The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

CHAPTER VI

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

“You’ll be a wizard at it in a few months.”

“I meant the ruddy ale, i***t. I’m not bragging about my accomplishments yet. Seen any of our chums lately?” he asked.

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

“Fine. Any of ‘em give you any news? Anything startling been happening?”

“Not much. Same old stuff.”

Same old stuff!

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

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

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

“Ar, yus,” he agreed.

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

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

* * * *

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

“Let’s go,” I said to Geoff. “Time we were thinking of bed.”

“Righto.”

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

“Geoff,” I whispered, “I’m going to start the ball rollin’. I’m going to find out something.”

“How, old son?”

“I’m going to do a murder.”

“Think it’s wise?” he asked.

“I want to ascertain something. Just come along a bit.”

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

“Come on, boy, let’s make tracks.”

“Home?”

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

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

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

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

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