Amazing Stories — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

62 AMAZING STORIES drowned, which was, of course, unfortunate, but not unusual. And we did not further enlighten them. “T have no idea just what it was that suggested a connection between the sounds that disturbed our slumber and the happenings on the lake, but I found myself associating them in my mind. Wilson, when I mentioned it to him, scoffed at the notion. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘could a noise tip a boat over?’ and when I tried to explain that the thing that made the noise might be the cause, he wanted to know how a loco- motive could leave its rails and accomplish such a thing. You see, he had accepted as fact, the idea that the sound we had been hearing emanated from a mechanical contrivance. I told him my idea of the situation and I’m inclined to believe that he thought I had gone crazy, for when I asked him to put ina night with me, trying to locate the noise, he refused. “In deference to his opinion that the disturbance could be traced to some engine, I made it a point to investigate. The men were very courteous and obliging, and blew the whistles of engines that traveled over that stretch of the company’s right of way, but none of them gave forth the sound, the origin of which I was trying to discover. “T told Wilson about my findings, and when I told him I was convinced the noise came from the lake, he consented to stand watch with me, but I could see that he took no stock in my belief. “For three nights we watched but heard nothing, and Wilson was ready to drop the matter, I hada hard time getting him to go out the fourth night, but grudgingly he came with me. “Since the noises seemed always to have come from the southwestern shore and, because it was there the accidents had occurred, we had used that as our watching post. Unlike the eastern shore, which was open and fairly flat, the western side dropped sharply down to the water. Some of the trees, their footing broken away by the cave-in, lay flat in the water, attached to the shore only by their roots, their branches obscuring considerably the nearer reaches of the lake. “We found one tree which had rooted a little far- ther back from the line of break, had therefore, part- ly escaped the fate of its fellows. Held by its roots, it reached out over the water, at an angle of some twenty degrees. It was a large conifer and its tough branches with broken limbs placed across them, af- forded a safe and comfortable resting place, although being out over the lake and with nothing to break the wind, it was far from warm. As I have said al- ready, the nights out there were cold. “There were no dangerous land animals about, so we carried no arms and, I feel sure any arms we might have taken would have been useless against the creature we were hunting. So, with a packet of lunch and a thermos bottle of hot coffee, Wilson and | set out for our point of observation. “The night was clear, when we started from the house, but,,after an hour or so, it began to thicken and a mean, cold drizzle set in. We were warmly dressed, however, so, aside from the ordinary dis- comfort of damp skin, wherever it was exposed, we suffered none. | : “Tt was, as nearly as I could judge, (I didn’t think of looking at my watch) about half past ten o’clock when I was aroused from a half doze by an odd noise that I could not for a moment classify. It woke me up, however and now fully alert. I waited for a hod . a —_ —a one - ee el ee aa a oe repetition of the sound. 1 heard it again presently, and this time I recognized the sound. It was a grunt, a regular hog’s grunt. If it differed in any respect from the familiar vocalizations one hears coming from the pig-pens, I didn’t realize it at the moment, although it did seem to be an unusually healthy grunt. “My only feelings, as I remember, were those of mild astonishment; not so much because I had heard the grunt of a hog, (which might have escaped from its pen and wandered down to the lake), but because the sound came from the lake, and not from the land, 667 J°HERE is nothing in the sound of splashing water to scare one. Yet, there by the lake, with the cold drizzle wetting my hands and face, I shivered when I heard that noise. “Wilson, his back against a crotched branch, was fairly asleep, (though he swore he wasn’t) and I was in the act of waking him when, like a blast from the siren of an ocean liner, the most awful roar I ever heard, tore through the night air, from out there in the darkness, nearly shattering my ear-drums, “Tt fairly brought me to my feet and, as for Wil- son, if I had not been lucky enough to grab his coat, as he was disappearing downward, through the branches of the conifer, what happened to him later, might have happened to him that night. “T had only just recovered from my mental balance and got Wilson back to safety when it came again. And I knew it was the same screaming noise we had been hearing all the time. And I knew also that that noise was in some way responsible for the distressing disappearances of our tenants, and I knew that the originator of that sound was of enormous size. “Tt would be difficult to adequately describe my feelings, as I sat crouched there upon our none too secure platform, peering out into the black darkness, trying to discover what manner of creature it was that had given voice to that soul-shaking scream, Fear I knew, but there was something else beside fear; something of unrecognized dread; perhaps a premonition of some dreadful occurrence. And when the splashing sound came nearer, I had to exercise ereat self-control to keep from backing out of those branches as quickly as possible and out of the neigh- borhood. And Wilson, I believe, was even worse off, for his teeth were chattering and he seemed dumb with fright. “Then the splashing noise gave way to another sound, this time to a swishing, sucking sound, like that made by an oar, pulled forcibly through the water. Whatever that thing was, it was swimming, not like our ordinary animal swims,—by moving its legs—but, rather after the manner of a seal—by pad- dling with flippers. And it was heading toward the north end of the lake. “As the sound of its movements through the water came from directly in front of us, I dimly perceived, like a vague, black shadow against a wall of black- ness, a vast, undulating body. I could not make out® its shape for there was not light enough, but I knew it was enormous and, as I thought of it in connec- tion with the terrible screams of those unfortunate men and that helpless woman, the muscles of my ~ throat tightened and—I am not ashamed to admit it —tears filled my eyes. Wilson apparently had been following the same line of thought. He was almost un-nerved. and sat there Gomicbook s €om”