Forest of Shadows (20 page)

It wasn’t going to happen. He had to follow her. It didn’t matter if she was real or a hallucination brought on by shock or the crap he’d dumped into his system. He had to follow her to the end because that’s what he was supposed to do. Teddy wouldn’t understand and he sure as hell wouldn’t keep up the chase. 

He saw her up ahead, just to the right of the bullet-riddled stop sign on Fairbanks Street. She was dressed in a white paper gown with spatters of red where her raw hands brushed against it. Her skin looked the color of the world’s worst shiner but her eyes were so alive. And she was smiling. 

As she stepped to the right of the sign, he cut the wheel to the right. 

Once again, she disappeared. He kept driving. 

Even Teddy had stopped trying to talk to him, realizing the futility of it. 

Millie appeared four more times, her bloated, grinning face leading him farther from Shida, past the shanty homes. He had to pull an evasive maneuver when something large and opaque leapt into the middle of the road. It just stood there like a damn statue and Judas could have sworn it looked him straight in the eye. 

And winked. 

The truck fishtailed, slid off the road and into the high grass that whipped the front and sides of his truck, swallowing the light from its headlamps. 

“Dude!” Teddy wailed and reached over to pull the steering wheel upwards. They bounced out of a small depression and back onto the main road a second before they would have collided head first with a tree the width of a semi. 

Judas drove a couple of hundred more feet with trembling hands before finally stomping on the brakes. Once he settled down and regained his senses, he realized where Millie had taken them. 

The gravel entrance to the last house on Fir Way opened before them, waiting, Judas felt, to swallow them up. 

“All right, man, enough’s enough!” Teddy shouted as he shoved Judas aside. “I’m taking us back to my place before you get us killed.”

Judas opened the truck door and started to walk up the path with the gait of a sleepwalker. Beyond the glare of the headlights lay darkness and within that inky black, whatever it was that dead Millie wanted him to see. 

“Hey, come back. You don’t want to go up there.”

He turned around when he heard the heavy crunch of Teddy’s feet on the gravel approaching him. “Stay in the truck, Teddy.”

“Shit, I’m coming to drag your drunk ass back in the truck.”

“I’ll just be a couple of minutes. I need you to stay here.”

“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 the 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.