“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.
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.