The Sisters: A Mystery of Good and Evil, Horror and Suspense (Book One of the Dark Forces Series) (8 page)

She was glad she had cleaned the room up before going downstairs to clean that morning. “I have my moments. Come on, Sir Lancelot,” and she dragged him by the arm back out into the hall, where she insisted on going to every room and turning on each light. Every room was normal, and nothing was out of place.

“Looks clear to me,” Nathan said. “Are you okay with it?”

“I guess so. I could have sworn that I never turned that bedroom light on this morning, but I’ll just chalk it up to one more weird happening here. They’re starting to add up.”

Nathan smiled his boyish grin and and opened his eyes wide in mock terror. “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night―good Lord deliver us.”

She punched him lightly on the arm. “Where did you hear that? Sounds like old English, or something from school.”

“I used to read a lot of horror fiction and someplace I ran across that. It might have been Ray Bradbury.”

“Who?”

“You’d have liked him. Wrote a lot of great fiction, not so much about horror as about imagined horror. He could make even the most innocuous things curl your hair. Like your bedroom slippers there.” Nathan pointed to a pair of fuzzy pink slip-ons that Sarah had by the bed. “He could make a series of events and circumstances seem so real in a story that you wouldn’t be a bit surprised when the slippers suddenly crept up the bed and smothered the person sleeping in the bed―they’d both just wedge themselves in, and block breathing while the person’s body flopped and flipped and tried to get up. But when it was over, they’d still be just as dead.”

Nathan recounted this while looking at the slippers and was appalled to turn to Sarah and find her trembling.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Sarah. Jeez, I never was very good at saying the right thing at the right time.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said shakily. “I must really be jumpy at the thought of spending another night here alone. I don’t want any more bad dreams. Do you hear that, house?” she suddenly yelled. “I’m tired of all this and just want things to go back to normal. Keep your horrible secrets to yourself!”

“Sarah,” Nathan said quietly.

“I just want things to be normal again,” she said, sobbing. Nathan folded her into his arms.

“Hey, remember what I said about not letting anything happen to you?”

She looked at him with big, liquid eyes and nodded.

“Well, I meant that. I’ll sleep down on the sofa in the parlor tonight, if that will make you feel better.”

“Oh, Nathan, you don’t have to―”

“What, you’d rather stay here by yourself? Remember, I said you don’t have anything to prove. We’ll leave every light in the place on. I’m not much of a hero, and I can’t stop dreams from happening. But I think I could be of some help from any kind of normal intruder. Not that I think that’s going to happen. I just want you to be okay.”

She hesitated, then nodded, clinging to him like a child. “I really don’t know what’s happening,” she said.

“Well, let’s go downstairs for a while, build the fire up, and not tell ghost stories,” he said, taking her by the arm and descending the stairs. “And, I think I’ll lay off the wine tonight as well. I never was that much of a drinker.”

She laughed. “It’s just as well. I meant to go to the market today and buy more, but never made it. How about some hot chocolate?”

“That would be perfect,” Nathan said, and bent to build another fire.

my dear, do you know what is happening?

I’m sure it’s something delicious

it reminds me of the time back in the late 1890s when two children turned the root cellar into a hidden playroom―only, the plays they performed were dark and full of hatred and fear

oh, my dear. And just children, you say?

they all worked in town at odd jobs and the mother took in sewing to keep them in food and the people of the town took pity on them until strange things started happening like

fire, after fire, after fire in the town’s businesses. Usually they were the ones run by Italians―you know, they’re not much better than the Jews. And they suspected the girl, who was about fourteen, but it couldn’t have been her because she was always down here, lighting candles and reciting from a book she had found.

a book, you say

yes, and the book had symbols and prayers and chants that she and others who dressed in black joined her. They brought chickens at first and then pigs―my how they would squeal―and then the townspeople got together and forced them out of town. I’m not sure where they lived then. But

the locks were changed on the house and no one was allowed inside for a very long time

yes, dear, we know

and I was so lonely. Only the keeper would pass through from time to time and speak words of comfort to me, saying another time would come

and it has, hasn’t it my dear?

yes, darling. Yes, it has.

March, 1908

The sun is beginning to set over the Hudson River, throwing out rays of red and gold that bounce among the buildings in lower Manhattan and it lights, for a brief moment, the alleyway that leads through a clothesline-strewn neighborhood of Italian-Americans.

Carlos Androcci has thrown on his ragged topcoat and is stepping out of a dingy doorway into the fading daylight. He has worked hard that day, one of more than a hundred and fifty workers on the massive construction project that will be called the Queensboro Bridge (and, still later, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge). He has spent hours climbing the girders and steel cables like an ape, making fast the moorings on the island side of the river. He is tired, and wants nothing more than to slip into Shaunessy’s bar and wash the dust from his throat with some good Irish whiskey. He flips his collar up against the lingering chill of a late winter day and turns the corner onto 14th Street. A young woman with dark hair and striking features steps into his path. Androcci maneuvers to get by her, but she sidesteps directly into his path once again.

“Scuzi,” he says, thinking she is a neighbor that he does not recognize. But when she looks him straight in the eye, he knows she means to speak to him. He smiles. “Do we know each other?”

She smiles back, a disarming and coquettish feature on a very pretty face. “Not yet. But I’m hoping to change that.”

Androcci has gotten paid that day and the money is burning hot inside his front trouser pocket. He knows many prostitutes in New York, but none as attractive as this one.  “What is your name?” he asks.

She takes a step closer to him. He can smell strong but pleasant perfume. “Does it really matter?” she says. “Can you buy me a drink? I know a good place.”

Androcci hesitates. He has his heart set on Shaunessy’s, but he doesn’t want to be seen in his neighborhood bar with a streetwalker. Too many tongues would wag and he doesn’t need that. He looks up and down the avenue and then holds out his arm. She puts her hand lightly through the crook and clasps his big forearm firmly. The fire spreads from his wallet to his loins, and he looks forward eagerly to the time he will spend with this one. She cannot be more than twenty years old, at the most. He looks quickly at her lightly powdered face and bright red lipstick. She is genuinely pretty, walking in step with him. He feels as proud as a new husband, steering this young woman down the crowded avenue.

“Turn here,” she says as they get to the corner of Grand Street and Elizabeth Street. They turn right on Elizabeth Street and walk two blocks to Kenmare Street, where they turn right. On this street are many restaurants and fancy bars, not the kind Androcci usually chooses. But it is a special night, he decides. The bridge will be finished by early next year, they say, and he has been congratulated that very day by none other than the mayor himself, who toured the project and showered accolades on all the workers. This bridge will be among the grandest in the United States and even the world, he had said, and Androcci’s chest swells at the memory. He is proud to be a part of American history, and he is glad to make his family proud as well. Family means a lot to him. Family had taken him in after he had fled Cape May twenty-five years earlier, and sheltered him and kept his secret safe. But now he felt he could hold his head up again, and indulge himself in the simple pleasure this young girl could afford him. He is fifty-five years old but still strong as a young ox. Tonight he feels he is in the prime of his life, and feels wonderful, never better. “Where are we going?” he asks.

“In here,” the woman says, and waits for him to open the door of a small but elegant bar and restaurant named Pauly’s. They walk in, hand their coats to a red-haired hat-check girl behind a mahogany half-door, and walk into the restaurant. A maitre d’ immediately seats them at a table for two near the back, sliding the table out so they are both seated side by side on a plush velvet bench. He gives a menu to each one of them, but Androcci hands them back.

“Just Irish whiskey for me, and for you?” he turns to the young woman.

“I’ll take a gin and tonic,” she says, never taking her eyes off Androcci. A flame burns behind her dark lashes and she casually places her hand on his upper thigh, stroking it gently under the white tablecloth. Androcci feels his erection at once, as though it has stiffened in a second. The maitre d’ disappears and Androcci turns to look at his companion in the dim light. “So, what is your name, my pretty young friend, and why am I so lucky as to have your company this night?”

“My name is Stella,” she says, “and I already know yours. You are Carlos, the strongest man on the lower East side. It is said that you can bend a steel bar with your bare hands. Is that true?”

“They exaggerate,” he says. “My strength is only that of an ordinary man. But I have other talents.”

“I can’t wait to find out what those are,” she says, her white teeth gleaming in the candlelight from the table. A waiter appears with the drinks and she takes her glass and tinks it against his. “To chance meetings,” she says.

“To bona fortuna meetings,” he says, and clinks his glass against hers. He takes a long pull on the whiskey and lets the fiery beverage seep down and warm the inside of his stomach. She sips her gin and tonic and watches him over the rim of her frosted glass. He pulls a cigarette from a pack in his front shirt pocket and offers her one. She looks at it and smiles.

“Not my brand,” she says, “but thanks anyway.”

He strikes a match and lights his cigarette, watching the pale blue sheet of smoke drift listlessly up toward the gilded ceiling tiles. “So, what’s your brand? Pall Mall? Chesterfield?”

“Dunhill. It’s British. I doubt they have it here,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. I’m with you and that’s all that I want.”

But Androcci is feeling magnanimous. He has had a wonderful work day, perhaps the best in his life and he is in a classy restaurant with a beautiful young woman. “You want Dunhill, you’ll get Dunhill. I’ll be right back,” he says, and pushes the table back so he can ease his big, muscular frame from behind the table. In less than five minutes he is back, tearing the cellophane from the pack that he has bought from the hat-check girl. He taps on the pack until one slides out. Stella takes it, puts it between her cherry-red lips, and waits for him to strike a match. She inhales deeply and blows a stream of smoke away from the table.

“Thank you, Carlos,” she says, and rubs his thigh again, moving a little higher up this time. She raises her glass. “To new friends.”

He raises his and repeats the toast. She again sips her drink while he drains his glass. The fire from the Irish whiskey is beginning to go to his head. Perhaps he should order dinner, he thinks dully. He looks at Stella and grins, but he blinks several times. “Perhaps we should go to my place,” she says smoothly, sensing that he is already excited and ready for more. She does not want to wait until he is drunk and unable to leave the restaurant.

“All right,” he says, though he really wants another drink. But the raging fire in his loins is now demanding attention, and he knows that until he has consummated his desire, there will be no lasting satisfaction for him that night. Puzzled that only one drink could already make him feel so drunk, but somehow not caring, he stumbles out the front door with the young woman to the curb where a cab is waiting. It is the last thing he remembers that evening.

Candles are burning in a hundred places around the small room. It is dank, but the sulfurous smell of the burning wicks and the strong smell of tallow make the air cloying. The man, blindfolded and bound hand and foot, gags and vomits in the center of the white-tiled room. He weeps and pleads for his life. Hands are laid on his shoulders, and he is drawn back into a kneeling position, his hands in front of him. Tears and mucous mix on his face and run down into his mouth. He now prays, but the silence around him is complete, so the sounds fall flat as they leave his lips. Nothing stirs, and the five forms gathered around him in multi-colored robes are as still as church bells hanging in a belfry, awaiting the end of a funeral. A slim hand reaches out to the man’s head and peels off the blindfold. He blinks in terror, and looks into the eyes of a woman just past the age of thirty-five. Her countenance is self-assured, almost clinical, as she listens to his prayer.

“Our Father, in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done . . .” Furtively, he looks around the room. There are cloth hangings everywhere featuring demonic goings-on: horned men with pitchforks herding women and children into fiery furnaces; rosy-cheeked cherubs flying above men, weeping large, fine-textured tears, as the men are being tortured in unimaginable ways; a great, dark image of a half-man, half-wolf sitting on a throne, grinning, showing rows and rows of great, sharp teeth.

She makes no move to silence the man. But a thin, cruel smile crosses her face and she stretches her long arm over to an alcove with a single large pillar candle burning in it. From the alcove, she retrieves a photo, set in an elaborate frame. It shows a family: a seated, matronly-looking small woman with a young boy on her lap. To her right is her husband, a dapper, competent-looking man with one hand thrust deep into his pants side pocket. A gold watch chain runs in a long loop from the pocket to his belt loop. He is not smiling, nor are any of his family members. To the mother’s left, hard by her armchair, stands a young girl of ten or so. Her look is one of intense concentration, as though she is trying to penetrate the camera lens and will it to produce a photograph composed exactly in the way she wants it. It does not look like a happy family, but it is thrust nevertheless in front of the man’s eyes and held there, suspended by the woman’s slim and delicate hand.

“Do you know the man in this photo?” she calmly asks the prisoner.

“… on earth as it is in Heaven,” the man continues.

Without warning, the woman strikes the man hard across the face with the framed photograph, causing a deep cut in his forehead. The bleeding is instant and profuse and almost causes the man to black out. He wavers and slumps. Hands quickly bring him back into a kneeling position.

“I said for you to identify the man in this photograph, you immigrant pig,” says the woman.

For the first time, the man seems to be aware of what he is supposed to do. With dazed eyes, he tries to focus on the photograph, but cannot see it through the bleeding that now runs into both eyes and down his face. He begins whimpering again, and resumes praying.

“… on earth, as it is in heaven.” His voice quavers, but as he speaks the prayer his voice gathers strength.

“That’s my father in this picture, you Wop, you Italian slime. You killed him, and now you are going to die. For what you did to us―to my mother, my brother and me―all those years ago.”

And then the man does recognize the faces in the photograph, because the age of the man standing so self-assuredly with his family was no more than 40 at the time, and he looked much the same in the picture as he had on the day he came to the jobsite to press the foreman for an unreasonable deadline. They had both been much younger then, perhaps too young to settle so petty a dispute simply by talking. So the matter had come to blows, and the end had been swift, unexpected and tragic.

“It’s Mr. Claymore,” says Androcci.

The thin woman smiled, revealing large white teeth.  “That’s right. It’s Mr. Claymore: my father, my brother’s father and my mother’s husband.” The photo dances in front of the Androcci’s face, thrust too close for him to really make out much detail. And the blood continues to stream down his face. He is beginning to become dizzy, and a throbbing noise in his ears is getting louder. “Do you have any idea what you did to us that day?” the woman shouts.

The man wobbles his head from side to side numbly. He is beginning to sag and lose consciousness.

“Stella, get some water to clean this pig up,” the woman commands one of the other women standing in the semi-circle. Stella begins climbing a shallow set of steps to a tiny alcove.