. “No man. I could always have my sister ask her, if you really wanna know. What difference does it make anyhow? She’s a hosebag. Who hasn’t she done around here?”

  Muraco rose on unsteady legs. His eyes rolled back in his head as he tried to establish some form of equilibrium.