The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

CHAPTER VIII

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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