Island of the Forbidden

by Hunter Shea

  Stepping up his efforts, he, Nina and Mitch beat at the dresser until it was nothing but a pile of splintered wood.

  Eddie tried the bedroom door, wondering where all the EBs had gone.

  “It’s locked.”

  “That can’t be,” Jessica said. Putting the books down, she retrieved her lock-picking kit and tried to open the door. The paperclip and screwdriver weren’t able to penetrate the lock. It was as if glue had been poured into the opening.

  “It’s gotta be the EBs,” she said. “You think you can get them to open it?”

  “I don’t think they’re going to listen to me.” He closed his eyes, opening his mind as much as he could, listening for scraps of conversation or thoughts between the spirit children. Most had flitted from the house, dispersing among the trees.

  Those left behind guarded the doors like powerful lookouts. He was amazed by how much stronger they’d become in just the last hour. He heard Tobe, Mitch and Nina shouting, a demolition derby in the room down the hall. Daphne must have been across the way, beating at the door and calling her children’s names.

  “They want us to be afraid,” he suddenly said.

  Jessica worried the doorknob. “Tell them it’ll take more than this.”

  He shook his head as if warding off a nightmare. “No, not us, them. And it’s working.”

  Giving up, Jessica sat on the floor and opened Nathaniel’s journal, using a penlight to read by. “I have to keep reading,” she said. “You’re the door man.”

  Eddie realized there was no reasoning with the EBs, not now. He’d have to force the door open. Brute strength wouldn’t do.

  George Ormsby’s children were gone, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Everything had fallen into place. George’s son Nathan picked up where he’d left off, siring even more children, conducting even more terrible experiments in a quest for human perfection. When his life’s endeavor failed, his own son, Alexander, was handpicked to carry on.

  Creating children that were perfect, just the way their mothers had seen them, but not perfect in their possessed father’s eyes.

  The Last Kids were the final generation of Ormsbys. Alexander must have felt his time was coming to a close. There would be no sons to pass his dementia on to. None had measured up. So he killed them, as surely and easily as so many others. He took his life not out of guilt, but a selfish desire to die without prolonged pain and suffering.

  Alexander and Nathaniel, I’m coming for you.

  Taking several deep breaths, he flexed his fingers, loosening his muscles as best he could in the extreme cold, a bitterness that had turned his sweat to ice.

  Moving objects with his mind was as natural to him as using his own two hands. However, the more exertion he had to put into it, the heavier the repercussion. As with all of his latent abilities, there was a give and take. He knew he’d have a bitch of a headache when this was done. He just hoped it didn’t take too much out of him.

  Eddie stared at the door, burning the image in his mind. His lids slowly closed, but he could still see the door plain as day. It was only a matter of wishing the door open. The knob began to turn in fits and starts. The EBs, unseen in his image, fought against him.

  They were strong, but he was stronger. With a great mental tug, he pulled the door free. It slammed into the wall, making Jessica jump back, the journal still tight in her hand.

  Daphne’s head whipped around. “I can’t get inside!” she pleaded.

  The door to the children’s room was easier. The EBs, seeing Eddie break their hold, didn’t give him much resistance. The door flew open and Daphne rushed inside. Eddie grabbed two of the heavy journals. He and Jessica had just stepped into the hallway when the door to the master bedroom cracked in half. Tobe and Mitch came tumbling through, bouncing off the floor with pained grunts. Nina was framed in the doorway, looking exhausted and terrified.

  It felt like someone had cleaved Eddie’s skull in two. Bright, white fireworks exploded in his periphery. He had to shake it off, quick. Where he was going next would require every bit of gas he had in the tank.

  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, e
ver 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.

&nbs
p; 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!”