 Section 1 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Ken Crooker on the web at kencrooker.com. Famous Modern Ghost Stories, compiled by Dorothy Scarborough. Section 1 The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. Our meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence, avoiding one another's eyes and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up and prepared for the night, and once smoking our minds unoccupied with any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more than if I had been able to take it and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the night with a faint continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct notes. At one time it was behind, and at another time in front of us. Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides, and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound really defies description, but nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless, muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and willows. We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and holy unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to me that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not. After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness. Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself. Corroboration, too, which made it so much more convincing, from a totally different point of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was secret to himself. And these fragments were the bits he founded impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved him. It was like being sick. There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction. Our destruction, he said once, while the fire blazed between us. We strayed out of a safe line somewhere. And another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said, as though talking to himself. I don't think a phonograph would show any record of that. The sound doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a fourth dimension sound might be supposed to make itself heard. I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were masked all over the sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way. It has that about it, he went on, which is utterly out of common experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really. It is a non-human sound. I mean a sound outside humanity. Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time. But he had so admirably expressed my own feeling, that it was a relief to have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind. The solitude of that Dan Yube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet. My thoughts ran incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul, as the saying is, for the feel of those Bavarian villages we had passed through by the score. For the normal, human common places, peasants drinking beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the rocks behind the Red Roof Church. Even the tourists would have been welcome. Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had strayed, as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us, where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called our lives, yet by mental, not physical processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure, a sacrifice. It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed elements, infesting them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose. Resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding place, whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form, at first, of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell. At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never before or since have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a beyond-region, of another scheme of life, another evolution, not parallel to the human. And in the end, our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world. Small things testified to this amazing influence of the place, and now, in the silence around the fire, they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication. The otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatmen making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect, as it existed across the border in that other region. In this changed aspect, I felt, was new not merely to me, but to the race, the whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word, unearthly. It's the deliberate calculating purpose that reduces one courage to zero, the sweet said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. Otherwise, imagination might count for much, but the paddle, the canoe, the lessening food? Haven't I explained all that once, I interrupted viciously? You have, he answered, Riley, you have indeed. He made other remarks, too, as usual, about what he called the plain determination to provide a victim. But having now arranged my thoughts better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass. And I have never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me, the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid. Meanwhile, in the pitchy night, the fire died down and the woodpile grew small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight, it was inky black. Occasionally, a stray puff of wind sent the billows shivering about us. But apart from this not very welcome sound, a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead. We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds. At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a blaze and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start. 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 sweet'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. I see 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 and the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I could 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 is word 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 stopped 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 are 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 with a gong-like note hum ceaselessly, rising and falling like the 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 that 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, stalled. 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 sandfunnels. 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. My chance 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 idolator! 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 sweet, of course, heard it too, that strange cry overhead in the darkness and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come nearer. He had turned ash and white under the tan. He stood bold 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 head 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 comorm. 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 thick 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 sweet. 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 dropped curtain used at the back of a theater, hazzly 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 sweet, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped in size 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 down 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 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 sweet 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 fleshy coverings, 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 all together and about to die. An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the sweet 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 this 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. He had 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 time, 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 around 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 hole 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 leased motion would disturb and wake us. In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a sudden start. Five. 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 onto 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 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 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 a 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 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 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 bothily 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 and this hot sky, and he at once got up and sent 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. Rivers 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 and stabbed 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 design, and I was determined to know it. Because they 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 his 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 in 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 24 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. It was a 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 and began clamoring 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, he 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 onto 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 as if I had been shot. At the moment we touched the body, there arose from its surface the loud sound of humming. The sound of several hummings which passed with a vast commotion as if 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 mainstream and 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 midstream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight turning over and over on the waves like an otter. End of the Willows End of Section 1 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories Section 2 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by JC Guan Famous Modern Ghost Stories Compiled by Doracy Scarborough Section 2 The Shadows on the Wall by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward died, said Helen Glyn. She spoke not with acrimony but with grave severity. Rebecca Anne Glyn gasped by way of assent. She sat in a wide flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa and rolled terrified eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister as a Stephen Brickham who had been Emma Glyn the one beauty of the family. The latter was beautiful still with a large splendid full-blown beauty. She felt a great rocking chair with her superb bulk of feminity and swayed gently back and forth her black silks whispering and her black frills fluttering. Even the shock of death for her brother Edward lay dead in the house could not disturb her outward serenity and meaner. But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her sister Caroline's announcement and her sister Rebecca Anne's gasp of terror and distress and response. I think Henry might have controlled his temper when poor Edward was so near his end. She said with an asperity which disturbed slightly the rosy curves of her beautiful mouth. Of course he did not know murmured Rebecca Anne in a faint tone. Of course he did not know it said Caroline quickly. She turned on her sister with a strange sharp look of suspicion. Then she shrank as if from the others possible answer. Rebecca gasped again. The married sister, Mrs. Emma Brigham was now sitting up straight in her chair. She had ceased rocking and was eyeing them both intently with a sudden accentuation of family likeness in her face. What do you mean? said she impartially to them both. Then she too seemed to shrink before a possible answer. She even laughed an evasive sort of laugh. Nobody means anything, said Caroline firmly. She rose and crossed the room toward the door with grim decisiveness. Where are you going? asked Mrs. Brigham. I have something to see to, replied Caroline, and the others at once knew by her tone she had even set duty to perform in the Chamber of Death. Oh! said Mrs. Brigham. After the door had closed behind Caroline she turned to Rebecca. Did Henry have many words with him? she asked. They were talking very loud, replied Rebecca evasively. Mrs. Brigham looked at her. She had not resumed rocking. She still sat up straight with a slight knitting of intensity in her fair forehead with the rippling curbs of her auburned hair. Did you ever hear anything? She asked in a low voice with a glance toward the door. I was just across the hall in the south parlor, and that door was open and this door ajar replied Rebecca with a slight flush. Then you must have I couldn't help it. Everything? Most of it. What was it? The old story. She was mad as he always was because Edward was living on here for nothing when he had wasted all the money Father left him. Rebecca nodded with a fearful glance at the door. When Emma spoke again her voice was still more hushed. I know how he felt, said she. It must have looked to him as if Edward was living at his expense, but he wasn't. No, he wasn't. And Edward had a right here according to no, and Henry ought to have remembered it. Yes, he ought. Did he say hard things? Pretty hard from what I've heard. What? I heard him tell Edward that he had no business here at all and he thought he had better go away. What did Edward say? That he would stay here as long as he lived and afterward too if he was a mind too and he would like to see Henry get him out and then what? Then he laughed. What did Henry say? I didn't hear him say anything, but but what? I saw him when he came out of this room. He looked mad? You've seen him when he looked so. Emma nodded. The expression of horror on her face had deepened. Do you remember that time he killed the cat because she had scratched him? Yes? Then Caroline re-entered the room. She went up to the stove in which a wood fire was burning. It was a cold, gloomy day of fall and she warmed her hands which were reddened from recent washing in cold water. Mrs. Brigham looked at her and hesitated. She glanced at the door which was still a jar. It did not easily shut being still swollen with the damp weather of the summer. She rose and pushed it together with a sharp thud which jarred the house. Rebecca started painfully with a half-exclamation. Caroline looked at her disapprovingly. It is time you controlled your nerves, Rebecca, she said. Mrs. Brigham, returning from the closed door, said and curiously that it ought to be fixed. It shut so hard. It will shrink enough after we have had the fire a few days, replied Caroline. I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself talking as he did to Edward, said Mrs. Brigham abruptly, but in an almost inaudible voice. Hush, said Caroline, with a glance of actual fear at the door. Nobody can hear with the door shut. I say again, I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself. I shouldn't think he'd ever get over it, having words with poor Edward the very night before he died. Edward was enough sight's better disposition than Henry with all his faults. I never heard him speak a cross word unless he spoke cross to Henry that last night. I don't know, but he did from what Rebecca overheard. Not so much cross as sort of soft and sweet and aggravating sniffed Rebecca. What do you really think hailed Edward, asked Emma in hardly more than a whisper? She did not look at her sister. I know you said that he had terrible pains in his stomach but what do you think made him have them? Henry called it a gastric trouble. You know Edward has always had dyspepsia. Mrs. Brigham hesitated in moment. Was there any talk of an examination, said she? Then Caroline turned on her fiercely. No, said she in a terrible voice. No. The three sister souls seemed to meet on one common ground of terrified understanding through their eyes. The old fashioned latch of the door was heard to rattle and the push from without made the door shake ineffectually. It's Henry, Rebecca sighed rather than whispered. Mrs. Brigham settled herself after a noiseless rush across the floor into her rocking chair again and was swaying back and forth with her head comfortably leaning back when the door at least yielded and Henry Glean entered. He cast a covertly sharp intensive glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate calm. At Rebecca quietly huddled in the corner of the sofa with her handkerchief to her face and only one small uncovered reddened ear as attentive as a dog and at Caroline sitting with a strained composure in her armchair by the stove. She met his eyes quite firmly with a look of inscrutable fear and defiance of the fear and of him. Henry Glean looked more like another than the others. Both had the same hard delicacy of form and equillinity of feature. They confronted each other with the pitiless immovability of two statues in whose marble liniments, emotions were fixed for all eternity. Then Henry Glean smiled and the smile transformed his face. He looked suddenly years younger and an almost boyish recklessness appeared in his face. He flung himself into a chair with a gesture which was bewildering from its congruity with his general appearance. He leaned his head back flung one leg over the other and looked laughingly at Mrs. Brigham. I declare, Emma, you grow younger every year, he said. She flushed a little and her placid mouth widened at the corners. She was susceptible to praise. Our thoughts today ought to belong to those who will never grow older, said Caroline and her hard boys. Henry looked at her, still smiling. Of course, we none of us forget that, said he in a deep, gentle voice. But we have to speak to the living, Caroline, and I have not seen Emma for a long time and the living are as dear as the dead. Not to me, said Caroline. She rose and went abruptly out of the room again. Rebecca also rose and hurried after her, sobbing lightly. Henry looked slowly after them. Caroline is completely unstrung, said he. Mrs. Brigham rocked. A confidence in him inspired by his manner was stealing over her. Out of that confidence she spoke quite easily and naturally. His death was very sudden, said she. Henry's eyelids quivered slightly, but his gaze was unswerving. Yes, said he. It was very sudden. He was sick only a few hours. What did you call it? Gastric? You did not think of an examination? There was no need. I am perfectly certain as to the cause of his death. Suddenly, Mrs. Brigham felt a creep as of some life horror over her very soul. Her flesh prickled with cold before an inflection of his voice. She rose cuddling on weak knees. Where are you going? asked Henry in a strange breathless voice. Mrs. Brigham said something incoherent about some sewing which she had to do, some black for the funeral, and was out of the room. She went up to the front chamber which she occupied. Caroline was there. She went close to her and took her hands, and the two sisters looked at each other. Don't speak. Don't. Have it, said Caroline finally in an awful whisper. I won't, replied Emma. That afternoon, the three sisters were in the study. Mrs. Brigham was hemming some black material. At least, she laid her work under her lap. It's no use. I cannot see to sew another stitch unless we have lights, said she. Caroline, who was writing some letters at the table, turned to Rebecca in her usual place on the sofa. Rebecca, you had better get a lamp, she said. Rebecca started up. Even in the dusk, her face showed her agitation. It doesn't seem to me that we need a lamp quite yet, she said in a piteous, pleading voice like a child. Yes, we do. Returned Mrs. Brigham pre-remptorily. I can't see to sew another stitch. Rebecca rose and left the room. Presently, she entered with a lamp. She set it on the table, an old-fashioned card-table which was placed against the opposite wall from the window. That opposite wall was taken up with three doors. One small space was occupied by the table. What have you put that lamp over there for? asked Mrs. Brigham, with more impatience than her voice usually revealed. Why didn't you set it in the hall and have done with it? Neither Caroline nor I can see if it is on that table. I thought perhaps you would move, replied Rebecca Horsley. If I do move, we can't both sit at that table. Caroline has her paper all spread around. Why don't you set the lamp on the study-table in the middle of the room, then we can both see? Rebecca hesitated. Her face was very pale. She looked with an appeal that was fairly agonizing at her sister Caroline. Why don't you put the lamp on this table, as she says, asked Caroline, almost fiercely. Why do you act so, Rebecca? Rebecca took the lamp and set it on the table in the middle of the room without another word. Then she seated herself on the sofa and placed a hand over her eyes as if to shade them and remain so. Does the light hurt your eyes? And is that the reason why you don't want the lamp? asked Mrs. Brigham kindly. I always like to sit in the dark, replied Rebecca chokingly. Then she snatched her handkerchief from her pocket and began to weep. Caroline continued to write. Mrs. Brigham to sew. Suddenly Mrs. Brigham, as she sewed, glanced at the opposite wall. The glance became a steady stare. She looked intently. Her work suspended in her hands. Then she looked away again and took a few more stitches. Then she looked again and again turned to her task. At last she laid her work in her lap and stared concentratedly. She looked from the wall around the room, taking note of the very subject. Then she turned to her sister's. What is that? said she. What? asked Caroline harshly. That strange shadow on the wall replied Mrs. Brigham. Rebecca sat with her face hidden. Caroline dipped her pen in the ink-stand. Why don't you turn around and look? asked Mrs. Brigham in a wandering and somewhat aggrieved way. I am in a hurry to see Mrs. Brigham. I am in a hurry to finish this letter, replied Caroline shortly. Mrs. Brigham rose. Her work slipping to the floor and began walking around the room, moving various articles of furniture with her eyes on the shadow. Then she suddenly sheaked out. Look at this awful shadow! What is it? Caroline, look, look! Rebecca, look! What is it? All Mrs. Brigham's triumphant placidity was gone. Her handsome face was livid with horror. She stood stiffly pointing at the shadow. Then, after a shattering glance at the wall, Rebecca burst out in a wild wail. Oh, Caroline, there it is again! There it is again! Caroline, Glenn, you look! said Mrs. Brigham. Look! What is that dreadful shadow? Caroline rose turned and stood confronting the wall. How should I know? she said. It has been there every night since he died, cried Rebecca. Every night? Yes, he died Thursday and this is Saturday. That makes three nights, said Caroline rigidly. She stood as if holding her calm with a vice of concentrated will. It, it looks like, like, stammered Mrs. Brigham in a tone of intense horror. I know what it looks like well enough, said Caroline. I've got eyes in my head. It looks like Edward burst out Rebecca in a sort of frenzy of fear. Only... Yes, it does, I sent in Mrs. Brigham whose horrid, stricken tone matched her sisters. Only... Oh, it is awful! What is it, Caroline? I ask you again. How should I know? replied Caroline. I see it there like you. How should I know? Any more than you. Something in the room, said Mrs. Brigham staring wildly around. We moved everything in the room. The first night it came, said Rebecca. It is not anything in the room. Caroline turned upon her with a sort of fury. Of course it is something in the room, said she. How you act? What do you mean, talking so? Of course it is something in the room. Of course it is, agreed Mrs. Brigham looking at Caroline's especially. It must be something in the room. It is not anything in the room. Repeated Rebecca with obstinate horror. The door opened suddenly and Henry Glenn entered. He began to speak. Then his eyes followed the direction of the others. He stood staring at the shadow on the wall. What is that? He demanded in a strange voice. It must be due to something in the room, said Mrs. Brigham faintly. Henry Glenn stood and stared a moment longer. His face showed a gamut of emotions. Horror conviction then furious in credulity. Suddenly he began hastening hither and thither about the room. He moved the furniture with fierce jerks turning ever to see the effect upon the shadow on the wall. Not a line of its terrible outlines wavered. It must be something in the room. He declared in a voice which seemed to snap like a lash. His face changed. The inmost secrecy of his nature seemed evident upon his face until one almost lost sight of his liniments. Rebecca stood close to her sofa regarding him with woeful, fascinated eyes. Mrs. Brigham clutched Caroline's hand. They both stood in a corner out of his way. For a few moments he raged about the room like a cage wild animal. He moved every piece of furniture when the moving of a piece did not affect the shadow he flung it to the floor. Then suddenly he desisted. He laughed. What an absurdity he said easily. Such a to-do about the shadow. That so assented Mrs. Brigham in a scared voice which she tried to make natural. As she spoke she lifted the chair near her. I think you have broken the chair that Edward was fond of, said Caroline. Terror and wrath were struggling for expression on her face. Her mouth was set, her eyes shrinking. Henry lifted the chair with a show of anxiety. Just as good as ever he said pleasantly. He laughed again, looking at his sisters. Did I scare you? he said. I should think you might be used to me by this time. You know my way of wanting to leap to the bottom of a mystery and that shadow does look queer, like and I thought if there was any way of accounting for it I wouldn't like to do it without any delay. You don't seem to have succeeded, remarked Caroline Dryley with a slight glance at the wall. Henry's eyes followed hers and he quivered perceptively. Oh there's no accounting for shadows, he said, and he laughed again. A man is a fool to try to account for shadows. Then the supper bell rang and they all left the room but Henry kept his bag to the wall as did indeed the others. Henry led the way with an alert motion like a boy. Rebecca brought up the rear. She could scarcely walk, her knees trembled so. I can't sit in that room again this evening, she whispered to Caroline after supper. Very well. We will sit in the south room, replied Caroline. I think we will sit in the south parlor, she said aloud. It isn't as damp as the study and I have a cold. So they all sat in the south room with their suing. Henry read the newspaper, his chair drawn close to the lamp on the table. About nine o'clock he rose abruptly and crossed the hall to the study. The three sisters looked at one another. Brigham rose, folding her wrestling skirts compactly around her and began tiptoeing toward the door. What are you going to do? inquired Rebecca agitatedly. I am going to see what he is about, replied Mrs. Brigham cautiously. As she spoke she pointed to the study door across the hall. It was a jar. Henry had striven to pull it together behind him but it had somehow swollen beyond the limit with curious speed. It was still a jar and a streak of light showed from top to bottom. Mrs. Brigham folded her skirt so tightly that her bulk with its swelling curves was revealed in a black silk sheet and she went with a slow tattle across the hall to the study door. She stood there, her eye at the crack. In the south room Rebecca stopped suing and sat watching with dilated eyes. Caroline soared steadily. What Mrs. Brigham standing at the crack in the study door saw was this. Henry Glenn evidently reasoning that the source of the strange shadow must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall was making systematic passes and thrusts with an old sword which had belonged to his father all over and through the intervening space. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation. The blade gave out flashes of light. The shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham watching felt herself cold with horror. Finally Henry seized and stood with the sword in head and raised as if to strike, surveying the shadow on the wall threateningly. Mrs. Brigham toddled back across the hall and shut the south room door behind her before she related what she had seen. He looks like a demon, she said again. Have you got any of that cold wine in the house, Caroline? I don't feel as if I could stand much more. Yes, there's plenty, said Caroline. You can have some when you go to bed. I think we all had better take some, said Mrs. Brigham. Oh, Caroline, what? Don't ask, don't speak, said Caroline. No, I'm not going to, replied Mrs. Brigham. But soon the three sisters went to their chambers and the south parlor was deserted. Caroline called to Henry in the study to put out the light before he came upstairs. They had been gone about an hour when he came into the room bringing the lamp which had stood in the study. He set it on the table and waited a few minutes, pacing up and down. His face was terrible, his fair conflection showed a livid and his blue eyes seemed dark blanks of awful reflections. Then he took up the lamp and returned to the library. He set the lamp on the center table and the shadows sprang out on the wall. Again he studied the furniture and moved it about, but deliberately, with none of his former frenzy. Nothing affected the shadow. Then he returned to the south room with the lamp and again waited. Again he returned to the study and placed the lamp on the table and the shadows sprang out on the wall. It was midnight before he went upstairs. Mrs. Brigham and the other sisters, who could not sleep, heard him. The next day was the free world. That evening the family sat in the south room. Some relatives were with them. Nobody entered the study until Henry carried the lamp in there after the others had retired for the night. He saw again the shadow on the wall leapt to an awful life before the light. The next morning at breakfast Henry Gulen announced that he had to go to the city for three days. The sister looked at him with surprise. He very seldom left the house and just now his practice had been neglected on account of Edward's death. How can you leave your patients now, asked Mrs. Brigham wonderingly. I don't know how to, but there is no other way, replied Henry easily. I have had a telegram from Dr. Midford. Consultation inquired Mrs. Brigham? I have business, replied Henry. Dr. Midford was an old classmate of his who lived in a neighboring city and who occasionally called upon him in the case of a consultation. After he had gone, Mrs. Brigham said to Caroline that after all Henry had not said that he was going to consult with Dr. Midford and she thought it very strange. Everything is very strange, said Rebecca with a shudder. What do you mean, inquired Caroline? Nothing, replied Rebecca. Nobody entered the study that day nor the next. The third day Henry was expected home, but he did not arrive and the last train from the city had come. I called it pretty queer work, said Mrs. Brigham. The idea of a doctor leaving his patients at such a time as this and the idea of a consultation lasting three days. There is no sense in it and now he has not come. I don't understand it for my part. I don't either, said Rebecca. They were all in the South Parlor. There was no light in the study. The door was ajar. Presently Mrs. Brigham rose. She could not have told why. Something seemed to impel her. Some will outside her own. She went out of the room, again wrapping her wrestling skirts around her that she might pass noiselessly and began pushing at the swollen door of the study. She has not got any lamp, said Rebecca in a shaking voice. Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took the only remaining lamp in the room and followed her sister. Rebecca had risen, but she stood trembling, not venturing to follow. The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it. It was on the south door, on the other side of the house from the study. Rebecca, after hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the door. She remembered that the servants were out. Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study. Caroline set the lamp on the table. They looked at the wall and there were two shadows. The sisters stood clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the wall. That Rebecca came in, staggering with a telegram in her hand. Here is a telegram she gasped. Henry is dead. He died of the shadow on the wall. And of section 2 of famous modern girl stories.