The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

“Don’t!” implored Marie. “He’ll know I told you. And you can’t do nothing.
Plato’s a walking corpse by now—and I’ll be one, too, if Ducoin finds out—”
She tried to detain Connell, but he broke clear before her full-blown fascinations
could conspire with her sinister hints. She had merely delayed the quest;
and Connell headed up the river, toward that mysterious plantation.
Ducoin’s house loomed up above the surrounding orange groves, nearly a
quarter of a mile from the highway. Its remnants of white paint made it resemble
a gaunt, ancient tomb. As Connell pulled up, he saw a Model T parked in a
clump of shrubbery. Plato’s decrepit red Lizzie!
And then Connell received a shock. A file of blacks emerged from the orange
groves. Their black faces were vacant. They shambled toward the left wing of
the house with the grotesque gait of animated dummies.
The sodden, lifeless clump, clump, clump of their feet sounded like clods of
earth dropping on a coffin. Their arms dangled limp as rags.
Connell shuddered. No wonder that the ignorant Cajuns considered them
walking dead men.
Clump, clump, clump. The most poverty stricken and oppressed black laborers
jest and chatter at the end of a day’s work; but these black men stalked in silence
broken only by the shuffling crunch of their flat feet.
Following the file came a white man who wore boots and riding breeches. His
heartless, handsome face was tanned and deeply lined. Intelligent but relentless.
His dark eyes were as cryptic as his smile as he confronted Connell.
“Looking for someone?”
“Yes. A man named Plato,” said Connell. “Are you Pierre Ducoin?”
“That’s the name,” admitted the taskmaster. “But there are no strangers on this
plantation.”
The more Connell saw of Ducoin, the less he liked him. There was something
uncanny about the man.
As Connell hesitated, something compelled him to glance towards the veranda
that ran the full length of the house, some ten feet above the ground level.
Framed by a French window was a girl whose dark eyes and lovely, delicate
features for an instant made him forget that she was clad only in a chiffon robe
which, half parted, revealed enticing glimpses of silken legs, and a body to
which clung the caressing haze of sheer fabric that betrayed slender, olive-tinted
curves…the amorous inward sweep of her waist…pert breasts that any hand
larger than her own could conceal.…
Her lips were silently moving, and she was gesturing for him to leave at once.