Forest of Shadows
Page 18
Eve hung up the phone and looked at Liam in his crib. The sun was pouring in through the skylight and illuminating his angelic face. She’d left a window open just a crack last night and the air that came wafting in smelled of cinnamon and wild flowers.
How could a place so beautiful have any trace of negativity? Then again, who said the strange events that were happening were negative? People just assumed that any paranormal activity was frightening and tinted with bad omens or an eternal snapshot of some horrific event. One of John’s first rules for investigating the unknown was to remain objective. See things for what they are, don’t taint them with your preconceived notions or the emotions of the witnesses who come to you for help. Report the facts and realize not every story has an ending.
Last night was odd and Judas could ratchet things up a notch today. It might be best to have a small period of normalcy, so Eve decided to clear her mind and make a big breakfast for everyone.
“Come with me, kiddo.” She held Liam in the crook of her right arm and found Jessica sitting on the couch, zoned out by the television.
“Morning, honey,” she said and ran a hand through her long, soft hair that was now a tangled mess.
“Hi!” She looked up and smiled, then was back glued to the screen.
Eve placed Liam in his playpen by the couch. He proceeded to pick up a plush toy and throw it Jessica’s way. It bounced harmlessly on the cushion next to her.
First things first, Eve warmed up a bottle for Liam and got the coffee maker percolating. As she warmed a skillet, she opened a fresh pack of bacon and took four eggs out of the refrigerator.
“Are you hungry Jess?”
“I had donuts.”
“You have any room for bacon and eggs?”
“One slice of bacon with no gooey parts and a scrambled egg with ketchup on the side,” Jessica called out.
While the bacon was sizzling, Eve asked, “What time did you wake up?”
Jessica shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Early, I think.”
“If you were lonely, you could have woken us up. I never mind being up with you in the morning.”
“I know. I almost woke you up when the energy boy was outside on the patio but then he left so I watched more TV.”
Eve shivered.
“What energy boy? Was there a kid playing in the yard?” Eve did a poor job of containing her worry.
“I asked if he wanted to come inside and watch cartoons with me but then he disappeared, just like before.”
Eve had to grip the kitchen counter to steady herself. Here they were, fast asleep, while innocent Jessica was moments away from letting some phantom boy, possibly the same apparition that John and Muraco saw just hours earlier, into the house.
“He looks lonely,” Jessica added. “I wish I could be his friend.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Jeep ran into a pothole the size of a toboggan and John nearly dropped the index card he’d written the directions to Judas’s apartment on. “This is nuts!” he exclaimed, fighting the wheel to keep the Jeep on the road.
Judas had told him his apartment was off the beaten path and John had laughed. Shida invented the phrase “off the beaten path”, though some paths were more beaten down than others. The sign for Alder Street, bent over in one corner and faded to the point of near luminescence, poked out from behind a spruce tree and John turned into a road surrounded by smallish meadows with fading green grass as high as a man’s chest. A quarter mile into Alder Street, he spotted a ramshackle house with a warped porch and a Sno-Cat parked to the side. He glanced at the postcard and noted the landmark. Tuttu Road should be just ahead.
When he asked what Tuttu meant, Judas sighed and said, “I think caribou or something. There are so many languages used up here to name shit, no one knows what it all means. My friend Teddy tried to look the word up once and caribou was the closest he could come.”
The meadows were overtaken by tall evergreens and day turned to night under the canopy of thick pine needles. John bounced around in the Jeep for a minute or so until a pair of squat buildings appeared out of nowhere, one on each side of the road. Each building had three apartments, so they were more like the multi-family homes he was familiar with back in Long Island, though less appealing to the eye. He pulled next to Judas’s truck, walked up the front steps with enough paint peeled off to reveal the original wood underneath, and rang the bell.
“Come on up,” Judas shouted down the staircase.
John paused when he heard the sound of rain pelting the porch roof. When he looked back, small pellets of hail bounced crazily off of every hard surface they hit. It wasn’t even autumn and already there was hail. With any luck it’ll be over by the time I have to get back to the truck, John thought.
Judas’s apartment was exactly as he pictured it—small, unkempt and redolent of innumerable bong hits. It was like being back in college. The next tenant would have to torch the place to get rid of the scent of burning weed.
“Hey man, thanks for coming.” Judas, on the other hand, looked rather well-pressed. John did notice two bookshelves packed with books on a multitude of subjects. He suspected the boy had read them all, some more than once. For all his carefree stoner ways, he was actually a bright kid.
“No problem at all. Eve said you sounded pretty excited. I guess she mentioned some of the stuff that happened at the house last night.”
“We didn’t really get into it.”
John dropped his jacket on the couch. “I’ll save my story for later. You tell me yours first.”
“Hey, you want something to drink, you know, before I start blabbing?”
“No thanks, I just had breakfast.”
He sat down next to John and lapsed into silence. The hail pelted the windows, sounding like a swarm of biblically angry bugs trying to break in. John pulled out his mini recorder and placed it on the coffee table.
“This seems to be getting a lot of use lately. You don’t mind, do you?”
Judas snapped up from his trance. “No, no, not a problem, man. I’m just trying to get everything in order so I make some sense.”
John patted his shoulder. “Just take your time.”
“I’ve been pretty freaked out about Millie’s death, you know. This may sound weird, but I’ve felt kinda guilty, like whatever happened to her was somehow because of me.”
“Which, in turn, was because of me.”
Judas studied him and for the briefest moment, John detected the harsh glare of anger. Just as quickly, it was replaced by sorrow.
“I don’t know anymore. So you see, I got all these mixed up feelings and something kept telling me I had to get up off my ass and find the truth for myself, because I know for shit-sure that Sheriff High Bear isn’t about to do anything about it. In fact, it seems like the entire town is happy to push the whole thing under the rug, which gets me even more suspicious.” He picked up a dented beer can from an end table and plucked at the pop top. “Last night I broke into the library.”
“You did what?”
John was tempted to stop the tape, lest it get into the wrong hands somewhere down the line, until he reminded himself it would be smarter to edit that part out when he got back home.
“Kinda stupid, huh?”
“You could say that. You do that kind of thing often?”
Judas shook his head vigorously. “I’ve never even been tempted before until the first time I went in through the window and found Millie, and then again last night. I’ll probably regret both times for the rest of my life.”
John asked, “What happened?”
Judas flicked his thumb hard on the pop top and it vibrated like a miniscule springboard. Now he looked genuinely terrified.
“Something tried to attack me, and it wasn’t a person or an animal. It was in the basement and it was hell bent to skin my ass.”
“Did you see anything? You’re sure it wasn’t a raccoon or something trapped in the basement?”
John rubbed his hands through his beard and massaged his brow. “So, through all of this, you weren’t able to see what was coming after you or what, you believe, interacted to save your life. But you did hear the thing in the basement and feel the touch of whatever pulled you aside.” He suspected the presence in the basement was an angry squatter who was using the abandoned library as a place to catch forty winks. Unseen, arctic hands that yank a man backwards, now that was a mystery.
“It was like having dry ice pressed against raw skin.”
“And you’re sure the entity in the basement meant to harm you?”
“As sure as I am that you’re sitting next to me right now, yes. But that’s not the end of it.”
The apartment grew suddenly silent as the hail storm stopped. Even the white noise of the humming refrigerator chose that moment to switch off.
“When I got in my truck, I felt something in my back pocket, which is strange because I don’t even keep my wallet there. I hate sitting on shit, you know. This is what I pulled out.”
Judas reached into his shirt pocket and handed over a folded piece of yellow legal paper. John’s heart was racing but he managed to remain cool on the outside. It was probably nothing, just a scrap of paper, but with the way things were going, you never knew.
He unfolded the paper carefully and read the neatly scrawled handwriting.
“Judas, I need you to be one hundred percent sure you didn’t make this up or put it in your pocket.”
“I’m sure,” he replied, sounding offended. “Look, I think that the thing that pulled me from the basement put it there. It not only answered my question, it saved my life!”
“So you believe…”
“It was Millie.”
Muraco hadn’t been able to sleep at all. When he’d gotten back to his apartment a little after four in the morning, he tried to take a blue but it only made him nauseous and he ended up puking it into the toilet. It sat atop the brownish mass of beer and digested food, a blue beacon of respite mocking him in its swill of irretrievable filth.
Even in the light of a new day he couldn’t shake the jitters. Just what the fuck was the deal with that boy?
Wadi, Ahanu and Ciqala could forget about him hanging out in the woods tonight. He wouldn’t be hanging out in the middle of nowhere ever again.
It must be serious to have some dude who hunted ghosts for a living come all the way up to this shithole, all undercover. John seemed like a pretty cool guy. Not many people would let a raving lunatic into their house in the middle of the night then be so calm when they saw that insanity go down in the front yard.
Then again, this was a man who had transplanted himself and his family on the words of Stitch Graves, a world class putz if ever there was one. The kid had smoked so much weed he could probably roll his turds and get high off them. And what the hell would Judas know about that house?
He remembered the Bolster family only because the father, Joe or George or something like that, had once hired him for a day of wood chopping before the first snowfall. He’d been a product of Shida but Muraco had guessed the man had grown soft from living with his wealth down continent. Not that it mattered much. All he cared about was getting paid. The father had talked to him in between axe swings about recently moving back and wanting his kids to grow up like he did, surrounded by nature and their own people. He had barely paid attention to the man, concentrating more on how he would spend his money and what girl he would bang in the back of his car that night. When the job was done, he took his cash and drove away. It was the last time he’d ever seen any of the Bolsters. It wasn’t until after the long winter, and it had been a bastard, that the house was discovered empty. Neddie Rundel, Shida’s sole mailman, was the one who reported the missing family. Their car was still in the driveway and when High Bear and his deputy dogs entered the house, they’d found a window on the top floor wide open. The entire place was cold as hell, like a slaughterhouse locker, even though the temperatures outside had started to warm up. It was like the house refused to release the grip of its winter intruder.
Muraco had heard all this one night while he was in stir for drunk and disorderly. That dipwad Deputy Roberson was chatting it up with his girlfriend on the phone when he thought Muraco was sleeping it off. He’d heard every superstitious, frightened word that came out of Roberson’s mouth and decided at that moment that everyone in the Sheriff’s office was a world class wuss.
“The whole family was just gone, like they never existed,” he’d murmured into the phone. “There were dirty dishes in the sink and toys on the floor, but no people. I got the creeps just being in there.”
Muraco had laughed silently then.
Maybe now was a good time to rethink his stance on the house on Fir Way.
Gary High Bear squeezed the steering wheel with both hands and his leather jacket creaked as his shoulder and back muscles flexed. It was so tempting to smash the accelerator and run over the dirt bike parked in front of Erica’s house.
The little bastard.
He had decided to drop by and bring her flowers to make up for not being there to pick her up after work. She’d been spooked by something she heard in the night, and that made her anger at him increase tenfold. He’d even picked the flowers himself and wrapped them up with some leftover Christmas paper he’d found in his closet.
Now here she was with that lowlife Wadi. His dirt bike lay on its side in the yard. God only knows what was going on in there.
Face it old man, it’s hard to keep up with a girl her age. You knew this day would come sooner or later.
Shit. Their age difference had been more of a problem for him than Erica since day one and in the back of his mind he always knew their relationship had the shelf life of a carton of blueberries. Every day he had with her, every chance he got to bed her down was a damn fine gift. No, he was resigned to the fact that she would eventually move on and maybe that instilled an attitude in him that had now blossomed into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact that she was keeping company with a skid mark like Wadi was enough to make him want to bust the door down and get some baton practice in on the kid’s thick skull. Gary pulled the flask of bourbon he kept in the truck out of the glove compartment and took a long drink.
“I may not have X-ray vision, but I know for sure you two aren’t sitting around knitting a quilt in there,” he muttered.
To make matters worse, he still had to get his ass in gear and work on looking into the situation out at the cabin on Fir Way. Backman and his family pretty much stayed holed up in the place all the time, leaving him scant few chances to persuade the man face to face to go back where he came from. Sooner or later, he’d have to haul his ass out to the house, and remedy the situation so he could get the council off his back. Millie’s death didn’t make things any easier.
After he stared at Erica’s house for several minutes, the radio crackled to life, the words unheard because he knew they weren’t meant for him. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, broke the filter off a cancer stick and jammed it in the side of his mouth. After lighting the cigarette with a match, he contemplated setting the dying flame to the bouquet of flowers and tossing it onto her porch. Or better yet, chuck the burning bunch onto the dirt bike and hope it caught the gas line.
Now that wasn’t such a bad idea.
The smell of sulphur was overwhelming in the closed car. The tiny orange flame moved further down the gray match stick, creeping closer to the pads of his fingers. Only a few seconds left to decide. Let it burn out, or touch it to the Christmas paper and give it new life.
“Shit.”
He watched it sink down to his fingertips and didn’t so much as flinch as it snuffed out on his flesh.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
John silently thanked the gods when he arrived home to find both kids down for their naps.
“Care to help me out with something?” he asked Eve as he barreled into the house like a man on a mission.
Eve had been sitting in the dining room reading a book. The kids were upstairs asleep and for the first time since they had come here, she’d felt uneasy in the quiet house. John’s face, even though his eyes had that slightly manic glint that only came when he was on to something strange and exciting, was a welcome sight.
“First, I have something to tell you,” Eve said.
She related the story of the boy that Jessica saw outside the patio window, and as she did, John’s excitement seemed to grow, which conversely helped ease her tension.
“Amazing. That’s the second time. Come downstairs,” he said as he tossed his coat onto the couch and made a beeline for the basement door. Eve dropped her book and followed close behind.
“See those boxes?” he said when they were both in his makeshift study. In a corner by the stairs, four large cardboard boxes sat stacked atop one another. They were still sealed with packing tape.
“I see them.”
“Those are some of the reference books I had shipped over. We need to go through them to find instances of physical contact with spirits, specifically, cases where people were saved by the intervention of an entity.” If Eve didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was hopped up on speed. She’d seen him this excited a couple of times before when he’d come across cases of the supernatural that had credible and clear evidence and also on the day Jessica learned to walk. She thought for sure, in fact, that he would have been this way first thing in the morning considering what they’d seen the night before. It made her wonder just what had transpired at Judas’s apartment.