The Door of Dread

Full name: The Door of Dread: A Secret Service Romance.

He neither saw her nor heard her as she stood so closely behind him. He was crouched, with blithe wheezes of contentment, over a little bundle of folded white sheets and blue-prints. Around these, after a voluptuous stare at the closely inscribed white pages, he snapped a rubber band to hold them together.

It was at the precise moment that the rubber band snapped against the folded and sorted papers that his world suddenly went out, like a bubble bursting in mid-air.

For it was at that moment that the woman so close behind him, swinging with all her force, brought the heavy candlestick down on the wavering high light along the pink-fleshed skull.