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Mistress of the Undead
Lazar Levi
1940
For thirty minutes she lived. Thirty minutes she suffered while the plane wreckage and dismembered human bodies burned around her. And one year later she told her story!
"DEATH!"
Tim Blake whispered the single word as he gazed in horror at the cuckoo clock on the mantel shelf. Fear contorted his rugged brown face when he turned to John Turner.
"God, man, did you hear that?" he asked.
John Turner had heard nothing except striking of the clock, but he felt strangely queer. An eerie silence followed as vibrations of the cuckoo's mournful croaks died away slowly.
"What was it?" He managed to get words out of a dry throat.
"Hit struck seven," Tim replied, in nervous agitation, "and it's only six o'clock. Death's acomin' to this here very house, and it's only a hour away." He was trembling and beads of perspiration popped out on his weather-beaten face.
From the next room there came a pitiful moan, hollow and weird. John Turner thought it whining of the cold January windÑa wind that had caused him to stop and warm at Tim Blake's shack on the edge of the marsh before plodding on to the lodge, where he and three other duck hunters were quartered for a week's shoot.
"Hit's the ole woman!" Tim Blake barely whispered the words. They seemed to lodge, chokingly, in his throat.
"Is she ill?" Turner asked.
"Sick for nigh onto a month," Tim whispered. "An' she ain't got but a hour to live by the clock." The old man's face twitched, revealing the inward agony tearing at his gaunt body. He wrung his hands pathetically.
"You don't believe that clock striking the wrong hour means any