The Sisters: A Mystery of Good and Evil, Horror and Suspense (Book One of the Dark Forces Series) by Don Sloan Read Free Book Online

storm was gathering momentum, throwing wave after wave of heavy snow at the eastern shoreline and points well inland. The Adirondack chairs were already coated in three inches of wet snow and Nathan knew it was only the beginning. He unlocked his front door and stepped inside.
    Instantly, he noticed a difference, and it was not a pleasant one.
    It was as though a large animal had died in the basement three or four days earlier, parked against the heating ducts that led from the basement to the upper floors. The odor was so foul and so intense that Nathan gagged involuntarily and put his hand to his mouth and nose. Surely the decay could not have set in so abruptly while he was away from the house at dinner, he thought, and he reached for the hallway light switch. As the lights flared, he moved toward the back of the house and the entrance to the basement stairs. He wasn’t sure why, but he reached into a tall cupboard and extracted a baseball bat, a relic from his visits to the shore with cousins, along with a big, solid Nightwatch flashlight with halogen beam.
    He opened the door to the basement tentatively, still expecting to find a rational explanation for the smell. In truth, he thought he would find a couple of Cape May high school kids in his basement with a fresh cow patty or some half-rotten relic from the countryside―something they no doubt intended as a joke. Nathan crept down the stairs in the darkness, hoping to hear adolescent giggling in one of the corners.
    Instead, he heard a noise he could not quite place. Nathan flipped on the basement light switch, but no light came on. That’s strange, he thought.  He stopped, one foot still on the wooden step of the staircase. Something heavy was being dragged across the cement floor in the darkness.
    Nathan switched on the big flashlight, holding it shoulder-high, police style. “Who’s there?” he said. The dragging noise stopped, but when Nathan flooded the area with light there was nothing there. “Come on,” he said gruffly, “this is no time for jokes. Where the hell are you?” The dragging noise resumed, right where the beam of his light was focused, not ten feet away. Bile crept into Nathan’s throat on furry little feet and he choked.
    This is impossible, he thought.
    Down here, the sounds of the storm were muted, the wind faint and far away. The stench, however, was nearly unbearable and Nathan put the back of his hand to his mouth.
    He swept the cellar again with the big light and saw nothing out of place. But the dragging noise continued, receding now into one of the far corners, as though a bag of rotten potatoes or some other object too heavy to pick up was being pulled with deliberate care to its destination.
    “Why can’t I see something?” he asked.
    And then he did.
    Fainting was not something that had happened often in Nathan’s life. He recalled once he did, when he was having stitches taken out of his hand after a childhood accident. Then, later, when he had sliced open a finger and seen the fresh fillet of skin carved down to the white bone, spurting blood like a water pump, he went out cold.
    And so it was that on this third time in his life, he came back to consciousness, wondering for an instant where he was and what had happened. He was lying halfway down the cellar stairs, leaning against the cold cinder block wall. The baseball bat he had carried earlier was at the bottom of the staircase along with the heavy black flashlight, now illuminating nothing except the usual basement oddments, stacked here and there.
    The muzzy taste was still fresh in Nathan’s mouth and he licked his lips and blinked his eyes. The darkness in the basement was complete, except for the halo of light thrown by the flashlight at the bottom of the steps. But Nathan noted one other thing immediately: the horrible, stifling dead animal stench was gone. Not just diminished, but utterly gone, as though it had never been.
    A slightly damp smell was in the