Island of the Forbidden

by Hunter Shea

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked to the left of the docks, then the right. EBs of every size and shape dotted the shore.

  “Jess, I’ve never seen so many spirits gathered in one place before other than an old battleground.” His mind drifted closer to the gathering in an attempt to latch onto brief snatches of information as one would skim the surface of a pool with a net. “They’re all tied to the island. No visitors here.”

  Jessica tugged his arm, urging him forward. “We better keep moving.” Then louder, she said, “We’re coming, Paul.”

  Eddie couldn’t see the bearded man through the fog of EBs.

  Each step was like pounding a nail into his skull, one tiny tap at a time. “There’s so many kids,” he said low enough so only Jessica could hear. “We’re going to walk right into them in two more steps.”

  If it gave Jessica pause, he didn’t sense it. Instead she seemed to pull him faster.

  A frigid hand closed around his heart, freezing the ebb and flow of his blood.

  Eddie gasped, overcome with the chill of a thousand deep, dark graves.

  And just as suddenly as it came, his heart was set free. They were surrounded only by the pitch of the tight canopy above. The air inside the path was much cooler, bordering on cold.

  He cast a quick glance behind them, but the rows of EBs were gone.

  “It’s just a little ways up this incline,” Paul said, oblivious not only to the spirits but Eddie’s pained reaction.

  “You all right?” Jessica asked as they walked along the uneven, overgrown earth.

  He rubbed the right side of his head with his fingertips. “Yeah, the pain’s going away. It was a bit overwhelming. We’re going to have our work cut out for us.”

  “I might just tell them to get their kids off the island and head back to New York.”

  Leaves that had fallen years before crackled under their feet. It was going to take him some time to get used to the new Jessica. The girl he’d met three years earlier would have dived right in, ready to tackle any EB, no matter how terrifying. Now, it felt like she was taking this as a kind of consultancy, her mind already made up to offer the path of least resistance.

  Flashes of light broke through the lush tree limbs.

  “And here we are. Trust me, it’s not as bad as it looks once you get inside,” Paul said, waving his hand across the view of the crumbling Colonial as if he were a model showcasing the prize on a game show.

  The big old house looked as if it was dying of cancer. Whatever vibrancy it once contained had long ago turned to rot and…sickness. Yes, the house gave off an aura of malignancy.

  “That’s a big place,” Jessica said, stopping to take it all in from a slight distance. “Do you know how old it is?”

  Paul scholarly tugged at the ends of his beard. “I think my brother-in-law told me the place was built around the mid-1800s. A small part of it burned down at the turn of the twentieth century and was rebuilt right away. I think it started from a spilled kerosene lamp. Happened a lot in places that didn’t have electricity back in the day. It’s that area to the right. Impossible to tell now. The outside looks equally bad no matter where you look. It has the same name as the island—the Ormsby House. The name alone makes it sound creepy. Probably what got people thinking it was haunted in the first place.”

  “You don’t think there are ghosts?” Jessica asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve been here a couple weeks and haven’t seen or heard a thing. I went to a couple of bars in Charleston and once I said where I was staying, I got enough ghost stories to fill a book. But none of the folks who told them have ever even been on the island. It’s a bunch of ‘my grandmother told me about the time her mother was on Ormsby Island’ stuff.”

  Eddie’s head finally felt clear. He said, “So you’re the resident skeptic?”

  Paul gave another one of his big smiles. “I guess you could say that. That’s until you two can prove otherwise. Now my sister and brother-in-law, they believe it whole hog. It’s why they bought this in the first place.”

  Before Eddie could ask another question, Paul turned his back to them and resumed his trudge to the decaying mansion.

  “It would make a lovely B&B,” Eddie joked.

  Jessica didn’t laugh. “Why bring their little kids to a creepy place like this if you think it’s haunted?” Of course, her father had done the same thing to her when she was only six, so it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had experience with grown ups making poor decisions.

  “Because they knew you were out there to make the ghosties go away. They get an island and a mansion on the cheap, and after a few days with you, it’s all clear.”

  “Yeah, but how the hell did they find out about me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know…yet, but I have my suspicions. Secrets that used to reside in my head have been…compromised. It’s a long story. Better still, how the hell are you supposed to banish an entire island full of EBs?”

  At the foot of the rotted steps, Jessica knelt down, fumbling in the high grass that had grown between the cracks of a narrow concrete strip along the foundation of the house. She picked up an old, glass hypodermic syringe, the inside crusted yellow with some long decayed substance.

  “At least there’s no needle,” she said. “Reminds me of the beaches back home.”

  Paul plucked it from her hand. “That’s the third one I’ve seen around here. The last old man that owned the house was sick. I guess he didn’t take good care of the medical waste. I’ll throw it out.”

  Jessica looked to Eddie for any insight. He could only shrug his shoulders. “Could have been some junkie that shot up on the island. This is a pretty good place to get high without anyone bothering you.”

  They stepped onto the porch, the old wood groaning under their weight. A frog croaked once, the leapt off the porch into the brush. Paul turned the oversized, cut glass handle, swinging the door wide.

  Nothing, it seemed, was to be as expected out here.

  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 you
r 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.