Free 22 - Ghost Beach by R.L. Stine - (ebook by Undead)

much
darker without the moon. Rain kept blowing into my eyes. And the rocks were
slippery and wet.
    I stumbled twice, fell forward, scraping my knees and elbows. The wet rocks
kept sliding under my sneakers, rolling down toward the beach.
    Another jagged bolt of lightning stretched across the sky, making the cave
glow white above us.
    We stopped at the ledge in front of the dark cave mouth. My entire body
trembled. From the rain. From the cold. From fear.
    “Let’s just warm up inside for a moment,” Terri suggested.
    The three Sadlers clung together. “No, we can’t. We’re too scared,” Louisa
replied.
    “Just for a second,” Terri insisted. “Just to wipe the rain from our eyes.
Look—it’s coming down in sheets.”
    She practically shoved Louisa and her brothers into the cave. Nat began to
cry. He held on tightly to his sister.
    A roar of thunder made us all jump.
    This is the dumbest thing I have ever done, I thought, shivering.
    I will never forgive Terri for this. Never.
    And then a yellow light flared in front of us at the mouth of the cave.
    And under the yellow light, the old ghost flickered into view. He carried a
flaming torch in one hand. A strange smile played over his pale face.
    “Well, well,” he uttered in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the
rain. “Here we all are.”

 
 
25
     
     
    “Nooo!” Nat let out a terrified wail and tried to bury his head in his
sister’s wet T-shirt. Sam and Louisa froze like statues. The flickering light of
the torch revealed expressions of horror on their faces.
    Harrison Sadler stood in the cave entrance blocking our escape. His dark,
sunken eyes peered from one of us to the next.
    Behind him, the rain crashed down, glowing eerily from flashes of bright
lightning.
    He turned his attention to Terri and me. “You brought the ghosts to me,” he
said.
    “ You’re the ghost!” Sam cried.
    Nat wailed, his arms wrapped tightly around Louisa’s waist.
    “You have terrified people long enough,” the old man told the three trembling
kids. “More than three hundred years. It is time for you to leave this place.
Time for you to rest.”
    “He’s crazy!” Louisa cried to me. “Don’t listen to him!”
    “Don’t let him fool you,” Sam added with emotion. “Look at him! Look at his
eyes! Look where he lives—all alone in this dark cave! He’s the
three-hundred-year-old ghost. And he’s lying to you!”
    “Don’t hurt us!” Nat wailed, clinging to Louisa. “Please don’t hurt us!”
    The rain suddenly slowed. Water splattered off the rocks outside and dripped
steadily from the top of the cave. Thunder rumbled, but in the distance. The
storm was moving out to sea.
    I turned and caught the strangest expression on my sister’s face. To my
surprise, Terri was actually smiling.
    She caught me staring at her. “The solution,” she whispered.
    And I suddenly realized why she had agreed to come back to this frightening
cave, to face the frightening old man again.
    Terri wanted to solve the mystery. She needed to solve it.
    Who was the ghost?
    Was it Harrison Sadler? Or was Harrison telling us the truth? Were our three
friends the ghosts?
    My sister is really crazy, I thought, shaking my head. She risked our lives
because she had to solve the mystery.
    “Let us go,” Sam told the old man, breaking into my thoughts. “Let us go, and
we won’t tell anyone we saw the ghost.”
    The torchlight dipped low as a strong gust of wind invaded the cave.
Harrison’s eyes seemed to grow darker. “I’ve waited too long to get you here,”
he said quietly.
    Louisa suddenly reached out to Terri. “Help us!” she cried. “You believe us—don’t you?”
    “You know we’re alive, not ghosts,” Sam said to me. “Help us get away from
him. He’s evil, Jerry. We’ve seen his evil our whole lives.”
    I turned from Harrison to the three kids.
    Who was telling the truth? Who was alive? And who had been dead for over
three hundred