Terrors Read Online Free Page B

Arlie’s ears. He looked puzzled but he didn’t seem unhappy. He gestured to the grownups in the room and they all went out of Arlie’s room but they left the door open and they took turns looking back at him.

    Dr. Goldsmith stayed in the house for a long time. Arlie wondered if Aunt Cora minded Dr. Goldsmith seeing her in her nightgown with her hair in a braid but she didn’t seem to.
    Finally Dr. Goldsmith came back into Arlie’s room and sat on the bed and looked at him again. He held his hands and looked at them, picked up Arlie’s pajama shirt and looked at his tummy and his chest.
    He stood up andput on his overcoat and his hat and picked up his doctor bag. He went out of the room and Arlie could hear Dr. Goldsmith and the other grownups talking again. They talked for a long time. Dr. Goldsmith came back still again and peered at Arlie.
    He turned around and went to the front door. Arlie heard Dr. Goldsmith open the front door and he heard him whistling that song that Arlie liked untilhe heard the front door close.

The Crimson Wizard and the Jewels of Lemuria
    The Central Railroad Tower in the very heart of the world’s greatest city rises forty-two stories into the air. It houses the offices of more than three thousand companies, lawyers, dentists, and physicians. And one mysterious organization, the frosted glass of whose doorway is marked, simply,
C. W. Enterprises—by Appointment Only
.
    The Seacoast Citytelephone directory contains no entry for C. W. Enterprises, and a call to the information operator elicits only a terse, “I am
sor
-ree, I have no
lis
-ting for that
par
-tee.”
    Any curiosity seeker who knocks at the door of C. W. Enterprises will be met only by silence; if he tries the knob, he will find the door securely locked.
    And yet, were it not for C. W. Enterprises, Seacoast City, the world’shub of commerce, culture, and transportation, would lie helpless before the marauding forces of crime and corruption.
    The lobby level of the Central Railroad Tower plays host to an oyster bar, a cigar and news-stand, a dry cleaning establishment, a newsreel theater, and the Central Barber Shop.
    It is in the last named establishment that our story begins.
    Two men sat in adjacent barber chairs.The nearly identical jackets of their fine hundred-dollar suits hung on the establishment’s brass coat rack. Their nearly identical fedoras, blocked and brushed, awaited them on the hat stand. Despite their careful grooming there was something vaguely disquieting about these men. Perhaps it was the cold expression in their eyes. Perhaps it was the abnormallywide, flat appearance of their mouths.

    The co-proprietors of the Central Barber Shop, twin brothers Alberto and Roberto Morelli, danced around their customers, snipping here, powdering there. The brothers’ hair was wavy, graying; each wore a neatly-trimmed mustache.
    Each customer had already been carefully shaved with an imported straight razor of finest Toledo steel and the precious faces of both customers were covered with lightlyscented, damp towels. Unlike most men in their position, for whom the towels were heated before application, these two insisted upon theirs being chilled. The Morellis thought this odd, but their business ethic required them to provide the service that their customers demanded.
    Kneeling before one customer, Clarence Willis, the Morelli Brothers’ faithful employee, worked his shoeshine magic ona pair of handmade cordovan bluchers. In Clarence’s hands shoe wax coated leather like honey on a clabbered milk muffin, brushes danced like Bojangles’ feet, and a soft flannel cloth popped and rang like a bullwhip.
    A battered Emerson radio stood on the shelf between rows of potions and elixirs, the voices of the greatest tenor and soprano in the world emerging in a live broadcast from the greatMetropolitan Opera Palace. A copy of the Seacoast City
Daily Reporter
lay beside the radio. The Morelli brothers had been reading the