Tuesday Terror! The Sea-Fit by Algernon Blackwood

To his death singing…

Although the British Library call their series of vintage horror stories Tales of the Weird, the stories often don’t strictly fall into the nebulous definition of “weird fiction”. (Xavier Aldana Reyes defines weird fiction as ‘a subgenre of speculative fiction concerned with the limits of human experience and the unknowability of the natural world that brings together elements of the horror, science fiction and fantasy literary traditions’.) This week’s definitely does, however! I haven’t read much Algernon Blackwood yet, but he’s already left lingering horrors imprinted on my mind from his wonderful weird story The Willows. This one is less well known, but in my opinion just as unsettling. I’ve taken it from the BL’s anthology, Our Haunted Shores…

The Sea-Fit
by Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood

The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose.

Three friends have gathered in a little bungalow nestling in the sand dunes.

Foregathered for Easter, they spent the day fishing and sailing, and at night told yarns of the days when life was younger.

The owner of the bungalow is Captain Erricson…

‘Big Erricson’, Norwegian by extraction, student by adoption, wanderer by blood, a Viking reincarnated if ever there was one, belonged to that type of primitive man in whom burns an inborn love and passion for the sea that amounts to positive worship—devouring tide, a lust and fever in the soul.

His friends are half-brothers, Major Reese and Doctor Reese, so both men of learning and experience, surely not subject to superstitious fancies. The last occupant of the bungalow is ‘Sinbad’, Erricson’s servant…

‘Sinbad,’ sailor of big seas, and a man who had shared on many a ship all the lust of strange adventure that distinguished his great blonde-haired owner—an ideal servant and dog-faithful, divining his master’s moods almost before they were born.

Yes, well, it was the times! However nauseating that description, Sinbad is more than faithful – he knows that his master holds some strange views and is affected sometimes by the moon and the tides, and he tries to protect him when the sea-fit comes on him. As it does this night…

Erricson had one of his queer sea-fits on—the Doctor was responsible for the term—and was in the thick of it, plunging like a straining boat at anchor, talking in a way that made them both feel vaguely uncomfortable and distressed.

The tumbledown bungalow and the sound of the tide don’t help…

The loneliness of the sandspit and that melancholy singing of the sea before their very door may have had something to do with it, seeing that both were landsmen; for Imagination is ever Lord of the Lonely Places, and adventurous men remain children to the last.

And nor does Sinbad’s muttered warning to the doctor…

Sinbad had tugged his sleeve on entering and whispered in his ear significantly: ‘Full moon, sir, please, and he’s better without too much! These high spring tides get him all caught off his feet sometimes—clean sea-crazy’; and the man had contrived to let the doctor see the hilt of a small pistol he carried in his hip-pocket.

As the room grows cold and a strange sea-mist creeps over the bungalow, Erricson talks ever more wildly of the old sea gods, and his belief that they still exist for those who are willing to believe…

‘And I like the old idea,’ he had been saying, speaking of these departed pagan deities, ‘that sacrifice and ritual feed their great beings, and that death is only the final sacrifice by which the worshipper becomes absorbed into them. The devout worshipper’—and there was a singular drive and power behind the words—‘should go to his death singing, as to a wedding—the wedding of his soul with the particular deity he has loved and served all his life.’

And the sea-mist creeps through the cracks in the window-frames and the cold pours through the badly-fitting doors and the tide continues to sing as it brings the sea ever closer and Erricson plunges deeper with each passing moment into the sea-fit…

The man’s inner soul was on fire now. He was talking at a fearful pace, his eyes alight, his voice turned somehow into a kind of sing-song that chimed well, singularly well, with the booming of waves outside, and from time to time he turned to the window to stare at the sea and the moon-blanched sands. And then a look of triumph would come into his face—that giant face framed by slow-moving wreaths of pipe smoke.

Illustration by mgkellermeyer
via deviantart.com

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Well! I shall be considerably less enthusiastic about going paddling in the sea after this one, I can tell you! It’s fabulously written, and although it’s clear where it’s heading somehow Blackwood still manages to build an atmosphere of real tension, and the climax is worthy of the story. There’s something about the way he describes nature that makes it utterly terrifying – there’s no romantic beauty in it, all is power and malevolence, all is ruled by beings too great for our puny minds to comprehend and so ancient we foolishly believe they must no longer exist…

‘And I like, too, the way they manage to keep their names before us . . . There’s old Hu, the Druid god of justice, still alive in “Hue and Cry”; there’s Typhon hammering his way against us in the typhoon; there’s the mighty Hurakar, serpent god of the winds, you know, shouting to us in hurricane and ouragan…’

If you’d like to find out what happens, here’s a link.

(The porpy was so scared by this one
he’s refusing to come out of hiding…)

Fretful Porpentine rating:   😮 😮 😮 😮 😮

Overall story rating:            😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Amazon UK Link