Outside the veranda the crabs were scuttling and clicking and rustling, scavenging with resistless vigor and great enthusiasm. A thin, far burst of song came from the government accommodation house, where the bulk of the steamer’s passengers were gathered in jovial celebration.
Then through all the muffled night there again began to pierce that insistent watch-like ticking. Not as of one watch, but as of a thousand it was, steady and irregular and very thin. Occasionally a quite distinct crunch would echo through, as though some one had stepped on a beetle; only there was no one to step.
Once or twice there came a soft “flop” on the floor; whatever had fallen must have fallen from the ceiling.
The sounds were not exactly pleasant, especially to a fevered imagination. They might mean anything from ghosts to dragons.
And over all, slurring the staccato harmony of the ticking, was an almost inaudible soft scurrying—like innumerable feathers or hairy legs running about.
It was a weird symphony, a symphony of lesser noises, of louder silences, a symphony whose eldritch orchestration produced hideousness.
There was no discord. Over the crescendo and diminuendo of the ticking swept that soft horror of nearly inaudible sound, shot through by the louder crunches; there were other sounds also that could not be defined by human ears, but all blended into a terrible harmony, the more terrible because produced by darkness and rife with suggestion.
“I say, old man,” Hobson’s voice rose in a thick discord that ruined the symphonic whispers utterly, “what’s all this bally rustling, eh?”
Cranshaw waited a little, smiling into the blackness, inscrutable.
“I say, Cranshaw! Let’s have a drink, old man!”