FOR some time Wilson plodded on, his one idea being to escape from the ghostly valley. The weirdness of the place, enclosed as it was on every side by towering cliffs, its unnatural stillness, and, above all, the grim remains with which the ground was littered, sent an uncanny thrill through the engineer; and, despite his resolution, he found himself continually glancing backward, to make certain that no spectral form was dogging his steps.
All unconsciously he was moving in exactly the opposite direction to that he wished to take, straying farther at each step into the interior of the underworld. The valley seemed to be endless, and the lonely traveller grew tired after awhile of the eternal monotony of the scene around. More, he grew afraid; afraid that he would never find his way out of these ghostly wilds, where reigned an everlasting silence—afraid that he would never again see the Seal or the comrade from whom he had been snatched so suddenly.
The fear grew. Try as he might he could not shake it off. It seemed to be gripping his heart with icy fingers, paralysing his every energy, and turning him into a craven coward. He started at his own footsteps. The shadow of a boulder, cast in a grotesque, distorted form by the fungi light upon the ground at his feet, brought him up with a jump, and only with great difficulty did he restrain a cry.
The valley seemed to grow full of strange sounds. Ghostly voices whispered in his ears, hideous faces peered out from the shelter of the fungi.
He was in the grip of a terror such as he had never known before!
Then, upon the heels of this wholly imaginary fear, came a real one. Footsteps—stealthy, all but noiseless footsteps—sounded behind him, He glanced backward. A score of yards behind him a black shadow was moving, a shapeless smudge against the green of the moss.
For one terrible instant his heart seemed to stop beating. What was the Thing?
Nearer it crept, sliding from shadow to shadow with a sinister movement horrible to witness. And still the lad stood motionless, his very soul withered by the fear that gripped him.
Nearer still—but a few feet separated the thing from the engineer; then the latter recovered the use of his limbs, and, with a wild yell of terror, dashed madly down the valley. As he did so, the creature behind rose from its crouching position, disclosing to view the hideous form of a wolf-man.
A moment the savage stood gazing after the rapidly-vanishing Wilson, then, picking up something the latter had dropped, he turned without troubling to give chase, and, plunging in among the fungi, disappeared.