Текст книги "Island of the Forbidden "

Автор книги: Hunter Shea

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Eleven

Jessica stepped inside and paused, taking a moment to study the craftsmanship that had gone into the interior. “Wow, it’s beautiful.”

Paul’s eyebrows danced up and down. “I know, right? When I first came here, I thought there’d be holes in the roof and rats running everywhere. Looks like the exterior did a damn good job of protecting the interior.”

Eddie walked past her, running his hand along the polished banister of the spiral stairway that split the house into two even halves. “They must have some quality people as caretakers.”

“Until we viewed the house, no one had even been on the island for two decades,” a baritone voice called out. A tall, gaunt man emerged from the room to their left. He wore a light sports jacket and slacks with a crease so sharp, Jessica was sure it could dice an onion. “Hello Ms. Backman, Mr. Home. Thank you so much for coming. I’m Tobe Harper.”

He offered his hand. The flesh was cold, as if he’d been rooting around a freezer.

“You mean this place was abandoned for twenty years?” Jessica asked, flexing her fingers to shake off the chill from his handshake. “You must have done a lot of work to get it looking like this.”

Tobe Harper regarded her with a sly smile. That, along with his deep-set eyes, made him look like a leering skeleton. “On the contrary. All we’ve done is apply a little elbow grease to clean the place, clear out the dust, shake the cobwebs free. You’ll find this is just one of many peculiarities of not only Ormsby House, but the island as well. Come, I’ll introduce you to my wife.” He looked at Paul. “Would you mind keeping the children occupied while we discuss matters? I believe they’re both in their room.”

Paul nodded. “Sure thing, Tobe. Hey, it was nice meeting you both.” And with that, he bounded up the stairs. Jessica listened to his heavy footfalls overhead, followed by a knock and the sound of a door opening and closing.

“I hope my brother-in-law didn’t make you sea sick. He has a penchant for speed in that thing,” Tobe Harper said. Jessica was having a hard time not only placing his age—he could be anywhere from forty to sixty, the creeping gray in his hair clouding her judgment—but his accent as well. It was a mix of Louisiana Creole, the South Side of Boston and a touch of British aristocracy. Words flowed from his lips with a melody and cadence like Chopin filtered through a hard rock garage band. Strange.

“It actually felt good catching a nice breeze off the water,” Eddie said. For some reason, his eyes kept flicking to the rooms on their right. They were dark and presumably empty, but Jessica knew he saw other things that were not necessarily attracted to light and crowds.

“Good,” Tobe Harper said. “Daphne is in the library.”

He turned and they followed. Jessica felt like she had been thrust into some old time movie, the genteel butler leading the way to the parlor. Their footsteps sounded like small-arms gunshots, the aged hardwood floors a symphony of pops and sighs. She looked over at Eddie who had fixed his eyes on Harper’s back as if he could X-ray the man’s soul. For all she knew, he could.

There wasn’t much in the way of furniture, but what was there looked antique and expensive. There were no framed pictures on the walls or mantle. Gliding past the great room’s fireplace, she could smell the sweet char of last night’s fire.

Tobe Harper pulled a set of double doors open, sliding them into recesses in the walls. The library had four south-facing windows that went from the floor to the ceiling, filling the room with light. A large, round table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by four leather chairs on casters. The shelves that had been installed in all four walls were empty, save for some surface dust.

A very pretty redheaded woman stood beside a small wet bar, pouring drinks. She wore a high-necked dress and if Jessica’s eyes were accurate, she also had a tight corset on underneath. She wore no makeup on her cream colored skin, not that she needed it. She looked as if she had dressed for one of those gag period photos, the kind people took at county fairs.

“Our very special guests are here,” Tobe said.

“I was just getting drinks ready. I’m Daphne Harper. We spoke on the phone,” she said to Jessica.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she said.

A warm smile lit Daphne’s face. “Do you like Tom Collins?” She tilted a crystal decanter over a glass filled with ice.

“I never had one before. I’m happy to try.”

She looked at Eddie and he said, “Same here.”

Tobe gently ushered them into chairs while Daphne delivered their drinks.

The vacant shelves diverted Jessica’s attention. It just felt odd, being in a library without a single book. It made the room seem barren and unfulfilled, like a dying wish arriving seconds after a final breath.

Daphne noted her interest. “It seems some historical society had all of the books removed when the last of the Ormsby family passed on. For all the trepidation the locals on the mainland had about the island, they found a way to look past it when it came time to pillage the place of its valuables. I guess it’s knowledge of that darkness of man’s soul that made a man like Maxwell Ormsby retreat to an island in the first place.”

“And of that, we have a very like mind,” Tobe added.

Despite the abundance of sunlight and the fact that it was an unbearably hot day, Jessica felt goose bumps break out along her arms and the back of her neck. A tiny, rippling chill made her shiver.

Daphne placed a motherly hand over Jessica’s. “The cold never leaves this house. Tobe, can you please start a fire?”

He took a restrained sip from his glass, placed it on the table and went over to the fireplace.

“I take it you don’t have a need for central air,” Eddie said. He swiveled the ice in his glass.

“Not in Ormsby House, no. We don’t have any official instruments, but you’ll find that the temperature on the island is slightly less than it is just off the island. And the house, that’s an entirely different animal. There are many times we can see our breath, even though it’s well over ninety outside. I’m just grateful the house has so many fireplaces.”

Jessica heard the crackle of kindling accepting the flame behind her. “Do you know if the house is directly over any kind of underground waterway?”

“If it was, the place would collapse into it like a great sinkhole, I suppose,” Tobe said. He threw a snuffed match into the miniscule flames. The fire was just begging to grow, gyrating orange triangles replicating along the logs. “Though it is an island.”

“I saw the heavy tree cover outside. I’m sure that keeps the sun and heat at bay,” Jessica said. “Open windows will circulate a nice cool breeze.”

Daphne tilted her glass back. “You can explore the house at your leisure in a bit. You’ll see that all of the windows and doors are closed tight.”

“EBs draining the ambient temperature, converting it to fuel?” Eddie suggested to Jessica.

“Uh, EBs?” Daphne said.

Jessica nodded. “I’m not a big fan of the word ghost. I believe that what people call ghosts or spirits or shadows are made up of pure energy. So, I call them Energy Beings, EB for short.”

“Interesting,” Tobe said, crossing his left leg over his right, adjusting his trousers to avoid wrinkling.

What the hell year did we fall into? Jessica thought. The whole scene was straight from a bad Victorian horror story. She wondered when Tobe Harper would break out a pipe and ask Eddie if he’d like to go fox hunting. For once, she wished Eddie would read her mind, and if possible, be able to respond to her. A running, private conversation was what she needed more than anything to lessen the strange vibe she was getting from the Harpers.

“In fact,” Daphne said, “we both believe that the temperature in the house is getting colder each day.”

“And this is all the time?” Jessica asked.

Tobe gave a heavy, slow nod. “All the time. You won’t find global warming in here.”

There was something about his smile and that awfully bizarre accent that made Jessica cringe internally, deep where no one but Eddie could see.

She sipped on the Tom Collins, forcing a mouthful down. “Before we go any further, there is a question I’d like to ask.”

Leather creaked as Eddie sat back in his chair, a subtle gesture of moving away from the line of fire.

Daphne Harper did the opposite, leaning close enough to Jessica to rub her forearm. “You’d like to know how we found you. More so, how we even knew about you. Am I right, dear?”

Jessica resisted the impulse to pull her arm away. Being touched by strangers wasn’t high on her list of “likes”.

She took a slow, even breath and said, “Yes. Your call concerned me in more ways than one.”

“Of course it did, and I don’t blame you. My husband and I are armchair enthusiasts when it comes to the world of the paranormal. My mother claimed to have psychic abilities, holding séances for her bridge group, members of the PTA and even a Catholic nun one time. My husband’s father grew up in a house of ill repute in Cotswold. The stories handed down in his family of apparitions, objects moving about and screeches in the night are a bit of a family legend. We first learned of you, or at least your pseudonym, on your website.”

“I thought you did a fabulous job cataloging the paranormal, just stating facts and keeping opinions to the minds of the reader,” Tobe Harper added.

Eddie’s head jerked to an area beside the sweeping windows. It appeared that neither Daphne nor Tobe noticed.

“I took the website down almost three years ago,” Jessica said. She put the glass to her lips, remembered the sour taste and placed it back down.

“We were devotees of your website long before then. It was a disappointment to say the least when it disappeared. Then we heard about an incident with a doppelganger you experienced personally in New England. That was the first bread crumb left for us to follow.”

Jessica’s heart thumped in her chest. Her blood pressure rose like boiling water in a tea kettle. The incident with the doppelganger, and the sinister EB it was trying to warn them about—almost at the cost of her life—had, to her knowledge, been buried too deep for anyone to find.

Daphne looked to her husband who cocked his head in thought. He said, “It was a teenaged girl that wrote about it on her blog. We were lucky to have found it at all because she must have had second thoughts as it was taken down within a couple of days.”

Eddie sighed. “Could have been one of Selena’s friends. Something like that, experienced by kids, it would be hard for them to resist posting it somewhere. I wouldn’t put it past Selena’s friends Julie or Chrissy, or even one of their friends if they treated the secret like any other sixteen-year-old girl.”

Jessica knew he was right but it did little to settle her nerves. She trusted those girls. They saw what it did to Selena Leigh, to her family, even to Eddie and Jessica. It should have scared them to death, or at the very least, to silence.

“So, she put my contact information in her little blog post?” Jessica asked.

Daphne shook her head. “No, just your first name. We took the rest from there. Believe me, we would never have expended so much time and energy to locate you unless we felt we truly needed your services.”

They still haven’t said how exactly they found me, she thought.

“You want me to get rid of the EBs residing in this house?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Tobe said. “My wife and I don’t mind them at all, but the children, well, they’re young and impressionable and easily frightened. Living out here on an island with nowhere to run should something go bump in the night is a lot to ask of them.”

The kids. Jessica had almost forgotten why she even went through with their request to come here in the first place. The house was so quiet. It was hard to imagine there were two children just over their heads. She hadn’t heard so much as a thump or a shuffle.

“I’d like to meet them,” she said.

A motherly frown crossed Daphne’s face as she checked her watch. “I’m afraid it will have to wait until tomorrow. They were playing outside earlier and are in desperate need of a bath, dinner and bed. I promise, Paul will pick you up early tomorrow and you’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted. But feel free to walk through the downstairs for a spell. I’ll ask Paul to get ready to take you back to Charleston.”

Daphne rose, as did her husband in polite deference. “I’ll be back in just a moment. Feel free to top yourselves off if you like.”

The stairs creaked as the couple went, presumably, to speak to Paul and the children.

“Is this the Twilight Zone or what?” Jessica said, keeping her voice low.

Eddie chewed on his lower lip. “Oddball aristocrats aside, there’s a lot going on here.”

“How much is a lot?”

“More than you can imagine. You want to tell her to take the kids and sell the place?”

She kicked at one of the table’s legs. “She doesn’t seem like the type that would listen.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“So, I guess we come back tomorrow and get busy. Even my EB senses are tingling, and I didn’t need to go to the Rhine to get them.”

Eddie held her gaze. “Did I mention there’s a lot of EB stuff around this place?”

“You did.”

“Well, the two children standing behind you seem to like the idea of your sticking around.”

Jessica turned her chair around, coming face-to-face with rows of empty bookshelves.

She held out her hand, waving it slowly back and forth. “Right here?”

“Yep,” Eddie said.

Her hand felt as if the marrow in her bones had been dipped in liquid nitrogen.

“Looks like we’re going to have to help more kids than we first thought,” she said, shaking the chill from her fingers.

Chapter Twelve

After Paul took them on another death ride to the Charleston docks, Jessica and Eddie went back to their hotel to prepare for the week ahead. Jessica asked him to meet her in the hotel bar in an hour so they could talk. Eddie changed out of his sweaty, wet clothes and into a pair of worn blue jeans and button down shirt.

With nothing much else to do, he rode the elevator and sat at the bar a half hour early. The low lighting and maroon décor was perfect for crying in your beer or finagling a one-night stand. The Braves game was on one television beside the bar, a boxing match by a pair of welterweights on the other. He ordered a beer and stared at the baseball game, following nothing. Two innings in and he couldn’t even tell a passing patron what the score was when the game went to commercial.

“Starting without me?” Jessica said, settling onto the barstool next to him.

Jessica had changed as well into low riding hip huggers with a V-neck shirt that revealed the red straps of her bra. She had filled out a smidge during the two plus years they had been apart. She upgraded her girl body for a woman’s, Eddie thought. The blond hair still made him feel as if he were with a different woman. It was impossible not to notice how attractive she was now. When they first met, it was hard to get past the tough front she’d erected. She was softer now, maybe even a tad vulnerable, but he wasn’t going to be fooled. He knew her interior was still harder than a diamond.

He waved the bartender over and ordered two beers. “I noticed you weren’t much of a Tom Collins girl.”

She winced. “That was disgusting. I’ve never met a mixed drink I like, with the exception of that Cosmo at my aunt’s place. That bartender is like a magician.”

The beer glasses were frosty, trails of foam sliding down the cold glass. Eddie made a toast. “Here’s to EBs everywhere, especially on Ormsby Island.”

They clinked glasses. Jessica downed half of her beer in one long gulp. “I was thirsty,” she said.

Eddie made a half-turn in his seat to face her. “So, what did you think of our hosts?”

She chuckled. “I think they could be not-too-distant cousins of the Addams Family.”

“With Paul as a fuzzy Uncle Fester,” Eddie laughed.

“I find it hard to believe he’s in any way related to Daphne. Maybe they have different fathers.”

“Or mothers.”

“Or that.” She finished her drink and ordered another. “On a more serious note, how many EBs did you see out there?”

He tipped his glass back, finishing his beer so he could keep up with her. “Too many to count.”

“How many EBs can possibly be on that island? It’s a tiny speck in the grand scheme of things.”

Eddie shook his head, recalling the wall of EBs at the dock, as well as the wispy children in the library. “I don’t know how, but they’re all there. I was so blown away, I couldn’t get a proper reading on a single one. It was like trying to zero-in on your favorite flame in the middle of a bonfire. I’m hoping I can focus a little better tomorrow.”

She clapped him hard on the back. “You passed the first test. You really didn’t read anything about the island?”

“No, you told me not to.”

“Exactly. I wanted you to go in there with a blank slate. The more you know, the better chance to color your take on things.”

“Do you know the history?” he asked.

“Some of it. That reminds me, I have to ask Swedey to get more intel for me.” She pulled her phone from her back pocket and started texting. She’d told Eddie about Swedey, her European web designer who was also a cyber P.I. on the side. Even though she never met the man, she trusted him implicitly. It was a difficult relationship to decipher.

“What are you asking him to look up?”

The tip of her tongue darted in and out of the side of her mouth as she typed. “I want him to see what he can get on Tobe, Daphne and Paul. That and anything else he can dig up about Maxwell Ormsby and the island itself.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me anything tonight,” Eddie said.

“Nope. We’ll see what comes to you tomorrow.”

“You want something to eat?”

“Hell yes. I’m frigging starving.”

Eddie reached over the bar, grabbing a couple of menus and knocking a few lime wedges to the ground. Luckily, the bartender didn’t notice.

“You know what I can’t get over?” he said, his face buried in the menu.

“The way the interior and exterior of the house don’t match at all?”

“That’s another thing—that and the pervasive chill that never seems to go away. No, what I’m talking about is how nice you’ve been to me through all of this. Last time we spoke, you told me to, and I quote, ‘stay the fuck away from me’. And now here we are in South Carolina having beers at a bar before heading off to an island for a week to deal with another person’s haunting issues. I know it can’t be the bleached hair that made this turnabout.”

She lowered her menu and he was sure she was going to hit him with it.

Why do you always push your luck with her?

“Let’s not discuss this now,” she said. “Things change. People change. I’m working on it.”

He slapped his menu down on the bar. “Works for me.” Catching the bartender’s attention, he said, “Can we place our order?”

She added, “Plus, I’m worried about those kids. I know what it’s like. If I can somehow shield them from the same crap I went through, it’ll be worth it.”

When the food came, he noticed how some things didn’t change at all. The heat of the day had knocked the appetite right out of him. He drove his fork into his Cobb salad, wishing he’d settled on beer for his meal.

Jessica’s appetite was as strong as ever. Her plate was filled with barbecued ribs, mashed potatoes, green beans, a side of pinto beans, two biscuits that were fluffier than a new pillow and slathered in butter, and a side bowl of cole slaw. She dove in like a woman at the end of a hunger strike.

“You’re a man’s dream dinner date,” he said.

“What do you mean?” The corners of her mouth were stained red from barbecue sauce.

“It means any guy who takes you out to dinner can enjoy the meal he really wants to eat and not the paltry one he thinks his date expects him to eat.”

She twirled a clean rib bone in the air. “Just doing what I can for equality among the sexes.”

Twenty minutes later, they were both done. Jessica patted her flat stomach. “I can only imagine how good the southern cooking is outside of a cookie cutter hotel. Too bad we’ll be stuck on an island this week. I didn’t get the impression that the Harpers have spent much time in the kitchen.” She checked her text messages and tucked the phone back into her pocket. “So, let’s get to the most important part. Tell me what you can about the kids. Are they really like me?”

The entire time he’d been in Ormsby House, he tried to cleave through the white noise of the horde of EBs, seeking what he called the psychic pulse of the children upstairs. He’d caught enough snatches to confirm the initial impression fed to him by the dead before he reconnected with Jessica.

He took in a deep breath. “From what I can tell, yes, they do have an innate ability to draw the dead to them. It’s nothing like yours, but they’re still kids. Adolescence will be the time when things really kick in. Teen years are a drag for more than just pimples and voice changes.”

Perfect, not perfect.

The voice was his own, but he had no idea why it had flitted into his head. He was suddenly aware that he hadn’t seen the weeping blond women, or the other dead that had been his constant companions since leaving his apartment. He’d heard them say it so many times, it had become a song that looped in his brain.

Jessica played with the ends of her hair. “Do you think their parents are aware of it?”

“It was impossible for me to tell. I’d hope not. What kind of parents would use their own children as bait?”

“There are shitty parents everywhere, Eddie. Right now, some kid is getting a cigarette burned into his arm or a beating with a belt buckle. Tobe and Daphne don’t seem like the type, but you never know.

“I need you to spend as much time with them as you can tomorrow,” she said. “We’re either going to make this place safe for them or convince Tobe and Daphne to get them the hell out of there. Every internal meter I have was going off when we were in that house. No doubt there’s something hanging around. We just need to find out who and why.”

Sighing, Eddie said, “It’ll be a lot of whos, I can tell you that much.”

They sat quietly for a while, both lost in their own thoughts.

Best to tell her now, Eddie thought. They were going to put themselves into the center of a storm in the morning. It was unfair to keep her in the dark about his problems.

“Jess, there’s something I need to tell you.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Looks like it’s serious.”

His stomach twittered with anxiety. “I’m broken.”

Jessica leaned back, staring at him with skeptical confusion. “What do you mean by broken?”

“I can’t shut them out. Ever since New Hampshire, I’ve steadily been losing control. For the past couple of years, the dead have been smothering me. Most times, it’s like living in the middle of the stock exchange. I can’t even get to sleep at night without a few drinks. When I touched that pedophile’s spirit—”

“We both did,” Jessica interjected. She was right. He’d been able to draw her into contact with the dead man’s depraved soul. It had sickened them to their core, but also gave them what they needed to find his rotting corpse and put an end to his reign of terror on the poor girl he’d attached his desires to.

“For me, it feels like it accelerated things, so much that I couldn’t keep up. All of the controls I’ve spent my life putting in place were blown wide open and I can’t get them back. I’ll be able to see and hear the EBs on Ormsby Island. I just don’t know if I’ll be able to make much sense of them.”

“Have you spoken to your father or any of your professors at the Rhine?”

“No.” His relationship with his father, a burned out psychic, was tenuous at best. He could have called the Rhine, but a part of him didn’t want them to know he’d failed being on his own.

Surprisingly, she gently placed her hand over his. “Hey, we’ll get through it together. At least you haven’t spent years running from yourself.”

He met her eyes and was relieved to see the sympathy there. “There is one good thing. Since I met up with you, other than on the island, the EBs have been staying away. I think, and this is no joke, that they’re afraid of you.”

Jessica chuckled. “I guess it’s cool to see that I’ve made a name for myself on the other side.”

He paid their tab and agreed to meet in the lobby at nine the next morning. They rode the elevator together. When Jessica was getting off at her floor, he said, “That island is a bad place. We’re going to have to be very careful.”

“I know. Try to get some sleep. Call me if any dead strangers won’t leave you alone.”

The doors closed before he could ask what she would do if he called.

Once in his room, the first thing he did was scoop up several small bottles of vodka from the mini bar, setting them on the bedside table. He showered, changed and watched the news, waiting for the dead to come.

The room remained empty. He closed his eyes, entering his barn talisman. The old structure looked older, with jagged cracks splitting the wood-flaked beams. The doors remained open wide, a crumbled defense that couldn’t even hold back the whisper of a summer breeze. Dragging a bale of rotted hay to the center of the barn, he sat and waited. They would come. They always came. And then he would drink the vodka.

But they didn’t. Even the heavy scent of the tall grass outside the barn would not enter.

Eddie came to in his bed with a start. His eyes roamed the room, searching for motorcycle crash victims, suicides, cancer patients, pretty women with impenetrable souls chanting Perfect. Not perfect.

The news had given way to a late night talk show.

He eyed the vodka bottles. The craving had nothing to do with aiding his escape to empty dreams.

I have to stop living like this.

Unscrewing the cap of Absolut, he brought the tiny opening to his lips. Before the burning liquid could touch his tongue, he flung the plastic bottle across the room, splashing the mirror and writing desk. He scooped up all of the bottles, dumping them in the sink one at a time.

Digging through his luggage, he found the bottle of Xanax. Jessica’s father had become addicted to the pills after his wife had died in her sleep, terrified of being the sole caretaker for a small child, terrified of being alone, terrified of dying, terrified of living. It had been his undoing for many long years. He knew that if he’d told Jessica he had been taking them, she would have read him the riot act, maybe going so far as to physically impress upon him why he had to stop.

“I don’t need this,” he said, staring at the bottle in his palm.

But of course, he had needed it. How else was he supposed to sleep surrounded by the clamor and push of the dead encircling his bed every night?

They weren’t here now.

Jessica was, although floors away.

Taking a deep, hitching breath, he poured the blue, oval pills into the toilet, flushing before second thoughts could take hold.