Algernon Blackwood (7 page)

"I can't disguise it any longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the
darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something
here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth.
If the other shore was—different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"

The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He
stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge
excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was
the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he
replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must
sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of
elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only
chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It
was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose
symptoms had puzzled me.

"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have
not found us—not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're
blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe
and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see
us. We must keep our minds quiet—it's our minds they feel. We must control
our thoughts, or it's all up with us."

"Death, you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

"Worse—by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either
annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves
no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's
gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible
loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even
annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches
ours, where the veil between has worn thin"—horrors! he was using my very
own phrase, my actual words—"so that they are aware of our being in their
neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming
overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded
more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the
fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and
look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of
another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly
different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and
terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which
earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires,
the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast
purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with
more expressions of the soul—"

"I suggest just now—" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I
was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his
torrent that had to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought
perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would
be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending
upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about
us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that
their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."

The mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I
listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set me
shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements.

"And what do you propose?" I began again.

"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could
get away," he went on, "just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give
the sleigh another start. But—I see no chance of any other victim now."

I stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he
continued.

"It's the willows, of course. The willows mask the others, but the others
are feeling about for us. If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost,
lost utterly." He looked at me with an expression so calm, so determined,
so sincere, that I no longer had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as
sane as any man ever was. "If we can hold out through the night," he added,
"we may get off in the daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered."

"But you really think a sacrifice would—"

That gong-like humming came down very close over our heads as I spoke, but
it was my friend's scared face that really stopped my mouth.

"Hush!" he whispered, holding up his hand. "Do not mention them more than
you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the
inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that
they may ignore us."

"Even in thought?" He was extraordinarily agitated.

"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must
keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own
way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful
blackness of that summer night.

"Were you awake all last night?" he went on suddenly.

"I slept badly a little after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow
his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of
course—"

"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises."

"Then you heard it too?"

"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard," he said, adding,
after a moment's hesitation, "and that other sound—"

"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something
tremendous, gigantic?"

He nodded significantly.

"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.

"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been
altered—had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed."

"And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards
where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind.
"What do you make of that?"

"It's their sound," he whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their world,
the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks
through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above
so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselves
humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that
are against us."

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea
in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realized
what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on the
tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the
ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face
again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very
earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent
control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative,
stolid!

"Now listen," he said. "The only thing for us to do is to go on as though
nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth;
pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the
mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape.
Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!"

"All right," I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the
strangeness of it all; "all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing
first. Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us,
those sand-funnels?"

"No!" he cried, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "I dare not,
simply dare not, put the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am
glad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to
prevent their putting it into yours."

He sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did not
press him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me as
I could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipes
busily in silence.

Then something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way is
when the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thing
for a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced to
look down at my sand-shoe—the sort we used for the canoe—and something to
do with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I
had bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and other
details of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in its
train, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I was
accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale,
motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that
proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate
and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a
sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of
things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and
incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from
my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and
utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.

"You damned old pagan!" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "You
imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You—"

I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother
the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course,
heard it too—the strange cry overhead in the darkness—and that sudden
drop in the air as though something had come nearer.

He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of
the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.

"After that," he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! We
can't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on—down the
river."

He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject
terror—the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him at
last.

"In the dark?" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst,
but still realizing our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! The
river's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go
deeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but
willows, willows, willows!"

He sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of
those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the
control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had
reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.

"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe
of genuine terror in his voice and face.

I crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine,
kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.

"We'll make one more blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the
night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself
together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"

He said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure,
too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the
darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping
among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but
seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It
was shivery work!

We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where
some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when
my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was
the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I
heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I
knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing
to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger,
and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze
drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither
a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being
as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three,
moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it
differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow
bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface—"coiling
upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look,
by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"—he gave a kind of whistling cry.
"They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy
form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed
backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to
support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a
struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I
was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that
plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in
my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,
extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was
losing it altogether, and about to die.