Algernon Blackwood (8 page)

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede
had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he
caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to
forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were
about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of
discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He
himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what
saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I
found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches,
and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist
me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me.
Nothing came to me to say, somehow.

"I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what
saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."

"You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected
thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.

"That's what saved you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them
off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone—for the
moment at any rate!"

A wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my
friend too—great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a
tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire
and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent
had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.

We picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught
our feet in sand.

"It's those sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again
and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look
at the size of them!"

All round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving
shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar
to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and
deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the
whole of my foot and leg.

Neither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we
could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having
first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle
inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the
end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would
disturb and wake us.

In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a
sudden start.

It was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the
exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while
came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion
also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted and constantly sat
up, asking me if I "heard this" or "heard that." He tossed about on his
cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over
the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with
the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still.
Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds
of snoring—the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a
welcome and calming influence.

This, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.

A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face.
But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first
thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in
his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me
that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering
was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.

I called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed
the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was
down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook
it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively
that the Swede was not here. He had gone.

I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I
was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me
completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was
that same familiar humming—gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might
have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very
atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.

But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.

The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards
over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I
could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy
patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island,
calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that
came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming
muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged
among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my
face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark
figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And
already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken
the plunge.

I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him
shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a
noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most
outlandish phrases in his anger about "going inside to Them," and "taking
the way of the water and the wind," and God only knows what more besides,
that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with
horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him
into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and
cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.

I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding
as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering
outside—I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business
perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me
so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said,
for all the world just like a frightened child:

"My life, old man—it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow.
They've found a victim in our place!"

Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my
eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though
nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a
sacrifice by drowning. And when the sunlight woke him three hours
later—hours of ceaseless vigil for me—it became so clear to me that he
remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed
it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high
in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation
of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did
not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark
about the extra coldness of the water.

"River's falling at last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."

"The humming has stopped too," I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he
remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

"Everything has stopped," he said, "because—"

He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just
before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

"Because 'They've found another victim'?" I said, forcing a little laugh.

"Exactly," he answered, "exactly! I feel as positive of it as though—as
though—I feel quite safe again, I mean," he finished.

He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on
the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to
feet.

"Come," he said; "I think if we look, we shall find it."

He started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks, poking
with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself
always close on his heels.

"Ah!" he exclaimed presently, "ah!"

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the
horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was
pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water
and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots
so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot must
have been under water.

"See," he said quietly, "the victim that made our escape possible!"

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the
body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and the
face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned, but a few
hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island
somewhere about the hour of the dawn—at the very time the fit had passed.

"We must give it a decent burial, you know."

"I suppose so," I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for
there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that
turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his
face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more leisurely.
The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body,
so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in
warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to
bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward
with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the hard
sand so that our feet splashed into the water. And, before anything could
be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud
sound of humming—the sound of several hummings—which passed with a vast
commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards
into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the
distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet
invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of
us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a
movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became
released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned
completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky. It lay on the
edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch
about a "proper burial"—and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the
sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an instant.

I saw what he had seen.

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed
chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh
were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar
in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the
island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful
mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the
current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream
and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and
over on the waves like an otter.