But to-night this fine scorn of the supernatural and the bizarre was
some way gone from my being. It wasn't so easy to reject them now. Those
hide-and-seek, half-glimpsed, eerie phantasies that are hidden deep in
every man's subconscious mind were in the ascendancy to-night. They had
been implanted in the germ-plasm a thousand thousand generations gone,
they were a dim and mystic heritage from the childhood days of the race,
the fear and the dreads and horrors of those dark forests of countless
thousands of years ago, and they still lie like a shadow over the
fear-cursed minds of some of the more savage peoples. Civilization has
mostly got away from them, it has strengthened itself steadily against
them, building with the high aim of wholly escaping from them, yet no
man in this childlike world is wholly unknown to them. The blind,
ghastly fear of the darkness, of the unknown, of the whispering voice or
the rustling of garments of one who returns from beyond the void is an
experience few human beings can deny.

The cold logic with which I looked on life was in some way shaken and
uncertain. The fanciful side of myself crept in and influenced all my
thought-processes. It was no longer possible to accept, with implicit
faith, that last night's crime was merely the expression of ordinary,
familiar moods and human passions, that it would all work out according
to the accepted scheme of things. Indeed the crime seemed no longer
_human_ at all. Rather it seemed just some deadly outgrowth of these
weird sands beside the mysterious lagoon.

The crime had seemed a thing of human origin before, to be judged by
human standards, but now it had become associated, in my mind, with
inanimate sand and water. It was as if we had beheld the sinister
expression of some inherent quality in the place itself rather than the
men who had gathered there. It was hard to believe, now, that Florey had
been a mere actor in some human drama that in the end had led to murder.
He had been little and gray and obscure, seemingly apart from human
drama as the mountains are apart from the sea, and it was easier to
believe that he had been merely the unsuspecting victim of some outer
peril that none of us knew. Slain, with a ragged, downward cut through
the breast--and his body dragged into the lagoon!

What was to prevent the same thing from happening again? Before the
week was done other of the occupants of that house might find themselves
walking