BEWARE, THE USURPERS!
by GEOFF ST. REYNARD
Have you ever seen monsters stalking the
streets? Only if you're drunk, you say?--Don't
laugh--_your best friend could be one of them!..._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
November 1951
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I stopped the black Jaguar beside the crumbling stone balustrade
and swung my legs out. The drive was deep in rotted leaves and
long-uncleared trash. Above me the ancient castle looked out across
the groves of oak and elm and chestnut to the silent moors, like
the veritable ghost of Old England itself: aloof, brooding, noble,
withdrawn from this hectic modern age into its memories. Blind blank
holes of windows stared over my head as I walked up the drive where in
a more regal century the carriages of dukes and knights and princes
of the blood must have rolled, the big horses of neighboring squires
must have pawed impatiently before many a hunt, and lovers in satin and
velvet and cascading lace must have strolled and dallied a thousand
thousand times.
As I was hauling open the heavy iron-banded door, my foot trod upon
something that squashed unpleasantly. I bent down, and in the sick
yellow moonlight saw a newly-dead rook, its eyes already pecked out. I
shivered, uncontrollably. Then I went in and pulled the door shut.
My electric torch stabbing the darkness before me, I crossed the
empty hall and mounted the broad curving stairs. At the top I turned
and glanced downward; the great hall was patterned with moonlight,
and although there was no furniture of any sort, the whole vast place
seemed to crawl and pulse with shapes of menace, of dead-yet-living
evil. I shook myself angrily. My nerves were rotten, my mind was
bursting with fear. That was the whole trouble--fear, fear and nerves.
The only thing to do was act quickly.
I strode down the dank passageway, opened the third door on the left,
went into the room and shut the door behind me.
Here the old stone walls were ashine with lights, the air was less
musty and far less creepy. Six people were here, standing about or
sitting on straight-backed chairs. They all turned to look at me.
Nobody spoke. I nodded to each in turn.
* * * * *
There was an old army officer, leathered and permanently tanned by
decades of the dreadful Indian sun; he wore a short grizzled mustache
and a stern, rather stuffy expression. There was a man of about fifty
who could not have been anything but a physician, so scrubbed and
competent he seemed. There was a youngish fellow with only one arm, and
another whose dark glasses sheltered sightless scar-pitted hollows.
There was an antique of a man, poker-thin and poker-straight and
poker-hard, with a pale face and keen, faded blue eyes. And there was
a girl, who had sometimes been described as a summer sky, as a star,
and as other things just as lovely and unbelievable.
"What ho," I said, with empty cheerfulness. "Sorry to be late. Let's
get at it."
"Will," said the doctor abruptly, "I forbid it. It's madness, it's
criminal lunacy."
"Sorry you feel that way, John. We've gone too far to stop here--and
we've been all through this a hundred times." I went to the table and
sat down briskly in the vacant chair beside it. Truth to tell, every
muscle in my body was rebelling, was shrieking to me that John Baringer
was right; only my mind still insisted that he was wrong, and I knew
that if I dallied for an instant my body would conquer my brain....
I fitted my head snugly against the curious apparatus we had attached
to the back of the chair. It was constructed along the lines of an
old-fashioned photographer's head clamp. To the table were nailed a
number of steel braces, which held a Tower musket, an obsolete firearm
primed with black powder and aimed rigidly so that the load would
pass within a hair's breadth of my eyes as I sat with my head pressed
against the clamp. The musket was already cocked. "Let 'er go," I said,
and felt glad that my voice had not cracked into falsetto.
"No!" said John Baringer. "No!"
None of them moved.
"Have I got to do it myself?" I asked, rather angrily.
The retired officer pushed the doctor aside, took two steps forward and
laid his hand on the musket. "Ready?" he asked.
"I am."
"Hold hard," he said, and pulled the trigger.
The world seemed to lift up into the air all at once, its foundations
tearing apart with a noise like all hell bursting in half; then it
slowly toppled down again, and everything was blackness and hot,
searing death.
The last thing I remember was the scream of the beautiful girl, she who
was as lovely as a summer sky.
CHAPTER II
I lay in the warm bed and for a long time I tried to think of something
that I knew I should recall, and at last, after hours of waking and
dozing and waking again, I had it; it was the fact that I was not
dead. When I knew this for certain I was extremely surprised, in the
weak fashion of the very ill. I slept once more, and when I woke again
I was stronger and more in command of my mind. I was still a little
astonished that I was alive. Then I began to wonder whether I was
blind. The knowledge that I would not know about this for some days was
intolerable. I yelled angrily, and a cool hand was laid across my lips.
"Gently, Will, gently," said the loveliest voice in England.
Then I knew that I could bear the uncertainty till doomsday, if I must.
"Hello, Marion," I said, brushing the hand with my dry lips. "What time
is it?"
"Middle of the afternoon, Will. You've been asleep a long while. It's
Tuesday."
"Tuesday. Good Lord, nearly forty-eight hours!"
"Do your eyes hurt?"
"Not much."
"Thank John for that."
"Where is he?"
"Here," said the physician's voice. "We're all here but the Colonel."
"He's in London," said Marion Black, "buying supplies."
"Is Johnson here?"
"Yes, sir," said the respectful voice of the pale-faced old man. "Very
much at sea, if you'll allow me, Mister Chester."
"They haven't told you, Johnson?" I asked incredulously. "You must
think us all mad!"
"No, sir," said he promptly, "I give you my word I don't, sir. Had it
been one or two of you, why then I might fancy you'd gone off your
respective rockers, as you might say, sir; but six of you--that's
different."
"What do you think, then, Johnson?"
"I think there's something big going on, sir," said the old man.
"Something fearfully big. With poor young Mister Exeter blind, and you
a-lying here like this--what _is_ it, sir? They told me you were the
proper one to explain."
"Johnson," I said, grinning, "that's the first time I ever heard your
voice express anything but well-bred deference."
* * * * *
Johnson coughed and, I imagine, looked at the floor with embarrassment.
"Very strange circumstances, sir," he said.
"I shan't keep you in suspense, Johnson, although these callous people
have. Are you prepared to hear a nightmare of a yarn?"
"Are you prepared to tell it?" growled John Baringer.
"Oh, yes. I seem to have had a good bit of rest lately." I drank from a
glass that Marion put to my mouth, and said, "You remember Jerry Wolfe?"
"Of course, sir."
"You were there the day he came back to the Gloucester Club and was
murdered, weren't you?" I knew he had been, but I was feeling my way
into the story.
"Yes, sir. I brought him and Mister Talbot here a bottle of Scotch. I
saw him killed."
"He told Alec--" Alec Talbot was the chap with one arm; he'd left the
other in Europe somewhere, during the latter days of the war--"he told
Alec a tale that day, Johnson. It's a wild, incredible, super-fantastic
tale. No sane man would believe a word of it."
"No, sir."
"But we six believe it, Johnson."
"Yes, sir. I gather it has something to do with this--"
"This madness of ours. It does. You see, Jerry Wolfe was nearly blinded
in India when a Tower musket was discharged athwart his eyes. The
bandages were removed as he was coming home, and he found he could
see ... could see rather more than most of us can."
"Yes, sir," said the dignified voice. "May I ask what he could see,
sir?"
"He could see into Hell," said Alec Talbot quietly.
* * * * *
"He could see that certain people are not--people," I went on. "Let
me try to explain that. He discovered that there are among us many
aliens of another race, perhaps from another dimension, or from
another planet, or--who knows? He thought they were out of a different
dimension, because he could see silvery lines behind them which he
believed to be that dimension's scenery, as it were. Each of these
aliens, these usurpers, as he called them, had stolen a human body, and
was using it as a focal point of entrance into our world. Do you follow
me?"
"With some difficulty, sir."
"Drop the 'sir', Johnson. We're all plain human beings together in
this."
"Yes, sir."
"Well, he could see these alien creatures, but within them, or
behind them, he could also see the human bodies they were occupying;
the bodies which to everyone else appeared to be quite normal men
and women. The bodies apparently didn't contain a human soul or
mind or whatever you want to call it, but were only puppets for the
interlopers. He sat in Charing Cross Station and made notes on them,
at one stage of his adventures, and he decided that they were entering
this world by usurping the bodies of newly-born children, children of
unions between two of them or between one of them and a regular human.
See?"
"Vaguely, sir."
"He figured out that after a few of them got into our dimension,
through some fluke or other, they found that they could spawn
puppet-humans who would become vehicles for others of their breed. They
come 'in' by route of birth. Perhaps, Jerry thought, a freak accident
generations ago let just one of them into our world, and he put his
foot in the door. Now there are multitudes of them here. What was the
ratio Jerry calculated, Alec?"
"About seven to six in our favor," said Alec Talbot. "Of course, that
was figured within an hour or so at Charing Cross Station. He didn't
have a chance to make a real survey. They got him first."
"Yes, they got him. He was so shocked by his discovery that he didn't
cover up fast enough, and they found out he could see them. They
harried him all over half of England, and finally they tracked him
down at the club and shot his guts out."
"He died in my arms," said Alec without expression.
"But Mister Wolfe was shot by men from Scotland Yard and bobbies, sir,"
protested Johnson.
"That's what they seemed to be, Johnson, to you. Jerry could see them
truly. He knew they were the usurpers, using the husks of human beings
as points of contact between our dimension and theirs."
* * * * *
Johnson coughed politely. "And this is the story he told Mister Talbot?"
"It is."
"And you all believe it?"
"We do. Partly because it tallies up with a lot of queer things, partly
because it explains a lot of others. But mainly because we all knew
Jerry Wolfe, and he was as sane and decent a fellow as ever breathed
tobacco smoke."
"Yes, sir."
"He couldn't see all of their dimension, you understand. It was only
where one of them had taken over a human body that the veil was thin
enough to be pierced by his blast-warped sight. There was a sort
of field of force or something around them, and he could see the
beasts and their nearby background of silver lines that ran at an
angle of about forty-five degrees. That was all. He killed the human
parts of three or four of them, and although he couldn't touch the
other-dimensional folk with his bullets, when their human puppets
died they were relegated to their own world again. They faded out and
vanished, he said. Their point of contact was obliterated."
"I see, sir. I begin to get the picture. These foreigners--" I could
not help smiling at the word--"have been infiltrating our island by
some means, using our bodies, you might say, as disguises. A dirty bit
of business, sir, if I may say so."
"Very dirty, Johnson. Because if nothing is done to stop them,
eventually they'll have our whole world to themselves."
Johnson evidently thought this over for a moment. I could hear everyone
breathing heavily in the silence. Then, "What do they want with it,
sir?" he asked.
"Lord knows. Jerry never asked 'em."
"Ah. It gives one pause, sir."
"It damned well does. It's given us so much pause--the six of us--that
we've decided to devote our lives to fighting the usurpers. That's why
we're doing this huggermugger business, Johnson. We're duplicating
Jerry Wolfe's experience, trying to get our eyesight warped or marred
or shifted, or whatever the phrase ought to be, as his was. So we
can see 'em, and combat 'em, and send 'em home to their silver-lined
wastelands."
"And that's what happened--"
"To Geoff Exeter. Yes. We did the same thing with him that you saw
two nights ago with me in the chair. Unfortunately--there's a feeble
word!--we bungled somehow. And Geoff is blind."
* * * * *
"You get used to it," said Geoff Exeter cheerfully. "It's in a good
cause. Better cause than we fought the Nazis for if Jerry Wolfe was
right."
"We're banking that he was. We're betting our eyes or our lives,
Johnson, that he was right."
"If you'll forgive me, sir, it seems a terribly long chance to take. He
might have been addled in the head, or drunk; or if he was right, you
may all lose your eyes and never acquire his strange vision."
"We're relying on old Jerry," said Alec Talbot. "You see, at least
three of us were at loose ends, with nothing to make of our lives, and
our hearts full of bitterness and frustration. It's given us an aim in
life. It's given us life itself, by heaven! We drew lots, Geoff and
Will and I; Geoff got first try, Will the second, and I lost. I'm to be
the third one. Before he was murdered, Jerry told me who was all right
and who wasn't. He'd seen a few chaps he knew--Will and Geoff and the
doctor here, Marion and Colonel Bedford. He bequeathed me their names.
I rounded them up and beat them with Jerry's yarn until they began to
feel a horrid truth in it. Then just a few days ago I remembered that
you'd been our waiter at the Club that night, and he'd sat easy and
safe in your presence; so we knew you were human too."
"I'm sure I'm very gratified, sir. But what can I do?"
"We don't know. We don't know what any of us can do. But we were only
six. Johnson--six against half a world. We grasped at you like a
drowning man at a--"
"Straw," said Marion. "Really, Alec, your similes stun me!"
"I was going to say 'bottle of whisky'," growled Alec.
"Do you get the whole picture now, Johnson?" I asked.
"I think so, sir. Just one thing...."
"What's that?"
"Well, sir, what do these aliens look like? I mean, if you can see
them?"
"Like obscene nightmares," I said. "Like demons down under the sea.
Like anything and everything you can conjure up that's evil and strange
and full of hellishness."
"Oh. Quite so, sir," said Johnson woodenly.
"Jerry talked of toads, of sharks and dragons, weird tree-shapes
and amoebae, but he made it clear that those were only far-fetched
similes." Alec's voice was low; he was remembering his friend, haggard
and gray in the face, a ghastly ghost of the man he had once been. I
broke in.
"Yes, Johnson, they're a fearful horde. If Jerry was right, they're
overrunning us in a manner far more subtle and deadly than any invader
ever did before. Which is why we must take these desperate measures.
Are you with us?"
"Of course, sir," said the old waiter.
"Why?" asked the skeptical Doctor Baringer. "Why so quick to leap at
this fantastic story, Johnson? I've got into the affair over my head,
but I'm still not sure I believe in it."
"Well, sir, you might say I'm in just about the same position as Mister
Exeter and Mister Talbot and Mister Chester. I'm an old soldier, much
too old to be of any use in a regular war any longer; and I still fret
for the days of bivouac and battle. If you'll pardon the liberty, sir,
I must agree with you that it's a rum go, a very rum go. But if it's
true, then I may be of some slight use in the world after all."
"You were a soldier, Johnson?" I asked.
"Sergeant, Boer War, sir. I fought at the siege of Ladysmith and a
dozen other engagements."
"I thought the Boer War was a million years ago," said Marion Black.
"Very nearly, miss," said Johnson with a dry chuckle.
"Welcome to the ranks, Sergeant Johnson," said Alec Talbot.
I started to say something, but suddenly was very weary, so instead I
went to sleep.