Forest of Shadows (31 page)

Erica grabbed her beer glass and flushed red with embarrassment until Ahanu said, “You know, my father used to tell me some story like that, too. He scared me so bad once I actually hid my snow boots so I couldn’t go outside. It’s been so long, I can’t remember what he said to me. I just remember that feeling of being afraid. Since then, though, I’ve been everywhere in this town.” He looked at John. “Except by your house.” 

John’s mouth suddenly went dry and he felt his heart stumble from its usual rhythm. Tense and hyper alert to his entire respiratory system, he drew in a deep breath, waiting to see if his heart would settle back or continue its clumsy pace. Breathing felt like a chore and he became dizzy. 

“It’s like everyone knows not to go there without even being told,” he heard Judas say, though his voice sounded muffled and distant. 

“Like a lot of other stuff that goes on here,” Muraco added. 

John reached for the pitcher, poured a glass, spilling some on his hand, and drank deeply. 

“Hey, you okay, man?” Teddy asked. 

He took another long sip, willed his system, which had suddenly gone Defcon 3 on him, to calm itself. A black cloud of dread loomed on the horizon, waiting for him to let it take control. 

Dammit. I thought I was over this. What the hell’s wrong with me? Will I ever be normal again?

He placed his trembling hands under the table and onto his lap. “I’m fine. Just got a little dizzy there.”

“He must have had the meatloaf,” Ciqala said and everyone but Judas broke out laughing. 

John, meanwhile, internalized his mantra: You’re not going to die, you’re not going to die, you’re not going to die…

When the laughter settled, Muraco said, “So, I hope you don’t mind that I told them what you do for a living. We want to know how we can help.”

John concentrated on the faces before him, blocking out the swirl of thoughts in his head. “Does anyone remember the name of the man who built the house?”

They shook their heads. 

“Well, your father’s reaction, Ciqala, and your observation, Erica, tell me there’s more to the story. And maybe not just about this house, but the entire town itself.” Thrusting himself back into the conversation was helping to settle the sudden anxiety. 

“Do you have any ray guns or shit that we could use?” Wadi asked. 

“No, nothing quite so dramatic. Most of my work is about reviewing video and audio tapes. Pretty boring stuff. I’m not here to cure the problem, just prove that it exists.”

Erica said, “We could help with that, you know, looking at videos and stuff.”

“I’ll think about it,” John replied. “Best thing you could do for now is a little snooping to see if anyone else you know will talk about the house.” He saw the dejected looks on their faces, like five-year-olds who’ve just been told Santa doesn’t exist, and added, much to his own shock, “If I find anything on the tapes, I’ll have you come take a look. It’ll go on my website eventually, but you all might as well have a first look, since this is your town.”

Muraco mulled the offer over, and nodded. “Sounds solid. Only Erica has a job, so the rest of us are like born free. We’ll see what kind of shit we can kick up.”

Judas and Teddy stole a furtive glance at one another. 

John checked his watch. “I’ve gotta get going. My ride’s outside waiting. Thanks for everything, including the beer.”

As he walked past Phil to the door, he was sure the man was preparing to shoot him in the back. He was giving him a world class case of the hairy eyeball. He stepped out into a rain storm, his legs still shaky from the panic attack, and waited for Eve to arrive. 

Chapter Thirty-Four

“I’m not exactly pleased as punch myself,” Sheriff Gary High Bear said in exasperation. “I’m doing the best I can.”

“Then it looks like your best ain’t cuttin’ it.”

Phil scratched at the white stubbles of his beard with his hook and sat back with a smug look on his face.

Who does this fool think he is?
The sheriff thought to himself.
If it wasn’t for the money his father left him to open this pit he calls a bar, he’d be a bum in the streets. The nitwit already drank away the little sense God gave him, and here he comes thinking he can tell me how to do my job.

“We’re all a little concerned.”

Muriel Hawkins sat opposite the two men in the small office at the back of the bar. There was just enough room for the three of them, a floor lamp and a termite eaten desk. It smelled like stale sweat because Phil had a tendency to pass out in his chair after hitting the tap one too many times. 

Muriel’s hair was wild and windblown. Gary thought she wore it that way when she came to town just to scare the little kids into thinking she was some kind of mad witch. They weren’t that far off the mark. 

“I hear Phil bitching about him being with Muraco and his pack of idiots, but I don’t hear much being said about you entertaining the man at your house,” he said to her. “You mind telling me what went on in Casa Hawkins?”

Unfazed, she replied, “My grandson brought him to me. He wanted stories about Shida, so I gave him stories, nothing more.”

“Well, seems to me you’ve been closer to him than most other people, so you tell me what I should do.”

“He won’t leave until he finds what he came for.”

“That being?” Talking to members of the secret council irritated the hell out of him and it only got worse as they grew older and stranger. Getting information from them was like ice fishing with a jump rope. 

“I wish I knew.” She waved her hand as if to clear the air of smoke or dust and gave him a look that said,
that’s your job, to find these things out
. “Whatever it is, it can’t be good if he’s still in that house. He’s stirring it up again. Millie can attest to that.”

The sheriff’s stomach churned when he called up the image of the dead, terrified girl. He’d seen his share of corpses over the years, victims of human misdeeds. Millie’s was far different. 

Maybe he was growing soft in his old age. Soft and maybe even frightened? The confidence of a man at thirty had a way of being beaten into submission thirty years later. His mortality was all too evident and death held no solace. There were too many sins to pay for on the other side. 

His pining for Erica didn’t help matters much. It was taking him away from the real business at hand and he found it harder and harder to care. 

Phil opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of rye. He took a swig and put it back in the drawer. 

“You gotta do it, Gary,” he said. His breath, especially in such close quarters, could be described as fetid at best. 

“I’m done with that!” he shouted and slammed his fist on the desk. “Get that through your thick head, Phil. This isn’t thirty-five years ago. Hell, it’s not even ten years ago. The world is changing and whether you like it or not, so will Shida. I’m not going to be sheriff much longer. Then what? You think any of those men I call deputies is going to carry this on? Think again. The council is getting old, too. When we’re all dead, and for some of us it’ll be sooner than later, it’s all over. Over!”

If Muriel hadn’t situated herself by the door, he would have stormed out. Instead, he was trapped, like a wounded animal. 

She grabbed his arm and squeezed hard, kept applying pressure until it hurt. “You have no choice. If you don’t do something soon, I fear for us all. The past is digging itself out of the grave. You better pour more dirt on it, or you better start digging fresh graves for all of us.”

Sheriff High Bear closed his eyes, chewed on his lower lip and nodded shakily. 

“Phil tells me your girl was with them, too.”

He paused, momentarily stunned, and in doing so, gave away whatever secrets he thought he had left. 

“Don’t ever think the council isn’t aware of what goes on. We may be old, but we’re not deaf, dumb and blind.” She wagged a scolding finger at him. Phil went back for his bottle and got his hook temporarily caught in the drawer handle. 

“Now, I’m sure you don’t want her getting too close to the white man and his newfound friends, especially the one with all the jokes.” 

The sheriff pictured Wadi undressing Erica, laughing at him the whole time, running his hands all over her naked body, fouling the solitary source of joy in his life. He instinctively brushed his fingertips across the handle of his holstered gun. 

“The council is counting on you, High Bear. The entire town, whether they know it or not, is counting on you. You’d better act fast, or we’re all going to die.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

It was nearly four in the morning and John was still awake, flipping through book after book, rereading stories he’d gone over just hours before in the hopes that he would find something he’d missed the first time around. Surely there had to be some precedence to what they were experiencing. This place was a veritable melting pot of paranormal happenings—shadowy apparitions, phantom boys, hot and cold spots, odd sounds, captured images of strange white blurs, fluctuations in the electromagnetic fields of the house for no apparent reason (unless they were atop an unknown mineral deposit or there was an underground waterway), and most terrifying of all, Jessica’s visitation by an entity that appeared to be a full, flesh and blood man. Her energy man. 

He couldn’t totally discount the mysterious death of Millie Cloud, though he highly doubted any ghost could kill someone other than via a massive heart attack brought on by abject fear. 

This house was like a bus terminal for the departed, each with their own destination and plans on how to get there. 

There were plenty of theories on vortexes, places that housed rips in the time-space continuum that were hotbeds of unexplained phenomena from wraiths to alien abductions and even strange animals that lurked in the night. Maybe this was one of them. 

He had a final, troubling theory. Perhaps this was something no one else had ever experienced. There were no reference points, no how-to guides, no ready solutions. Should that be the case…

He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, trying to erase some of the blurriness that was creeping in. It had been days since he’d slept more than three hours. Concern that he was falling into his old patterns was his constant companion. Since the panic incident at Phil’s, he’d been on the lookout for signs of future attacks. He’d rather lose all of his limbs than go back to being a prisoner of his own mind. 

Then again, he may just be amped up from the cascading of events over the past couple of weeks. When you lived with anxiety, the hard lines between emotional states became fuzzy and you no longer trusted your own perception of things. The slightest changes in your body or surroundings could lead to a sickening spiral into illogical terror and bleak acceptance that you were about to die, even while your muffled, last shred of reason shouted it was all just a trick of your own mind. 

It was better to assume he was just charged from his investigation into the house and focus on that. 

The blaze in the fireplace had burned itself down to glowing orange embers and the rest of the house was fast asleep. 

He heard light footsteps on the stairway behind him. When he turned around, the stairs were empty. A static prickling made the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Turning his back on the stairs, he opened his notebook, found the page marked FOOTSTEPS and marked the time and place. If they stayed another month, he’d need a new notebook. 

The next page contained his notes about the trigger object he’d left in the empty room. When they came back to the house, it had moved several inches. When he checked the camera his heart sank. The battery that had been fully charged when he put it in was dead. It had barely recorded ten minutes worth of tape. Ghosts were known to draw power from anything around them, especially camera batteries. It was frustrating, though it couldn’t discount the fact that the glass had moved. 

“If you’re here, have a seat,” he said as he set the notebook aside. “My eyes are tired, so I’m going to put on headphones to listen to some of the audio tapes I made. You’re going to have to do something visual if you want my attention.”

Deep down, John hoped that whatever was in the room with him right now would take his invitation to heart. He had a video camera on and pointed in his direction just in case his presence attracted something here in the dark, silent hours of the night. 

He had transferred the audio from the tapes he’d made when they had left the house to go to town to his laptop’s hard drive and dropped the audio files into a sound filtering program that had cost a pretty penny. With the software, he could dissipate any of the normal hiss inherent on tape and filter out any definable noises as well as block off sections of audio for enhancement. The tapes he’d made in the dining room and basement were filled with the sounds of birds and the occasional creaking of the house. Nothing to write home about. 

In the upstairs hallway, he’d left a portable radio on next to the recorder, set to nothing but static with the sound relatively low. Scientists in Europe had developed a method for recording EVP by allowing for some measure of white noise which a talkative spirit could utilize to communicate with the living. Just how or why this worked was still unknown. Thousands of incorporeal voices had been recorded over the years utilizing this procedure and the results were, at times, chilling.