Forest of Shadows by Hunter Shea Page B

that had him spellbound. Judas’s heart sank as a vision of the sheriff’s car parked next to his flashed across his brain. 
    All of the saliva in his mouth dried up as he reluctantly edged around Teddy to face his fate. He could almost feel the harsh pinch of the handcuffs, hear the monotone of his rights being read to him. 
    Except there was no sheriff’s car. 
    Judas’s old Ford was right where they had left it, alone in the night. 
    “What’s the deal?” he asked. 
    “Look at the truck.”
    “I did. Was there a bear near it or something?”
    “Look again.”
    Teddy was breathing in quick, syrupy gulps. Judas moved his gaze back to the truck and squinted hard. 
    And then he saw them.
    Moving shadows, some flitting across the hood, others oozing up from the ground and undulating around it. They swirled, formed a single mass, then broke apart into dozens of pulsating black globs, a sentient dance of darkness. 
    Judas gasped and the shadows froze. 

Chapter Nine
    Ed Smythe had a nervous habit of rubbing his hands together like a raccoon washing itself. His bug eyes, made larger than life under a pair of coke bottle glasses, darted between John and Eve as they stood before him in his ordered living room. 
    John made one last pass around the room with his electromagnetic field detector while Eve took notes. The needle on the hand-held black box jumped slightly when it faced the fireplace. John motioned his arm away, and swung it back again. The needle remained calm and steady.
    “Is that telling you anything?” Ed Smythe asked them, his voice high and bordering on whiny. 
    “As of this moment, no,” John said. “The EMF readings have been pretty normal throughout the entire house.”
    “EMF?”
    “Electromagnetic fields. There are those that say ghosts cause a disturbance, a kind of ripple, in ambient electromagnetic fields.” He tilted the box so Ed could see the small meter. “The needle will jump when it comes across high EMF frequencies. Of course, many things in a common household can give a false-positive reading, such as major appliances, outlets, computers, even digital alarm clocks. Just about everything has its own electromagnetic frequency. What I look for is something out of the norm, that is, after eliminating possible sources for the anomaly. And from what I can see here, everything looks normal.”
    Eve looked over John’s shoulder to see the meter and made a note of its position on her pad. She had accompanied John on a handful of these initial investigations over the years, mostly as a note taker and in one case, as a buffer between John and a hysterical woman who swore her bedroom blinds were possessed. Eve was the only other person that had been allowed to accompany John on his few field investigations. Even Jessica wanted to come along on her father’s trips, moaning and groaning every time when she was told she was too young. Eve wondered if there was anything that scared the little girl. Not that there was anything actually scary about this, in Eve’s experience. 
    “I hope that’s not all, because let me tell you, something is definitely happening here. Just yesterday my TV turned itself on and off and I heard banging in the rooms upstairs.”
    “Do you have any pets, like a cat or dog?”
    Ed Smythe looked puzzled. “No.”
    “Sometimes what people mistake for spirits walking around their houses turns out to be the family dog. I have to check everything,” John explained. This seemed to relieve Ed’s puzzlement. “And you live alone?”
    “Yes.”
    “How many years have you lived in this house?”
    “Five. I moved here from Ardsley so I could be closer to my mother. She’s getting older and she hasn’t been well.”
    Eve looked up from her notepad and said, “That was very nice of you to do that for your mother.” 
    “I’m her only child and my father passed away a long time ago. She has no one else. What else could I do?” He gave her a small