Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 3 (1929-03).djvu/119

still see the faint traces of the eddy it had made to reach me. But dead men can not move and there was no wave or tide or any breath of wind that could propel it within that enclosed space.

Now I was certain it was breathing. The slight but definitely regular expansion and contraction of the chest were caused by respiration. I could not be mistaken.

Then suddenly the lids flashed open and I was staring into its eyes. And they Avere the eyes of a living creature, sea-green and evil, that probed through mine into the very recesses of my brain with satanic curiosity. Then, still holding me with its baleful gaze, the thing reached for the brink with huge hands that were webbed like those of some aquatic bird, and started to pull itself up.

Somehow I broke the spell by which the thing held me, and, half mad with loathing and horror, I kicked him with my bare foot back into the pool.

I think I stumbled half back to the open water before I recovered my courage and paused to look back. It had come out of the pool and was dragging its slimy length over the rocks toward me. I realized at once it could not walk upright and that I would have no difficulty in evading it. With unmitigated loathing I watched it crawl until it approached to within a few feet of me. Then I backed away from it, taking care to avoid being crowded into the sea where it could easily outmaneuver me with its finlike appendages.

Again it tried to hold me with its hypnotic stare, but I avoided its eyes, and, stooping down, picked ixp a fragment of rock and tried to threaten it back. Suddenly it, too, reached out and picked up a stone, and we both threw at the same moment. But I was completely beside myself with horror and missed him by inches, while he caught me fairly on the chest—a blow that knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. The next moment he was upon me, his powerful hands closing about my throat, his cold, slimy body against my cringing, warm flesh, his fetid breath in my nostrils.

But I fought, fought in a stark, frenzied madness that promised to rid me of his clinging, hateful weight, when suddenly he released one of his hands from my throat, and I could feel him fumble around his waist. The next moment I would have been free of him, but his hand came up again wielding a stone or coral knife.

I screamed and tried to evade the blow, but while I spoiled his aim for my throat he managed to inflict that awful gash on my forehead.

When I came back to consciousness it was with a cry of terror, in the arms of two men who were lifting me into a skiff; and for some minutes I struggled with them, before I realized they were my rescuers.

Their story is briefly told. They had observed me from the beach apparently trying to avoid some creature which they thought was a seal. They quickly got into a skiff and rowed to the rocks, shouting to frighten off the creature when they saw me struggling with it. Then for a minute or two I was out of their sight, hidden by a projecting rock, and when they again saw me I was alone and lying flat on my back, though a moment before they had heard the thing splash into the sea.

That is their story. Mine they would not believe. In fact, they tried to stop me in the telling of it, and attempted to soothe me as if were a terror-stricken child, or crazy. They said I had injured my forehead by falling on a jagged stone.

But that day two bathers were pulled down to their death by some creature of the sea. Sharks, they all said. But I know better.