Famous Modern Ghost Stories - The Original Classic Edition. Scarborough Dorothy

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 door 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 there. 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 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

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       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 backwaters, 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