“They’re all along the front,” said Bedford. “If they’ve covered the back, lads—it’s a bit late for our emissary to think of leaving.”
We spread out over the house, peering cautiously out of windows at front and back and sides. Then we gathered in the upper hall, as disconsolate a band of crusaders as ever eyed each other with grim scowls.
We were entirely surrounded. The siege was on.
CHAPTER XX
Marion and the doctor roamed the upper floor, watching developments from the windows; when the first rush came, they were to fire down on the enemies’ heads. Geoff was ensconced behind an overturned table at the head of the great staircase, so he could at least hear everything that occurred. Alec, Johnson, the Colonel and I were the ground floor garrison; we bolted off the east and west wings entirely, barricading the doors thereto with piles of lumber from the cellars so that if the aliens broke into those sections of the castle, it would avail them little. We had already carried a dozen armloads of bottles up to our quarters from the bins below us, and there seemed little we could do now but wait, there in that echoing empty hall, until our foe took the initiative. This happened about eleven o’clock that morning.
We heard Marion’s warning cry, and instantly sprang to our feet (we had each been sitting below a window, trying to relax) and looked out. I was at the front of the house with Alec. I saw some fifteen or eighteen of the monstrous beast-folk come lumbering across the open spaces between the house and the drive. I smashed a pane of glass in the mullioned window with my elephant gun and let fly at the foremost surper. He caught the charge right in the belly, and went heels-over-head backward to lie in a tangle of dark limbs and body, above which the mortally wounded alien grew pale and flickered and went out with a sputter. I let off the second barrel at another and reloaded hastily, thanking the powers that I’d taken this great shoulder-punishing gun rather than one of the lighter and less effective rifles; its load would stop a man even if the wound was not mortal, and I with my double vision was handicapped above my friends. It was often difficult for me to locate the vital points in a running puppet, when the body about him was distending and wavering through half-a-dozen horrible shapes.
I stopped another pair of them in as many seconds, then drew my two revolvers and began to fire first one and then the other, ambidextrously, like Wild Bill Hickock in the films. I don’t know how many shots I wasted, but it was a bloody barrage.
* * * *
That first charge lasted no more than three minutes, I should judge. They were taken quite by surprise, and comparing notes after, we discovered that they had not even bothered to have their own guns drawn when they began their attack. They must have pictured us crouching in terror, with bottles and chair legs for weapons.
Marion came to the head of the stairs and called to us. We assured her of our safety; Geoff was growling to himself over not being able to take a hand in the sport. Then the second wave came at us.
This time they were more cautious, and had automatics and target pistols in their hands. We took toll of them with our rifles and then with our handguns; when they withdrew again, they left at least a score of dead and dying husks on the ground around our fortress.
Just to show them that we were the seers they thought us, and also to decimate the ranks of the ungodly, I picked off all those wounded robots whose tenants were vacating, dashing back and forth from window to window to give the effect of half a dozen sharpshooters. I think that gave them pause, for nothing else happened until well into the afternoon.
Alec had a grazed cheek from which the blood was seeping, and Johnson had been cut on the shoulder by flying glass, but otherwise we were still intact.
“What do they look like?” I asked Alec, as we stood together watching the deserted drive. “I can’t tell much from those crumpled corpses, and you know they’re so many dim shadows in misshapen sheaths of unearthly coloring to me when they’re alive.”
“Oh, they’re—normal. People you’d see anywhere, and never notice ‘em. Small business men, maybe, or out-of-work clerks. Nondescript. Certainly they’re not seasoned fighters.”
“It’s occurred to me that a lot of them must have got out of joining in the late world fracas, one way or another; through their bigwigs, you know. I doubt they’d care to go marching off to war in one of our little two-bit three-dimensional fracases, and I’ll bet their ranks were full of shirkers and slackers and dodgers and pseudo-conchies. So maybe they have no experienced fighters!”
“Those out there aren’t,” agreed Alec. “What duffers they looked, trotting up to our guns!”
* * * *
There was one more attack, about four o’clock. This was a more carefully planned affair, and by utilizing all the cover they could, and coming in from all directions, they managed to get right up to the windows. When they did we retreated to the center of the hall, the windows framed them into perfect targets, and after losing a dozen or more they retreated in their turn, for the last time that day.
At dusk we deserted the ground floor and, barricading the stairs as effectively as we could, took up our posts on the upper floor. Sentry duty was apportioned, and after a good meal and an hour of desultory talking we lay down to sleep as much of the night through as the usurpers would allow.
My watch was from three to four-thirty. I was prowling around the halls, peering into each room as I passed, when above the night noises and the snoring of the Colonel I thought I heard an ominous creaking. On tiptoe I went down the hall, past the stairwell that went down into sinister blackness, and fetched up some yards thereafter before a gaping square hole in the wall of the passageway. What the devil...! I turned the beam of my electric torch into it. It was another staircase, narrow and steep, which I had not known existed. Without hesitation I started down its creaky old treads. The air was musty and smelled of a thousand generations of mice. More through my skin than my ears I got the impression that someone was descending these secret stairs in advance of me.
I drew out one of my guns, with a childlike thrilling of my pulse, and muffling the torch’s light with the fingers of my left hand so that only a thin streak or two of brightness preceded my searching feet, I went down.
The square door at the bottom was standing wide. Slipping through it, with the torch now dark, I stood still and listened.
* * * *
The moon’s rays patterned the cold floor under the windows, and across one of them I thought I saw a shadow glide. I swiveled my head quickly. Perhaps I had been mistaken. There was nothing there. The end of the room in which was cradled the massive black fireplace lay in impenetrable gloom. Watching this, I felt the skin of my neck creep and the hair bristle....
Something had moved in that murk, I could swear it. Something bigger and more ponderous than a body. I could not pin down the exact analogy I groped for: it was as if ... as if the wall had suddenly advanced toward me, and then sunk back again. I husked through a dry throat. This would not do. Despite the usurpers without, I had to risk a light.
I shot the beam of the torch across the wall from corner to corner. Nothing moved. I went to the cold fireplace—feeling the eyes of a multitude of ghosts upon me as I moved—and ran the flash over it. I even knelt and peered up the gut of the chimney. Nothing. I found myself shuddering. One more sweep of the torch around the vault of the hall, and then I ran (I admit it freely) for the secret door. Pulling it to behind me, I raced up the narrow steps and with pounding heart slammed the upper one also. I saw then that it was a swinging panel, that looked much like any one of the other panels in the hall. This secret must be a relic of the bad old days, when Exeter Castle was young and the nobility was riddled with treachery, intrigue, and evil.
After two minutes of cogitation, I went and aroused Colonel Bedford. He listened to my tale in silence. Then, “This might be serious,” he said. “Let’s wake the others.”
We did, and in the short time before the early dawn of summer gilded the east windows, we combe
d that castle from roof to cellars; but the incredible fact which we had uncovered remained, not to be dispelled or explained by any means in our power.
Geoff Exeter, our poor gallant blind Geoff, had disappeared....
CHAPTER XXI
I truly believe that that day was the longest and worst I ever managed to live through.
The aliens who ringed the castle did not attack in force: but they maintained a kind of sullen, dangerous watchfulness over the place, and every time one of us showed himself at a window, a rifle cracked and a slug spread itself on a wall nearby or buried itself in the ceiling above him.
“What are they doing?” Marion asked me again and again. “Why are they waiting?” And I could not tell her.
The night came, but our sleep was no more than an occasional leaden doze which left us unrefreshed, with gummy aching eyes and minds gnawed by worry.
Where in hell was Geoff?
Had they slipped in and abducted him, right out from beneath our noses? Hardly. The doors and windows were still bolted.
Had he left of his own free will? And if so, how? And why?
“The place is haunted,” Alec had said somberly at dinner; and in my heart I half agreed with him.
That night we had renewed our barricades at the head of the stairs, and kept our watches as before. About six in the morning I was starting to tear down the lumber once more when a hand was laid on my arm, and the Colonel, his face gray and drawn, said, “Leave ‘em, boy.”
“Why?”
“Come and look out the window. They’ve gathered. There must be two hundred if there’s a one. We can’t hold that great hall against them when they come. We’ve got to make a stand up here.”
It was true. The groves and the unkempt lawns swarmed with them, their loathsome bodies all gay and shining in the sunlight.
“Still clerks and shopkeepers?” I asked.
“No, this is a rather less appetizing lot. More like the mugs you were always spying on in pubs,” said Alec. “They look—well, pretty competent.”
“We’ll give them a reception,” said the Colonel grimly. “Spread out, front and back, and fire into the brown of ‘em when I give the word. Empty your rifles and then your revolvers as fast as you can; the fools are bunched so that we can’t miss. There’s not a military man in the lot, I’ll be bound.”
* * * *
I went to the farthest corner of the east wing, many rooms away from our G.H.Q. by the main stairwell: I swung open a window as gently as possible, then waited for the Colonel’s signal. I imagined he would fire his 450-400. I was forgetting that for development of the lungs there’s nothing to compare with half a lifetime of commanding the sepoys of India. To say merely that he shouted “Fire!” in a stentorian voice is like saying that the Last Trump will be rather loud. His bellow rattled the beams of oak in their stone sockets. Even the aliens on the lawns turned to look in his direction.
I thrust out the muzzle of my pachyderm blaster and let it speak twice in rapid fire; dropped it, threw down on the milling crew with my two Colts, and picked off three more usurpers before they could gather their wits and make for the groves. When the guns were empty I counted seven bodies. If my friends had had as good luck, I thought exultantly, the foe had lost more than thirty of their number! I found subsequently that our total for the surprise attack was twenty-four or -five.
This decimation must have shaken them to their toes, for the morning wore on and no assault came.
Johnson brought each of us a bowl of soup and a plate of biscuits at noon. Staying at my post in the eastern corner, I watched the trees and thought of Geoff Exeter.
Could that have been Geoff whom I followed down the secret stair two nights since? Certainly it was not one of them; and Geoff of all people would have known of its existence, for he had spent his childhood here in the castle. If it was him, where had he gone from the great hall? And what had moved in the black shadows of the fireplace? Had Geoff been spirited away by ghosts? I could credit anything, after these past months of hellish experience.
As I was chewing my last biscuit, firing broke out at the front of the castle; first a single shot or two, then heavy volleys, as though all my friends were engaged in it. I shifted from foot to foot, wondering what to do. Finally, after a searching look at the groves and lawns where nothing moved, I ran for the hallway.
* * * *
Marion and Alec were shooting from the windows of our sitting room. I dashed in, said foolishly, “What is it, an attack?” and looking out saw line after line of the beast-folk advancing rapidly on the castle, their numbers not bunched this time but spread out so that they presented more difficult targets. I judged them to be at least two hundred and fifty strong. “Shoot low,” I snapped, even as I brought the elephant gun to bear on a blue octopus-like brute and sent him sprawling. “Remember you’re aiming downhill.”
The thunder of a battering-ram smiting at the big door seemed to jar the floor beneath our feet. It ceased in a moment, and I heard the Colonel bawl, “They’re in! Come to the stairs!”
We gathered there behind our lumber-and-furniture barricade, six against an army. We did not say anything coherent, I believe, but continually shouting encouraging noises to one another, we fired and fired until our weapons grew hot to the touch. The beasts were thronging the hall below us, converging on the stairs and tearing at the mass of impeding obstacles which the Colonel and John had strewn down the length of the steps that morning. It was at once a hideous and a thrilling sight. The monsters were swarming up at us, a foot at a time, clawing at planks and barrels and broken chairs, hurling them back onto their comrades’ heads; none of them seemed to be firing at us, though in the heat of battle I may not have noticed if they had. It looked to me as if they were too infuriated to bother with guns. Like so many enraged baboons, they wanted to get at us and tear us to bloody tatters with their hands and teeth alone. As they fought upward, those in the fore exploded soundlessly, horribly, and quickly, like multicolored bags of gaudy rubber stabbed with sharp knives, leaving their dead robots to roll and flounder to the bottom again. I had run out of ammo for the big gun; howling with a kind of mad glee, I blazed away into the thick of them with my twin Colts, putting my bullets into the dark human forms within the hybrid monsters. The castle rocked and echoed with the fury of the fight. Cordite and spilt blood reeked in my nostrils. One of the devils, a rhinocerous-brute with a towering ivory-tinted “horn” that wobbled as he moved, came scrambling on all fours up over the mess of wreckage toward us; I took him for my very own, waiting until he was within a yard of me and then presenting both my revolvers to his face and pulling the triggers.
My guns were empty!
* * * *
Before I could recover from my surprise, he had gathered himself—he must have been an especially athletic fellow—and leaped straight for me. I went down under his weight, flailing my arms wildly. I was unprepared for a scuffle and for a few seconds could do nothing to defend myself properly. Before I had rallied, the body of the creature went limp and sagged down onto me, while his true form flickered away into nothingness. I struggled out from under him to see old Johnson pulling back a bloodied pig-sticker. He grinned at me complacently. “Still a trace of the old skill left, Mister Chester!”
They were the last words he ever spoke. A volley crashed out below us, and he swayed and fell at full length, like an ancient tree cut at the roots. I knelt over him, and saw that he was dead.
I peered over the railing, while feverishly loading my guns, and saw that we were nearly done; for the aliens, sacrificing scores of their men in that wild attack, had almost cleared the staircase. Now they were pulling back the corpses and the last of the impeding furniture, and only our barricade at the top remained between them and our garrison of five. Any of them who were in good shape and in the least degree agile could clear this barrier with ease. I knew we were almost done.
Now there occurred one of those queer, inexplicable pauses that come in the
thick of the wildest battles, when the men of both sides seem to draw back an imperceptible inch or two, cease firing and yelling, suck in a deep swift breath, and tauten their muscles for a final foray or a last furious defense. The usurpers in the hall and on the stairs fell silent as though by prearrangement; while we humans, as it chanced, were all either loading or taking careful sights over our gun barrels.
And in that comparative silence, broken only by the susurrus of heavy breathing, we all suddenly pricked up our ears and listened. The pause lengthened, by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement between the two parties. I looked at the Colonel, and he gestured imperiously toward the nearest room that faced on the drive. I flew into it, making for a window.
Because there had come to us the sound of many automobiles, driven at high speed down the country lane that led to Exeter Castle.
CHAPTER XXII
Behind me I heard firing start up again, though not with any great volume. Below me as I leaned out of the window I saw a number of usurpers come running out of the broken door to see what was happening, then turn and go in again. My attention was not on them however, but on the drive, where the first of a line of motors had already pulled up and stopped.
It was an old pre-war sedan. Its doors opened and six or seven men boiled out of it, staring at the castle and shouting as they moved.
Men! Not were-folk, not monsters, but men!
Had the sound of our fight carried to Exeter Parva? No, it could never produce these fifteen autos, decrepit though most of them were. Exeter Parva ran more to hay wagons.
Then the riddle was solved. The second car, a battered Bentley, halted, and out of the front seat climbed a man I would have recognized on a dark night in a cellar.
Dear old drunken, amoral, faithful Arold Smiff! Smiff to the rescue!
“At ‘em, Arold!” I whooped. “Inside, son!”
He stared up at me, then waved joyfully. “General! Hoy, General! Gawddam!” He motioned fiercely to his henchmen. “Come on, you one-legged paralyzed barstids, earn your wack! Out arms and forrard!”
The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard Page 9