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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: Dime Mystery Magazine
- Sprache: Englisch
Monster at Play by Arthur Leo Zagat is a haunting and suspenseful tale that delves into the dark corners of human nature. In a seemingly idyllic small town, something sinister lurks beneath the surface. A series of inexplicable events and terrifying attacks lead the townspeople to believe that a monstrous force is at play. As fear grips the community, one man dares to uncover the truth behind the terror, but what he finds is more horrifying than anyone could have imagined. Will the town fall victim to the monstrous force, or can it be stopped before it's too late? Dive into this chilling story where innocence meets horror, and nothing is as it seems.
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Seitenzahl: 82
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Monster at Play
Monster at Play
I. — AN ALIEN PRESENCE MOVES?
II. — THE SCREAM FROM BELOW
III. — BLOOD-STAINS
IV. — THE LEGLESS CORPSE
V. — CRUCIFIED
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Monster at Play
Monster at Play
In the dark cellar beneath the gloomy mansion of the Waynes was quartered a monstrous thing, tiny yet horrible...At night Rose Lynn heard it scampering, childlike, through the halls—and shuddered. But not until she saw the mangled bodies of its victims did she know how gruesome was its play—how hideous were the fiendish joys it sought...
I. — AN ALIEN PRESENCE MOVES?
TINY in the great four-poster bed, Rose Lynn sat bolt upright and hugged her knees to firm, round breasts. She stared into wavering, uncertain shadows magnifying the expanse of the spacious bedchamber, and in the sea-tinted depths of her wide eyes dread lurked. The heavy coverlet under which she cringed could not shut out the chill of fear shaking her with the faintest of tremors. Her red lips quivered to shallow, affrighted breathing.
A sound had mingled with the first flash of her startled awakening. A swift patter of wee footsteps rattling into stillness. Such a small patter as a child might have made, scampering down the long, dark corridor outside. A child? In this gloomy structure which no child had entered for forty years? What then? What could possibly have fumbled at her door and whisked away with an eerie glee in the tap-tap-tap of its retreat, a mischievousness strangely sinister?
Rose's eyes ached, and the manifold small noises of the country night were an ominous silence to her straining ears. She heard the sough of wind through foliage, the shrill of nocturnal insects, the distant, melancholy wail of a train. And within the house there was only the crackle of drying beams and the rattle of ancient plaster dribbling inside the walls.
The girl's lips twisted. "I dreamed it," she whispered. "It was only a dream. I ought to forget it and go to sleep." If she slid down under the blankets and forced herself to sleep, in the morning black Isaiah would rap on her door as always and mumble his toothless, "Seben o'clock, missie, an' b'eakfas' am ready." She would laugh at her scare then, when the sunshine streamed through the mullioned window, and she would tell Miss Wayne about it, and perhaps the dear old lady would pat her hand with her own fragile, almost transparent fingers, and say, "My dear. This gloomy house is no place for your fresh youth; it is cruel of me to keep you here."
"Cruel!" Rose forced herself to continue the imagined talk, seeking thus to win her mind from the terror that numbed it. "What would I do if I didn't have this job? I'd starve. And besides, you have been so sweet and kind I feel more like a niece than a paid companion. I—"
Her fingers tightened on the quilt edge. From somewhere beyond the closed mystery of her door, an eerie laugh had sounded—distant, but high-pitched like a child's! The stillness quenched it at once, but a pulse beat in the girl's temple now with a dull thumping, and her mouth was dry. Someone stirred in the sleeping house, some alien presence moved.
Who could it be? Was Loretta Wayne, prim, aristocratic spinstress, trotting her spindly shanks about on some midnight adventure? Despite her unease the corners of Rose's eyes crinkled with fugitive humor at the whimsy. Or was it Loretta's brother, Roger Wayne—tall, austere, black hair silvered at the temples above the chiseled dignity of his patrician countenance? Incredible! But there was no one else in the desolate, crumbling mansion. There should be no one else.
The girl's head jerked. There were the pattering footfalls again—fainter now and farther off, but distinct as the tick of the watch under her pillow. Her throat cords tautened to a scream. She gulped it down, remembering the waxen pallor of her mistress' skin that told of a heart all too fragile. A sudden fright...
Oh, why didn't that scampering stop? It was the patter of leaves blown against a window-pane, of pebbles rattling on the roof. It was nothing, nothing at all. That creak!—? That was a step on the staircase at the end of the hall, the third step from the top. No doubt now. No doubt at all that some alien presence was in the house, that someone was on those stairs.
Rose could not ignore this thing, yet she dared not call for help. Her lips tightened. She slid from the bed, stood swaying, nerving herself, while moonlight silhouetted the clean lines of her young body through the sheerness of her nightdress. She whimpered, fisted small hands, moved. Even the whisper of her bare feet on worn carpeting was somehow a sibilant warning of menace...
She got to the door, got through. The knob was pulled from her stiff fingers by a sudden puff of cold air. The door thudded shut, and blackness engulfed Rose, impenetrable dark. Her nostrils clogged with the mustiness of the ancient corridor through which trailed elusive wisps of fragrance, of scent and powder and vanished flowers of a long ago when once the moribund mansion was aglow with gayety and light laughter.
She stood taut, poised, listening for a repetition of the noises that had brought her out of sleep to fear. Momentarily the silence was absolute. Then her veins were a network of ice and her scalp was a tight cap squeezing her skull.
The stillness had been broken, not by the patter of small feet that she had heard before, but by a voice. A thin, thread-like voice prattling unintelligibly, somewhere in the dark. A babbling voice curiously infantile, lisping the monologue of a child at solitary play. An endearing sound in a sun-filled nursery—but a sound fraught with marrow-melting horror in the midnight murk of this moldering mansion. A sound that struck all power to move from the listening girl's limbs and froze her to nightmare rigidity that wrenched a moan from her tight throat...
The pattering recommenced; the third stair creaked again, and little feet scampered toward her through the hall's lightlessness! Rose's brain flashed a frantic message to unresponsive muscles, and something thudded against her knees, toppling her. As she fell her outflung arm brushed a face in the dark, a damp and coldly clammy face not two feet from the floor! Hands were on her cheek, her breast. Hot hands stroked down her side. Hands hot and harsh through the gossamer silk wrung a scream from her.
Somewhere a door slammed. "What is it?" Loretta Wayne shrilled. "Rose!"
Then the hands were gone, and the shaggy body that had pressed close to hers where she had fallen was gone. From somewhere nearby Roger Wayne said, "All right, Loretta. I'll see to it." His tones were measured, calm, as always. "Don't excite yourself."
The dark swirled about Rose. She fought to hold it steady as Wayne's solicitude recalled to her his sister's weakness, and she managed to call out, "A dream, Miss Wayne. I had a nightmare." Then everything slid into swirling blackness that seemed to lift her in strong arms...
She lay on her bed once more, the blankets warm about her. A lamp's soft yellow centered its nimbus about the chest of drawers and edged Roger Wayne's ascetic profile with a line of light. In all the sudden alarm he characteristically had contrived to don a dark dressing-gown buttoning close to his neck, and it gave him the appearance of a medieval monk. But a brother of a fighting order—for his stiff, ramrod erectness, never relaxed, was that of a soldier trained for years.
"Oh," Rose gasped. "I must have fainted."
The man's thin lips moved in a slow smile. "You did, my dear. Fainted dead away. I had to carry you in here. The hall was draughty, and we cannot afford to have you taking cold."
The commingling of grave courtesy and kindliness in his tone was typical of the fortnight since she had come here. In the crumbling decay of the ancient mansion Roger Wayne maintained, somehow pathetically, the courtliness of more spacious days. He was an aristocrat, and neither the loss of fortune nor the mark of time could change his ways.
"It was awfully silly of me to faint." The words slid from Rose's cold lips, and she looked up at his looming figure, his shadowed countenance, waiting for the inevitable question as to what had brought that scream of terror from her and robbed her of consciousness. It did not come. Wayne stood there, silent and grave, and in his eyes there brooded a troubled murkiness, the faint hint of some hidden pain. Tonight it was more alive, more definite than it had ever been.
At last he said, "You can sleep now." That was all. "Sleep?"
He turned away. His slender, blue-veined hand picked up the lamp, and suddenly the light was gone. Protest vibrated in the girl's throat, but before she could voice it the man was gone, the door shut behind him. She was alone with the silver spray of moonlight in the dim room, and the shuddersome recollection of burning, avid hands desecrating her body, of the embrace of a malformed, horribly small frame against hers. Fear clutched her.
The fear seeped away; for the thump, thump of Roger Wayne's stiff walk had not faded but continued in a measured pacing just outside her door. Thump, thump, thump. Back and forth. Back and forth. He had told her to sleep, but there would be no sleep for him tonight. Thump. Thump. Thump. He was mounting sentry-go, guarding her against the unacknowledged horror that stalked his house.
