“No fish woulda acted the way he says. He was scared right, I tell you. He… Whoa, boy! Turn left here for the wharf.”
Harry applied the brakes, and turned the car into a dirt road, that led through a thick woods. The sun had nearly set, and it was dark beneath the trees. Harry turned on the bright headlights.
His companion was silent. The car moved almost noiselessly, as Harry steered it slowly along the narrow, winding road. Following his companion’s talk of ghosts and eerie happenings, the woods seemed filled with spectral stillness.
Suddenly they turned into a clearing. The road ended on the shore of a lake, where the waters sparkled beneath the rays of the setting sun.
In front of them was a small wharf; beyond — a mile out in the lake — towered a tree-clad island. A thin wisp of smoke curled upward from the trees, indicating the presence of a house.
“See them rocks?”
Harry’s companion pointed to the headland of the island, which was a solid mass of stone, rising to a height of thirty feet. Blackened flaws in the rocky front gave it a peculiar appearance.
“Looks like a big skull, don’t it? Some folks say that’s why it’s called Death Island.”
HARRY noted the resemblance. In the mysterious, dulling light which now hung over the lake, the rocky headland looked amazingly like a monstrous death’s head, its sightless eyes directed toward the wharf. Harry felt a creepy feeling come over him.
The features of the huge skull seemed more pronounced in the settling gloom. They were intensified as Harry watched.