Riverfront Horror E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

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

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Riverfront Horror by Arthur Leo Zagat is a spine-tingling thriller that explores the darkest corners of a once-peaceful riverfront community. When a series of gruesome murders begins to plague the area, the locals are thrust into a world of fear and suspicion. As the body count rises, it becomes clear that the river holds a dark and deadly secret. With each chilling revelation, the line between the supernatural and the mundane becomes increasingly blurred. Can the community uncover the truth behind the riverfront's horrors before it's too late, or will they fall victim to the malevolent force lurking beneath the surface? Dive into this harrowing tale where every ripple in the water conceals a deeper terror.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Riverfront Horror

I. — ATTACK IN NEW DEAL TOWN

II — I PUT HER ON THE SPOT

III. — ALONE WITH THE KILLER

IV. — GOOD-BYE TO MARGE

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Riverfront Horror

       Terror Tales

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published in Terror Tales, February 1935

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

I. — ATTACK IN NEW DEAL TOWN

THE night it all happened, we were feeling pretty high in the hut that Jim Hawks and I had made out of wood scrap and old tomato cans. Marge Beals had started to sing a song. Mother Machree it was, and I forgot everything else listening to the kind of husk in her voice that makes it hard for me to swallow. I didn't hear the yowling of Red Connors and Rat-Face Floyd from under the railroad embankment over their smoke—that stuff they stew out of rubbing alky and throw into their lead-lined guts. I didn't hear the slither of the river sliding by under the fog. I didn't even hear the bawling of the ferry-boats—till that one hoot, so close and loud it drowned out the quivery sadness of Marge's singing—and ended in a high, thin scream!

Wow! It was like somebody stabbed a knife right through the dark, and the shack wall, and into my chest. I saw the girl's mouth stay open without any sound coming out of it, and her eyes were all of a sudden big and round and black with the scare of that shriek. I saw Jim's face go the color of a dead fish's belly.

Then the scream came again, wire-edged with pain and something more terrible than pain, and it cut off right in the middle. Then there wasn't any more noise except the hoot of boats feeling along in the fog like blind men, and the rasp of our breathing that made the silence more silent and scary.

In the bunch of lopsided shacks made out of broken boxes, rusting sheet-iron and what have you that we called New Deal Town, we were used to screams. But this one was different. It wasn't any souse that had made it, nor any cokey. You knew the guy that had screamed that way had seen something a man wasn't supposed to see, and it had killed him, and he'd gone crazy before he died.

Marge moved first, twisting to the door and reaching her little hand to open it. That got Jim and me started. We jumped up together. I shoved the kid aside, barking, "Stay here. We'll go!" And my buddy and I jammed in the doorway.

In the seconds it took for us to get through, the yellow fog outside came alive with guys yelling and the squeals of rusty opening hinges and the pound of running feet.

I pushed hard, tumbled as I came out, scraped my face with mud and cinders. As I twisted to get up, Jim pounded by me towards the hollering of the gang, that was going away towards the other end of the muck plot. There was someone else alongside of me. Marge said, "Hen, is that you?" and I felt her little hand on mine. She helped me get up and I started to follow Jim.

"Wait," Marge whispered. "Wait, Hen." I could hear her teeth clicking through her words.

I started to whisper something. Only started—I didn't finish. Because just then the light from the shack-door was gone, and something big and black and shaped like nothing God ever made was there instead, and it was lunging at us like a big bird come out of the fog. I saw a tremendous black wing and hooked claws flashing silvery like, and I yelled and threw myself at Marge. The two of us went down in the mud and the big thing missed us and pounded past.

My yell was answered by yells from the gang and I heard the bunch coming. But I heard something else that made gooseflesh all up and down my backbone. It was a laugh, a laugh thin and loud and screechy and terrible...

Marge pulled at me, pulled me up. "Come on," she gasped. "Come on. It went this way." Nuts. The girl was nuts, but she started away and I couldn't let her go alone.

I didn't catch her till she was stopped by the river. I grabbed her. "What's the big idea, Marge?" I said. "Running—"

"Hush," she whispered. "Hush. Listen."

I shut up. I couldn't hear a thing, nearby, except the oily lap-lap of the river along the rock. The gang hadn't seen us go, and we were alone there.

We were alone, and we weren't. There was someone else there, someone or some thing else. I couldn't see it. I couldn't really hear it. It just was there, if you know what I mean. A feel like eyes on the back of my neck. But no sound, not anything to let me know I was right. Nothing except the little shiver of Marge's slim, cold hand in mine and a whimper from her throat that told me she felt it too.

And then, like the snap of a finger, whatever it was, was gone. But a footfall thudded over to one side of us. I jerked around, started to go after it, stubbed my toe in something soft, and tumbled again. Tumbled and came down hard on something limp laying there. My arms flailed out. One hand splashed into the cold wet of river water. The other touched something wet too—a warm, sticky wetness on skin—on human skin.