Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/62

Rh his long immersion in wintry seawater. He was chiefly occupied though, with the strange history of his experience, which continued to stand out quite sharply in his mind. He could not shake off the notion that it had been, somehow, a real experience. Why—he could remember the details of day after day of it. He seemed to have acquired some unique knowledge of the ways of the sea’s great deeps: the barely luminous darkness of animal phosphorescence; the strange monsters; the incredible cold of that world of pressure and dead ooze; the effortless motion through the water; the strange grottoes; above all, the eery austere companionship of the mer-woman and the final dreadful battle His mind was filled to overflowing with intimate details of what seemed a long, definite, regulated, amphibian life, actually lived!

There remained, permanently, even after the process of time had done its work in rendering most of the details indistinct in his mind, the desire for the sea: the overwhelming urge to go into, under, the water; to swim for incalculable distances; to lie on dim, sandy depths, the light, blue and faint, from above, among the swarming, glowing, harmless parrot-fish. And, deeper than all, in this persistent urge of consciousness, was the half-buried, basic desire to rive and tear and rend—a curious, almost inexplicable, persistent set of wholly new instincts, which disturbed his mind when he allowed himself to dwell on them. He looked forward to the first swim in the Caribbean, after landing at his port, St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands.

Fully restored to his ordinary physical vigor, he joined a swimming party on the afternoon following his arrival in Frederiksted. There had been rumors of sharks, but his hosts hastened to reassure their guests. No! Sharks were virtually negligible, anyhow. Sharks were cowardly creatures, easily frightened away from any group of swimmers. If it were a barracuda, now—that would be quite another matter. Over in Porto Rico, so report had it, there had been a case of a barracuda attacking an American school-teacher. Terribly injured—permanently, it was said. Months in the hospital, poor fellow.

But, barracuda rarely troubled the bathing beaches. Occasionally, yes, one would take the bait of one of the Negro fishermen, far out in their little boats, and then the fisherman, if he were agile, would cut his line and row, gray-faced, inshore, perhaps not to venture out again for days. They were the sea-tigers, the barracudas.

Their attack was a fiendish thing. With its eighteen-inch jaw, and its rows of rip-saw teeth, it would charge, and charge again, tearing its helpless victim to ribbons, stripping flesh from bones with relentless avidity. There was no escape, it seemed, once those lightning rushes had begun. They came in such rapid succession that unless the victim were almost on shore there was no escape. Yes, a kind Providence save us from a barracuda!

HE party, a gay one, entered the water under the declining afternoon sun. The beach here shelved steeply, four or five steps being quite enough to reach swimming depth. The water was so clear, over its white, sandy bottom, that a swimmer, floating face downward, could see bottom clearly, and count the little parrot-fish, like flashing sunbeams, as they sported about, apparently near enough to be gathered up by extending the hand; a curious, amusing delusion.