There were sixteen of them left--sixteen out of two hundred and fifty.
No wonder the castle's great hall was swimming with blood! No wonder
we all looked like red Indians! "Who's the senior ghoul among you?" I
asked, and a white-haired robot encased by a yellow lumpy godhelpus
moved forward a little. The Colonel hissed in my ear.
"Good gad. I know that man! That's Sir Lawrence Hockling!"
"He's also a monstrous, warty, holey creature, like a lump of wormy
cheese.... Good afternoon, Sir Lawrence," I said loudly. "I believe
you've been looking for me. I'm Robert Hood of Manchester."
"Ah yes, the Slasher." The bugaboo that was Sir Lawrence nodded
briefly. "It seems we have failed to annihilate you. No matter; others
will."
"No, Sir Lawrence, you fail to grasp the situation. You're finished,
you invaders. You've had your fun, but now you've got to pick up and go
home, and never come back. Because we can see you."
He held up his hand. "Wait, sir. We accept you as a seer, of course.
There have been others--" _Jack the Ripper_, said I to myself with a
chuckle--"others who have accidentally been enabled to pierce the veil
between the lands. We have dealt with them, as we shall eventually with
you. But your companions--let them describe us!"
The Colonel pounced on this challenge like a tiger on a goat. I was
breathless, thankful that I had described at least Sir Lawrence to
him. "You're a cross between a speckled cheese and a diseased bit of
garbage. Lumps and bumps all over your slimy carcass!"
"Good enough," said the monster, quaking with wrath. "That will do,
Colonel Bedford. I meant to say, let some of these--ah, rather unwashed
gentry tell us of our true bodies."
* * * * *
I was turning sick with fear, the fear that now we were done for, that
now the colossal bluff would collapse. I had forgotten Arold--Arold,
who could see them plain as day.
"The bloke on yer right," he shrilled, "is lyke a shark, all silvery
and slick, wiff a big glow in 'is guts lyke a blurry fire. Next t' him
is--welp, it's 'ard to tell, but I'd say he were a ostopus, you know,
one o' them big leather things under the ocean."
"Shall I have each of them describe you all?" I leaped into the breech
with a shouted challenge. "Shall we waste a couple of hours talking of
your stalks and pseudopods? Or are you satisfied? Man, man, why do you
think they came here, if not to crush you and your kind? Why did they
fight you with such fury, if not because they can see you in all your
horror?" Needless to say, Arold's ruffians were staring bug-eyed at all
this incomprehensible arguing.
"Well," said Sir Lawrence, "you obviously couldn't make so many men
believe in us if they couldn't see us. I simply had to make sure."
Fortunately he and the others never turned round to observe the wonder
on the thugs' faces. "I accept you as seers. How did you manage it? How
did you warp their vision?"
"You know as well as I." _Now, Will Chester, bluff, bluff!_
"Yes," he said, "ever since we entered your world, centuries ago,
we've been afraid that one day the secret of vision-tuning might be
stumbled upon by some clever member of your species. The trick of it
is, after all, ridiculously simple."
I snapped my fingers to show how simple it was, as I thought grimly of
that antique Tower musket blasting across my eyes. But through my brain
the ideas were tumbling. There _was_ an easy way to change one's sight,
to peer into the silver land. That made my bluff much more feasible!
"Yet it has been found too late, sirrah. We are ready to invade your
plane by the millions, through every new birth that takes place on your
globe. Can you, a handful of seers, wipe out so many? I think not!"
"You fool," I said coldly, "do you think I risked our whole band in
this slaughter? There are men all over England now, performing that
simple operation on others. There are hundreds, yes, thousands of
us already. We're wise to you, my boy; we've got an underground as
efficient as your own. Already we're spreading to other countries. In
a short time the entire world will be on guard against you--and men
will be assassinating you in the dark." I let out my chest and roared
it at him. I was suddenly an inspired Henry V before Agincourt, an
impassioned Emile Zola addressing the jury of Dreyfus, a thundering
Caesar in the Senate. Marion said later that my eyes flashed lambent
flame and she thought the roof of my mouth would split. I had a great
sense of my own power; I felt my frame filling with the elation of a
true savior, a liberator, an emancipator. I curved my hands like talons
and shook them above my head, intoxicated with a belief in my own
wholly untrue words.
* * * * *
"Don't you see how useless it will be for you to be born into a
world where you will be seen and immediately slain? From now on, the
bestowing of double vision will be as much a part of a man's life as
his--his education, baptism, and what-have-you. Forevermore we'll
be on guard against you. I tell you now: go home, go back to your
silver-lined wastes, and never try to trouble us again. Give up your
infiltrating, your bestial usurping of bodies that ought to have had
the chance to live and see and feel and think for themselves. Go home,
God damn you all, go home! Your sole weapon, invisibility, is gone. You
don't enjoy death any more than we do--I've felt your fear! I feel it
now! Be sensible; you made a good try, but you've lost. Go home!"
The mouldy-looking thing that was Sir Lawrence began to colloque
silently with his countrymen, after their fashion. I looked beyond
them to the army of thugs. Most of them, giving up their attempt to
understand what the toffs were talking about, were engaged in looting
the dead. I wondered what to do with them after this was over, if my
bluff worked. Pay them off and send them home, I supposed. They would
never talk about this pogrom--they'd be hanged! I'd have to see that
they helped us bury all these corpses, alien robots and dead rogues
alike, before they left. About twenty of the thugs had been killed.
Who would miss them? And an event was coming--I devoutly hoped!--which
would engulf any such minor event as the disappearance of some three
hundred men from all walks of life....
At last Sir Lawrence Hockling turned back to me. All his companions,
too, faced my way.
* * * * *
Never, in all my journeying among their foul kind, had I felt the
concentrated effluvia of so much hate, so many noxious, diabolic
waves of damnable ferocity beating against me like the wind off the
Styx, turning me weak and sick. Malignant powers from the poisonous
womb of Hell! I shook with uncontrollable nausea, with the dreadful
revulsion caused by the towering, smashing, soul-wrenching blast of
hatred flung at me by the group of beast-folk in that moment. It was
beyond words. Nor was it my warped vision, affecting my other senses
in the relatively mild way it had done before this. No, this was a
feral force, a raging thing which knew no bonds of dimension or of the
senses. It stabbed to the soul itself. Marion gave a muffled scream and
huddled down on the step, clasping my knees; even the Colonel, the
last man to be disturbed by an abstruse sensation, gasped audibly. As
for poor Arold, he sat down with a bump and hid his face in his hands,
whimpering; having as we did the added receptivity, that terrible blow
nearly killed us both. The hall was blotted from my sight, a gulf
opened below me, I felt myself hurtling down into unmentionable depths
of agony. When I opened my eyes I did not know what to expect: perhaps
the unknown wastes and plains of the silver land, whither their foul
thrust, I thought, might very well have hurled me. As a matter of fact,
I was still standing upright on the staircase. I have never been more
surprised.
Then I saw that they were in the process of leaving their human bodies,
wrenching and hauling backward as though caught in a tight box.
"We accept your ultimatum," said the scholarly voice of the beast
who was Sir Lawrence Hockling. "We are rational beings. We have been
beaten, and we will return to our own plane, which lies at an angle to
your space-time continuum. Please spread the word of the capitulation
abroad, so that no more may die. Agreed?"
"Agreed," I said. I leaped down the steps to stand face to face with
his robot. "I give you three days of grace," I cried, "and then we
begin to slay you all over England."
* * * * *
I looked from him to the others of that group of inferno-bred ogres,
shining like so many luminous bloated corpses at the bottom of the
sea, with the colors of malice and savagery changing, coming and going
in their rotten bodies; feeling the last exhalations of their enmity
touching me like a palpable force. It had not begun to dawn on me that
we had won. My head throbbed and racketed like a gourd full of thunder.
Then I saw two men coming toward me through the mob, and my headache
died to a near-forgotten dull throb; for they were John Baringer and
Geoff Exeter.
"Look what I found on the lawn," said the doctor. "Sitting out there as
calm as ice, whistling Lili Marlene!"
"What ho," said Geoff, groping with his hand until I had gripped it
with mine. "You boys have fun?"
"I knew it," said I. "I knew you were the one. How'd you get out? How'd
you find your way to Birmingham?"
"Long story, son ... everyone okay?"
"All but Johnson."
"The sergeant," said Geoff blankly. "Why, he's to live forever, hang
it."
"He's gone."
Geoff was still for a minute, and then burst out, "Well, don't say it
like a morbid stuffed owl! After fifty years of civilian life, he smelt
the powder and heard the shots again, God be thanked! So he died--so
bloody what? It's how he _should_ have gone."
"Right," said I, from the heart. I turned to the aliens then, and found
sixteen grinning, drooling, mindless carcasses, staring round with
blank dull eyes. They were empty hulks. The usurpers were gone into
their silver-blue fastnesses, and the fight was done.