Dimly, as though from an incredibly far distance, he heard Yamada suck
in his breath, as if surprized. Then the Japanese said, "That is good.
Very good. Now listen: your uncle will be here soon. He has chartered a
special plane. Will you be my guest until he arrives?"
The room seemed to darken before Dean's eyes. The form of the Japanese
was receding, dwindling. Through the window the surf-sound came
crashing, and it rolled on in waves through Dean's brain. In its
thunder a thin, insistent whispering penetrated.
"Accept," it murmured. "Accept!" And Dean heard his own voice accept
Yamada's invitation.
He seemed incapable of coherent thought. That last dream haunted
him ... and now Doctor Yamada's disturbing story ... he was ill--that
was it!--very ill. He wanted very much to sleep, now. A flood of
darkness seemed to wash up and engulf him. Gratefully he allowed it
to sweep through his tired head. Nothing existed but the dark, and a
restless lapping of unquiet waters.
Yet he seemed to know, in an odd way, that he was still--some outer
part of him--conscious. He strangely realized that he and Doctor Yamada
had left the house, were entering a car, and driving a long way. He
was--with that strange, external other self--talking casually to the
doctor; entering his house in San Pedro; drinking; eating. And all the
while his soul, his real being, was buried in waves of blackness.
Finally a bed. From below, the surf seemed to blend into the blackness
that engulfed his brain. It spoke to him now, as he rose stealthily
and clambered out of the window. The fall jarred his outer self
considerably, but he was on the ground outside without injury. He kept
in the shadows as he crept away down to the beach--the black, hungry
shadows that were like the darkness surging through his soul.
_3. Three Dreadful Hours_
With a shock, he was himself once more--completely. The cold water had
done it; the water in which he found himself swimming. He was in the
ocean, borne on waves as silver as the lightning that occasionally
flashed overhead. He heard thunder, felt the sting of rain. Without
wondering about the sudden transition, he swam on, as though fully
aware of some planned destination. For the first time in over a month
he felt fully alive, actually himself. There was a surge of wild
elation in him that defied the facts; he no longer seemed to care about
his recent illness, the weird warnings of his uncle and Doctor Yamada,
and the unnatural darkness that had previously shadowed his mind.
In fact, he no longer had to think--it was as though he were being
_directed_ in all his movements.
He was swimming parallel with the beach now, and with curious
detachment he observed that the storm had subsided. A pale, fog-like
glow hovered over the lashing waters, and it seemed to beckon.
The air was chill, as was the water, and the waves high; yet Dean
experienced neither cold nor fatigue. And when he saw the things that
waited for him on the rocky beach just ahead, he lost all perception of
himself in a crescendo of mounting joy.
This was inexplicable, for they were the creatures of his last and
wildest nightmares. Even now he did not see them plainly as they
sported in the surf, but there were dim suggestions of past horror in
their tenebrous outlines. The things were like seals; great, fish-like,
bloated monsters with pulpy, shapeless heads. These heads rested on
columnar necks that undulated with serpentine ease, and he observed,
without any sensation other than curious familiarity, that the heads
and bodies of the creatures were a sea-bleached white.
Soon he was swimming in among them--swimming with peculiar and
disturbing ease. Inwardly he marveled, with a touch of his former
feeling, that he was not now horrified by the sea-beasts in the least.
Instead, it was almost with a feeling of kinship that he listened to
their strange low gruntings and cackles--listened _and understood_.
He _knew_ what they were saying, and he was not amazed. He was not
frightened by what he heard, though the words would have sent abysmal
horror through his soul in the previous dreams.
He knew where they were going and what they meant to do when the
entire group swam out into the water once more, yet he did not fear.
Instead, he felt a strange hunger at the thought of what was to come, a
hunger that impelled him to take the lead as the things, with undulant
swiftness, glided through the inky waters to the north. They swam with
incredible speed, yet it was hours before a sea-coast loomed up through
the murk, lit by a blinding flare of light from offshore.
Twilight deepened to true darkness over the water, but the offshore
light burned brightly. It seemed to come from a huge wreck in the waves
just off the coast, a great hulk floating on the waters like a crumpled
beast. There were boats gathered around it, and floating flares of
light that revealed the scene.
As though by instinct, Dean, with the pack behind him, headed for the
spot. Swiftly and silently they sped, their slimy heads blurred in
the shadows to which they clung as they circled the boats and swam in
toward the great crumpled shape. Now it was looming above him, and
he could see arms flailing desperately as man after man sank below
the surface. The colossal bulk from which they leaped was a wreck of
twisted girders in which he could trace the warped outline of a vaguely
familiar shape.
And now, with curious disinterest, he swam lazily about, avoiding
the lights bobbing over the water as he watched the actions of his
companions. They were hunting their prey. Leering muzzles gaped for the
drowning men, and lean talons raked bodies from the darkness. Whenever
a man was glimpsed in shadows not yet invaded by rescue-boats, one of
the sea-things craftily snared his victim.
In a little while they turned and slowly swam away. But now many of the
creatures clutched a grisly trophy at their squamous breasts. The pale
white limbs of drowning men trailed in the water as they were dragged
off into the darkness by their captors. To the accompaniment of low,
carrion laughter the beasts swam away, back down the coast.
Dean swam with the rest. His mind was again a blur of confusion. He
knew what that thing in the water was, and yet he could not name it.
He had watched those hateful horrors snare doomed men and drag them
off to the deep, yet he had not intervened. What was wrong? Even now,
as he swam with frightening agility, he felt a call he could not fully
understand--a call that his body was answering.
The hybrid things were gradually dispersing. With eery splashings they
disappeared below the surface of the gelid black waters, pulling with
them the dreadfully limp bodies of the men, pulling them down to the
blackness biding beneath.
_They were hungry._ Dean knew it without thinking. He swam on, along
the coast, impelled by his curious urge. That was it--he was hungry.
And now he was going for food.
* * * * *
Hours of steady swimming southward. Then the familiar beach, and above
it a lighted house which Dean recognized--his own house on the cliff.
There were figures descending the slope now; two men with torches were
coming down to the beach. He must not let them see him--why, he did not
know, but they must not. He crawled along the beach, keeping close to
the water's edge. Even so, he seemed to move very swiftly.
The men with the torches were some distance behind him now. Ahead
loomed another familiar outline--a cave. He had clambered over these
rocks before, it seemed. He knew the pits of shadow that speckled the
cliff rock, and knew the narrow passage of stone through which he now
squeezed his prostrate body.
Was that someone shouting, far away?...
Darkness, and a lapping pool. He crawled forward, felt chill waters
creep over his body. Muffled by distance came an insistent shouting
from outside the cave.
"Graham! Graham Dean!"
Then the smell of dank sea-foulness was in his nostrils--a familiar,
pleasant smell. He knew where he was, now. It was the cave where in his
dream he had kissed the sea-thing. It was the cave in which----
He remembered now. The black blur lifted from his brain, and he
remembered all. His mind bridged the gap, and he once again recalled
coming here earlier this very evening, before he had found himself in
the water.
Morella Godolfo had called him here; here her dark whispers had guided
him at twilight, when he had come from the bed at Doctor Yamada's
house. It was the siren song of the sea-creature that had lured him in
dreams.
He remembered how she had coiled about his feet when he entered, flung
her sea-bleached body up until its inhuman head had loomed close to
his own. And then the hot pulpy lips had pressed against his--the
loathsome, slimy lips had kissed him again. Wet, dank, horribly avid
kiss! His senses had drowned in its evil, for he knew that this second
kiss meant doom.
"The sea-dweller will take your body," Doctor Yamada had said.... And
the second kiss meant doom.
_All this had happened hours ago!_
Dean shifted around in the rocky chamber to avoid wetting himself in
the pool. As he did so, he glanced down at his body for the first
time that night--glanced down with an undulating neck at the shape he
had worn for three hours in the sea. He saw the fish-like scales, the
scabrous whiteness of the slimy skin; saw the veined gills. He stared
into the waters of the pool then, so that the reflection of his face
was visible in the dim moonlight that filtered through fissures in the
rocks.
He saw all....
His head rested on the long, reptilian neck. It was an anthropoid head
with flat contours that were monstrously inhuman. The eyes were white
and protuberant; they bulged with the glassy stare of a drowning thing.
There was no nose, and the center of the face was covered with a tangle
of wormy blue feelers. The mouth was worst of all. Dean saw pale white
lips in a dead face--human lips. Lips that had kissed his own. And
now--_they were his own_!
He was in the body of the evil sea-thing--the evil sea-thing that had
once harbored the soul of Morella Godolfo!
At that moment Dean would gladly have welcomed death, for the stark,
blasphemous horror of his discovery was too much to bear. He knew
about his dreams now, and the legends; he had learned the truth, and
paid a hideous price. He recalled, vividly, how he had recovered
consciousness in the water and swum out to meet those--others. He
recalled the great black hulk from which drowning men had been taken in
boats--the shattered wreck on the water. What was it Yamada had told
him? "When there is a wreck they go there, like vultures to a feast."
And now, at last, he remembered what had eluded him that night--what
that familiar shape on the waters had been. It was a crashed zeppelin.
He had gone swimming into the wreckage with those things, and they had
taken men.... Three hours--God! Dean wanted very much to die. He was in
the sea-body of Morella Godolfo, and it was too evil for further life.
Morella Godolfo! Where was _she_? And his own body, the shape of Graham
Dean?
* * * * *
A rustling in the shadowy cavern behind him proclaimed the answer.
Graham Dean saw _himself_ in the moonlight--saw his body, line for
line, hunching furtively past the pool in an attempt to creep away
unobserved.
Dean's flippered fins moved swiftly. His own body turned.
It was ghastly for Dean to see himself reflected where no mirror
existed; ghastlier still to see that in his face there no longer were
_his_ eyes. The sly, mocking stare of the sea-creature peered out at
him from behind their fleshy mask, and they were ancient, evil. The
pseudo-human snarled at him and tried to dodge off into the darkness.
Dean followed, on all fours.
He knew what he must do. That sea-thing--Morella--she had taken his
body during that last black kiss, just as he had been forced into
hers. But she had not yet recovered enough to go out into the world.
That was why he had found her still in the cave. Now, however, she
would leave, and his uncle Michael would never know. The world would
never know, either, what horror stalked its surface--until it was too
late. Dean, his own tragic form hateful to him now, knew what he must
do.
Purposefully he maneuvered the mocking body of himself into a rocky
corner. There was a look of fright in those gelid eyes....
A sound caused Dean to turn, pivoting his reptilian neck. Through
glazed fish-eyes he saw the faces of Michael Leigh and Doctor Yamada.
Torches in hand, they were entering the cave.
Dean knew what they would do, and he no longer cared. He closed in
on the human body that housed the soul of the sea-beast; closed in
with the beast's own flailing flippers; seized it in its own arms and
menaced it with its own teeth near the creature's white, human neck.
From behind him he heard shouts and cries at his very back, but Dean
did not care. He had a duty to perform; an atonement. Through the
corner of his eye, he saw the barrel of a revolver as it glinted in
Yamada's hand.
Then came two bursts of stabbing flame, and the oblivion Dean craved.
But he died happy, for he had atoned for the black kiss.
Even as he sank into death, Graham Dean had bitten with animal fangs
into his own throat, and his heart was filled with peace as, dying, he
saw himself die....
His soul mingled in the third black kiss of Death.