_In the White House_
Colonel Stopford's car had been parked around the corner of the
building, and within a minute the four men were inside it, Stopford at
the wheel, and racing in the direction of the White House. A nod to
the guard at the gate, and they were inside the grounds. At the
entrance a single guard, in place of the four who should have been
posted there, challenged sharply, and attempted to bar the way, not
recognizing Dick or Stopford in their civilian clothes.
"Where's your officer?" demanded Stopford sharply.
Half-cowed by the Colonel's manner, the young recruit hesitated, and
the four swept him out of the way and hurried on. The scene outside
the main entrance to the White House was one of indescribable
confusion. Soldiers were swarming in confused groups, some trying to
force an entrance, others pouring out. Every moment civilians,
streaming over the lawn, added to the number. Discipline seemed almost
abandoned. From inside the building came outbursts of screams and
cursing, the scuffling of a mob.
"Roscoe! Roscoe!" shouted Stopford. "Where's the President's
secretary? Who's seen him? Let us pass immediately!"
No one paid the least attention to him. But a short, bare-headed
civilian, who was struggling in the crowd, heard, and shouted in
answer, waved his arms, and began to force his way toward the four. It
was Roscoe, the secretary of President Hargreaves. The President was a
childless widower, and Roscoe lived in the White House with him and
was intimately in his confidence.
Roscoe gained Stopford's side. "Say--they've got him!" he panted.
"They've got him somewhere--inside the building. They're trying to get
him out! We've got to save him--but we can't see them--or him. They've
made him invisible too, curse them! I heard him crying, 'Help me,
Roscoe!' He saw me, I tell you--and I didn't know where he was!"
* * * * *
The little secretary was almost incoherent with fear and anger. The
five men, forming a wedge, hurled themselves forward. Out of the White
House entrance appeared a tall officer, revolver in hand. It was
Colonel Simpson, of the President's staff. Half beside himself, he
swept the weapon menacingly about him, shouting incoherently, and
clearing a passage, into which the five hurled themselves.
Stopford seized his revolver hand, and after a brief struggle Simpson
recognized him.
"He's in the building!" he shouted wildly. "Somewhere upstairs! I'm
trying to form a cordon, but this damned mob's in the way. Kick those
civilians out!" he cried to the soldiers. "Shoot them if they don't
go! Guard the windows!"
Stopford and Dick, at the head of the wedge, pushed past into the
White House. The interior was packed, men were struggling frantically
on the staircase; it seemed hopeless to try to do anything.
Suddenly renewed yells sounded from above, a scream of anguish, howls
of terror. There came a downward surge, then a forward and upward one,
which carried the two men up the stairs and into the President's
private apartments above.
In the large reception-room a mob was struggling at a window, beneath
a blaze of electric light. A soldier was standing there like a statue,
his face fixed with a leer of horror. In his hands was a rifle, with a
blood-stained bayonet, dripping upon the hardwood floor at the edge of
the rug. Upon the rug itself a stream of blood was spouting out of the
air.
Dick looked at the sight and choked. There was something appalling in
the sight: it was the quintessence of horror, that widening pool of
blood, staining the rug, and flowing from an invisible body that
writhed and twisted, while moans of anguish came from unseen lips.
Colonel Stopford leaped back, livid and staring. "God, it's got
eyes--two eyes!" he shouted.
Dick saw them too. The eyes, which alone were visible, were about six
inches from the floor, and they were appearing and disappearing, as
they opened and shut alternately. It was a man lying there, a dying
man, pierced by the soldier's bayonet by pure accident, dying and yet
invisible.
* * * * *
The mob had scattered with shrieks of terror, but a few bolder spirits
remained in a thin circle about that fearful thing on the rug. Dick
bent over the man, and felt the outlines of the writhing body. It was
a man, apparently dressed in some sort of uniform, but this was
covered, from the top of the head to the feet, with a sort of sheer
silken garment, bifurcating below the waist, and resembling a cocoon.
It seemed to appear and alternately to vanish.
Dick seized the filmy stuff in his fingers, rent it, and stripped it
away. Yells of terror and amazement broke from the throats of all.
Instantly the thin circle of spectators had become reinforced by a
struggling mass of men.
The half-visible cocoon clung to Dick's body like spider webs. But the
man who had been wearing it had sprung instantly into view beneath the
cluster of electric lights. He was a fair-haired young fellow of about
thirty years, his features white and set in the agony of death.
He was dressed in a trim uniform of black, with silver braid, and on
his shoulders were the insignia of a lieutenant. He opened his eyes,
blue as the skies, and stared about him. He seemed to understand what
had happened to him.
"Dogs!" he muttered.
Shrieks of fury answered him. The mob surged toward him as if to grind
his face to pieces under their feet--and then recoiled, mouthing and
gibbering. But it was at Dick that they were looking, not at the dying
man.
He raised himself upon one elbow with a mighty effort. "His Majesty
the Invisible Emperor! Long be his reign triumphant!" he chanted. It
was his last credo. The words broke from his lips accompanied by a
torrent of red foam. His head dropped back, his body slipped down; he
was gone. And no one seemed to observe his passing. They were all
screaming and gibbering at Dick.
"Rennell! Rennell!" yelled Stopford. "Where are you, Rennell? God,
man, what's happened to your legs?"
Dick looked down at himself. For a moment he had the illusion that he
was a head and a trunk, floating in the air. His lower limbs had
become invisible, except for patches of trousering that seemed to
drift through space. The mob in the room had fallen back gaping at him
in horror.
Then Dick understood. It was the invisible garment that had coiled
itself about him. He tore it from him and became visibly a man once
more.
Shouts from another room! A surging movement of the crowd toward it.
The muffled sounds of an automatic pistol, fitted with a silencer!
Then screams:
"The devils are in there! They're murdering the soldiers!"
There followed a panic-stricken rush, more muffled firing, and then
the sharp roar of rifles, and the fall of plaster. Some one was
bawling the President's name. The rooms became a mass of milling human
beings, lost to all self-control.
A bedlam of noise and struggle. Men fought with one another blindly,
cursing soldiers fired promiscuously among the mob, riddling the
walls, stabbing at the air. The plaster was falling in great chunks
everywhere, filling the rooms with a heavy white cloud, in which all
choked and struggled. The yells of the civilian mob below, struggling
helplessly in the packed crowd that wedged the great stairway, made
babel. Outside the White House a dense mob that filled the lawns was
yelling back, and struggling to gain admittance. Suddenly the lights
went out.
"They've cut the wires!" rose a wild, wailing voice. "The devils have
cut the wires! Kill them! Kill everybody!"
His cry ended in a gurgle. Somewhere in that dark hell a struggle was
going on, a well defined struggle, different from the random, aimless
battling of the half-crazed soldiers and the civilians. President
Hargreaves was still within the walls of the White House, it was
known; it was physically impossible for him to have been carried away
when every foot of space was packed. And through that darkness the
invisible assailants were edging him, foot by foot, toward the
outside.
* * * * *
Dick was on the edge of this silent battle. He sensed it. Bracing
himself against a bureau, while the mob surged past him, he tried to
pierce the gloom, to reinforce with his perceptions what his instinct
told him. A soldier, crazed with fear, came leaping at him, bayonet
leveled. He thrust with a grunt. Dick avoided the glancing steel by a
hand's breadth, and, as the impetus of the man's attack carried him
forward, caught him beneath the chin with a stiff right-hand jolt that
sent him sprawling.
From below the cries broke out again, with renewed violence: "They've
got the President! Get them! Get them! Close all doors and windows!"
But a door went crashing down somewhere, to the tune of savage yells.
The mob was pouring down the stairs. It was growing less packed above.
Dick heard Stopford's voice calling his name.
"Here, sir" he shouted back, and the two men collided.
"For God's sake do what you can, Rennell!" shouted the Colonel.
"They've got the President downstairs. They had him in this very room,
in the thick of it all. I heard him cry out, as if under a gag. They
put one of those damned cloths over him. God, Rennell, I'm going
crazy!"
The upper floor of the White House was almost empty now. Dick thrust
himself into the crowd that still jammed the stairs. He reached the
ground floor. It was lighter here, but a glance showed him that it was
impossible to attempt to restore any semblance of order. The big East
Room was jammed with a fighting, cursing throng. Dick stumbled over
the bodies of those who had fallen in the press, or had been shot
down. Outside the mob was thickening, swarming through the grounds and
screeching like madmen.
* * * * *
Nothing that could be done! Dick found himself caught once more in the
human torrent. Presently he was wedged up against a broken window. He
precipitated himself through the frame, dropped to the ground, stopped
for an instant to catch breath.
The yelling mob was congregated about the main entrance of the White
House, and on this side the grounds were comparatively empty. As Dick
stopped, trying desperately to form some plan of action, he heard
footsteps and low voices near him. Then two men came toward him,
followed by three or four others.
The men--but, though the light was faint, Dick realized instantly that
they were wearing invisible garments. He could see nothing of them; he
could see through where they seemed to be--the trees, the buildings of
the streets. Yet they were at his elbow. And they saw him. He heard
one of them leap, and sprang aside as the butt of a pistol descended
through the air and dropped where his head had been.
Yet no hand had seemed to hold it. It had been a pistol, reversed, and
flashing downward, to be arrested in mid-air six inches from his face.
But the men were not wholly invisible. Nearly six feet above the
ground, three or four pairs of eyes were staring malevolently into
Dick's. Only the eyes were there.
The two foremost men were breathing heavily. They were carrying
something. Grotesquely through a rent in the invisible garment Dick
saw a patch of trouser. He heard a muffled sigh. President Hargreaves,
in the hands of his abductors!
Dick's actions were reflex. As the pistol hung beside his face, he
snatched at it, wrested it away, struck with it, and heard a curse and
felt the yielding impact of bone and flesh. He had missed the head but
struck the shoulder. Next moment hands gripped the weapon, and a
desperate struggle began.
* * * * *
It was torn from Dick's grasp. He struck out at random, and his fist
collided with the chin of a substantial flesh and blood human being.
Invisible arms grasped him. He fought free. The pistol slashed his
face sidewise, the sight ripping a strip of flesh from the cheek. He
was surrounded, he was being beaten down, though he was fighting
gamely.
"Kill the swine! Shoot! Shoot!" Dick heard one of his assailants
muttering.
Out of the void appeared the blue muzzle of another automatic, with a
silencer on it. Dick ducked as a flame spurted from it. He felt the
bullet stir his hair. He grasped at the hand that held it, and missed.
Then he was held fast, and the muzzle swung implacably toward his head
again. Helpless, he watched it describe that arc of death. It was only
later that he wondered why he had fought all the while in silence,
instead of crying for help.
But of a sudden the pistol was dashed aside. A woman's voice spoke
peremptorily, in some language Dick did not understand. And he saw her
eyes among the eyes that glared at him. Dark eyes that he knew, even
if the voice had not revealed her identity. The eyes and voice of
Fredegonde Valmy!
Dick cried her name. He put forth all his strength in a final
struggle. Suddenly he felt a stunning impact on the back of the head.
He slipped, reeled, threw out his hands, and sank down unconscious on
the grass at the side of the path.