085- Three Skeleton Key -William Conrad- -1

Tired of the everyday routine, ever dream of a life of romantic adventure. Wanna get away from it all? We offer you escape, escape. Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

Tonight we escape to a lonely lighthouse of the steaming jungle coast of French Guiana and a nightmare world of terror and violence. As George Todouz describes it in his hair-raising tale, three skeleton key. Picture this place.

A gray tapering cylinder, welded by iron rods and concrete to the key itself. A bare black rock, 150 feet long, maybe 40 wide. That's at low tide. At high tide, just the light. rising 110 feet straight up out of the ocean.

And all about it, the churning water, gray-green scum-dapple, warm as soup, and swarming with gigantic, fat-like devil fish, straight-violet schools of Portuguese man-awar, and, yes, sharks, the big ones, the 15 footers. And as if this wasn't enough, There was a hot dank rotten smelling wind that came at us day and night off the jungle

swamps of the mainland. A wind that smelled like death. Set in the base of the light was a watertight bronze door. And in you went, yes, up and up and round and round. Past tanks of oil and the coils of rope, cases of wicks, racks of lanterns, sacks of of spuds and cartons and cans.

And up, and up, and up. Over the light store room was the food store room. And over the food store room was the bunk room where the three of us slept. And over the bunk room was the living and cooking room.

And over the living and cooking room was the light. She was a beauty, balanced like a ballerina on a glistening steel axle of her rotary mechanism. At night, you'd lie there on the stone deck of the gallery with the light revolving smoothly and quietly over your head, easing her bright white eye 360 degrees around the horizon.