Forest of Shadows (38 page)

“As the years went on, Shida became the final stop in a kind of underground railroad for our people, at least those that needed to hide away for good. Within five years there were eighteen of us, including Millie Cloud’s grandfather, all from different tribes throughout the country. We considered ourselves the founding council of Shida and we’ve watched over it ever since. Others came, sometimes followed by white people waving their flags of justice. Those white people, John Backman, every single one of them is buried just outside those doors.”

John felt each breath would be his last. Despite the intense cold in the room, drops of sweat beaded on his forehead. If what she said was true, they were sitting on a powder keg of raw, unadulterated hatred. It was like a coal mine fire, burning beneath the surface for years, growing in intensity, seeking release into the world above. 

“Then Robert Foster came with his money and we hoped the spirits had passed on. We were wrong. Foster went mad in this house. He claimed the voices never stopped, that the shadows were alive. We put him on a plane and heard he nearly died.”

A wisp of fear flickered in her eyes. 

“I tried to warn George Bolster to keep his family away but he’d changed too much. The
ixitqusiqjuk
grew stronger, fed by their animosity towards the descendant of their killers. They killed them, of that I’m sure.”

Through bitter, shallow breaths, John said, “So why rent the house to me? Why not destroy it? You set my family up.”

Muriel responded with the patient smile one gives to a child who has just asked a ridiculous question. “Our own greed blinded us. I thought you would be gone by now, but I was wrong. Shida was built with the blood and sweat of evil men and we will die the same.”

The room was filled with frantic scratching on the windows, walls and doors. It sounded as if a pride of lions were trying to claw their way inside. 

“I told you to leave before the snow came. We buried them here to contain the poison. Shida was ours and we weren’t about to let the white man destroy it, even in death. Most of them came just before the cold season, and quite a few were left in the snow until the spring when we could dig. Shida was born with the shed blood of the white man. And now your blood is the very thing that has given them new power,” she paused to grind her teeth as a bolt of pain pierced her chest. “Your family gives
ixitqusiqjuk
the strength to carry out their revenge.”

Muraco huffed angrily. “So who shot you? Some spook?”

Muriel smiled, and it brought a chill to everyone around her. 

“Not
a
spook, boy.
All
of the spooks. They’re
in
Sheriff High Bear, they’re outside, they’re everywhere. High Bear’s killing the council right now. When he’s done, they’ll bring him back here to destroy the house and all the land around it.”

Muriel suddenly doubled over and howled in agony. Judas looked close to tears. 

Judas leaned close to her and said, “You mentioned Millie’s grandfather? How is her death connected to this?”

More blood bubbled over her lips. “There was a man, years after we thought all of the chasing was over. Millie’s grandfather, Fred Cloud, shot him and buried him in the library basement. Everyone from the council was there to help. We thought it would be safe ground, but you awoke something, brought the hate from this house to the library. No one can go back in there. It’s why we’ve left it closed. I never wanted Millie to work there but it was as if she was drawn to the place of her grandfather’s trespass.”

Now Judas let the tears come. For a moment, he looked as if he wanted to strike the dying woman. Eve grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Come upstairs.”

The scratching stopped, and the heavy pounding resumed on the door and walls. The front door began to rattle in its frame. Muraco ran over and pushed his back into it. “Help me Wadi!” he shouted. 

Wadi rushed to join him, as well as Erica. Their bodies shook as the assault escalated. 

“We had always wondered, those on the council, why we had lived so long, every one of us without sickness,” Muriel gasped. A gray film had clouded her eyes. “The
ixitqusiqjuk
kept us alive, waiting for today.”

She vomited a fountain of blood, shuddered once and died in John’s arms. 

Chapter Forty-Six

“Quick, get upstairs, now!” John shouted to Eve and Judas and they sprinted to the second floor. 

He slipped Muriel from his lap and laid her lifeless body on the floor. Muraco, Wadi and Erica were doing their best to keep the door from crashing in, their eyes wild with fear. Ahanu held a sobbing Mai to his chest.

“Come over here and help me,” Muraco pleaded with Ahanu, but he was glued to the spot. 

John teetered on his feet. His head felt like it was filled with helium, the screams and cries of everyone around him a distant warble. His breathing was ragged and he almost choked from the simple act of swallowing. 

It was all crashing down around them. So many people dead. His family was upstairs, their safety guaranteed for only the briefest of moments before whatever was about to invade their home made its way through the door. 

The smashing of phantom fists on wood grew so loud Ahanu clamped his hands over his ears. 

I’ve killed us all, John thought. This just doesn’t happen to people. Countless others had devoted their entire lives to the study of the paranormal without encountering anything like this. Priests performed exorcisms, mediums called upon spirits good and bad. Not one of them had ever brought such murderous wrath upon an entire town. Since Anne’s passing, death had loomed over him like a patient predator, fraying his fight or flight response until he could no longer function. His brief respite from fear was merely the calm before the storm. It was as if he had somehow escaped his fate, that he and Anne should have died together, and now fate was pounding at his door, falling into relentless rhythm with the pounding in his chest. 

Amidst the cacophony, there was a loud crack and Wadi screamed. 

He jerked his hand away from the door, shouting even louder when he noticed his three missing fingers. The flesh of his hand was torn into ragged strips and blood poured from the three stumps where his fingers had once been. 

The handle was on the floor, a smoldering hole bored through the door. Muraco and Mai saw Wadi, then the hole, and jumped away from the door. They rushed to where Ahanu, Mai and John stood staring at the open doorway to the snow-filled night and possibly their doom. 

Sheriff High Bear stepped out of the darkness and across the threshold, his hat and mustache caked with icicles, his eyes a vacant glaze. It looked like he had fallen in a lake of blood, which now covered him head to toe in one frozen blanket of gore. Black tentacles swirled around him along with the windswept snow, snaking into the house and surrounding them.

He spoke, and his voice was unearthly, a rumbling chorus of angry, discordant voices. “
We are retribution. We are death. Come die with us.”

The sheriff reached for his holstered gun and they could actually hear the crack of icy plasma as his hand flexed. 

Muraco shouted, “Nooooo!” and charged him, but it was too late. The gun went off and Muraco fell to the ground clutching his side. 

In the brief confusion, Ahanu and Mai tried to run past the sheriff through the open door. The shadowy tentacles whipped into action and enveloped them in an oily embrace. 

The sheriff turned his attention to Wadi, who was on the verge of tears. He pulled the trigger, the shot going wild. Wadi backed into the wall, his lower lip quivering. 

“You bastard,” Erica screamed, hurling a fireplace poker at the husk that once held the spirit of her lover. The poker hit him square in the chest and the gun dropped from his hand. 

Two more shadows zipped around John and trapped Erica and Wadi while another draped over Muraco on the floor. Everyone but John was entwined by the shadows, all screaming for their lives save Muraco, who lay bleeding and unconscious. 

Amidst the inexplicable chaos, John could only think of Jessica. 

He ran up the stairs on legs that felt as if they would give out with each passing step. 

“Where are you going?” Erica cried. 

He cast one last glance at them, locked in a death grip by malevolent phantasms. 

There’s nothing I can do. I have to get to Jessica, Eve and Liam. 

He bounded to the upstairs hallway, saw the door at very end was shut. As he ran down the hall, he was slammed by an unseen blast of heat that stole the breath from his lungs. His feet ceased moving, locked in a quagmire of thick, impenetrable heat. It was the same as that time when they’d first moved into the house, like being trapped in a bubble belched from a supernatural volcano. His heart went into arrhythmia and his breath came in short gasps. 

As he began to swoon, a man approached him. He was medium height with salt and pepper hair and tanned skin. He hovered more than walked, and a floating ball of light drifted close to his side. When he was within a few feet of him, the heat suddenly vanished and the extreme cold that had swept through the house washed over him. 

The man spoke in an urgent yet benign tone. “What are you afraid of?”

John was dumbfounded. All he wanted was to get behind that door to his family, to die with them. 

No matter how hard he tried, he could not move. The shouting continued downstairs and the sheriff’s gun crackled. The glowing orb sank into the floor and disappeared. 

“John, what do you fear?”

John knew at once he was talking to George Bolster, the man who had disappeared with his family in this house. Was this the horror that had taken their lives? How they must have suffered. 

Tears sprang unbidden to John’s eyes. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like Anne and leave Jessica alone.”

He sobbed uncontrollably, the truth, which should have been evident to him all these years, falling from his mouth with such ease. 

“If you go in that room, Jessica and Eve and Liam and even Judas will die. They won’t stop now. Once they have murdered Shida’s descendants, building strength and hate, they will turn on you.”

John fell to his knees, defeated. 

“I didn’t mean this to happen. I’d do anything to take it all back, to give everyone back their lives, but I can’t. Please, let me be with my family.”

“No!” the man shouted. 

The unbearable heat was back again and John sagged. 

“You can stop this, John. But you must destroy your fear. Can you do that?”

He thought of Jessica wrapping her skinny arms around his neck and the scent of her hair pressed against his face. Of the days and years that lay before her, the joy and occasional sorrows of growing up and growing old. 

He rolled his eyes upward into the face of the dead man and nodded. 

George’s spirit spoke. “Your spirit must always remain, a white light offered in love that will stand sentinel over this land. You must cut their power source, John Backman, and reverse the rot of
ixitqusiqjuk.
Only you can safeguard against the spirits from rising again.” He stepped forward and placed his hand on John’s heart. It disappeared beneath John’s shirt until his entire arm rested inside the man’s body. 

John felt a pulsating warmth grow in his chest, radiating throughout his body like the prickle of the summer sun on pale skin, until he was immersed in an aura of pure calm. 

The spirit whispered, “You can be the light. But first, you must enter the dark.” 

Chapter Forty-Seven

Eve stared in disbelief at the woman guarding the door. Middle aged with high, pronounced cheek bones and beautiful raven hair, a look of dire worry creased her otherwise beautiful face. Eve wasn’t so much concerned about who she was more than what she was. The woman hovered facing them, semi-transparent. There was a distinct charge in the room, the kind you feel when lightning has struck nearby. 

Eve clutched Liam to her chest. Judas paced around the room while Jessica sat in front of the apparition completely unafraid.

“My family will do what they can,” the woman who had been Sharon Bolster when she was alive said. “You must stay in here. You mustn’t go outside.”

“We won’t,” Jessica replied. Her little body shivered from the cold. 

Judas draped his denim shirt over her shoulders. Even though there was a spirit standing before him, he was not afraid. There was something about this ghost, call it her aura for lack of a better term, that kept them all at ease where normally they would have fought to flee the room. 

The melee downstairs continued and they all flinched when the gun went off again. 

It sounded like a slaughter taking place below them. 

“Will my daddy be okay?” Jessica asked the spirit. 

She closed her eyes and remained silent. 

Eve began to silently sob. She wanted so much to be with John, to once again be by his side, but Liam and Jessica were her responsibilities now. Her only hope was that John would find a way to save them.