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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: Wonder Stories
- Sprache: Englisch
In A Lodging in Hell, Arthur Leo Zagat crafts a chilling tale of terror and survival. When a group of unsuspecting travelers seeks shelter in a remote, decrepit inn, they soon realize they've entered a place where evil lurks in every shadow. The inn, seemingly abandoned by time, holds dark secrets that begin to unravel as night falls. Trapped in a nightmare from which there seems no escape, the travelers must confront the horrors that dwell within the walls and face the sinister forces that threaten to consume their souls. This haunting story is perfect for those who love gripping tales of suspense, mystery, and the supernatural.
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Seitenzahl: 61
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
A Lodging in Hell
I. — THE STRANGLER
II. — THE PHANTOM WHO LAUGHED
III. — DEATH ENTERS BY A LOCKED DOOR
IV. — THE CORPSE THAT WALKED
V. — TERRIBLE HERITAGE
VI. — PARADE OF THE HANGED
VII. — STRANGLER'S END
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
A Lodging in Hell
I. — THE STRANGLER
THE raucous tones of the radio flooded the room:
"—the saturnalia of extortion and murder that has so long ravaged Halesburg must stop," it was blaring. "It shall stop, if the decent people of our fair city will aid me. The sadistic, ruthless racketeer who masks himself under the name of the Strangler trembled when an aroused citizenry swept me into office with the command, free us from terror! He saw the imminence of his doom when the legislature of Massikota placed in my hands the one weapon I need to defeat him. He cowers now in his lair, shaking, afraid. Mr. Strangler: whoever you are, wherever you may be, your end is at hand!"
A gasp of indrawn breath ended the speech, but the odd quiver of fear that had underlain its orotund bravado lingered in Kitty Brian's ears. That fear seemed to have seeped into the very house, seemed to hang about the girl; a chill, miasmic shadow which the living room lights could not dispel...
"You have been listening to an address by G. Harold Corbett, district attorney of Hale County. This is WKUP, the voice of the Halesburg Courier. A short interlude of organ..."
Switch-click cut off the announcer's unctuous accents and silence smashed down, a brooding silence somehow pregnant with threat. Kitty's fingers tightened on the embroidery hoop they held. This was silly, this nervousness, this mood of chill apprehension that tortured her. Childish! Just because she was alone in the house for the first time since Dad's death. She'd have to learn to live alone. She couldn't stay in Uncle Frank's house forever, kindly solicitous as he was...
Sudden auto brakes, shrieking, pulled her startled glance to the shaded window. Skidding tires squealed. Running footfalls crunched on the gravel path and the frantic pound of the knocker on the entrance door echoed through the house.
Apprehension of midnight disaster struck color and warmth from Kitty's cheeks. Uncle Frank! Had the Strangler's killers...? But he wasn't mayor any longer. The futile fight had been taken from him... She was out in the hall, was unbolting the great oak portal.
The man's face was livid, contorted, his slight body taut, quivering. Words spewed from him in a thin terror-squeal. "Mr. Brian. I got to see him. Do you hear me? I got to..."
"But he isn't here," the girl gasped. "He went to New York..."
Her words jolted him back, as though they had been physical blows. "Then I'm done for," he groaned, "The Strangler..."
The rest was lost as he whirled, and catapulted down the path between black masses of shrubbery, toward the vague shape of a curb-parked roadster.
Motor-roar thundered, drowning the pound of his footfalls. As he reached the sidewalk a dark sedan hurtled around the corner. Something snakelike writhed from the careening vehicle's open window, flicked to the fleeing man's neck. He leaped—was jerked—into mid-air, soared grotesquely to crash on the roadway. He was a thudding black bundle bouncing, skidding, plunging horribly in the wake of the rushing murder-car.
The horror vanished, far up the glimmering midnight stretch of Halesburg's Pershing Boulevard. Kitty Brian's fingers tore at her neck as if the Strangler's noose were clamped about its whiteness to choke off the scream that sliced her chest, rasped her throat, and would not come. It had not happened! It could not have happened!
Could not? How many times had it happened already, in the past terrible year? How many times had the noose of the Strangler's killers garotted the throats of those who had refused his extortionate demands, of members of his own gang who had obscurely offended him, of witnesses to the flicking, lethal swoop of his executioner's loops...
TERROR surged, a nightmare flood in Kitty Brian's veins. Was she marked now for the inevitable death that had terrorized Halesburg so long? In the instant the black sedan had swept around the corner, the roadster's headlights had sprayed through its windshield and spotlighted the visage of the killer. The brutal, apelike countenance was ineradicably limned on the screen of her memory—and she had recognized it!
But Martin Glatow could not know it! Engrossed in his crime he could not have seen her. If Kitty kept silent the Strangler would never know what she had seen. If she shut the door, and went to bed, and was surprised in the morning to read of another body found, somewhere, with the red mark of the lethal noose around its neck, she would be safe.
But if she told? No one had ever lived to appear in court against a servant of the Strangler. No one at all—no matter how the police had tried to protect them, how secret their identity had been kept...
"... It shall stop if the decent people of our fair city will aid me!" It seemed as if the radio had spoken again, with Hal Corbett's shaken, earnest appeal. Kitty Brian turned. An invisible viscid fluid seemed to cling to her limbs so that she had to use all her strength to reach the telephone. But her voice was clear and firm as she spoke into the transmitter's black maw.
"Give me Harold Corbett's home, operator. And hurry. Hurry!"
LIGHT, its source artfully concealed, glinted cheerfully from the chromium fittings of the air-conditioned car. The staccato clacking of track joints, underneath, did its best to tell Kitty Brian that each minute of the train's smooth speed added another to the thousand miles stretching between her and terror. A thousand miles—but dread was still a hard, cold lump in the girl's chest, a queasy, slow creep of febrile chill in her veins. Dread that had accompanied her furtive flight across dawn-dreary fields, that had ridden with her the eternal, fearful day, that whispered now in the rush of speed-wind against the night-darkened panel of the window beside her.
She shrugged lower in her seat, tried to focus her attention on the magazine the news-dealer had sold her, but the print blurred into a mass of illegible grey as the nape of Kitty's neck prickled with the eerie, frightening feel of eyes upon her, of watching, inimical eyes.
But she did not again spin around in a futile attempt to trap the watcher. Each such attempt had been met by rows of inscrutable faces utterly disinterested in her. This time she caught herself in time. Yawning, she picked up her pocketbook from the seat, fumbled in it, pushed aside a tiny, pearl-handled pistol, extracted a red-enamelled powder compact.
