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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Terror Tales
- Sprache: Englisch
Revels for the Lusting Dead by Arthur Leo Zagat is a spine-tingling journey into the realms of the occult and the supernatural. When a series of gruesome murders begins to plague a quiet town, the community is thrown into panic. Each crime is linked to a dark and ancient ritual, and the victims are found in horrifying poses, their expressions frozen in fear. As an intrepid detective delves into the town's eerie past, he uncovers a sinister cult whose members seek to awaken something far more terrifying than they could ever control. Can he unravel the mystery before the lusting dead rise to wreak havoc? Prepare yourself for a haunting tale of darkness and despair that will leave you breathless.
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Seitenzahl: 59
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Revels for the Lusting Dead
I. — DELEGATION FROM THE TOMB
II. — THE DEAD ATTACK
III. — SAVED—FOR WHAT?
IV. — PRISONER OF DOOM
V. — HELL'S BRIDAL SPORT
VI. — DREADFUL DILEMMA
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Revels for the Lusting Dead
The dead seek gruesome entertainment in this spine-tingling novelette.
I. — DELEGATION FROM THE TOMB
LINDA LORAY tried not to show her disappointment and growing uneasiness as she asked the hotel clerk whether he knew Holt Carst—the man she had come to Torburg to wed.
"Yes," he replied, eyes narrowing in his young but strangely grey-hued, brooding countenance. "Everybody in Torburg knows Holt Carst." His glance flickered over Linda's face with a curious intentness, dropped to the brass-framed card, flat on the counter, that bore the words:
ON DUTY: Dan Thilton
"Mr. Carst wired me to come by the late train," Linda explained, "but he wasn't at the station and there was no message for me." She was poignantly conscious of the dusty hush of the lobby, of its somehow desolate emptiness. "How can I reach him?"
"Hard to say." The girl had a queer impression that Thilton was holding something back deliberately, perhaps maliciously. "There are no more trains till morning. Best thing for you is take a room here and wait for Carst to get in touch with you." He shoved the register at her; thrust a pen into her hesitant fingers.
The ancient, musty inn was vaguely repulsive to her, but there was nothing else for her to do but sign: Linda Loray, Boston.
Thilton turned and took a key from a rack whose hooks were completely filled. He came out from behind the counter, moving slowly, not from weariness but as though trammeled by some odd reluctance. His tall frame was a little stooped, a little awkward with the earthbound clumsiness peculiar to men born in the hills.
"This way," he murmured, picking up Linda's bag and motioning across rutted floor tiles toward a staircase at the other end of the dim foyer. Linda reached the worn steps, started to mount them. "Lije," Thilton called, behind her. "Oh, Lije!"
A big door slid open in the lobby wall at right angles to the staircase, and the cloying, sick-sweet odor of funeral flowers was all about the girl. She turned, startled, and looked through the doorway.
The flowers were piled around a makeshift bier in what must be the dining room of the old hotel. They formed a bank of blood-red roses, of lilies wax-white as death itself, and on that bank a dull ebony coffin rested. Two huge candles were burning on either side of it.
There was no lid to the coffin, so that from her slight eminence Linda looked right down into it. She saw a black frock coat clothing a man's body—a coat unnaturally stiff as are only the garments of the dead.
The dead man's hands were decorously folded on the rigid chest, but even lifeless they were pallid, rapacious claws; their bony fingers half-curled as if still eager to tear some helpless, quivering flesh.
The head was completely bald. The face was lashless, wax-white as the lilies. It resembled the visage of an albino vulture. Beneath the closed, blue eyelids the skin sagged in the pendulous dark pouches of dissipation, and the way the livid lips were thinly puckered branded those moribund features with lascivious cruelty.
"I'm going upstairs, Lije," Thilton said, "to show this lady to her room. Watch things, will you?"
"Sure," a toneless, heavy voice responded. "Sure, Dan."
Linda looked at the man who had opened the door from within. The watcher of the dead was as tall as Thilton, as spare-framed and gangling, but much older. His hair was iron-grey, his cheeks deeply seamed, weather-beaten. And in his hands there was—a shotgun! Its black barrel slanted across his torso and one calloused forefinger rested on the trigger. Watcher of the dead indeed! The man called Lije was a guard of the dead. An armed guard!
Against what impossible menace was he armed? Against what ghouls who would violate a coffined corpse?
Thilton, in motion again, forced Linda to recommence her climb, lest he collide with her. He unlocked the door of a room at the head of the stairs, shifted the key to the inside, put her bag down and departed without a word.
Despite the questions hammering within Linda's skull, questions she oddly dared not voice. Despite her perturbation over Holt Carst's failure to meet her, the exhaustion of her long journey welled up drug-like in her, numbed her. She was already half-asleep as she undressed, and when she crept into the creaking bed, it was as though she crept into immediate, tangible oblivion...
* * * * *
THOUGH she had slept long enough to warm the harsh cotton sheets, Linda Loray's slim body seemed molded within ice when she awoke—as frigid and as utterly incapable of motion! Fear, naked and terrible, was a presence in the room, a livid crawl in her veins.
The sound that had startled her to the quick came again—a thin cry shrilling out of the night. This time the incredible words were clear and terrifying.
"They're coming! The dead are coming!"
Running footfalls thudded toward the hotel. "The dead—they're alive again!" The shout was right under Linda's window, and the pound of frightened feet was first dull on the hard-dirt path from Torburg's single street, then hollow on the inn's porch planks. "They're com—" A door slammed, cutting off the cry.
"Lije!" a muffled voice shouted from below. Now the sounds of trampling feet were within the house, the sounds of voices husky with apprehension but too low for Linda to distinguish the words...
She was dreaming, she tried to tell herself, and then her fear-frozen brain was demanding, can one dream noises alone, seeing nothing, feeling nothing except the pressure of one's lids against aching eyeballs, the pressure of lids one fights un-availingly to open?
It must be a dream. In no waking moment did one hear a voice crying that the dead were alive. Only in a nightmare did one's muscles refuse the bidding of a brain squeezed between the jaws of terror's dreadful vise. Only in a nightmare were one's nostrils so stuffed with the odor of funeral flowers that one could hardly breathe.
Of course! The smell of the flowers from that improvised morgue below, seeping up through the moldering walls and warped floors of the crumbling structure, had inspired a dream of horror. If she could only get her eyes open, if she could only come fully awake...
It was no dream! Linda was staring at the cold, hueless glow of moonlight that crept into the musty chamber. She was awake now, without possibility of question, and she still heard those ominous sounds.
