Forest of Shadows

by Hunter Shea

  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.

  “Jess, honey, I’ll be in my study if you need me.”

  She gave him a zombie-like nod.

  He checked the thermostat by the stairs. Thank God for central air. The neighborhood, now filled to capacity with kids freed from the bonds of school for the summer, was quiet. The birds were even too hot to chirp.

  He carried his paper and coffee into his study and fired up the computer. He was able to scan the baseball box scores while the Dell clicked and ticked its way to life. The Mets had won in Atlanta and the Yankees were pummeled by the Indians.

  “Things are looking up already.”

  Opening his email, he went to a folder marked SHIDA. In it were the five emails that he had traded back and forth with Judas Graves as well as the completed questionnaire that he used as a standard preliminary tool for cases he considered worthy of further review. He read them each over for the umpteenth time, then went to his Inbox to see if anything new had come in. This was his personal email, so it wasn’t bogged down like the mailboxes he had linked to the fearnone.com website. Just a couple of pieces of junk mail, a message from Jack about meeting him and some of the people they used to work with for drinks on Saturday night and a trio of less than hysterical jokes forwarded by Eve from her office.

  Sipping his coffee, John jumped onto the internet and went to a weather site. He tried to look up the current temperature in Shida but the town wasn’t found in the database. He opened another internet window and found a site that had a pretty detailed map of Alaska. He tried a couple of nearby cities and hit pay dirt with Talkeetna, an oddly named place in the interior region, north of Anchorage and south of Mount McKinley. The forecasters were calling for partly sunny skies with a high of sixty-seven degrees, dipping down into the mid-forties overnight.

  John looked out his window at the leaves of the elm tree. They hung limply from their branches, as unmoving as a painting.

  “Wish they’d send some of that mild weather this way.”

  It was almost eleven o’clock. Time for his anti-anxiety medication. He took half the usual dose and downed it with the dregs of his coffee. There’d been a time when he counted the minutes until pill time. Now he dreaded it. He had to keep reminding himself that he was on the road to independence from meds. Times like now, when he was feeling strong, calm, it was easy to think I don’t need these. I should just chuck them all down the toilet. But he knew there were moments, lurking unseen throughout the day,that would turn his world upside down and make him wish he’d doubled up on his dose.

  “Daddy, can Allison come over to play?”

  Jessica was standing half-dressed in the doorway. Her shirt was in her hands.

  “Sure. You guys going to play in the yard?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s kinda hot.”

  John laughed. “You can say that again. Let me know if you are so I can watch you.”

  “Oh Dad.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll stay in the kitchen, out of sight.”

  “Fine.” She moped down the hall, her shoulders drooping melodramatically.

  When Allison arrived, John set the sprinkler up in the back yard and the two girls spent the better part of an hour running around and over it. It only took a few minutes in the yard to convince him that he was better off indoors.

  While he watched them, he decided to call Eve at work.

  “Hello, this is Eve Powers.”

  “I’d like to purchase a bride from your catalogue,” he said in a pretty good Indian accent.

  “What’s the matter, can’t get a lady on your own?”

  “Well, my friend, I have this goiter on the side of my face that some people find slightly off-putting.”

  Eve laughed hard at that one.

  John asked how her day was going and she talked about her latest project. He could tell that she was holding something back. She hated her job and he knew it. He also knew that she tried very hard not to complain around him.

  “I was actually calling for more than just trying out my latest sub-par accent.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to ask, do you have any vacation time left?”

  “Only about two weeks,” she said facetiously. Two weeks was her vacation allotment for the year.

  “You think you could take some time off soon?”

  She hesitated. “How much time are we talking about?”

  “Two, three days tops.”

  He could almost hear the gears turning in her head. He grinned.

  “Sure, I guess I could. How come?”

  Now here was the bomb. It had only been a thought until now. Once he said it out loud, there was no going back.

  “I need to take a trip, the sooner the better. I’d ask my father to watch Jess but a couple of days and nights is too much for him. I was wondering if you could take her in. If you want, you and Liam could even stay here.”

  There was a slight clack as Eve shifted the phone to her other ear and banged it into her earring. “Did I hear you right? You’re going to take a trip?”

  “Yep.”

  He knew she wanted to add, but you never go anywhere.

  “It’s kind of a business trip, believe it or not. Turns out, I really can’t do everything I need from my home office. So, you think you could swing it?”

  His heart was beating double time. He was nervous about the trip, nervous about her response.

  Eve sighed into the phone.

  “Of course I could. I’d watch Jessica any time. I’m just shocked, you know.”

  “Me too,” John chuckled.

  “May I ask where you’re headed off to?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Alaska.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alaska

  “It’s an interesting proposal, Mr. Backman. This is the most prestigious piece of property in all of Shida.”

  “Kind of like the crown jewel,” John said and smiled.

  The real estate agent, Mary Longfeather, was young but had a hard look about her. She sat back and closed her eyes for a moment. Her walnut skin crinkled around her eyes as she concentrated.

  John had been given the grand tour of the house, a whale of a modern log cabin that looked fit to be in a magazine. All it needed was some heavy wood furniture and a fire in the hearth to complete the picture of perfection. A city boy all his life, John was instantly enthralled not just by the house but by the entire countryside. This was a side of nature he’d only
read about or glimpsed on his trips to Bear Mountain in upstate New York. Nothing could prepare him for this. Shida was a town shrouded by trees taller than Bronx apartment buildings with occasional paths plowed out and small, weathered houses carved into the clearings.

  “It seems to me that it’s a one-of-a-kind house.”

  “Yes.” Her tone was leery, waiting for the but.

  “I would guess you haven’t had many queries since it went on the market.”

  John had spoken to Judas Graves several times before his flight. Judas sounded a bit on the flaky side, what with all the dudes and the occasional far out man, but he did seem to know the town. If he was nothing else, John was thorough. He’d researched all he could on Shida, which wasn’t a whole heck of a lot. Thankfully, Eve had a friend with the California tourism board who agreed to contact an acquaintance in the Alaska Travel Bureau. Shida was a small town in the sense that it had a sparse population, last estimate around five hundred and eleven, though the amount of acreage within the town limits could easily house hundreds of thousands. He was happy to learn that he could take the scenic George Parks Highway to Shida should he drive on his return instead of taking the terrifyingly tiny air-taxi he took for the sake of saving time. Originally created as a mining town, it was now a collection of people who got by on odd jobs, hunting, working on the pipeline and some mining. Hardly the kind of place where someone would come to purchase a million-dollar home.