He felt that he could not endure another night of the torture he
had passed through four times before. That he should go mad he was
positive, and he commenced to tremble and whimper even while daylight
yet remained. For a time he tried turning his back to the forest, and
then he sat huddled up gazing out upon the ocean; but the tears which
rolled down his cheeks so blurred his eyes that he saw nothing.
Finally he could endure it no longer, and with a sudden gasp of horror
he wheeled toward the wood. There was nothing visible, yet he broke
down and sobbed like a child, for loneliness and terror.
When he was able to control his tears for a moment he took the
opportunity to scan the deepening shadows once more.
The first glance brought a piercing shriek from his white lips.
The thing was there!
The young man did not fall groveling to the sand this time--instead,
he stood staring with protruding eyes at the vague form, while shriek
after shriek broke from his grinning lips.
Reason was tottering.
The thing, whatever it was, halted at the first blood-curdling cry, and
then when the cries continued it slunk back toward the wood.
With what remained of his ebbing mentality Waldo Emerson realized that
it were better to die at once than face the awful fears of the black
night. He would rush to meet his fate, and thus end this awful agony of
suspense.
With the thought came action, so that, still shrieking, he rushed
headlong toward the thing at the wood's rim. As he ran it turned and
fled into the forest, and after it went Waldo Emerson, his long, skinny
legs carrying his emaciated body in great leaps and bounds through the
tearing underbrush.
He emitted shriek after shriek--ear-piercing shrieks that ended in long
drawn out wails, more wolfish than human. And the thing that fled
through the night before him was shrieking, too, now.
Time and again the young man stumbled and fell. Thorns and brambles
tore his clothing and his soft flesh. Blood smeared him from head to
feet. Yet on and on he rushed through the semidarkness of the now
moonlit forest.
At first impelled by the mad desire to embrace death and wrest the
peace of oblivion from its cruel clutch, Waldo Emerson had come to
pursue the screaming shadow before him from an entirely different
motive. Now it was for companionship. He screamed now because of a fear
that the thing would elude him and that he should be left alone in the
depth of this weird wood.
Slowly but surely it was drawing away from him, and as Waldo Emerson
realized the fact he redoubled his efforts to overtake it. He had
stopped screaming now, for the strain of his physical exertion found
his weak lungs barely adequate to the needs of his gasping respiration.
Suddenly the pursuit emerged from the forest to cross a little moonlit
clearing, at the opposite side of which towered a high and rocky cliff.
Toward this the fleeing creature sped, and in an instant more was
swallowed, apparently, by the face of the cliff.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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