Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/61

Rh raging of the baffled seas just below him, the splatter of salty spray on his face. He was aware that Christa was bending frantically over him, as his consciousness darkened.

"David! David dear!" Her sobbing voice came thinly and remotely to his fading hearing. "David, we're safe now. I'll get help—get someone"

And then there was only darkness in David Russell's brain.

the steady showering of the stinging spray on his face that finally revived his overtaxed body and brain. He opened his eyes, and weakly struggled up to a sitting position.

He was still on the ledge at the island's shore. The incoming combers were still smashing a few inches below him, flinging up great geysers of feathery foam, and a hundred yards outward the yawl lay grinding on the outer rocks where it had been tossed.

Where was Christa? She was nowhere in sight along the rocky, wave-dashed shore. David's clearing brain remembered now her frantic attempts to revive him. She had gone to look for help, and she was not back yet. How long had she been gone? Had something happened to her on this hellish island that had appeared so magically in the mid-Atlantic? Cold fear for his bride clutched at David's heart, and forced him to stagger weakly to his feet. Wildly he looked along the shore of the island.

From the sea-beaten, jagged rocks, a narrow strip of beach lifted toward the edge of the dark, great forest that seemed to cover most of the island. He saw tracks in the sand, leading toward the forest. Christa must have gone that way. He stumbled after her, spurred by apprehension. This island, a mysterious place that should not be—what danger might not Christa meet on it?

As he toiled up the slight grade of the beach, David's mind was still dazed by the suddenness with which the whole incredible thing had happened. This island had been utterly invisible to his eyes until the yawl had almost run onto it, had reached the edge of that strange flickering area. Then the island had clicked suddenly into sight.

He turned his head and looked wildly back out to sea, as he hastened on. David received another shock. He could not see more than a few hundred feet out from the island! He could look that far out over the rocks and waters, but beyond that limit he could see nothing but a weird flickering. His vision seemed to be repelled at that limit, to be turned back upon itself.

He looked upward. The sky had changed too. It was a strange, flickering sky of very dark blue, and the sun could not be seen in it. This nightmare island! It could not be seen by anyone outside it—and neither could anyone on the island see outside.

It was all crazy, incredible. But his dazed mind clung frantically to the thought of finding Christa. David reached the edge of the forest, and stood staring haggardly into its dark depths.

Huge, black-trunked trees rose for hundreds of feet, mighty columns supporting a canopy of green foliage high overhead. Thickets of brush and snaky creepers that bore enormous white blooms, choked the space between the trees. This forest loomed strangely silent in the weird, sunless day. And he saw beyond the waving tree-tops the towering central cliffs he had already glimpsed from the yawl. On those distant, frowning bluffs of dark rock crouched a monstrous square black castle.

David stared and stared over the great trees at that somber structure of mystery on the distant heights, his gaze fascinated