Forest of Shadows (37 page)

When he was done, their bodies peeled to reveal bright red muscle and stark white bone, he went to the refrigerator, took two apples and jammed one in each of their mouths. 

He was back on the slippery road now. No matter how hard he tried, he could not exert even the slightest control over his body. 

Since the murdering spree had begun, in the midst of reeling from the scenes played out before him, he kept trying to at least regain the use of his hands to stop the killing. 

Maybe they knew. Whatever was in him now, possessing him like an insane puppet master, thwarted every attempt he made at self control. Of course he would try to govern his hands because they were the instruments of death. 

What he hadn’t thought of, until now, was this. 

Using every ounce of psychic strength he had left, he managed to mash his right foot down, pinning the accelerator pedal to the floor. The truck revved insanely and the wheels spun in the slick snow. 

Fuck you! I’ll kill myself before I let you take another step.

The wheel pulled from his hands and the truck started to spin out of control. Gary was pulled back, shoved into the spectator box, and he saw the road spin round and round, felt the truck tip off the road, heard the crunch of metal as it landed on its roof. 

The engine sputtered and died. The roof, now flat on the ground, groaned from the weight above and the windows shattered outward. 

He prayed for the car to explode or to discover the drive train had impaled him to the seat. Instead, he watched his hands reach out to the edges of the empty window frame and pull his body out of the truck. 

Gary High Bear’s body rose and walked up to the road, unharmed and undeterred. 

Erica had started shouting as she was taking pictures near the front door. Mai was quick to join her. John, Judas, Muraco and Ciqala ran to her side. 

Thick, dark shapes like self contained black smoke were rising out of the snow. They looked like deformed tree trunks, standing almost six feet high. John did a quick count and blurted, “Fifteen!” 

Judas glanced at him quizzically but John was already busy training the video camera on the scene outside. 

The shadows swallowed the falling snow like sinister black holes. 

“Hey John, how’d you do that?” Wadi shouted from the couch. He and Ahanu had decided not to join the party at the window. 

When John turned around, every drawer and cabinet in the kitchen was wide open. How could they have missed hearing that? “I didn’t,” he replied. He snapped some pictures in the kitchen. 

Something thumped on the floor beneath them. Judas jumped. 

“Anyone else here in the basement with a broom?” Judas asked. 

“No.”

Just when he’d discounted the possibility of poltergeist activity, here were some classic examples. It was almost like whatever was around them could read his mind and was toying with him. He looked down at his EMF meter and it was off the chart, no matter where it pointed. 

The entire house was charged. He grabbed the thermal scanner out of Judas’s hands and saw they were standing in one big cold spot. Fear was probably the one thing keeping them all from noticing it. 

“They’re moving!” Muraco shouted. 

Indeed, they were. The shadow shapes outside started to move towards the driveway, drifting through the fresh snow but leaving no tracks. 

“I wonder where they’re going,” Mai said. 

John was about to run upstairs to check on Eve and the children when the sound of a car pierced the whistling wind. 

“Someone’s coming,” Judas said. 

John stopped at the foot of the stairs. 

“Holy shit, he ain’t stopping!” Muraco said and pulled the girls away from the window. 

An engine roared, followed by the sound of metal slamming through wood. The house shook, groaning from the impact. Everyone stood motionless. 

A car door squealed open followed by banging on the door. 

Shockingly, it was Judas who opened the door. He barely managed to catch Muriel Hawkins as she collapsed in his arms. 

“Close the door!” she barked, her voice wheezing like a punctured inner tube. 

Through the open door, they saw the amorphous black shapes rush at the front of the house, eager to accept an invitation inside. It was Erica who slammed the door shut and bolted the lock. 

The shapes pounded on the door and sides of the house. 

Judas lowered Muriel to the floor. Blood was everywhere. He couldn’t tell through the mess of gore exactly what had happened to her or where the blood was coming from. 

Mai screamed and clasped her hands to her ears. 

John knelt by Muriel and shouted, “Someone get me a towel!”

Erica ran to the kitchen. 

“That’s it man, I’m outta here,” Ciqala said, backing away from them into the dining room. “This place is crazy. No way I’m hanging around. You coming?” he asked Wadi, who shook his red head no. 

“Don’t go out there, man,” Judas warned him.

Ciqala pointed at John tending to Muriel. “We could all end up like her. This shit is whack. Kiss my ass.”

As he opened the patio door, a shadow poured down from the roof like an inky waterfall. A whip-like tendril wrapped around his ankle and yanked him outside, flinging him into the air where he was swallowed up by the night. 

Judas sprinted to the door and closed it tight. 

Muraco shouted, “Ciqala!” 

No one moved to the door. 

Judas bumped into Erica as she brought dish towels and water to John. 

The pounding continued, a steady barrage of cannon fire which they were all sure would end with the walls tumbling down around them, leaving them exposed to the malevolent shadows outside. 

Chapter Forty-Five

The snow was coming down in thick sheets now and Gary couldn’t feel a thing as his body trudged back into the slush. He carried the arms that once belonged to Agnes Riggs, heaving one onto the roof of the house. The other he skewered onto the red metal flag on her mailbox and raised it high. He fumbled with her fingers for a while, trying to get them to stay in a position of flipping off anyone who happened by the gruesome scene, but lack of rigor kept them from staying in place for long. 

And then there were none. 

Gary had grown utterly numb. So much death, so much torture. Judging by the growing darkness, it must have only taken him two hours to kill all eighteen members of the council, as well as anyone with the misfortune of being with them. He’d lost count at twenty-three bodies. If he tried to think back, Agnes would probably make somewhere close to thirty. 

With any luck, the cold would kill his body and free him. What he was trapped in now was beyond living death. For all he knew, this was hell, a trip he’d more than earned, and there was no end. 

What more was there to do? They were all dead, every last person responsible for committing and hiding Shida’s dark secret. Except him, of course, though that was up for debate. 

Gary was confused when he trudged back into Agnes’s house. After a few minutes of searching the bedroom and kitchen, he found a set of keys. 

A gust of cold air blasted him in the face when he turned Jeep’s ignition. 

Gary knew it would be useless to make another attempt at sabotage. His spirit puppeteer would be prepared this time. He was losing more and more of himself with each passing minute. There were no tunnels, no bright lights. Just endless black awaiting him. 

Tires spun for a moment before biting into the snow. When he turned onto the road, he knew it wasn’t over. 

Of course. There was only one logical place he could be going. Back to where it all started. Back to the house on Fir Way. 

Eve awoke in a panic when the car struck the house. She first checked on Liam, who had also been jarred awake, then Jessica, who was nowhere to be seen. 

How the heck did I fall asleep?
she thought. With so much going on in the house, she should have been on high alert. Instead, she felt as if she’d been drugged. 

“Jessica!” She shouted as she stumbled into the hallway with Liam in her arms. He was crying and waving his arms, catching his fingers in her hair. 

“Over here!” came her little voice. She was sitting cross-legged in the room at the end of the hall. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Stay there, honey. I’m going downstairs to see what happened. I’ll be back in just a little bit.”

Oh thank God, thank God, thank God. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Now that she knew Jessica was safe and sound, she could find out just what the hell made that noise. 

It sounded as if everyone downstairs was talking at once and all of them in a panic. At first she thought she’d heard loud banging but that had stopped. As she reached the landing, she noticed her breath misting in the air. It was freezing. Maybe the furnace had blown. 

When she looked down, John was cradling an old woman. Some stood nearby while the rest were staring out the patio doors. The woman was bleeding profusely. 

She was once again thankful, this time for the foresight of telling Jess to stay in the room. 

What the hell was going on?

John saw Eve out of the corner of his eye and said, “It might be best if you go back up with Jessica. Judas, would you mind staying with them?”

Judas shook his head and moved to Eve’s side. 

“John, what happened?”

Wadi was the first to answer. “I’ll tell you what happened. Muriel Hawkins drove her car into the house and comes in all shot up and now something just yanked Ciqala out of the house and threw him around like he was a fucking doll, man! We’re fucking trapped in here!”

Eve knelt next to him. Liam had even ceased crying, sensing the tension in the room. “Is he telling the truth?”

“I’m afraid he is.”

She looked at Muriel’s blood-soaked body. “Who did this to her?”

“I don’t know. I can assure you it wasn’t one of those things outside.”

“What things?” Eve said. 

Muraco barked, “The same things that came at me that night, only bigger. They killed Ciqala, they probably killed old Muriel too.”

“We don’t know that Ciqala’s dead,” Mai cried. A steady stream of tears cascaded down her cheeks. 

Muriel coughed and a thick clot of blood and mucous spilled from her mouth. “Teddy’s dead,” she sighed. 

Judas visibly stiffened. She turned to him. “I’m sorry, Judas. I’m so sorry.”

John wiped the blood from her face. “Muriel, who did this to you and Teddy?”

“All of them. They killed us. They used the sheriff and they killed us all.”

John’s confusion grew deeper. 

“Who are they, Muriel?”

She sucked in a great lungful of air and it sounded like corn popping in her chest. “Those that we buried out there. The ones trying to get in right now.”

“This is bullshit,” Wadi said and stormed into the kitchen. Mai hugged herself and sank along the wall onto her rump. 

“You can’t stop them,” Muriel continued. Her eyes seemed to grow brighter and stronger. She attempted to sit up but found it too painful, so she rested back into John’s arms. “You brought
ixitqusiqjuk
, the bad spirits, John Backman, and now you’ve brought our inevitable doom.”

John’s mind was reeling. This was way out of his league. He felt the familiar dizziness and constriction of his lungs that had come to signal an oncoming panic attack. 

Not here. Not now. Think of Jessica and Eve and Liam. Think of all the lives of the people you’ve brought to this house. 

“Shida has been damned from the beginning,” she said. “Thomas Covell was the first to come here almost forty years ago. He’d escaped from a prison in Beacon, New York and was wanted for the murder of a bank teller and two prison guards. He thought he was safe, started to build a home in the middle of nowhere. Then a lawman tracked him down, barged into his house with guns drawn. But Thomas had been prepared. He rigged a tripwire to a shotgun. Blasted the man’s kneecaps to mince meat. Then Thomas took him outside and finished the job. Buried him about twenty yards from your front porch.”

Eve gasped. 

“Thomas sent me a letter some time after he killed the man, told me he finally felt free. He was my cousin through marriage and even though he was wild, I’d always had a special place for him. About a year after his letter, I found myself in a bit of trouble. I did some shady things because of a man. My best friend’s man. Damn foolish thing to do.”

Her body rocked with a series of barking coughs and John thought she was going to die any minute. She motioned with her hand to stay calm and settled her breathing. 

“So up I came to live with Thomas. My friend found me. She was a white girl who was a social worker for the Chitimacha reservation where I lived down in Louisiana. She comes telling me I have to pay for what I done and all I can think is, who is this white bitch to tell me I have to make amends? The way I figure it, I should have done more to make up what white people have done to us. So I borrowed Thomas’s gun and I killed her. Buried her right next to the lawman.