Oakwood Island

by Cormier, Angella; Arseneault, Pierre C;

  The doctor stepped out of the room and left Jenny to tend to Harriett’s room transfer.

  Once Jenny was done moving Harriett, she met up with Doctor Johnson at the nurses station and pulled him aside. In a hushed voice she spoke. “She’s still in denial about Doctor Edwards you know. She keeps telling me that he is going to come by and see her soon. But the worse part isn’t that she doesn’t remember he’s dead, but she seems to have forgotten that he killed five people in cold blood!”

  Doctor Johnson looked at Jenny and with a look of empathy on his face as he spoke. “She was the one that eventually told the police about the evidence she had found in his desk after he killed himself. I think it was more the fact that she saw his suicide and then the guilt she felt for leading the cops to that evidence. Exposing him as a killer is what did her in. She is really in a bad state mentally. You know she even told me if it’s a boy she will name the baby Richard after his father.”

  Jenny looked down the hall towards Harriett’s room, where she could see the pregnant woman talking to herself again. She turned back towards Derek and asked. “What if it’s a girl?”

  Doctor Johnson scratched his head, trying to remember the name Harriett had mentioned. “If it’s a girl it’ll be Maggie, after Richard’s grandmother. That poor woman doesn’t even realize that she won’t be able to keep the baby while she is in the psych ward. Honestly, I’m not sure how long she will be in professional care.”

  Jenny felt a pang of sadness for Harriett. Throughout everything, she had only seen love from Harriett, for both Richard and her unborn baby.

  “So I assume the baby will go into foster care or into an adoption agency?”

  The doctor picked up some files from the station desk and before going on to his rounds he replied. “I guess that’s the best thing to do for that child, isn’t it?”

  With that, Jenny looked on again towards her patient’s room, her heart a bit more open to the unstable woman’s needs.

  * * *

  When Jenny and Doctor Johnson left the room, Harriett closed her eyes to try and find a bit of rest, as she knew that soon enough rest would not come so easily. The dimness of the room was relaxing; quietness enveloped her, caressing her very essence as she drifted off to a light slumber. The room remained quiet and still for a short while, the only sound was Harriett’s soft and rhythmic breathing.

  Suddenly there came a loud crashing noise as a tray of equipment flew across the room and smashed against the wall and then fell with resonating echoes onto the floor. Harriett, startled awake, held her wide eyes on the tray that had crashed into the wall nearest her head. A soft, faint voice could be heard, almost a whisper but not quite that clear.

  “Why do I keep getting weaker as time goes on? Damn you, Harriett! Having my child and without me there to raise it properly. How dare you! Like your betrayal alone wasn’t enough? Have you no shame? I will keep coming back until that baby is out of you, woman! Maggie huh? Naming the baby after my grandmother is the only sensible thing you will ever do in your miserable excuse for a life...”

  The voice rambled on, faint as ever, hardly discernible. The lightness of the voice matched by the lightness of the air that carried the spirit of the doctor. As he approached Harriett, he noticed she had fallen back asleep.

  “Harriett...my dear Harriett,” he whispers into her ear. “You used to be able to hear me so clearly before. It seems as though you can hardly hear me anymore.”

  Harriett stirred and in a sleepy voice she replied. “Is that you Richard?”

  * * *

  About thirty years later, the spirit that was Doctor Richard P. Edwards was now drifting through the rooms of an old motel on Oakwood Island. It would go room to room, looking at the lives that all these living people were wasting away.

  “Those newlyweds...HA! They don’t know what’s in store for them...all the lying and the deceiving....Oh yes, my Peggy Sue was a beautiful bride...’til she decided she wanted Teddy Boy...”

  He moved onto the next room, where the young man was still sitting slouched down on the floor next to the mini-fridge. His mouth hung open, drool oozing out of one corner.

  “What a fool; sitting there drooling all over himself.”

  Danny raised his head, reacting as if he had heard something, or someone. Danny mumbled through the thick drool that coated his tongue. “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  The voice had seemed very far away to both Danny and to Doctor Edwards, but now both could hear each other’s voices much clearer.

  “You can actually hear me?” the doctor’s spirit asked. Danny struggled a bit, trying to get up, but finding that he couldn’t, he remained on the floor, slouched and drooling.

  * * *

  The spirit of the doctor held such a fascination with Danny’s ability to hear his voice that he never noticed the beady black eyes watching him. He had felt these eyes before, never able to see them, but always sensed they were on him. Eyes that were not visible to the living but yet they were to the dead. They held a powerful gaze on him at times, so strong that he had to recoil and just stay still from the fear of what it was that held this gaze over him.

  On most days he had felt the stare, but now, he was distracted and the eyes peered ever so openly from up on the power line outside of the motel. The giant black bird, the crow with feathers as black as the darkest of nights was perched above the spirit of the doctor and this young man, or rather what used to be a young man.

  The man that sat slouched against the wall appeared as empty as a shell to the crow. His spirit and mind had been disconnected from his body somehow and without a vessel, a spirit was free to roam anywhere it so chose. The crow had seen this purposely done by man before, especially in their dream state. They would roam in spirit form, and then return to their physical bodies. This body however, was now seemingly unoccupied by its spirit. The doctor had somehow found a way to command the body of the young man. The dark bird perched on the power line above, it watched and listened.

  When Danny entered his room again and closed the door behind him, the bird flew away towards the centre of the island. It flew along an invisible path, without deviation, as if it knew precisely where it was going. It eventually reached a small clearing near the centre of Oakwood Island. It swooped down towards a small cabin in the clearing and straight into an opened window.

  The crow cawed once over a low chanting that also came from inside the cabin. Once the wings of the birds became still, so did the chanting voice still itself into quietness.

  Chapter 9

  Fury Unleashed

  September

  Willowisp Lane was a quiet street just on the outskirts of the populated area of Oakwood Island. Large oak and willow trees lined each side of the paved road, the branches overhead intermingling, creating a green canopy of leaves and vines. It was at the very end of this small stretch that stood an old two storey white house with black trim and antique style decorative shutters.

  On any normal day, the modest home would have blended well with the others and seamlessly sat among the rest of the nestled houses between the trees. Today was not a day to be named normal however, and the house at 67 Willowisp Lane held more than its share of abnormal scenery.

  The yellow tape with large black print letters that read:

  “Police Line – Do Not Cross”

  was draped across the oaks surrounding the property. The black and white police cars were scattered about in front of the residence. Two were directly parked in the driveway, no doubt belonging to the first officers to have arrived on the scene earlier that morning. There were three more along the side of the street, but these had their lights flashing, a beacon that seemed to attract onlookers to the scene.

  The closest emergency vehicle to the driveway was an ambulance. The paramedics were standing outside their white ghost ride, waiting for the coroner to arrive from
the mainland. The chill in the mid-September air could be felt each time the wind would pick up and the breeze would create a sudden fluttering of leaves overhead. They heaved simultaneously and then shook down in resounding ripples until the last of the fiery, fleeing breezes flowed through the crisp branches and cast itself further down in the direction it came.

  In the trees, there were several large, black crows perched in most of the branches. They sat silent, their beaks closed; beady eyes peering down at the scene where the officers and the onlookers stood. There must have been hundreds of them, black feathers mingling with the green leaves of the large oak trees. Hardly any cawing was heard, as though a silent prayer was being said and the entire murder of crows was part of the mourning.

  The mailbox at the end of the driveway had the family name of “Watson” hand painted in bold white lettering which contrasted brightly against the deep burgundy red. The house belonged to tow truck driver Lawrence and his wife Kathleen Watson. The couple had a teenage son, Eddy, who had been showing a genuine interest in following his father’s footsteps and stepping into the role of owner/operator of the tow truck service one day when his father could no longer be able to manage the company. The Watson family had been a small but very close family of three. They held an unwavering love for each other, as all families should. Today their togetherness did not flinch as they remained bonded in such tragic circumstances.

  Just beyond the red mailbox, outside the yellow police tape that fenced in the home, the crowd grew by a few more curious people and neighbours as time went on. Only half an hour had passed since the first police cars had arrived on the scene, their sirens wailing. They had broken the early Saturday morning silence, sending it hiding in the dew coated blades of grass on the front lawn of the residence.

  Shelley had been the one to call 911 when she’d walked by the Watson’s home, on her way next door to Lawrence’s garage to pick up her car. When she’d noticed the massive amount of blood smeared across the living room window, she had been terrified, but felt she had to go and take a closer look. Peering into the living room through the bloodied window, she could see there was a body behind the couch. Only a leg and a hand were sticking out from behind it, but the crimson splatter was everywhere; on the walls, on the furniture and even on the ceiling. Shaken and in a panic, she had called 911 using her cell phone, and ran next door to wait until the first police cars arrived on the scene.

  A small crowd of about twenty onlookers had now gathered, wondering what was happening and asking each other if they had any idea what was going on inside the home. Nobody seemed to have any answers. When Officer Ryan stepped outside, he was bombarded with a flood of questions from the gathering, to which he completely ignored, as dictated by police regulations. The crowd sensed something was terribly wrong inside the home, especially when they saw the paramedics coming out empty-handed. They feared the worse for their well-liked neighbours and friends. A grim foreboding enveloped the bystanders as the sun crept slowly upwards into the blue morning sky.

  Among the gathered group of people stood Gertrude Dawson. She had been driving down Willowisp Lane on her way to work. She came upon the scene shortly after having picked up her husband’s aunt Helen, who owned the nursery where she worked. Aunt Helen had not wanted to step outside of the car at first, worried of what she might see. But after a few minutes of watching the crowd growing larger, she decided to meet up with Gertrude again and wait to see if she could get a sense of what had happened. As she had been walking across the street from the car, Timmy Augustine had narrowly avoided her slow moving feet with his bike.

  He turned his face slightly and from his helmet-head he called out “Sorry, Mrs. Dawson!” and kept on his way until he had reached the closest spot to the yellow tape as possible. He was determined to not miss anything that came in or out of the Watson’s house. Timmy had his own theory of what had happened. He had made up the alien abduction scene in his head already, tall green aliens with no clothes and large, black soul-less eyes had come into the Watson’s home. Of course this was from the mind of an eleven-year-old paper boy that spent the entire summer watching science fiction movies and reading comics. He waited patiently with the others in the crowd, glancing back and forth from the blood in the living room window, to the paramedics and to the yellow tape that wrapped up the scene like a bow on a morbid gift.

  Among all the bystanders in the crowd, there was one that showed a different expression on his face. While others showed confusion, worry, and anguish, Jack Whitefeather’s face showed a calm and collected expression. His dark wrinkled skin and long grey hair were a familiar sight on Oakwood Island. He wore the same type of clothes that made him easily recognizable. This faded red shirt, old and worn blue jeans and slightly beaten up brown wide brimmed hat had been one of his select few fashion choices for the past several years. He stood among the others in the crowd, his long hair tousling slightly with the breeze as it passed by. When Officer Ryan McGregor came out of the home, it wasn’t long before he spotted Jack in the crowd who was standing with his arms crossed on his chest. He had stood there quietly, keeping to himself, not asking questions like most of the others were doing.

  As soon as Ryan passed near Jack and made eye contact with him, Jack spoke up, “This is like the Stuart’s killing, isn’t it? Their bodies partially eaten as if it was done by an animal....aren’t they, Ryan?” Jack uncrossed his arms and stood with his hands loosely on his hips now, his elbows jutting outward, exposing a few long feathers of brown, black and white that were looped in with his belt.

  Ryan’s walk suddenly became rigid. His eyes shifted from Jack and then over to the others in the crowd. His body language told Jack that what he had said was true, so he continued on.

  “They are like the animals found dead all over the island. The tracks. Footprints in the blood are like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  Jack was not asking Ryan, he was stating facts. He could tell by Ryan’s expressions and body language that he had surprised the officer with this information that nobody else was supposed to know yet.

  Jack already knew that Lawrence and Kathleen’s bodies were sprawled out dead on their bedroom floor. He already knew that Lawrence had his throat torn out and his left arm had been ripped off at the shoulder, threads of skin, ligaments and nerves jutting out from the tear in his arm. His wife lay on the floor in a pool of blood with her chest and abdomen torn open. The bite marks were clear and apparently made with very sharp teeth. Large pieces of flesh had been ripped off the bodies, but not cast aside. They had been torn off the bodies and eaten by the creature that had attacked them. Eddy had been found in the living room, his arm and leg the only thing visible from the living room window. If Shelley had been able to see behind the couch, she would have also seen that half his torso was missing from his body. There was no way for Shelley to know these things though, as she did not have Jack’s ways and eyes that saw everything.

  Jack knew and he wanted Ryan to know that he was aware of everything inside that house before Ryan could even process what he’d just seen with his own eyes. Once he was satisfied that Ryan’s lack of expression held the answer to his questions, he walked away from the chaotic scene and climbed into his truck. Jack closed the door behind him and sat there quietly by himself, lost in thought.

  Others that had seen him go to his truck knew that there was no point in asking him if he was alright, as he’d done this so many times before that to locals, his odd behaviour was now considered normal. He sat with his head slung down in front of him, his breathing deep and even, he appeared to be sleeping, but his rigid stance proved he was awake.

  When Ryan noticed Jack sitting in his truck, his mind brought him back to when he himself was but a kid. He had seen Jack doing this very same thing so many years ago as he had stood just a few feet away from the truck. What struck Ryan as odd with this memory was that it was during another horrible, tragic event that he had seen
Jack doing this.

  It had been a day almost thirty years before when they had found a body in the river. Although Ryan had been a kid back then, Jack had not looked any different than what he looked like today. The old 1950 red Ford truck was also the same one he had been sitting in back then, though it had been much newer looking in those days. The old man and the old beat up truck sat in the morning sun, while Ryan stared them down with an air of curious confusion.

  Overhead, there came a loud series of caws and wings fluttering about as the crows flew up and out of the oak and willow trees and off they went into the sky. Only one crow stayed behind on one of the higher branches. It cawed a few times and then swooped down onto the sill of the bedroom window. It peered inside, its head but a mere inch away from the glass, it stared and searched endlessly.

  * * *

  Inside the Watson’s bedroom, Detective Burke stepped around the bodies and over the pieces that had been ripped away from them. The blood was splattered across the walls, ceilings and furniture. The deep red contrasted brightly against the bright white bedding of the duvet that covered the couple’s bed. Now it had a splash of red that the investigators on the scene were examining closely.

  The coroner, Harold Randolf, was also the only specialized crime scene investigator that serviced the island, and until this year, he had only been called in a handful of times in all his twelve years with the force. It seemed that over the past year or so, the calls had been coming in more frequently. Both investigators were from the mainland. Oakwood Island only had a small police presence, as it required very little service. At least, this was how it had been for a long time, up until this year. The string of gruesome findings, especially over the past few months, had kept both Burke and Randolf coming back to the island too frequently.