Great God, did ever such a motley army advance on such an unearthly enemy? It was like the thieves of Paris defending their city against Burgundy ... had that kingdom recruited its army from the swamps of Hell. From the line of cars swarmed a gang of shabby, dirty, swearing men, as tough and evil looking a mob as ever trod the soil of England. Spawned in the slums and reared on violence, every one of them! Muggers, knifers, coshers, men with scarred faces and broken teeth, men fitting brass knuckles on their fists as they came, men sliding straight razors (the favorite weapon of our underworld) from their frayed sleeves and clicking open big clasp knives, men drawing automatics for which you could have staked your life they had no permits, men who were scarcely more than wild boys and men who had grown gray and bald in crime; at once as undisciplinable and as effective a fighting troop as one could find anywhere. I think I screamed encouragement to them as they came, for I was half-hysterical with relief. Arold Smiff, miraculously, had come in time.
* * * *
As they ran toward the castle I ducked inside and went to my friends, loading my guns as I moved. The aliens were still attacking up the stairs, but now they wavered as the vanguard of the thugs struck them from behind. All roaring hell broke loose.
I saw plenty of action in the last war; I saw the slaughter of the Normandy beaches and the havoc wrought through France, Germany, and several other countries; but the goriest brawl I ever laid eye on was the fight at Exeter Castle between Arold Smiffs hundred criminals and the motley hordes of the silver land.
We were outnumbered, at the start, nearly two to one. But our crooks were professional killers, used to the mechanics of murder, and the usurpers were not. The hall was jammed from wall to wall with a struggling, howling, thrashing jam of fighters, so that often when a man was killed his body could not fall; conditions were thus perfect for our knifers and gougers, throttling experts and razormen.
The aliens for the most part had turned from us to engage this new menace. We tore away our barricade and charged down to mix it with them. I caught a glimpse of Arold before I struck the level. He had an automatic in his right hand and in his left, one of those fearsome weapons used by the gangs in their private wars, called a “moley”—a large potato, stuck half-full of safety razor blades. When pressed against the face and twisted, it made a grisly instrument of torture, mutilation, and often death. I grimaced. These were wicked men who had come to our rescue.
With our heavy Colts we blasted back the beast-men till we had cleared a space at the foot of the stairs; standing shoulder to shoulder, we bellowed, “Rally! To us, to us, rally round!” and many of the rogues fought through the press to join us, so that shortly we were the nucleus of the battle. Bedford led a charge that smashed the center of the enemy line and crumpled up the right wing as it returned. I saw John Baringer go down from a blow on the head; beat my way to him and dragged him to the relative safety of the big fireplace.
* * * *
I was entirely out of ammunition by then. Sticking the pistols in my belt for last-ditch use as clubs, I grappled with the human husk of a big sprawling beetle-beast, throttled him, took away a butcher’s cleaver he was utilizing, brained him with it and waded into the combat once more. I was splashed with gore from boots to hair, my left arm was numb from a crack on the elbow, I was whooping like a maniac, and felt myself supremely happy. I would not have been anywhere else for ten thousand pounds sterling.
I found myself next to Arold. I hugged him, and his muddy-crimson eyes squeezed up with a grin. “General! Bloody fine scrim!”
“How did you know to come here?” I yelled at him; but the tides of battle flung us apart before he could answer. I knew, though. Nobody in the world but Geoff could have brought him.
I found myself engaged with a razorman of our own forces, and had to explain who I was, in exceedingly rapid speech. Then I went hunting for the Colonel, and found him dripping blood (someone else’s) by the stairs. Now the fight had become a massacre, and the aliens, fleeing, found a heavy guard on the door and no sanctuary anywhere short of the grave. “Colonel,” I screeched in his ear, “your voice will carry over this hubbub. Go up the stairs a bit—tell ‘em to leave a few alive—got to parley!”
He clumped up the steps, and his bull’s roar quelled the racket like thunder drowning out a kindergarten choir. The thugs turned astonished eyes upward, and the few usurpers still on their feet shrank together in a corner. For one brief instant I felt pity for them. Then I remembered their plot to take over our world....
“That’s enough,” the Colonel was saying. “Collect the remaining enemies and bring ‘em here, lads.”
The “lads” did so. Alec and I went up the dozen steps to join the Colonel, Marion ran down from the upper floor, and Arold Smiff pushed through his followers to wring my hand heartily. Then we all looked at the things from the silver land, and I began to speak.
CHAPTER XXIII
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 s
ecret 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.
CHAPTER XXIV
A week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London’s finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over.
At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembered as he came to the ground floor that there was an old hidden exit in the back of the fireplace.
“I give you my word I never meant to use it! I only wanted to see if I remembered the trick of it. You twist one of the hounds on the stone coat of arms, and the door opens behind the logs. Well, I did it, and heard the door clink open; I hadn’t tried it since I was a kid, and I thought, By golly, what a lark to go through the underground tunnel and see if the other end’s still workable! I guess I had some vague notion of us using it for an escape route, if things got too hot for us in the castle. So I went in, and closed the door behind me.
“I bumbled along the tunnel—how I recalled the feel of those damp, rough bricks!—and came after three hundred feet to the other end, where a hidden trap leads to a summerhouse. I lifted it cautiously, still with no idea of leaving the tunnel, and felt the breeze on my face; and I knew then that I had to go on. I’d come this far and suddenly I knew I had to keep travelin’ till I got to Birmingham and Arold. So I slipped out and cut straight through the woods till I came to the road. My lack of sight was no handicap, because there’s not a chunk of turf within five miles o’ the castle I don’t know by its first name.
* * * *
“After I hit the road it was easy. I just groped my way for a few hours till I knew by the sound of the farm dogs that I’d come to Granny Moore’s place. After running into a fence and a cart or two, I found the door and banged on it; explained to Granny that I had to get to Birmingham as quick as possible; and she, bless her staunch old soul, detailed her youngest boy (a lad of forty-nine) to take me there, without so much as a single query as to my reasons—and that’s all. I found Arold that afternoon at Old Mag’s.”
“To think I was standing in the hall when you went through the door in the fireplace,” I said. “God! I thought it was ghosts I heard.”
“I’d have left a note, or come back to tell you, but I was all carried away with the spirit of rollicking adventure and looniness,” said Geoff, filling his pipe. “I expect I gave you some bad hours. I’m sorry.”
“Forgiven,” gruffed the Colonel. “You saved our bacon.”
“And the world,” said Marion quietly.
“Yes, the world! The jolly old human race, that didn’t even know it was in danger, and wouldn’t believe it now if we told it! Hell’s sweet bells, it’s hard for me to believe!” Geoff laughed. “Did we really pit ourselves against ten thousand fantastic beasts, and drive them from our dimension by a colossal bluff? Or did we dream a long horrid dream, we seven strange crusaders?”
The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard Page 10