Forest of Shadows (9 page)

Rubbing his eyes, he ambled over to the main desk. Millie was organizing a pile of old magazines. Her gold, wire-rimmed glasses had slipped to the edge of her nose. 

“Looks like another hectic day at the Shida P.L.,” he said with a grin. 

Millie looked up from the magazines, pushed her glasses back and smiled. God, her teeth were perfect. Her shiny black hair cascaded over her shoulders, flowing free and beautiful. “Kind of makes me wish there was someone I could shush every now and then.” She smiled back, her ebony eyes sparkling. 

“If you want, I could make some noise.”

“Well, you were snoring quite a bit before.” She laughed while Judas blushed. “I didn’t want to wake you. I tried reading that book once,” she nodded towards the paperback in his hand. “It had the same effect.”

Judas stared at the book like he’d never seen it before. Whatever cool he mustered when he was around Millie never seemed to last for very long. She rose from her chair and stacked the magazines in a neat pile on a battered metal cart. 

“Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked. 

“Oh, yeah, actually, there is,” he stumbled. “I was wondering if I could use your computer for a little bit.”

The Shida library had only one computer, and it was not for the general public. It had been reserved strictly for the head librarian’s use. Judas had heard tales of libraries in bigger cities that actually had whole banks of computers at their patrons’ disposal. People could just waltz right in and use them to tool around the internet, send emails, or do their homework. A good number of libraries even had their entire catalogues on computer. 

Not Shida. If you wanted to look up a book, you had to go to the warped card catalogue drawers and hope someone hadn’t swiped the card you were looking for a decade or so earlier. He was unsure if Millie would let him use her computer this one time, even though he was her number one customer. Sure, they’d engaged in their share of small talk, but the most he had asked of her before today was the key to the restroom. 

“Sure,” she replied and his eyes lit up. Could it really have been that easy? And here he’d been agonizing over it so much that he had fallen asleep while trying to stall for time. 

“As long as you promise you won’t access anything that would make your mother mad,” she added with an air of jocularity. 

Judas felt the tips of his ears grow hot. “You don’t have to worry about that. I just need to look up something on the internet.”

He followed her past the microfiche machines to the former storage closet that was now her office. When she had taken over for Wanona, Millie had insisted on her own office and a computer. She vowed to bring the library into the twenty-first century, kicking and screaming if necessary. After graduating from college in California, she had returned to care for her ailing father, one of Shida’s founders, who passed away within six months. Being a town legacy, she was given her choice of jobs, of which there were very few, if she chose to stay on. She had eagerly taken the job as librarian in the library where she had spent a good portion of her youth and she was determined to make some changes for the good. The town council purchased a four-year-old computer, ancient by today’s standards, and had David, the library’s janitor, clear the closet of decades worth of rotting books and paper. He somehow managed to wedge a small desk, hard back chair and floor lamp into the cramped space. Millie had been so elated by the fact that her first demands were met so easily that she overlooked the state of both the computer and office. 

They were the first and last concessions the council would provide. 

Millie had to turn sideways to squeeze between the desk and nearby wall. A look of embarrassment crossed her face as she inched her way behind her desk. Judas stood just outside the door, basically because there wasn’t any room for the two of them. She tapped a few keys and the computer hummed to life. 

“Now, it’s a little slow, so if you need to get onto any web pages that have a lot of graphics or audio files, be prepared for a long, long wait.” She navigated the mouse around her desktop, double clicked her internet icon and stood up. “Okay, you’re all set to go. Take as long as you need. Lord knows, I have enough to do out there to keep me busy for a while.”

As Millie slipped out the door, their arms brushed against each other. For Judas, it was almost as good as a kiss. 

Almost. 

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll only need it for a half hour or less.”

“Have fun,” she said as she disappeared down the hall. 

Judas took a deep breath to calm himself. An arm brush. In her private office. The library was loaded with perks. 

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded magazine. It was called
Spirit Walker
. He’d bought it at the stationery/camping store a few months back. Reb, the owner, remarked when he put it on the counter to pay, “That damn magazine. Hell, you can have all five copies if you want for the price of one. When I saw the ad for it, I thought the damn thing was about us, well, not you Judas. Instead it’s about goddamn ghosts and whatnot. Who the hell wants to read about make-believe ghosts?”

Judas did. It was a welcome departure from the usual selection of
Field & Stream, Guns & Ammo
and other nature-related magazines that filled the rack. Judas read it from cover to cover that night, then left it on the floor by his bed along with dozens of other magazines, comic books and paperbacks where it lay forgotten, collecting dust. 

The incident at the house made him remember it, especially one particular article about a man who ran a ghost hunting service. He’d been spending his nights at Teddy’s since the episode with the shadows, neither of them really sleeping. After Teddy left for work, Judas went to his apartment and stuffed the magazine in his pocket after rereading the article. 

He typed in
fearnone.com
and waited for the well-worn computer to load the home page. Bit by agonizing bit, it came into view, one line at a time. He tried to stretch his arms while he was waiting and almost knocked the lamp into the wall. 

A couple of minutes later, it was complete. 

It looked like a well ordered, legitimate website, from what he could tell on the home page. Nice graphics, non-cluttered layout. Though he’d only used a computer a handful of times, Judas knew quite a bit thanks to his extensive reading on the subject. He’d seen more glossy pictures of web pages than actual ones on a computer screen but he had a pretty good idea what worked and what didn’t. This one for
fearnone.com
fell into the former category. 

He was tempted to click on the link for Case Studies but thought better of it. Only God knew how long it would take to download and he was here to accomplish a specific mission. He scrolled down the page until he came to a hyperlink that said “
Click here to report any paranormal occurrences in your neck of the woods”. 

“Bingo.”

The words flowed faster than his hunt and peck method of typing could keep up with. He found himself using the backspace bar quite often. 

With any luck, the guy who ran the service, John Backman, would post it to the site so maybe someone in the general vicinity could come take a look at the house. Judas knew it was probably futile. How many ghost hunters lived in the armpit of Alaska, especially a shit squirt of a town like Shida? Just why he was even bothering to pursue the matter was another mystery. After all, it wasn’t his house and he couldn’t think of any reason why he’d need to be that far on the outskirts of town again. 

Lord knows, he was scared witless over the whole thing, Teddy maybe worse.

But then, what they each saw by the car under the moonlight differed slightly.

Teddy didn’t hear the voices. 

Chapter Twelve

Stapled packets of paper littered John’s dining room table so extensively that he couldn’t even see the wood finish beneath. Eve eyed the pile and let out a huge sigh. 

“When you said you had some correspondence to go through, you didn’t tell me it was three years worth.”

John shook his head. “Believe it or not, that’s only a month. It’s a far cry from the old days when I only got a single email a week if I was lucky.”

Lying atop the table were all the printed paranormal accounts he had received from visitors to
fearnone.com
over the past four weeks. It was staggering. Either his website had received some free promotion that he wasn’t aware of or the world was being flooded with unexplained events. Or maybe it was both. No matter what the cause, he still owed it to the people who took the time to write him to read them and see what could be done. 

“So, what would you like me to do?” Eve asked. She was still in her work clothes, though John had offered her one of his T-shirts.

Jessica came bouncing into the dining room wearing pigtails, thanks to Eve. “Can I help?”

The last thing he wanted was for her to read the pile of the bizarre in front of them. Knowing her, she would be more fascinated than frightened, but at the moment, there was no telling what lay within the printed pages.
Fearnone.com
tended to get its share of crazies, along with those, for lack of a better term, more grounded in reality.

“How about this? You get a drink for me and Aunt Eve, then you can tear up and throw out any of the ones we put on this chair.”

“All right!” She darted into the kitchen.

John said to Eve, “Here’s the deal. I need to make several different piles. We go through each of these and give them a quick glance.” He pointed to spots on the floor by the table. “Ghost stories will go there, UFOs and aliens there, strange beasts and sea creatures there, near death experiences there and everything else there. If you see anything that seems totally out of this world, give it to me and I’ll see if it needs to go into Jessica’s circular file.”

Eve shuffled the pages by her into an orderly pile. “Aren’t most of these out of this world?”

John smiled. “Oh, wait and see. You’ll know the true oddballs when you read them.”

Over the course of the next hour, Eve quickly learned which ones to hand over to John. These were accounts so outlandish, so disjointed, that only a schizophrenic mind could have conceived them. She found herself alternating between gasps and uncontrolled laughter. 

They wrapped it up around eight o’clock. Eve tried to get Liam out of the house without waking him but his eyes flew open and he motioned with outstretched, chubby arms for Jessica. When he realized he would be leaving his favorite person in the world, next to his mother, he bawled all the way out the door. John thanked Eve and gave them both a kiss on the cheek. 

“All righty, squirt, it’s time for you to get into your pajamas and into bed,” he said, turning to Jessica. 

“Oh, all right,” she said, dispirited. 

He read
The Giving Tree
to her for the hundredth time, kissed her on both cheeks and forehead, and tucked her in. She was asleep before he hit the light. 

The night was young and he had neat piles of work to do. He lugged the stacks of emails to his office and settled in. Without even looking, he picked his favorite CD out of the wall rack, a homemade compilation of White Zombie’s greatest hits, grabbed a yellow highlighter and started to read. 

The UFO reports were fewer than usual. Most of them were about face-to-face encounters with members of an extraterrestrial race and abductions. Because he was on the inside track to paranormal investigations, he was privy to so much more than the typical anal probe garbage that the mass media centered its attention on over the past twenty years
.
To read in confidence what some very frightened people were experiencing, some just once, others over an entire lifetime, was enough to raise the hairs at the back of your neck. 

Next, he tackled the strange beasts pile. Nothing original here. He decided he’d write back to a couple of them, especially the one from Texas about a
chupacabra
sighting. 

All that was left were twenty emails relating to hauntings, his favorite topic. He sat back in his leather chair and picked the first one off the pile.

John read through a dozen until he came across an email that for some inexplicable reason poured ice water down his spine. Reading it twice, he placed it on top of his keyboard so he’d make a point of responding to it first thing tomorrow. 

He swiped the highlighter across the sender’s address, intrigued even by the name. 

Judas Graves. 

He thought,
Well, where there are graves, there are ghosts. 

Chapter Thirteen

It was only nine in the morning and the mercury was already congregating around the ninety degree mark. Adding to the misery, the humidity draped itself over the entire state of New York like an unwelcome bear hug from an uncle with chronic halitosis. 

Jessica sat on the living room floor in front of the television eating a bowl of cereal and watching a cartoon. John walked by and passed his fingers over the top of her hair. They almost got caught in the tangle of bed-head. He glanced at the screen to see if it was one of the cartoons he liked, but failed to recognize it. A pair of kids with green faces were jumping over ramps on their bikes.