The green grass became a strange, dusky blue; the gray sand of the shore whitened; the blue-green waters turned to ink except for their silver-white caps of foam. Watching closely, our eyes gradually adjusted themselves to the fading light, conveying the impression that the twilight was of unusual length. Perhaps we didn’t quite know when the twilight ended and the night began.
The usual twilight sounds reached us with particular vividness from the lagoon and the forest and the shore. We heard the plover, as ever; and deeper voices—doubtless those of passing sea-birds, mingled with theirs. But the sounds came intermittently, sharp and penetrating out of the darkness and the silence, and they always startled us a little. Sometimes the thickets rustled in the gardens—little, hushed noises none of us pretended to hear. A frog croaked, and the hushed little wind creaked the tree-limbs together. Once some wild creature—possibly a wildcat, but more likely a great owl—filled the night with his weird, long-drawn cry. We all turned, and Van Hope, sitting near by, smiled wanly in the gloom.
Darkness had already swept the verandas, and Van Hope’s was the only face I could see. The others were already blurred, and even their forms were mere dark blotches of shadow. A vague count showed that there was six of us here—and I was suddenly rather startled by the thought that I didn’t know just who they were. The group had changed from time to time throughout the evening, some of the men had gone and others had taken their chairs, and now the darkness concealed their identities. It shouldn’t have made any difference, yet I found myself dwelling, with a strange persistency, on the subject.
The reason got down to the simple fact that, in this house of mystery, a man instinctively wanted to keep track of all his fellows. He wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. He found himself worrying when one of them was gone. I suppose it was the instinct of protection—a feeling that a man’s absence might any moment result in a shrill scream of fear or death in the darkness. Van Hope sat to my left, a little further to the right was Weldon, the coroner. There were three chairs further to the right, but which of the five remaining guests occupied them I did not know.
Three white men—two of the guests and the sheriff—were unaccounted for. My better intelligence told me that they were either in the living-room or the library, perhaps in their own rooms, yet it was impossible to forget that these men were of the white race, largely free from the superstition that kept the blacks safely from the perilous shores of the lagoon. Any one of a dozen reasons might send them walking down through the gardens to those gray crags from which they might never return.
I found myself wondering about Edith, too. She had excused herself and had gone to her room, ostensibly to bed, but I couldn’t forget our conversation of the previous night and her resolve to fathom the mystery of her uncle’s disappearance. Would she remain in the security of her room, or must I guard her, too?
How slow the time passed! The darkness deepened over land and sea. The moon had not yet risen—indeed it would not appear until after midnight. The great, white Floridan stars, however, had pushed through the dark blue canopy of the night, and their light lay softly over the gardens. The guests talked in muffled tones, their excited laughter ringing out at ever longer intervals. The coals of their cigars glowed like fireflies in the gloom.
By ten o’clock two of the six chairs were vacant. Two of the guests had tramped away heavily to their rooms, not passing so near that I could make sure of their identity. Soon after this a very deep and curious silence fell over the veranda.
The two men to my right, Weldon the coroner and one of the guests, were smoking quietly, evidently in a lull in their conversation. I didn’t particularly notice them. Their silence was some way natural and easy, nothing to startle the heart or arrest the breath. If they had been talking, however, perhaps the moment would have never got hold of me as it did. The silence seemed to deepen with an actual sense of motion, like something growing, and a sensation as inexplicable as it was unpleasant slowly swept over me.
It was a creepy, haunting feeling that had its origin somewhere beyond the five senses. Outwardly there was nothing to startle me, unless it was that curious, deepening silence. The darkness, the shore, the starlit gardens were just the same. Nor was it a perceptible, abrupt start. It came slowly, growing, creeping through me. I had no inclination to make any perceptible motion, or to show that anything was different than it was before. I turned slowly to Van Hope, sitting to my left.