"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, becausetheydon'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 gatheringhiscrew. 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 ofthemmust 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....
Somethinghad 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 ofthem; 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, butmen!
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. Therewasan 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 heshouldhave 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 formeto 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 onthem.
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. Whatmighthave 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 thattheyare 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....