Lair of the Snake Girl E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

• Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Terror Tales
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 77

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Lair of the Snake Girl by Arthur Leo Zagat is a spine-tingling adventure that delves into the heart of an ancient and deadly cult. When a series of mysterious disappearances leads a daring journalist to a remote, jungle-bound temple, they discover a horrifying secret: a tribe worshipping a mythical snake girl with the power to enchant and destroy. As the journalist uncovers the dark rituals and sinister motives of the cult, they must escape the clutches of the serpent goddess and her followers. Will they survive the perils of the lair and reveal the truth, or will they become another lost soul in the cult's grisly history? Immerse yourself in this thrilling tale of danger, mystery, and supernatural horror.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Lair of the Snake Girl

EDITOR'S NOTE

I. — DEATH SQUEEZES

II. — DEATH FROM THE SKY

III. — SPOOR OF THE SERPENT

IV. — CRIPPLE'S COURAGE

V. — THE SERPENT'S LAIR

VI. — TRAPPED

VII. — TIGHTENING COILS

VIII. — DREAD METAMORPHOSIS

IX. — THE END—PERHAPS

EPILOGUE

EDITOR'S NOTE

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Lair of the Snake Girl

       Terror Tales

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published in Terror Tales, May/Jun 1937

No part of this publication may be reproduced whole or in part in any form without the prior written permission of the author

EDITOR'S NOTE

MR. ZAGAT is on a trip through the Midwest in search of local color for his tales of terror. Two hours before the deadline for this number of Terror Tales we received a bulky package by airmail, and ten minutes later the following telegram:

YARN RUSHED YOU AIRMAIL NOT MINE STOP APPEARS TO BE TRUE TALE BUT SUGGEST PRINTING AS FICTION UNLESS INVESTIGATION I AM NOW ENGAGED IN CONFIRMS IT STOP CAN YOU ARRANGE HOLD PAGE OPEN FOR FURTHER REPORT FROM ME QUESTION MARK —ZAGAT

We were unable to wire him that holding a page open would be impossible because he omitted to give us his address, so we persuaded the printer to do the impossible and leave a page blank following this story. At this writing we cannot know whether we will again hear from Mr. Zagat in time to fill it. If you run into an expanse of unprinted whiteness when you get through reading "Lair of the Snake Girl" you will know that we did not hear from him. We have our fingers crossed.

I. — DEATH SQUEEZES

I THOUGHT it was only the brooding cold that made me shiver as I crouched over the wheel of the battered flivver I had hired at Centredale, where the railroad ended. It struck through my light topcoat to my very bones, that damp chill of air shadowed all day by the brooding dark height of Old Mountain. Yet there was something beside that dank coldness that chilled me deep within...

North of Lost River's shallow flow the flat land was lushly green, but as I had been told, it was a spongy swamp into who's tall, rank reeds only belly-crawling, noisome creatures ventured; a morass whose treacherous black mud would suck a man down to hell itself if the ancient tales were to be believed. That was why this narrow road that was the town of Eden's only connection with the world, clung to the southerly bank of the murky stream.

I stared at the brown ribbon of earth rolling under the tires of my car and wondered dully why a village had ever been planted here. For miles now I had seen no farms, no signs of any human habitation; had encountered no traffic. For more than an hour I had pounded on and on through a hushed, desolate solitude.

Well, my lips twisted bitterly, I was looking for quiet and isolation. Peering at an outspread map with red-trimmed, haggard eyes, I had read those names—Eden, Lost River, Old Mountain—and had stabbed at them a determined forefinger.

"That sounds forsaken enough," I had mumbled. "I'll go there, Doc."

"Good boy!" Dr. Stone had exclaimed. "It's the only thing that will save you from going to pieces. Complete rest for a month, somewhere where they don't know who you are, where you won't be constantly reminded of what you've been through."

"Quit it!" I had snarled. "Quit hammering at me. I've said I'd go, haven't I?" And then I had flung out of the office, the aching swirl inside my skull beginning again...

Yards ahead the trail seemed to end against a blank wall of gloomy foliage. It was only a spur of the mountain around which river and road curved, but I fought an eerie premonition that beyond it something waited in ambush. Something grisly, malignant... I reached for the emergency brake.

But instead of pulling it I stepped on the accelerator once more. The feathery quiver along my spine was only hysteria. It was the same sort of jitteriness that had made me see staring faces, pointing fingers, all about me as I pounded to my lodgings from the physician's office, as I had taxied to the station. The same rebellion of ragged nerves that had rasped me in the Pullman car, resenting my fellow passenger's covert, curious glances, their sly whisperings.

They had known me, of course. They couldn't help recognizing me. They had seen my face in the newspapers for a week. They had read my name, in shrieking black headlines and my description in the columns of the sob sisters.

I felt a muscle twitch in my cheek as I recalled the saccharine words: "Blond-haired, blue eyed, blunt-jawed, Ross Kane might be the reincarnation of an ancient Viking." "Broad- shouldered, narrow-waisted; under his trim blue suit one senses the flat, powerful muscles of the trained athlete." "Nerves like steel piano wires, a brain keen and flashing as a rapier, this is the man who has broken up the Scarlet Legion, the man who for four interminable days has sat in a witness chair and with cold implacable speech has condemned fifty men to the execution chamber. He is a man of iron, without emotion, without fear..."

Without fear? I had lived with fear for six dreadful months, with the fear of death and of worse than death. With the fear that I fail and let the murderous legion that had stunned a nation go unpunished.

I had not failed, but I had paid a terrible price for success. When at last I had penetrated to the identity of the Scarlet Legion's masked leaders, I teetered on the very brink of madness...

An uncanny howl cut across my thoughts! From beyond the mountain spur it came, bestial in its wordlessness, yet somehow human—and filled with unthinkable agony... It ended abruptly, with an awful finality.

I gasped, pounded my heel down on the gas. The motor roared as the car leaped into swift motion. The hillside flung its racket back at me as the car surged around the curve. Brakes squealed, skidding rubber scorched. The flivver rocked to a halt.

I was already out of the car. I bent over that which lay utterly still in the road. A sick nausea twisted at the pit of my stomach.

IT —it had been—a man, a lad not long out of his teens. Above the midriff it still had the form of a man, scarlet with blood that had fountained from a gaping mouth, but everything below—flesh, bones, even the corduroy trousers and leather half-boots—was squeezed into one heterogeneous pulp.

Squeezed! The fearful pressure that had crushed the youth had been exerted equally from all sides, so that the gory mass was almost cylindrical, and gruesomely elongated. Legs, hips, abdomen were constricted as though a gigantic fist had grasped them and tightened...

I whirled to a rustle, the furtive threshing—instantly quieted—of some large body in the pines. My automatic snouted from my fist at the dark wall that was the woods.

Consciousness of peril sloughed from me the palsy of my illness, and I knew my muscles were once more coiled springs, ready for instant action. My every sense was keenly alive to locate and combat the imminent threat. The sound of my approach must have frightened the killer from its prey—the crushed youth—but it was lurking now in the gloomy underbrush, watching its chance to spring upon another victim—me...

Old Mountain's flank rose steeply above me, its shadows impenetrable to my staring eyes. The odor of needle-carpeted earth, of rotting wood and putrescent fungi, breathed down from it; and its silence, after that single warning rustle, was unbroken. There was a strange, foreboding quality to that hush, as though the murk and the soundlessness cloaked the very essence of fear, as though nature itself crouched beneath some overhanging terror.

A twig snapped, the tiny sound thunderous. And then once more there was the rustle of something moving through the underbrush. Moving away!

Wrath exploded within me; red wrath at the thing that had violated the sanctuary of a human body and was now escaping. It sent me hurtling up into the woods.

My feet slipped on the slick carpet of dead pine needles, my heels ground in, hurled me forward. Brambles tore at my pants legs, low branches lashed my cheek. Above me the sound of my quarry was louder, swifter, but momentarily I gained on it. Then I saw it, a flicker of motion through motionless tree trunks, a pallid flutter glimpsed between huge black columns. My finger tightened on its trigger—and instantly relaxed.

"Hey there," I contrived to shout. "Stop! Stop, I say!"

It was no ravaging, lethal beast that fled from me, but a woman, or rather—a girl. The pale flutter was that of her white loose frock that fell from molded shoulders and was caught up at a slim waist by a belt of some shimmering, iridescently green leather. In the half-light the stygian cascade of her unbound hair had made her seem headless, but just in time to check my shot she had thrown backward a terrified glance and I had seen her profile, a cut cameo of ivory against the ebony of her tresses.

"Wait for me," I called, more calmly. "I'm not going to hurt you."