Cliffhangers - Short Tales of Terror & Turmoil

By Cynthia Kozlowski

READ ON . . . IF YOU DARE!

A young boy trapped in a cave full of bats; a frozen body found in a field; an accidental trip through time . . . these heart-pounding short stories are sure to haunt your imagination. But beware! Just don’t turn out the lights!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Azalea Art Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9780990845669

Book preview

Cliffhangers - Short Tales of Terror & Turmoil

CLIFFHANGERS: SHORT TALES OF TERROR & TURMOIL

by Cynthia Kozlowski

Azalea Art Press

Southern Pines, North Carolina

© Cynthia Kozlowski, 2015.

All Rights Reserved.

Illustrations and Cover Art

by Cynthia Kozlowski

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & PUBLICATIONS

River Always Moving (poetry collection)

Azalea Art Press, 2014.

On Making Beds (poem)

Byline Magazine Competition

Honorable Mention, 1995.

Remembering Those Fish

and Other Things (short story)

Byline Magazine Competition

Third Place, 1994.

Terror in Linden Cove (short story)

The 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Competition

Children’s/Young Adult Fiction

Honorable Mention, 1978.

C O N T E N T S

Terror In Linden Cove

Dead Center

On Friday Aunt Minnie Baked Cookies

Trapped

No Cheese Doodles

The Loser

Swallowing the Sadness

About the Author

Contact / Book Orders

Terror in Linden Cover

Linden Cove was never really ours. Even later when my father’s lumber mill bought all the land along the St. Lawrence River from there to our cottage, the Cove belonged to out-of-towners. I’m ten now, but when I was eight something happened there that I’ll never forget as long as I live and breathe.

The people who owned Linden Cove were rich. They had their own boat captain who lived upstairs in their huge boathouse. That boathouse was four times as big as our cottage. I know that for a fact, ‘cause me, my brother Jim, and cousin Bud and I snuck under the boathouse door one time in our skiff to have a look around.

The main house had an elevator that zoomed up three stories to the attic. They even owned an island with a bridge connecting it to the mainland and a dock big enough to tie up the Queen Mary.

The water was really deep off that dock. If you laid on your stomach and hung your head over the water staring directly down with all your might, all you’d see are tiny white specks swirling round in a greenish brown  liquid. My brother Jim told me that huge sturgeons swim down there. Those fish live in the deepest water they can find. It has to be at least a hundred feet deep or they’ll go belly up. There were whirlpools under the dock, too. A whirlpool can suck you down to the bottom so fast you won’t know what hit you ‘til you’re dead.

The big house sat up from the river on a hill the way our cottage does. Giant stone steps led up to a porch surrounded by huge columns. A queen could walk down those steps with all her robes trailing and look perfectly natural.

It was the first of September when this thing happened. The people had left Linden Cove for the winter, and gone back to the city. My brother, Bud, and I stayed on at our cottages until late September, unless