Algernon Blackwood (6 page)

"Come and listen," he said, "and see what you make of it." He held his hand
cupwise to his ear, as so often before.

"Now do you hear anything?" he asked, watching me curiously.

We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only the
deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface.
The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to
reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound—something like the humming of a
distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste
of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but
it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant
steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense
gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled
metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. My heart
quickened as I listened.

"I've heard it all day," said my companion. "While you slept this afternoon
it came all round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near
enough to see—to localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and
sometimes it seemed under the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn
it was not outside at all, but within myself—you know—the way a sound in
the fourth dimension is supposed to come."

I was too much puzzled to pay much attention to his words. I listened
carefully, striving to associate it with any known familiar sound I could
think of, but without success. It changed in the direction, too, coming
nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote distance. I cannot say
that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical,
yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that made me wish I had
never heard it.

"The wind blowing in those sand-funnels," I said determined to find an
explanation, "or the bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps."

"It comes off the whole swamp," my friend answered. "It comes from
everywhere at once." He ignored my explanations. "It comes from the willow
bushes somehow—"

"But now the wind has dropped," I objected. "The willows can hardly make a
noise by themselves, can they?"

His answer frightened me, first because I had dreaded it, and secondly,
because I knew intuitively it was true.

"It is because the wind has dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before.
It is the cry, I believe, of the—"

I dashed back to my fire, warned by the sound of bubbling that the stew was
in danger, but determined at the same time to escape further conversation.
I was resolute, if possible, to avoid the exchanging of views. I dreaded,
too, that he would begin about the gods, or the elemental forces, or
something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep myself well in hand for
what might happen later. There was another night to be faced before we
escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing yet what it
might bring forth.

"Come and cut up bread for the pot," I called to him, vigorously stirring
the appetizing mixture. That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the
thought made me laugh.

He came over slowly and took the provision sack from the tree, fumbling in
its mysterious depths, and then emptying the entire contents upon the
ground-sheet at his feet.

"Hurry up!" I cried; "it's boiling."

The Swede burst out into a roar of laughter that startled me. It was forced
laughter, not artificial exactly, but mirthless.

"There's nothing here!" he shouted, holding his sides.

"Bread, I mean."

"It's gone. There is no bread. They've taken it!"

I dropped the long spoon and ran up. Everything the sack had contained lay
upon the ground-sheet, but there was no loaf.

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I
burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my
laughter also made me understand his. The stain of psychical pressure
caused it—this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an
effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve.
And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.

"How criminally stupid of me!" I cried, still determined to be consistent
and find an explanation. "I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That
chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it
lying on the counter or—"

"The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning," the Swede
interrupted.

Why in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.

"There's enough for tomorrow," I said, stirring vigorously, "and we can get
lots more at Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from
here."

"I hope so—to God," he muttered, putting the things back into the sack,
"unless we're claimed first as victims for the sacrifice," he added with a
foolish laugh. He dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I
suppose, and I heard him mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it
seemed quite natural for me to ignore his words.

Our meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence,
avoiding one another's eyes, and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up
and prepared for the night, and, once smoking, our minds unoccupied with
any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more
and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very
vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to
ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note
of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the
night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct
notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us.
Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again
from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like
the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front,
at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound
really defies description. But nothing within my knowledge is like that
ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and
willows.

We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute
greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not
know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way
of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the
sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly
unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind
of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not.
After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same
tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the
support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As
long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to
ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me,
coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration,
too—which made it so much more convincing—from a totally different point
of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such
an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was
secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it
impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.

The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul,
as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed
through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking
beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the
rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been
welcome.

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely
greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of
terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of.
We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of
conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the
frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by
the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy
upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn
a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be
carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by
mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be
the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.

It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the
horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious
intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the
unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place
where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former
worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the
old pagan spell.

At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were
within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so
attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another
scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human. And in the
end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we
should be drawn across the frontier into their world.

Small things testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in
the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind.
The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every
indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making
signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural
character, and revealed in something of its other aspect—as it existed
across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was
now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we
touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience,
and in the true sense of the word unearthly.

"It's the deliberate, calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to
zero," the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my
thoughts. "Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the
canoe, the lessening food—"

"Haven't I explained all that once?" I interrupted viciously.

"You have," he answered dryly; "you have indeed."

He made other remarks too, as usual, about what he called the "plain
determination to provide a victim"; but, having now arranged my thoughts
better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul
against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that
he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage
and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have
never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me—the one that
explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish
explanations, yet was horribly afraid.

Meanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the wood pile grew
small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness
consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle
of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the
willows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a
deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the
river and the humming in the air overhead.

We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.

At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the
wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation,
the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech,
or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have
been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a
blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start.