Forest of Shadows (33 page)

“Is the other boy who comes around the house your brother?”

Liam grunted in his sleep. 

And then, almost imperceptibly, the boy nodded his head. The multicolored array of lights that made up his form blinked to a solid yellow and he blazed like a tiny sun. 

She was startled when one of her father’s EMF meters that had been left in the hallway started to whistle and beep like a town crier. The light boy remained motionless, oblivious to the cacophony at its very feet. 

Jessica blurted out, “Daddy, come upstairs and see the boy!”

Her voice startled the phantom and the bright lights dulled as if they had been attached to a dimmer switch. It shrank down to a dull ball of luminescence, crossed the threshold into the room and hovered near her face. 

Liam awoke crying and Eve was rustling in the bed, but to Jessica the sounds of their stirring seemed miles away. 

The ball of light was no more than the size of a golf ball and as it buzzed by her ear, a cool breeze washed over her. 

It spoke to her in the voice of a child whispering at night for fear of being overheard by his watchful parents. “We’ll protect you.”

By the time her father entered the room with the wailing meter in his hand, the light was gone. 

“Are you okay, honey?” her father asked, breathless from his dash up the stairs. “Did you see the boy again?”

The EMF meter suddenly stopped, dropping into absolute silence. 

Jessica, much to her own amazement, felt a tremendous calm, despite the frantic faces of her father and aunt. 

“I think I saw the other boy, Daddy. He was beautiful. It was like looking at the Fourth of July.”

Eve wrapped her arm around her. “It’s all right sweetie. Everything’s all right. “

She turned to her aunt who looked frightened and confused. “I know, Eve. He’s just a boy. He said he was going to protect me.”

Her father sat on the bed next to her and placed his warm hand on her cheek. “Did he say anything else?”

She looked in his eyes and was grateful for the trust she saw in them. Any other parent would have told her it was all a dream. Not her father. He believed in her. 

Jessica shook her head. “That was all. I think I scared him when I yelled for you. I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“One thing you don’t ever have to be is sorry, baby.” He gave her a comforting hug. “I love you mucho much. You’re one cool customer.”

“Just like my daddy.”

Leaning into her father’s embrace, she was too young to sense the concern in her father’s voice as he wondered exactly what she was being promised protection from. 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The call from John did little to calm Judas’s nerves. 

Calling the man all the way up here to live in what they all knew now was a haunted house was strange enough. That same man, an unassuming multi-millionaire with a beautiful, albeit, non-traditional family, getting involved with the likes of Muraco, Wadi, Ciqala and Ahanu took things to an unknown level of the bizarre. 

I think whatever’s up here is attracted to the people who live in Shida
, he’d said.
We’ll just get everyone together this weekend for one final night. It’ll be like building a bonfire to attract a slew of moths.

Bait. That’s what they were going to be. Bait for something from the unknown that scared the living hell out of him. 

Normally, he would have told him thanks but no thanks, passed along the invite to Muraco because he could care less about his well being, and spent the night with Teddy getting stoned. That was definitely the safe bet. 

Except he’d been feeling crushed by guilt lately and the more he tried to avoid it, the worse he felt. If something happened up at that house to John or his family, he’d never be able to live it down. 

So, yellow streak or not, he was going to be there. 

He lit up a roach that had been sitting in his ashtray and took a few hits before calling Teddy. 

“You want to come to John’s house with me on Saturday? He’s running an experiment and needs some volunteers.” He was deliberately vague, hoping his friend would automatically agree to accompany him. 

“No way, man. I wouldn’t be caught dead up there, especially as part of some experiment.”

“It’s nothing crazy, Teddy. Come on, it’ll only be for a few hours. The man’s leaving the next day.”

“That doesn’t make what’s gonna happen on Saturday night any less creepy. Dude, if I was you, I’d stay away too. This isn’t a game.”

Judas sighed heavily. “You’re preaching to the choir. Hey, forget I asked you. It’s no big deal.”

He could hear Teddy tapping a pen against a desk. It was one of his many nervous habits. Most people thought the stereotypical pothead was a loose dude in a mellow mood. What they didn’t realize was that deep down, most were nervous wrecks, which is where the need to smoke a joint came in. 

“Look, I’m real sorry,” Teddy said. 

“Nothing to be sorry about. Me, I’m obligated to be there, you know.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” 

“I told John I’d go find Muraco and ask him and the other assholes if they want to be there Saturday night. Why don’t you swing by later?”

“How about I come with you to find that asshole? I figure it’s the least I can do. Being surrounded by the quote-unquote wolf pack isn’t anyone’s idea of fun.”

Judas showered and changed into clothes that had been washed and dried but piled into a heap on a beanbag in his bedroom. The wrinkles in his cotton shirt looked like a big city road map. 

Maybe it’s time for me to finally get off my ass and get out of Shida, he thought as he inspected himself in the mirror. He used a blue rubber band to tie his hair into a tight ponytail. 

There’s a chance that if I ask John, he can hook me up with something in New York. I’m sure he’s got loads of connections. Anything but his line of work. 

He drove over to Teddy’s house daydreaming about what life in New York would be like. In his fantasy, he had a well-paying job as a sound technician for one of those big music halls where he could see concerts for free and hang with the stars. Every girl had a perfect body and they all wanted a piece of him. He’d take them back to his brownstone apartment in the Village and soon the clothes would be off. There were weekends in Central Park just lounging around on the lawn or watching the toy motor boats in the pond. Wild parties on weeknights. 

Teddy was waiting for him outside his place. He was leaning against the front fender of an old Chrysler and the metal made an audible pop when he pushed away to get in Judas’s car. 

“Where should we check first?” he said. 

“It’s still daylight, sorta,” Judas said, looking out at the gray afternoon clouds. “Don’t they sleep in coffins or something during the day?”

Teddy laughed. “Vampires sleep in coffins. They’re just miscreants. They probably curl up in cardboard boxes.”

Judas drove past Wadi’s house and saw that no one was home. Same for Ciqala and Muraco. 

“You think they’re at Mai Smith’s?” Teddy asked. 

“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that first.”

“That’s why you brought me. We’re a team, like Jake and the Fat Man.”

Sure enough, Muraco’s car and several dirt bikes were parked outside Mai’s house. He hated to disrupt their afternoon delight, for lack of a better term, but he also wanted to get it over and done with. 

He parked the car and they milled around the front yard. Teddy touched the handle of one of the bikes and looked like he was contemplating taking it for a ride. 

“Don’t even think it,” Judas warned. 

“What’s a little joy ride between friends?” he quipped. 

Judas took a deep breath and blew out a cloud of smoke. It was starting to feel like snow. Not a good sign. It was too early for snow. If he had any inkling of making his escape from this town, it would have to be soon. Waiting too late would leave him snowbound. 

He rang the bell while Teddy waited at the bottom of the steps. He could hear the TV blaring inside. The door opened a minute later, just before he was about to ring the bell again. 

Muraco answered, a cigarette scrunched in the side of his mouth. He was shirtless and sporting grease-stained jeans and leather boots. 

“What are you doing here?” he huffed. His breath reeked of whiskey. 

Damn good question
, Judas thought. 

“John Backman wanted me to find you.”

“What for?”

Mai could be heard laughing in the background, followed by a catcall from Wadi. 

Standing face to face with his lifelong tormentor was not getting any more comfortable. He’d spent so many years cultivating his mind to just block the thug out whenever he came near, it was hard to engage him in actual two-way conversation. 

Luckily, Teddy piped in, “He said he’d like you and the rest of your gang to come to his house Saturday. Something about an experiment.”

Muraco flicked the cigarette into the yard. “Yeah? What kind of experiment.”

Teddy shrugged his shoulders. 

“He wants to see if the spirits in the house are attracted to people from the town. He already knows that weird shit happens when you or me are around. Maybe with more people, something big will happen,” Judas said. 

Muraco closed the door and sat on the top porch step, oblivious to the cold. He motioned for Judas to sit beside him, which he did, reluctantly. 

“I broke into my parents’ place yesterday,” he began. 

He has to break in to his own parents’ house?

“They don’t let me come by anymore, so I had to wait until they left for the bar to get in. I was alone. I remember as a kid that my grandmother kept a journal about everything. That old coot was writing all the time. Her and my grandfather came here just when the town was getting started, so I figured there might be something in one of those journals that might interest Backman. She died when I was, like, fifteen, but I know my mother keeps all her stuff in this big plastic box in their closet. I’ve seen the journals there before, like twenty of them, when I’ve gone in the box looking for shit to pawn.”

He paused and looked them in the eye, daring them to judge him. When he realized they were only waiting for the conclusion to the story, he continued. 

“Now these things have been there for the past ten years. Except when I go to get them yesterday, they ain’t there. There’s just an empty space where they used to be in the box. Weird, huh?”

Judas nodded in agreement. Chalk another oddity to the drama they’d all been sucked into. 

“It’s almost like someone doesn’t want us to find the truth,” Muraco said. 

He lit another cigarette and stood back up. “Well, fuck ’em. I don’t care what they’re hiding and I’m not running from anything up at that house. Tell Backman we’ll all be there.”

Stretching, he began to howl, setting Judas’s nerves on edge. 

“Yeah, fuck ’em all.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

John was still humming from the excitement of the previous night, as well as the heightened sense of awareness that comes from lack of sleep. If he didn’t get at least five solid hours of sleep in soon, that awareness would degrade to vapor lock. Go enough days without sleep and your thoughts were no longer your own, your vision was less than reliable and that old friend paranoia would soon start creeping in. The more you thought about the sleep you were missing and how crucial it was to get some this very night, the more your mind played tricks on you, convincing itself that sleep would never come and you would be left a babbling lunatic. 

He knew firsthand what it meant to be your own worst enemy. 

He cast those thoughts aside and instead concentrated on viewing the video from the hallway. Jessica had put on a brave face when she recounted her experience with what she called the light boy. John slipped the VHS-C cassette into the player and started at the beginning. Even though he knew the incident wasn’t until about an hour into it, he would watch it all, hoping to catch something that Jessica had missed. With any luck, there would be recorded evidence to back up his daughter’s claims, which, as her father, he had no reason to doubt. 

While the cassette rewound, his stomach started to growl. 

“All right, all right,” he said, patting his aching stomach. “I’ll feed you in a minute.”

Resistance to his hunger was futile, so he went upstairs to grab something quick. 

Eve was seated at the kitchen counter, her head bent over reading a large, leather bound book. She looked up when he stepped into the kitchen. 

“I’m at a loss, John,” she said. The rims of her eyes were red from lack of sleep, too. After Jessica and the detector’s bleating woke her up from a deep sleep, she’d found it almost impossible to slip back into her dreams. She’d been perusing all of the books John had brought instead, looking for anything that might match their experience. 

“This is the second time I’ve looked over this stuff and I can’t find anything like what’s happening here. The closest thing would involve poltergeist cases, and even those, from the Smurls to Borley Rectory, the Enfield case and even the Lutz’s, I can’t find anything that has as much solid phenomena as here. Just bits and pieces here and there.”