The Willows
horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He
was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in
the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some
twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few
hours before the spot must have been under water.
“See,” he said quietly, “the victim that made our escape possible!”
And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on
the body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant,
and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned,
but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our
island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—_at the very time the fit
had passed._
“We must give it a decent burial, you know.”
“I suppose so,” I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for
there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that
turned me cold.
The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his
face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more
leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing
from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.
Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his
hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much
momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and
sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled
together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water.
And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily
against the corpse.
The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.
At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud
sound of humming—the sound of several hummings—which passed with a vast
commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared
upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally
ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some
living yet invisible creatures at work.
My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either
of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw
that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it
became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it
had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the
sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would
be swept away.
The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch
about a “proper burial”—and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the
sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an
instant.
I saw what he had seen.
For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the
exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin
and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and
exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found
all over the island.
“Their mark!” I heard my companion mutter under his breath. “Their
awful mark!”
And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the
current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into
mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight,
turning over and over on the waves like an otter.