Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
BEWARE, THE USURPERS!
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
BEYOND THE FEARFUL FOREST
THE BUTTONED SKY
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
THE ENORMOUS ROOM
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
THE GIANTS FROM OUTER SPACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
Wildside Press’s MEGAPACK® Ebook Series
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
The Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: Geoff St. Reynard is copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved.
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The MEGAPACK® name is a registered trademark of Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved.
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Published by Wildside Press LLC.
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A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
“Geoff St. Reynard” was the pseudonym used by Robert Wilson Krepps (1919-1980) for most of his science fiction and fantasy pulp work—he published adventure tales and mainstream stories in higher-paying “slick” magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which tended to look down on the pulps and avoid stories by their “hack” writers. (Ray Bradbury was one of the exceptions.)
Krepps also collaborated with H.L. Gold—one of my own personal favorite Golden Age science fiction authors—on the novel The Enormous Room, which appeared under their joint byline. I suspect it takes its title from the e.e. cummings semi-autobiographical novel from 1922. (Their version of The Enormous Room is included here.)
Enjoy these novels—and a couple of shorts—by a master.
—John Betancourt
Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”
The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This has included John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)
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BEWARE, THE USURPERS!
GEOFF ST. REYNARD
Originally published in Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy, November 1951.
CHAPTER I
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 w
as 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.”
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