Read Algernon Blackwood for Free Online Page B

And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no
longer be held a sufficient explanation of it.

III
*
    At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.
    "Queer thing," he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to
say something and get it over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last
night."
    I had expected something so totally different that he caught me with
surprise, and I looked up sharply.
    "Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things—"
    "I don't mean that, of course," he interrupted. "I mean—do you think—did
you think it really was an otter?"
    "What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?"
    "You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed—so much bigger
than an otter."
    "The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.
    He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other
thoughts.
    "It had such extraordinary yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.
    "That was the sun too," I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'll
wonder next if that fellow in the boat—"
    I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again of
listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of
his face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with our
caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Five
minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch
in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.
    "I did rather wonder, if you want to know," he said slowly, "what that
thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man.
The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water."
    I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was
impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.
    "Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going
out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the
man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast
as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the
fool about it!"
    He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the
least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.
    "And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear
things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but
the river and this cursed old thundering wind."
    "You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's
just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as
I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The
best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as
possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder
when you're forced to meet it."
    My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew
quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a
certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I
felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less
sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant
all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very
beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his
words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves
were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward,
but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.
    "But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject
passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what
one says, happens."
    That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of
rising