Forest of Shadows (5 page)

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. 

“I’ll be honest with you,” she said during one of their early sessions. “Somniphobia is a very difficult phobia to tackle. For some people, it can even take years. You and I both know that the root cause of your problem lies with your wife’s untimely death. Your mind has created this fear as a protective mechanism to keep you from suffering a similar fate. The key is resolving the issues with your subconscious. It won’t be easy, but I need you to stick with it.”

Over the years, he had taken a multitude of medications to help him sleep, as well as to quell the panic attacks that plagued him during the day and night. For sleep, he took Ativan, Halcyon, Valium, Dalmane and lately, Ambien. His anti-anxiety pills ran the gamut from Xanax, to Zoloft, to Klonopin and Wellbutrin. 

There was one other issue, well beyond the borders of phobia. 

Guilt. 

He suffered from a relentless case of remorse that he was sure could never be erased. That he and Anne’s last night together was marred by their fight. Did she know that he still loved her? Or did she die filled with anger, not realizing how empty his words had been? They were questions he would never be able to answer, so he would have to forever live with that guilt. As long as he could keep it from ruining Jessica’s life, he was happy to carry that cross. 

Time had passed, measured by the pencil marks on Jessica’s door frame as he charted her growth, and though he was taking less medication than in the past, it was still a necessary evil in his life. 

The bottle of Ambien stared at him from its perch on the high bookshelf. He considered taking one and just going to bed. Then he checked his email and saw that ten more messages had rolled in since the last time he’d logged on at midnight. 

“Sleep be damned.”

Chapter Six

It took an entire joint and a couple of beers, but Judas Graves was finally calm. He crushed the can of beer, cocked his arm back, aimed and let it fly in the direction of the garbage can at the far end of his kitchen. It clanked off the wall, landing wide and to the left of its intended target. Basketball was never his strong suit. 

Things had been rough lately. The shit that went down today took the cake. 

Work was hard to find, harder than hooking up with a girl in this town. The few chicks he’d bagged had only come to his place with the promise of good weed. Sure, he had plenty of dry spells, just like any other red-blooded Alaskan male. You learned to deal with them or you went crazy. 

A job was a different story. There was no way he’d charm his way into a potential employer’s heart by waving a nickel bag in his direction. Judas had barely made it out of high school, spending most of his time easing the pain of life with whatever he could get his hands on. Since turning twenty-one, he’d settled on pot and alcohol, in moderation, most times. The damage to his reputation was already done and most places wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. The fact that he was a white transplant in a predominantly Native American town didn’t help matters much. 

So it was no wonder that he’d chomped at the bit when the real estate agency hired him to do some cleaning prep for some of their more weather-beaten homes. Most of the places were little more than dilapidated log houses, built in the late sixties, battered by the elements on the outside and kept in a perpetual state of slovenliness on the inside by their aging owners. Mary Longfeather at the White Eagle Real Estate Agency, the town’s newest and possibly least necessary business, warned him it would be hard work. Her agency had recently purchased the houses, if you could call them that, by another real estate office from two towns away that had closed its doors due to the retirement of its owner and sole agent. 

“Almost all of the previous owners were single men,” Mary had said. “I think it’s also safe to say that they were heavy on hunting and light on housework. You’ll see what I mean when you go in the houses.”

“No sweat. They’re probably no worse than my place,” he joked. “What happened to the owners?”

“They all passed away.” She paused and picked up a file from her desk. “Except this one.” She pointed to the address and a picture of a veritable mansion of a modern log home. “This one was abandoned by the occupants some time ago. Looks like they just up and left without so much as a forwarding address. That’s one way to beat paying a mortgage,” she said with a hint of nervousness. 

Something about the address and the story of a family hitting the road and never coming back tickled Judas’s memory, but he didn’t care enough to give it a second thought.

Mary gave him a cash allotment to pick up cleaning supplies. He had to give her a receipt for all of his purchases, so there was no way for him to skim a twenty off the top for himself, but that was cool. At least he’d be making some dough.

All of the houses were on the outskirts of the town, seemingly dropped at random by some great log cabin maker in the sky decades ago. The roads leading to each house were barely penetrable, especially for his fifteen-year-old Ford pickup that was in desperate need of everything. Whoever bought these dumps was going to have to invest some real capital in clearing and smoothing a path from the main road. Rocks, pits and large fallen tree branches provided a worthy endurance test for the Ford. The clearing to the first house was studded with so many foot-deep sinkholes that he actually bit his tongue twice as the car dipped to the left and right. 

Mary Longfeather was right. The first two places were dumps. She was also right about the previous inhabitants being hunters. The old, warped wood of the porches and kitchens were stained brownish red from the blood of decades of kills. The walls were lined with the heads of prize game. He guessed the families didn’t want anything to do with them, opting to leave them for the next lucky family or in this case, Judas. 

It took him three days to make those two houses presentable. He decided to reward his hard work by taking on the modern cabin out on Fir Way. It may have been the road farthest from town, any farther and it would have been swallowed up by the vast, endless bush, but least there the access road and driveway were relatively paved. The place was huge but new. Best guess would put it at fifteen years old, give or take a few years. He vaguely remembered talk about the house when it was built, but he’d been too young to care at the time. 

He stepped up onto the porch that wrapped around the entire house and was drawn to the square keypad to the right of the front door. No one had alarms in Shida, not even the businesses. The town’s version of high crime was the occasional drunk and disorderly on a Saturday night or an even rarer domestic disturbance that usually ended with a husband getting his ass thrown out of the house for a couple of days. 

“Groovy,” he said and began punching buttons at random. The electricity had been cut off long ago but it made him feel like a rich dude entering a secret mansion. 

The inside looked like something out of a magazine. A spiral staircase was to his right while the living room to his left was twice the size of his entire apartment. It was connected to what he supposed was a dining room with two bay windows overlooking the forest that lined the back yard. 

Better yet, the place was almost spotless. It just needed a little mopping, some light dusting and a spritz of Windex on the windows. The furniture had long been removed so every move he made echoed throughout the vast, empty house. He went back to the car and lugged his cleaning supplies inside, snapped his headphones on and started dusting around the windows, countertops and anything that had an edge that could collect dust. Next, he filled the mop bucket and got to work on some light mopping. It took about a half hour to do the entire bottom floor, after which he went outside to fire up a joint and let the floors dry. The sun felt good as he lay in the grass and closed his eyes, drinking in the pleasant summer air. 

He awoke two hours later. The sun was still out but losing its mid-afternoon strength. 

“Great. Just great,” he muttered. He was going to have to haul ass if he wanted to get the house done on time. This was supposed to be his easy job. If it took more than a day he was up shit’s creek. 

He dashed into the house, grabbed some window cleaner and paper towels and made quick work of the downstairs windows
. One floor down, one to go
. He dropped another CD into his walkman and carted his duster, mop and bucket up the spiral stairs, cursing as some of the dirty water sloshed over the side onto the clean floor below. 

There was a long hallway with four doors on either side and another large door at the very end. He decided to tackle one room at a time instead of dusting the entire floor, then mopping, then windows. The first two were sizeable bedrooms, the third a bathroom with two sinks. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. 

The next room must have been the master bedroom. Larger than the others, it also had a bathroom with a toilet and sink set off to the left. It had a skylight and large crossbeams nestled into the ceiling. The sun was starting to set by the time he finished cleaning it, spurring him on even faster. 

He prayed aloud that the last room at the end of the hall was nowhere near as big. As he shuffled down the hallway and came to the final door, he noticed deep scratch marks etched into the shiny wood. Judas traced his fingers along the jagged criss-cross of unsightly lines. 

“Damn waste of a door. I’da killed my dog if he did this.”

When he opened the door he was relieved to find that it was the smallest bedroom on the floor. His job was made even easier when he saw that the sole window had been boarded up. That just left dusting and mopping. He gave the bucket a shove with his foot to move it to the center of the room and started wiping down the molding around the inner door. After clearing the molding of all accumulated dust, he turned to grab his mop and sucked his breath in hard. 

The mop and bucket were gone. 

Judas pulled the headphones from his ears and scanned the empty room. 

Where the hell did the mop and bucket go? 

His heart kicked up the tempo. He stayed perfectly still, listening for the sounds of a possible intruder. Maybe someone saw his truck outside and decided to play a stupid game of “drive the house cleaner nuts”. That was a short enough drive. He didn’t need any help there. 

“Hello,” he called out. “Anyone else in here?” 

The house was silent, save for the sound of the wind blowing outside. 

Maybe he was more burnt than he thought. Could be he left the mop bucket in one of the other rooms and only thought he brought it in here. He sighed, disgusted with himself and started to walk out of the room. 

He fell through the floor, landing in a puddle of mop water on the living room floor. The mop and bucket lay scattered to his left. 

“What the hell?”

His head throbbed where it had collided with the floor. In fact, every bone in his body ached as he’d landed flat on his back. He looked up, fearful to see the damage done to the floor and ceiling. Damage he was sure to be blamed for and in turn taken out of his pay, which would most likely leave him with nothing. 

But when he looked up, there was no hole in the ceiling. Just sturdy slats of unbroken, grooved spruce.