195- Three Skeleton Key -Antony Ellis

Tired of the everyday grind, ever dream of a life of romantic adventure, 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.

The steaming coast of French Guiana, while around you, frightful in its fury, A nightmare of terror and violence is closing in on you. A nightmare from which there is no escape.

Tonight by popular request, we repeat one of the most terrifying stories ever presented on escape. Listen now as we bring you free skeleton key by George Toodoo's. Picture this place. A great tapering cylinder welded by iron rods and concrete to the key.

It's self 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-dappled, warm as soup, and swarming with gigantic bat-like devilfish, great violet school to the Portuguese man of war,

and, yes, sharks, the big ones, the 15 footers. And as if that wasn't enough, there was a hot, dank, rotten smelling wind that came out as day and night off the jungle swamps of the mainland, A wind that smelled like death.

Set in the base of the light with a watertight bronze door, and in you went, and up. Yes, up and up, and round and round, past the tanks of oil and the coils of rope, the cases of wicks, racks of lanterns, axes of spuds and cartons and cans, and up and up and up and up,

Round and round, over the light store room with 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.