The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  Nadia stared at me with her disarming hazel eyes that seemed far more mature than her adolescence. “If she already has your heart, what’s left to steal?”

  It was an uncomfortable line of inquiry I’d rather not answer. She made up her own mind about it. “I’m not sure she’s right for you.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I let it drop. “Are you hungry? Can I get you something to drink?”

  She shook her head no, but licked her lips as if thirsty. “No, I’m okay, I ate earlier.”

  Nadia put down the high school yearbook and patted me on my thigh, holding my gaze with that soul-deep stare. “I think you should get some sleep.” As soon as she spoke I felt tired.

  “Yeah, good idea, I’ve got school in the morning.”

  She reached over to click off the light switch and pecked me on the cheek with a platonic kiss. “Good night.” Then she curled up under my blankets like it was the most natural thing in the world to sleep in my bed. She had definitely taken over.

  If she wasn’t worried about sleeping in my bed, why should I?

  I was too tired to care. I stripped off my shirt and climbed under the covers. She curled around me and snuggled up tight. It was weird at first, but I drifted off in minutes.

  Throughout the night I had the same recurring dreams of Nadia, her lithe, pale limbs entwined around me intimately. I dreamed of slow, sliding, seductive motions gliding over my skin, like a boa constrictor coiling around me. Late at night, I awoke to find Nadia had stripped off her hoodie sweatshirt. She was in her little half shirt, wrapped around my torso, her head buried in my neck, her spindly legs enveloping my left thigh. I thought I heard her saying things in Russian again, calling me Mikhail and at times Misha.

  In a moment of lucidity, our gazes locked. She was but a centimeter from my face, staring at me intently. I thought she might kiss me. “Go back to sleep.” I was so damn tired that’s exactly what I did. I quickly returned to the dreamland of Nadia.

  My cell phone alarm went off next morning, and Nadia was gone again. This time she left a $100 dollars on my dresser. But I thought of her as a sister. Didn’t I? Maybe she didn’t view me as a brother and I remembered that almost kiss last night. Shit. All I knew was that $100 would be put to good use.

  “There’s my new tire.” I smiled.

  Then I remembered something from that wicked vision last night. The side of that tractor had three letters on it – RSC – the company with the job opening Dad had just applied for.

  “Shit.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

  Monday, September 27th

  I sat next to Anita on the bleachers in the Moses Lake High School gym zoning out while waiting for the assembly to begin. She jabbered all the latest gossip, pointing out various couples on the bleachers below. I grew bored with the he-said-she-said pretty quick. My thoughts drifted back over the strange encounters with Nadia, and my visions. I rolled the images over in my mind again and again, searching for meaning, portent. The first vision had already happened, Nadia was there outside my trailer, and then at my window. The second one made almost no sense, me dancing with some girl, while Rachelle was mean-mugging me.

  Should I ask Rachelle to homecoming? What did it all mean? Do I actually have a snowball’s chance in hell of dating Rachelle? Maybe this vision meant it would be a mistake to go to homecoming with anyone else, because she’d be really angry with me.

  But Rachelle doesn’t even like me.

  None of it made any sense. Maybe she was mad about something else? There were too many unanswerable questions. But I hoped it was a sign that I should ask Rachelle to homecoming. That’s how I chose to interpret it.

  The third vision showed Nadia in trouble, but I couldn’t see who the guy was. Some asshole pervert crawling all over her, a sexual predator. How can I stop it from happening if I don’t know the details of who and when? I’d have to keep her close, make sure nothing happened to her.

  And what the hell was I supposed to do about this latest gruesome vision, the guy with the tractor at RSC? Was my Dad gonna get hired and then crushed by a tractor? How could I stop that? And what would I say – Hey, don’t work on that tractor, someone’s gonna get hurt. Yeah, who would listen to that shit?

  I recalled my previous visions. I had tried to make a difference, to change the outcome, but I wasn’t really able to do much.

  Three years ago, dead of winter, January, I’d arrived at Rachelle’s to walk her to school, our morning routine. She was running late and would’ve made us both late to school. I didn’t care, I waited for her. We were real close back then.

  Thing is, it took forty minutes to walk from Rachelle’s house down Northshore Drive to the bridge, then across and back down to Frontier Junior High. The school was basically on the opposite side of the lake from Rachelle’s backyard. Going around the lake to the bridge wasted a lot of time.

  Rachelle had mentioned walking across the frozen lake several times in the past week. She hated being out in the cold and snow. She hated walking. Normally, her mother gave her rides to school, but their Honda civic was in the shop, and her Dad took the Tahoe to work early.

  As she finally exited her bedroom, makeup and hair perfect, she looked at the clock and looked at me. I already knew. She grabbed my hand and marched around to her backyard. I stopped short, but she pushed. “Come on, let’s do it. We might make it on time if we cut across.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “It’s been frozen for three weeks. They were playing hockey a couple days ago. Come on.”

  As soon as she stepped on the ice I was slammed with a vivid vision of Rachelle falling through the ice, completely submerged in the lake. Her pale face turn blue-grey as she beat on the ice from below, fighting to find a way to the surface while the current dragged her down the ice, away from the breakage. I had never seen anything more frightening. It seemed so real I actually shook with the chill of the icy water wrapped around my body.

  As I awoke from the vision, I hyperventilated, a panic attack. I caught my breath, and snatched Rachelle’s coat to stop her. “Don’t! You can’t go, you’ll fall through. I know it, I just know. You have to believe me, Rach.”

  She humored me for a minute, listened to my grisly tale of a vision of death. Then she grabbed my hand and resumed her march out onto the ice. I begged her, “I don’t care how late we are. It doesn’t matter. Let’s skip, we’ll spend the day in your basement with the X-box or we can do whatever you want.”

  She snapped on me. “Stop whining, we’re going to school, every minute we waste is making us that much later. I have Lynch first period, he’s cool as long as I’m not more than five minutes late. Come on!” She yanked on my hand and kept on walking.

  “NO! We are not going out there! You’re gonna die out on the ice! Don’t you get it?”

  She looked at me and laughed in my face. Not one of those ha-ha-your-so-cute laughs, it was a bitter, mocking sound.

  “Listen, you wanna stay here and be a whiny little bitch, go for it. I’m going to school!” With that, she left me behind at a fast clip, straight across the ice.

  I debated for a moment whether or not to follow her. I was just angry enough to leave her to her fate. In the end I felt like I had no choice. I followed her out onto the ice, certain in the knowledge that it wouldn’t hold her weight, let alone both of us. She was halfway across the lake by the time I caught up to her, slipping and sliding with every step. I was terrified.

  We made it most of the way across. I had ceased trying to convince her to turn back. She wouldn’t hear another word of it. She got nasty with me, “Shut up!”

  We were about twenty feet from the shoreline when the unnerving crackle-snap sounds started. I ran. I yanked Rachelle’s hand up and pulled her as fast as I could run.

  The ice broke near the shore.

  The glacial cold water was only four feet deep. If we had fallen through a few paces back we’d have been in over our heads, caught in
the current, exactly as I had envisioned it. As it was, we were soaked, standing in freezing water that reached all the way to our chins.

  “Yep, you were right. I am totally drowning right now.” She glared at me full of hate.

  Even as her teeth chattered in the cold, wet hair plastered to her forehead, she was so beautiful, and still alive. I was so happy we’d made it, I kissed her.

  “Get off me!” She shoved me away.

  We dragged ourselves out of the lake and trudged the rest of the way to school in silence. The two city blocks across Broadway and Third Street were sheer torture in the freezing January morning breeze with sopping wet clothes. Our pants and jackets were crisp with ice by the time we made it to the nurse’s station. We got the day off from school, both of us caught the flu. I was out of school for an entire week. Rachelle only missed three days.

  From that point on, Rachelle began to distance herself from me. I think I freaked her out with my admission of visions. She didn’t appreciate or even acknowledge that I’d risked my life for her.

  About a year ago, I had a vision of Bobby Krager, a kid who skated occasionally at the skatepark. I had seen very clearly how Bobby would dive headfirst off a bridge into one of the Columbia Basin Irrigation District canals surrounding Moses Lake. His dive was perfect, right into the center of the canal. But then he had a wicked cramp. In the midst of fighting off the muscle spasm in his leg, he was sucked into the powerful current of the canal flowing down through a large corrugated drain tube out onto a spillway. The opening was covered with a series of cross bars we called dragon teeth. I saw Bobby hit the bars headfirst, knocked unconscious and drowned, held in place underwater by the massive current flowing past the teeth. His body hung suspended…his lifeless appendages waved in a ghostly fashion as his body pressed tightly against the bars. Dead eyes stared at me, and blood washed away in a dark cloud from the peeled back flesh on his forehead.

  I went straight to Bobby, confided in him about the gruesome details of my vision, and told him stay the hell out of the canals. Bobby ignored me, shunned me, laughed at me, and even talked shit to a few skaters at the park.

  Three days later it happened, precisely as I saw it, right down to the last detail. It took forty hours for the Grant County Fire Department divers to find his corpse, which had to be pried off the dragon teeth. No one was laughing about Bobby’s death. His buddies conveniently forgot all about their jokes from a few days earlier.

  Everyone pretended I had never said a word. Selective memory loss. I caught some strange looks from the guys who knew, and once in a while someone would remark on how weird it was, but only if they thought I wasn’t listening.

  I had learned my lesson twice over. There was little to be gained by telling anyone about my visions.

  It’s up to me to do anything about it, if anything can be done. Talk is cheap. Bobby didn’t listen, Rachelle didn’t listen. I doubt anybody at RSC would listen, why bother talking to them about some vague threat of a tractor accident? Who would take these things seriously?

  Anita elbowed me in the ribs, waking me from my daydreams. She sat on the bleachers leaned against my shoulder while I was absorbed in thought. She’d been jabbering about who was pairing up for homecoming.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Hunh?”

  “I said I think Jennifer Marsh is goin’ with T-bone. See how he’s all over her.” Anita pointed to an obnoxious brunette holding hands with a lanky black kid. “I heard him bragging about her – Yo dog, I be havin’ white chicks and stuff.”

  “You know what they say, once you go black you never go back.”

  Anita raised her eyebrows as though considering the merits of going black. “I wonder if the rumors are true?” She stuck out her tongue and licked her lips as if the idea sounded yummy.

  I had a hard time picturing Anita dating a black guy. Didn’t seem to be her type. I followed this line of thought wondering who would be a good matchup for her. She never seemed interested in guys. Apart from some grungy dudes at the skatepark, and me, she didn’t have any other guy friends. Well there was Justin, but that bridge had been burned to ashes.

  Anita bumped my shoulder. “So, who are you gonna ask to homecoming?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I probably won’t even go. I’m not much for dancing. I don’t think I can afford a tux anyways.” I shrugged.

  I remembered Rachelle in the blue dress. “I guess if I was gonna ask anyone it would probably be Rachelle, but I think you made that pointless.”

  “She’s going with Tommy you idiot!” Anita knocked on my skull with two thumps of her knuckles. “Blondes must really scramble your brains hunh?” She teased, but with an undertone of snipish attitude.

  “No. Not all blondes.” I looked at her in annoyance, which was when I noticed how truly angry she was.

  “What’s your problem? I’m not going, alright. Not with Rachelle. Probably not at all.”

  Anita looked away, avoiding my searching gaze.

  “Who are you going with?” I snapped.

  “No one! Nobody wants to date a blimp. OKAY!”

  She was damn near crying. What had gotten into her? Anita the hardcore tomboy? She was never girly about things like dances.

  I could tell she was really upset. I put my arm around her, speaking low in her ear.

  “You’re not a blimp. You’re not really fat … just … curvy.” I didn’t know what to say. We’d never had a conversation like this before. “Lots of guys like curvy girls.”

  I decided to take a risk and just say it. I’d always been able to speak my mind to Anita, “What are you, a 36 double D?”

  There it was again, her blush, a very slight change in color. And she could hardly look me in the eyes. “No! Only 34 D.”

  I whispered in her ear. “I’ll bet half the guys in this gym would love to get their hands up your shirt. I admit it’s crossed my mind.”

  She seemed to have calmed down, she was docile and quiet in my embrace. I began to suspect I had stepped over an invisible line, a barrier I didn’t know existed. Just then the assembly started. I focused my attention on the Vice Principal at the podium. Every time I looked to Anita she was staring at me. And holding my hand.

  My mouth went dry, and it was suddenly hot, uncomfortable.

  Something had just happened. Yep, I had crossed the line.

  Could I ever find my way back across that line to my best friend?

  * * * *

  My hands and forearms ached with a dull throb as I left the Kittelson farm that evening. Only 8:30 p.m., and physical exhaustion made it difficult to grip the steering wheel. The half mile drive to Stratford Highway seemed twenty miles.

  I hadn’t seen Nadia for three days, and I never found out if she had a cell phone. I didn’t have a clue how to get ahold of her or where to find her. She had me worried.

  Paused at the highway, waiting for the oncoming traffic to clear, I almost took off when suddenly she was there again, right in front of my car. Exactly like the first time we met. The girl seemed to appear out of nowhere. And just like that first night, I had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting her.

  “Dammit! Are you trying to get killed?” I yelled as she flowed around to the passenger side and climbed in like it was totally normal to hop out of the darkness into the path of my car. Her only answer was a huge entrancing smile. She was happy to see me, and I couldn’t stay angry when she smiled like that.

  “Did you miss me?” Nadia beamed.

  “Un hunh. You are one strange girl, you know that?” She nodded with a smirk.

  It went without saying that she was coming home with me. Again.

  I felt I deserved a little more information this time. I snapped, “So, where the hell have you been for three days?”

  “Staying away. But don’t worry. I didn’t go too far.”

  “Do you ever make any sense?” She never gave me an inch. It was maddening.

  “How was work?” She artfully changed the
subject.

  “You’re not getting off that easy, I wanna know where you go when you’re not … sleeping … in my bed.”

  “You really did miss me, didn’t you? That’s so sweet. I didn’t know you cared.” She stared at me with a look of sublime happiness.

  I lost patience with the game, “You can’t just disappear on me like that!” She reached out to soothe me, calming with her touch. “I don’t know how to find you,” I admitted.

  “You’re gonna have to trust me. I’m not ready to talk about it right now, but someday I’ll explain.” She was so serious all of a sudden, staring at me with those wonderfully entrancing eyes. No way could I stay angry with her, impossible.

  “Enough about me. What about you? How was work? Are you okay? You look tired.”

  There was simply no denying her. She wanted to listen, and she was so good at listening to me. So easy to talk to. With a sigh, I pulled onto Stratford to make my way home.

  “Everything’s fine, same old same old. Kittelson had me running a weed whacker along the sides of the driveway. I guess there’s some county law about how high your weeds can grow. Where do they come up with that crap? They got a bunch of people sitting around bored, making up stupid laws to justify their paychecks as county officials?”

  It was mostly a rhetorical question – just another rant – but she answered me, “Yep, that’s how it works. Isn’t that the American way?”

  “Yeah, I guess. So, what, you’re not American?” I watched her as we pulled into the trailer park, hoping to learn something.

  “Not exactly, but I’ve been here long enough that it doesn’t really matter. I’m Americanized.” As usual her words didn’t provide any real answers. A bullshit line if I ever heard one.

  My Dad’s truck was in the driveway. “Are you up for the window routine again?”

  “Okay.” She tried to pretend it didn’t matter as she nodded. But I could see that it bugged her.

  “Look, I’m sorry. But I don’t know how to explain this to my Dad. I don’t know how to get you in there without questions.” Questions I didn’t have a clue how to answer.