Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/11

Rh in that dismal darkness she was, perhaps—and perhaps not alone, I do not know what form my thoughts were taking. I hesitated to go back there; I was feeling my weakness again, and—not for myself alone—I dreaded the blow in the dark that might mean my sudden finish. Yet forward I must go, and into the unseen and unguessable.

Then the surprising thing happened. A light flashed on, back there in the darkness. Before I saw his face my fancy conjured up Gibbs' image; for of us all he alone had saved a flashlight. And it was Gibbs, and Valerie lay apparently senseless at his feet.

He spoke quickly, after the long wait while he must have been looking out of the darkness at me, as I stood there limned against the moonlit water.

"Don't get this wrong, Sydney!" he said. "I've done what I could for her, see? And it was necessary to cut a little. A snake—she came here to sleep alone, I think, and the snake bit her right in the throat. I cut out a little with my penknife, and sucked the wound. I've done what I could, but the throat looks a bit lurid."

He dipped the flashlight, so that its brightest circle of light illumined Valerie's white face and upturned throat.

Yes, it looked lurid, to use his word. Blood was trickling from a swollen wound. She looked like—what? God, the old vampire tales!

Then Gibbs doubled over so that his own face entered the paler circle of light around the central brilliant aura. And he—he looked like Dracula.

I walked over and picked Valerie up in my arms. I had to carry her away from this place at once—at once.

I said only one thing.

"A snake?"

Gibbs was in darkness again, but I could almost see and feel the look on his face, the slow flush that went with it.

"Queer, on a bare rock in the mid-Pacific. I saw it, though; it made for the water. A sea snake—sea serpent, Sydney. You see?"

He was insane and a liar, and I was about to tell him so. But just then he screamed, and swung the flashlight in a wild gesture that seemed to signal me to turn around—and I turned. God! The memory of that moment would live a hundred years, if my life lasted that long.

A snake, after all. As big and thick as a man, limned against the moonlit water beyond the mouth of the cavern behind me, crawling up the sheer side of the rock, and over the ledge that was the mouth of the cavern. As big and thick as a man

FELT a scream strangle in my own throat, and then I got hold of myself. For my eyes were playing me tricks, and now I saw that what I had thought was some impossible kind of face in the snake's head, was a face, all right, only it was in the head of a man. Yes, a man was climbing up out of the sea and into our cavern, and I couldn't see how he made it, especially as a sort of cape seemed hanging from his shoulders, which, being wet and slinkily clinging, had given him the serpentine effect.

Then—was he shipwrecked as we were? He must be, and so would be of no help to us, since no man having a boat that would stay afloat would come near a barren rock, let alone swim to it and climb over it.

Gibbs screamed again. I suppose he was, as often, on the border of D.T. anyway, and if he had seen this man and frightened him away by screaming at him before, and if he had really taken him to be a sea serpent, he probably thought now that he saw fangs and heard hisses.

"Shut up, Gibbs," I said crossly. "You're crazy drunk, and I don’t know what you've done to Valerie, but after what you did to Lisa today it isn't going to be