Текст книги "Island of the Forbidden "

Автор книги: Hunter Shea

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Thirty-Six

Rusty lay on his back, shivering in the cold. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sit up. Frigid, invisible hands pressed against his shoulders, his legs, froze the liquid in his eyes, making it difficult to see the moon cresting above the tree line.

He wanted to get up and go, but where?

The island was alive with them.

Even though he couldn’t see the ones that held him in place, icing the marrow in his bones, there were others walking in the woods, feet crunching through the brambles, a seemingly aimless shamble to and from the crumbling Colonial mansion.

Eyes rolled up in his head, he was able to make out great parchments of faded paint and splinters of wood sloughing free from the house as if it were an enormous, prehistoric reptile shedding its skin. Only what lay below was not vital and fresh. Surface rot gave way to true death’s decay.

Ormsby House was dying.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When Jessica entered the hallway, her arms laden with the heavy journals, she was not alone. Daphne held Jason and Alice close to her waist, the children wiping sleep from their eyes.

How the hell did they sleep through all that noise?

Tobe, Nina and a shirtless Mitch stood outside the smashed master bedroom door. Whereas Mitch and Nina looked like a pair that had barely survived their first ride on a corkscrewing rollercoaster, Tobe wore a mask of barely contained fury that seemed completely out of place on the middle-aged aristocrat.

Eddie leaned against the wall, collecting himself.

“Jessica, what’s happening?” Daphne asked.

“We’re just finding out,” she said. “It’s not good. Terrible, terrible things happened here. I was able to free some of the children, but there are so many more.”

Daphne’s eyes grew wide, panicked. “Paul! He fell down the stairs. It…it looked like he was pushed, but I was there. He was alone. I…I…”

Eddie touched her shoulder. “I’ll go check on him. You need to stay up here with the kids and Jessica.” He turned to Jessica. “After that, I’m going outside, to the little cemetery between the trees. It’s time I spoke to the Ormsby men.”

“Don’t go alone. I’ll come with you.”

To her complete shock, he pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead. “I need you here. The children won’t hurt you. They need you.”

“Need me?”

His face turned grave.

“Oh,” she said.

They don’t need me to solve the mystery. They need me so they can grow stronger. They’re afraid of me sending them away. No matter how horrible their time here, this island is all they know. They’re terrified of what lies beyond, or maybe they’re not even aware there is more.

Eddie was running down the stairs before she could tell him to be safe. Nina followed after him, then Tobe.

Mitch lumbered down the hall, wincing with every step. When Jessica saw his flesh, she took an unconscious step back. A criss-cross of scarlet slashes covered his entire torso, neck and face. It looked as if he’d been given a hundred lashes with a bullwhip.

“It burns so much,” he said, his voice pleading.

There was no need to ask him what had happened. Whatever they had done while filming had stirred the EB children into a rage. Mitch, the cocksure man who wanted to press on no matter what, was the unlucky focus of their anger.

“The burning will stop soon,” Jessica said.

“How do you know?”

“You’re not the first person to get clawed up by an EB. I’ve gotten a few myself.”

She didn’t tell him that she’d never seen it done to this extent before. Some of the welts were deep and beaded with blood. Plenty would heal into scars that would never, ever go away.

Kneeling down to the children, she was taken aback by the blank expressions on their faces. They looked like a pair of sleepwalkers, both deep in a dreamlike trance. They hadn’t been right at all since they’d found them in the special place where the Last Kids had died. What hold did the Last Kids have on them? She wished Eddie were here to find out.

She said to Daphne, “You should check them for scratches, too, just to be safe.”

Their mother looked on the verge of tears. She nodded. “I just want to get them away from here.”

“I know, I know,” Jessica said, stroking Jason and Alice’s cheeks. “We’ll wait out here while you check.”

Daphne ushered them back into the room where they had just been locked away.

Looking at Mitch’s savaged body, Jessica found it hard to find sympathy for the man.

“You should probably put your shirt and jacket back on, unless you want to freeze to death.”

“Yeah.”

He turned to go back to the master bedroom where he’d left his clothes and gasped.

The end of the hallway was choked with children, eyes like silver dollars, mouths “catching flies” as Jessica’s Aunt Eve used to say when she spotted her staring off into space.

They were a dozen or more, silent, motionless, a wall of un-death.

In all her years investigating the paranormal, Jessica had never seen anything like it.

“Perfect, not perfect,” they said, though their mouths never moved. Their collected voices sounded as if their throats were clotted with dirt, the words pushing through the gaps in the worm-filled earth.

Mitch skittered behind her, his hands on her shoulders. She tried to shrug him off but he held firm.

Perfect, not perfect.

Eddie had said that when they were in the attic.

What did it mean?

Perfect.

Perfect people.

Perfect race.

It all came back to eugenics.

An island of perfect but not perfect children. Generations of what the Ormsby patriarchs deemed experiments gone wrong.

Jessica buckled over. Her stomach felt as if it was teeming with burning snakes. Her pulse pounded at the back of her skull. The journals slipped from her hands, thudding on the hardwood floor.

No!

The children phased in and out as she struggled to remain on her feet. It was so hard to breathe. Impossible to stay upright.

Sleep. God, she was tired. Beyond bone tired. An exhaustion that depleted her energy right down to a cellular level.

As consciousness faded, so came an influx of empathic emotions, a tidal wave of sadness and horror, sweeping down the hall, tumbling her end-over-end, sluicing down her throat until she couldn’t scream, couldn’t draw a lifesaving breath.

Paul was unconscious but breathing at the foot of the stairs. Each breath sounded wet, like blood was filling his lungs. Eddie knew that was a very bad sign. His left leg was twisted at an impossible angle, a compound fracture for sure. He was going to need some serious medical attention.

Eddie felt for them man’s pulse beneath the wiry beard on his neck. Still strong.

While Nina dropped to the floor to hold the big man’s hand in her own, Tobe stepped over his brother-in-law’s body, heading for the kitchen.

“He’s alive,” Eddie said to the retreating man. “Just in case you give a shit.”

Tobe whirled at him. “Of course he’s alive. I can see that.”

Eddie wondered just how he could in the dark.

Before he could ask, Tobe stalked into the kitchen, banging cabinet doors.

“Should we move him to the couch?” Nina asked.

“No, with that leg the way it is, we just have to make him comfortable where he is. Grab a pillow from the couch and a blanket. Then see if there are any painkillers in the house, or Ibuprofen at the very least. When he regains consciousness, he’s going to be in a hell of a lot of pain, and probably shock.”

He didn’t express his concerns about the sound of the man’s breathing. Should he be rolled onto his side, to drain any fluids that made come up? Or was it better to keep him on his back? Eddie couldn’t think straight.

She nodded quickly, running to the great room to get the pillow and blanket.

“What did you do up there?” Eddie asked her when she came back.

“I…we…”

“I need to know what you said or did to get them so angry. I’d find out for myself, but it’s hard to make out anything through their static. It’s like listening in to a kennel of pissed off pit bulls.”

He lifted Paul’s head so she could slip the pillow underneath.

Nina wiped her hand across her face. She looked ten years older than she had before the night started. Yes, she had a touch of psychic abilities, just enough to get her and everyone else in a world of trouble. That was a problem that wasn’t unique to her. Too many others thought they had all the answers, could control every outcome when dabbling with the unknown. They could take the cork out of the bottle, but they had no concept of what to do with the genie when it emerged, or how to put it back in the bottle. Genies were not to be trifled with.

“I was telling the children here I could reunite them with their father. Children need their parents, more so in death than life.”

“You what?” He desperately wanted to shake her for displaying such profound stupidity.

Tears snaked down the crow’s feet around her eyes.

“I just…just thought.”

Eddie bolted erect. “You didn’t think. You didn’t think at all. You play acted like a goddamn fool. Those children don’t need to be with their fathers for a very simple reason. Their fathers were the ones who murdered them. They watched them grow, grand little experiments that were tossed aside the moment they didn’t live up to theory.”

Nina’s mouth worked, open and closed, but no words filtered out.

He left here there, pondering the consequences of her actions, turning on the assistive light on his cell phone to search for the Ormsby graves.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Mitch grabbed under Jessica’s armpits to keep her from face-planting on the floor. “Daphne, I need a little help!”

The door to the children’s room flew open. A hand flitted to Daphne’s mouth.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Those damn ghost kids appeared and she passed out from fright, I guess.” He gestured with his head down the hall. Daphne barely contained her shriek when she spied the gathering of dead Ormsby children.

“Help me get her inside,” he said.

Unable to tear her eyes from the silent children, she grabbed Jessica’s ankles and helped Mitch get her on one of the children’s beds. Jason and Alice sat on the other, staring at Jessica.

“Don’t forget the books, Mommy,” Alice said.

“Books? What books?”

“The ones Ms. Backman found upstairs in the bad place,” Jason said.

The flood of questions threatened to overwhelm her. Alice pointed outside the door. Daphne tilted her head in that direction and saw the three large books spilled on the floor.

“She thinks she needs them,” Alice said.

“I’ll get ’em,” Mitch gruffed, clomping into the hallway. He paused as he bent to pick them up, his gaze locked down the hall. Daphne was too afraid to poke her head out and see for herself. She’d never imagined something so terrifying.

“Are they still there?” she asked meekly.

He nodded, licking his lips.

“Please, just come back in.”

Gripping the books, he slowly stepped sideways into the room, as if breaking his gaze would cause the children to swarm the hall. He shut the door, dragging a chair and jamming it under the knob.

Looking down at the feeble barrier, he rubbed the back of his neck, muttering, “That won’t keep them out. They’re not even real.”

Alice and Jason stood over Jessica, pushing stray locks of hair from her face with tender strokes from their fine-boned fingers.

“She’s just tired,” Jason said.

“Like us,” Alice added.

Daphne ran her fingers through their downy hair. “Yes, she’s just very tired right now. Why don’t we let her sleep?”

What she wanted to do was throw cold water on Jessica’s face, anything to bring her back. She found it difficult to believe that Jessica had fainted at the sight of ghosts. If it had been Nina, she would have understood. But Jessica was different. She and Eddie were all they had now. It was hours until daylight and with no working boat, there was nowhere to go. Not that she thought she had the courage to walk past the eerie children at the end of the hall and face God knows what that was waiting for them in the rest of the house or the cold, darkened woods. They would have to wait it out, and hope that Eddie could figure a way to stop the madness that had taken hold of the island.

She jumped at the sound of a revving motor. A metallic sputtering echoed throughout the house, the sound of steel breaking down, becoming undone.

The lights flickered, then died.

“The generator,” she whispered in the darkness.

Reaching out for Jason and Alice, her hands swooped through cold, empty air.

“Jason? Alice?”

The hinge to the door gave a light squeak. The children had gone.

Paul groaned, turning his head slightly. His breathing had been so shallow and thready.

Nina heard the generator’s last gasp and felt the first trickle of true fear pour down her back when the lights went out. She’d never been afraid of the dark, not even as a little kid.

But she’d never been in a place like Ormsby House before, where the dark held its secrets and a multitude of angry wraiths, eager to lash out at the living.

“Tobe!”

His voice, heavy with irritation, came from far off. “I know. I’m checking it now.” A door opened and slammed shut.

Her hand brushed Paul’s beard. The flesh of his face was cold and clammy. It reminded her of her grandmother’s wake, when she’d taken her gram’s hand in her own, feeling the certain chill of death.

Something creaked on the stairs. Her shoulder rose up, as well as every hair on her body. Her hands and feet became numb. Staring into the darkness, she held her breath.

Jason and Alice slipped through the lone shaft of moonlight that penetrated a crack in the great room blinds. Nina exhaled, an uncontrollable rush of shivers galloping through her body.

“You shouldn’t be down here,” she said to them, teeth chattering.

They didn’t answer. She listened to their bare feet as they padded away from her with a slow, benumbed gate. “Where are you going? It’s not safe in the dark.”

Where was their mother?

She rose to go after them.

The wood stairs groaned. She said, “Daphne, I just saw Jason and Alice go by.”

Nina looked to the stairs, jumping back with terror, tripping over Paul’s prone body and slamming her head onto the floor.

Dozens and dozens of children appeared from thin air. They gathered round her, dead, vacant eyes with black holes for mouths.

“You won’t take us to Father,” they hissed, a barrage of tiny voices dipped in decades of cooling revenge.

“No! No!”

She tried scooting away on her back, legs pushing as hard as they could, the pain in her head threatening to bring down the curtains. Her shoulders bumped into something solid.

Looking up, she saw two teenage boys glowering down at her.

It can’t be! They’re not alive! I shouldn’t be able to feel them!

Several pairs of hands grabbed her legs, pulling her closer to the horde of angry spirit children.

“Get off me! Stop touching me! Leave me alone!”

“You won’t take us to father.”

They clawed at her clothes, her hair, her neck, her limbs. No matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t escape their icy grip. She screamed, the howl dying in her throat as a small fist that tasted of sweet, pungent gangrene, forcefully worked its way into her mouth.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Eddie found the three graves not by the meager light of his cell phone but the unearthly pull of the demented souls interred within. He stood over the hidden graves, nauseated by what he had to do next.

Kneeling into the soft earth, his head snapped toward the house when he thought he heard a scream. All of the lights were out.

“Gotta make this fast.”

When he’d first psychically gone to visit the graves, he’d detected no hint of the spirits of the Ormsby men. But that was before he’d started to regain control of his abilities. He wondered if he was siphoning off of Jessica as much as the poor Ormsby children, over a hundred lost souls born without a name. Or maybe the dead bastards simply wanted to be here to watch the show.

This time would be different. He knew now exactly who had been buried behind the old mansion: George, Nathaniel and Alexander. Three men who had insulated themselves from the world, so convinced that they were onto creating a new dawn for their family and, ultimately, mankind, that they couldn’t bear to rest eternally far from their life’s work. The patriarch, Maxwell, a man who was the first to be intrigued but not driven by the new eugenics philosophy, was buried elsewhere, perhaps the town of his birth. Eddie could feel his son, grandson and great-grandson lurking about, keeping to the shadows, lest their strengthening children should find them. Old Maxwell’s spirit was nowhere near this place, perhaps disgusted by what had become of what was once a cherished family name.

Eddie lay on his back and closed his eyes, feeling the fingers of death brush against his spine. “Nathaniel Ormsby! Alexander Ormsby! Come!”

He felt their curious presence, stepping closer, furtive yet fearless of the strange man who had disrupted their island.

“Come!”

He couldn’t let them retreat.

They whispered through the trees surrounding the graves, keeping low to the ground, out of sight.

Closer.

Come on, come on.

When they were close enough, Eddie unleashed a mental net, snaring them within.

“Got you!”

He threw his mind wide open, plunging into a deep, dark well, clutching at the writhing souls of monsters. Stomach lurching into his throat, he fell, flipping and twisting until coming to rest within Nathaniel Ormsby’s coffin.

Despite the total absence of light, Eddie could see the ages-eaten corpse’s smile, black worm lips pulled over browned teeth. Decades of decay had run riot since his first visit in the Ormsby graves. The madness that had gripped these men and fueled their sick desires, even into death, was coming undone.

“Where were you ninety years ago? Things could have been much different,” Nathaniel Ormsby said with a voice that sounded as if he were gargling rocks.

Eddie wasn’t going to be pulled into any discussion with the Ormsby monsters. He’d come for one thing only. If he let them play with his emotions, he could be lost. How many children had Nathaniel and Alexander bred for their experiments? How much blood was on their hands?

“Where are the women who bore your children?” he demanded.

“I had no children,” Nathaniel gurgled. “Only failure. No matter how hard I tried, only failure.”

Another voice, a memory, whispered, “Perfect, not perfect.”

“How many women did you bring here? Who were they? What did you do to them?”

Nathaniel Ormsby laughed, a horrid cackle that chilled Eddie’s psychic essence.

“Why would you care so much about cattle? I looked for the finest stock, and they gave me runts. Every last one. I hope those cunts are burning in hell.”

Eddie never wanted to strangle someone before, alive or dead. If he could, he would tear Nathaniel’s corpse to pieces while doing his damnedest to shatter what was left of the madman’s life energy. If it meant destroying himself in the process, so be it.

Stop it, Eddie. That’s what he wants.

He slipped into Alexander Ormsby’s coffin. The old corpse regarded him with dripping, milky eyes.

“You won’t get what you want from me,” Alexander said. “Buried and burned, buried and burned. Buried and burned.”

He’d gone completely mad before he’d taken his life, before he’d burned his children to death. It would be impossible to glean a coherent thought. It was painfully clear to see that there was nothing he could say to make the dead man expose his secrets. If only he’d been stronger.

“Buried and burned. Never find them. Never. Buried and burned.”

The Last Kids. How they must have suffered in those final agonizing moments. And here was this fucking creature who called himself a man, singing about their demise as if it were a nursery rhyme. Alexander and Nathaniel, and even George, they were the bad man. Their power coursed through the island like a blood-borne disease. But it wasn’t incurable! Eddie and Jessica had been lured here to put an end to this.

Perfect not perfect.

Their mothers. Where were their mothers?

A soothing warmth came over Eddie as he realized the only way to shock both dead men to telling him what he needed to know. He tunneled through the earth, slipping through his own body and into the night.

It was time to be a shepherd.

Jessica awoke in darkness. She startled when a man’s voice said, “Thank God you’re awake.”

She looked across to where the voice had come from.

“Are you all right?”

A bright flash of pain went off in her head like a bottle rocket. It was Mitch. Why was she in a room with Mitch?

“Yeah, I think so. Where is everyone?”

“I don’t know. When the lights cut out, the kids walked out of the room. Daphne went after them. You were out cold.”

She swung her legs off the bed. Her legs gave out when she tried to stand up. It was an effort to even breathe. What the hell happened to her?

“Where’s Eddie?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t seen Rusty in a while, either. All I do know is that I’m not leaving this room. No fucking way.” Something hard and heavy smacked into his hand. “If anyone tries to screw with me, they’re getting the leg of this bed over their head.”

Struggling to talk, she said, “Mitch, what’s on this island can’t be hurt by you. They’re already dead. You can’t kill them twice.”

Snorting, he said, “I can make them think twice before touching me again.”

“You have to put that down. You’ll hurt someone, if not yourself.”

“No fucking way.”

Summoning up the few stores of energy she had left, Jessica managed to get to her feet, holding onto the bedpost for support. She had to get out of this room. For all she knew, Mitch would bash her head in if he heard the mattress settle. The man was wound tighter than a banjo string.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Eddie and the kids. Promise me you’ll stay here. I don’t want to think about you running around the house with your little bat.”

The bed creaked under his shifting weight. “I told you, I’m not leaving here, at least until the sun comes up. Then I’m getting the hell out of here, and I don’t care how.”

She took a shuffling step, leaning forward into the wall to keep erect. Bearing her shoulder against the wall, she slowly made her way out the door, sitting on the top step and taking them one at a time. Daphne cried out for the kids on the first floor, her voice faltering, desperate.

Come on, Jess. Slide down another step. That’s it. Now the next.

She wished she could say she was getting stronger, but in fact it was becoming more and more clear that her body was shutting down.

Perhaps for good.