The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER IXIt was a mean street, one of the meanest in the whole city. The moon was vivid, and straight overhead, so that my shadow lay in a black little pool around my feet. I sought a dark doorway and waited, knife in hand, my brain full of liquor and loathing.

A man, and a man, and then a beast....

I slid along in his tracks, glancing quickly behind me to make sure we were unobserved, and swiftly performed the now-familiar operation of driving the impalpable demon back to its own dimension by hacking the throat of the man-shape. Standing above the dead thing, I knew for a second or two the feeling that must have held Jack The Ripper as he stood over his victims: I wanted to stab and s***h and mutilate, I wanted to let out some of the terrible hatred that boiled in my heart.

Civilization won, however, and I sheathed the knife after wiping it clean on the man’s leather jacket.

At that moment one of them came round the corner and stood staring at me, not twenty feet off!

It was a gorgon of a brute, with several repulsive “heads” on lean stalks of necks; the biggest one looked rather like a hippopotamus whose mother had been frightened by a Ubangi, and I was so used to the weird beings by now that, had I seen this one on a daylit street, I think I would have chuckled. In that deserted lane, though, with the shell of its brother’s puppet at my feet, I didn’t chuckle. I turned and ran like hell.

A whistle split the air; I turned my head as I pelted away, and squinted my eyes. By all the gods! The hippo gorgon was a bobbie! A ruddy P.C.!

The garage where my Jaguar champed at her inactive gears was only a couple of blocks from the lane. I made for it, taking an extra turning or two in order to lose my pursuer. Coming to the big double doors, I slowed to a business-like stride, went in and demanded my car with a brisk tone, and bestowed a couple of notes on the attendant who brought her to me.

“Be coming back again?” he asked me cheerily.

“Oh, very likely,” I lied, and because he was a blessedly human little man, I tipped him an extra pound, which made him goggle and stutter as he thanked me.

* * * *

I shot the black car out into the street, turned left and lost myself in the maze of Manchester. The distant whistling of the searchers died out behind me.

Now, I thought, I was in the bloody soup. My description would be circulated in the other world, first of all. Well, I look like the common man, and that wouldn’t help them much. Second, however, they’d be sure to discover that a fellow came into a garage in the vicinity and took his two-seater at the very time the bobbies were hunting the Manchester Slasher (as the papers called me) thereabouts. That’s elementary police work. So up to there all I really had to fret over was the ordinary human bloodhound business.

I’d given the garage a false name, naturally, when I took the old girl in to leave her. A purely automatic precaution. Lucky I have a turn for the criminal life, said I to myself smugly. Nothing to identify her with me, Will Chester of London.

Then there was my gear in the hotel.

Whoa! I slapped the wheel with one palm. I’d given the hotel the same fake name—Robert Hood—but in my Gladstone were half a dozen items with my own label on them. I’d intended a quick baggageless dash out of the city, before they traced me to the garage and sent out a call for a black Jaguar; but to leave without that damning luggage would be to present my true identity to the police in a matter of a few days, or even less. I headed for the hotel. Minutes counted, but so did that accursed Gladstone bag.

Then I bethought myself of the garage again. Of course they knew where I had been staying! That meant that within two minutes of the police—they—arriving at the garage and discovering that I had come in and hared out, the hotel would be receiving a call about me.

I groaned aloud. The Jaguar, sensitive to my thought waves or perhaps to the unconscious pressure of my foot, pounced forward at a law-shattering speed. Minutes counted? Seconds!

The hotel was no fly-by-night, tuppenny-ha’penny wee place, for I had seen no reason on earth why I should not be comfortable while on my crusade; I put the Jaguar alongside the curb within a dozen paces of the entrance, walked nonchalantly in and demanded my key. The desk clerk was listening to the telephone. “One moment,” he said, and then to me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece, “I think this is for you, sir.”

* * * *

My mind speeded up and raced like a mad thing. No one would be calling me, so it must be about me; therefore the police had already found the garage; and the clerk must only have heard them say my name (my false name) within the instant. I imagined that they had said, “Have you a Mister Robert Hood staying there?” or something of the sort. Now I had two choices: I could bolt at once, leave my luggage to be inspected, and subsequently have my face plastered on every newspaper in England as the Manchester Slasher; or I could brazen it out. Instinctively I chose the right course, the only course. I bluffed to the top of my bent.

“Give me my key first,” I said. He did so. “Now just tell ‘em I’m not in, and hang up. It’s a bloke I don’t care to talk to.”

“Ah,” said he, smirking, “I see.” To the instrument he murmured, “I’m sorry, Mister Hood is out at present,” and—my eternal gratitude to that sleek-haired, smug-faced desk clerk!—rang off without asking if there was any message. He had given me a good half minute of free time. I went to the lift and said, “Four please.” If it had not been there I should have had to take the steps. Surely my luck was running that night!

I judged that, just about the time I struck the fourth floor, that phone at the desk would be sounding impatiently again. I opened my door, bolted it behind me, and began to throw things into my Gladstone.

My phone started to ring.

I emptied the drawers of the high-boy, the devilish jangle in my ears; leaped into the bathroom and brushed my shaving kit and toilet articles into a little leather bag I used for them. I would be certain I was leaving nothing behind on which there might be a monogram, an engraved name....

Fingerprints! Great merciful God!

I was packed. Everything I had brought with me was in the Gladstone.

The phone stopped ringing.

They would be on their way. A hotel detective or a couple of policemen, called in after that urgent message from the garage. Perhaps the usurpers—

* * * *

I whipped out my handkerchief, wrapped it round my right hand, and started in to dust that room as no chambermaid had ever dusted it in all its memory. Each piece of wood which I might have touched in the past week received a quick vigorous swipe. Each glass and porcelain surface in the bathroom. Everything. The door knob. The glasses. Is that all? The window, which I’d raised a few times. Is that all? It that all?

I believed it was. I snatched up the Gladstone and with the cloth still around my hand I opened the door and slipped into the corridor.

Close the door, son. That’ll halt them for a precious two seconds.

Down the corridor, around the first turn....

Safe, for the moment, safe!

And now what? Here was a flight of stairs. And in the distance I heard a lift door open.

Down the stairs I rushed, and was on the third floor.

Running for another flight, a different one, with a vague thought of confusing my trail, I stumbled and almost fell. Recovering, I fled down these, on down, down, down.

I was on the ground floor at last. The men’s bar lay before me. The lobby was far away in the front of the building.

I straightened my tie, tried to appear like an eccentric who always carried a large brown bag with him, and paced into the bar.

As I put my hand—still swathed in the linen—to the outer door, the barman cried out, “‘Ere, sir!” but I was gone. They would think I was an absconding guest. They would pursue me. But I shouldn’t run, didn’t dare run, along this street where humans and aliens strolled singly and in couples. I walked as fast as I thought I could without attracting attention. The hue and cry arose behind me. I came to the corner, rounded it without halting, and saw my dear old Jaguar twenty yards off.

I ran then, for there was no help, indeed there was deadly peril, in walking any longer. I went with great bounds, brushing aside people and them indiscriminately. Hurling the bag onto the seat, I hurdled it with a last burst of energy, crashed in behind the wheel, and in a flash my motor and I had leaped forward and were on our merry way.

We had gone a dozen blocks before I took my right hand off the wheel and unwrapped the handkerchief from it, stowing it away in the side pocket that also contained my hotel key. Mentally I checked over every clue to my true identity; so far as I could think, I had wiped them all out. Now all that remained was to get out of Manchester safely.

* * * *

Choosing the darkest streets almost without volition, I had put a couple of miles between me and that by-now-surely-tumultuous deathtrap of a hostelry. I thought of road blocks. One is always reading in American mystery stories of road blocks set up to catch thieves and murderers, but I had no notion as to whether they were used in England. Relying on the thought that at any rate I had never heard of one here, I tore for the outskirts of the city.

They would be on my trail. I kept seeing mental pictures of the alien beasts, sniffing me out like so many obscene bloodhounds. My hands grew slippery on the wheel with the sweat of fear. Then I put my panic behind me; they, after all would be working in the usual human channels, for surely they had at worst no more than a hazy suspicion that I could see them. True, I had relegated quite a few of them. But it must seem more likely to them that I was a maniac with luck on his side, rather than a seer. I doubted strongly that they would make such a concentrated effort at finding me as they had done last year with poor Jerry Wolfe. So I had only the laws and power of Old England to worry about.

Going over the past hour again and again, while driving, now at breakneck speed through deserted streets and now at a snail’s pace in traffic, I decided that once I had left the city I had a very good chance of escaping entirely. Therefore I set myself to leave it as soon as possible. Beneath me the Jaguar purred contentedly as my foot caressed her accelerator.

And so the notorious Manchester Slasher went into the fastnesses of the Peak District, and laid his course south for Birmingham.