There was nothing sinister in the first entry. It was made in the steady, squarish script of a self-educated seaman, and dated February 21st, 192-. The words were sure and sane, with no hint of the hell- penned horror that lay in the final pages of the book.
Lazarus Heath had shipped out as First Mate aboard the freighter Macedonia, bound Southeast for Africa. It was as simple and prosaic as that. For pages there was nothing but the easy, satisfied chatting of a sea-faring man setting down, for his own amusement, the record of an interesting but mundane voyage. The first leg of the journey had gone well; even the weather had been with the Macedonia. The crew was competent and not too quarrelsome, and already looking forward to a “time” in the African coast-towns. Then, somewhere in the Southern Atlantic, they ran into the fog.
At first, Lazarus Heath made only passing mention of it; although it had come upon them unexpectedly and was intensely thick and disconcerting, it was judged that they would sail on through it on instruments without too much difficulty. There was a controlled, sensible attitude in Heath’s script at this point; he was writing for himself the things he had told his men. At the dose of the entry he wrote, as though loathe to admit it, even to himself: “There is a certain uneasiness among the men; it is not good for the nerves, this endless, blinding fog….” The writing trailed off with the first whisper of the uncertainty that was laying siege to Lazarus Heath’s mind.
The next entry was made four days later in a dashing, cold hand. It was short and bewildered. “Still this damnable fog, and that is not the worst of it. The instruments have begun to act queerly. We must go on as best we can and trust in the Almighty. Men very jumpy….” And, on the night of the same day, the controlled hand had wavered perceptibly as it scribbled: “Instruments gone dead. What in God’s name does it mean?” The story continued.
The coming of the voices was not sudden. It began with Dyke. Lazarus Heath knew little about the gangling, blond-bearded kid called Alan Dyke. He had signed on in New York as a fireman. A quiet, uneasy individual, he spent most of his leisure with books. He affected the bilge-water lingo of the sea, but underneath, he was only a kid, and he was scared. It began, according to Heath, when the engines went dead. They had expected that for what seemed a century. The Macedonia couldn’t go on plowing in blind circles forever; the fuel gave out. The hell-fire in the bowels of Heath’s ship guttered and died; there was only an echoing ghost of the roar that had choked the engine room.
It was too quiet. An unholy, nerve-rending silence enveloped the becalmed Macedonia. After a time, the men even gave up talking, as if the very echo of their voices, hollow and dead in the smothering fog, terrified them.
Dyke was on the foredeck when he heard the voices. Heath, standing beside him, had sensed an abrupt new tautness in the bony, coltish frame. Dyke’s adolescent face strained to one side, marble- blue eyes gazing blindly into the mist; he listened. His words came to Lazarus Heath as though they had been separated by some yawning, fog-choked abyss.
“You hear them? The voices? I can hear them; they’re calling us…. The syrens are chanting the melodies of watery death…. Zoth Syra calleth…The voice was no longer Dyke’s. It was light and cloying, possessed of a malignant beauty. Men froze and stared; they seemed not to hear Heath’s sharp commands. “I heard nothing,” Heath wrote that night. “Still, the sounds must have been there. Dyke must have been listening to something; he and the others…. But, I mustn’t believe these whispered legends of sea-syrens. Someone must hold this God-forsaken crew together… if only I have the strength… if only I can keep from hearing the voices….” That was the prayer of Lazarus Heath, the night the Macedonia ran aground and sank off the ghostly shores of a lost, uncharted island.
Little space separated the next entry from those last frantic words, scribbled unevenly across a water-streaked, foul-smelling page of the diary, yet, reading on, I had the sensation of an endless spinning through some dark, watery nothingness. I lived the nightmare of which Lazarus Heath wrote with the calm sadness of a completely sane man.
The end of the Macedonia had been sudden and strange. By the hour, they had known it must be noon in that outer world with which they had lost all hope of contact. Their own existence had become a perpetual fog-swarming night; the monstrous ticking of the ship’s clocks only taunted them. The bells of the Macedonia ricocheted mockingly into the boundless darkness of the mist. They had been chiming when the end came.
Lazarus Heath had spent most of his life on the water; he had survived more than one shipwreck. Panic and the smashing fury of the sea were nothing new to him. It was the quiet that terrified the Macedonia’s First Mate. The crew seemed not to understand; his lashing, bitter orders fell on deafened ears. The swirling Atlantic sucked thirstily at their feet and they did not move. Officers and men alike, they stood or sat in a speechless, apathetic stupor, unmindful of the death that swirled and lapped on every side. Each face held the same rapt, hypnotized expression. One would have said they were listening….
Heath steeled himself. He mustn’t listen. He mustn’t let himself hear what they could hear. He wanted to live. He stalked the length of the bridge angrily, bawling harsh commands. Only the fog and the sea listened and echoed. The Macedonia groaned mournfully and listed to port; water, thick and brine-tangled, flooded her hold. No one moved. She was going fast. He had to do something, make them hear him, bring them back to life….
Inky wetness washed against him, whirling him blindly in a stinking bottomless pit. His lungs would burst… they must…. Air! And, then, he was on the surface. In the near-distance of the fog, the gray mass of his ship loomed balefully. It foundered and up-ended; there were no cries of terror or pain… only cold, death-spawned silence. The Macedonia went down. There was nothing but a dull phosphorescence on the surface, and the frozen, black expanse of sea and fog.
Heath was never quite certain about the island. It seemed probable that the Macedonia had run aground on the pinpoint of land that rose like a monstrous medusa from the mauve-green depths of the sea, yet Heath had never been aware of the existence of such an island; it was marked on none of the charts drawn by human hands. At a moment’s notice, it had seemed to rear itself into the cotton-wool fog off the port bow of the ship. The water lapping at its fungus-clotted shores gurgled insanely as it swallowed the last of the Macedonia.
Oil-stained brine tangled Lazarus Heath’s limbs; swimming was next to impossible. He never knew how long he was lost in the whirling eddies that licked about the island. It seemed an eternity. In the limitless, time-killing darkness of the fog, he struggled hopelessly, until finally, his feet touched bottom. He slithered ashore, lashed on by the incoming tide. Salt burned his lips and eyes; he was between choking and crying. In the lee of a gigantic finger of rock, he toppled to his knees, and sank forward, facedown, into a thoughtless stupor….