Free Algernon Blackwood by The Willows

and constantly sat
up, asking me if I "heard this" or "heard that." He tossed about on his
cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over
the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with
the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still.
Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds
of snoring—the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a
welcome and calming influence.
    This, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.
    A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face.
But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first
thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in
his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me
that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering
was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.
    I called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed
the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was
down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook
it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively
that the Swede was not here. He had gone.
    I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I
was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me
completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was
that same familiar humming—gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might
have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very
atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.
    But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.
    The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards
over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I
could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy
patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island,
calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that
came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming
muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged
among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my
face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.
    Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark
figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And
already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken
the plunge.
    I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him
shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a
noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most
outlandish phrases in his anger about "going inside to Them," and "taking
the way of the water and the wind," and God only knows what more besides,
that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with
horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him
into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and
cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.
    I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding
as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering
outside—I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business
perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me
so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said,
for all the world just like a frightened child:
    "My life, old man—it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow.
They've found a victim in our place!"
    Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my
eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to