The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  We were all very quiet for a while.

  * * * *

  I went over to a wall mirror and examined my face. I took out my little tin of pancake makeup, Marion’s clever idea, and spread some thinly on the scars of the blast: the little pink almost-healed scars that ran across the bridge of my nose and scattered out fanwise toward my ears. We were dealing with cleverness beyond thought, and every tiny giveaway must be taken care of.

  “Jerry Wolfe died,” I said, still peering in the mirror, “because he was taken unawares, because he hadn’t prepared himself to stay incognito among them. I have. I’ve had my first sight of them, and been terribly shocked, yes; but now I think I’ll be all right. I’m ready to go.”

  “Up to London?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll all go.”

  “In a bunch? I don’t think.”

  “No, in pairs and trios. But there’s no sense in any of us frettin’ here without news from you.” The Colonel was firm. “The motors are below. Ready, you chaps?”

  “Packed and primed,” said Geoff.

  “Let’s be off.”

  And almost before I knew it we were in the old stables, putting our gear in the back of Alec’s great red Rolls.

  “Who’ll ride with me?” I asked.

  “Not I,” barked the Colonel promptly. “I’ve had some of your idea of driving.”

  “I’ll go with you, Will,” said Geoff Exeter. “Just put my fist on the car, will you?” I did so, and he climbed in. “I like speed,” he said.

  I had been hoping for Marion’s company, but Geoff—well, he rated a front-row stall in the game. He’d lost his eyes for us. I said, “Geoff will stick with me for the first days. The rest of you put up at the Albany, where Colonel Bedford has a suite, and at that inn in Baker Street, The Gray Gander. Geoff and I will be at the Gloucester Club.”

  “I shall be there too, sir,” said Johnson. “I’ve been on ‘sick leave’ quite long enough.”

  “Roger. Geoff, the Sergeant and I at the Gloucester. The Colonel and John at the Albany. Marion and Alec at The Gray Gander. Don’t get in touch with me, unless you give birth to some really ripping idea. I’ll find you when there’s news.”

  I touched Marion’s hand in farewell, and slid into the Jaguar. We backed out and shot away into the blue.

  CHAPTER VI

  We stood at the bar of a dingy little pub on the outskirts of the dingy little district of Seven Dials. Geoff, who was learning to orient himself by sounds, heard the clunk of his mug on the bar, and unerringly put his fingers around it. “Pretty good, eh?” he asked me, sipping the half-and-half.

  “You’ll be a wizard at it in a few months.”

  “I meant the ruddy ale, idiot. I’m not bragging about my accomplishments yet. Seen any of our chums lately?” he asked.

  “Oh, dozens. Run into ‘em everywhere.” It was a kind of simple code; I was telling him that the pub was full of the aliens.

  “Fine. Any of ‘em give you any news? Anything startling been happening?”

  “Not much. Same old stuff.”

  Same old stuff!

  Same old fiends from Abaddon! Same old hosts of Hell! Same old ogres and ghouls, harpies and bugaboos, hobgoblins and hellhags!

  The barman, when I squinted, was a big jovial red-nosed Cockney. The barman, when I opened my eyes normally, was a writhing monster, a shapeless blob of intangible protoplasm in whose depths moved turgid lights of orange and mauve; from whose devilish form the waves of malevolence came and went like the roiled swell made by the sluggish moving of some hideous primeval entity beneath the surface of a grisly tarn....

  I grinned at him. “Cool weather for June, mate,” said I affably.

  “Ar, yus,” he agreed.

  I was pleased with myself. Like a spy plunked down in a strange land, I had been feeling my way to confidence these last days, growing used to the shapes about me, learning to show an expression of bland normality when confronted with unnameable horrors. I believed I was perfectly ready now to begin our war.

  The only trouble was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to begin it!

  * * * *

  One could move among these usurpers for a lifetime, I thought, and learn nothing about them except that they were more hideous than leprous two-headed baboons, more incomprehensible than might be the dwellers of Mars. I watched them talking among themselves where they sat at the little oak tables. While their earthly husks chatted of prosaic things, the forms around the husks spoke—inaudibly to me—with twisting tentacles, gesturing pseudopods, flowers of rotten-looking “flesh” that grew upon their bodies and swelled and burst and subsided to nothingness again. I knew they were speaking of terrible things....

  “Let’s go,” I said to Geoff. “Time we were thinking of bed.”

  “Righto.”

  I gave the barman good-night in a pleasant voice, and we emerged from that ninth circle of Hell into the cool and lovely air. Seven Dials lay about us, all a-murmur with the homely human sounds of earth’s evening. I could not stand it.

  “Geoff,” I whispered, “I’m going to start the ball rollin’. I’m going to find out something.”

  “How, old son?”

  “I’m going to do a murder.”

  “Think it’s wise?” he asked.

  “I want to ascertain something. Just come along a bit.”

  We went up a dingy street and turned down a lane or two, until at last we were alone on a length of grubby pavement, shadowed by the rickety houses on either side. “Stand here,” I said to Geoff Exeter. “It’s black in this corner and you won’t be noticed. I’ll come for you in half a tick.”

  He saluted carelessly. What nerve he had! To stand alone, blind and helpless, ignorant of what I meant to do—I think Geoff was the bravest of all our little band.

  * * * *

  I slunk up the street to a place some forty yards off, and hid myself in a time-battered doorway. The street lay empty and deserted in the early moonlight. I drew the great keen knife that lived on the side of my belt these days, and I waited.

  A man came down the road, staggering drunkenly. He was a man. I let him pass.

  Another came toward me. I heard his footsteps in the dark, echoing valley of brick, and shortly thereafter saw him pass beneath a fading street lamp.

  Do you remember the passage in Doyle’s Lost World, where the hero is pursued along a jungle trail by a prehistoric carnivore?

  “This beast had a broad, squat, toad-like face ... the moonlight shone upon his huge projecting eyes, the row of enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms. With a scream of terror I turned and rushed wildly down the path.”

  Well, I did not turn and rush wildly down the street, but if I had not been hardened by much contact with the aliens, I think I must have done so. This was the worst I had seen: toad-like, yes, but squat and loathsome as no toad ever hoped to be; and indeed some of the projections of its form did look like claws and fangs. Yet no prehistoric reptile could ever have exuded the repulsive effluvium of evil which radiated from this hideous usurper.

  As it passed me I felt my stomach draw in as if from a sharp blow, and it is a wonder to me to this day that I did not scream or become violently ill. The gods were with me, however, and I kept strict silence.

  * * * *

  When it had gone on a dozen paces, I slipped out and followed it noiselessly. Moving as I had moved on many a commando raid in the old days, I eased up behind it. It did not turn—neither of its bodies turned. Narrowing my eyes, I lifted the great knife and struck, with all the hatred in my soul concentrated in the blow. The blade sank into the pseudo-human neck, severing the spinal cord instantly, and before my horrified eyes the great toad-creature swelled, turned vivid crimson, and went out like the flame of a trodden candle.

  It had left our dimension in the very instant that its human husk had died.

  Sheathing the knife under my coat, I flew
down to where Geoff stood patiently waiting. I took his arm.

  “Come on, boy, let’s make tracks.”

  “Home?”

  “No, to another pub.” We hurried down an alley, turned up a street and down another, until I had put a maze of lanes behind us. Then we slowed abruptly and ambled into a smoky little room full of liquor fumes.

  “Two beers, old toff,” I said to the fright behind the bar.

  We guzzled them slowly, while I watched the aliens around the tables and at the bar. Shortly there was a flurry of excitement among them, the tentacles writhing quickly and the ghastly brutes enlarging and deflating as though pumped by a bellows. All the time the human portions drank and chatted and played darts. But the usurpers were excited over something. Shortly half a dozen of them moved toward the door, the people in no evident hurry, but their marionette-masters wriggling like mad, as though eaten with impatience.

  I knew they were going to discuss something important. I had what I had come for.

  “Bedtime,” I said to Geoff Exeter. We went out of the pub and caught a tram for the vicinity of the Gloucester Club.

  CHAPTER VII

  Safe in our rooms, with Johnson sitting, very unlike a waiter, behind a bottle of brandy and a tray of sandwiches, and Geoff lying on the Chesterfield smoking a pipe he could not taste, I told them what I had done.

  “It’s taught me a couple of things I didn’t know, and affirmed some others I wasn’t sure of. First, I’m certain the faculties of these brutes are the same in this dimension as their ‘human parts’. That toad didn’t hear me coming, I know. He didn’t have time to turn and get a look at me before he went pop and left us. He was bound to the body till I released him, I think, and if he’d left it he couldn’t have got back into it, or rather around it. His ears weren’t keener than a man’s, or he’d have turned to see me when I crept up behind him.

  “But their communication system is terrific. That’s where they have it all over us. When he was shut out of our world, the toad must have gone around their region telling his pals about it; and before long the ones who were in that pub heard of it, too. Now they weren’t told by a newcomer, for I watched the door; so they were told on their side of the veil, by an alien who wasn’t occupying a human frame. Got it thus far?”

  “I admit to a little uncertainty here and there, sir.”

  “Well, put it like this. There’s a long tall screen set up across a stage. On one side of the screen—our side—are a lot of human beings. This side is our world as we know it. On the other side, the fourth dimension or whatever it may be, are a lot of these horrid-lookin’ beasts of usurpers.

  “Now here and there in the screen are holes, and through them some of the aliens are holding fake human beings, just as in our well-worn simile of the puppet show. I can see those who are leaning through the holes, but you can’t.

  “When they’re leaning through, they haven’t any powers except those of normal people. They can’t hear any better than a man. They can’t walk through bricks or see through stones. They can’t look behind them without turning the human puppet around. I’ve been watching them and I feel pretty certain of that. In some curious way they’re limited by their puppets’ limitations here. That makes it easier to assassinate ‘em, by the way—I just have to make sure that the human form doesn’t get a chance to turn its head and spot me before it dies.”

  * * * *

  I drank a little brandy and went on intently. “The only way they really have me beat six ways from the jack is in their system of tidings, of spreading ‘em, I mean. That’s a marvel. For as soon as I shoot or stab or throttle a puppet, the beast that’s been twiddlin’ his strings leaves him and goes along behind that hypothetical screen between the worlds, telling all his playmates about it; and if he’s had a chance to see me, and can describe me, then about a thousand of the others will be watching through their holes in the screen for a blighter of my specifications, and my name is Lord Jonathan Mud.”

  “I see,” nodded Johnson.

  “So my problem is to remain utterly anonymous. And I needn’t tell you that if I try to embark on a career of murder-by-night, I won’t last very long.”

  “No, you won’t.” Geoff was grave. “What else is there to do, though?”

  “I don’t know. And I think I could watch them for a lifetime and not learn another thing about ‘em. I’m a tremendously handicapped spy because I can’t disguise myself as one of them, and I can’t understand what they say to each other. It’s like a man going into a colony of bears and trying to pass himself off as a bear, except that I can’t even begin to look like a usurper, while I could put on a grizzly skin.”

  “What are we to do, sir?” asked Johnson. His pale face was deadly serious. “We must do something, sir—but only you can decide what it’s to be.”

  Two weeks before, I might have groaned aloud at such a responsibility. Now I took it in stride. Anyone who had been observing the demons of Hell at their work for fourteen days and nights had either to take things as they came along or to go stark staring loony.

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do first. I’ll take Geoff over to the Albany. Then I’ll strike out alone for a bit. Maybe for a week, maybe a month. Travel light, fast, and inquisitive. Give myself a chance to cook up plots. And if nothing’s come of it by then, why, I suppose we’ll just have to set up an assassination bureau and hope I live a hundred years....”

  CHAPTER VIII

  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.