Within an hour I left him dozing—God forgive me—and we went. I need not tell you of that little voyage in the morning sun. You’ve been yourself. Nor need I tell you of the Stone and of my childish wonderment at seeing it in fact as Gray had said. There were the four completed bulbs—and the fatal fifth so dank and gaping: I well remember that. And then, of course, I took my fill of satisfaction by photographing it as well.
But was I satisfied? I wondered. What was there yet in store? I felt as one who hears a prelude played and waits the fall of chords that mark the onset of the major theme.
“We should have brought him with us, sir,” I heard Gray murmur in reproach. And then at once I saw the lines of fate converging on him—my poor friend, Calladine. A sudden guilty fear welled up inside me now. Old Colin’s thought was doubtless of the man’s being cured by touching the Stone, but in my mind I saw a thousand chances of some untoward act he might be led to by his crazy brain while we were dallying there.
Into the boat we tumbled, and as we rowed I heard anew those ominous words, “I know this is an evil day for me out there.” The afternoon sky was darkening noticeably as we rowed. A yellow dullness lowering in the air boded the rising of an unseasonable storm. No rain, however, had fallen when we got to land, but Mrs. Gray came running out to meet us from the house.
“Mr. Calladine’s gone out,” she panted. “Can’t you find him, Colin, afore this storm comes on? If he’s caught I’m sure hell get his death.”
We took the coat she gave us and hurried down the beach, and as we ran I felt it was a race against a darker foe than rain. At last Gray spotted him. Indeed, but for a surface mist, we should have seen him earlier from our boat.
“Good Lord!” cried Gray, “the man’s stark mad. Look there! He’s at the wreck.”
In the distance we could see the black hulk of that fatal boat in which the girl had drowned. An exceptionally low tide—due to the equinox, no doubt—had brought about one of those rare occasions when the sea exposed this melancholy hulk. And that small figure moving about was surely Calladine, clambering on the half-buried vessel.
“Dang the fool! What’s he tampering with?” groaned Colin with a curse. “He knows to keep away. I told him there’s something wicked there. And now the tide’ll cut him off.”
As we approached I noticed Calladine had got his camera in his hand, and now we heard him call.
“By Jove! I’ve made a choice discovery, Aitchison. Queer sort of sea plant with abnormal features, and quite huge. Seems to be growing through the timbers down here.”
“Yes, all right, but come on, man! You look like being caught,” I cried. “The tide’s already here.”
Gray had dropped back somewhat and was scanning the blackening clouds.
“There’ll be a clap just now, sir,” he bawled.
But neither of us could get quite to the boat because of a shore pool engulfing it on our side. The first fringe of the approaching tide was now lapping also on the seaward side, whence Calladine apparently had come upon his prize. Nor had we any view into the boat as it was shored up on its side, facing away from us. All we could see in that livid daylight were the rotting timbers, and Calladine slithering round the gunwale and fumbling with a flashlight pan.
“I must just get one exposure of it somehow,” he yelled, strapping the camera to a withered rowlock.
A moments silence followed, then—
“Good God! It’s . . .”
One agonizing scream, a blinding flash, and I felt myself thrown headlong in the wet, quaking sand, with the mortal crack and roar of thunder in my ears.
The next I knew was being dragged to my feet by Gray amid the drenching torrents of a cloudburst. Giddily I pulled myself together, and joined with him in calling, “Calladine! Hey, Calladine,” and wading about in the swirling sea. All our cries were in vain. Nothing could we find save bits of wreckage floating here and there. From one I snatched the fatal camera still strapped to it.
In haste I went for help while Colin stayed to search. Even when men and lanterns and a boat arrived it was a fruitless task. Splinters of wood and fragments of what seemed like bloody seaweed—all beefy red and gristly—and that was all. There was no sign of unhappy Calladine. With the lanterns flickering we took our last look across the evening sea and I could not help but muse upon my vision of the previous night when
“Death by misadventure” was all that could be safely said of my poor friends fate. The only evidence was a fresh-stripped skeleton found three days later. But the fisherfolk put the whole tragedy down to malevolent powers. Talk turned on spiritual forces, incarnate in some carnivorous sea plant of monstrous dimensions. Folklore was rife about “St. Cuthbert’s fiends,” and “sea blood” and the like.
The sexton, too, who had been digging a grave that tragic afternoon, soon had a tale to tell. I got it from the parson later, when no doubt it had gathered details by transmission several times. This fellow had, so Mr. Ainsley said, often noticed a reddish slime in the ground when he was excavating. Beetles and worms seemed greatly drawn to this stuff from all directions, and he could not make out where it oozed from. He had never liked the look of it himself and so had kept pretty clear. Besides, it had a most obnoxious stench, he said. Now, on the afternoon of Calladine’s death, this man was in the graveyard at his work when the ground began to quake and he saw a subsidence, not in the old quarter where you might expect it among the vaults, but where the recent burials had been. He rushed to where the soil was broken most and was in time to see a curious sight.
There were his beetles and other insects by the hundred making, through a ruddy patch of soil, toward a writhing length of something like an elephant’s trunk. It gleamed with a phosphorescent light, he said, and seemed to have tough veins pulsating along it, but it lashed out so violently that in a moment it was gone. He saw what looked like tawny-colored bristles twitching on the thing, with insects being impaled upon them and sucked into scaly apertures within the trunk. But what horrified the fellow most were tentacles stuck piercing through a newly buried coffin for purposes so obvious and evil.
It must have been a gruesome sight, and it always sets me wondering about that rootlike line I saw, the night before the tragedy, running from the sea across and under the sands, and also about what Calladine must certainly have seen and touched when out with Gray the other time.
I should think less of this but for a startling thing that came from that camera of his. One of the demonstrators at the laboratory—for amusement, it seems—betook himself to develop the plates when it arrived, along with Calladine’s other things, in Newcastle. Anyway, what should Dr. Angus bring me one morning but a photograph of the very sight that Calladine beheld at the moment of his death!
If you will kindly reach down that large book—that old one in faded leather—on my cabinet, you will find this same photograph inside.
Drury had soon seen enough. Even after a glass of brandy and soda he was still shivery for some time at the thought of those countless layers of rank, concentric lobes and the unfolding bunch of antennae, just glimpsed there in the very instant of disclosing that inane and meager “face” within the vortex.