The Sisters: A Mystery of Good and Evil, Horror and Suspense (Book One of the Dark Forces Series) (10 page)

“I’ll do my best. Fresh towels are in the hall closet.”

“Thanks. I’ll be right back.”

Nathan grabbed his coffee mug, refilled it, and then went up the stairs to find himself a thick green towel and a new bar of soap, and was inside Sarah’s shower within minutes. He decided against singing, even though the urge to do so was so strong he could barely fight it. When he finished, he stepped out of the shower and toweled off. He made a mental note to run up to his house and change clothes, if possible, before breakfast. He dressed quickly and descended the stairs.

well, my dear, the Presburys are gone, but what about all these remaining people?

we’ll just have to deal with them just as we have all the others.  Remember the way we—

tortured that one young family?  Kept it up for days and days, until they were all insane and the—

way that poor boy’s head split open like a ripe watermelon when she hit him with the axe! It was all we could do—

not to stop screaming, but the shadow took him and never gave him back. That was very satisfying. We talked about him for months, but they never—

could put all that baby’s intestines back inside. What a terrible mess! And the Roberts’ found her brother that same day with a butcher knife in his hands and blood all over—

the piano, turning all the ivory keys the most peculiar shade of red . . .  

What first struck Nathan was the absence of something that should have been there. The pleasant smells of coffee and breakfast-cooking from just a few minutes ago―before he went upstairs to shower―were gone. The second thing to strike him was the absence of any sounds at all.

“Sarah?” he called out. No answer. He quickened his pace and hit the bottom of the stairs at a dead run. “Sarah, where are you?”

He ran into the kitchen. Not only was Sarah not there, no breakfast of any kind was being prepared. He looked around wildly. This is not possible, he thought. He placed his coffee cup on the counter and noticed that there was no coffee maker in this kitchen. In fact, he was dumfounded to discover that this was not Sarah’s kitchen at all.

“Sarah!” he yelled. “Where are you?” But only his echo came back to him. This house’s kitchen had not been updated like his and Sarah’s. Old tile, in shades of pink and gray, covered the countertops and an old Hotpoint stove and refrigerator from the 1950s sat against the wall. Wallpaper was peeling off the beadboard behind it and hanging in tatters, and a single fly-specked bulb hung from the ceiling. “This is insane,” he cried. “This can’t be happening. Sarah! I can’t find you. Where are you? Where am I?”

He ran from the kitchen to the parlor and over to the great room. In the parlor he found a black grand piano. And in the great room he discovered French doors that led onto a tiled patio, exactly as it had been in the moonlight from his dream. Now, however, the morning sun had gone behind a cloud and, as he looked out, the threat of more snow loomed. He looked at his watch and it was still only 8:05 a.m. So time had not changed―only his location. But how? And to what purpose?

His only thought now was to get out of that house and back to Sarah’s before she started worrying about him. He quickly retraced his steps back to the hall and found the front door padlocked on the inside.

“Oh, man, tell me I’m dreaming,” he said. But no voice came to him this time. He ran to the kitchen and pulled on the back door. This, too, was padlocked but the glass panel inlaid in the door crashed easily outward when he wrapped a kitchen towel around his elbow and gave it a quick punch. Wrapping the towel around his fist, he cleared the window of shards and quickly climbed through and out onto the back stoop. Here he found himself in the overgrown yard he had seen in the moonlight in his dream.

“This is just a little too much for me,” he said. “There is no damned way for me to explain this. I go upstairs in one house and come down in another a block and a half away.” The wind suddenly picked up, blowing around the house from the ocean and Nathan realized how cold he was, clad only in his work shirt and jeans. He had left his coat at Sarah’s. “It must be below freezing again,” he said, “and some questions really need answering.” He went out the back gate, which was not padlocked, and made his way back to Beach Avenue.

He was worried about Sarah. Any force that could physically and in real time transport him from one house to another while he was in the shower was certainly capable of harming her while he was away. The question still remained as to how this was done so easily and flawlessly, so he didn’t discover his whereabouts until he reached the kitchen, but the explanation―and there had to be one―would have to be left until later, when he found Sarah all right.

He was running now, down Beach Avenue, and passing startled people out strolling the avenue with their dogs. He passed his own house and broke into a sprint. Sarah’s house was in the very next block and he doubled his speed. Sweat was dripping from his brow as he pulled up―in front of an empty lot, where Sarah’s house should have been. The ground was as level and overgrown as though the lot had never been developed.

“Oh, my God!” Nathan said, and the people passing by wondered if this young man, standing in a bitter ocean wind, was all right. He put his hands up to his head and fell to his knees in front of the lot, which had no fence, no driveway, no outbuildings―nothing to indicate that Sarah or her house had ever existed. After a long moment, someone touched his shoulder and he looked up to see a man in a bowler hat and high cravat. He had a kindly face, the face of a minister, perhaps, and he looked very concerned.

“Young man, is there some trouble?”

Nathan didn’t know what to say. Yes sir, I was just here fifteen minutes ago, upstairs taking a shower, and now the house doesn’t exist, and then here you are, looking like someone from the 1800s. His thoughts whirled crazily in his head and he began to shake violently. The cold wind, coupled with his light clothing and recent exertions, were causing a sudden warmth to flood his body. He began to feel light-headed. Then he began to sway, and slumped to the ground, with a curious knot of troubled faces surrounding him. He slipped further and further into unconsciousness.

Sarah’s face was the first one he saw when he awakened in the hospital room. His eyes were having trouble focusing, but she bent her head down to his face and kissed him. “Sarah?” he said thickly. “I—“

“Shh—don’t try to talk,” she said. “I’m just glad to see your eyes open. We were beginning to wonder.”

“Wonder, what?” and he tried to put together a more coherent stream of words, but there were none. Sarah’s face floated in front of his, full of worry, before being replaced by a brisk nurse in an old-fashioned white, starched cap and uniform. She began busily taking his vital signs as Sarah stepped back from the bedside. “Wait,” he said weakly, “I don’t understand why I’m here, or even where I am.”

“Well,” said the nurse briskly, “you are in the Cape May General Hospital and you were brought in two days ago for hypothermia that went directly into pneumonia and other complications. You wouldn’t regain consciousness and everything we did to bring you back just seemed to make you go further away.” She finished taking his blood pressure and shoved a thermometer in his mouth: the old-fashioned kind with a mercury bob at one end. “Put this under your tongue and keep it there,” she said.

“Wait,” he mumbled. “This still isn’t right. Where’s Sarah?” But the two women were gone, as quickly as they had appeared.

Nathan felt too weak to get up, even though every fiber in his being said he should. None of this was right, but he was having to fight his way back to consciousness to begin making any sense of it. All right, Nathan thought to himself, first things first. My temperature right now is normal―I can tell that just by feeling my forehead. And I can’t be in a real hospital because I don’t have one of those weird gowns on. He looked down and saw that he was still clad in his work shirt and jeans. He wriggled his toes and found that even his Weejuns were still on his feet. “Who is doing this, and why?” No one was in the room, which was, now that he could see better, like one of his own upstairs guest rooms. Who the hell were these people, how did they get into my house, and what was going on? The questions and events seemed to be flowing so fast that he could scarcely keep up with them. With an effort he raised his head from the pillow and felt a pounding throb that caused him to stop abruptly. After a moment or so, however, the throbbing subsided and Nathan swung his legs over to the side of the bed and out from under the covers. The bed was one that his grandfather had made. He had slept in it many times. It was made of redwood and could be stacked on top of an identical one across the room when necessary to make bunk beds. It felt strange to Nathan to be tiptoeing his way across the room to his own bedroom doorway in his own house. But he seemed certain that the two women would be back soon if he didn’t hurry and get out of there. He wondered who they were, and, if it wasn’t Sarah who had kissed him, who was it?

Nathan made his way over to his own bedroom and looked in.  He entered and  found that all his clothing was in its proper place, and waiting. Hesitating only a moment, he opted for a snug Polo sweatshirt and fresh jeans, and put on thick socks before slipping into his Weejuns again. At least this is going well, he thought, and cautiously made his way down the stairs, expecting at any moment to see someone who would ask him what he meant by sneaking out of his own house like this. He met no one, however, and he let himself out the front door, locking it tightly behind him. “Let’s try this again,” he said, and he went down the walk to the boulevard. The bitter wind knifed at him as he walked. His heart leaped when he came close enough to see its gables rising above the trees, just as they should have been. He went up the wide steps and knocked on the door. Sarah quickly answered it and let him in.

“Where have you been?” she asked with genuine concern. “I thought you were just going to get a shower. Did you go back to your house?”

“Well, yeah, kind of,” he said, for he didn’t know what else to say at the moment. He looked around him and saw his jacket hanging on the hall tree, and smelled once again the fresh aromas of a big breakfast cooking. “Have I been gone long?”

“What kind of question is that? Nathan, are you all right? I was really starting to worry about you. I started looking for you about a half-hour ago when you didn’t come back into the kitchen.”

“Well, I have just had a very strange experience that I hope doesn’t repeat itself. Have you been here the whole time?”

Sarah still eyed him with worry, and she could tell that whatever had happened had shaken him. Indeed, he wavered a little when he walked, so she had to prop him up on the way down the hall. “Nathan, I’m going to call a doctor.”

“No. I mean, I’d really prefer you didn’t.” He sat heavily in a kitchen chair and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m still not sure that what I think happened really happened. But it’s just one more out-of-body experience that keeps adding up here. This one really took me by surprise. If I had been asleep, I’d write it all off as a dream.”

Sarah pulled out two large plates from the oven, brimming with eggs, bacon and homemade biscuits. “Are you sure you’re well enough to eat?” she asked. She looked around. “Where’s your mug? Upstairs?”

“Not exactly,” Nathan answered with a wan smile. “Unless I’m crazy, which I may be, it’s sitting on a pink and gray countertop in the kitchen of the old abandoned house at the corner of Beach Avenue and Howard.”

It was an hour later.

They stood in the freezing wind outside the back door of the abandoned corner house. On the stoop was broken glass, and the open window gaped before them. They were not surprised, but neither were they comforted by the sight.

“I guess we’ll add breaking and entering to our list of possible felonies if we go in for that cup,” Nathan said. “Best let me go, and you wait out here.” He started to clamber through the window.

“Oh, no, Spiderman. You really are crazy if you think I’m going to wait around on this stoop for something else weird to happen. We’re going to stay together every minute from now on.” She climbed through the door after him.

The old house was freezing cold and―there was something else―a malevolence that seemed to creep across the floor and up their pant legs, and into the very marrow of their bones, as though spirits were at loose in this house that did not like intruders.

“Sarah, I think maybe we’ve made a mistake coming here,” Nathan said. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but there’s more to the dream I had last night—it was about this place.”

Sarah was clinging to Nathan’s arm and occasionally swatting at something Nathan couldn’t see. “There’s something following us. Can’t you feel it? There, over by the refrigerator.”

Nathan turned his head quickly and did see something, although he would have sworn it was just a wisp of smoke, like the mists that are put out by a fog machine. “It’s nothing. Look, there’s the cup. Let’s just pick it up and get the hell out of here.”

Sarah shook her head. “No. I think that whatever is in this house is in all the houses along this stretch of Beach Avenue and I think it may be causing our weird dreams. And I don’t think we’re going to find answers any more convincing than the ones we find here. Let’s have a look around before we go. We’re already here. And if the cops come and find us, at least they’ll have guns. Look at us. What do we have?”

The question made Nathan feel briefly foolish. He looked around for a weapon, and opened a drawer. In it he found a butcher knife. “This is getting weirder and weirder. I feel like I’m in some kind of scary movie. The ones where the audience says, ‘Don’t go in there! What are they thinking?’”

Sarah laughed, an unexpected sound in the silent old house.

“I imagine they’re also saying, ‘A lot of good that butcher knife is going to do against people who are already dead,’” she said. “But, here we are, and here is where we’ll stay until we get some answers. Do you hear that, house?” This last part she shouted, as she had in her own home. And the answer that came back to her was the same as before, only more silent and more malevolent. The house itself was getting colder and the wind was picking up again offshore and blowing a new storm their way. It swooped in around the doorframes and window casings and seemed to make the sheets and blankets that covered the furniture in this house move with a life all their own.

Sarah went to the counter and picked up the coffee mug. “I don’t suppose you thought to bring a flashlight with you?” she asked Nathan.

Amidst the talk of the young couple, a shadow had been forming behind them in the doorway to the cellar. It now grew to man-shape and took a step forward. Sarah froze in mid-sentence, sensing its presence before it took her.

It was as though she had just disappeared before Nathan’s eyes, but even in the dim light of the kitchen, he could see the blackness that now lay between him and the wall. “Sarah!” he yelled, for the room was suddenly filled with wind, as though the house did not exist at all and he was standing alone on the beach. “Sarah, where are you?” he yelled into the deafening wind. He reached into the blackness and saw his own arm disappear up to the elbow. The shadow turned to regard Nathan. Its red, glowing eyes were familiar to him, and as it turned, it reached out to take him as well. But Nathan quickly pulled his arm back and stabbed at the shadow. From deep within it, he heard a laughing sound, then a screaming sound. It was Sarah, though she sounded very far away. Nathan was still trying to decide whether to stab again and attack the shadow, or fall back for fear of hurting Sarah with the knife, when the apparition suddenly turned and shambled off toward the front of the house, as though it had been called.

No hunting dog could have been given greater heart than to see his prey turn and run. With a hoarse shout, he leapt after the shadow―but, rounding the corner of the kitchen door into the hallway, he found he was too late. The shadow was gone.