Out of the Dark

by Robert W. Chambers

She turned her flushed face to us:

  ‘I made up my mind,’ she said, ‘that Tiger-tail’s story was worth investigating. It was perfectly easy for me to secure corroboration, because the Seminole went back to his Everglade camp and told every one of his people that I was a white Seminole because my ancestors also hunted the three-eyed man and nobody except a Seminole could know that such a thing as a three-eyed man existed.

  ‘So, the next afternoon off, I embarked in Tiger-tail’s canoe and he took me to his camp. And there I talked to his people, men and women, questioning, listening, putting this and that together, trying to discover some foundation for their persistent statements concerning men, still living in the jungles of Black Bayou, who had three eyes instead of two.

  ‘All told the same story; all asserted that since the time their records ran the Seminoles had hunted and slain every three-eyed man they could catch; and that as long as the Seminoles had lived in the Everglades the three-eyed men had lived in the forests beyond Black Bayou.’

  She paused, dramatically, cooling her cheeks in her palms and looking from Kemper to me with eyes made starry by excitement.

  ‘And what do you think!’ she continued, under her breath. ‘To prove what they said they brought for my inspection a skull. And then two more skulls like the first one.

  ‘Every skull had been painted with Spanish red; the coarse black hair still stuck to the scalps. And, behind, just over where the pituitary gland is situated, was a hollow, bony orbit – unmistakably the socket of a third eye!’

  ‘W-where are those skulls?’ demanded Kemper, in a voice not entirely under control.

  ‘They wouldn’t part with one of them. I tried every possible persuasion. On my own responsibility, and even before I communicated with Mr Smith’ – turning towards me – ‘I offered them twenty thousand dollars for a single skull, staking my word of honor that the Bronx Museum would pay that sum.

  ‘It was useless. Not only do the Seminoles refuse to part with one of those skulls, but I have also learned that I am the first person with a white skin who has ever even heard of their existence – so profoundly have these red men of the Everglades guarded their secret through the centuries.’

  After a silence Kemper, rather pale, remarked:

  ‘This is a most astonishing business, Miss Grey.’

  ‘What do you think about it?’ I demanded. ‘Is it not worth while for us to explore Black Bayou?’

  He nodded in a dazed sort of way, but his gaze remained riveted on the girl. Presently he said:

  ‘Why does Miss Grey go?’

  She turned in surprise:

  ‘Why am I going? But it is my discovery – my contribution to science, isn’t it?’

  ‘Certainly!’ we exclaimed warmly and in unison. And Kemper added: ‘I was only thinking of the dangers and hardships. Mr Smith and I could do the actual work—’

  ‘Oh!’ she cried in quick protest, ‘I wouldn’t miss one moment of the excitement, one pain, one pang! I love it! It would simply break my heart not to share every chance, hazard, danger of this expedition – every atom of hope, excitement, despair, uncertainty – and the ultimate success – the unsurpassable thrill of exultation in the final instant of triumph!’

  She sprang to her feet in a flash of uncontrollable enthusiasm, and stood there, aglow with courage and resolution, making a highly agreeable picture in her apron and cuffs, the sea wind fluttering the bright tendrils of her hair under her dainty cap.

  We got to our feet much impressed; and now absolutely convinced that there did exist, somewhere, descendants of prehistoric men in whom the third eye – placed in the back of the head for purposes of defensive observation – had not become obsolete and reduced to the traces which we know only as the pituitary body or pituitary gland.

  Kemper and I were, of course, aware that in the insect world the ocelli served the same purpose that the degenerate pituitary body once served in the occiput of man.

  As we three walked slowly back to the campfire, where our evening meal was now ready, Evelyn Grey, who walked between us, told us what she knew about the hunting of these three-eyed men by the Seminoles – how intense was the hatred of the Indians for these people, how murderously they behaved towards any one of them whom they could track down and catch.

  ‘Tiger-tail told me,’ she went on, ‘that in all probability the strange race was nearing extinction, but that all had not yet been exterminated because now and then, when hunting along Black Bayou, traces of living three-eyed men were still found by him and his people.

  ‘No later than last week Tiger-tail himself had startled one of these strange denizens of Black Bayou from a meal of fish; and had heard him leap through the bushes and plunge into the water. It appears that centuries of persecution have made these three-eyed men partly amphibious – that is, capable of filling their lungs with air and remaining under water almost as long as a turtle.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’ said Kemper bluntly.

  ‘I thought so myself,’ she said with a smile, ‘until Tiger-tail told me a little more about them. He says that they can breathe through the pores of their skins; that their bodies are covered with a thick, silky hair, and that when they dive they carry down with them enough air to form a sort of skin over them, so that under water their bodies appear to be silver-plated.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ faltered Kemper. ‘That is a little too much!’

  ‘Yet,’ said I, ‘that is exactly what air-breathing water beetles do. The globules of air, clinging to the body-hairs, appear to silver-plate them; and they can remain below indefinitely, breathing through spiracles. Doubtless the skin pores of these men have taken on the character of spiracles.’

  ‘You know,’ he said in a curious, flat voice, which sounded like the tones of a partly stupefied man, ‘this whole business is so grotesque – apparently so wildly absurd – that it’s having a sort of nightmare effect on me.’ And, dropping his voice to a whisper close to my ear: ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘Can you reconcile such a creature as we are starting to hunt, with anything living known to science?’

  ‘No,’ I replied in guarded tones. ‘And there are moments, Kemper, since I have come into possession of Miss Grey’s story, when I find myself seriously doubting my own sanity.’

  ‘I’m doubting mine, now,’ he whispered, ‘only that girl is so fresh and wholesome and human and sane—’

  ‘She is a very clever girl,’ I said.

  ‘And really beautiful!’

  ‘She is intelligent,’ I remarked. There was a chill in my tone which doubtless discouraged Kemper, for he ventured nothing further concerning her superficially personal attractions.

  After all, if any questions of priority were to arise, the pretty waitress was my discovery. And in the scientific world it is an inflexible rule that he who first discovers any particular specimen of any species whatever is first entitled to describe and comment upon that specimen without interference or unsolicited advice from anybody.

  Maybe there was in my eye something that expressed as much. For when Kemper caught my cold gaze fixed upon him he winced and looked away like a reproved setter dog who knew better. Which also, for the moment, put an end to the rather gay and frivolous line of small talk which he had again begun with the pretty waitress.

  I was exceedingly surprised at Professor William Henry Kemper, D.F.

  As we approached the campfire the loathsome odour of frying mullet saluted my nostrils.

  Kemper, glancing at Grue, said aside to me:

  ‘That’s an odd-looking fellow. What is he? Minorcan?’

  ‘Oh, just a beachcomber. I don’t know what he is. He strikes me as dirty – though he can’t be so, physically. I don’t like him and I don’t know why. And I wish we’d engaged somebody else to guide us.’

  Towards dawn something awoke me and I sat up in my blanket under the moon. But my leg had not been pulled.

  Kemper snored at my side. In her little dog-tent the pretty waitress probabl
y was fast asleep. I knew it because the string she had tied to one of her ornamental ankles still lay across the ground convenient to my hand. In any emergency I had only to pull it to awake her.

  A similar string, tied to my ankle, ran parallel to hers and disappeared under the flap of her tent. This was for her to pull if she liked. She had never yet pulled it. Nor I the other. Nevertheless I truly felt that these humble strings were, in a subtler sense, ties that bound us together. No wonder Kemper’s behavior had slightly irritated me.

  I looked up at the silver moon; I glanced at Kemper’s unlovely bulk, swathed in a blanket; I contemplated the dog-tent with, perhaps, that slight trace of sentiment which a semi-tropical moon is likely to inspire even in a jellyfish. And suddenly I remembered Grue and looked for him.

  He was accustomed to sleep in his boat, but I did not see him in either of the boats. Here and there were a few lumpy shadows in the moonlight, but none of them was Grue lying prone on the ground. Where the devil had he gone?

  Cautiously I untied my ankle string, rose in my pyjamas, stepped into my slippers, and walked out through the moonlight.

  There was nothing to hide Grue, no rocks or vegetation except the solitary palm on the back-bone of the reef.

  I walked as far as the tree and looked up into the arching fronds. Nobody was up there. I could see the moonlit sky through the fronds. Nor was Grue lying asleep anywhere on the other side of the coral ridge.

  And suddenly I became aware of all my latent distrust and dislike for the man. And the vigour of my sentiments surprised me because I really had not understood how deep and thorough my dislike had been.

  Also, his utter disappearance struck me as uncanny. Both boats were there; and there were many leagues of sea to the nearest coast.

  Troubled and puzzled I turned and walked back to the dead embers of the fire. Kemper had merely changed the timbre of his snore to a whistling aria, which at any other time would have enraged me. Now, somehow, it almost comforted me.

  Seated on the shore I looked out to sea, racking my brains for an explanation of Grue’s disappearance. And while I sat there racking them, far out on the water a little flock of ducks suddenly scattered and rose with frightened quackings and furiously beating wings.

  For a moment I thought I saw a round, dark object on the waves where the flock had been.

  And while I sat there watching, up out of the sea along the reef to my right crawled a naked, dripping figure holding a dead duck in his mouth.

  Fascinated, I watched it, recognising Grue with his ratty black hair all plastered over his face.

  Whether he caught sight of me or not, I don’t know; but he suddenly dropped the dead duck from his mouth, turned, and dived under water.

  It was a grim and horrid species of sport or pastime, this amphibious business of his, catching wild birds and dragging them about as though he were an animal.

  Evidently he was ashamed of himself, for he had dropped the duck. I watched it floating by on the waves, its head under water. Suddenly something jerked it under, a fish perhaps, for it did not come up and float again, as far as I could see.

  When I went back to camp Grue lay apparently asleep on the north side of the fire. I glanced at him in disgust and crawled into my tent.

  The next day Evelyn Grey awoke with a headache and kept to her tent. I had all I could do to prevent Kemper from prescribing for her. I did that myself, sitting beside her and testing her pulse for hours at a time, while Kemper took one of Grue’s grains and went off into the mangroves and speared grunt and eels for a chowder which he said he knew how to concoct.

  Towards afternoon the pretty waitress felt much better, and I warned Kemper and Grue that we should sail for Black Bayou after dinner.

  Dinner was a mess, as usual, consisting of fried mullet and rice, and a sort of chowder in which the only ingredients I recognised were sections of crayfish.

  After we had finished and had withdrawn from the fire, Grue scraped every remaining shred of food into a kettle and went for it. To see him feed made me sick, so I rejoined Miss Grey and Kemper, who had found a green coconut and were alternately deriving nourishment from the milk inside it.

  Somehow or other there seemed to me a certain levity about that performance, and it made me uncomfortable; but I managed to smile a rather sickly smile when they offered me a draught, and I took a pull at the milk – I don’t exactly know why, because I don’t like it. But the moon was up over the sea, now, and the dusk was languorously balmy, and I didn’t care to leave those two drinking milk out of the same coconut under a tropic moon.

  Not that my interest in Evelyn Grey was other than scientific. But after all it was I who had discovered her.

  We sailed as soon as Grue, gobbling and snuffling, had cleaned up the last crumb of food. Kemper blandly offered to take Miss Grey into his boat, saying that he feared my boat was overcrowded, what with the paraphernalia, the folding cages, Grue, Miss Grey and myself.

  I sat on that suggestion, but offered to take my own tiller and lend him Grue. He couldn’t wriggle out of it, seeing that his alleged motive had been the overcrowding of my boat, but he looked rather sick when Grue went aboard his boat.

  As for me, I hoisted sail with something so near a chuckle that it surprised me; and I looked at Evelyn Grey to see whether she had noticed the unseemly symptom.

  Apparently she had not. She sat forward, her eyes fixed soulfully upon the moon. Had I been dedicated to any profession except a scientific one – but let that pass.

  Grue in Kemper’s sailboat led, and my boat followed out into the silvery and purple dusk, now all sparkling under the high lustre of the moon. Dimly I saw vast rafts of wild duck part and swim leisurely away to port and starboard, leaving a glittering lane of water for us to sail through; into the scintillant night from the sea sprang mullet, silvery, quivering, falling back into the wash with a splash.

  Here and there in the moonlight steered ominous black triangles, circling us, leading us, sheering across bow and flashing wake, all phosphorescent with lambent sea-fire – the fins of great sharks.

  ‘You need have no fear,’ said I to the pretty waitress.

  She said nothing.

  ‘Of course if you are afraid,’ I added, ‘perhaps you might care to change your seat.’

  There was room in the stern where I sat.

  ‘Do you think there is any danger?’ she asked.

  ‘From sharks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Reaching up and biting you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t really suppose there is,’ I said, managing to convey the idea, I am ashamed to say, that the catastrophe was a possibility.

  She came over and seated herself beside me. I was very much ashamed of myself, but I could not repress a triumphant glance ahead at the other boat, where Kemper sat huddled forward, evidently bored to extinction.

  Every now and then I could see him turn and crane his neck as though in an effort to distinguish what was going on in our boat.

  There was nothing going on, absolutely nothing. The moon was magnificent; and I think the pretty waitress must have been a little tired, for her head dropped and nodded at moments, even while I was talking to her about a specimen of Euplectilla speciosa on which I had written a monograph. So she must have been really tired, for the subject was interesting.

  ‘You won’t incommode my operations with sheet and tiller,’ I said to her kindly, ‘if you care to rest your head against my shoulder.’

  Evidently she was very tired, for she did so, and closed her eyes.

  After a while, fearing that she might fall over backward into the sea – but let that pass … I don’t know whether or not Kemper could distinguish anything aboard our boat. He craned his head enough to twist it off his neck.

  To be so utterly, so blindly devoted to science is a great safeguard for a man. Single-mindedness, however, need not induce atrophy of every human impulse. I drew the pretty waitress closer – not that
the night was cold, but it might become so. Changes in the tropics come swiftly. It is well to be prepared.

  Her cheek felt very soft against my shoulder. There seemed to be a faint perfume about her hair. It really was odd how subtly fragrant she seemed to be – almost, perhaps, a matter of scientific interest.

  Her hands did not seem to be chilled; they did seem unusually smooth and soft.

  I said to her: ‘When at home, I suppose your mother tucks you in; doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded sleepily.

  ‘And what does she do then?’ said I, with something of that ponderous playfulness with which I make scientific jokes at a meeting of the Bronx Anthropological Association, when I preside.

  ‘She kisses me and turns out the light,’ said Evelyn Grey, innocently.

  I don’t know how much Kemper could distinguish. He kept dodging about and twisting his head until I really thought it would come off, unless it had been screwed on like the top of a piano stool.

  A few minutes later he fired his pistol twice; and Evelyn sat up. I never knew why he fired; he never offered any explanation.

  Towards midnight I could hear the roar of breakers on our starboard bow. Evelyn heard them, too, and sat up enquiringly.

  ‘Grue has found the inlet to Black Bayou, I suppose,’ said I.

  And it proved to be the case, for, with the surf thundering on either hand, we sailed into a smoothly flowing inlet through which the flood tide was running between high dunes all sparkling in the moonlight and crowned with shadowy palms.

  Occasionally I heard noises ahead of us from the other boat, as though Kemper was trying to converse with us, but as his apropos was as unintelligible as it was inopportune, I pretended not to hear him. Besides, I had all I could do to maneuver the tiller and prevent Evelyn Grey from falling off backward into the bayou. Besides, it is not customary to converse with the man at the helm.

  After a while – during which I seemed to distinguish in Kemper’s voice a quality that rhymes with his name – his tones varied through phases all the way from irony to exasperation. After a while he gave it up and took to singing.