And 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.