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

waited.
    “Sarah, when you were growing up and coming to the shore as a child, did you ever hear ghost stories about these old houses?”
    Sarah laughed. “Well, sure. My cousins tormented us in the dark with these terrible old stories about people getting killed here—but they were just stories, right?  They weren’t real.”
    “I don’t know anymore. I came across some old newspapers in my attic yesterday that talk about some incidents just like you describe from about the time you’re describing. Maybe there’s a connection.”
    “A connection? What kind of connection?”
    “That’s what I’m not sure of,” Nathan said, shaking his head.
    “Oh, and somehow my dreams here suddenly have become the catalyst for the recreation of them? Nathan, I’m not buying that. Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
    Nathan looked unsure of himself. He was not by nature a believer in the occult or superstition. And yet something inside his mind had just clicked when Sarah told him about the dream.
    “Look, this may be a crazy thing to do, and it may or may not make you feel better, but I think we should go back to my house and check something out.”
    “What, now?” Sarah turned off the coffee maker and followed Nathan out into the hall.  “What about this coffee I just made?”
    “We’ll take it with us,” he said with a grin.  Come on.”
    And opening the front door for Sarah, they went out into what had become—at least for the moment—a light snowfall.
     
     
     

Chapter 7
    October, 1890
    One hundred yards out to sea, directly in a line with the Cape May Point light, a lone seaman is laboriously fighting his way through the heavy surf and brutal storm in a sturdy wooden longboat with a tall prow. Every dip of his oars brings him closer to the shoreline, only to be swept back another 15 feet. The swells are huge, and are getting larger as he nears the shoreline.
    He has been pulling on the oars for more than two hours and the ship from which he came has long since vanished from sight in the wind and rain. His knotted muscles are cramping and every stroke is an effort. Finally, some luck comes his way in the form of a cresting wave that bears him almost straight up one side and then down the other, tilting him just a bit to bring him more on a straight line with the crest. It is as though a roller coaster ride has begun for the seaman, and he ships the oars and hangs on for dear life. Straight down the wave he shoots in the longboat, like an arrow from the bow of a master archer, down and inside the curl of the wave, so that all he can see is a foaming, churning pipe full of angry water.
    On and on he rides, clinging to the gunwales and crouching in the sheets. The sound is deafening, and still he rides on, until at last he reaches the end of the curl and finds himself bobbing harmlessly in a shallow line of hissing surf. Seizing the moment, he jumps from the longboat and pulls it far up the sand bar. Then, he flings himself down on the beach and lies like a dead man. The rain continues to pelt him and the surf rises up now and again to touch his feet, but it always recedes quickly, until finally the storm moves back out to open water, taking with it the tide and the rain. The seaman is left alone on the sand, right in the shadow of the Cape May light. Darkness comes, and still he lies there, trying to make himself move.
    And so it is that he dimly perceives her standing there: a seventeen-year-old girl, whose life was changed forever seven years earlier, when her father was killed by an Italian craftsman. She looks down with curiosity at the bedraggled seaman, wondering why the voices in her head have sent her to this place, at this time. Now the voices coo their approval, and Moira stoops to fill her straw hat with seawater. She stands for just a moment within arm’s reach of William Willingham, then silently upends it over his face.
     
     
     

Chapter 8
    Bundles of newspapers lay scattered about the