Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/93

When the Sea Gives Up its Dead

by Robert Peery

"Die! Ah, die, grave-wreckers! Destroyers of the peace of souls!"

With slow strokes I pushed my tiny craft among the dead brown grasses of the creek that wound its way over the flatlands of southern Carolina toward the distant sea. About me, as far as my eye could see, there stretched a level waste of melancholy sands topped with sparse dead grasses. Now and then a low-flying beach bird trailed its legs in dejection and uttered its long wailing cry, wending a dispirited way toward the quagmires of the swamp lands in search of food. In the east, black clouds were banking toward the zenith; jagged lightning darted eerily, blue and white and yellow, before the ominous ascension of the cloud masses. The wind was rising; the grasses bowed down to the water, as if accom plishing some ritual to a gray, forbidding god. And now and then, breaking the depressing silence, the slow mutter of a thousand drums in the distance—the guttural complaint of the god of thunder—rolled up to me like waves of the sea, and receded again into a fearful silence.

Loneliness! It is more than a word to one in a small boat upon the meandering stream that will carry one to the beaches of Carolina. Melancholy! The word, upon that depressing shoreland, drips with the ooze of despair, when one’s lips roundly utter its syllables.

For many days I had found myself becoming more and more depressed at being away from my family. Perhaps this depression, this saddened condi-