On my other side, shapeless, grotesque arms were clutching at me as if to tear at my heart. Other hands were reaching . . . reaching. . . .
I signaled frantically. I clutched at the depth line desperately. I was afraid that it would be torn from my grasp.
At last after infinite centuries of waiting (it could not actually have been as much as a minute) I could feel myself rising. I gulped a deep breath . . . another. It seemed as if I had not breathed for hours. As I rose a spectral arm dragged along my body and trailed off my leaden boots in a last lingering caress.
My single impression as I towered above the serried rows of bodies—safely out of their reach—was that they Were fighting among themselves, as the sons of the dragon's teeth had fought so long ago. Fighting over me who was escaping from them—though, like the legendary warriors, perhaps they did not know.
I was conscious, I know, as I rose along side the lighter. I climbed up the diving ladder unassisted.
To the thousand questions phrased in the eyes of the silent group that circled about me, I repeated:
“Yes! There must be thousands . . .” I hesitated. It seemed a palpable lie. “. . . of human beings down there . . . fighting among themselves.
“No!” I corrected. Perhaps I had been wrong. “Not fighting—playing! . . . dancing!” I stopped. That was it.
But through my imaginative consciousness coursed weird, imaginative phrases.
“Dancing . . . to the rhythmic beat of the waves . . . a slow dance of death . . . living persons dancing a death dance.”
And so we returned to the ancient city of Odessa and told our tale of the living dead in the sea—just as I have recounted it here.
The denouement came later. After a torturous three acts, came (as the critics say) the belated epilogue, and cleared up the mystery. It was absurdly simple.
During the winter of 1918, a citizen informed us, when the Bolsheviki conflagration was sweeping like a prairie fire over terrorized Ukrainia in Southern Russia, a surprise attack upon Odessa by the revolutionists turned a battle into a veritable massacre. The defenders—defenseless men, women and children—were driven before the Red marauders like sheep, through the narrow streets to the land’s end. They came at last to the buttressed dikes and the very edge of the sea.
Here they had their choice—of two deaths: to be cut down by malevolent devils or drown in the Black Sea.
The invaders were riding down the outer fringes of the ghastly hegira and slaughtering the stragglers without mercy. The others jumped into the sea. Burdened with heavy winter clothing, many of them in uniform, they did not have a chance for their lives in the tossing black waters. They sank like ballast.
The scientific explanation is likewise simple. Having sunk to the bottom they congealed in the icy waters and had never—not a single one of them—come to the top.
We left the country believing that they were destined, doomed, to dance eternity away . . . plashing, dancing, to the rythmic eddyings of icy currents.
I have since learned from Lieutenant Blake—whom I see occasionally when he is in port—that many of these bodies came to the surface and were recovered and buried the following year.
It was, of course, inevitable that when chemical re-agents neutralized the gases, the bodies should rise to the top—just as it is a law of physics that they should have retained their upright positions while dancing on the floor of the sea—with the upper portions, housing the air ventricles, swinging almost vertically upward while the lower halves remained down.
Blake also informed me that the bullion had been recovered two years later. But none of our party were there at the time.
“And so the guardian specter-cordon finally deserted the lost ship . . . to the last man,” he concluded with a grim smile.
It made me thoughtful. And many times since I have caught myself thinking of those weird dancers in the sea . . . undulating . . . gyrating . . . shapeless arms . . . reaching . . . dancing that slow dance of death in the rythmic eddying of icy currents.
Pawn of the Unseen
(Continued from page 33)
smell of dirt that has long lain in the dark places and never known the sun- light—a fetid, heavy smell peculiar to cellars.
It was just an ordinary cellar, so far as they could see by a hasty reconnoiter- ing. On one side was a row of coal bins, and on the other were locked bins, prob- ably holding discarded furniture, clothes and furnishings of an ancient and earlier day, and things of like character.
Suddenly they stopped in their search, as a sound came to their ears.
“What's that?” whispered Terry as he
grasped Marius’ arm in a grip of steel.
The men listened, and as they listened a low chant seemed to come to them from above. It was faint—faint as the new Wind in the tops of young trees, but there was something sinister and ever- lasting about it—something ageless, something of doom and of the grave,
“Sounds to me like the humming of that grave-watching bird over Grimm's body,” said Marius finally, after they had listened for a space. And, indeed, that was what it was.
“Seems to come from right overhead,”
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