Thirst of the Damned E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

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

Seitenzahl: 71

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Thirst of the Damned by Arthur Leo Zagat is a chilling and relentless journey into the heart of darkness. In a remote, desolate region, an ancient curse awakens, bringing with it a thirst that drives the damned to hunt the living. As the villagers are stalked by nightmarish creatures with an insatiable craving for blood, a small band of survivors must confront their deepest fears and unravel the mystery behind the curse. With every shadow concealing a new terror, will they uncover the truth and escape the wrath of the damned, or will they become victims of an unquenchable thirst? Immerse yourself in this spine-tingling tale of horror and survival.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Thirst of the Damned

I. — THE FIELDS OF AALU

II. — THE BLUE FIRE OF ISIS

III. — DESECRATOR OF THE DEAD

IV. — LOVE'S ANCIENT MAGIC

V. — DREAD SACRIFICE

VI. — BLUE FLAME, HUNGERING

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Thirst of the Damned

       Terror Tales

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published in Terror Tales, November 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. — THE FIELDS OF AALU

"NEVER! You shall never wed him!"

Stasia Moyne's words were all the more virulent, all the more dreadful, because she whispered them and because—that whisper was taking all the strength left in her old body, so wasted and so horribly still under the white sheet of her deathbed.

"You won my son away from me while I lay dying, but before I am in my grave he shall look at you in horror and run from you, loathing your lips that have robbed mine of their last few kisses."

Ellen Faye shuddered, listening to the dying woman's breathed curse, and Garry Moyne's arm pulling her close to his stalwart side, was unable to still that shudder. He pressed her to him, trying to reassure her of his love. But his anguished gaze clung to his mother's seamed countenance, and Ellen felt the spasm of a soundless sob shaking him.

"Mother!" His voice was thick, choked with emotion, when he spoke at last. "You aren't going to die." The girl's throat ached at his pitiful denial of the inevitable. "You are going to get well, and when you learn how sweet and good Ellen is, you will be happy to have her as your daughter."

Stasia Moyne's skin was as yellowed and wrinkled as the parchments to whose study her life had been devoted—as sere and fleshless as a mummy's, and as utterly expressionless, except that the shrinking girl sensed a flood of hatred beating about her that came from beneath the drooped, almost transparent eyelids.

"Sharah is my daughter—not of my body but of my soul. Only Sharah, living or dead."

A stifled moan pulled Ellen's look across the bed to the girl haunched on the floor beyond. Her forehead was bent to her knees in the mourning pose of the immemorial East and she was shrouded and hooded in white so that she was a personification somehow spectral, of grief itself.

"Sharah has remained faithful to me while you abandoned me for this stranger. Go! Till you put her from you, you are not my son. Take her and go!"

"Mother!" Garry's exclamation was a groan. "You are unfair. I've sacrificed my own career to help you. Ever since you returned from Egypt I've lived in this lonely house with you, staying here because you asked it when I should have been making a place for myself in life. And now, just because I love Ellen—"

"Go!" His mother's injunction cut across his bitter protest and halted it, though the syllable was barely audible. Color drained from Garry's cheeks, and he winced as though from a physical blow. Without another word, he turned and went out of the room, and Ellen went with him, aware of the agony that racked him and of the inexplicable hate that followed her.

The door closed on the room where death hovered. Ellen twisted out of the circle of her lover's arm, stood facing him in the dim corridor. "Garry!" she cried. "You should not have brought me here. What she did not know would not have hurt her. Go in to her now, and tell her you have sent me away. Tell her you will never see me again. It will be only for a little while, and—"

"No!" He towered above her, a smoldering, dark fire in his eyes, his nostrils flaring and knotted muscles making a hard ridge along the edge of his jaw. "I shan't lie to her. I will not lie and I will not give you up. I love you, Ellen, and I shall never deny that love."

"Bravely spoken, Sidi Moyne." The sudden voice came from beyond Garry, and Ellen realized that a door had opened, far down the passage, and that a man stood in grey dusk that drifted through the opening.

"Bravely spoken." There was more than the hint of a sneer in the mock approval of his tone. He was a weazened, shrunken figure, and the dark olive of his thin, oddly ageless countenance made startlingly vivid the whiteness of his close cap of tightly curled hair. "But will you speak as bravely when she calls upon Isis to send down upon you and your beloved the curse of Nefer-ka-ptah?"

Garry whirled, his arms stiff at his sides, his hands fisting. "Damn you, Merab!" he grunted. "It is since you came that she has been so—queer. I ought to wring your neck."

Merab shrugged, and his thin lips moved with a secret smile. "You would have done better, sidi, to have burned the papyri from which she read the ancient knowledge of the Book of Thoth, and learned how to summon me from the Fields of Aalu."

Ellen did not understand his meaning, dared not understand. But a cold prickle scampered up her spine as she saw that at Merab's feet there was no shadow...

In that instant he moved out of the drab patch of dying light on the floor, and she could not be certain that she had seen rightly. There was something ominous in the way he glided toward them—in the absolute soundlessness of his walk. He was far shorter than Garry, thin and fragile-seeming in his black, high collared suit, yet Ellen was suddenly afraid for her sweetheart, inexplicably afraid?

"Merab—she wants you." Sharah was suddenly in the door of Stasia's room, her white robe fluttering about her, her hood veiling her face. "Come."

"Keep back," Garry growled. "Keep back. If I can't be with her, neither shall you."

Merab came on, as if he had not heard. Ellen saw cords swell in Garry's neck, saw a small muscle twitch beneath his ear. "Keep back," he flung at the old man again, and the cold anger in his voice was edged by a strange rasp that might be—fear. His big fists lifted...

"Don't," Ellen managed. "Let him pass. What's the difference...?"

Merab was close to Garry. The girl saw his face clearly for a fleeting moment, saw its queerly angular features, straight-nosed and square-chinned as though drawn with a ruler. Then Garry struck at it.

Incredibly there was no thud of fist on flesh. There was no sound at all, and Merab was through the doorway—he was in the room and the door had closed on him and on Sharah. "God!" Garry groaned. "Oh my God!" He swung around to Ellen and stared at her out of an ashen-grey, writhing mask. "I didn't feel anything. Nothing at all."

"He dodged you," the girl cried. "He dodged your blow and got past you." That must be it! It couldn't be possible that...

"I hit him squarely," Garry mouthed. "He was right in front of me and I couldn't have missed. But my fist went through him as though he were thin air."

"That isn't so, darling." Gelid fingers probed Ellen's brain, but she contrived a brave smile, fighting for her sweetheart's sanity and her own. "It can't be so. You're excited, upset by what your mother said."

Garry gnawed at his lip and, confronted by the girl's courage, was a bit shamefaced at his terror. "You're right. I am—overwrought, and his talk about the Fields of Aalu got to me, I guess. He ducked me and got by."

"Of course—Garry! What did he mean by that? What are the Fields of Aalu?"

"The Fields—?" His face seemed to tighten, and his eyes were somber. "That is something from the mythology of the ancient Egyptians. It is what they called their afterworld—their purgatory. He meant that he is not—alive."

"Oh nonsense!" There was a faint scent in the heavy atmosphere of the old house, an odor of dust and of corruption so vague that Ellen was not certain it was real. "He was just trying to scare you."

But why had Merab cast no shadow? Why had there been no sound, no stir in the close air as he moved?

"Who is he, Garry? What is he doing here?"