085- Three Skeleton Key -William Conrad- -2

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Who want to 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 Toudouz 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, a hundred and fifty feet long, Maybe forty wide. That's at low tide. At high tide, just the light, rising a hundred and ten feet straight up out of the ocean.

And all about it, the churning water. Grey green, scummed apple, warm as soup, and swarming with gigantic bat-like devilfish, great violet schools of Portuguese man-awar, and, yes, sharks, the big ones, the fifteen 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... And up, yes, up and up and round and round, Past the tanks of oil and bacoyles of rope, Cases of wicks, racks of lanterns, Sax of spuds and cartons and cans.

And up and up and up, round and round. 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.