“If I live through this, I need to quit smoking,” Burke mumbled as he struggled to his feet. His legs still felt weak but at least the urge to vomit and faint was less intense now. His head spun a bit at first when he got on his feet, but he steadied himself. He looked at the Zippo in his hand and at the gas cans in the back of the SUV and understood what Jin had in mind. The doors were locked. He went to his car, retrieved the tire iron which he found under a box of old case files in the back seat.
Still in a bit of a daze from his exertions, he found himself bashing in the back window of the SUV with the tire iron. The SUV’s alarm was deafening. With no keys to turn it off, he cursed at his luck. Had he been thinking clearer, he would have remembered the alarm. He went to the SUV’s driver side door, bashed in that window, reached in and felt for the hood latch. Once he popped the hood, he disconnected the SUV’s battery by prying off one of the terminals using the tire iron, however the deafening alarm kept blaring. Damned thing has a small back up battery somewhere, thought Burke.
He hopped into the SUV and felt around until he found the fuse panel and began randomly plucking out fuses until the alarm finally died, but the ringing in his ears continued. He cast a glance towards the woods, worried the monster rat creatures might have heard the noise and come looking, but nothing stirred. Burke walked behind the SUV, tire iron clutched firmly in his right hand, as if he expected to be attacked by something. Another glance up and down the road showed nothing either, so he felt he was good to keep going.
He sighed in relief and reached into the vehicle to take out the two gas canisters. He set them on the ground next to him, tucked the tire iron into his belt like they did with swords in the movies, and patted his breast pocket looking for cigarettes that were no longer there.
Scanning the ground, he saw his recently discarded cigarette and retrieved it. He lit the piece and puffed away the last little bit of it while he looked at the gas canisters before him. He glanced at his cigarette, felt the Zippo in his pants pocket and marveled at his own stupidity. Gas canisters which had been locked in a hot vehicle for hours sat next to him while he lit a cigarette, he thought. He was the guy who made jokes about these dumb people. He exhaled smoke as he flung the cigarette behind him onto Ocean’s Edge Road again where he had just retrieved it. I’ve really lost it, he thought, if I’ve ever really had it at all, he chuckled.
He picked up the gas canisters, strapped on Jin’s backpack and marched off into the forest in the same direction he had come. Jin was right. This had to be done.
Chapter 25
Off the Beaten Path
Scott’s stomach tightened into an acidic ball as he glanced down at the minivan’s gas gauge and saw he was low on fuel. If he was headed in the wrong direction, he might regret his decision to head out looking for the kids without thinking it through. Searching for them was devastating enough but imagining being broken down on the side of the road after running out of gas, helpless while Jack Whitefeather did God knows what to them, would be much worse. This thought weighed heavily on him since he drove past a car and an SUV broken down on the roadside. He had wanted to stop and ask if they had seen Jack’s truck, but the man was under the hood, the SUV’s alarm was blaring, and Scott simply didn’t feel he had time for any of that.
He tried to breathe and focus but panic always caught up to him. His cell phone hadn’t rung since he yelled at his wife not to call him unless she had news and he would do the same. He didn’t have time to talk. He needed to find his children. They were his responsibility and he couldn’t live with himself if he let them down when they needed him most. Just when the stress of it all felt like it was getting to be too much, he saw Jack’s truck on the side of Ocean’s Edge Road.
His minivan screeched to a halt behind the truck leaving skid marks as he came to an abrupt stop. Scott got out in a panic and ran to the truck. Looking inside, he saw an empty seat where he had hoped to find his kids. In a way he was glad to find it empty, it was certainly better than finding them injured, or worse. Looking inside the truck he saw the shotgun on the dash, the keys in the ignition and no blood. Maybe Jack hadn’t hurt them yet. Maybe he hadn’t done anything to them. He glanced around, in the ditch, at the edge of the forest by the road and saw no sign of them. Panic started to rise again, from deep in his abdomen, rising up to his throat, where he could feel the pressure mounting. He stopped, took a deep breath and reminded himself that the shotgun was still in the truck. That was a good sign. With that, Scott felt a sudden sense of calm wash over him. Unsure why, he felt abnormally calm. The thought that Lily and Patrick might not have been harmed yet was the only thing on his mind.
The multicolored aura surrounding the spirit of Norah Jenkins glowed bright as she laid her hand on Scott Cudmore’s back, even if he didn’t feel her do it. He had been standing next to Jack Whitefeather’s truck, in a state of panic and that wouldn’t help the children any. Norah had no idea why she had such influence on people and things in this state, but she did. Perhaps it was having been touched by evil while alive that allowed her spirit to do these things? She did not know, nor did she care. All she wanted was for Scott to calm himself and find the children before harm came to them. She knew time was running out.
Scott saw what he was looking for. A few meters from the truck laid the plastic arm of a Barbie doll on the edge of the asphalt. They had walked from there. It was obvious to him now where Jack was headed with the kids.
Scott called Sandy at the Oakwood Island Police Department.
“Scott? Where are you?” Sandy demanded.
“I’m past the bend on Ocean’s Edge Road, approaching Dead Man’s Cliff. I found Jack’s truck abandoned by the footpath leading up to the lookout.”
“I’m sending someone to you, Scott. Hang on,” Sandy replied.
“I’m going up by Dead Man’s Road.”
Scott ended the call without waiting for Sandy to tell him not to do anything stupid. He knew she would have told him that. When your children are at risk, doing something stupid is sometimes all you can do. Scott ran back to his minivan, stopped and then ran back to Jack’s truck. He grabbed the shotgun from the dash and brought it with him. Not long after hitting the road again, he found himself convinced that he needed to stop at the first beaten path he came upon off of Dead Man’s Road. There he saw recent tracks in the dirt path. One pair was large, with smaller sized prints on either side of the larger ones. Scott drove up the dirt road as fast as he could. He hoped he wasn’t too late.
Jack Whitefeather knew there was no turning back now. There was something dark and sinister at play, and it had been for a long, long time. Something evil had a hold on these children. Having watched the wind strip dirt away from the clearing, Jack came closer to the cleared off area near the cliff. He looked at the bone that had been sharpened into a dagger. He wondered if his grandmother had kept the dagger all those years for this very moment. He knew something wanted this done, and maybe Sparrow had foreseen it. Perhaps the evil was tired of playing with children. Perhaps it wanted to be released from the bond as much as Jack wanted to release it. But how could he not do it?
He closed his eyes and pictured Edwin Quartley as he’d seen her on his last visit, in her hospital bed, comatose. He pictured Ben Augustine in his wheelchair, grimacing from pain that he might have to live with forever. There were many more that had fallen victim to the curse through many generations. If Lily could injure and kill so many before she turned five, Jack imagined that she would do much more harm than any who had come before her. Other Jenkins twins had had guardians who prevented them from harming people, but Lily and Patrick had no such guardians. Also blind from birth, Patrick would never be able to care for his twin sister like Norah had for her twin sister Amy.
The crow’s cawing startled Jack from his deep thoughts as he saw Lily standing by the cliff’s edge. She was looking down at the rocks as she clutched a doll’s torso, whi
ch was all that was left of her doll. Patrick stood next to Jack as if waiting. He kept his head slightly tilted back as he listened to the wind shake the tree leaves all around them. The lighthouse stood tall in the distance.
Jack took Patrick’s hand and led him to the patch of dirt before him, where the grass simply would not grow. Jack bent at the waist, picking up the sharpened bone and examined the ground before him. The wind had removed the topsoil, exposing the dirt below it, but he hadn’t noticed that it was a perfect circle. In the exposed dirt he saw more rib bones, the bones of a hand and the edge of a skull protruding from the exposed thin layer of soil. These were human bones.
Jack felt a sudden shooting pain coursing through his left arm and into his chest as he looked at the sharpened bone in his hand and then at the blind boy next to him. Lily now stood on the inside of the circle of freshly overturned soil. She looked at Jack with an intensity that he recognized from earlier in the truck. The crow cawed twice.
The multicolored aura of Norah Jenkins glowed strong, casting a multitude of bright shimmering rays across the clearing in all directions as she laid a hand on Jack Whitefeather’s back. His stress levels increased dramatically as he struggled with the idea of murdering these children. The crow cawed again.
In his mind’s eye, Jack saw a vision of the Cudmore house as it burned. Screams were coming from the house as a large fire consumed it. From the flames, unharmed exited Lily and Patrick, walking hand in hand. Lily was smiling.
Jack felt the pain in his chest intensify. This was it. He was having a heart attack, he thought. He staggered forward, reaching out, grasping Lily by her shoulder as he raised the pointed bone overhead. He knew what he had to do. There was no doubt he needed to do this, in order to save the island for generations to come.
“Please forgive me,” he said aloud to the spirits of Oakwood Island. It was now or never.
Jack heard a loud gunshot from behind him as he felt the wind of the buckshot whoosh by, missing his head by very little. Jack staggered as the pain in his chest got the better of him. Even with the pain in his chest, he found himself suddenly worried that the children had been shot. The same children he had intended on killing. Lily stepped backwards as a sly grin appeared on her face. Patrick covered his ears to protect them from the sudden loud noise that had startled the blind boy. Jack looked at the sharpened bone in his hand and then at a frightened Patrick.
Behind Jack, at the edge of the clearing, a teary-eyed Scott struggled clumsily with the shotgun. He was pumping it to reload and jammed a shell casing in the ejector port in the process.
“Jack…no!” Scott muttered as he tried to free the jammed shell casing.
“Please forgive me,” Jack said to the children as he clutched his chest and struggled to stand.
For a brief moment, he realized that there was a chance he would survive his heart attack and found he no longer wanted to. Although he knew he had to end the curse, he could not bring himself to do it in the way his grandmother had instructed him. He realized he could end it all himself, and without causing more pain and evil to affect these children, and so many more. He decided he didn’t want the curse to survive for even one more day, and because of this he couldn’t chance that he would survive either. He saw no other option. It is my time to die, he thought. It was time to let the people of Oakwood Island fend for themselves. Evil be damned, he simply couldn’t murder children.
He turned the pointed end of the bone to his chest and let himself fall forward, impaling himself on the sharpened bone. The bone pierced his chest and protruded from his back. Jack felt the squeezing in his chest subside as the pain from the sharpened bone replaced it. Rolling to his side, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, Jack watched Lily walk past him and run towards Scott. Jack heard the crow caw as his vision blurred.
Drifting off into what felt like a slumber he would not awaken from, Jack blinked twice, unsure of how to feel about what he was seeing. The last thing he saw before taking his last earthly breath was Lily smiling up at Scott Cudmore. The last thing he heard brought peace to his soul. Jack could feel his grandmother’s presence stronger than ever.
“Thank you, grandson. Thank you for ridding the children of the curse, once and for all.” Jack felt his grandmother’s soft touch on his forehead just as everything went dark.
Scott knew there would be time to weep later. Right now he had to get Lily and Patrick to safety. He had gotten his minivan stuck when driving up a slight incline on the beaten road. But as it turned out, getting it unstuck by backing up was easier than he had assumed it would be. Patrick and Lily were strapped into the car seats in the back of the van as he stopped near the exit that emptied out onto Ocean’s Edge Road. He pulled his cell phone and called his wife.
“The twins are safe,” he blurted. “They’re with me.”
He heard his wife burst into sobs.
“Miriam?”
“Scott?” Reverend Masterson asked. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” Scott replied. “Is Miriam okay?”
“She’s upset, Scott. What did you say to her?”
“The twins,” Scott repeated. “They’re ok. They’re with me,” he added as he watched the children in the back seat. The pair sat quietly next to each other. Patrick smiled and Lily looked on at Scott. It was like he was seeing her for the first time. Something about her face was different. It took him a moment to realize that it was a look of peaceful contentment.
“Where’s Jack Whitefeather?” Reverend Masterson asked.
“Dead,” Scott replied. “Jack’s dead.”
“Thank God,” the Reverend replied without realizing what he had said.
“Can you call Sandy at the police station and tell her I’m on Ocean’s Edge Road and almost out of gas. Tell her I’ve got the twins, they’re safe and that I’m bringing them back.”
“Of course,” Reverend Masterson replied. “God bless you, Scott.”
“And tell Sandy Jack’s dead,” Scott added. “And tell Miriam we’re coming home.”
Blood pooled under Jack’s now lifeless body on the freshly exposed soil. The blood flowed into the straight lines that darted away from his body in every direction. A pattern began emerging in the soil around the body. The shape of a pentagram appeared in the blood-soaked soil. Faint at first, billowing smoke started rising from the blood-filled lines that formed the pentagram in the soil. The black smoke soon gave way to flickering flames. The flames rose out of the ground in the lines of the pentagram, and as the winds grew in strength, the flames grew higher.
The crow cawed loud as it flew into the center of the circle and landed on the late Jack Whitefeather’s shoulder. It cawed over and over, relentless as it called upon the many it called its brethren. The trees surrounding the clearing began filling with crows. One by one, they arrived, then in pairs and eventually in large flocks; they flew in from all directions and filled the trees surrounding the flaming pentagram. The crow in the center of the pentagram spread its wings wide, flapping them hard, strong wings fanning the flames until they grew and Jack’s dead body caught fire. The crow hovered in the center of the flaming circle for a moment, its beady eyes looking at the murder that had filled every branch of the trees covering the area. The black eyes of the bird turned to a greyish white as it blinked, and the murder of crows took flight and began flying in swarms around the single crow.
They circled over and over as more crows joined in the ceremonial flight. Their combined black bodies created a pulsating motion, swooping around and around, closing in tighter and closer to the crow in the center. A sudden force exploded from the middle of the burning circle making all the birds fly away in random directions. Among the flames stood the naked body of a brown-skinned woman who stood in the circle of fire. The bones in the circle of exposed earth were gone, as was the one that Jack had impaled himself with.
The woman smile
d. She bent down and using her long fingernails she scooped out Jack Whitefeather’s eyes. Standing over his burning body which lay in the blood-soaked dirt, she laughed.
“Be my eyes, my old friend,” she said mockingly, laughing before she swallowed his eyes whole.
Not far from the cliff, near the clearing where the body of Jack Whitefeather lay burning before a naked, brown-skinned woman, a wooden crate floated to the surface of the sea. Near that, a large sealed bottle floated to the surface in turn. A gnarled wooden staff appeared on the water’s surface next to a few smaller little bottles and vials. All of which began a slow but steady drift towards the shore of Oakwood Island.
Parked on the side of Ocean’ Edge Road Scott adjusted his rear view mirror so he could watch the children as they waited for the police to arrive. He wiped away a tear as he saw Patrick smiling, reached out patting the seat next to him until he found what he wanted. Patrick took Lily’s hand in his and smiled. They sat, both of them quiet, in the back seat until Lily broke the silence.
“My dolly’s broken,” Lily said, a sad expression on her face as she examined the remnants of her Barbie doll.
“We’ll get you a new one,” Scott replied who struggled to keep his voice from showing emotion. “We’ll get you a new one soon.”
Chapter 26
Jin Was Right
Burke’s legs felt like cement. His feet throbbed, his calves hurt and his back ached. All that plus his head throbbed from what he assumed was dehydration. He didn’t remember the last time he pushed his body this much. It had to have been during his old police academy days, back when he ran for fun. Back when he actually enjoyed exercising. Now as a much older man, he found himself exhausted to the point where he felt he might collapse, and yet he still craved a cigarette more than anything. I’m definitely crazy, he thought as he pulled off the backpack, setting it on the ground near a pile of black goop. The strange part was that there were no flies on or around it. He’d seen enough dead things in his career as a detective to know there should be flies and bugs buzzing around it. He looked up at the trees and figured the black goo must have come from Grady.
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