CHAPTER IV
939 Words
CHAPTER IVWe went into the deserted hall of Exeter Castle. “Look, Colonel,” I said, “will you tell them about this? They’ll be upstairs. Tell ‘em that it works, that I can see as Jerry Wolfe saw, and everything he told Alec was true. I’ll be all right after a while, but now I want to be alone. I don’t want to be hedged in by close walls, or have to talk. I’ll just roam around down here for a bit. You tell ‘em it’s okay, that I’ll speak to them later.”
“Absolutely.” The Colonel was the best stuff there is. “Come up when you feel like it, son.” He was gone.
I strolled over to one of the great mullioned windows and touched its dusty glass lightly. That glass was older, probably, than all our little band put together. I thought: when it was placed here, were the usurping devils abroad in England? How long have they been filtering through into our world—a hundred years, a thousand? If you start with one and he lets in others, then figuring by the birth rate and the multiplying branches of his horrid clan, how long would it take to let in a million of them? How many figures of our glorious history were just that—figures, puppets, marionettes pulled by fourth-dimensional strings, flesh-and-bone shadows fronting for demons....
We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go....
Jerry had asserted that when the human body died, the alien was relegated to his own world again. Then it had to come back, I presumed, via another birth. It must be centuries, then, at the very least a couple of centuries, since the first one came through. It takes time to corrupt the blood of six-thirteenths of all England.
But was it six-thirteenths? Jerry had taken his census in Charing Cross Station. At Exeter Parva I had seen exactly one usurper. Were they then centered in London? Were there perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty thousand of them altogether? That brought down the odds!
* * * *
I laughed loudly, and the age-old echoes waked in the oak rafters and laughed after me. Oh, the odds were in my favor, all right.
Opposing me, say (conservatively) twenty thousand foemen: great livid beasts like nothing a sane mind could conceive, that had a system of communication outside my dimension which could gather a score or a thousand of them to down me if I showed fight.
On my side, a regular Colonel Blimp of a retired officer, a Boer War veteran, a skeptical middle-aged physician, a blind man, another chap with no left arm, and a girl.
And I: Will Chester, thirty-three years old, five feet ten, moderately strong, normally intelligent; having all my teeth save two, a thick crop of black hair, brown eyes, a complexion more ruddy than otherwise, and a face that, if it would not halt a charging bull in his tracks, still would not win a beauty competition either.... Seven years of Army behind me, an income of eight hundred pounds a year from a legacy, and nothing much in view as a future, until this morning—when I had suddenly been elected the savior of mankind.
I walked across to the tremendous blackened fireplace, empty now of everything but a lonely-looking single bronze firedog. Above the keystone of the arch were the arms and motto of the Exeters, done in ancient stonework. I could not read the motto, having forgotten what Latin I once knew. The arms were a jumble of crossed lances, fleurs-de-lis, and hounds couchant. I wished I had a hound to fondle and pat, to be a companion in these moments when I felt I could not bear a human being near me.
* * * *
For half an hour or so I stood there gazing blindly into the depths of the hearth and pitying myself shamelessly. Then a touch on my arm made me leap like a deer. It was Marion; Marion, carrying with her her own special radiance even in the shadowed hall.
“What cheer, old stager?” she said.
“Not much cheer, lady.”
“Obviously. What is it, got the wind up? Scared sky-blue-pink?”
“Yes. I’ve just realized that this whole affair is fact, is true; that it’s not a crazy adventure in fancy, but a dreadfully real matter of saving the sane world from destruction—and I’m scared!”
“We all are.” She said it quietly, and with her simple words I knew for the first time that I was not alone in my terror of the unknown. We were all afraid. I put my arm around her shoulders. Her long light hair tingled on the back of my hand. I loved her very much, and so I tormented myself.
“I’ve been thinking of Jerry Wolfe, and of how alone he must have felt. He didn’t have six pals behind him when the first alien fouled his view.”
“Poor old Jerry,” she said.
“You were engaged to him, weren’t you?”
“Yes, back in prehistoric times, before Jennifer Tregennis caught him. Jennifer was one of them, you know.”
“Yes, I know. D’you still love Jerry?”
“How do you mean? Of course I do.”
I didn’t say anything. She went on after a moment. “But I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you’re driving at. Good heavens, Will, do you see me as a moony widow-in-name-only? I’ve got more sense than that.”
My heart lifted. I patted her on the back. “Come along young Marion. Let’s go plan strategy with the troops.”
We went up the stairs to our sitting room, and I stood before the six of them and took the reins into my hands. I had a job to do.
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