Beware, the Usurpers!
Date: 2021-05-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; England -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Vision -- Fiction

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Title: Beware, the Usurpers!

Author: Robert W. Krepps

Release date: May 24, 2021 [eBook #65437]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEWARE, THE USURPERS! ***

BEWARE, THE USURPERS!

by GEOFF ST. REYNARD

Have you ever seen monsters stalking the
streets? Only if you're drunk, you say?—Don't
laugh—your best friend could be one of them!...

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
November 1951
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I stopped the black Jaguar beside the crumbling stone balustrade and swung my legs out. The drive was deep in rotted leaves and long-uncleared trash. Above me the ancient castle looked out across the groves of oak and elm and chestnut to the silent moors, like the veritable ghost of Old England itself: aloof, brooding, noble, withdrawn from this hectic modern age into its memories. Blind blank holes of windows stared over my head as I walked up the drive where in a more regal century the carriages of dukes and knights and princes of the blood must have rolled, the big horses of neighboring squires must have pawed impatiently before many a hunt, and lovers in satin and velvet and cascading lace must have strolled and dallied a thousand thousand times.

As I was hauling open the heavy iron-banded door, my foot trod upon something that squashed unpleasantly. I bent down, and in the sick yellow moonlight saw a newly-dead rook, its eyes already pecked out. I shivered, uncontrollably. Then I went in and pulled the door shut.

My electric torch stabbing the darkness before me, I crossed the empty hall and mounted the broad curving stairs. At the top I turned and glanced downward; the great hall was patterned with moonlight, and although there was no furniture of any sort, the whole vast place seemed to crawl and pulse with shapes of menace, of dead-yet-living evil. I shook myself angrily. My nerves were rotten, my mind was bursting with fear. That was the whole trouble—fear, fear and nerves. The only thing to do was act quickly.

I strode down the dank passageway, opened the third door on the left, went into the room and shut the door behind me.

Here the old stone walls were ashine with lights, the air was less musty and far less creepy. Six people were here, standing about or sitting on straight-backed chairs. They all turned to look at me. Nobody spoke. I nodded to each in turn.

There was an old army officer, leathered and permanently tanned by decades of the dreadful Indian sun; he wore a short grizzled mustache and a stern, rather stuffy expression. There was a man of about fifty who could not have been anything but a physician, so scrubbed and competent he seemed. There was a youngish fellow with only one arm, and another whose dark glasses sheltered sightless scar-pitted hollows. There was an antique of a man, poker-thin and poker-straight and poker-hard, with a pale face and keen, faded blue eyes. And there was a girl, who had sometimes been described as a summer sky, as a star, and as other things just as lovely and unbelievable.

"What ho," I said, with empty cheerfulness. "Sorry to be late. Let's get at it."

"Will," said the doctor abruptly, "I forbid it. It's madness, it's criminal lunacy."

"Sorry you feel that way, John. We've gone too far to stop here—and we've been all through this a hundred times." I went to the table and sat down briskly in the vacant chair beside it. Truth to tell, every muscle in my body was rebelling, was shrieking to me that John Baringer was right; only my mind still insisted that he was wrong, and I knew that if I dallied for an instant my body would conquer my brain....

I fitted my head snugly against the curious apparatus we had attached to the back of the chair. It was constructed along the lines of an old-fashioned photographer's head clamp. To the table were nailed a number of steel braces, which held a Tower musket, an obsolete firearm primed with black powder and aimed rigidly so that the load would pass within a hair's breadth of my eyes as I sat with my head pressed against the clamp. The musket was already cocked. "Let 'er go," I said, and felt glad that my voice had not cracked into falsetto.

"No!" said John Baringer. "No!"

None of them moved.

"Have I got to do it myself?" I asked, rather angrily.

The retired officer pushed the doctor aside, took two steps forward and laid his hand on the musket. "Ready?" he asked.

"I am."

"Hold hard," he said, and pulled the trigger.

The world seemed to lift up into the air all at once, its foundations tearing apart with a noise like all hell bursting in half; then it slowly toppled down again, and everything was blackness and hot, searing death.

The last thing I remember was the scream of the beautiful girl, she who was as lovely as a summer sky.

CHAPTER II

I lay in the warm bed and for a long time I tried to think of something that I knew I should recall, and at last, after hours of waking and dozing and waking again, I had it; it was the fact that I was not dead. When I knew this for certain I was extremely surprised, in the weak fashion of the very ill. I slept once more, and when I woke again I was stronger and more in command of my mind. I was still a little astonished that I was alive. Then I began to wonder whether I was blind. The knowledge that I would not know about this for some days was intolerable. I yelled angrily, and a cool hand was laid across my lips.

"Gently, Will, gently," said the loveliest voice in England.

Then I knew that I could bear the uncertainty till doomsday, if I must.

"Hello, Marion," I said, brushing the hand with my dry lips. "What time is it?"

"Middle of the afternoon, Will. You've been asleep a long while. It's Tuesday."

"Tuesday. Good Lord, nearly forty-eight hours!"

"Do your eyes hurt?"

"Not much."

"Thank John for that."

"Where is he?"

"Here," said the physician's voice. "We're all here but the Colonel."

"He's in London," said Marion Black, "buying supplies."

"Is Johnson here?"

"Yes, sir," said the respectful voice of the pale-faced old man. "Very much at sea, if you'll allow me, Mister Chester."

"They haven't told you, Johnson?" I asked incredulously. "You must think us all mad!"

"No, sir," said he promptly, "I give you my word I don't, sir. Had it been one or two of you, why then I might fancy you'd gone off your respective rockers, as you might say, sir; but six of you—that's different."

"What do you think, then, Johnson?"

"I think there's something big going on, sir," said the old man. "Something fearfully big. With poor young Mister Exeter blind, and you a-lying here like this—what is it, sir? They told me you were the proper one to explain."

"Johnson," I said, grinning, "that's the first time I ever heard your voice express anything but well-bred deference."

Johnson coughed and, I imagine, looked at the floor with embarrassment. "Very strange circumstances, sir," he said.

"I shan't keep you in suspense, Johnson, although these callous people have. Are you prepared to hear a nightmare of a yarn?"

"Are you prepared to tell it?" growled John Baringer.

"Oh, yes. I seem to have had a good bit of rest lately." I drank from a glass that Marion put to my mouth, and said, "You remember Jerry Wolfe?"

"Of course, sir."

"You were there the day he came back to the Gloucester Club and was murdered, weren't you?" I knew he had been, but I was feeling my way into the story.

"Yes, sir. I brought him and Mister Talbot here a bottle of Scotch. I saw him killed."

"He told Alec—" Alec Talbot was the chap with one arm; he'd left the other in Europe somewhere, during the latter days of the war—"he told Alec a tale that day, Johnson. It's a wild, incredible, super-fantastic tale. No sane man would believe a word of it."

"No, sir."

"But we six believe it, Johnson."

"Yes, sir. I gather it has something to do with this—"

"This madness of ours. It does. You see, Jerry Wolfe was nearly blinded in India when a Tower musket was discharged athwart his eyes. The bandages were removed as he was coming home, and he found he could see ... could see rather more than most of us can."

"Yes, sir," said the dignified voice. "May I ask what he could see, sir?"

"He could see into Hell," said Alec Talbot quietly.

"He could see that certain people are not—people," I went on. "Let me try to explain that. He discovered that there are among us many aliens of another race, perhaps from another dimension, or from another planet, or—who knows? He thought they were out of a different dimension, because he could see silvery lines behind them which he believed to be that dimension's scenery, as it were. Each of these aliens, these usurpers, as he called them, had stolen a human body, and was using it as a focal point of entrance into our world. Do you follow me?"

"With some difficulty, sir."

"Drop the 'sir', Johnson. We're all plain human beings together in this."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, he could see these alien creatures, but within them, or behind them, he could also see the human bodies they were occupying; the bodies which to everyone else appeared to be quite normal men and women. The bodies apparently didn't contain a human soul or mind or whatever you want to call it, but were only puppets for the interlopers. He sat in Charing Cross Station and made notes on them, at one stage of his adventures, and he decided that they were entering this world by usurping the bodies of newly-born children, children of unions between two of them or between one of them and a regular human. See?"

"Vaguely, sir."

"He figured out that after a few of them got into our dimension, through some fluke or other, they found that they could spawn puppet-humans who would become vehicles for others of their breed. They come 'in' by route of birth. Perhaps, Jerry thought, a freak accident generations ago let just one of them into our world, and he put his foot in the door. Now there are multitudes of them here. What was the ratio Jerry calculated, Alec?"

"About seven to six in our favor," said Alec Talbot. "Of course, that was figured within an hour or so at Charing Cross Station. He didn't have a chance to make a real survey. They got him first."

"Yes, they got him. He was so shocked by his discovery that he didn't cover up fast enough, and they found out he could see them. They harried him all over half of England, and finally they tracked him down at the club and shot his guts out."

"He died in my arms," said Alec without expression.

"But Mister Wolfe was shot by men from Scotland Yard and bobbies, sir," protested Johnson.

"That's what they seemed to be, Johnson, to you. Jerry could see them truly. He knew they were the usurpers, using the husks of human beings as points of contact between our dimension and theirs."

Johnson coughed politely. "And this is the story he told Mister Talbot?"

"It is."

"And you all believe it?"

"We do. Partly because it tallies up with a lot of queer things, partly because it explains a lot of others. But mainly because we all knew Jerry Wolfe, and he was as sane and decent a fellow as ever breathed tobacco smoke."

"Yes, sir."

"He couldn't see all of their dimension, you understand. It was only where one of them had taken over a human body that the veil was thin enough to be pierced by his blast-warped sight. There was a sort of field of force or something around them, and he could see the beasts and their nearby background of silver lines that ran at an angle of about forty-five degrees. That was all. He killed the human parts of three or four of them, and although he couldn't touch the other-dimensional folk with his bullets, when their human puppets died they were relegated to their own world again. They faded out and vanished, he said. Their point of contact was obliterated."

"I see, sir. I begin to get the picture. These foreigners—" I could not help smiling at the word—"have been infiltrating our island by some means, using our bodies, you might say, as disguises. A dirty bit of business, sir, if I may say so."

"Very dirty, Johnson. Because if nothing is done to stop them, eventually they'll have our whole world to themselves."

Johnson evidently thought this over for a moment. I could hear everyone breathing heavily in the silence. Then, "What do they want with it, sir?" he asked.

"Lord knows. Jerry never asked 'em."

"Ah. It gives one pause, sir."

"It damned well does. It's given us so much pause—the six of us—that we've decided to devote our lives to fighting the usurpers. That's why we're doing this huggermugger business, Johnson. We're duplicating Jerry Wolfe's experience, trying to get our eyesight warped or marred or shifted, or whatever the phrase ought to be, as his was. So we can see 'em, and combat 'em, and send 'em home to their silver-lined wastelands."

"And that's what happened—"

"To Geoff Exeter. Yes. We did the same thing with him that you saw two nights ago with me in the chair. Unfortunately—there's a feeble word!—we bungled somehow. And Geoff is blind."

"You get used to it," said Geoff Exeter cheerfully. "It's in a good cause. Better cause than we fought the Nazis for if Jerry Wolfe was right."

"We're banking that he was. We're betting our eyes or our lives, Johnson, that he was right."

"If you'll forgive me, sir, it seems a terribly long chance to take. He might have been addled in the head, or drunk; or if he was right, you may all lose your eyes and never acquire his strange vision."

"We're relying on old Jerry," said Alec Talbot. "You see, at least three of us were at loose ends, with nothing to make of our lives, and our hearts full of bitterness and frustration. It's given us an aim in life. It's given us life itself, by heaven! We drew lots, Geoff and Will and I; Geoff got first try, Will the second, and I lost. I'm to be the third one. Before he was murdered, Jerry told me who was all right and who wasn't. He'd seen a few chaps he knew—Will and Geoff and the doctor here, Marion and Colonel Bedford. He bequeathed me their names. I rounded them up and beat them with Jerry's yarn until they began to feel a horrid truth in it. Then just a few days ago I remembered that you'd been our waiter at the Club that night, and he'd sat easy and safe in your presence; so we knew you were human too."

"I'm sure I'm very gratified, sir. But what can I do?"

"We don't know. We don't know what any of us can do. But we were only six. Johnson—six against half a world. We grasped at you like a drowning man at a—"

"Straw," said Marion. "Really, Alec, your similes stun me!"

"I was going to say 'bottle of whisky'," growled Alec.

"Do you get the whole picture now, Johnson?" I asked.

"I think so, sir. Just one thing...."

"What's that?"

"Well, sir, what do these aliens look like? I mean, if you can see them?"

"Like obscene nightmares," I said. "Like demons down under the sea. Like anything and everything you can conjure up that's evil and strange and full of hellishness."

"Oh. Quite so, sir," said Johnson woodenly.

"Jerry talked of toads, of sharks and dragons, weird tree-shapes and amoebae, but he made it clear that those were only far-fetched similes." Alec's voice was low; he was remembering his friend, haggard and gray in the face, a ghastly ghost of the man he had once been. I broke in.

"Yes, Johnson, they're a fearful horde. If Jerry was right, they're overrunning us in a manner far more subtle and deadly than any invader ever did before. Which is why we must take these desperate measures. Are you with us?"

"Of course, sir," said the old waiter.

"Why?" asked the skeptical Doctor Baringer. "Why so quick to leap at this fantastic story, Johnson? I've got into the affair over my head, but I'm still not sure I believe in it."

"Well, sir, you might say I'm in just about the same position as Mister Exeter and Mister Talbot and Mister Chester. I'm an old soldier, much too old to be of any use in a regular war any longer; and I still fret for the days of bivouac and battle. If you'll pardon the liberty, sir, I must agree with you that it's a rum go, a very rum go. But if it's true, then I may be of some slight use in the world after all."

"You were a soldier, Johnson?" I asked.

"Sergeant, Boer War, sir. I fought at the siege of Ladysmith and a dozen other engagements."

"I thought the Boer War was a million years ago," said Marion Black.

"Very nearly, miss," said Johnson with a dry chuckle.

"Welcome to the ranks, Sergeant Johnson," said Alec Talbot.

I started to say something, but suddenly was very weary, so instead I went to sleep.

CHAPTER III

Ten days later they took off the bandages. The doctor had changed them and examined my eyes a number of times, but always in what was to me total darkness; I believe he used some sort of queer light, infra-red or black or what-have-you. I'm not up on these medical and scientific gadgets.

The last layer of gauze came off. Nothing happened. The world to me was all a pinkish-red blurring.

"I can't see," I said. "John! I can't see!"

"Neither can I when my eyes are closed," said Marion, with a nervous choked laugh.

So I opened my eyes.

I saw a tall straight old man, a one-armed chap, a young fellow in dark glasses, a rather stuffy-looking retired colonel, a middle-aged physician with a worried face, and a girl as radiant as a spring morning.

"Greetings," I said unsteadily. "Greetings, little army. Don't look so scared."

Alec Talbot grinned and Marion gulped with relief, Colonel Bedford clapped me hard on the shoulder, muttering something that was probably "Stout fella!" Geoff Exeter said, "You can see, Will? Your eyes are all right?"

"I think so. Yes, there isn't anything but a little fuzziness around the edges."

"That may be the result of the long spell of darkness," said John Baringer, fussing about professionally.

"Well, let's get out and test the old orbs," said I, throwing off the covers. John pushed me back into the pillow.

"Not for a day or two. You've got to regain your strength. Been in bed a long time."

I raged, but it did no good. It was three mornings later when at last I was allowed to leave the old castle—it belonged to Geoff Exeter's family, by the way, Geoff's father being old Lord Joseph Exeter—and go into town, with Colonel Bedford at the wheel of my Jaguar.

We averaged a wild and impetuous thirty-two miles per hour all the way there. The Colonel was a driver of the old, the very old, school, and obviously wished that the sleek little sports car were a two-wheeled tonga. As for me, I fidgeted and mumbled and longed to get behind the wheel myself; I had once clocked the two-seater at a hundred and fourteen m.p.h., and when she was forced to creep along like this, both she and I were unhappy. However, my job was to observe, and so I contained my impatience perforce.

We circled the village and came in from the opposite end. No one knew we were staying at the long-deserted Exeter Castle, and we meant to keep it that way. It was a priceless hideaway, an excellent G.H.Q. for our planned insurgence.

The village of Exeter Parva contained some three hundred souls, if one included eighteen large placid-faced farm horses and ninety-seven dogs more or less. It was market day. The countryside had boiled into town for a hectic time. You might have scraped more citizens out of the pubs of one short London lane, and heard more noise in Westminster Abbey; but for Exeter Parva it was a gala morning.

We drove down the main street—I believe it was the only street, but this may be prejudice on my part—and stopped to let a couple of deeply suspicious cows pass by on either side. "Well?" asked the Colonel.

I had nearly forgotten the purpose of the jaunt. I narrowed my eyes and stared keenly about me. I saw farmers in dull blue and faded gray, women in carefully mended finery, children in everything from Sunday bests to Saturday rags. I saw what one might see in any small village on market day. I saw no monsters whatever. I sighed and gave a weak grin. "Just people," I told him. "Just Englishmen."

He attempted to gnaw his short mustache. "Which means either that they don't foregather in small towns, or that they existed only in Captain Wolfe's brain," said he meditatively. "Which, mind you, young fella, I don't believe for a minute. If there was ever a sane 'un, Wolfe was he. Besides, he'd served in my old stations in India." He pronounced it "Injuh." He edged the Jaguar forward through what Exeter Parva doubtless considered its heavy traffic. "Or else the experiment didn't work. When you think about it, that's the logical explanation. Whatever happened to the Captain's eyes must have been almighty complicated. Don't understand a tenth of it myself, these dimensions and whatnot, but there it is. Frightfully complex changes must ha' been wrought."

I was too dispirited to answer that. "Let's have a drink," I said. "There's a tavern. At least we can have a mug of ale before we go back."

"Right." He parked the Jaguar expertly if rather slowly. We went into the tavern, which was called The Leathern Funnel.

"Well, gents, what'll it be?" inquired the barmaid affably.

"Two ales, miss, if you please," said the Colonel. It was lucky for me that he ordered. I could not have produced anything but a squeak or a howl. The mugs bumped down before us and I picked mine up with both hands and drank it off like a thirst-mad sot after a month of bread-and-water. Then I aimed myself carefully at the door and put on the greatest piece of acting of my career; I walked casually and without a single stumble all the way to the street. The Colonel came after me.

"What the deuce, Chester! You don't allow a chap much time to enjoy his bit of ale," he grumbled.

I got in at the off side of the Jaguar without speaking and put my hands on the wheel. "Ready?" I managed to ask.

"Here, I'm to drive."

"You are like hell. Get in." He did. "Hang on." I nudged the old girl out of the village and when we were hidden by the first hill I trod on her pedals with all my weight and terror behind my feet. We crashed off into a beautiful eighty m.p.h., which I held or surpassed all the way home. Three or four times he tried to bellow something at me. I ignored him.

When we had flown up the long winding drive I put her into the stables, part of which we had fitted up as a garage. Then I sat there in the gloom and shook with what felt like fever.

"Here, what is it, laddie?" he barked. "What's wrong?"

"Describe the barmaid," I said.

"What?"

"Describe the barmaid."

"Fortyish, plain, thickset, red hands, red face, couple of warts. Pleasant expression. Right?"

"Not exactly. You left out a few things."

"What on earth?"

"The green horns, six of 'em, growing out of her face in the middle where the nose should have been. The shifting outlines that looked now like a tree stump and now like an octopus. The pulsing heart of scarlet fire in the belly. The dusky-pink tentacles that pushed the mugs across the bar. The pure hatred that throbbed visibly and seemed to feel cold when it got near you. The eyes like bursting orchids full of slimy white worms."

He put his hand on my arm and tightened his grip until his knuckles grew pale. "Merciful God!" he said quietly. "Merciful God!"

CHAPTER IV

We went into the deserted hall of Exeter Castle. "Look, Colonel," I said, "will you tell them about this? They'll be upstairs. Tell 'em that it works, that I can see as Jerry Wolfe saw, and everything he told Alec was true. I'll be all right after a while, but now I want to be alone. I don't want to be hedged in by close walls, or have to talk. I'll just roam around down here for a bit. You tell 'em it's okay, that I'll speak to them later."

"Absolutely." The Colonel was the best stuff there is. "Come up when you feel like it, son." He was gone.

I strolled over to one of the great mullioned windows and touched its dusty glass lightly. That glass was older, probably, than all our little band put together. I thought: when it was placed here, were the usurping devils abroad in England? How long have they been filtering through into our world—a hundred years, a thousand? If you start with one and he lets in others, then figuring by the birth rate and the multiplying branches of his horrid clan, how long would it take to let in a million of them? How many figures of our glorious history were just that—figures, puppets, marionettes pulled by fourth-dimensional strings, flesh-and-bone shadows fronting for demons....

We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go....

Jerry had asserted that when the human body died, the alien was relegated to his own world again. Then it had to come back, I presumed, via another birth. It must be centuries, then, at the very least a couple of centuries, since the first one came through. It takes time to corrupt the blood of six-thirteenths of all England.

But was it six-thirteenths? Jerry had taken his census in Charing Cross Station. At Exeter Parva I had seen exactly one usurper. Were they then centered in London? Were there perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty thousand of them altogether? That brought down the odds!

I laughed loudly, and the age-old echoes waked in the oak rafters and laughed after me. Oh, the odds were in my favor, all right.

Opposing me, say (conservatively) twenty thousand foemen: great livid beasts like nothing a sane mind could conceive, that had a system of communication outside my dimension which could gather a score or a thousand of them to down me if I showed fight.

On my side, a regular Colonel Blimp of a retired officer, a Boer War veteran, a skeptical middle-aged physician, a blind man, another chap with no left arm, and a girl.

And I: Will Chester, thirty-three years old, five feet ten, moderately strong, normally intelligent; having all my teeth save two, a thick crop of black hair, brown eyes, a complexion more ruddy than otherwise, and a face that, if it would not halt a charging bull in his tracks, still would not win a beauty competition either.... Seven years of Army behind me, an income of eight hundred pounds a year from a legacy, and nothing much in view as a future, until this morning—when I had suddenly been elected the savior of mankind.

I walked across to the tremendous blackened fireplace, empty now of everything but a lonely-looking single bronze firedog. Above the keystone of the arch were the arms and motto of the Exeters, done in ancient stonework. I could not read the motto, having forgotten what Latin I once knew. The arms were a jumble of crossed lances, fleurs-de-lis, and hounds couchant. I wished I had a hound to fondle and pat, to be a companion in these moments when I felt I could not bear a human being near me.

For half an hour or so I stood there gazing blindly into the depths of the hearth and pitying myself shamelessly. Then a touch on my arm made me leap like a deer. It was Marion; Marion, carrying with her her own special radiance even in the shadowed hall.

"What cheer, old stager?" she said.

"Not much cheer, lady."

"Obviously. What is it, got the wind up? Scared sky-blue-pink?"

"Yes. I've just realized that this whole affair is fact, is true; that it's not a crazy adventure in fancy, but a dreadfully real matter of saving the sane world from destruction—and I'm scared!"

"We all are." She said it quietly, and with her simple words I knew for the first time that I was not alone in my terror of the unknown. We were all afraid. I put my arm around her shoulders. Her long light hair tingled on the back of my hand. I loved her very much, and so I tormented myself.

"I've been thinking of Jerry Wolfe, and of how alone he must have felt. He didn't have six pals behind him when the first alien fouled his view."

"Poor old Jerry," she said.

"You were engaged to him, weren't you?"

"Yes, back in prehistoric times, before Jennifer Tregennis caught him. Jennifer was one of them, you know."

"Yes, I know. D'you still love Jerry?"

"How do you mean? Of course I do."

I didn't say anything. She went on after a moment. "But I'm not in love with him, if that's what you're driving at. Good heavens, Will, do you see me as a moony widow-in-name-only? I've got more sense than that."

My heart lifted. I patted her on the back. "Come along young Marion. Let's go plan strategy with the troops."

We went up the stairs to our sitting room, and I stood before the six of them and took the reins into my hands. I had a job to do.

CHAPTER V

"It comes to this, then," said Alec. "You mean to go and mingle with the enemy, and try to discover weak spots in 'em, eh?"

"I don't see any other way to begin. We've been scratching for a plan ever since we first heard of the usurpers; and nobody's come up with one, for the good reason that we have nothing to go on. Oh, granted we know we can kill their worldly bodies and send them home. But I hardly think we're going to do nothing but roam the countryside killing off puppets for the next thirty years."

"Remember what Jerry told me—that once one of them was sent back to his own dimension, he could evidently still communicate with those who were left here? That the aliens who're attached to human bodies exist in both dimensions equally?"

"Yes, Alec, I was thinking of that a few minutes ago. It means that under no circumstances can I let any one of them discover I can see them; for even if I killed him here, he could go around his silver-lined dimension telling all his pals about me. It means working in the dark, from behind, anonymously. It means I've got to be circumspect as Satan. We all have to be circumspect."

"Beg pardon, sir," put in Johnson, "but when do the rest of us have a try at warping our eyeballs?"

"You don't, Sergeant," I said flatly.

"What d'you mean, we don't?" cried Alec. "Of course we do."

"No, son, not for a while, anyhow. It's a hundred to one, or a million, more likely, to one, that we couldn't duplicate the exact injuries again. We can't blind anyone else now. One of us seeing them may be enough—or if he isn't, then half a dozen might not be any better."

"I think Will's right," said Marion suddenly. She lit a cigarette while we waited. "I think we mustn't press our luck too far. At least we should wait until we have a plan. I think—I really think one will be enough."

"Why?"

"Those million to one odds. Why did the experiment succeed the second time? I think God's with us. I think God's on our side, and means us to win."

We were all very quiet for a while.

I went over to a wall mirror and examined my face. I took out my little tin of pancake makeup, Marion's clever idea, and spread some thinly on the scars of the blast: the little pink almost-healed scars that ran across the bridge of my nose and scattered out fanwise toward my ears. We were dealing with cleverness beyond thought, and every tiny giveaway must be taken care of.

"Jerry Wolfe died," I said, still peering in the mirror, "because he was taken unawares, because he hadn't prepared himself to stay incognito among them. I have. I've had my first sight of them, and been terribly shocked, yes; but now I think I'll be all right. I'm ready to go."

"Up to London?"

"Yes."

"We'll all go."

"In a bunch? I don't think."

"No, in pairs and trios. But there's no sense in any of us frettin' here without news from you." The Colonel was firm. "The motors are below. Ready, you chaps?"

"Packed and primed," said Geoff.

"Let's be off."

And almost before I knew it we were in the old stables, putting our gear in the back of Alec's great red Rolls.

"Who'll ride with me?" I asked.

"Not I," barked the Colonel promptly. "I've had some of your idea of driving."

"I'll go with you, Will," said Geoff Exeter. "Just put my fist on the car, will you?" I did so, and he climbed in. "I like speed," he said.

I had been hoping for Marion's company, but Geoff—well, he rated a front-row stall in the game. He'd lost his eyes for us. I said, "Geoff will stick with me for the first days. The rest of you put up at the Albany, where Colonel Bedford has a suite, and at that inn in Baker Street, The Gray Gander. Geoff and I will be at the Gloucester Club."

"I shall be there too, sir," said Johnson. "I've been on 'sick leave' quite long enough."

"Roger. Geoff, the Sergeant and I at the Gloucester. The Colonel and John at the Albany. Marion and Alec at The Gray Gander. Don't get in touch with me, unless you give birth to some really ripping idea. I'll find you when there's news."

I touched Marion's hand in farewell, and slid into the Jaguar. We backed out and shot away into the blue.

CHAPTER VI

We stood at the bar of a dingy little pub on the outskirts of the dingy little district of Seven Dials. Geoff, who was learning to orient himself by sounds, heard the clunk of his mug on the bar, and unerringly put his fingers around it. "Pretty good, eh?" he asked me, sipping the half-and-half.

"You'll be a wizard at it in a few months."

"I meant the ruddy ale, idiot. I'm not bragging about my accomplishments yet. Seen any of our chums lately?" he asked.

"Oh, dozens. Run into 'em everywhere." It was a kind of simple code; I was telling him that the pub was full of the aliens.

"Fine. Any of 'em give you any news? Anything startling been happening?"

"Not much. Same old stuff."

Same old stuff!

Same old fiends from Abaddon! Same old hosts of Hell! Same old ogres and ghouls, harpies and bugaboos, hobgoblins and hellhags!

The barman, when I squinted, was a big jovial red-nosed Cockney. The barman, when I opened my eyes normally, was a writhing monster, a shapeless blob of intangible protoplasm in whose depths moved turgid lights of orange and mauve; from whose devilish form the waves of malevolence came and went like the roiled swell made by the sluggish moving of some hideous primeval entity beneath the surface of a grisly tarn....

I grinned at him. "Cool weather for June, mate," said I affably.

"Ar, yus," he agreed.

I was pleased with myself. Like a spy plunked down in a strange land, I had been feeling my way to confidence these last days, growing used to the shapes about me, learning to show an expression of bland normality when confronted with unnameable horrors. I believed I was perfectly ready now to begin our war.

The only trouble was that I hadn't the faintest idea of how to begin it!

One could move among these usurpers for a lifetime, I thought, and learn nothing about them except that they were more hideous than leprous two-headed baboons, more incomprehensible than might be the dwellers of Mars. I watched them talking among themselves where they sat at the little oak tables. While their earthly husks chatted of prosaic things, the forms around the husks spoke—inaudibly to me—with twisting tentacles, gesturing pseudopods, flowers of rotten-looking "flesh" that grew upon their bodies and swelled and burst and subsided to nothingness again. I knew they were speaking of terrible things....

"Let's go," I said to Geoff. "Time we were thinking of bed."

"Righto."

I gave the barman good-night in a pleasant voice, and we emerged from that ninth circle of Hell into the cool and lovely air. Seven Dials lay about us, all a-murmur with the homely human sounds of earth's evening. I could not stand it.

"Geoff," I whispered, "I'm going to start the ball rollin'. I'm going to find out something."

"How, old son?"

"I'm going to do a murder."

"Think it's wise?" he asked.

"I want to ascertain something. Just come along a bit."

We went up a dingy street and turned down a lane or two, until at last we were alone on a length of grubby pavement, shadowed by the rickety houses on either side. "Stand here," I said to Geoff Exeter. "It's black in this corner and you won't be noticed. I'll come for you in half a tick."

He saluted carelessly. What nerve he had! To stand alone, blind and helpless, ignorant of what I meant to do—I think Geoff was the bravest of all our little band.

I slunk up the street to a place some forty yards off, and hid myself in a time-battered doorway. The street lay empty and deserted in the early moonlight. I drew the great keen knife that lived on the side of my belt these days, and I waited.

A man came down the road, staggering drunkenly. He was a man. I let him pass.

Another came toward me. I heard his footsteps in the dark, echoing valley of brick, and shortly thereafter saw him pass beneath a fading street lamp.

Do you remember the passage in Doyle's Lost World, where the hero is pursued along a jungle trail by a prehistoric carnivore?

"This beast had a broad, squat, toad-like face ... the moonlight shone upon his huge projecting eyes, the row of enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms. With a scream of terror I turned and rushed wildly down the path."

Well, I did not turn and rush wildly down the street, but if I had not been hardened by much contact with the aliens, I think I must have done so. This was the worst I had seen: toad-like, yes, but squat and loathsome as no toad ever hoped to be; and indeed some of the projections of its form did look like claws and fangs. Yet no prehistoric reptile could ever have exuded the repulsive effluvium of evil which radiated from this hideous usurper.

As it passed me I felt my stomach draw in as if from a sharp blow, and it is a wonder to me to this day that I did not scream or become violently ill. The gods were with me, however, and I kept strict silence.

When it had gone on a dozen paces, I slipped out and followed it noiselessly. Moving as I had moved on many a commando raid in the old days, I eased up behind it. It did not turn—neither of its bodies turned. Narrowing my eyes, I lifted the great knife and struck, with all the hatred in my soul concentrated in the blow. The blade sank into the pseudo-human neck, severing the spinal cord instantly, and before my horrified eyes the great toad-creature swelled, turned vivid crimson, and went out like the flame of a trodden candle.

It had left our dimension in the very instant that its human husk had died.

Sheathing the knife under my coat, I flew down to where Geoff stood patiently waiting. I took his arm.

"Come on, boy, let's make tracks."

"Home?"

"No, to another pub." We hurried down an alley, turned up a street and down another, until I had put a maze of lanes behind us. Then we slowed abruptly and ambled into a smoky little room full of liquor fumes.

"Two beers, old toff," I said to the fright behind the bar.

We guzzled them slowly, while I watched the aliens around the tables and at the bar. Shortly there was a flurry of excitement among them, the tentacles writhing quickly and the ghastly brutes enlarging and deflating as though pumped by a bellows. All the time the human portions drank and chatted and played darts. But the usurpers were excited over something. Shortly half a dozen of them moved toward the door, the people in no evident hurry, but their marionette-masters wriggling like mad, as though eaten with impatience.

I knew they were going to discuss something important. I had what I had come for.

"Bedtime," I said to Geoff Exeter. We went out of the pub and caught a tram for the vicinity of the Gloucester Club.

CHAPTER VII

Safe in our rooms, with Johnson sitting, very unlike a waiter, behind a bottle of brandy and a tray of sandwiches, and Geoff lying on the Chesterfield smoking a pipe he could not taste, I told them what I had done.

"It's taught me a couple of things I didn't know, and affirmed some others I wasn't sure of. First, I'm certain the faculties of these brutes are the same in this dimension as their 'human parts'. That toad didn't hear me coming, I know. He didn't have time to turn and get a look at me before he went pop and left us. He was bound to the body till I released him, I think, and if he'd left it he couldn't have got back into it, or rather around it. His ears weren't keener than a man's, or he'd have turned to see me when I crept up behind him.

"But their communication system is terrific. That's where they have it all over us. When he was shut out of our world, the toad must have gone around their region telling his pals about it; and before long the ones who were in that pub heard of it, too. Now they weren't told by a newcomer, for I watched the door; so they were told on their side of the veil, by an alien who wasn't occupying a human frame. Got it thus far?"

"I admit to a little uncertainty here and there, sir."

"Well, put it like this. There's a long tall screen set up across a stage. On one side of the screen—our side—are a lot of human beings. This side is our world as we know it. On the other side, the fourth dimension or whatever it may be, are a lot of these horrid-lookin' beasts of usurpers.

"Now here and there in the screen are holes, and through them some of the aliens are holding fake human beings, just as in our well-worn simile of the puppet show. I can see those who are leaning through the holes, but you can't.

"When they're leaning through, they haven't any powers except those of normal people. They can't hear any better than a man. They can't walk through bricks or see through stones. They can't look behind them without turning the human puppet around. I've been watching them and I feel pretty certain of that. In some curious way they're limited by their puppets' limitations here. That makes it easier to assassinate 'em, by the way—I just have to make sure that the human form doesn't get a chance to turn its head and spot me before it dies."

I drank a little brandy and went on intently. "The only way they really have me beat six ways from the jack is in their system of tidings, of spreading 'em, I mean. That's a marvel. For as soon as I shoot or stab or throttle a puppet, the beast that's been twiddlin' his strings leaves him and goes along behind that hypothetical screen between the worlds, telling all his playmates about it; and if he's had a chance to see me, and can describe me, then about a thousand of the others will be watching through their holes in the screen for a blighter of my specifications, and my name is Lord Jonathan Mud."

"I see," nodded Johnson.

"So my problem is to remain utterly anonymous. And I needn't tell you that if I try to embark on a career of murder-by-night, I won't last very long."

"No, you won't." Geoff was grave. "What else is there to do, though?"

"I don't know. And I think I could watch them for a lifetime and not learn another thing about 'em. I'm a tremendously handicapped spy because I can't disguise myself as one of them, and I can't understand what they say to each other. It's like a man going into a colony of bears and trying to pass himself off as a bear, except that I can't even begin to look like a usurper, while I could put on a grizzly skin."

"What are we to do, sir?" asked Johnson. His pale face was deadly serious. "We must do something, sir—but only you can decide what it's to be."

Two weeks before, I might have groaned aloud at such a responsibility. Now I took it in stride. Anyone who had been observing the demons of Hell at their work for fourteen days and nights had either to take things as they came along or to go stark staring loony.

"I'll tell you what we'll do first. I'll take Geoff over to the Albany. Then I'll strike out alone for a bit. Maybe for a week, maybe a month. Travel light, fast, and inquisitive. Give myself a chance to cook up plots. And if nothing's come of it by then, why, I suppose we'll just have to set up an assassination bureau and hope I live a hundred years...."

CHAPTER VIII

And so for a time I dwelt alone among the beast-folk.

Packing a few shirts and such in a Gladstone bag, I left London in the black Jaguar, ostensibly on a casual motoring jaunt. I headed up through the East Anglian Heights, stopping the first night in the lovely town of Bury St. Edmunds. Strolling through the streets next morning, I was astonished and heartened beyond measure to find not a single usurper abroad. I went into a pub—I had begun to think that the aliens were concentrated in pubs, so many horrendous bartenders had I seen—and bought a pint from a perfectly normal girl. Lingering about the town, I passed the time of day with gardeners and workmen and loafers, and was tempted to throw up the game and stay here in this oasis of normality forever; but after lunch forced myself to get into the Jaguar and roar off into the Lincoln Heights, where I spent a jolly evening in Old Bolingbroke talking politics with a spidery yellow creature who amused himself by flicking my face now and again with his hairy-looking, tenuous, unfelt members. When at last I went to bed I felt that I had served my apprenticeship and was a full-fledged spy who could thenceforth bear anything the enemy could show or do....

I worked westward and put up for a week at Manchester, in which great inland port I found an awful concentration of them. I left the two-seater at a garage and walked the streets from dawn till midnight, observing, thinking furiously, trying to construct impossible plans of attack.

The third night, making sure that my knife was safely sheathed under my coat, I went into the slums to do murder.

Deliberately I chose my victim: a strapping brute of a navvy whose mortal form was surrounded by a cloudy gray beast of indescribable grossness. I shadowed him from tavern to tavern, finally catching him alone in a narrow gut of an alley where the light fell dismally on scummed pools of stagnant water and heaps of filth. I crept up behind him and circling his neck with my left arm I held him motionless for dragging seconds, my knee in the small of his back. He struggled madly, but could not turn his head; and although the gray fiend puffed up and hurled out its streamers of ugly mist-like stuff, I knew it was helpless to see me without twisting the human neck around. That was what I had wanted to know for certain, what I had staked the continuance of my crusade on. I tipped up the navvy's chin and sliced across his throat with the clean steel. He died, gurgling, and the monster dwindled away into gray ribbons and vanished.

Now I felt I had verified my earlier theory of the limitation of their senses on this plane. Not only did the outsider have to rely for hearing on the ears of his manikin, for tactile sensations on the nerves of the were-human, for strength on its muscles and (for all I knew) for taste and scent on the poor dumb thing's tongue and nose—but most important of all, I believed that the beast must see into this world through the puppet's eyes, and through them alone! The recent gray devil had been able to twist and turn itself to some degree independently of its fleshly body; what I took to be its eyes, a cluster of violet-tinted globules high in its upper torso, had flashed all round as it moved, even seeming to flit over me once or twice; yet it obviously could not detect me with them, or surely it would have concentrated their baleful focus on my face.

No, I was certain that I could only be seen by the eyes in the heads of the puppets. I may as well say now that I never had cause to change this conception of mine, and still strongly believe it to be true.

This may be as good a place as any to make it plain that my descriptions of the beast-folk are of necessity limited and analogical; but that the beings themselves had no analogy in anything existing on this prosaic three-dimensional globe. This is true in part because of their utterly undefinable proportions and lineations, which had to be seen to be fathomed, and in part because the creatures did, after all, exist in at least one more dimension than our acknowledged three, so that, despite my own mutant vision, I saw them in a state of flux, continuously moving, warping, and seeming to bend at impossible angles and to flow off just beyond the range of my sight into a sphere which was to me forever invisible.

It must be understood, too, that when I identify portions of them as beaks, mouths, orifices, eyes on stalks, and other natural parts of animal life, I am only grasping at the nearest comparison. For all I know, their senses may reside in quite different organs than eyes, mouths, noses and so on. For all I know, indeed, they may have no actual five senses in our meaning of the term. They seemed to communicate, it's true, by a kind of writhing and wriggling motion, which may have been accompanied by sounds which I could not hear; but this may have been akin to a nervous reaction, while their actual talk might well have been telepathic.

During the next two nights I gave rein to my intense abhorrence of these invaders from another world, and stalked through the city slaying indiscriminately in a passion of hatred. This makes me sound as bloodthirsty as a weasel. Well, I was. A tiny human David opposing a hideous throng of Goliaths, I gave no quarter even as they had given none to my friend Jerry Wolfe.

Of course the police, the newspapers, the citizens of Manchester were shaken by the wave of inexplicable violence. Headlines shrieked that a new Ripper was abroad. And at that I began to wonder: what if an accident had happened to somebody's eyes back in the 1880s, and he, seeing the aliens all about him, had begun on a wild career of assassination like my own? What if he had prowled the slums as I was doing, killing and mutilating in a frenzy of detestation? Was that the true explanation of the never-identified Jack The Ripper? Was he, perhaps, a much-maligned champion of mankind? It was at least a fascinating possibility!

For those few score of hours I felt no remorse, no distaste for my butcher's job, no sorrow except a fleeting one for the human relatives and friends of these poor brainless husks I was destroying. And their grief, I was persuaded, was as nothing in the balance against the good I was actually doing them by ridding our plane of the invading beast-folk.

Then reaction set in, and I lay in my hotel room and shook as though I had blackwater.

I couldn't keep this up, week after week, month after month, for years—even if I were not discovered, either by our police or by them, I knew I could not go on. Give me what resounding titles you wish: savior of mankind, champion of humanity, valiant worker for the survival of the race—I was still only a kind of butcher. I knew I was glutted with killing. The papers put my total score at nineteen corpses. They were husks, puppets, yes: but even though what I killed had no life save that imparted by the guiding usurper, it still had the flesh and the blood of my own breed. When the alien was dispatched to his own place, what remained had the look and feel and smell of someone who might have been my brother. I had once quite callously shot a number of tigers in India: but when a tiger dies, he does not turn into the slashed corpse of a man. He remains a tiger. If only the usurpers had continued in their own true shapes after the slayings, I think I might have gone on killing them forever.

So again I moved harmlessly among my foemen, and watched them colloque together in their silent, loathsome fashion, and did nothing.

And a great melancholy took me; and I felt as helpless as a child surrounded by the dismal wraiths of all ghost-haunted England, as hopeless as a man alone in a jungle full of teeming ghouls.

I would have given a year of my life for one hour with Marion Black, but I would not write or telephone her to come to me. I didn't want them to be able to connect me with any of my band, in case they ever discovered my identity.

Then, on the last night I spent in Manchester, I got a little drunk (out of frustration and despondency, and my inarticulate, stupidly silent love for Marion) and I decided to put just one more of the enemy out of the fight, before I went on my way.

CHAPTER IX

It was a mean street, one of the meanest in the whole city. The moon was vivid, and straight overhead, so that my shadow lay in a black little pool around my feet. I sought a dark doorway and waited, knife in hand, my brain full of liquor and loathing.

A man, and a man, and then a beast....

I slid along in his tracks, glancing quickly behind me to make sure we were unobserved, and swiftly performed the now-familiar operation of driving the impalpable demon back to its own dimension by hacking the throat of the man-shape. Standing above the dead thing, I knew for a second or two the feeling that must have held Jack The Ripper as he stood over his victims: I wanted to stab and slash and mutilate, I wanted to let out some of the terrible hatred that boiled in my heart.

Civilization won, however, and I sheathed the knife after wiping it clean on the man's leather jacket.

At that moment one of them came round the corner and stood staring at me, not twenty feet off!

It was a gorgon of a brute, with several repulsive "heads" on lean stalks of necks; the biggest one looked rather like a hippopotamus whose mother had been frightened by a Ubangi, and I was so used to the weird beings by now that, had I seen this one on a daylit street, I think I would have chuckled. In that deserted lane, though, with the shell of its brother's puppet at my feet, I didn't chuckle. I turned and ran like hell.

A whistle split the air; I turned my head as I pelted away, and squinted my eyes. By all the gods! The hippo gorgon was a bobbie! A ruddy P.C.!

The garage where my Jaguar champed at her inactive gears was only a couple of blocks from the lane. I made for it, taking an extra turning or two in order to lose my pursuer. Coming to the big double doors, I slowed to a business-like stride, went in and demanded my car with a brisk tone, and bestowed a couple of notes on the attendant who brought her to me.

"Be coming back again?" he asked me cheerily.

"Oh, very likely," I lied, and because he was a blessedly human little man, I tipped him an extra pound, which made him goggle and stutter as he thanked me.

I shot the black car out into the street, turned left and lost myself in the maze of Manchester. The distant whistling of the searchers died out behind me.

Now, I thought, I was in the bloody soup. My description would be circulated in the other world, first of all. Well, I look like the common man, and that wouldn't help them much. Second, however, they'd be sure to discover that a fellow came into a garage in the vicinity and took his two-seater at the very time the bobbies were hunting the Manchester Slasher (as the papers called me) thereabouts. That's elementary police work. So up to there all I really had to fret over was the ordinary human bloodhound business.

I'd given the garage a false name, naturally, when I took the old girl in to leave her. A purely automatic precaution. Lucky I have a turn for the criminal life, said I to myself smugly. Nothing to identify her with me, Will Chester of London.

Then there was my gear in the hotel.

Whoa! I slapped the wheel with one palm. I'd given the hotel the same fake name—Robert Hood—but in my Gladstone were half a dozen items with my own label on them. I'd intended a quick baggageless dash out of the city, before they traced me to the garage and sent out a call for a black Jaguar; but to leave without that damning luggage would be to present my true identity to the police in a matter of a few days, or even less. I headed for the hotel. Minutes counted, but so did that accursed Gladstone bag.

Then I bethought myself of the garage again. Of course they knew where I had been staying! That meant that within two minutes of the police—they—arriving at the garage and discovering that I had come in and hared out, the hotel would be receiving a call about me.

I groaned aloud. The Jaguar, sensitive to my thought waves or perhaps to the unconscious pressure of my foot, pounced forward at a law-shattering speed. Minutes counted? Seconds!

The hotel was no fly-by-night, tuppenny-ha'penny wee place, for I had seen no reason on earth why I should not be comfortable while on my crusade; I put the Jaguar alongside the curb within a dozen paces of the entrance, walked nonchalantly in and demanded my key. The desk clerk was listening to the telephone. "One moment," he said, and then to me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece, "I think this is for you, sir."

My mind speeded up and raced like a mad thing. No one would be calling me, so it must be about me; therefore the police had already found the garage; and the clerk must only have heard them say my name (my false name) within the instant. I imagined that they had said, "Have you a Mister Robert Hood staying there?" or something of the sort. Now I had two choices: I could bolt at once, leave my luggage to be inspected, and subsequently have my face plastered on every newspaper in England as the Manchester Slasher; or I could brazen it out. Instinctively I chose the right course, the only course. I bluffed to the top of my bent.

"Give me my key first," I said. He did so. "Now just tell 'em I'm not in, and hang up. It's a bloke I don't care to talk to."

"Ah," said he, smirking, "I see." To the instrument he murmured, "I'm sorry, Mister Hood is out at present," and—my eternal gratitude to that sleek-haired, smug-faced desk clerk!—rang off without asking if there was any message. He had given me a good half minute of free time. I went to the lift and said, "Four please." If it had not been there I should have had to take the steps. Surely my luck was running that night!

I judged that, just about the time I struck the fourth floor, that phone at the desk would be sounding impatiently again. I opened my door, bolted it behind me, and began to throw things into my Gladstone.

My phone started to ring.

I emptied the drawers of the high-boy, the devilish jangle in my ears; leaped into the bathroom and brushed my shaving kit and toilet articles into a little leather bag I used for them. I would be certain I was leaving nothing behind on which there might be a monogram, an engraved name....

Fingerprints! Great merciful God!

I was packed. Everything I had brought with me was in the Gladstone.

The phone stopped ringing.

They would be on their way. A hotel detective or a couple of policemen, called in after that urgent message from the garage. Perhaps the usurpers—

I whipped out my handkerchief, wrapped it round my right hand, and started in to dust that room as no chambermaid had ever dusted it in all its memory. Each piece of wood which I might have touched in the past week received a quick vigorous swipe. Each glass and porcelain surface in the bathroom. Everything. The door knob. The glasses. Is that all? The window, which I'd raised a few times. Is that all? It that all?

I believed it was. I snatched up the Gladstone and with the cloth still around my hand I opened the door and slipped into the corridor.

Close the door, son. That'll halt them for a precious two seconds.

Down the corridor, around the first turn....

Safe, for the moment, safe!

And now what? Here was a flight of stairs. And in the distance I heard a lift door open.

Down the stairs I rushed, and was on the third floor.

Running for another flight, a different one, with a vague thought of confusing my trail, I stumbled and almost fell. Recovering, I fled down these, on down, down, down.

I was on the ground floor at last. The men's bar lay before me. The lobby was far away in the front of the building.

I straightened my tie, tried to appear like an eccentric who always carried a large brown bag with him, and paced into the bar.

As I put my hand—still swathed in the linen—to the outer door, the barman cried out, "'Ere, sir!" but I was gone. They would think I was an absconding guest. They would pursue me. But I shouldn't run, didn't dare run, along this street where humans and aliens strolled singly and in couples. I walked as fast as I thought I could without attracting attention. The hue and cry arose behind me. I came to the corner, rounded it without halting, and saw my dear old Jaguar twenty yards off.

I ran then, for there was no help, indeed there was deadly peril, in walking any longer. I went with great bounds, brushing aside people and them indiscriminately. Hurling the bag onto the seat, I hurdled it with a last burst of energy, crashed in behind the wheel, and in a flash my motor and I had leaped forward and were on our merry way.

We had gone a dozen blocks before I took my right hand off the wheel and unwrapped the handkerchief from it, stowing it away in the side pocket that also contained my hotel key. Mentally I checked over every clue to my true identity; so far as I could think, I had wiped them all out. Now all that remained was to get out of Manchester safely.

Choosing the darkest streets almost without volition, I had put a couple of miles between me and that by-now-surely-tumultuous deathtrap of a hostelry. I thought of road blocks. One is always reading in American mystery stories of road blocks set up to catch thieves and murderers, but I had no notion as to whether they were used in England. Relying on the thought that at any rate I had never heard of one here, I tore for the outskirts of the city.

They would be on my trail. I kept seeing mental pictures of the alien beasts, sniffing me out like so many obscene bloodhounds. My hands grew slippery on the wheel with the sweat of fear. Then I put my panic behind me; they, after all would be working in the usual human channels, for surely they had at worst no more than a hazy suspicion that I could see them. True, I had relegated quite a few of them. But it must seem more likely to them that I was a maniac with luck on his side, rather than a seer. I doubted strongly that they would make such a concentrated effort at finding me as they had done last year with poor Jerry Wolfe. So I had only the laws and power of Old England to worry about.

Going over the past hour again and again, while driving, now at breakneck speed through deserted streets and now at a snail's pace in traffic, I decided that once I had left the city I had a very good chance of escaping entirely. Therefore I set myself to leave it as soon as possible. Beneath me the Jaguar purred contentedly as my foot caressed her accelerator.

And so the notorious Manchester Slasher went into the fastnesses of the Peak District, and laid his course south for Birmingham.

CHAPTER X

I did not take the Jaguar into Birmingham proper; I put her into a half-smashed, bombed-out old building I found quite by chance some few miles out of the city, and prayed that she would wait there for me till my business was done. It was then about four-thirty in the morning.

At a little tea-and-biscuit place in the suburbs I had a hearty breakfast, and read in an early edition the terrifying tale of the Manchester Horrors. It seemed that the infamous Slasher had been tentatively identified when he was tracked by the police to his lair in a well-known hotel; he was thought to be either a certain Irish communist agitator, or else a celebrated American gangster who I happened to know had been killed in 1937....

I walked on down to Birmingham and took a room in an obscure house in a slum district, run by a blowzy slattern who answered to "Old Mag." The parlor was equipped with a weary wireless set and an assortment of highly-flavored gentlemen in the last stages of disrepair. One of them looked like a racetrack tout fallen on evil days, another I could have sworn was a professional mugger. A fitting den for the Manchester Slasher!

I was careful not to touch anything at all until I had gone out and bought a pair of thin silk gloves, which I wore at all times thereafter. The proprietor of the pawnshop gave me a knowing wink as he handed them to me. I'm sure he thought I was a cat-burglar or a safe-cracker. No one in my new home deigned to notice them. I must mention that, quite by accident and not through any searching on my part, I had happened to strike a place where none of the other-world brutes lived; I had been prepared to see a number of them here, but only found the lowly humans I have spoken of.

I spent my first evening in going over my clothing and other possessions, ripping out name tags, obliterating initials, and cleaning off fingerprints. I would not be trapped again as I had nearly been in Manchester.

The second day and the early evening thereof I walked through the streets, thinking furiously. And the only conclusions I could come to anent my problems were bitter and lonely and hopeless.

Going "home" about eight o'clock, I wandered into the parlor and was accosted diffidently by a very low-looking form of life, which begged the pleasure of my company in a nearby hooch hut. I agreed. I would have stood drinks to a wolverine if the creature would have listened to me. I was starved for speech.

When I had bought him a few rounds, his taste running to that noble old British concoction, a four-o'-gin-hot, we began to talk freely: of anything, the weather, the latest race results, the difficulty of getting "real prime raw gin"....

He was a curious fellow. The name he gave me was Arold Smiff, which I imagine had once been Harold Smith; he was small and stringy and of a tobacco-brown hue, with eyes in which liquor-broken veins had long since stained the irises and the white to an all-over muddy-crimson. He stank like a shebeen, his breath would have shriveled a brass monkey, but I soon noticed something really odd about him—he did not seem to be at all intoxicated. I made bold to comment on this.

"Why, General," he said, grinning wryly, "fak is, I been lushed for so long, I can't get lushed any more hardly at all. You ever had the snykes?"

I shook my head. He nodded wisely. "Ar, I thought not. You're clarss. Me, I got a permanent case of 'em, bloody snykes and 'orrors all the tyme. You wouldn't know what it's lyke, General, seeing such 'orrors all the bloody damn tyme."

Would I not, I said to myself, oh, would I not!

"No, you're clarss, any bloody fool could see that." He leaned over confidentially, and I could fairly feel my eyebrows curl under that breath. "Between pals, now, wot's your lay?"

"Lay?" I repeated idiotically.

"Gyme, General, gyme! I knew you was hot stuff the mo' I seen yer at Old Mag's. Wot's your specialty—jools?"

Good Lord! The man took me for a jewel-thief!

"Not exactly," I said.

We were sitting in a booth. He craned his neck around to see that no one could overhear us. "Aye, but it's something fust-rate. You're no bloomin' snaveler nor knuckler."

"Ah, no," I agreed, presuming that, whatever they were, I couldn't be one of them.

"You're clarss," he repeated obstinately. "Me, I may not look so likely now, but once I was Manny Jarman's right'and lad."

I tried to look impressed, and wondered who Manny Jarman had been. A great deal of ale had flowed down my gullet at a good clip, and I was feeling reckless and friendly. "I'll tell you one thing," I said, "the police want me rather badly. I wouldn't tell you that if I didn't trust you."

"Ar! You trust Arold Smiff, General. 'E won't letcher down. I knowed you was on the lam when you come into Old Mag's. You're okay there. And you're okay so long as I'm your chum, too, see? I got connections." He brooded darkly over his connections. "Mugs, but they respecks old Arold Smiff, knowing wot 'e was once. Before the gin got 'im," he added significantly, peering into the depths of his glass. I snapped my fingers for another four-o'-gin-hot.

He chattered on, in his strange drunk-sober style, for a few minutes: and then, someone pushing by me, I moved my elbow to make more room in the aisle. In doing so I glanced up. It was one of them. A truly fearsome beast, this one purplish, slimy and grotesque.

Arold bent closer, again singeing my eyebrows. "I'll give yer an example," he hissed. "Example o' wot I go through nowadyes. You seen that bloke leave?"

"Yes?"

"'E were a bloke to you, huh? Regular normal bloke?"

"Mmmm," I said noncommittally.

"Welp, me, I didn't see no bloke at all, d'yer get me? I seen a great big glob o' goop! A great big purple wet-looking barstid of a garstly freak! You think a joker's bad off when 'e's got snykes, huh? Wot about me, wot sees Frank and Stein's monsters all about?" He sat back triumphantly.

I suppose I gaped. I suppose my jaw dropped, my hands shook, my face grew pale. I don't know. For the moment the gin palace was a blur and my faculties were frozen, as Arold Smiff's words rang in my head.

Frankenstein monsters! Purple freak!

Fate had given me an ally worth more than all six of my band combined. A souse of an ally, a lowbred criminal of an ally, a gin-soaked worthless-appearing ally: but one who could see the aliens, evidently as plainly as I could myself!

Our gallant pioneer, Jerry Wolfe, had speculated that perhaps some people could see them when having a fit of what we call the d.t.s—when they were saturated with alcohol, their vision was warped into the uncanny dimension-piercing angles which the musket blast had given me. Here was living proof of the theory. And here likewise was a fellow so permanently full of liquor (I swear the stuff ran in his veins) that he could see them all the time!

CHAPTER XI

"Where can we talk?" I asked him quietly, when I had got control of myself.

"Why, 'ere, General."

"No, no. A good safe place where we can talk privately and without interruption."

"Ow! Old Mag's, o' course. None better. Your room or mine."

"Mine," I said. "Let's go, old horse."

We went, taking along a bottle of gin for medicinal purposes. I sat him down in the dilapidated rocking chair, in my bedroom and, staring into his brown face intently, said, "I've got a proposition for you, Arold. It's a whopper, too."

"Big job?" he said. "You want me on a big job?"

"Yes, you. You'll be my partner in it."

"Me?" he repeated incredulously.

"You're the one chap who can help me."

The muddy eyes actually filled with tears; it was not a maudlin drunk's easy weeping, though, but the honest emotion of a humble workman who finds himself asked to assist a master. "You want me, Arold Smiff, to link up wiff you, a gent, a real gent, clarss, wot I mean a toff as ever was? Cor! I knowed I wasn't through yet," said he. "Just you lead on, General."

"I was only a Captain," said I.

"Then you didn't 'ave your deserts, I'll say. Wot's the gyme?"

"The biggest."

"Bank o' England?" he asked without much astonishment.

"No, not theft. We don't have to steal anything in this game."

He frowned. "'Old on, now, you mean I gotta knock somebody orf? Scrag 'em?"

"Not you personally, Arold. You'll be too high in the game for that."

"Ow, not that I objecks, mindjer," he hastened to assure me. "It just took me off guard, as you might say, you not lookin' lyke a basher." He grinned. "'Twouldn't be the first mug I've did in, General."

"I'll wager on that," said I under my breath, and aloud, "I told you: you'll be too important in this affair to do any murdering yourself, Arold." I prodded him in the chest with a finger. "You'll give the orders," said I.

He was deeply impressed by that. "Cripes!" he said. "Me?"

"Yes. Now listen closely, and I'll explain the whole business. Think back. Remember that purple monster you saw leaving the pub?"

"Not 'arf. Holy hell, not 'arf!"

"It was something like a lizard in shape," I said slowly. "It had a long trailing tail, and two big hind legs it walked on; it had two sets of little forearms, only they weren't like arms, but more like big snakes: no fingers, no hands, just oozy rounded arms. It looked as if it had just crawled out of the sea, and around it there were a lot of thin silvery-blue lines, running at a tangent like this—" I chopped my hands through the air at a forty-five degree angle—"that seemed like a background to the creature. There were glowing eyes in its chest, and for a head it had what looked like a dead fish. Right?"

"Right." He gave me a long blank stare. Then he batted his lids up and down. "'Ow did you know? I never told you all that!"

"I saw it too."

"Garn!" he said scornfully. "Wotcher givin' us?"

"If I didn't see it, then how did I know just what it looked like?"

He thought that over, sucking his yellow teeth. Then he gasped. "My Gawd! You got 'em too?"

"Do I look drunk?"

"No, but—"

"And if I were, would I have seen exactly what you saw, unless it were really there?"

Arold Smiff sank back in the rocker and let out a wheeze that began in the tips of his toes. "My old mother! I'm off it for good. The snykes are catchin'. Ow! 'O are you, mister?"

I threw my whole hand into the center of the table, staking everything on it.

"I'm the Manchester Slasher," I said.

He recoiled. His brown face, incapable of turning pale, nonetheless gave the effect of blanching in some mysterious manner of its own. The common little thief and garden-variety mugger quailed before the celebrated Mad Ghoul of Manchester. He drew out a large clasp knife and snapped open the blade, his hand shaking. "'Ere, now, you keep back from me, you 'ear? I'm not to be trifled wiff, see? You touch me and you're a deader, that's wot."

"Oh, put it away," I said fiercely. When he refused, I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and struck it a stinging judo blow with my right: the knife fell.

"Ow-er!" he yelled. "You keep back!" Cowering, he gazed at me with those muddy-crimson eyes wide, his mouth stretched in a nervous, sickly grimace of fear. "Twenty you done in, all in a couple of dyes," he whispered. "And I been and gone and drunk wiff you lyke you was my brother. You're mad-dorg crazy, you are."

"I'm as sane as you are," I said, "or saner. For heaven's sake, man, get hold of yourself. Do you think I stood you a bucket of gin and wasted two hours on you just to murder you in my own room?"

"Welp, no," he said grudgingly.

"Up north I killed four in the time I've taken to talk to you," I said, to impress him further. "Now listen closely, because I don't want to go over this more than a couple of times. In the first place, those people I killed weren't people."

"Garn!"

"They were beasts like the purple lizard. Some of 'em were worse. I killed one that was like a giant hoptoad with fangs."

"I've seen 'em like that.... 'Ere, wotcher giving us? I know them 'orrors is all in my mind. I ain't no common lushington. I knows it's the gin. I know they're folks like everyone."

"Oh, you know, do you? Open up that walnut you call your mind, chum. Why do we both see the identical brutes, if they're in your mind?"

"I dunno," he growled sullenly.

"Then just sit quiet—there's the gin beside you—and I'll explain it all in words of one syllable."

And this I did. I went over the whole frightful business, with a side dissertation on the theory of a fourth dimension. Then I went over it again. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck two. I summarized it again. I could see it beginning to penetrate to his submerged intellect. I went through it all a fourth time, and his murky gaze began to glow. The far-away clock struck three.

"'Ere," he said at last. "You ain't loony at all, are yer? Tell me agayn about them as is in it wiff yer."

"There's an old Colonel, a real big gun in his day, with pots of money. There's two veterans, gentlemen both, and one the son of a lord. There's a doctor with plenty of brains, and an old chap with more dignity than you ever saw in your misspent life. There's even a girl, a real lady. And there's me. Do you think we'd all be chucking our lives into this mess if we didn't know it was desperately real?"

He scratched his nose with a black nail. "No," he said, "no, you wouldn't. I can see as you're real clarss, ripper or no. What d'yer want of me, though? I'm plain dirt compared wiff you."

"Why, you were Manny Jarman's right-hand man," I said. "You haven't forgotten what it's like to be top dog?"

He was immensely flattered at that. "Thank you kindly, General. You sees deeper into a bloke than most. Go on."

"I've only a hazy idea of what I want you to do, Arold, when the time comes. But here's an important part of it. Could you find me a whole raft of fellows who'd be willing to commit murder for money, no questions asked?"

"Hell," he grinned, "could a cat find garbage cans?"

"They'd have to be given definite instructions, and be the kind of men who would carry them out to the letter. And no copper's narks, see? Nobody who'd take our cash and then squeal."

"I could do it," he said, thinking. "I could get bullies 'ere in Brummagem who'd cut their mothers' necks for three quid. And they could get others. Ow, trust Arold Smiff to find the right 'uns!"

"We might need a hundred."

"There's that many and more."

I was giving slow birth to a real plan now. "It might be that they'd have to go all over England, and do these murders in a hundred different places. And they'd have to do them in a certain manner you'd tell 'em about, see? No slipshod hatchet work, but well-planned assassinations."

"Might be harder to find them as would work precise to orders, but I could do it. I know every rogue in these parts, don'tcher doubt it, General."

"That's why you're so valuable, Arold: that's why you'll be my right-hand man. And only you and I must know that the men we'll be killing aren't truly men, but—"

"But oosluppers," agreed Arold, proud of the new word. "Oosluppers from the fourth demented, yus. Why, General, it's lyke a crusade, a bloody noble crusade, ain't it?"

"That's what we think, pal. But that part's a deep secret."

"Hot knives won't drag it outen me," he bragged. "Gawd, to think I been seein' these 'ere Frank and Stein's monsters for eight years more or less, and thought all the time it was the gin!" He made his apologies to the liquor by taking an enormous gulp of it.

"Now I've got to go away for a while, Arold," I told him. "I've got to travel all over this island, and collect some names. When I've done that I'll let you know. Meanwhile you can be lining up your lieutenants. With care, old horse, with the greatest care." Then it occurred to me that he had never asked what his reward would be. "You'll find yourself a rich man when this is over, Arold."

"Garn, what'd I do wiff a lot o' money? I don't need much but gin and a few comforts now and agayn, and maybe a bit o' cash to swank it wiff around town."

"You'll be able to build a swimming pool and fill it with Gordon's if you do your job right."

"Trust old Arold, General."

"I do," I said. "I do."

"That's damn near thanks enough," said he in a choked voice. There was a stratum of pretty fine stuff in Arold Smiff, besides the streak of sentimentality you'll usually find in your lower-class Briton.

"Now," I went on, "here's the plan. I'll go over it until we both know it word for word."

I sketched it out as it had come to me in this strange night of lengthy explanation. Then I repeated it, and re-repeated it, until I thought it would bubble out of our ears.

And when the clock rang five, we were nearly ready to begin. But first we laid ourselves down to sleep for a few hours, till the pubs had opened again; when we arose, and put on our coats, and sallied out together to commit a murder ... a most unpleasant but most necessary murder.

CHAPTER XII

I walked out of Birmingham alone, just before noon, heading for the bombed-out old building in which I had left the Jaguar, with my Gladstone bag locked in her dickey, or rumble seat. I had not carried any baggage with me into the city except my razor, toothbrush, knife and automatic, and my pipe.

It occurs to me that, since she played nearly as useful a part in my adventures as did my human colleagues, I should perhaps devote a moment to describing my black Jaguar. I had bought her late in 1937 for a matter of some four hundred pounds, and except for the war years, which she waited out in a barn near my home in Coventry, we had been inseparable ever since. She was one of the mighty Standard Swallow 100s, with a wonderfully reliable three-and-a-half-liter engine, and as I've said, I once clocked her at a hundred and fourteen m.p.h. and believed she could do more. She would go from a standstill to eighty m.p.h. in a matter of twenty-seconds, for her acceleration was ferocious. Yet she was the smoothest-riding jade I ever owned. Her brown leather upholstery had faded through the years to a rich old tan, but her heart was as young as ever. I had lavished on her the affection that might more properly have gone to a wife or a kennel of hounds; in my lonely careering about the countryside in these last days she had amply repaid me. She had been companion and steed and confidante to a very homesick man.

It was a clear day, with a promise of sultry heat to come that prickled my body with sweat under the old tweed suit. I tramped briskly along, thinking of Marion—I thought of her whenever I could, for her sweet face shut out the menacing usurpers from my mind—until I came in sight of the wrecked building. As I swung down the hill toward it, I heard voices raised in argument.

Cautiously I slowed a little, looking nonchalant and disinterested. I walked past the ruin and from the corner of my eye saw a number of men (and monsters) clustered around the Jaguar looking at her curiously. "Aye," said one of them, "that's his, right enough. Black Jaggiar, it says here on the prints." Two of them were constables. I ambled over.

Now this was a particularly idiotic thing to do, but I must plead extenuating circumstances. In the first place, I had just been a partner in the commission of a messy homicide, and was strung up as high as a barrage balloon. Secondly, I had been hardheaded and coldly practical for many hours—indeed, since the night of my last murder in Manchester I had not done an impetuous act, nor played the swaggering gambler with death for any stakes except the highest. It suddenly came to me that I must do a doughty deed, act the bold Quixote for once, to liven up my interest and tone up my reflexes. I was never born to be an ice-brained plotter, although I had been forced by fate into that uncongenial role. Rather for me the swirling cape and impetuous rapier, the big-plumed hat and gallant gesture, the fiery and slightly ridiculous beau geste. So I ambled into the wrecked building.

The men (and monsters) turned to stare at me. I could see the great brutes of aliens turning orange and green with interest. I had learned that they often swelled and changed color when intrigued or alarmed. "Cheero," I said vacuously. "What's up?"

One of the group, a portly constable with a red face, eyed me dourly and said, "Stranger 'ereabouts, sir?"

"I'm on a walking tour," said I. "Just spent a night in Birming'm. Saw you chaps in a rum sweat over something, thought I'd have a dekko. Dashed sleek-lookin' car, what?"

"Ar," said the constable, observing my boots. They were stout and old, the very thing for a walking tour. "You know anything about motors, sir?"

"Me? Lord, no," said I. I then giggled, which pained him visibly. "I wouldn't touch one. Cousin owned one, name of Algy; cousin, you know, not the car. Turned over in a treacherous manner and simply squashed him like a bloomin' bug. What's up with this one?"

The monsters were scrutinizing me intently. I told myself that I needn't be afraid of their inspection: in addition to my quite ordinary features, which could scarcely have been described in much detail by their compatriot who had seen me, I was at the moment wearing the shell-rimmed spectacles which I ordinarily used only for reading, being far-sighted as an eagle. I had put them on a few moments before, just in case.

An alien said, leaning his human form toward me, "We think it may be the Manchester Slasher's."

If he thought to startle me into betraying myself, he was disappointed. I fluttered my hands and bleated. "Gad! Not that murderer chappie? The one who killed about ninety people up north?"

"Twenty, sir." The alien appeared to relax. "Yes, it fits the description, all right." He turned to another. "Tom, you'd best go and telegraph Manchester. Sam, you go with him and bring back another couple o' boys. We'll just lay us a trap."

I walked all about the Jaguar, prodding her bonnet and peering at the dashboard gingerly. "Deuced mysterious affairs, motors," I said. "Don't see how anyone can tell what gadget to push next."

"We're a-going to lay an ambush for this 'ere Slasher, sir, if you don't mind," said one of them.

"Hear, hear," I said. "Chop the blighter, what? Pip him in the early counties, right?"

"There's liable to be trouble, sir," insinuated another.

"Rather," I yammered. "Oh, rather."

"We'd like to get ready now, if you please, sir."

"Oh, absolutely. Carry on. Lay a snare for the wretched person, lads," said I heartily.

"You'd better leave now, sir," said the constable firmly. "Before there's trouble, you know. Wouldn't want to get hurt."

"Heavens, no," said I. "I say, officer, could I just sit in that seat a mo'? Give one something to boast of, what?"

"No, sir. There may be fingerprints in the thing."

"I won't touch a bally thing," I assured him, and as there was no one within six feet of me, I hopped in behind the wheel. At once they all shouted angrily; but there was no suspicion of me yet. It is the firm belief of the lower-middle classes that anyone who bleats and says "bally" and "dashed" is a regular Bertie Wooster character and as harmless as a sheep, although somewhat less attractive. "Come out o' that, sir!" yelled the constable.

"Just want to get the feel of it, you know," said I reassuringly. "Want to tell old Algy I sat in what's-his-name's seat."

"I thought you said Algy was killed in a wreck."

"That was Algy Witherspoon, my cousin," I told him reproachfully, secretly extracting the ignition key from my pocket. "This is young Algy Pope, my other cousin. Regular ripping chappy on murders and all that, Algy is. Tell you all about Crippen, and whoozis that did in his maiden aunt over at that little place in Sussex, and all such bloody—pardon the expression—goin's-on. Likes birds, too. Sits about in swamps watchin' them. Deuced rum feller."

Suspicion must have dawned just about then. They moved toward me, while the humans still hesitated. I slid the key in under cover of my bent body, chortling something inane about the mythical Algy, and stepped on the clutch. A hand was laid heavily on my shoulder. The Jaguar leaped backwards at the same instant, hit someone who reeled away with a scream, rocked crazily over the rubble and struck the road. I twisted her madly around, waved my hand in an appropriately cavalier-like manner, and sped off south-eastward on the great road that leads to London. Shouts of rage followed me. I patted the Jaguar's wheel. "Everything's all right, baby," I said. "Old Will is back. It'll all be all right now."

I devoutly hoped that it would be.

CHAPTER XIII

It is a hundred and fifteen or twenty miles from Birmingham to London. Having gambled the fate of the world on a silly trick, and won back my two-seater from the very hands of the law and of the usurpers, I was wonderfully bouyed up; and decided to go down to my gang's headquarters and tell them all the new developments. I was aching to talk to someone ... preferably Marion.

In half an hour I had left Birmingham and then Coventry far behind me, and was feeling pretty safe, as there had been no signs of pursuit. Then, just as I roared into some cursed little hamlet along the route—I don't even know its name—a great black motor dashed out of a lane ahead of me and blocked the way. I saw it was crammed to the roof with them; knew that this was no accidental barrier, but a contingent of the enemy, either lawful or of the misbegotten underground of the beasts; and without pausing ran the Jaguar up over the curb, squeezed through between their car and the wall of a shop, rocketed on two wheels back into the road and trod the accelerator down to the floor. The black job was after me in a flash. We howled through that hamlet like a pair of greased lightning bolts.

They gave me only a few bad minutes: when we hit the open road I drew away as though—to coin a stunning simile—they had been standing still. But even when their dust was no more than a puff on the horizon, I gnawed my lips and worried. My course was known, and the telegraphs and telephones would be crackling far in advance of me. Yet doggedly, and perhaps rather stupidly, I held to this main road until I had come nearly to St. Albans, for I could eat up the miles so swiftly on decent paving that it gave me the illusion of outrunning my enemies. At last, just before the old cathedral town, I turned off and lost myself in the network of country byways.

Evening was closing in when at last I rolled the black lass to a halt at a garage in the south of London. The owner was an old mate of mine with whom I'd seen a lot of action in the war. What lies I told him don't matter: suffice it that in three minutes the Jaguar was stowed in a dark corner of his big shed, and he had contracted to paint her a deep red hue by next afternoon ... and to keep quiet about her. Gladstone in hand, I then set out for The Gray Gander. I told myself that (a) I would be less conspicuous there than at the toney Gloucester Club or the exclusive Albany, (b) although three of my men were billeted at the latter place, Alec Talbot was the most able of the whole band, despite his single arm, and he was at the inn, (c) I did not want to be seen by any of the aliens who knew me—I hardly realized why, but I had the creepy feeling that they would somehow penetrate my secret—and on the single occasion when I had visited the Gander, I had seen none of the beast-folk. Finally I admitted to myself that these reasons were so much rot, and actually (d) Marion Black was drawing me like an irresistible whirlpool draws a chip of flotsam.

I went up to Alec's room, closed the door behind me, and fell on his bosom. He beat me on the back and gurgled wordlessly. I beat him on the back and sputtered idiotically. It was a grand reunion.

"Where's Marion?" I asked.

"I'll get her." He dashed out and brought her back. When she came into the room, lighting it up like a sunburst in a cavern, I took her in my arms and kissed her long and well.

"Marion, will you marry a poor devil who loves you in a humble but most passionate manner?"

"After one kiss?" asked Alec blankly. "Just one kiss?"

"Certainly," she said. "That can be remedied."

"Oh, Lord, not immediately," groaned Alec, as we began to do so. "Let him tell us where in hell he's been for seventeen years. Let him relieve my mind."

I ended the second kiss with a splutter. "Good God! I can't ask you to marry me, dearest. I—come and sit down—I'm a murderer."

"You can't call it murder, son, to chop an inhuman monster," said Alec.

"But I'm wanted by every policeman in the Kingdom. You see, I'm the Manchester Slasher."

I don't know what reaction I expected of Marion ... the pale cheek, the indrawn gasp, the expression of loathing and fear ... as a matter of fact, she clapped her hands and laughed.

"You owe Geoff ten bob, Alec!" she cried.

"Huh?" said I.

"Geoff bet Alec ten shillings that you were the Mad Ghoul. He said—" she became serious—"he said that one just couldn't give a man the power to see such nightmares as you've been seeing, and expect him to keep a cool head and not strike at them. He said he had wild bursts of fury himself when he thought of them, and knew if he could see them, he'd start a reign of terror."

"I thought you'd draw back with abhorrence," I said.

She threw her arms around me. "Oh, Will, poor old Will! My Uncle Geordie was a big game hunter, and I think he was a much more reprehensible character than you. After all, darling, the beasts you're stalking are far worse than any innocent old family-man of a lion."

"Say," put in Alec, "something's been puzzling me. Why haven't the coppers spotted the license of your Jaguar? It's famous, you know—on the wireless every hour these days."

"Oh, my dear chap! I stole a set of plates off a big Daimler before I ever left London. You're dealin' with a hardened crook." I told them how I had rescued her from the hands of the enemy in Birmingham. "It was the serial numbers on her innards that worried me. Except for them, though, she couldn't be traced to me." I kissed my girl again. Her lips were like a drug, that drew me back again and again for larger doses.

Alec clucked his tongue. "Most un-English!"

"See here, chum: you trot out and collect the lads. Have 'em come here unobtrusively by ones and twos, and we'll have a council of war."

"Oh, all right, if you don't want an appreciative audience to make funny remarks at appropriate places." He slapped on his hat and went out, while I returned to Marion's embrace. For a little while I could forget the whole abominable race of beast-people, the dire venture before me, and everything else except the incredible fact that she returned what I had always considered my hopeless love.

CHAPTER XIV

It was grand to see my half-dozen sub rosa crusaders gathered together again, sitting expectantly on sofas and chairs in Alec's room, watching me with friendship and love. What a tonic those comradely faces were! I drank a silent, sentimental toast to them, and began my yarn.

First I told them of Arold Smiff, the cheap, crooked, gin-soaked little man, who had taken his last bath in 1922; the man who could see the usurpers as well as I could. That roused them to gleeful vociferance, which I squashed with a bark. "Quiet, will you! I'm half starved—haven't had a bite since breakfast. I want to get this done, so I can go and eat a good dinner.

"You know that when I left you I could see just one dismal possibility—a long campaign of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter. But when I met Arold, a plan grew up in my mind—"

"Like a lovely flower in a swamp," murmured Geoff. "Sorry. Pray continue."

"The whole plan," I growled, "is about nine-tenths sheer bluff; but I think it may work. Here it is: first, I travel around the country and collect a hundred names; the names of usurpers whose human shells have had more or less spectacular careers. Not those born to the purple, but those who've come up like rockets, self-made men who've climbed to posts of importance in politics, the law, and elsewhere. I've seen a number of big shots of that sort who are nothing really but robots moved by slimy misshapen blobs ... and I've deduced (pardon the Holmesian expression) that the important members of their loathsome breed are probably those who rise to take over important positions in this world. That allows 'em to protect and to advance their secret cause."

"How?"

"By passing certain laws, and—well, here's an example. One of them commits some crime, perhaps inadvertently. They don't want him to get chucked into prison, where he'd be no use to them in furthering the birth rate. So a were-policeman, to coin a name, will let him escape; or a were-judge will set him free. Get the poisonous subtlety of it? They work themselves into posts where they can help each other to the top of their bent. Even on the lower levels, they're often bartenders and hotel-keepers, who can pass quick word of developments, and so forth. It's as if a lot of Nazis had become lawyers and judges and M.P.s here during the late fracas, and from their exalted seats had protected whole battalions of lesser spies when they ran afoul of the cops."

"I see," said the Colonel. "That's logic."

"So it stands to reason that, if I want to put a great big crimp in their plans, I have to chop a slice off the top of their organization, rather than out of the bottom. I slew a score of 'em while I was the Manchester Slasher, but those were common low folk whom I can't see as especially important to the general plan of the usurpers. They got very peeved about me, but it was nothing to the way they'd have acted had I murdered twenty judicial were-people, or twenty husks of Members of Parliament. My score of twenty lower-case aliens might have been accidental, but twenty upper-crusters wouldn't be. And a hundred will make them sit up and scream like hell.

"You can't hire decent men to commit pointless assassinations, so of course I was handicapped until I met Arold Smiff. In fact, I never even thought of hiring killers, until that night when I found that he could see 'em too. Then the dawn flashed up. You can pay professional rogues to commit murders, and no questions asked. So I deputized Arold to go out and collect a hundred scoundrels for me: the most reliable riffraff available, men who would, as he says, do in their old mothers for a chew of tobacco. He's to pay them ten pounds apiece in advance, with a promise of ten more when the business is done. Then, on a certain night, and within a period of a few hours, they're to strike all over England—and slay these usurpers I'll have collected in my little black book. I understand that the underworld looks with disfavor on a gentleman who collects a fee from a brother crook and then doesn't deliver the goods, so I believe that most of these cutthroats will keep faith and comply with his instructions."

"How do you know this Smith won't do a bunk with your money?" asked Doctor Baringer cynically. "After all, a common thief—"

"Not common," said I loyally. "He was Manny Jarman's right-hand man."

"Who in blazes is, or was, Manny Jarman?"

"Haven't the foggiest, John ... anyhow, Arold's been promised a lot of cash if he comes through; he's enthralled with the scheme, for after all he's been seeing these pink and crimson cacodemons since the early '40s; lastly, and maybe most important, he knows I'm the Manchester Slasher, and in his heart of hearts he's scared white of me. I felt no qualms at all about giving him eleven hundred quid."

Alec whistled. "What a wad!"

"Nearly all I had with me. It's a lucky thing some of us are loaded with the ready, for this affair will cost like sin.

"Then, after our pogrom, I call one of their bigwigs and tell him to meet me somewhere, with as many of his pals as he wants to bring. I say to 'em, 'Gents, you've just seen a sample of my power. I've reached out and obliterated a hundred of you, and they weren't any small potatoes either, but some o' your finest. You realize I didn't snag 'em all by myself; you're no village idiots. Those killings were done by a hundred chaps who can see you. We struck at you all over England. In a few days, another hundred of you get it—and some of you here now are on that list. Couple days later, a hundred and fifty. Then two hundred. And we'll go on knocking you over regularly, working from the top down, till there aren't any of your breed left here, and damned good riddance to filthy bad rubbish, too.'

"Then I make my point. 'The nub of the thing is this: we want you to go home. Pick up your kilts and vamoose. Beat it. This world isn't your world, and by heavens you'd better leave it while the leaving is good. Otherwise you're sunk. You can murder me now,' I tell 'em generously, 'but there's plenty more where I came from. We've perfected a system of warping our vision, and every day there are more of us who can see you in all your ugliness. You can't beat us, because we're the best underground organization that ever existed; and last night's massacre proves it. Till now you had no idea we even existed. Did you?' And they have to admit they didn't, because we don't."

"How's that again, Will?"

"Never mind. Anyway, then they think it over, and if we're in luck, they decide the hell with it, and go home."

"Leaving thousands of suddenly dead bodies, and incredible misery and sorrow among the friends of their puppets," said Geoff. "Oh, I'm with you. That's our whole objective, to rid ourselves of them. But it just hit me: what a lot of tears will be shed because we stepped into this matter."

"Shall we turn back now?"

"Don't drivel. Only ... great merciful powers!" He drank from his glass, his hand shaking. "What will we wreak!"

"Do you think it'll work, Will?" asked Marion quietly.

"It's the biggest bluff of all time, darling. But it must work!" I paused. "There's one big factor. I've hinted at it—here it is. We've always taken it for granted that when the human body dies, the usurper simply goes back to his own world and begins again by getting himself born into a new husk here. Jerry Wolfe figured that out originally, and we've accepted his theory as gospel. But I submit that it needn't be true. I don't know why I ever thought it was. How do we know what happens to the monster when its hull of human flesh dies? How do we know that it's only the puppet which perishes? Echo answers: we don't know. Maybe the aliens are so bound to their false humans in this dimension that when the bodies die, the aliens must die too. What's so impossible about that? After all, I've told you that they haven't any powers here except those of the bodies they inhabit. God knows what they can do in their own never-never land—but here, they're little better than so many natural-born people. And if they're that restricted, that much identified with these puppets, maybe even their death is mutual."

I cleared my throat and took a drink of Scotch. "What happened when I killed my first ogre? I went to a pub with Geoff and watched. Pretty soon all the beasts sittin' there started to flap their arms at one another and turn different colors, and then a lot of them got up and left. Aha, yes, I said to myself, the gorgon who got his has gone around behind the dimension-screen telling his chums about it. But I was arguing from a false premise. I was basing my ideas on what I believed to be a fact—yet that fact hadn't been proven at all, and probably couldn't be proven this side of the silver land!"

"Nor disproven," put in Alec.

"But I can show you more to disprove it than you can dig up to prove it! What happens when I assassinate an alien? His human vehicle croaks, while he himself swells up, turns a vivid horrid hue, and goes pop. I submit that that looks more like the death of the alien itself than a simple relegation to another region.

"But I think they can leave this world voluntarily, in which case they go on living in their own. Lord knows how long a life expectancy they've got, over there. Maybe their time is different from ours, so that the life of a man occupies no more than a fraction of a day in the silver land; the theft of a body and the puppeteering of it from womb to tomb may be no more than an hour's vicious pastime for an alien."

"I've been thinking of that," said Geoff slowly. "I see this whole business as a kind of fierce joke on their part, the slow and sly winning of a world from its unseeing inhabitants. So perhaps they'll leave us if their lives are endangered—perhaps the joke may not be worth dying for."

"All this," interrupted John Baringer testily, "is off the track, and really no more than so much anthropomorphism. How can a man finally and definitely state what are the purposes of a pack of inhuman beings? Go on, Will."

"Well, to prove my new theory, Arold and I went out to a pub this morning. We chose a frightful creature that was doing some solitary drinking, and Arold, who's a whizzer of a lad at such matters, slipped some slow poison into his liquor.

"We watched him die, in the throes of agony, which was taken by all the other denizens of the pub for simple indigestion or appendicitis. It took him twelve minutes to die on the floor. I timed him.

"The first three minutes he just writhed and changed colors and shot off angry sparks. He didn't know he was dying. I refer to the real entity, not the human part. Obviously he could feel the pain—they must be able to, otherwise they'd give themselves away by not making the human body jump when it's stuck with a pin, or sits on a hot stove, or whatnot—you can see that. Well, after those three minutes, he seemed to wake up to the fact that this was it. Immediately he started to leave this dimension. It was the damndest sight I ever laid eye on. It was like a man trying to haul himself out of quick-sand or heavy muck. The beast wrenched upward, and jerked back, and did what in any normal being would be called shrugging his shoulders, for all the world as if he was mired in something and wanted to get out. He had an awful time of it. Took him seven minutes and fifteen seconds. But at last he made it.

"He oozed back and away from that twisting body on the floor. He stood there, weaving and trembling, and I'll bet he was sweating, too, if they do any such prosaic thing as sweat. He was entirely divorced from the husk—which lived, mind you, for more than a minute after he'd left it. But as soon as he'd stepped away, he began to fade, and within three or four seconds he had vanished. At any rate, from my sight, and Arold's."

I signaled to Alec to fill my glass. "That's why I think they die when I murder them: because of the time it took that critter to get loose from his puppet. He was scared. I could feel it, just as I can feel their ordinary waves of hatred and abominable passions. I could sense the terror that filled that usurping bastard when he knew his husk was dying. He was purely scared to hell! Why? Why, unless he knew he'd die in both worlds if he couldn't rid himself of the shell before it perished?"

I sighed. I was tired of this whole rotten business, and light-headed from the liquor on my empty stomach. I said, "It was what I'd wanted to discover, why we poisoned the thing. I'd recalled that every alien death I'd seen, every one Jerry Wolfe saw, had been sudden and quick. I'd realized that there were no data on slow deaths. I had to have some. I got it. And I say, it's two to one they die when the human part dies, unless they have plenty of time to get away from it. That's the reason I think they'll leave us voluntarily, in a terrific hurry, when they think there's a whole crew of seers after 'em. They don't like death any more than we do. Death's a queer, an uncanny thing. Nothing that I know in nature likes to die."

"But how did the aliens in those pubs of yours learn so quickly about the killings, if the one who was killed—I mean the one—" Marion frowned angrily—"if the one who'd been relegated didn't go around behind the scenes and tell them?"

"Oh, dear girl!" shouted Geoff. "Messengers! Errand boys! The pony express of the silver land!"

"That's it," said I. "That's what we never thought of. There must be plenty of them who don't have human bodies at all, and move freely in their own dimension. What's to keep them from spreading the word to their comrades when one dies?"

"Will, you've hit it," the Colonel said. "They die here. It's probable, it's the best news yet, and if it's true, the bluff will work."

"And now that I've lectured you for an hour," I said, reaching for Marion's hand, "let's go out to the best restaurant within walking distance, and have us a monstrous dinner. I could eat the proverbial horse."

"There's a place within two blocks where they give you a delightful Percheron steak," said Alec. "Let's travel."

CHAPTER XV

We ate a noble meal, sat long over the port, and came out into a deep July night canopied with a velvet turquoise sky in which the full moon was riding high. We began to stroll along, talking of inconsequential things; at the corner of Baker Street we split up, the others heading for their own digs, while Alec and Marion and I went toward the inn. As we passed beneath a lamp, I happened to glance over my shoulder. I do not know to this day whether I heard the footsteps, or sensed the hate-aura of the beast, or perhaps was warned by the primitive instincts that I had been developing through the past weeks of terror; whatever caused it, I peered back down the street, and saw one of the aliens following us. In the moonlight his human body was a dark form within an envelope of gray-blue mist.

Coincidence, I told myself, angry to feel the sweat leap out on my face and palms. Nonetheless, I had a second look in a moment, just as the thing was walking under the lamp. I was rewarded by a strange sight: in the flood of brilliant light I saw the puppet-body of the man all stark and clear and black, with the distorted form of the usurper about it flaming like a gaudy, transparent rainbow. It was an awesome spectacle, and sent the cauld grue racing up my backbone.

"Alec," I hissed from the corner of my mouth. "I'm going to stop in a minute. Take a good look at the bloke that's following us."

Then we halted, and to give us an excuse, I took out a cigarette and lit it. The monster passed us. I thought the moon-grayed protoplasm had a tinge of orange, which might indicate deep interest on the being's part, but I could not be sure. When it was out of hearing I said, "Anyone we know?"

"It's a man from the restaurant," said Marion. "I noticed him looking at us as we ate. I thought he was flirting with me."

"He gave you a damn hard stare, Will," said Alec.

"Jerusalem!" I growled. "May be a coincidence, but—he's one of them ... and I let him have a ruddy good look at me with that match!"

"Could he have chased you from up north?"

"No, no. Nobody followed me on the roads I took, son. But he and his gang have my description." I threw away the cigarette angrily. "'Course, I look like anybody else, but—"

"You do not!" protested Marion. "You're very handsome, for one thing."

Alec laughed briefly. "Well, maybe not that, Will, but you are individual enough to be spotted from a good description."

I was astonished. I had never thought so. I said, "We've got to be careful, then. Can't let him see us go into The Gray Gander."

We walked past our inn. The creature had disappeared. We went on a short distance, and then I felt from the prickling of the hair on my neck that he was behind us again.

So began a game of cat and mice, which took us around corners and fleeing through alleys until at last I felt we had lost our silent pursuer, and with a sigh we entered our tavern.

I was awakened next morning, as I slept uneasily on Alec's couch, by Doctor John Baringer. He was puffing a pipe and grinning, but his eyes were shadowed. "What's up?" I asked.

"Everybody but you ... Will, there's a lashing of people about in Baker Street. I don't know why I noticed 'em, especially, but they're there—just standing or sauntering, watching folk pass. It struck me queerly, and Alec tells me you were followed last night."

I started to dress hurriedly. "Do they look like policemen?"

"I wouldn't say so," John mused. "They're just ordinary people, men and women both, standing in the sun. I can't say I like it."

"Nor I. Are they concentrated near the inn?"

"No. Within a block or two, though; I didn't begin to notice them till I'd passed that restaurant where we ate last night."

Alec came in. "You were right," he said to John. "By God, you were right! Forty or more, loitering ... Will's got to get out."

"Will's got to lie low," snapped the physician. "They obviously don't know just which building he's hiding in. He'll have to stop here until the fiends give up."

"Or at least until I can slip out at night," I said. "I say! Does it occur to you that the blighters now have all our descriptions? We were under observation last night for an hour or two! Call—"

Alec was already pouncing on the phone. He rang through to the Albany, spoke ten words, and hung up with a long face. "The Colonel and Geoff are out. That means they're headed here. Too late! By the powers, we're dished!"

"Maybe not," I said hopefully. "It could be coincidence."

"And I could be the Lost Dauphin of France," said Alec gloomily. He put in a call to the Gloucester Club, got hold of Johnson, and told him to stay there till he heard from us. Then we waited, fretting, for Geoff and the Colonel: who came in blithely at ten.

We sat there, staring at one another morbidly, and argued and plotted futilely through a dragging, hot hour or two. It was dreadfully hard to decide on a plan, for now it was not a question of getting me out of London, but of finding a haven for all of us.

"You've got to collect a hundred names, if you hope to put that affair of yours through," said Geoff, chewing his pipestem. "You can't do that sittin' here on your well-cushioned behind. Your chum Arold will be gathering his ragtag army in Brummagem, and you've got to be ready to use 'em. Look here! Why not we form a flying wedge and bust you out o' here right now? If they're not coppers—and they didn't smell like the law to me when we passed 'em—they won't stop six of us in broad daylight. Wouldn't dare. We'll take Alec's Rolls and ditch them. Then we'll split up out of London, and you can put on a false beard and go it alone, if you like, or with one of us as sidekick. How's that sound?"

"I don't want to leap into it with both feet," I said. "Let's wait it out a bit. Maybe there's nothing in it. Maybe those people simply like to loiter in Baker Street. Maybe they're tourists, watching for Watson and Holmes." Dismal worries about the safety of Marion and my friends were crowding my mind, preventing rumination.

So we argued until luncheon, which we ordered sent up to the room; after which John went out to reconnoitre. He was soon back.

"Still there! There's no mistake, they're watching for you, Will. I couldn't be sure, but they may have noticed me, too." He scowled. "I hope not ... but they're clever as sin."

So, mainly because I was too unsure of myself to risk a bold move such as Geoff had suggested, we waited out the first half of the afternoon in the rooms of The Gray Gander. And nothing happened at all.

CHAPTER XVI

At three o'clock or thereabouts, there was a knock at the door. We all "stared at each other with a wild surmise," and then Colonel Bedford resolutely flung it open. I was sitting on a footstool beside Marion's chair, in such a position that I could not see the stranger; who said in an oily, semi-cultured tone, "Good day, sir! I'm making a survey—"

"Step in," said our old soldier. "Step right in, sir."

"Oh, no, I shan't bother you now, as I see you're having a bit of a gathering," said the unctuous voice. "I'll call round la—"

At this point the Colonel took him firmly by the lapels of his coat. Alec said afterwards that he never saw astonishment spread over a face so quickly. The man's mouth remained open in the middle of the word. The Colonel, a man of action who had been bottled up too long, now picked up our caller and genially hurled him halfway across the room. He slammed the door and turned the key, took it out of the lock and pocketed it with a sinister grin. Then he, as well as most of the other lads, gave me a brief inquiring glance. I nodded. It was one of the beast-folk.

"'Ere!" said that one, losing his pseudo-cultured accents. "Wot's the idear, sloshing a chap about!"

"Stow it," said the Colonel. "We can see you, you know. No use keeping up a pretense, old troll!"

Good for the Colonel!

"That's right," said I. "For the record, you're a lumpy-looking piece of dough, greenish-orange, with a tinge of maroon at the moment because you're mad. Madder'n usual, I mean. You blighters live in a constant state of ire, don't you?" Then I bellowed. "Stop him!" for the brute was edging toward the window. Alec picked up a small chair and tossed it at his legs, and as he tripped and went to his knees, John tapped him lightly but sternly on the head with a big glass ashtray. The alien sat cross-legged on the floor and glared wickedly at us, its true body quaking and shivering with wrath. "Well?" it said, through its robot's mouth. "Well?"

"First off," said I, strolling over to it and keeping a careless attitude tight-drawn about a wildly beating heart, "you'll answer us a few questions. Then ... we'll see."

"I don't think," said the other.

It was brutal, but entirely excusable. I picked him off the floor—he was a slight, insignificant fellow—and hit him squarely on the nose. He catapulted backwards with a howl. Alec thoughtfully kicked him in the stomach.

"The idea, you see," I told him, "is to hurt you badly, but to keep you alive. For a while, anyway. And if you try that again," I roared, for the beast had given a kind of preliminary shrug of its real form in preparation for leaving this dimension, "if you make one more move like that, I'll murder you instanter—and you'll die, both you and that poor shell of yours. Won't you?"

It nodded sullenly. Its great amorphous being settled down into itself quietly, as the human massaged his stomach.

"Whereas," I went on, "if you're good, and answer a few queries, maybe I'll let you go back into the silver land of your own free will, before I slay that husk you've appropriated."

It watched me for a while, speculating. Then it said hoarsely, "Which of you is Robert Hood of Manchester? You?" pointing at me.

"That's right, chum."

"How did you find him?" asked Geoff. "How'd you follow him?"

The brute turned its marionette's head toward our blind companion, sneered, and said nothing. I would not have this draff, this other-world swine, sneering at Geoff; I lashed out and knocked him galley-west. Sniveling, he crawled up onto a straight-backed chair and sat there, peering round at us until his eyes lit on Marion.

"'Ere, miss," he whined, "you won't see 'em beat a poor chap to death, will you? I've done you no harm...."

I was proud of my girl then. I had been afraid our battering of the beast would set her teeth on edge; but she leaned forward and spat invective into its face. "You foul, filthy spawn of a Gadarene hog! I'd see you sliced to fringes, and laugh for joy!"

It sank back and regarded the carpet bleakly.

"How'd you follow the Slasher?" asked Geoff again.

"We all had his description. It was known he was in or near London. Then he was seen in a restaurant nearby. Our comrade lost him in Baker Street. We've been searching ever since." The voice was now too expressionless even to be called cold. "The others will find you. It doesn't matter what you do to me."

"Aha," I snapped, "except to you! We can feel your fear, you know." It was true; he was loathsomely afraid. It gave me a good feeling, one of renewed confidence, to realize afresh that the usurpers were not omnipotent godlings, but beings who, like any others, could know fear. Again I thought I saw the thing pull himself up surreptitiously, like a man caught in the mire; and again I slapped his head sideways till his jaws grated. He stopped it.

"Next," said the Colonel, "what are you doing here? Your race, I mean. What d'you want with this earth? It isn't yours, damnit."

The beast looked at him. Then it laughed. Somehow it managed to get a shade of the horror of its own being into the vocal chords of the puppet, and the laugh was icy. It did not answer.

So the Colonel and Alec and I worked it over. We formed a triangle, like bullies persecuting a small boy, and threw it from one to the other, not really injuring it, but slapping its face and pummeling it until it shrieked hysterically. Then we let it sink to the floor, and we tried again.

"What are you doing here?"

I had been afraid that we would never find this out, or that, if one of them told us, we would not be able to understand; perhaps the concept, the point of view, would seem as wild and bizarre and incredible as they themselves. But as it began to speak now, I found that its motives, those of all its uncanny race, were as plain and nearly human as could be.

"We found your land by accident," it said, nursing its head in its hands and speaking without inflection or accent. "I do not know how long ago it was by your standards. I think a long time. One of our people by a mischance of a kind I cannot describe in the words of your language was born into your dimension in conjunction with an infant of your race. When you are all dead, and we are the sole owners of both our dimensions and yours, and write history books here for our amusement even as you have done for your own, that chance birth will be hailed as joyfully and reverently as you hail the—discovery of America."

"Dashed if I hail that reverently," murmured the Colonel. "Bloomin' colonials ... go on."

"I wonder if you can imagine with what delight our people greeted the discovery? How far can you see into our plane?"

I saw no harm in answering that. "Not far. Just a background of silver-blue lines at an angle."

"That is it. A silver land." Evidently they had the same color perception as we; a surprising but not wholly unthinkable fact. "Nowhere is there color or change of form or beauty, save in our own bodies. Your earth burst on our ken with such a wealth of beauty and such opportunities for pleasure as we had never dreamt of. At once we began to infiltrate, in the guise of normal humans; at first only by the route of births stemming from that original accident, then afterwards by births regulated and controlled from our plane, by methods you could not comprehend, which once discovered freed us from the necessity of waiting endlessly to be born into a body that had descended from that original fortuitous 'sport.' I believe that in terms of your space-time continuum, this discovery of ours has been quite recent."

I grew pale and cold at his words.

For—if true—this meant that the beast-folk could make a wholesale invasion of our dimension at any time! The brute saw me, and laughed again.

"Exactly. You are beaten. Indeed, you never had a chance, but now you have less than none. We are an advance guard, who have prepared the way for all the others of our race who will one day inhabit bodies on your plane. We have felt you out, tested your power to resist—which has been practically nil, my friend, with the exception of your own feeble and haphazard efforts—and spread out over this island until we are more numerous than you can imagine. But with the new method of coming in, there is no longer a need for infiltrating into high offices and key government positions, as we have so laboriously done before; for, my friend, D-Day is at hand."

He folded his arms and chuckled once more, icily, hideously. "Quite soon now, we will come into this dimension in one great wave that will obliterate your race as though the stars had never shone upon it at all! Every birth in the world shall be one of our robots—and then, no matter how you struggle and fume and plot, your people are doomed! Then, no matter how hard you fight, you will lose, for your species will ultimately die of old age!"

In the silence that followed this burst of ghoulish amusement, I heard someone who was going by in Baker Street whistling the Bronze Horse Overture, one of my favorites ... oddly, irrelevantly, I considered it a good omen, and was cheered. Then Geoff spoke.

"Just put my hands on his throat, somebody, will you?"

"Not yet, son. Go on, ogre. Why will you murder a whole race? Just for amusement? Just so you can see colors and pretty forms?"

"Yes. That simple a reason. And because we hate you, for that you have inherited a world of such perfections and do not appreciate it. To see colors, to revel in sounds and scents and tastes we had never imagined; to feel the vicarious ecstasy of these robots in acts you take for granted—acts of feeding, of drinking, of viewing and touching, of sex, which we do not have in our proper forms in any fashion whatever. We envy you, and hate you. We want your world, even if we must take its tactile delights vicariously—which is not so second-best as it sounds, for these robots are in a sense ourselves as much as our own bodies are. You who are born to this wondrousness—can you claim you properly appreciate it? Or will you admit that you have held it lightly and unthinkingly for as many generations as you can count?"

"Well, I'll be a devaluated pound," gasped Alec. "Will you listen to the conceited son-of-a-bitch!"

"Another question," I said to the beast. "How do—"

It was done almost before I could blink. He made a sudden break for the windows, one arm raised to smash the glass so that he could shout down to the street. Two feet short of his goal he ran into Alec's good right hand, swung round like the head of a short-hafted axe. He dropped with a crash.

"No use inspecting the body," I said. "His real shape blew up like a paper bag and went blam. I guess you broke his neck. He's dead."

Geoff stood up and said matter-of-factly, "Well, we'd best be going, what? If someone will just find my pipe for me, I'm ready."

"Wail till I toss a few things into my purse," said Marion. "Can't expect a gal to flee without a lipstick, can you?"

I stared at Alec, who nodded. It was time for us to be on the wing.

CHAPTER XVII

After three or four minutes of stuffing useful things into our pockets and a couple of overnight bags, we went downstairs to the ground floor; turning toward the back door, we ran smack into a sentinel of the usurpers. He wavered, then stepped aside as we strode toward him. I did not want to make a scene in The Gander, so waited until we stood in the lane behind the inn before I told them we had been seen.

"Never thought we wouldn't be," said the Colonel. "Where's the garage, Alec?"

It was directly opposite the rear of the inn. We went in and, unmolested, packed ourselves into the great red Rolls. "Whither?" said I, taking over the wheel.

"The Albany. I've guns there we'll need before we're much older."

"Then to the Gloucester," said Alec, "for Johnson."

I swung out into the lane and nearly ran down an alien, who leaped squeaking out of the way. Now they knew what our car looked like. I didn't care. We seemed to be in over our heads already.

"Do you know that in an hour or two we'll be much-wanted fugitives from the horrid vengeance of Scotland Yard?" I asked as we reared downtown. "We left a corpse on the floor of Alec's sitting room, with enough of our gear lying around to identify us all. My God! We're acting like a pack of heedless cretins. We should have stayed and made a plan."

"Hark to the Manchester Slasher!" shouted Geoff. "Why, my dear old cloth-head, the late lamented's buddies would have been on us in force in less than two ticks. Have you forgotten that somewhere in their dimension, at a spot approximating the location of Alec's flat, there's a dead beast-critter? Their pony express would ha' found him first thing. We had to run. And I didn't hear you objectin', when we snatched up Marion's intimate garments and Alec's dirty socks, to doing a bunk."

"My mind seems to be running ten minutes behind time," I said, skirting a corner and just missing a little old lady.

"Also there's this," put in the doctor. "We could never have gotten rid of the body, but they could, and I believe they will. They know now there's at least half a dozen of us in this business. Do you think they'll want us brought to trial? Granted that our story would sound like half a ton of wet fish ... would they want it spread on the front pages? After all, they can tell by our looks we're solid citizens. We might get some credence from the police—the last thing they would want. I think they'll quietly haul away that body, and set out on our trail by themselves. The time for worrying about the law is over, as I see it. There's too many of us. It wouldn't be like hauling up just one ripper with a mad story; it would mean publicity in every paper in Christendom—will they risk that?"

"Good for you, John," I said. "You're right. It's them and us now."

We drew up at the Albany. Leaving Geoff and Marion in the car, the four of us hurried to the Colonel's rooms and began a systematic collection of weapons, even including a set of ancient Khattar daggers and a couple of pig-sticking spears which were part of a collection Bedford had made in India. Into a Gladstone we stuffed bottles of brandy and whisky, a first aid kit, such items of clothing as we'd need in our flight, and what looked like seven years' supply of ammunition. Down again and through the lobby we went, trying to look like eccentrics who habitually carried sporting rifles, elephant guns and pig-sticking lances under our arms when we ambled through the city; piled the stuff onto the floor of the tonneau, wedged in once more, ran down to the Gloucester to get Sergeant Johnson, and took the road out of London to the east. As the sun was setting we left the last suburb behind, and came to the quiet open countryside.

"Where now?" I asked.

"The castle?" suggested Geoff. "It's as good a hideout as any."

So, after a vote, we struck out for Exeter Castle.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was dark when we passed through Exeter Parva. So far as we could tell, there had been no pursuit; nevertheless I felt nervous and on edge, remembering what titanic forces were arrayed against us.

The elms and oaks and chestnuts whispered among themselves as we unloaded our gear and hauled it through the great iron-banded door to stack it in the empty hall. I was standing in the doorway looking at the dark groves and the moors beyond, when Marion touched my arm.

"Don't jump like that, boy! I only wanted to ask what you're gazing at so fiercely."

"The trees. They're like so many ghosts ... darling, I feel as though we'd walked into the dim and haunted past. This might be Glamis Castle itself."

She seized my hand and for the first time in the whole adventure I knew she was afraid. "I think it's a trap," she said. "Oh, Will, I can't say anything to the others—after all, there's nowhere else to go—but I don't like this place!"

"It's not what you'd call cheerful."

"It's a great box propped up with bait under it, and now that we've walked under it, it's going to drop over us. Don't listen. I'm only scared. That awful man, this afternoon, telling us their damnable plan in that cool way—I feel like Peter Rabbit, nibbling on a cabbage leaf while the farmer cocks his shotgun."

"Pass me one of those cabbage leaves, Pete," I said. "I'm hungry!" Which set her giggling, and broke the evil spell.

Lugging our weapons and bags, we followed the Colonel up the big curved staircase and down the dank passage to our old quarters. We lit a lamp or two; the familiar furniture sprang out of darkness, and my gaze fell first on the table to which the Tower musket had once been clamped. That seemed half a century ago. I dropped my pig-stickers and rifles on the table. "Let's hustle up some food."

"It's stacked in the next room," said the Colonel, who had been in charge of our stores during the first residence here. "There's enough for about three weeks."

"I'll get dinner," said Marion.

"I'll go down to the wine bins and bring up a few bottles," said Johnson. Luckily, Geoff's ancestors had laid down a noble cellar full of the finest potables.

We all began bustling around, Alec dusting, Marion clinking dishes in our makeshift kitchen, the doctor arranging chairs about the table, the Colonel and I stacking weapons against the walls, and Geoff lounging in an armchair whistling a militant tune. We grew quite gay, laughing and chattering, until old Johnson came in with his pale face grown chalky. The Colonel saw him first.

"For God's sake, man, what is it?"

Johnson sat down heavily, by which sign I knew he was terribly upset, for he would never sit when the rest of us were standing. He passed a hand over his eyes. "I was going through the hall—downstairs, that is—and suddenly I felt as though someone were observing me. You know the sensation, sir?"

"Yes, yes."

"Well, I looked about, and saw nothing at first, so thinking it was my nerves, I went on to the cellars. I chose two bottles of wine and a good brandy—" he held them out and automatically I took them—"and came up again. Just as I stepped through the entrance to the cellars, I happened to glance toward the front door. There, looking in at me through the dirty glass of the window beside it, was a face. I—I can't tell you what a turn it gave me. The eyes seemed almost to glow, you know, sir. It was horrible."

Into the silence that followed Geoff said, "We've had a ghost here for ten generations, Johnson. The Stalking Man, they call him. I used to see him frequently when I was a nipper. He's supposed to walk on the south terrace between sundown and cock-crow."

Johnson stared wildly at him as though Geoff had sprouted two heads. "No, no sir," he said. "This wasn't a man. It was a woman."

"What happened next?" barked the Colonel.

"Well, sir, I'm afraid I was so startled that I stepped back into the entrance-way; and when I had conquered my aversion and returned, she was gone. I didn't go and look out the window as I should. I fear I was badly rattled. I came straight upstairs."

You might have sliced the apprehension in that room with a blunt knife. Nobody moved, except to turn their heads to one another with widened eyes. I wet my lips then.

"The barmaid from Exeter Parva," I said. "They've identified Geoff from something he left behind, and sent the word down here to check on the castle. It would occur to them at once, when they knew about Geoff, that we might make for such a sanctuary. They've sent the word to that fearful green-horned octopus, and it's hared out here to investigate. We're pinpointed now, lads, like a covey of quail on an open marsh."

Colonel Bedford was holding a Mannlicher. He opened the bolt with a snap. "Load up, my boys," he said. "Load 'em all up, and then let's have some food. The condemned may as well eat a hearty meal."

CHAPTER XIX

Surprisingly, we all slept very well that night. Each of us (save Geoff and Marion) took an hour and a half at sentry-go, roaming through the monstrous old place peering out of windows and jumping at every creak; but before and after my own tour of duty I slept dreamlessly and comfortably, and found in the morning that the others had done likewise. We foregathered at the breakfast table, which was placed in the center of a broad cheerful beam of sunlight that lanced down through age-old panes of glass, and we ate tinned meat and biscuits with honey and mugs of well-creamed coffee, with as excellent appetites as one could wish for.

When the meal was done, Johnson picked up one of the long pig-sticking spears and hefted it, trying the balance.

"Going to stab us a shoat, Sergeant?" asked Alec.

"No sir. It's that I can't abide firearms, while fifty years ago I was rather good with one of these, if I may say so without boasting. A number of us used to go out on the veld and try our luck at riding down small antelope, on days when the Boers left us alone, you know, sir. I think I could still wield one with the best of you young 'uns—begging your pardon, I'm sure, sir."

The Colonel bounced out of his chair. "Line up for weapons issue," he cried. "Who's tough enough to handle my elephant gun?"

"Will Chester," said Marion, with a grim nod.

I was then presented with the heaviest piece of Bedford's artillery and two pocketfuls of shells. Doctor John drew the Mannlicher and the Colonel himself took a murderous old 450-400 with which he'd once hunted big game. Marion had a light sporting rifle. Geoff and Alec, who styled themselves the Hamstrung Brigade, could obviously not handle rifles; but Alec thrust two Colt .45s through his belt, and Geoff was allowed to wear a long hunting knife—"just in case." The Colonel outfitted each of us others with one or two revolvers apiece, and we parceled out plenty of ammunition. Even Johnson had to add a .22 target pistol to his brace of spears.

"Now then," said Colonel Bedford, "here's how I see it. We're in as good a place as any for hanging on: the place is unburnable, and we can hold it against successive waves—first fighting on the ground floor, then retreating to this one, hall by hall and room by room, and finally when things really grow hot we can get onto the roof and make a fight there. We're far enough away from any settlement that the noise of a battle won't carry except by a freak of the wind. We can have a nice private war."

"But," interrupted Marion, "do we want a nice private war? I think we should want publicity for it, because they don't. D'you see? I'm for dragging the whole mess into the open."

"And end in a loony bin," said Alec. "No, the Colonel's right as far as he goes: this is the place to make a stand, and since we know we can't escape to anywhere in this island that'll be safe, we may as well stop here to make our fight. They aren't going to bring down a blooming brigade to eliminate us, mind you; they'll think, 'Ha, there's only seven, we'll just send round a score or so to pip 'em.' They don't know we've an arsenal here."

"And meanwhile," said Geoff excitedly, waving his pipe, "Arold Smiff in Birmingham will be gathering his crew. If we give him—how long would you say, Will?"

"Another couple of days, maybe. He's got to treat each of those thugs to a drink or two and sound him out before he hires him. It will take a few days. Besides, he thinks he's got a week at least. I'm supposed to be meandering over England getting names. And I'm afraid that scheme's out, too."

"P'raps, p'raps ... well, say we give Arold a couple of days, and then phone him—from Exeter Parva, let's say—to bring his outlaws down here a-whoopin' and a-cussin' in a bunch. How's that? They roar in, mop up practically all the usurpers in sight, then we catch a few of the aliens and tell 'em. 'This is a sample. We can see you, so there's no use your sticking. Scram!' How's that?"

"Dandy, dandy. Except for the little matter of getting out of here to phone Arold. What if we're surrounded?"

"Oh, hell's tinkling bells! Where's your red Injun blood? But if you like, one of us can leave now, before they arrive. He can contact Arold, have him hurry it up, and in a day or two catch the besiegers in the rear." Geoff was jubilant, and some of his fervor rubbed off on me. I said. "Right! We'll draw straws."

"You're the logical choice, Will," said Alec. "You know this Smith, after all. The plan is your pigeon. You go."

The Colonel was standing by the window, glancing out now and again as we talked. He said, "One minute chaps. Come here."

We crowded to the window. He pointed down to the drive. Shortly we saw a man run stooping across an open space in the old stone balustrade. The substance of the alien body seemed to float about him like a flimsy cloak of many colors.

"They're all along the front," said Bedford. "If they've covered the back, lads—it's a bit late for our emissary to think of leaving."

We spread out over the house, peering cautiously out of windows at front and back and sides. Then we gathered in the upper hall, as disconsolate a band of crusaders as ever eyed each other with grim scowls.

We were entirely surrounded. The siege was on.

CHAPTER XX

Marion and the doctor roamed the upper floor, watching developments from the windows; when the first rush came, they were to fire down on the enemies' heads. Geoff was ensconced behind an overturned table at the head of the great staircase, so he could at least hear everything that occurred. Alec, Johnson, the Colonel and I were the ground floor garrison; we bolted off the east and west wings entirely, barricading the doors thereto with piles of lumber from the cellars so that if the aliens broke into those sections of the castle, it would avail them little. We had already carried a dozen armloads of bottles up to our quarters from the bins below us, and there seemed little we could do now but wait, there in that echoing empty hall, until our foe took the initiative. This happened about eleven o'clock that morning.

We heard Marion's warning cry, and instantly sprang to our feet (we had each been sitting below a window, trying to relax) and looked out. I was at the front of the house with Alec. I saw some fifteen or eighteen of the monstrous beast-folk come lumbering across the open spaces between the house and the drive. I smashed a pane of glass in the mullioned window with my elephant gun and let fly at the foremost surper. He caught the charge right in the belly, and went heels-over-head backward to lie in a tangle of dark limbs and body, above which the mortally wounded alien grew pale and flickered and went out with a sputter. I let off the second barrel at another and reloaded hastily, thanking the powers that I'd taken this great shoulder-punishing gun rather than one of the lighter and less effective rifles; its load would stop a man even if the wound was not mortal, and I with my double vision was handicapped above my friends. It was often difficult for me to locate the vital points in a running puppet, when the body about him was distending and wavering through half-a-dozen horrible shapes.

I stopped another pair of them in as many seconds, then drew my two revolvers and began to fire first one and then the other, ambidextrously, like Wild Bill Hickock in the films. I don't know how many shots I wasted, but it was a bloody barrage.

That first charge lasted no more than three minutes, I should judge. They were taken quite by surprise, and comparing notes after, we discovered that they had not even bothered to have their own guns drawn when they began their attack. They must have pictured us crouching in terror, with bottles and chair legs for weapons.

Marion came to the head of the stairs and called to us. We assured her of our safety; Geoff was growling to himself over not being able to take a hand in the sport. Then the second wave came at us.

This time they were more cautious, and had automatics and target pistols in their hands. We took toll of them with our rifles and then with our handguns; when they withdrew again, they left at least a score of dead and dying husks on the ground around our fortress.

Just to show them that we were the seers they thought us, and also to decimate the ranks of the ungodly, I picked off all those wounded robots whose tenants were vacating, dashing back and forth from window to window to give the effect of half a dozen sharpshooters. I think that gave them pause, for nothing else happened until well into the afternoon.

Alec had a grazed cheek from which the blood was seeping, and Johnson had been cut on the shoulder by flying glass, but otherwise we were still intact.

"What do they look like?" I asked Alec, as we stood together watching the deserted drive. "I can't tell much from those crumpled corpses, and you know they're so many dim shadows in misshapen sheaths of unearthly coloring to me when they're alive."

"Oh, they're—normal. People you'd see anywhere, and never notice 'em. Small business men, maybe, or out-of-work clerks. Nondescript. Certainly they're not seasoned fighters."

"It's occurred to me that a lot of them must have got out of joining in the late world fracas, one way or another; through their bigwigs, you know. I doubt they'd care to go marching off to war in one of our little two-bit three-dimensional fracases, and I'll bet their ranks were full of shirkers and slackers and dodgers and pseudo-conchies. So maybe they have no experienced fighters!"

"Those out there aren't," agreed Alec. "What duffers they looked, trotting up to our guns!"

There was one more attack, about four o'clock. This was a more carefully planned affair, and by utilizing all the cover they could, and coming in from all directions, they managed to get right up to the windows. When they did we retreated to the center of the hall, the windows framed them into perfect targets, and after losing a dozen or more they retreated in their turn, for the last time that day.

At dusk we deserted the ground floor and, barricading the stairs as effectively as we could, took up our posts on the upper floor. Sentry duty was apportioned, and after a good meal and an hour of desultory talking we lay down to sleep as much of the night through as the usurpers would allow.

My watch was from three to four-thirty. I was prowling around the halls, peering into each room as I passed, when above the night noises and the snoring of the Colonel I thought I heard an ominous creaking. On tiptoe I went down the hall, past the stairwell that went down into sinister blackness, and fetched up some yards thereafter before a gaping square hole in the wall of the passageway. What the devil...! I turned the beam of my electric torch into it. It was another staircase, narrow and steep, which I had not known existed. Without hesitation I started down its creaky old treads. The air was musty and smelled of a thousand generations of mice. More through my skin than my ears I got the impression that someone was descending these secret stairs in advance of me.

I drew out one of my guns, with a childlike thrilling of my pulse, and muffling the torch's light with the fingers of my left hand so that only a thin streak or two of brightness preceded my searching feet, I went down.

The square door at the bottom was standing wide. Slipping through it, with the torch now dark, I stood still and listened.

The moon's rays patterned the cold floor under the windows, and across one of them I thought I saw a shadow glide. I swiveled my head quickly. Perhaps I had been mistaken. There was nothing there. The end of the room in which was cradled the massive black fireplace lay in impenetrable gloom. Watching this, I felt the skin of my neck creep and the hair bristle....

Something had moved in that murk, I could swear it. Something bigger and more ponderous than a body. I could not pin down the exact analogy I groped for: it was as if ... as if the wall had suddenly advanced toward me, and then sunk back again. I husked through a dry throat. This would not do. Despite the usurpers without, I had to risk a light.

I shot the beam of the torch across the wall from corner to corner. Nothing moved. I went to the cold fireplace—feeling the eyes of a multitude of ghosts upon me as I moved—and ran the flash over it. I even knelt and peered up the gut of the chimney. Nothing. I found myself shuddering. One more sweep of the torch around the vault of the hall, and then I ran (I admit it freely) for the secret door. Pulling it to behind me, I raced up the narrow steps and with pounding heart slammed the upper one also. I saw then that it was a swinging panel, that looked much like any one of the other panels in the hall. This secret must be a relic of the bad old days, when Exeter Castle was young and the nobility was riddled with treachery, intrigue, and evil.

After two minutes of cogitation, I went and aroused Colonel Bedford. He listened to my tale in silence. Then, "This might be serious," he said. "Let's wake the others."

We did, and in the short time before the early dawn of summer gilded the east windows, we combed that castle from roof to cellars; but the incredible fact which we had uncovered remained, not to be dispelled or explained by any means in our power.

Geoff Exeter, our poor gallant blind Geoff, had disappeared....

CHAPTER XXI

I truly believe that that day was the longest and worst I ever managed to live through.

The aliens who ringed the castle did not attack in force: but they maintained a kind of sullen, dangerous watchfulness over the place, and every time one of us showed himself at a window, a rifle cracked and a slug spread itself on a wall nearby or buried itself in the ceiling above him.

"What are they doing?" Marion asked me again and again. "Why are they waiting?" And I could not tell her.

The night came, but our sleep was no more than an occasional leaden doze which left us unrefreshed, with gummy aching eyes and minds gnawed by worry.

Where in hell was Geoff?

Had they slipped in and abducted him, right out from beneath our noses? Hardly. The doors and windows were still bolted.

Had he left of his own free will? And if so, how? And why?

"The place is haunted," Alec had said somberly at dinner; and in my heart I half agreed with him.

That night we had renewed our barricades at the head of the stairs, and kept our watches as before. About six in the morning I was starting to tear down the lumber once more when a hand was laid on my arm, and the Colonel, his face gray and drawn, said, "Leave 'em, boy."

"Why?"

"Come and look out the window. They've gathered. There must be two hundred if there's a one. We can't hold that great hall against them when they come. We've got to make a stand up here."

It was true. The groves and the unkempt lawns swarmed with them, their loathsome bodies all gay and shining in the sunlight.

"Still clerks and shopkeepers?" I asked.

"No, this is a rather less appetizing lot. More like the mugs you were always spying on in pubs," said Alec. "They look—well, pretty competent."

"We'll give them a reception," said the Colonel grimly. "Spread out, front and back, and fire into the brown of 'em when I give the word. Empty your rifles and then your revolvers as fast as you can; the fools are bunched so that we can't miss. There's not a military man in the lot, I'll be bound."

I went to the farthest corner of the east wing, many rooms away from our G.H.Q. by the main stairwell: I swung open a window as gently as possible, then waited for the Colonel's signal. I imagined he would fire his 450-400. I was forgetting that for development of the lungs there's nothing to compare with half a lifetime of commanding the sepoys of India. To say merely that he shouted "Fire!" in a stentorian voice is like saying that the Last Trump will be rather loud. His bellow rattled the beams of oak in their stone sockets. Even the aliens on the lawns turned to look in his direction.

I thrust out the muzzle of my pachyderm blaster and let it speak twice in rapid fire; dropped it, threw down on the milling crew with my two Colts, and picked off three more usurpers before they could gather their wits and make for the groves. When the guns were empty I counted seven bodies. If my friends had had as good luck, I thought exultantly, the foe had lost more than thirty of their number! I found subsequently that our total for the surprise attack was twenty-four or -five.

This decimation must have shaken them to their toes, for the morning wore on and no assault came.

Johnson brought each of us a bowl of soup and a plate of biscuits at noon. Staying at my post in the eastern corner, I watched the trees and thought of Geoff Exeter.

Could that have been Geoff whom I followed down the secret stair two nights since? Certainly it was not one of them; and Geoff of all people would have known of its existence, for he had spent his childhood here in the castle. If it was him, where had he gone from the great hall? And what had moved in the black shadows of the fireplace? Had Geoff been spirited away by ghosts? I could credit anything, after these past months of hellish experience.

As I was chewing my last biscuit, firing broke out at the front of the castle; first a single shot or two, then heavy volleys, as though all my friends were engaged in it. I shifted from foot to foot, wondering what to do. Finally, after a searching look at the groves and lawns where nothing moved, I ran for the hallway.

Marion and Alec were shooting from the windows of our sitting room. I dashed in, said foolishly, "What is it, an attack?" and looking out saw line after line of the beast-folk advancing rapidly on the castle, their numbers not bunched this time but spread out so that they presented more difficult targets. I judged them to be at least two hundred and fifty strong. "Shoot low," I snapped, even as I brought the elephant gun to bear on a blue octopus-like brute and sent him sprawling. "Remember you're aiming downhill."

The thunder of a battering-ram smiting at the big door seemed to jar the floor beneath our feet. It ceased in a moment, and I heard the Colonel bawl, "They're in! Come to the stairs!"

We gathered there behind our lumber-and-furniture barricade, six against an army. We did not say anything coherent, I believe, but continually shouting encouraging noises to one another, we fired and fired until our weapons grew hot to the touch. The beasts were thronging the hall below us, converging on the stairs and tearing at the mass of impeding obstacles which the Colonel and John had strewn down the length of the steps that morning. It was at once a hideous and a thrilling sight. The monsters were swarming up at us, a foot at a time, clawing at planks and barrels and broken chairs, hurling them back onto their comrades' heads; none of them seemed to be firing at us, though in the heat of battle I may not have noticed if they had. It looked to me as if they were too infuriated to bother with guns. Like so many enraged baboons, they wanted to get at us and tear us to bloody tatters with their hands and teeth alone. As they fought upward, those in the fore exploded soundlessly, horribly, and quickly, like multicolored bags of gaudy rubber stabbed with sharp knives, leaving their dead robots to roll and flounder to the bottom again. I had run out of ammo for the big gun; howling with a kind of mad glee, I blazed away into the thick of them with my twin Colts, putting my bullets into the dark human forms within the hybrid monsters. The castle rocked and echoed with the fury of the fight. Cordite and spilt blood reeked in my nostrils. One of the devils, a rhinocerous-brute with a towering ivory-tinted "horn" that wobbled as he moved, came scrambling on all fours up over the mess of wreckage toward us; I took him for my very own, waiting until he was within a yard of me and then presenting both my revolvers to his face and pulling the triggers.

My guns were empty!

Before I could recover from my surprise, he had gathered himself—he must have been an especially athletic fellow—and leaped straight for me. I went down under his weight, flailing my arms wildly. I was unprepared for a scuffle and for a few seconds could do nothing to defend myself properly. Before I had rallied, the body of the creature went limp and sagged down onto me, while his true form flickered away into nothingness. I struggled out from under him to see old Johnson pulling back a bloodied pig-sticker. He grinned at me complacently. "Still a trace of the old skill left, Mister Chester!"

They were the last words he ever spoke. A volley crashed out below us, and he swayed and fell at full length, like an ancient tree cut at the roots. I knelt over him, and saw that he was dead.

I peered over the railing, while feverishly loading my guns, and saw that we were nearly done; for the aliens, sacrificing scores of their men in that wild attack, had almost cleared the staircase. Now they were pulling back the corpses and the last of the impeding furniture, and only our barricade at the top remained between them and our garrison of five. Any of them who were in good shape and in the least degree agile could clear this barrier with ease. I knew we were almost done.

Now there occurred one of those queer, inexplicable pauses that come in the thick of the wildest battles, when the men of both sides seem to draw back an imperceptible inch or two, cease firing and yelling, suck in a deep swift breath, and tauten their muscles for a final foray or a last furious defense. The usurpers in the hall and on the stairs fell silent as though by prearrangement; while we humans, as it chanced, were all either loading or taking careful sights over our gun barrels.

And in that comparative silence, broken only by the susurrus of heavy breathing, we all suddenly pricked up our ears and listened. The pause lengthened, by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement between the two parties. I looked at the Colonel, and he gestured imperiously toward the nearest room that faced on the drive. I flew into it, making for a window.

Because there had come to us the sound of many automobiles, driven at high speed down the country lane that led to Exeter Castle.

CHAPTER XXII

Behind me I heard firing start up again, though not with any great volume. Below me as I leaned out of the window I saw a number of usurpers come running out of the broken door to see what was happening, then turn and go in again. My attention was not on them however, but on the drive, where the first of a line of motors had already pulled up and stopped.

It was an old pre-war sedan. Its doors opened and six or seven men boiled out of it, staring at the castle and shouting as they moved.

Men! Not were-folk, not monsters, but men!

Had the sound of our fight carried to Exeter Parva? No, it could never produce these fifteen autos, decrepit though most of them were. Exeter Parva ran more to hay wagons.

Then the riddle was solved. The second car, a battered Bentley, halted, and out of the front seat climbed a man I would have recognized on a dark night in a cellar.

Dear old drunken, amoral, faithful Arold Smiff! Smiff to the rescue!

"At 'em, Arold!" I whooped. "Inside, son!"

He stared up at me, then waved joyfully. "General! Hoy, General! Gawddam!" He motioned fiercely to his henchmen. "Come on, you one-legged paralyzed barstids, earn your wack! Out arms and forrard!"

Great God, did ever such a motley army advance on such an unearthly enemy? It was like the thieves of Paris defending their city against Burgundy ... had that kingdom recruited its army from the swamps of Hell. From the line of cars swarmed a gang of shabby, dirty, swearing men, as tough and evil looking a mob as ever trod the soil of England. Spawned in the slums and reared on violence, every one of them! Muggers, knifers, coshers, men with scarred faces and broken teeth, men fitting brass knuckles on their fists as they came, men sliding straight razors (the favorite weapon of our underworld) from their frayed sleeves and clicking open big clasp knives, men drawing automatics for which you could have staked your life they had no permits, men who were scarcely more than wild boys and men who had grown gray and bald in crime; at once as undisciplinable and as effective a fighting troop as one could find anywhere. I think I screamed encouragement to them as they came, for I was half-hysterical with relief. Arold Smiff, miraculously, had come in time.

As they ran toward the castle I ducked inside and went to my friends, loading my guns as I moved. The aliens were still attacking up the stairs, but now they wavered as the vanguard of the thugs struck them from behind. All roaring hell broke loose.

I saw plenty of action in the last war; I saw the slaughter of the Normandy beaches and the havoc wrought through France, Germany, and several other countries; but the goriest brawl I ever laid eye on was the fight at Exeter Castle between Arold Smiffs hundred criminals and the motley hordes of the silver land.

We were outnumbered, at the start, nearly two to one. But our crooks were professional killers, used to the mechanics of murder, and the usurpers were not. The hall was jammed from wall to wall with a struggling, howling, thrashing jam of fighters, so that often when a man was killed his body could not fall; conditions were thus perfect for our knifers and gougers, throttling experts and razormen.

The aliens for the most part had turned from us to engage this new menace. We tore away our barricade and charged down to mix it with them. I caught a glimpse of Arold before I struck the level. He had an automatic in his right hand and in his left, one of those fearsome weapons used by the gangs in their private wars, called a "moley"—a large potato, stuck half-full of safety razor blades. When pressed against the face and twisted, it made a grisly instrument of torture, mutilation, and often death. I grimaced. These were wicked men who had come to our rescue.

With our heavy Colts we blasted back the beast-men till we had cleared a space at the foot of the stairs; standing shoulder to shoulder, we bellowed, "Rally! To us, to us, rally round!" and many of the rogues fought through the press to join us, so that shortly we were the nucleus of the battle. Bedford led a charge that smashed the center of the enemy line and crumpled up the right wing as it returned. I saw John Baringer go down from a blow on the head; beat my way to him and dragged him to the relative safety of the big fireplace.

I was entirely out of ammunition by then. Sticking the pistols in my belt for last-ditch use as clubs, I grappled with the human husk of a big sprawling beetle-beast, throttled him, took away a butcher's cleaver he was utilizing, brained him with it and waded into the combat once more. I was splashed with gore from boots to hair, my left arm was numb from a crack on the elbow, I was whooping like a maniac, and felt myself supremely happy. I would not have been anywhere else for ten thousand pounds sterling.

I found myself next to Arold. I hugged him, and his muddy-crimson eyes squeezed up with a grin. "General! Bloody fine scrim!"

"How did you know to come here?" I yelled at him; but the tides of battle flung us apart before he could answer. I knew, though. Nobody in the world but Geoff could have brought him.

I found myself engaged with a razorman of our own forces, and had to explain who I was, in exceedingly rapid speech. Then I went hunting for the Colonel, and found him dripping blood (someone else's) by the stairs. Now the fight had become a massacre, and the aliens, fleeing, found a heavy guard on the door and no sanctuary anywhere short of the grave. "Colonel," I screeched in his ear, "your voice will carry over this hubbub. Go up the stairs a bit—tell 'em to leave a few alive—got to parley!"

He clumped up the steps, and his bull's roar quelled the racket like thunder drowning out a kindergarten choir. The thugs turned astonished eyes upward, and the few usurpers still on their feet shrank together in a corner. For one brief instant I felt pity for them. Then I remembered their plot to take over our world....

"That's enough," the Colonel was saying. "Collect the remaining enemies and bring 'em here, lads."

The "lads" did so. Alec and I went up the dozen steps to join the Colonel, Marion ran down from the upper floor, and Arold Smiff pushed through his followers to wring my hand heartily. Then we all looked at the things from the silver land, and I began to speak.

CHAPTER XXIII

There were sixteen of them left—sixteen out of two hundred and fifty. No wonder the castle's great hall was swimming with blood! No wonder we all looked like red Indians! "Who's the senior ghoul among you?" I asked, and a white-haired robot encased by a yellow lumpy godhelpus moved forward a little. The Colonel hissed in my ear.

"Good gad. I know that man! That's Sir Lawrence Hockling!"

"He's also a monstrous, warty, holey creature, like a lump of wormy cheese.... Good afternoon, Sir Lawrence," I said loudly. "I believe you've been looking for me. I'm Robert Hood of Manchester."

"Ah yes, the Slasher." The bugaboo that was Sir Lawrence nodded briefly. "It seems we have failed to annihilate you. No matter; others will."

"No, Sir Lawrence, you fail to grasp the situation. You're finished, you invaders. You've had your fun, but now you've got to pick up and go home, and never come back. Because we can see you."

He held up his hand. "Wait, sir. We accept you as a seer, of course. There have been others—" Jack the Ripper, said I to myself with a chuckle—"others who have accidentally been enabled to pierce the veil between the lands. We have dealt with them, as we shall eventually with you. But your companions—let them describe us!"

The Colonel pounced on this challenge like a tiger on a goat. I was breathless, thankful that I had described at least Sir Lawrence to him. "You're a cross between a speckled cheese and a diseased bit of garbage. Lumps and bumps all over your slimy carcass!"

"Good enough," said the monster, quaking with wrath. "That will do, Colonel Bedford. I meant to say, let some of these—ah, rather unwashed gentry tell us of our true bodies."

I was turning sick with fear, the fear that now we were done for, that now the colossal bluff would collapse. I had forgotten Arold—Arold, who could see them plain as day.

"The bloke on yer right," he shrilled, "is lyke a shark, all silvery and slick, wiff a big glow in 'is guts lyke a blurry fire. Next t' him is—welp, it's 'ard to tell, but I'd say he were a ostopus, you know, one o' them big leather things under the ocean."

"Shall I have each of them describe you all?" I leaped into the breech with a shouted challenge. "Shall we waste a couple of hours talking of your stalks and pseudopods? Or are you satisfied? Man, man, why do you think they came here, if not to crush you and your kind? Why did they fight you with such fury, if not because they can see you in all your horror?" Needless to say, Arold's ruffians were staring bug-eyed at all this incomprehensible arguing.

"Well," said Sir Lawrence, "you obviously couldn't make so many men believe in us if they couldn't see us. I simply had to make sure." Fortunately he and the others never turned round to observe the wonder on the thugs' faces. "I accept you as seers. How did you manage it? How did you warp their vision?"

"You know as well as I." Now, Will Chester, bluff, bluff!

"Yes," he said, "ever since we entered your world, centuries ago, we've been afraid that one day the secret of vision-tuning might be stumbled upon by some clever member of your species. The trick of it is, after all, ridiculously simple."

I snapped my fingers to show how simple it was, as I thought grimly of that antique Tower musket blasting across my eyes. But through my brain the ideas were tumbling. There was an easy way to change one's sight, to peer into the silver land. That made my bluff much more feasible!

"Yet it has been found too late, sirrah. We are ready to invade your plane by the millions, through every new birth that takes place on your globe. Can you, a handful of seers, wipe out so many? I think not!"

"You fool," I said coldly, "do you think I risked our whole band in this slaughter? There are men all over England now, performing that simple operation on others. There are hundreds, yes, thousands of us already. We're wise to you, my boy; we've got an underground as efficient as your own. Already we're spreading to other countries. In a short time the entire world will be on guard against you—and men will be assassinating you in the dark." I let out my chest and roared it at him. I was suddenly an inspired Henry V before Agincourt, an impassioned Emile Zola addressing the jury of Dreyfus, a thundering Caesar in the Senate. Marion said later that my eyes flashed lambent flame and she thought the roof of my mouth would split. I had a great sense of my own power; I felt my frame filling with the elation of a true savior, a liberator, an emancipator. I curved my hands like talons and shook them above my head, intoxicated with a belief in my own wholly untrue words.

"Don't you see how useless it will be for you to be born into a world where you will be seen and immediately slain? From now on, the bestowing of double vision will be as much a part of a man's life as his—his education, baptism, and what-have-you. Forevermore we'll be on guard against you. I tell you now: go home, go back to your silver-lined wastes, and never try to trouble us again. Give up your infiltrating, your bestial usurping of bodies that ought to have had the chance to live and see and feel and think for themselves. Go home, God damn you all, go home! Your sole weapon, invisibility, is gone. You don't enjoy death any more than we do—I've felt your fear! I feel it now! Be sensible; you made a good try, but you've lost. Go home!"

The mouldy-looking thing that was Sir Lawrence began to colloque silently with his countrymen, after their fashion. I looked beyond them to the army of thugs. Most of them, giving up their attempt to understand what the toffs were talking about, were engaged in looting the dead. I wondered what to do with them after this was over, if my bluff worked. Pay them off and send them home, I supposed. They would never talk about this pogrom—they'd be hanged! I'd have to see that they helped us bury all these corpses, alien robots and dead rogues alike, before they left. About twenty of the thugs had been killed. Who would miss them? And an event was coming—I devoutly hoped!—which would engulf any such minor event as the disappearance of some three hundred men from all walks of life....

At last Sir Lawrence Hockling turned back to me. All his companions, too, faced my way.

Never, in all my journeying among their foul kind, had I felt the concentrated effluvia of so much hate, so many noxious, diabolic waves of damnable ferocity beating against me like the wind off the Styx, turning me weak and sick. Malignant powers from the poisonous womb of Hell! I shook with uncontrollable nausea, with the dreadful revulsion caused by the towering, smashing, soul-wrenching blast of hatred flung at me by the group of beast-folk in that moment. It was beyond words. Nor was it my warped vision, affecting my other senses in the relatively mild way it had done before this. No, this was a feral force, a raging thing which knew no bonds of dimension or of the senses. It stabbed to the soul itself. Marion gave a muffled scream and huddled down on the step, clasping my knees; even the Colonel, the last man to be disturbed by an abstruse sensation, gasped audibly. As for poor Arold, he sat down with a bump and hid his face in his hands, whimpering; having as we did the added receptivity, that terrible blow nearly killed us both. The hall was blotted from my sight, a gulf opened below me, I felt myself hurtling down into unmentionable depths of agony. When I opened my eyes I did not know what to expect: perhaps the unknown wastes and plains of the silver land, whither their foul thrust, I thought, might very well have hurled me. As a matter of fact, I was still standing upright on the staircase. I have never been more surprised.

Then I saw that they were in the process of leaving their human bodies, wrenching and hauling backward as though caught in a tight box.

"We accept your ultimatum," said the scholarly voice of the beast who was Sir Lawrence Hockling. "We are rational beings. We have been beaten, and we will return to our own plane, which lies at an angle to your space-time continuum. Please spread the word of the capitulation abroad, so that no more may die. Agreed?"

"Agreed," I said. I leaped down the steps to stand face to face with his robot. "I give you three days of grace," I cried, "and then we begin to slay you all over England."

I looked from him to the others of that group of inferno-bred ogres, shining like so many luminous bloated corpses at the bottom of the sea, with the colors of malice and savagery changing, coming and going in their rotten bodies; feeling the last exhalations of their enmity touching me like a palpable force. It had not begun to dawn on me that we had won. My head throbbed and racketed like a gourd full of thunder. Then I saw two men coming toward me through the mob, and my headache died to a near-forgotten dull throb; for they were John Baringer and Geoff Exeter.

"Look what I found on the lawn," said the doctor. "Sitting out there as calm as ice, whistling Lili Marlene!"

"What ho," said Geoff, groping with his hand until I had gripped it with mine. "You boys have fun?"

"I knew it," said I. "I knew you were the one. How'd you get out? How'd you find your way to Birmingham?"

"Long story, son ... everyone okay?"

"All but Johnson."

"The sergeant," said Geoff blankly. "Why, he's to live forever, hang it."

"He's gone."

Geoff was still for a minute, and then burst out, "Well, don't say it like a morbid stuffed owl! After fifty years of civilian life, he smelt the powder and heard the shots again, God be thanked! So he died—so bloody what? It's how he should have gone."

"Right," said I, from the heart. I turned to the aliens then, and found sixteen grinning, drooling, mindless carcasses, staring round with blank dull eyes. They were empty hulks. The usurpers were gone into their silver-blue fastnesses, and the fight was done.

CHAPTER XXIV

A week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London's finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over.

At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembered as he came to the ground floor that there was an old hidden exit in the back of the fireplace.

"I give you my word I never meant to use it! I only wanted to see if I remembered the trick of it. You twist one of the hounds on the stone coat of arms, and the door opens behind the logs. Well, I did it, and heard the door clink open; I hadn't tried it since I was a kid, and I thought, By golly, what a lark to go through the underground tunnel and see if the other end's still workable! I guess I had some vague notion of us using it for an escape route, if things got too hot for us in the castle. So I went in, and closed the door behind me.

"I bumbled along the tunnel—how I recalled the feel of those damp, rough bricks!—and came after three hundred feet to the other end, where a hidden trap leads to a summerhouse. I lifted it cautiously, still with no idea of leaving the tunnel, and felt the breeze on my face; and I knew then that I had to go on. I'd come this far and suddenly I knew I had to keep travelin' till I got to Birmingham and Arold. So I slipped out and cut straight through the woods till I came to the road. My lack of sight was no handicap, because there's not a chunk of turf within five miles o' the castle I don't know by its first name.

"After I hit the road it was easy. I just groped my way for a few hours till I knew by the sound of the farm dogs that I'd come to Granny Moore's place. After running into a fence and a cart or two, I found the door and banged on it; explained to Granny that I had to get to Birmingham as quick as possible; and she, bless her staunch old soul, detailed her youngest boy (a lad of forty-nine) to take me there, without so much as a single query as to my reasons—and that's all. I found Arold that afternoon at Old Mag's."

"To think I was standing in the hall when you went through the door in the fireplace," I said. "God! I thought it was ghosts I heard."

"I'd have left a note, or come back to tell you, but I was all carried away with the spirit of rollicking adventure and looniness," said Geoff, filling his pipe. "I expect I gave you some bad hours. I'm sorry."

"Forgiven," gruffed the Colonel. "You saved our bacon."

"And the world," said Marion quietly.

"Yes, the world! The jolly old human race, that didn't even know it was in danger, and wouldn't believe it now if we told it! Hell's sweet bells, it's hard for me to believe!" Geoff laughed. "Did we really pit ourselves against ten thousand fantastic beasts, and drive them from our dimension by a colossal bluff? Or did we dream a long horrid dream, we seven strange crusaders?"

"I begin already to doubt my memory," answered Doctor John. "I was never cut out for a cavalier, wooing weird adventures. I'm a solid citizen. I'm going back to my practice on the steamers."

"When?" I asked.

"Next week." Now the present had intruded in our talk, and the future. "What will you do, Colonel?"

"Been thinking of retiring to the country, but I doubt I could stick it after all the excitement we've been through. I expect I'll stay on at the Albany. Lots of things happening about one, you know, keep a chap young."

I laughed to myself at the thought of the staid old-fashioned Albany being a bee-hive of activity, but said nothing. John went on. "You, Alec, what will you do?"

"Huh? Me? Dunno," said Alec blankly. "Haven't cogitated on it."

"Me neither," said Geoff.

"Marion and Will will marry, of course," said the Colonel, as though that accounted for us forever, and no question about it. "And you, sir," he said to Arold, making that worthy leap in his chair, "what do you intend doing? You're a fairly well-to-do man now."

"Ah, yes, thanks to you gents! As generous and kindly a lot o' toffs—that is to say, gentlemen—as you could arsk for. Me? I'm going over the border. Scotland, that's the ticket for Arold Smiff; nice little village, cozy house, new name, and plenty of gin—welp, anyway, I'm going to Scotland. Never meet nobody there who'd know me, and that's 'ow I wants it after the killings we done down at that there cawstle. Some of the blokes I 'ad to enlist ain't what you'd call above thinkin' of blackmail, to put it straight out. Course they don't know you, but they knows Arold Smiff. Me for the heather!"

"What did you think of the fight?" I asked him. "How did you explain it to them?"

"Hexplyne? To them barst—them blokes? I guv 'em fifteen quid apiece and all the loot they could find. What else 'ld they be wanting?" He grinned. "I might have cawst a few 'ints, such as that we was involved in a political move; the boys is hell on political moves. Maybe I mentioned the Sinn Feiners, careless-lyke. They drawed their own conclusions." He squinted into his cup. "I think I shall call meself Jock MacSmiff," he said meditatively. "Ar, that's a good Scotch name. Maybe I'll even give up the gin. Take Scotch whisky instead, I mean. More patriotic, lyke."

"You'll be able to afford it, old chap, should you live to be a hundred," I told him. "It was nearly all your doing, yours and Geoff's, that we won our fight."

The waiter brought a bottle of Piper Heidsieck '43. The Colonel stood up to propose the first toast.

"Gentlemen and Marion, I give you ex-Sergeant Henry Johnson. There is only one thing we can say of him: greater love hath no man, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

We drank standing. The waiter popped up with a second bottle. We resumed our seats, and Alec said, "The next is mine. I drink to the good green earth, and the race of men who live on it. Maybe they don't go about slopping over with gratitude for its beauty, but I think they appreciate it just the same, and I'm damned glad we saved it for 'em!"

Half-laughing, we drank that one, and many more. I drank to my Jaguar, now a deep red color and never to be identified with the sinister black car which flew out of Manchester that night so long ago. Doctor John drank to Jerry Wolfe, who first discovered the abominable race of beast-folk. Geoff toasted our army of rogues.

They all drank to our happiness, Marion's and mine. Then we called for a fifth bottle, and drank a tall glass down in memory of our victory, total and forever final, over the beast-folk of the silver land. I twirled my glass and stared at it, my eyes unfocused slightly, and I mused on them.

The usurpers....

Sir Lawrence Hockling, to give him his human name, had been as good as his word. Within a day, all through the land, the aliens had begun to decamp in disgust. As messengers raced behind the veil to tell their brothers the sad news, the exodus spread, first through the great centers of population, London and Birmingham and Sheffield, Cardiff and Liverpool, and thence into the countryside until all England was touched by this incredible mass desertion of a world, the beasts relinquished their stolen bodies and retreated into their own dimension. Well within my time limit of three days, the flight was completed. Some twenty-seven thousand robots were abandoned in the withdrawal.

Yet these puppets, these husks, had not died. They had become brainless, true; incapable of performing the simplest acts of caring for themselves; but they lived on. It was more horrible than their deaths would have been, I thought ... and yet there was a ray of hope. I had talked it over with my friends, and they agreed there was a chance of its coming true.

These new things (one could no longer call them puppets, when the marionette-masters had gone) were like nothing on earth so much as new-born babies, babies in grown or half-grown bodies. What if their brains, unimpressed thus far by any experience, now began to develop, even as a baby's begins? What if they were not idiots, as they seemed to a horrified world to be, but simply newly-born humans who must be taught learning and manners and speech and all the rest, as though they were so many victims of a titanic wave of devastating total amnesia?

If this were true—and it logically might be—then our rescue of the world would have been bought even more cheaply than we had calculated. Twenty-seven thousand amnesia victims to retrain is a damned sight better than that many idiots or, as we had expected at first, corpses!

There would still be sorrow and tragedy in the wake of the thing we had done. Couples who had spent lifetimes together had found themselves split, their mutual memories lost forever, as one turned infantile and looked mindlessly at the other. Men who had been forces for good in England (the usurpers were not intent on corrupting our daily lives, be it remembered, but on taking over our whole plane) had become useless hulks, great dribbling infants in old bodies. Many suicides had followed the plague of total amnesia.

Yet if my ray of hope chanced to be true, it took nine-tenths of the curse of the business off our consciences.

And some of the problems connected with the plague would then appear much smaller, and even rather funny; as for example, the twenty-seven thousand adolescents and adults who had never been house-broken....

Well! I came back to myself, filled up my glass again, and drank Arold's toast to Lord Nelson. How he ever crept into our party, I'm sure I don't know. By then, perhaps, we were all a little bit drunk; so we welcomed Lord Nelson, and drank to him joyously. Then we drank a final round to our long bitter fight with the usurpers, and we adjourned for the night. The next day we separated, each to his own place, and the great adventure was over at last.

CHAPTER XXV

It is just a year since we drove the usurpers out of England.

(About the robots that they left behind, my hunch was right; for they are learning to take care of themselves, to walk and speak and act decently, and many have even begun to read and think again. When I consider this, I am inclined to go to my knees in thanks. What might have happened...!)

For a while I could not realize that my wild bluff had actually worked. I kept expecting a trick, a wholesale re-invasion of our world by the ogres. Even yet it is hard to comprehend. I suppose the only explanation is that all created things hate and fear death: in their fashion, the usurpers were just as scared of dying as the humblest human, and must have decided that the vicarious pleasures of earth weren't worth it.

Selfish fear gripped them, selfish deadly fear of murder in the dark. They shrugged themselves out of their stolen bodies, and abandoned the world they had hoped to conquer. The simplest of weapons, the easiest to employ, had done our work for us in a manner beyond our most optimistic dreams. The simplest weapon ... fear.

Marion and I were married, of course, a year ago. The delirious happiness of our marriage has not cooled for me. Some day, perhaps, my feeling will have calmed to a steady, staid, cozy sort of affection; but not yet. Not for a long time yet.

I bought a little bookshop in Bury St. Edmunds, and took in Geoff and Alec as partners. It's the proper life for a quartet of reformed crusaders like the three of us and Marion. Peaceful, contemplative, and yet stimulating. We like it. And we like being together.

John is back on the seas as ship's doctor, the Colonel is laired up at the Albany, and Arold lives in Kirkcudbright, swilling great vats of Scotch whisky, I have no doubt. One day soon we must all get together for a grand reunion....

But a man cannot walk through fire without being burnt; and as there cannot be many such conflagrations as that through which I groped and fled and sought my way, it is only natural that my mind carries even yet a few scars of the burning. I do not expect—I dare not hope—that they will ever be wholly healed.

In certain moods, usually on dreary days when the sky is overcast and the sun is hidden, or sometimes at night when the great yellow hunter's moon rides in a black sky, the horror of the usurpers comes upon me with fresh and lurid obsession, more appalling than ever it was in the weeks of my hectic and headlong warfare. Then I go out into the streets or wander on the moorlands and fight with my hallucinations. A thousand times I tell myself that they are gone, that the world is clean and inviolate again; and a thousand times I hear in reply the hideous laughter of the fear that lives forever at the bottom of my soul.

I walk past a tavern, and see its door swing open, and catch a glimpse of the barman; and he seems to me in that moment to be, not a jovial red-faced fellow, but a twisting writhing monster shot with vivid lights and fringed with rippling pseudopods. A friend comes up behind to clap me on the shoulder, and I dread to turn and look at him, for fear of what he may be. I hear a snatch of speech from a wireless set, and the soft cultured voice emanates, I believe in a sudden jolt of panic, from the lips of a marionette-creature controlled by a hellish and malevolent incubus.

So at last I take my terror home to Marion, and lose it in her arms....

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