Forest of Shadows (25 page)

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. 

“Also, note anything that comes close to what we saw last night, especially ghostly presences that appear like shadows.”

He grabbed a pen from his desk and broke through the tape on the top box, hauled it upstairs and repeated the procedure for the next three. 

“I thought you said you wanted me to come down here?” Eve said when he was ready to carry up the last box.

“Did I say that?” He gave her a wink as he ascended the stairs. 

Eve noticed tiny trickles of sweat sliding down his temples and into his beard. He was slightly out of breath from running up and down the stairs. She braced herself for signs of impending panic. John had certain prompts for panic attacks over the years, and these were prime conditions. To her amazement, he seemed perfectly fine. 

“You want me to go through all of these books?”

She pawed through the open boxes, scanning the covers of the books. Some were encyclopedias of the unexplained, others case books by famous and not so famous ghost hunters, and many more just first or secondhand accounts of particular hauntings. He really had an amazing, odd collection. She had once heard that Jackie Gleason had one of the world’s largest libraries of UFO-related material. When she’d asked John about it, he’d asserted his agreement with the rumor like it was an established fact that children are taught in grade school. 

John scratched his beard. “Well, I know how much you like to read, not to mention your eagerness to assist me with my work from time to time. And hey, there’s no deadline. I don’t expect you to go through everything today.”

Eve smiled and shook her head. Sometimes he was impossible to refuse. 

“And what, pray tell, will you be doing while my eyes go cross?”

He came close to her and held her upper arms in his grasp. “Judas broke into the library last night, almost like he was drawn there. When he went to the basement where they found that girl’s body, he swears there was a malevolent presence. As it came up to attack him, something else slammed the door shut in its face and literally shoved him to safety.” Eve’s extremities suddenly felt cold. Something was definitely happening and it was kicking into a higher gear. The strange sighting in the yard last night was cause for alarm, but deep down she clung to the hope that they were in an episode of Scooby-Doo and it could all be explained as a smoke and mirror act by a curmudgeonly old-timer who wanted them off his land. 

“This happened last night?”

“Not long before the thing with Muraco and us.”

“That kind of stretches the barrier of coincidence, does it not?”

John nodded. “I would say so.” He slipped a piece of paper into her hand. “This is what was placed in Judas’s back pocket. He swears he didn’t put it there and had never seen it before. He went there for answers and he came back with that.”

Eve read the words on the folded up paper and thought. She was finding it hard to put two and two together. 

“This just looks like a to-do list.”

John had begun unpacking books and placing them on the dining room table. 

“That’s exactly what it is, my dear Watson. I bet you’re wondering why it’s so significant.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Let me give you a little more background. Judas says he saw Millie’s spirit leading him to this house while we were away. Granted, he was inebriated at the time but he’s been in that state plenty of times before without seeing ghosts. Something about that sighting kept nagging away at him, like she was trying to tell him something, and the only thing he could figure was that she died because she was helping him.”

“Helping him? How?”

“Actually, she was helping Judas who was helping me. I asked if the library had any public records on the history of the house and since he and Millie were friends, she volunteered to see what she could find. Judas feels she found more than she bargained for and paid the price.”

Eve scanned the note again, tracing her finger across each line so she didn’t miss a thing. She raised her eyebrows when she came to the next to last item on the list. 

“It says ‘Fir Way records, Judas’ down at the bottom. Everything else before it has been crossed off.”

“Which means it’s highly likely it was the last thing she set out to do before she died.”

“You don’t think…” Eve started. 

John interrupted. “I don’t know what to think. Is it possible something from ‘the other side’ was able to murder a poor innocent girl? I highly doubt it. I just don’t know anymore. I’m going to pray the computer can access the internet and my email account. I want to contact Jack and have him check the house for a couple of reference items I didn’t pack but may be of some use. Oh, and while you’re searching, look for anything that mentions interactive spirits. You can skip anything about demonic or non-human spirits, because I don’t think that’s what we have here. This is something far more rooted to this place. Don’t ask me how I know that. It’s just a feeling.”