The Sisters: A Mystery of Good and Evil, Horror and Suspense (Book One of the Dark Forces Series) (13 page)

October, 1891

William Bradford Morris, Architects, Philadelphia, have built the house at the corner of Beach Avenue and Howard Street under the direction of owner Thomas L. Tipton. He is a particular and secretive man, sallow to the point of melancholy, but he can be lively enough with a joke when in the mood. He has no family and has emigrated to America from Great Britain, where he reputedly amassed a fortune through speculation in gold futures. He has been free with his money philanthropically in Cape May and whatever doubts the locals may have held about his lineage have been put into perspective by his generosity and diplomacy in town matters. He has participated actively in the community, serving twice as town alderman, but has long since retired to his home on Ocean Avenue to write his memoirs.

Once a year he has opened his home to a gala party, benefiting the local charities, and, though he never has revealed much about his past or his present activities, he has been well-thought of. His age, while unconfirmed, was put at around 26 when he built the house. The local gossips often repeated the rumor that, since he did not court young women, he must be of another persuasion, and, indeed, he has leaned far more toward the collection of fine art than to the keeping of female company. This rumor was enhanced when he hired another British expatriate to be his personal servant and valet. There have never been women living in the household, neither maids nor housekeepers, but the house is always in spotless condition when the annual gala is held, each year in the fall.

Time passes, but Tipton seems to age very slowly. His youthful appearance, though not handsome, continues to endure well into his fifties and he sometimes jokes to those who remark on it that he has found the fountain of youth during his world travels. Other than this off-hand remark, he only explains that he comes from a line of very long-lived individuals. Since his health is still quite good and he does not appear to be more than 60, even to his physician, on his actual one hundredth birthday, he enjoys both good health and continued good will in the community. He has outlived all who knew him from years before.

No great curiosity is aroused over this. Brits are reputedly a long-lived people and so he continues to live as he has always done, holding his gala each year, and continuing to be a patriarch of the town, consulted in important matters involving civic development of the area. In only one area is he held in some disapproval. Over the years he has steadfastly refused to join―or even set foot in—a church of any denomination. When asked about this, he attributes his dislike for organized religion to a puritanical upbringing. But he always manifests an outwardly steadfast belief in all things holy. He is rarely questioned on this and, when he is asked point-blank about it, he replies only with terse answers that lead to empty silences. So, no one asks any longer.

He has kept his arms covered at all times over the years, so no one has ever seen the tattoos that once marked him as a seafaring man originally named William Willingham, first mate on a doomed vessel originally christened the Elizabeth Ann.

It was early Wednesday afternoon at Nathan’s house.

“Nathan, can you bring me a towel, please?”

The question, soaked in innocence, carried with it a stimulation Nathan had often felt but seldom acted upon. “Sure,” he replied nonchalantly, but his feet stumbled as he moved to the hall closet where linens and towels were kept. He reached a long arm in through the bathroom door, letting great coils of steam escape.

“I can’t quite reach it. Can’t you bring it in?” Sarah’s voice became teasing and openly free of innocence.

“You’ll be able to reach it just fine when you get out of the tub. I’ll just leave it hooked on the doorknob.”

“Goodness, what a fine sense of chivalry!” Sarah chided with a petulant tone in her voice. “I’m going to have to find a knight with fewer scruples if I’m ever going to have any fun.”

Nathan blushed up to the roots of his brown hair. “This isn’t the time or place for fun,” he said through the door. “Maybe you can block out the past 62 hours, but I, for one, am going to stay on my toes.”

“What an uncomfortable position,” Sarah said with a laugh, and opened the door suddenly, swathed only in the towel he had brought. “I have nothing to fear, then, with my knight on guard. What’s for dinner?”

Nathan thought he would burst with sexual energy. How the hell do these things happen when there are life-and-death issues being played out? he wondered. The human body really is an amazing machine to be able to compartmentalize abject fear into one section of the brain and hold it at bay while the reproductive organs kick into high gear.

“You’ll be the main course if you don’t get some clothes on in a hurry,” Nathan said huskily. “I’m not as strong self-willed as you think.”

“Glad to hear that,” Sarah said as she swooped by into the bedroom. She let the towel fall casually to the floor and began stepping into her panties. By an incredible act of self-control, Nathan was able to stand there and wonder at this woman’s beauty and ability to tantalize him. But only for an instant.

“God, you are so beautiful,” he said at last, and crossed the room to her. She dropped the sweater she had picked up and the two of them fell headlong onto the bed, consumed in spite of their circumstances by a more basic desire. Slowly, they made love while the sun traveled across the sky, far above the canopy of gathering storm clouds, and they discovered each other’s needs and wants intuitively, with no words ever spoken, and no motion or action out of rhythm. It was as though they had known each other for years, and had made love thousands of times before, but each time discovering new things about each other, like a blues musician who plays a well-known song but imbues it each time with a new riff, a new chord change at the right time, a new intonation—always something to keep the song fresh and natural and a thing of beauty.

At last Nathan spoke. “Sarah?”

“Mm-hm?”

“What would you think about doing some additional research on our houses—you know, check on other owners through the deed records and see if we can come up with a clue about what’s happening.  I dunno—maybe there is some leftover ghost that’s still haunting these places.”

“Come on—do you really believe in ghosts?”

“After what’s been happening to us, don’t you?”

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Great! Let’s head over to the county deeds office with what’s left of the afternoon.”

And this they did—but not before making love again—twice more.

They also decided to visit the local library.

This proved to be a long, weary search through local history and genealogy records. Nathan had probed his own house’s history first, checking deed records and matching them to death records and newspaper accounts to try and determine a pattern of some kind. Then, they did the same with Sarah’s house and the house on the corner. It proved to be a very inconclusive journey, though not without tantalizing hints.

Nathan’s house had been constructed originally in 1884 by a local contractor named Benjamin Storey. The deed and permit records showed that the original owner’s name was Douglas Steele, of Philadelphia, PA, and that he had lived in it for 20 years, at which time Nathan’s great-grandfather had bought it. Alfred Benjamin Forrest bought the house in 1904 as a gift to his new wife and they used it as a summer home until his death in 1944―a death put down officially by the county coroner at the time as simple heart failure.

Nathan explained to Sarah that during this time a whole new generation of Forrests had grown up at the shore, arriving each summer like migrating seabirds from points up and down the East Coast, to spend time in Cape May with the elder Forrest, a man as generous as he was rich. In the year 1941, however, there was a lapse in the family reunions while the war in Europe pushed into high gear. Nathan’s grandfather Jonathan―one of three brothers and two sisters―fought as a Marine while his brothers commanded naval destroyers in the Pacific. Late in the war, Jonathan was deployed along with thirty thousand other Marines to the tiny Pacific atoll of Okinawa, to hold it until relieved. This they did, but not before Jonathan, a second lieutenant twice decorated, was stricken and killed by a Japanese sniper bullet in the Spring of 1945, barely six months before they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus ending the terrible world conflict that had cost millions of lives at the mere charismatic whim of two world leaders and a handful of coat-tail dictators.

In that same year, Nathan’s great-grandfather Alfred had also died. And so it was that, by one of those unfortunate coincidences occasioned by fate now and then, Lt. Jonathan Forrest arrived at his father’s funeral, but not as one of those gathered in black at the house in Cape May to mourn the passing of the aristocratic patriarch of the Forrest family. Jonathan arrived in Cape May in a flag-draped casket and shared the funeral service with Alfred―a small service conducted in the family parlor, where both men were laid out in caskets on sawhorses.

The house descended in that same year to Edward Forrest, Jonathan’s eldest son who, at age six, was much too young to understand that he was now the owner of a large, well-appointed home on the Jersey shoreline. His grief at the passing of both his grandfather and father at the same time was intense, and the boy subsequently avoided any of the family gatherings at the shore for many years.

On one of the only two times he did go, he claimed that his grandfather and father had both come to visit him in the dead of night in his bedroom, his grandfather in the natty suit in which he had been buried and his father as a war-decorated soldier with half his chest missing. The boy was 10 at the time, and the house full of guests was awakened by his terrified shrieks.

Edward did not go back to the shore until the age of 47, when, after a long series of hospitalizations for depression and schizophrenia, he killed himself with a single gunshot to the roof of his mouth, standing in the house’s parlor. The year was 1985, and Nathan was five years old when he came to the funeral. He never forgot it.

The body of his uncle Edward lay in state in the family parlor in a closed casket, and, as tradition dictated, Nathan took his turn along with several of his cousins in sitting up with the body. Midway through the dreary vigil, Nathan thought he saw a mist rise through the sealed coffin lid, a mere wisp as it were, that solidified over the next ten minutes as a floating cloud. Nathan cried out, but his cousins saw nothing, and tried to comfort him in his fright. Eventually, Nathan’s father, Jeremy, came to the boy and led him away, crying, convinced that he had seen his uncle passing into the next life, writhing and twisting, and seemingly in great agony at the transition.

Nathan was recovered from this experience by the following summer, however, and gathered with his cousins once more at the shore of the house, which had passed to his Aunt Millie.  And so it was to her house that he came to play in the surf and to take piano lessons from the aging spinster. Millie took a special interest in the boy, who seemed to have both a creative and a practical side to him―evenly balanced, she would sometimes say to him―and taught him a love for the house that he carried with him into adulthood and, eventually, when his aunt died without survivors very early in January, 2014, to his ownership of the house itself on Beach Avenue.

She had lived in a nursing home in Cape May and not at the house on the shore for four years before her death, so it was with more than a little trepidation that Nathan had made this mid-winter trip as its new owner. He had never forgotten the strange evening he had spent sitting up with the body of his uncle, but he had not let it detract from his enjoyment of the house, and he had never mentioned the incident again to anyone outside his family. Indeed, after all these years, he had begun to convince himself that he had not witnessed the apparition at all―that it was merely the natural consequence of years of surfside bonfires and ghost stories.

Now, as he sat back in the hard library chair, he was not so sure.

Sarah’s search was little more productive. She saw that the house had been built by Edmund Joseph Claymore, Sr., and that the house had passed upon his death that year to his wife, and then to his daughter Moira, when the wife died in 1892. Moira was nineteen years old.

Sarah laughed. “She was my great aunt and apparently quite a character. Lived to be almost 80 years old. She wouldn’t let any of the family near the house while she was alive. When she died in 1952, the house was inherited by my grandfather John Claymore—he was Aunt Moira’s nephew, but not any special favorite of hers. The truth is, Aunt Moira’s house was more or less condemned by the town of Cape May for being in severe disrepair and he got the house by default in probate proceedings when she died.”

“So she didn’t have any children?”

“Aunt Moira was thought to be a lesbian, which was one of the kinder things said about her in the family. My father said she just seemed kind of odd. He said she had this way of, like, staring off into space as though her body was there but the rest of her wasn’t.”

Nathan rose from the hard back chair in which he had been sitting. “You can fill me in on the rest of Moira’s alleged lifestyle and any other tidbits about your family on the way back to your house.”

“Surely you don’t mean we’re going back to my house?”

“Well, what’s the worst that can happen? Transportation to another time and place? Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, as they say.” Nathan grinned.

“I’m serious, Nathan. I don’t want to go back there just yet. There’s more you ought to know.”

“OK, what else?” Nathan said.

“Well, for starters, Aunt Moira was reputedly a witch.”

“A what?”

“A witch, but not in the nice Bewitched way. See, family history has it that Aunt Moira witnessed the murder of my great grandfather Edmund Sr., and that she swore an evil oath on that day to get revenge.”

“Wow. And did she?”

“Well, no one knows for sure. As far as I know, she took the real story of what happened to the grave with her. Kept the house like a pig sty until my grandfather inherited it. She was quite the pack rat, apparently. He lived in Cincinnati, where most of the rest of my family still lives, and he hardly ever set foot in the place. They think New Jersey is a foreign country.”

“Well—never mind, just kidding. Go on.”

“Anyway, he kept the place up since the town was going to take it over if he didn’t, but like I said, nobody ever got to be inside it again on a regular basis until my uncle Joseph got hold of it.”

“Your grandfather died and left it to your uncle Joseph?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t really take care of it, either. He was a dancer on Broadway in New York. He would just come down here with a bunch of his boyfriends and party until the local police shut them down every night.”

“Boy, and I thought my family was a little off the straight and narrow. No offense, but those dry deed records didn’t say anything about witches or gay uncles.”

Sarah laughed again, and it was a pleasure for Nathan to hear. He enjoyed everything about this amazing woman, and he didn’t want the moment to end.

“Well, it gets boring pretty quickly now. Uncle Joseph died in 1989 at the age of 40 and the house passed to my father, Edmund III. He was an architect and put a lot of money into restoring the old place. It wasn’t until he and my mother got hold of it that any of the rest of the family really even knew anything about it or its history. My parents were killed in an automobile crash three years ago and the house passed into my name.”

“You started coming to the shore as a child, then?”

“Yes. And we would pass these stories among ourselves late at night, when my cousins and girlfriends from South Philly would be here with us.” She looked again at Nathan with big, imploring eyes. “Do we really have to go back to my house?”

“Sarah, we’ve got to do it sooner or later.”

“Let’s go in the morning.  Meanwhile, we can stop by the store and get some groceries.  I’ll fix dinner for the two of us.”

“That does sound like a better plan. What shall we get for dessert?”

She gave him a mischievous grin. “I’ll give you three guesses. Come on, let’s go.”