They’d passed Nina and Uncle Paul, who’d been sleeping. It was weird that he was sleeping on the floor and not in his room. And why was Nina sitting by him?
She wasn’t important. Neither was Uncle Paul.
As long as the bad man was here, nothing else mattered. The other adults couldn’t see the bad man. Only she and Jason had the gift of special sight. The bad man had been right there, with them, the entire time.
They had to make him go away. He was hurting everyone, just like he did the Last Kids.
There was enough light in the kitchen to see by and avoid bumping into the table. The back door was open. Jason and Alice turned in unison to the butcher block, gravitating to the big knives they were told never to touch. The metal blade sung a high, short tune when it was extracted from the metal holder. Jason handed one to Alice. It had a long, curving blade, the one their mother used to cut vegetables.
Jason took the one that was a big, sharp rectangle. She’d watched her mother cut through rib bones with it or quarter a chicken.
“Out there,” Alice said softly.
They stepped onto the back patio.
To their right was a type of shed, the place where the generator was kept. The tall picket door was open. The bad man was in there.
She looked over and saw the Last Kids standing by the shed’s entrance, an affirmation that she was in the right place, doing what was necessary. Jason gripped her hand, taking a steadying breath.
They stopped when the bad man emerged from the shed. He had a face she’d never seen before. Balding, with a large, bulbous nose, ears that came out too far from his liver spotted skull, a loose sack of skin hanging from his neck.
“What are you doing out here?” the bad man asked. His initial surprise was replaced with a cold sneer, his voice somehow changed. “You don’t belong here. I exterminated you! Get away from me!”
Alice’s stomach seemed to go all soft, like it did when she was sick. She knew it wasn’t from fear of the bad man. It was something else. Something the Last Kids hadn’t told her about. More than anything, she just wanted to lie down. But she knew she couldn’t, not now.
Alice felt the cold steel in her hands and braced her arm. If the bad man came any closer, she knew what she had to do.
They were everywhere.
Jesus. How much were they drawing from Jessica and the kids to manifest like this? If he didn’t stop them now, they could very well kill them.
Floating above the trees, able to view every inch of Ormsby Island, Eddie called out to the EB children.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “I can make the pain stop. I need your help.”
Heads turned upward in wonderment. They considered him, but were far from convinced. He projected an image of the “perfect women” who had followed his every move back in Connecticut. Perfect. Not Perfect.
“They sent me to find you. You are all perfect. Follow me.”
He slowly descended, spying his body, breathing softly, atop the graves. The sight gave him a chill so deep, he saw it shake through his seemingly sleeping body.
Eddie looked around. The children came from every direction, some holding hands, in various stages of development and decay. For a man who dealt with the dead all of his life, the sight would haunt him until his own last breath.
They stopped short of the cleared area for the graves.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”
The EBs hesitated, considering him with nickel-plated eyes.
“But you can hurt them.”
Rusty felt the pressure at his arms and legs disappear. Still, he kept his eyes closed, not daring to move. He was so cold. He was sure he’d never be warm again.
A lone voice shouted in the distance.
Rusty slowly opened his eyes.
Thank God, he was alone!
The children had left him, though he could still feel their icy hands, frostbit impressions on his flesh.
Someone was screaming.
Rusty scrambled to his feet, deciding whether to run toward the voice coming from the diseased Ormsby House, or to the relative safety of the docks.
Put this shit behind you, Russ. This isn’t your fight anymore.
He started at the path to the docks, sighed, and started running.
Daphne moved as fast as she could in the dark, calling out for her children. Her knee smashed into the side of the library door. She spun once, catching her other foot on the edge of the throw rug, and fell into the andirons. She cried out in pain as her back whumped on top of the unyielding iron.
“Jason. Alice,” she sputtered.
When she’d first come down the stairs, she’d stumbled upon Paul, resting under a blanket. She’d checked his breathing to make sure he was in fact alive and pulled herself away from him. He sounded terrible, like he was drowning. She had to find Jason and Alice.
Why did they leave? They hadn’t been right since Jessica and Eddie found them earlier. It was as if someone or something had snatched their souls, leaving organic automatons behind.
And where was her husband? Or Nina and Rusty? Had they been intentionally separated, easy pickings for whatever curse lived on this island? She wished to hell she’d never heard of Ormsby Island. Better to live in poverty than die trying to regain something as meaningless as money.
The library doors slammed shut with a loud bang.
Daphne jumped to her feet, pulling at the doors.
They wouldn’t budge.
She pounded her flat hands against the doors shouting, “Let me out! Alice! Jason! Somebody let me out!”
Chapter Forty-One
A phalanx of Ormsby children gathered in the back yard, watching the boy and girl approach the bad man.
Yes, they could finally see the bad man! And they would make him go away.
But he hesitated. Something tried to swim against the current of his rage. The boy and the girl might hesitate. They needed them to see…completely.
In turn, the bad man had to see as well.
They would make him see.
Jessica heard Daphne’s cries for help, her steady thumping on the doors somewhere off to her left. On her hands and knees, Jessica’s palm came to rest on something soft and warm. Groping like a blind woman, her fingers became entangled in a thick underbrush of wire.
Paul.
She rested her hand on his chest. If it was moving, it was doing so imperceptibly.
“Help!” Daphne cried again.
Jessica winced. Yes, she wanted to help Daphne, but with her strength leaking from her like a blown gas tank, she could only do so much. And right now, what she had to do was find Eddie and the kids.
She thought she heard Alice’s voice drifting into the house. Pulling herself across the polished floor, she turned the corner of the breakfast room and faced the entrance to the kitchen and the open back door. It looked miles away. If she hadn’t felt like she was dying, she could have made it out the door in just a few seconds. Even the thought of doing so now drained her.
Her forehead dropped to the floor. Her arms shook, elbow joints turning to Jell-o.
She was going numb. Not from the cold, but from the inside outward. All of her senses dulled, the hardwood floor beneath her body more of a conscious reality than a tactile presence at her back.
Sleep. Sleep was what she needed. A good eight hours. No, make it twelve. Maybe even an entire day. Eddie would take care of the kids. He was stronger than her, more tuned in to the things she’d always prided herself on being the resident expert. Pride goeth before the motherfucker of all falls.
“Stop!”
The man’s voice, hitting octaves reserved for moments of abject fear, shook Jessica from the heavy pull of sleep.
“Go away!”
A girl’s voice. Alice? Followed by, “He’s a bad man. A very bad man.”