THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE DEMON

“He’s gone,” said Kearney.

The child was asleep in the house, and he had taken his seat alone by the water’s edge. The tide was running out of the lagoon under the sunset and a faint chuckle of water against the ribs of the tied-up dinghy was the only response.

Tired out, he had taken his seat near the little boat as if for the sake of company and, with his pipe in his mouth, was chucking bits of coral at the water. Dick had left them kicking about on the sward; they had been his playthings, but he had outgrown them.

“Gone west,” said Kearney, chucking the last of them far out and watching the ripples as they spread, “and Lord knows where he’s dropped in them woods.” He had done his best, beating the trees and shouting and hallooing, hunting right up to where the groves halted before the rise of the summit, and returning with the tired-out Dick on his shoulder.

There was no chance that the missing man was lying somewhere disabled with a sprained ankle or broken leg. He would have heard the shouting and made answer. Lestrange had gone west; he had dropped, maybe by reason of his heart giving out, and was lying somewhere in those woods, lost beyond discovery.

Leaning now on his elbow, with his pipe, which had gone out, between his teeth, Kearney stared at the water before him.

The swirls in it as it moved gently with the outgoing tide seemed part of his trouble. The Ranatonga had not returned, Lestrange was sure dead somewhere or other in those woods, and here he was left alone with the child. What was to be the end of it all?

The sound of the reef was loud to-night, and his mind, travelling back, caught again the sound of the rollers on that night so long ago. He could hear them still, even-spaced, solemn, funereal—yes, the Ranatonga was gone beyond any manner of doubt, Lestrange was gone like the ship, and here he was left alone with the child—and what was to be the end of it all?

Too tired for concentrated thought, the general proposition framed itself loosely and vaguely in his mind, unanswerable, expecting an answer no more than that other proposition Nature had once or twice placed before him, making him ask himself, “What are them stars?”

Then a frightful yawn sounded through the dark, the sound of someone spitting into the lagoon, and a voice, grumbling and deep, addressing itself to the gathering night.

“That bloody hooker!”

Kearney had risen. He also seemed to have shoveled all his troubles on to the back of the Ranatonga. It is a way with sailors—complaints of misfortunes on shipboard, bad food, hazing officers or Cape Horn weather are rarely addressed to the proper quarters—the ship takes it all—“That —— hooker!” If he hadn’t sailed on the Ranatonga all this wouldn’t have happened.

Dusk, almost in a moment, had turned to night, and, just as though a door had been closed, the breeze from the sea died off, leaving the lagoon water unruffled.

Right before Kearney lay the west pool, from ten to six fathoms deep, beyond which lay the broken water that made navigation to the reef so difficult. The pool lay black as ebony, ebony polished and silvered with starlight. As the sailor cast his eyes over it, he saw moving beneath the surface a long thin line of light. It was a deep-sea pala, six feet in length, narrow as a sword, a fish that rarely enters lagoon waters, and never unless at night.

This phosphorescent ghost from the outer sea circled the pool in a grand curve and then, followed by a train of silvery-golden bubbles, vanished.

At night, especially when the moon was away, you could see the lagoon fish, like ghostly shadows, beneath the water. The phosphorescence varied. To-night it was intense, and as the pala vanished, a garfish flashed along, chased by a bream thrice its size. The bream seized the garfish in a whirl of phosphorescent light.

It was like a fight between fireworks, fading off in a luminous mist. As the attacked and attacker drove farther up the pool, the mist remained for a moment, slowly fading and dispersing. It was blood.

Kearney, forgetting everything else for the moment, stood watching as the night life of the lagoon disclosed itself, showing visions never revealed to the day. Great eels passed, filled with fire, and a whip-ray, a yard across, turning, as it went, over and over, like a leaf blown by a leisurely wind.

Then, looking up from the deep entrance to the pool came something that was not a fish—something that walked the floor of the lagoon to-night spreading terror before it as it went, so that in an instant the pool flashed black, free of all fish traces and showing nothing but the newcomer.

What Kearney saw was exactly like the bole of a great oak-tree sawed off at the branches and roots, glowing and pulsating with phosphorescence and crawling like a cat on the floor of the pool. In its forefront two broad lamps burned with an emerald light, now brilliant, now smoky, and from around the lamps serpentine tendrils a foot thick at the base spread and twined through the water, searching, feeling, exploring, now radiating out like a fan, now up-writhing like the locks of Medusa.

It was a barrel-shaped decapod twenty-five feet in length and over ten feet in circumference.

It had risen with the night from some cave far below the outer reef and strayed into the lagoon, either across the reef or by way of the break.

When he had got a full view of the thing, one glance was enough for Kearney. He turned away and made for the house. The child was fast asleep and he crept in beside it. Dick was company, after that sight, and though the child slept without a sound or a stir, the knowledge that it was there lessened the feeling of lonesomeness. Lying on his side on Lestrange’s bedding, he could see the doorway, and beyond the doorway the star-showered night stood as if watching him.

If that thing were to come out of the “lagun” and appear at the doorway with those two lamps—God! He tried to forget it by thinking of Lestrange, and then tried to forget Lestrange by thinking of the Ranatonga.

Bowers, Bully Stavers, Jerdein, all the fo’c’sle crowd appeared before him, individually, then collectively, and they were leading him off into dreamland, when a voice hailed him.

It was Lestrange’s voice, thin and far away like a voice in a gramophone.

Leaning upon his elbow, he listened—nothing. Then he sank back, still listening—nothing.

Next morning, when he awoke and turned out into the bright, early morning sunshine, he looked around him as though in search of someone or some sign that would tell him of the vanished one’s fate.

But the lagoon lay as blue in the morning light as though it had never shown him the spectre of the night before, and the trees of God’s Garden gave no hint of the form that lay amidst the groves, dead of a worn-out heart.