Front matter (continued 2)

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."