Forest of Shadows (32 page)

The tape from the hallway was different than the others. On this, there were footsteps, shuffling noises and what sounded like one of the doors closing and reopening. He placed the big, foam padded headphones over his ears and clicked play. 

He moved the scroll bar to the section he’d bookmarked and began listening. There was a steady pop of static from the portable radio he’d placed near the attached microphone, interrupted several times by the call of a nearby crow. 

During the night, most of the heat was diverted to the upstairs bedrooms. As the fire died, a sharp chill developed in the great room. Still listening to the recording, John added some more kindling to the dying fire and searched for a good log to throw on once he’d built up a flame. 

As he poked at the kindling, the sound of soft murmuring froze him instantly. 

It was just a soft, delicate babble. John pushed the volume up higher. A pause. The crackle of the radio’s white noise. Now another indecipherable voice, this one stronger, deeper. Was it a man? Then the softer voice again. They alternated several times, then a bump, like the sound of a suitcase being dropped on the floor. Then silence. 

He listened for five more minutes. 

Ten. 

Fifteen. 

He decided to go back and clean up the audio. With a flurry of mouse clicks, John returned to the moment the garbled voices started and made adjustments to bring the voices to the fore, clear out the background noise and slow the speed down. It had taken him over a year to learn how to properly work with the program and it was well worth the effort. 

The timer bar slowly expanded, the percentage complete reading inching up another two percent with each passing second. Without his assistance, the fresh kindling had burned away and the fire was truly dead. Encased in a shroud of darkness save for the glow from his laptop screen, John eagerly awaited the results. 

It may have been nerves, but he felt far from alone.

One hundred percent. 

He took a deep breath, looked into the glowing red eye of the video camera opposite him, and clicked the play button once more. 

This time the radio static was reduced to just the whisper of a summer breeze. 

He jolted upright at the clarity of the childlike voice that echoed in his headphones. 

“But you’re not supposed to tell. You’re not supposed to tell.”

“I had to.” The second voice was definitely that of a man. 

“They’re…ming…back. Mommy says you can’t…”

What followed was clipped, some of the audio lost. “I don’t…you and your…away. Away.”

There was crying. The soft sobs of a scared child. 

“…don’t want her to…Please…my friend…hurt.”

The man’s voice replying, “No.”

“He can be with us. He can…with us. He can…he can.”

Even though it was a bright sunny morning, a rarity lately, and she was surrounded by John and the kids, Eve felt a quiver of fear usually associated with night terrors. With shaky hands, she removed the headphones and placed them on the table, sat back into the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. 

She could sense John watching her, feel his anticipation. Liam was in full babble, relating some event to his attentive cousin. 

She stayed silent awhile, before saying, “Tell me again when you taped this?”

“A few days ago, when we all went to town.”

“You sure you didn’t just pick up some distant radio station or even someone’s signal from a baby monitor?”

He shook his head. “I’m ninety-percent sure this isn’t some stray signal. Also, when you compare it to other voices captured with EVP, the quality is perfectly in line with what most researchers expect. It’s hard to explain. There’s a certain, I don’t know, timbre with an authentic EVP recording. You hear enough, along with plenty of explainable, everyday occurrences, and you develop a gut feeling.”

“So what does it mean?” 

“I wish I could tell you.”

“I’ve been around you enough to have heard of EVP and remember that time you had me listen to a few files you downloaded from that website. It was creepy then, but nothing like this. I was okay with it until that part about not wanting
her
to hurt. Who’s the her it’s referring to? Is it Jess?” With a nervous glance, she looked towards Jessica and her stomach sank.

John put his arm around her. “The one with the boy’s voice mentions something about his mother. I think that’s who he or it is talking about. What really blew me away is the fact that it captured two separate entities talking between themselves. This is unprecedented.”

Eve noticed the dark circles under John’s eyes for the first time. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Not a good sign. After today’s latest installment of Chiller Theatre, she wasn’t so sure she’d be sleeping at all tonight. Investigating someone else’s house was one thing. Now that they were living in one with God knows how many spirits that went more than bump in the night, it was getting downright creepy.

“What was the name of the family that lived here before? The one that just disappeared,” Eve said. 

“The Bolsters. George and his wife Sharon and their two sons, Cory and Matt. George had left his roots and made some cash, then came back for one reason or another. He was probably the only person of Shida descent who could afford this house.”

Eve fidgeted in her seat, tucking one leg under the other. “You think there’s a chance these things we’ve been seeing and hearing is them?”

“It’s like you’re psychic,” he smiled. 

That smile and the boyish thrill that shone through it started to set her nerves at ease. 

“I have another theory,” he added.

“I’m all ears. Just know that no matter what your theory, we’re all sleeping in the same room tonight.”

There, she said it. For once, Eve the mighty caregiver to the world was stating she needed someone to care for her. She hadn’t even given herself a chance to think it over, which would have inevitably led to her never voicing her true feelings. She felt lighter just saying it. 

John never even hesitated. “Not a problem. I’ll move my and Jess’s beds into your room because it’s bigger. We can even make a big deal out of it for the kids, like a campout or something.”

In the midst of all this madness, she wondered, how can he be so sweet, and with such ease? 

“Okay,” he continued, “on to theory number two. It seems that whatever is here, be it the Bolsters or something else, it tends to get more riled up, for lack of a better term, when someone from town is here. Judas has been a lightning rod for it, then that girl Mai and Muraco. I was thinking of asking them all to come here one night, create a kind of lure and wire the entire house for video and sound. If it follows the pattern, I should get enough in one night to last a lifetime of study. The next day, we pile into the Jeep and head back to Anchorage for a flight home. Jessica’s getting homesick and it’s not so much fun up here for all of us with the non-stop rain. So, what do you think?”

Eve wanted to hug him. The splendor of nature
was
starting to lose its appeal, going to town was about as pleasant as a root canal and now just being in the house was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. 

Relieved, she said, “I think you’re a genius. And I truly hope you get all the proof you can handle.”

“So long as we’re looking at Shida in the rearview mirror by the following morning, right?”

“At this point, I think I’d be too afraid to look back.” 

Chapter Thirty-Six

Jessica hadn’t realized how much she missed Long Island until her father sat her on his lap and told her they were going home within the week. All of a sudden, she missed Allison so much it hurt just to think about all of the fun she was missing out on. 

What’s Allison doing now? She thought. 

Does she miss me? Does she have another friend? Will she still want to play with me?

Her mind was a whirlwind of questions all through dinner and the more she thought, the more terrified she became at the prospect of losing her best friend in her absence. She barely touched her Italian wedding soup, her second favorite next to mac and cheese, too lost in thought to bring the spoon to her mouth. Instead, she pushed the little meatballs around with her spoon and stared into the bowl like it was some kind of magic mirror that could show her what her best friend was up to at this very moment. 

After dinner and a bath, they moved their beds into Eve and Liam’s room. She may have been a little kid, but even she could detect the slight tension that had insinuated itself into their happy home away from home. Regardless, she was thrilled with the idea and suggested they pop some popcorn and bring the TV into the room so they could watch movies. Her father readily agreed and Eve even painted her nails and braided her hair. Throughout the bustle of getting ready for the night, Liam watched from his playpen, alternating between gnawing on the edge of the pen and hopping until he fell on his tush, giggling once he realized all of their attention was on him. 

Eve found a funny movie to watch while her father bustled around the hallway, setting up his instruments. She had tripped over one of his recorders one night when she got up to pee, so ever since then he made it a point to keep them out of the path to the bathroom. She heard him open the door to the room at the end of the hall and the slap of his bare feet on the hardwood floor. Jessica sensed something odd about the empty room at the end of the hall, though she’d never heard anything said specifically about it before. Maybe just the fact that it had remained empty when they had spread to every other nook and cranny of the house was reason enough to be suspicious. 

Jessica lay across Eve’s belly and watched the movie while Liam quickly fell asleep nestled on his mother’s chest. Her father came in and lay on his bed, which was placed next to her own and nearest the door. She gave him credit for trying to watch the movie, one they had watched together countless times before, until he eventually engrossed himself in one of his books, occasionally writing something in his notebook. 

Fully engorged with popcorn, she dozed off and missed the end of her movie. When she awoke some time later, the TV and lights were off in the room, though light from downstairs crept through the doorway. Her father’s bed was empty. 

He must be working, she thought. Daddy always works when he can’t sleep. 

She looked over at Eve who was sleeping on her back, while Liam rumbled with baby snores in his crib. The gentle rise and fall of his chest was hypnotic, and Jessica felt her eyes drift slowly downward. 

As she wafted back to her dreams, a trickling flash of light passed across her closed lids, back and forth, back and forth, bathing her in alternating hues of black and white. 

The first thing she thought was that the room was on fire. She rose from her bed with a slight gasp, expecting flames to be everywhere. 

Eve and Liam hadn’t moved. 

The room was still dark. No flames. No smoke. 

“Stupid dream,” she huffed, and turned onto her side, pulling the covers up to her neck. As she rolled over to face the open doorway, she saw it. 

Jessica held her breath, afraid to make the slightest sound or motion. Something was outside the room, waiting. 

A crackling fury of dancing lights hovered inches above the floor. At times it seemed to resemble an almost human shape before morphing into a basketball sized sphere of silent fireworks, the bursts of light imploding and exploding at a tremendous rate, almost hurting her eyes. 

It was energy, just like the boy and the man outside. Except this was different, the violent array of colors captivated her like the blue and red strobe of a police light. She wanted to call out for her father only to find herself mute. 

The ball expanded once again, this time retaining its more hominid form. It was no bigger than a small child, and as bright flares of orange flame zigzagged to the exterior limbs, she could make out fingers and knees and finally, a face, a translucent mask rippling with a prismatic display of otherworldliness. 

It was the man’s son. The one that watched over her. She knew it as surely as her own name. He was just a young boy, lonely and probably afraid. 

She cast a quick glance to see if Eve was witnessing this as well, but she had turned over and all Jessica could see was her back. 

The light spirit of the boy stood motionless in the doorway only a few footsteps away. 

I should talk to him, she thought. That’s what Daddy says some people do to help lost spirits find their way. 

But what should she say? That was something her father hadn’t told her. And what if she was wrong and this wasn’t some boy who simply wanted to be near her? 

She looked at the face, the small pug nose, thin lips and sightless eyes. Gathering her nerve, she whispered, “Hello.”

The boy’s body, if it could be called that, was a beehive of frantic lights. There was a momentary flash of white and she could make out a tiny smile on his face. 

“Are you the boy with the man who talked to me?”

It floated inches closer to her father’s empty bed, voiceless.