Priestess of Murder E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

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

Seitenzahl: 64

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Priestess of Murder by Arthur Leo Zagat is a thrilling and sinister mystery that delves into the heart of dark rituals and deadly intrigue. When a series of gruesome murders begins to unravel in a city shrouded in ancient secrets, all clues point to a mysterious figure known as the Priestess. With each murder tied to an arcane ritual, Detective Jameson is drawn into a world of occult practices and hidden agendas. As he races against time to stop the next killing, he must confront the eerie power of the Priestess and uncover a plot that threatens to unleash chaos. Can he solve the riddle of the Priestess of Murder before it's too late?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Priestess of Murder

I. — THE MONSTER OF WEST CLIFF!

II. — THE PHANTOM IN THE TREES

III. — A DREAMLAND OF DREAD

IV. — MASTER OF THE MONSTER

V. — INTO THE GRISLY NIGHT

VI. — MONSTER AT PLAY

VII. — A BARGAIN WITH THE FIEND

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Priestess of Murder

       Terror Tales

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published in Terror Tales, April 1936

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

I. — THE MONSTER OF WEST CLIFF!

THE house was full of whispers. Leila Monroy, pathetically small in the huge, wing-sided easy chair, fumbled at her throat. A sob was trying to rise there, knotting her muscles with a sort of physical pain.

The house was full of whispers. The ancient farmhouse that always had been her home was an abode of brooding dread, a place of dark despair. The groaning of the old timbers' drying fibers seemed terribly loud in the oppressive silence. They came from the very walls about Leila; from the age-darkened rafters overhead; from the ominous gloom of the entrance hallway that somehow repelled the living-room light; from the broad staircase twisting upward out of that foyer to appallingly empty obscurity above.

The house was full of whispers, shredding Leila's frayed nerves with terrible reminders of her day's long agony. Just such a place of muted, ominous sounds had the courtroom been. Unshed tears, through the anguished hours, had blurred its crowded benches; and the only reality had been the gaunt, suffering figure of her grey-faced father in the prisoner's dock. But the whispers had been inescapable. All day they had hissed at her, as they were hissing now: mutterings of horror as witness after witness had damned Justin Monroy with hushed tales of brutal, unutterably savage killing; gasps of outrage when Leila herself gave halting testimony that she had been with her father, here in this room, all the fatal hour between the time when Shean Rourke had last been seen alive and the time when Foster Corbett had found his hacked and mangled corpse beneath the poplars dividing the two farms.

Whispers had met the exhausted girl—whispers of tight- lipped condemnation—when at last she had stumbled down from the witness chair; and the farmer-women's Sunday silks had rustled, self-righteously, drawing away from the defiling touch of the girl who, hostile eyes said, had lied desperately to save a blood-guilty slayer.

Whispers, whispers, whispers—seething out of the pulsating silence as the stony-faced jury marched back into their box.

And then the whispers had become a soundless scream searing Leila's breast as the dreadful verdict soughed from the foreman's tight throat.

"Murder! While insane!"

Insane! The recollection flung Leila Monroy up out of her chair, held her rigid in distress. Insane! The word hissed within her skull, hissed from the stark vacancy in which she was so utterly alone with terror and despair. Slithering foliage, stirred by a swiftly rising wind, hissed it at her from the terrible outer night. Insane!

Insane! The kindly, tender old man to whose gnarled hand she had clung as the brown clods thudded on the drab wood of her mother's coffin; the hard-working, weather-beaten oldster who had been father and mother to her through so many years—a madman! Her father! From whose veins came the blood surging now so darkly in her veins.

Leila quivered. Tremors ran through the long, delicate curves of her slim form. The tiny oval of her small-featured countenance blanched with a new dismay. His blood in her veins! What if that blood were tainted with a foul lust to kill, with an atavistic urge to tear with fang and claw, to rend human flesh and taste the warm, salt-sweet tang of human life-fluid on smacking, gory lips? What if she had not really drowsed that half-hour whose lapse fatally had invalidated her testimony? Had she run, instead, ravening by his side while a fearful heritage of homicidal madness blotted memory from her soul as the alienists said it had blotted recollection from Justin Monroy's?

Abruptly the light within was paled by a blue blaze glaring in through the window on which her unseeing stare was fixed, by lightning that split the sky's black vault with a jagged and blazing fracture. Thunder blast became to the shocked girl the devastating roar of an enormous beast that leaped on the house, that battered it, that shook it in huge jaws whose slaver was driving rain. Storm tumult howled about the old walls, crashed through the empty rooms, drowned out the whispers that had tortured Leila, drowned out the whispers in her harried brain. Almost, after the first terrific onslaught, she was grateful for the fury that would no longer let her hear those whispers.

But it could not drown her dreadful thoughts.

"No," she moaned. "Merciful Lord, no!" as she had moaned when Justin Monroy's suave attorney had elicited from the bald-pated alienist glib testimony that had saved his client from the death- chair—and condemned him to a living hell. "No! It can't be true."

"I could have done nothing else," the lawyer had answered her reproaches afterward. "It was your father's axe Foster Corbett found buried in the dead man's chest. Your father's footprints were traced out of the trampled mess around the corpse and across the meadow to your back porch. There was the old boundary line feud between your father and his neighbor, his threats that if Foster Corbett or his son Stanley or his farm hand, Shean Rourke, stepped on Monroy land they would regret it. Against that we had only your word that he was seated in the room with you all evening. And on cross-examination you admitted that you had fallen asleep."

The wind pounded against the door as their fists had pounded, coming to accuse Dad of the awful deed. Foster Corbett, triumphant at last over his ancient adversary. Stan Corbett—

Leila's pale lips writhed. Stan! In his arms she had known happiness, against her lips his lips had thrilled. Defiant of the enmity between their fathers they had loved. If State Trooper Stanley Corbett had fired his gun into her heart, he could no more cruelly have slain that love than he had by saying to her father, "You're under arrest, Mr. Monroy."

Rain lashed against the window in a spasm of new fury. The world was ablaze with a flickering electric flare that spilled bluely on the tossing poplars marching along the tree-marked boundary between the two farms. It was just there that Shean Rourke's corpse—Something moved stealthily—vague and black—among the wind-bent trunks!

Darkness smashed down again! Who was it? Who prowled the storm-drenched night. The demoniac slayer who had made a ghastly horror of what once had been a man? The real killer, stalking a new prey? Stalking her? Icy fingers clutched Leila Monroy's throat, chill prickles tickled her spine. His blood-thirst still unslaked, inflamed by his terrible crime for which Dad unjustly had been condemned to terrible expiation, the murderer was creeping up on her. On her!