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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: Dime Mystery Magazine
- Sprache: Englisch
Soft Blows the Breeze from Hell! by Arthur Leo Zagat is a spine-tingling journey into the realms of supernatural terror. Set against a backdrop of a seemingly tranquil seaside town, the story unravels as an inexplicable and malevolent force begins to disturb the calm. The gentle breeze off the ocean carries more than just salt; it brings whispers of an ancient evil that preys on the unsuspecting. As strange occurrences escalate and darkness envelops the town, an intrepid few must confront the sinister entity before it consumes them all. Will they uncover the truth behind the chilling breeze, or will they succumb to the malevolent forces at play? Brace yourself for a chilling tale that will leave you breathless.
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Seitenzahl: 50
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Soft Blows the Breeze from Hell!
I. — MESSENGER OF HORROR
II. — DISASTER!
III. — THE THIRD PUFFBALL
IV. — THE DARK CLOAKS DEATH
V. — THE HOUSE OF HORROR
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Soft Blows the Breeze from Hell!
I. — MESSENGER OF HORROR
It was ball-shaped and about the size of a five-year-old's fist. Its color was the yellow-tainted white of a corpse dead a day. It was so weightless that although the lightest of breezes breathed down Stalton's elm-lined Blossom Street it fled before the zephyr, curiously swift, curiously without sound.
In the dusk's dim grey hush the thing was at first noticed by no one, so that for minutes no one thought its presence strange, though the hamlet lay in the midst of rolling fields, and the nearest spot sunless and dank enough for the fungus to grow was Roget's Wood, a full five miles away.
It darted along the narrow, sod-bordered walk, leaping the grass-shoots between the worn flagstones, flitting beneath the feet of the strollers in the dreamy twilight.
None had any hint of how soon all laughter would be stifled in Stalton, of how soon eyes now sparkling with gaiety would be dark and brooding with dread.
It was Hilda Mead who first saw the round thing as it scudded past her along a picket fence pale in the evening's greyness. "Look!" she exclaimed, snatching her slim hand from Hal Curtin's warm clasp to point at it. "Look, darling! What is that?"
"What?" her stalwart lover asked, his gaze reluctant to drag itself from her olive, elfin face, from the sweet promise of her velvet lips. "What is what, dear?"
"That... Oh, I don't like it, Hal." A tiny shudder went through her small-boned, round little body. "I don't like the way it's running along as though it were alive with a queer kind of life, and knows where it's going."
"Silly," the young man exclaimed, his teeth flashing in a fond smile as he peered after that at which Hilda pointed. "It's nothing but a puffball. It's a common fungus, and—"
"And I still don't like it," the girl interrupted, pouting prettily at Curtin. "I'm afraid of it."
"Afraid!" Instinctively wise in the ways of love, Hal Curtin had sense enough not to laugh, had sense enough to draw Hilda within the strong curve of his arm, to hold her close against his body's slender strength and say, deep-voiced: "You need never be afraid of anything while I'm alive to protect you."
The puffball veered sharply from its course, almost as if possessed of the weird sentience Hilda had ascribed to it. It leaped at a dim-seen gate, struck a paling and vanished in the spurt of spore-smoke that gives its kind their name.
In the next moment the cottage beyond that gate seemed blotted out by a dark pall; its outlines merged with the night, the yellow rectangles of its windows gone...
Something's happened to the lights, Hal Curtin thought...
In the blackened house someone laughed. The laugh was edged with shrillness and utterly humorless, and threaded by a mad sort of agony. More appalling than any scream, it held Blossom Street in thrall to a sudden, icy paralysis so that there was no movement under the elms but only blanching faces and the gasp of caught breaths.
Then there was light again in those windows, a burst of lurid light that lay in whirling sheets against the panes and smashed through them with a great shattering of glass, and spouted out of the gaping holes thus made in huge roaring tongues of flame. There was light in the street and on the ivy-clad small homes in the gardens, the terrifying orange-red light of fire. There were shadows; the gigantic black shadows of the trees wavering as the flames wavered; the shadows of humans, arms flung overhead—shouting shadows, screaming shadows pelting toward the blaze.
Shouts and screams and the roar of the flames, and always through the roar that terrible laugh...
"God!" Hal Curtin gasped, Hilda tight within his arm. "They haven't the ghost of a chance!" Those who had been strolling on Blossom Street were past them, those coming from farther off had not yet reached them, and for breathless seconds the lovers were isolated. "They're done for..."
"Look!" the girl throbbed. "Look!" Her free hand flung out to the ridgepole of the blazing house. "There..."
Against sky-glare was blackly silhouetted a thing man-form yet grotesquely not a man. On the narrow crest of the slanted roof that was not yet alight, it capered in a queerly simian frenzy and it was from that capering monstrosity that the brain-curdling laugh came.
From the dark human mass surging against the fence of the doomed house, surging away from the blasting heat of that furnace, a shout went up. Curtin could not know whether it was evoked by sight of the thing on the roof or by the explosion of flame through the black roof-slant. The house was a vast torch now, a pillar of seething orange and crimson and strange greens supporting on its apex the affrighted vault of the sky, within which nothing could live.
Nothing... Hal tore himself away from Hilda's clinging hands, a strange cry in his throat! He vaulted the pickets beside them, his leap a lithe and effortless bound, was hurtling away from her.
