Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/110

396 the drained thing that had been my father. And as the fruitless quest went on there came again that hush, that awed stilling of the myriad sounds of this rank nature about me.

I became conscious of each noise, as it were, when it had ceased to beat its note on my ears. The shrilling of the frogs first dropped out of nature's discordant symphony, to be followed by the chirp of the crickets, the various low bird-twitterings and rustlings, and other sounds, most of them to me fearsomely unidentified. Now all that remained was the droning of bees, punctuated at longish intervals by the mournful sol do-do-do-lo do-o-o—of a far-away swamp robin.

Now, after one dismally long-drawn-out call, the bird became silent, and the only sound left in the steamy, fetid swamp world was that bee-hum. This now seemed slowly to increase in volume until finally the very air became charged and volatile with its menace. At last I could endure the deafening sound no longer, and, eardrums bursting with the throbbing, zooming waves—smothered in them, overwhelmed—I toppled over in a black faint.

I was destined soon to bless that fainting fall, for I was to realize it had saved me from a fate worthy the ingenuity of a thousand fiends—the same ravaged death that had claimed my father.

I could not have lain unconscious more than a minute or two, but at the time it seemed ages before I opened my eyes—opened them to a sun-drenched, somehow less fearful world—to find myself sprawled on my back, evidently in a little depression. Of this hollow, the bottom seemed covered with some wet, sticky substance, which to my not over-critical bones made a rather pleasant couch.

Nature had resumed her normal note, and I became gratefully conscious that the horrible droning of bees was no longer in evidence. As I again closed my eyes in response to a certain feeling of lassitude that bound me, I wondered if it had been a sound from the outside world or if it had come from within me. Dreamily revolving the affair in my mind, I was inclined to believe the whole thing—the hush, the drumming in my ears and the fainting—had been caused by the gradual weakening of my faculties. But then how to account for that weakening?

The mystery was getting too deep for me, and I almost decided to give it all up and flee from this hellish swamp, sending someone in after Father's body. At any rate, I could not lie long dreaming in this soft bed. Lazily I opened my eyes; wearily I stretched out an arm; limply I let it fall at my side: and then, screeching with all my poor strength, I leapt to my feet. My outflung arm had dropped with a sirupy splash in what was revealed to my popping eyes as thickening, dark red blood!

And now began the horror—ugh! an experience so incredibly, grotesquely horrid that recollection of its lewd details now halts my pen and imbues me with stark nausea. If I had disliked and distrusted the woods and waste places before, my feeling was nothing compared to the seething, loathing hate that grips me now at the mention of that dread word, swamp.

Reeling giddily, my unmanning utterly completed by the sickening realization that I had been lolling so softly in a bed of blood, I had time only to clutch at a low-hanging vine for support before the things—oh, those fat, slime-sweating, crawling things—came on! There seemed to be hundreds of them—snail-shaped things as large as dogs—hemming me in on every side. With a slow, irresistible purpose they advanced in a horrible silence. As they closed in, their