Forest of Shadows Read online

  “I missed you mucho much,” she shot back before embarking on her tale yet again.

  Six-years-old and already she could out-filibuster any politician in Washington. After a day of being by himself, Jessica’s voice was music to his ears. It was hot, she was beautiful, so they stopped for ice cream on the way home and it wasn’t until an hour later that John was able to put all the pieces of her story together. Sure enough, it was about farting.

  Chapter Four

  Eve Powers came to the house at six bearing a heaping bag of Chinese food. She was no more than three paces in the door before Jessica came bounding down the stairs.

  “Aunt Eve!” Jessica yelled as she wrapped herself around Eve’s waist, almost toppling her over.

  “It’s nice to see someone’s glad to see me.”

  “What did you bring for dinner?”

  “Dinner? Your dad didn’t tell me to bring dinner. This is just a bag of laundry,” Eve said with a smile.

  Jessica sniffed the air. “Your laundry smells a lot like Chinese food.”

  “You know what? You’re right!” Eve grabbed her and started to tickle underneath her neck. Jessica squealed with laughter and darted towards the living room. Eve gave chase and caught up with her behind the couch where she proceeded to tickle her until she was almost out of breath from giggling. Eve helped her up and carried her into the dining room where she plopped her into a chair.

  “Where’s Daddy?” she asked as she emptied the little white containers from the bag onto the table.

  “Upstairs, reading.”

  Eve brought some plates and utensils from the kitchen, mindful to take out Jessica’s favorite Rugrats plate, cup and a straw. She dished out some fried rice and chicken and broccoli and poured her a cup of water.

  “There, you’re all set.”

  Jessica needed no further encouragement. She started to dig in immediately, devouring the broccoli first. Eve never ceased to marvel at the girl’s penchant for veggies.

  “I’ll be back in a minute. I’m going to get Daddy.”

  “Okay,” Jessica replied with a mouthful of green-specked teeth.

  Eve went upstairs to the spare bedroom, better known as John’s study, picking up Jessica’s discarded shoes, socks and assorted toys on the way. Near the top step, she even had to grab John’s sneakers. It was a wonder they didn’t kill themselves.

  The door to the study was open. She could see him lying on the loveseat, headphones firmly in place and a large book in his hands. The music was so loud she could make out every word of the song, even though she was still in the hallway.

  She walked into the room and quickly pulled the headphones off. John barely moved a muscle as he said, “Good evening, Eve my dear,” in a pretty good imitation of Bela Lugosi.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “The only person who would be in this house and rude enough to disturb my peace by nearly ripping my ears off mid-chorus is you. Plus, I could smell your blood,” he said, baring his teeth.

  She bopped him on the head with a throw pillow. “Okay, Count, your latest victim, I mean meal, is served in the downstairs parlor.”

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Where’s Liam? I don’t hear any baby babble?”

  “I tried to take him away from my parents after work but he got too upset. I figured I’d feed you and Jess first and get him on the way home.”

  John patted Jessica’s head and grabbed his plate, filling it with sesame chicken and noodles. The broccoli was gone from Jessica’s plate and now she was working on the rice.

  Eve tied her straight blonde hair into a ponytail so it wouldn’t fall into her food while she ate. Just one of the minor hazards to having long hair but it was easily remedied.

  For the next few minutes, the only sounds in the dining room were the clink of forks on plates and labored chewing, followed by the occasional, “Mmmm, that’s good.” Jessica eyed a fat piece of broccoli on John’s plate and managed to spear it with her fork when he went to grab the water pitcher.

  “So, what were you so engrossed in before?” Eve asked after she had finished most of her food.

  “Some terrible so-called Bible on ghost tracking. It was put together by a team of ghost hunters associated with the Southern Paranormal Society and when I tell you it’s boring, I speak the truth.”

  “Then why read it?”

  “Unfortunately, I agreed to review it for the spirit-dot-com website. It just came in the mail this morning and now I wish it was lost in transport.” He emptied the remaining sesame chicken on his plate and munched on a forkful. “I mean, they take something as intriguing as hunting for ghosts and turn it into the driest scientific diatribe imaginable.”

  Eve looked confused. “But isn’t the goal of ghost hunters to take the study of paranormal spirits and break it down scientifically so you can prove without a doubt their validity?”

  “That’s their goal, no doubt about it.”

  “What Daddy is saying is, they suck.”

  “Jessica,” Eve scolded.

  “You got that right,” John said, pinching her cheek.

  “Language of little girls aside,” Eve said. Jessica smiled. “Wouldn’t it make belief in the supernatural that much easier if science was on your side?”

  Eve had been around John for many years and she was pretty confident in her working knowledge of the paranormal. It was important to be able to hold her own in conversation with anyone, especially John, and she knew he respected her that much more because of it.

  After Anne’s death of natural causes, a tragedy that devastated everyone around them, John had tried to go back to his job with the phone company but it was just too much. He couldn’t bear to leave Jessica’s side and his fear of losing her to crib death became all consuming. It wasn’t until months later that he even cashed in his winning lottery ticket. What should have been the windfall of a lifetime turned out to be a painful reminder of the most horrific day of his life. All of the money in the world couldn’t bring Anne or his prior mental health back. In an instant, he had come face to face with mortality and he still hadn’t recovered from the shock.

  When all was said and done and Uncle Sam had taken his share, John was left with close to fifteen million dollars. For almost a year, he was beset by so-called friends and never-heard-of relatives who swarmed around him like locusts. Eve had married Anne’s brother, Patrick, just a few months before her untimely death. Though she was new to the family, she took it upon herself to deflect the money hungry, field the innumerable calls from accountants, brokers, credit companies and the like, and help take care of John and Jessica. His grief was unlike any she had ever seen. The first year was awful, made all the more difficult by the money. When she had asked him why he didn’t just take his money and move away, he’d replied, “This is Anne’s house. How can I leave it?”

  Since then, she had taken John and Jessica under her wing, adding Liam and losing her husband along the way. She was aware of their unusual relationship and how it appeared to others but she didn’t care. Real life was more important than erroneous perceptions.

  “I hate to tell you, but even science isn’t an exact science,” John said. “Just look at astronomy. I used to follow it religiously. Subscribed to every magazine, went to the planetarium every month, bought a nice shiny telescope with all the bells and whistles. Then I started to notice that all these established facts that I was reading about months or years ago were being proven untrue at an alarming rate. And no one seemed to care. They’d spout the new facts, you’d nod your head, and six months later the second established truth is tossed aside for the truth du jour.”

  Jessica dutifully left the table to bring her empty plate into the kitchen. John never failed to be impressed by her maturity.

  He continued. “And now there are quantum theories that have divided the entire scientific community. By using quantum theory, one can suggest that maybe spirits are just us at a subatomic level where the laws
of nature no longer apply. What we see, our version of reality, is actually an illusion. There’s an entire universe, hell, multiple universes, operating at the subatomic level that we can’t even imagine, and when we see what we call spirits, we’re catching glimpses of our world on a different plane of existence. And after you spend a few weeks trying to digest what took me a few sentences to clumsily describe, you’ll take some aspirin and decide whether you believe a ghost is a ghost is a ghost or it’s all the product of your imagination or a trick of light. You see, I don’t need science to justify my beliefs and there are a lot of people out there like me.”

  “As evidenced by all those hits on your website,” Eve interjected.

  John had started a paranormal website two years ago. No topic was off limits. It averaged about ten thousand hits a month and had won several web awards for overall design and content management. It was a repository of the unexplained, a vast library of stories, pictures and videos of things that went bump in the night. John collected their stories and put them out for the world to see. He had even, over the past two years, started field investigating, amassing an arsenal of technology both old and new, designed to capture the fantastic on film, video and audio. It was amazing how a man crippled by anxiety could be so fearless in the face of the paranormal.

  “You got it. I like this field because of all the unknown aspects. I don’t necessarily want to find all the answers. It’s the experiences that attract me and thousands of others. Like religion. The only thing that holds it all together is faith. I’ve been a Catholic all my life and not once have I ever desired to see some scientific study on the existence of God. I just believe. Same thing applies here.”

  He finished his monologue by munching on his last bite of chicken with a satisfied grin on his face. He loved talking about his passion and Eve had always been a great person to exchange ideas with. Knowing her, there was a counterpoint to come.

  “So, your faith in the existence of ghosts is the only thing you need.”

  “Exactly.”

  Eve squinted her eyes and leaned forward in her chair. “And on faith alone, you believe in the absolute existence of UFOs, poltergeists, the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot?”

  “Yes, yes, yes and no,” John said. “We all know Bigfoot is a crock of shit.”

  They both laughed while they cleaned up the dining room and Eve agreed to give Jessica a bath while he did the dishes. After the dishes, John sat on the living room couch and listened to Eve and Jessica sing some pop song in the bath. He was a lucky man in so many ways. He had a wonderful daughter, a beautiful home, no money worries and he was a self-employed man working in a field he loved. Most people would give their right arm to be in his position, and there were plenty of times he felt comfortable in the skin that had become his life after Anne.

  Except this skin had scars and blemishes, patches red and raw, some rough, and worst of all, impenetrable.

  Chapter Five

  John pushed the drawer that housed his keyboard into the desk and leaned back in his leather chair. The glare of the computer screen was drying out his eyes. With a click of his mouse, he downloaded the changes to his paranormal website, fearnone.com. It took about three minutes for all of the edited files to fully transfer. Just a few years before, he was an internet moron. If you’d asked him what version of Explorer he used, he would have cracked a joke about Columbus or Lewis and Clark. A few classes in html, Java and Photoshop later and he was his own web designer. Sure, he had the money to hire a team of designers, but the learning and the effort that it took to maintain a good site were welcome diversions from his inner life.

  He never claimed to be an expert in the paranormal. He was just a guy with a burning curiosity who happened to turn himself into a decent web designer. Anne’s death and his sudden fortune gave him the desire and flexibility to make this a full-time gig.

  He’d just added a new case study of ghostly presences complete with pictures of supposed ectoplasmic emissions from a hospital in Iowa. This particular hospital had been the center of a rash of otherworldly sightings for more than forty years. Doctors, nurses, patients and visitors had all been witness to a host of evanescent shapes, disembodied voices and telekinetic activity. John had been contacted through his website a few months ago by one of the hospital’s administrators who had asked if there was anything he could suggest they do to rid themselves of the unexplained activity. He explained to them that he was no ghost buster, but rather a hunter and gatherer of information. He promised to devote a section of his website to their plight and see what he could do about generating interest among the few reputable people that eradicated supernatural entities for a living.

  As a paranormal hunter, John’s primary objective was to seek out odd phenomena, study it and make it available to the public. Over the last couple of years, fearnone.com had attracted a lot of attention. He’d been interviewed by quite a few magazines and offbeat radio shows, especially because of his unique angle as a lottery winner who was using his money in such an unconventional way. His credibility was strengthened by the fact that he endeavored to make zero dollars from his efforts. Unlike a few others in this line of work, he didn’t charge people consultation fees or sell shirts or create museums of the bizarre that one could enter for a fee. Any money that he received for his articles written for magazines like Spirit, American Haunting and Fate was donated to charity or dropped in the collection plate at Sunday mass.

  John stretched his arms and yawned.

  Sleep was no longer a habitual, mechanized function in John’s life. The heavy pull of impending sleep brought anything but tranquility and a desire for pleasant dreams. A year after Anne had died in her sleep of what the doctors termed natural causes, her heart had just inexplicably stopped, John experienced his first bout of insomnia. It had lasted a week and started one night as a simple inability to shut his brain down. Snippets of past memories, to-do lists for the coming week, the unrelenting repetition of a particular song chorus, usually a song that he hated, all jack-booted their way across the landscape of his subconscious and refused to be silenced.

  By the third sleepless night he had become hyper-conscious of his breathing patterns as he lay in bed, praying for sleep. Any odd heartbeat or fluctuation in his respiration gave rise to a panic that thrust him back to being fully awake. Just as he would fall asleep, he’d awake gasping for air like a drowning man. He was convinced that his heart would stop beating while he slept, just like Anne’s. A part of him knew this wasn’t rational thinking but utter exhaustion was taking his mind to places he’d never been before.

  Here he was, a newly minted millionaire who couldn’t buy a peaceful night’s sleep. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a black-eyed zombie. It frightened the hell out of him and he wondered if he was going completely insane. Whatever thread of normalcy he’d managed over the past year had come undone and his next stop was a padded cell where he’d never see Jessica again.

  Finally, he’d called Eve and told her the hell that he’d been living. She had been so good to him and the baby since Anne’s death, the one solid presence in the tumultuous seas that he had been drifting upon for the past year. He wasn’t aware at the time that her husband Patrick was growing none too fond of their budding comradeship and the time she spent with them.

  Eve came over one night, put Jessica to bed and gave him a sleeping pill that she had left over when she was going through hormone therapy the year before. They sat on the couch watching a movie he’d seen a dozen times. Ten minutes into the movie, she said to him, “You can fall asleep at any time. I promise I’ll stay awake and watch over you. Nothing will happen to you. I’ll be here, awake, all night.”

  It was the words, not the pill, that broke the spell of insomnia. John knew that if he had taken the Valium on his own, he would have been up all night fighting its effects. Knowing that Eve was watching over him, a sort of guardian angel, was the cure. He slept seventeen hours straight and woke up to a late lunch that Ev
e had prepared.

  With her encouragement, he made an appointment to see his family physician, Dr. Daniels. After a physical, he was declared physically sound and given a prescription for sleeping pills should he experience another spell of sleeplessness.

  Despite the knowledge that his body was in good shape, the nocturnal terror of sleep returned again and again. One sleeping pill was never enough, especially without Eve by his side. There was no way he could call her to come over several times a week just to lull him to sleep. She was a married woman trying to start her own new family. The last thing he wanted to do was tether her to his problems.

  He sought a second opinion and went through an intense physical that checked everything that could possibly be poked, prodded, scanned and pricked within the human body. Again, he was given a clean bill of health, only instead of sleeping pills, he was handed a referral.

  “What does Dr. Anderson specialize in?”

  “She’s a therapist, John. She’s helped many, many people with anxiety disorders.”

  John laughed. “So, you think I’m crazy?”

  The doctor shook his head. “You’ve been through a lot. More in one year than most people will ever experience. Talk to her, John. I’m afraid there’s not much more I can do for you.”

  Dr. Anderson turned out to be a far cry from what he expected a shrink to look like. A shade over thirty, she had long chestnut hair that she tied back in a ponytail and deep, green eyes that had an almost magical ability to put him at ease. She had a way of drawing out her words that ended in the letter s, like she had taken a class in diction back when she was studying psychology.

  At first, John had been worried that he wouldn’t be able to open up to someone so attractive and close to his age. A month of hourly sessions three times a week cured him of his doubt. He was diagnosed with somniphobia, the fear of sleep. To a lesser extent, this also led to clinophobia, the fear of going to bed, and oneirophobia, the fear of dreams. Dr. Anderson formed a two pronged approach: suppress the symptoms with medication and begin attacking the problem from within through intensive therapy.