
Alone in a silent, sun‑blazed metropolis, a man awakens with a throbbing head and a vague memory of a dangerous drink. He pushes aside a wooden trap, crawls through dust‑laden alleys, and discovers an empty downtown where even the cats have fled. The city’s towering tenements stare back like vacant eyes, and every street he follows seems abandoned, as if the entire population vanished in an inexplicable holiday.
As he pieces together the fragments of his recent past—a tavern visit, a lingering hunger, a hostile, dream‑like haze—he begins to suspect that something far stranger lies beneath the surface. The eerie quiet, the locked storefronts, and the unsettling feeling that he’s being watched turn his desperate search for an exit into a tense trek through a place that feels both familiar and alien. Listeners will be drawn into the protagonist’s unsettling journey, feeling each breath of dread as the city’s mysteries unfold.
Language
en
Duration
~1 hours (86K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2010-06-05
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1909–1977
A prolific pulp-era writer and editor, he moved easily between science fiction, mystery, and other popular genres. He also helped shape the field behind the scenes as an early magazine editor.
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