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 mere 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 spirits 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.
22
"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 eyes 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 be crushed."
"And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and fall-
ing 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.
23
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 thing more 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
