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 Page A

air, as you might expect in any basement, but that was all.
    “What in the name of God just happened?” Nathan said in a hoarse whisper. And it came flooding back to him: the instant in which he had seen the eyes.
    They were wide-set, and seemed to glow with a luminescence all their own, turning, turning toward him, slowly as though in a dream, and regarding him coldly. They were not at animal height, but at man height, about seven feet from the floor. But is that really what he saw or just what he thought he saw? Nathan shook his head and stood up carefully on the creaking wooden step. This was all some kind of temporary mental aberration, he thought, as he walked to the bottom of the stairs and picked up the flashlight and bat. Straightening up, he felt again the bile that teetered on the back of his tongue. But as he swept the cellar again with the light, he saw nothing and heard nothing except the muffled sounds of the storm outside. He went up the stairs slowly, forcing himself not to look back. And, upon reaching the top, where the kitchen light shone out brightly, he closed the door and put the bat and flashlight back into the tall pantry.
    “This is all one big illusion, and I’m not buying it,” he said. Yet, doubt gnawed and slavered like a hungry rat around the edges of his reason.
    Sarah was sleeping soundly in her house as Nathan was closing the door to his basement.
    She had gone upstairs after leaving him, slipping out of her jeans, and climbing quickly into the big four-poster bed wearing only her sweater and panties, trying to escape the chill that swept in from outside. She rarely went to sleep quickly but tonight seemed to be a night for exceptions and she dropped almost immediately into a deep sleep.
    She was in a library―not the kind they had in town, with rows and rows of Dewey Decimal coded books and periodicals―but an old-fashioned parlor with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and volumes bound beautifully in leather and gilt.
    The smell of roses filled the air and, as she turned in a circle in the middle of the room, she saw bouquets of roses everywhere―on settees, on butler’s tables, on etageres, and on a fine oak table, set squarely in the middle of an octagonal bay window area.
    On the table was the largest bouquet by far, some three dozen fragrant long-stemmed roses in the most beautiful leaded crystal vase she had ever seen. Light from an elaborate chandelier overhead shimmered through the bevels in the elegantly cut glass and threw it in a hundred different hues around the room.
    Sarah looked down and found she was dressed in an elegant black sequined evening gown, made of the finest velvet, and that she clutched a small beaded bag.
    Where am I? she thought, and heard music from a Victrola playing somewhere. It sounded like an ancient phonograph record she had once heard at an antique store in South Jersey.
    toot-toot-tootsie, good-bye, toot-toot-tootsie, don’t cry
    The crooner crooned and Sarah continued to turn in place, in the middle of this storybook library, with a ladder close by, a ladder on wheels on a track, and she saw that the track went completely around three-fourths of the room, allowing easy access to the top-most books in the collection.
    She turned another quarter-turn and saw the tidy fire set carefully in the hearth, with a leaded stained-glass firescreen placed in front of it. An iridescent blue peacock was fashioned into the middle of the panes of cobalt and hunter-green glass, giving a three-dimensional perspective to the lavish outdoor scene depicted on the screen: a hunt from the middle of the 18th century, in search, perhaps, of this very bird magnificently strutting and warming itself in front of the economical fire.
    It really came as no surprise to Sarah when she realized that this was the parlor in her own house, and that she apparently was a guest―or perhaps the hostess―at a party that was about to begin.
    She crossed the room to the wide oak mantel