Kemp's hand went to his moustache. Was that a movement downstairs?
"And it is killing we must do, Kemp."
"It is killing we must do," repeated Kemp. "I'm listening to your plan, Griffin; but I'm not agreeing, mind. Why killing?"
"Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is: They know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man—and that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it's startling, but I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town, like your Burdock, and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them."
"Humph!" said Kemp, no longer listening to Griffin, but to the sound of his front door opening and closing.
"It seems to me, Griffin," he said, to cover his wandering attention, "that your confederate would be in a difficult position?"
""No one would know he was a confederate." said the Invisible Man eagerly. And then suddenly, "Hush! What's that downstairs?"
"Nothing," said Kemp, and suddenly began to speak loud and fast. "I don't agree to this, Griffin," he said. "Understand me, I don't agree to this. Why dream of playing a game against the race?[3] How can you hope to gain happiness? Don't be a lone wolf. Publish your results—take the world—take the nation at least into your confidence. Think what you might do with a million helpers—"
The Invisible Man interrupted—arm extended. "There are footsteps coming upstairs," he said.
"Nonsense," said Kemp.
"Let me see," said the Invisible Man, and advanced, arm extended, to the door.
And then things happened very swiftly. Kemp hesitated for a second, and moved to intercept him. The Invisible Man started and stood still. "Traitor!" cried the Voice, and suddenly the dressing-gown opened, and, sitting down, the unseen began to disrobe. Kemp made three swift steps to the door, and forthwith the Invisible Man—his legs had vanished—sprang to his feet with a shout. Kemp flung the door open.
As it opened, there came a sound of hurrying feet downstairs and voices.
With a quick movement Kemp thrust the Invisible Man back, sprang aside, and slammed the door. The key was outside and ready. In another moment Griffin would have been alone in the belvedere study a prisoner—save for one little thing. The key had been slipped in hastily that morning. As Kemp slammed the door it fell noisily upon the carpet.
Kemp's face became white. He tried to grip the doorhandle with both hands. For a moment he stood lugging. Then the door gave six inches. But he got it closed again. The second time it was jerked a foot wide, and the dressing-gown came wedging itself into the opening. His throat was gripped by invisible fingers, and he left his hold on the handle to defend himself. He was forced back, tripped, and pitched heavily into the corner of the landing. The empty dressing-gown was flung on the top of him.
Half-way up the staircase was Colonel Adye the recipient of Kemp's letter, the chief of the Burdock police. He was staring aghast at the sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight of clothing tossing empty in the air. He saw Kemp drop and struggle to his feet. He saw Kemp reel, rush forward, and go down again, felled like an ox.
Then suddenly he was struck violently. By nothing! A vast weight, it seemed, leapt upon him, and he was hurled headlong down the staircase, with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin. An invisible foot trod on his back, a ghostly patter passed downstairs, he heard the two police officers in the hall shout and run, and the front door of the house slammed violently.
He rolled over and sat up staring. He saw, staggering down the staircase, Kemp, dusty and dishevelled, one side of his face white from a blow, his lip bleeding, and a pink dressing-gown and some other clothing held in his arms.
"My God!" cried Kemp, "the game's up![4] He's gone!"
Chapter XXV
The Hunting Of The Invisible Man
For a space Kemp was too inarticulate to make Adye understand the swift things that had just happened. They stood on the landing, Kemp speaking hurriedly, the grotesque swathings of Griffin still on his arm. But presently Adye began to grasp something of the situation.
"He is mad," said Kemp; "inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking… He has wounded men. He will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic. Nothing can stop him. He is going out now—furious!"
"He must be caught," said Adye. "That is certain."
"But how?" cried Kemp, and suddenly became full of ideas. "You must begin at once; you must set every available man to work; you must prevent his leaving this district. Once he gets away he may go through the countryside as he wills, killing and maiming. He dreams of a reign of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you. You must set a watch on trains and roads and shipping. The garrison must help. You must wire for help. The only thing that may keep him here is the thought of recovering some books of notes he counts of value. I will tell you of that! There is a man in your police station—Marvel."
"I know," said Adye, "I know. Those books—yes. But the tramp…"
"Says he hasn't them. But he thinks the tramp has. And you must prevent him from eating or sleeping—day and night the country must be astir for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food, so that he will have to break his way to it. The houses everywhere must be barred against him. Heaven send us cold nights and rain! The whole countryside must begin hunting and keep hunting. I tell you, Adye, he is a danger, a disaster. Unless he is pinned down and secured, it is frightful to think of the things that may happen."
"What else can we do?" said Adye. "I must go down at once and begin organising. But why not come? Yes—you come too! Come, and we must hold a sort of council of war—get Hopps to help—and the railway managers. By Jove! it's urgent. Come along—tell me as we go. What else is there we can do? Put that stuff down."
In another moment Adye was leading the way downstairs. They found the front door open and the policemen standing outside staring at empty air. "He's got away, sir," said one.
"We must go to the central station at once," said Adye. "One of you go on down and get a cab to come up and meet us—quickly. And now, Kemp, what else?"
"Dogs," said Kemp. "Get dogs. They don't see him, but they wind him. Get dogs."
"Good," said Adye. "It's not generally known, but the prison officials over at Halstead know a man with bloodhounds. Dogs. What else?"
"Bear in mind," said Kemp, "his food shows. After eating, his food shows until it is assimilated. So that he has to hide after eating. You must keep on beating.[1] Every thicket, every quiet corner. And put all weapons—all implements that might be weapons, away. He can't carry such things for long. And what he can snatch up and strike men with must be hidden away."
"Good again," said Adye. "We shall have him yet!"
"And on the roads—" said Kemp, and hesitated.
"Yes?" said Adye.
"Powdered glass," said 'Kemp. "It's cruel, I know. But think of what he may do!"
Adye drew the air in between his teeth sharply. "It's unsportsmanlike. I don't know. But I'll have powdered glass got ready. If he goes too far…"
"The man's become inhuman, I tell you," said Kemp. "I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror—so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape—as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head."
Chapter XXVI
The Wicksteed Murder
The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp's gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken—and thereafter for some hours he passed out of human perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can imagine him hurr
ying through the hot June forenoon, up the hill and on to the open downland behind Port Burdock, raging and despairing at his intolerable fate, and sheltering at last, heated and weary, amid the thickets of Hintondean, to piece together again his shattered schemes against his species. That seems the most probable refuge for him, for there it was he reasserted himself in a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been[1] during that time and what plans he devised. No doubt he was almost ecstatically exasperated by Kemp's treachery, and though we may be able to understand the motives that led to that deceit, we may still imagine, and even sympathise a little with the fury the attempted surprise must have occasioned. Perhaps something of the stunned astonishment of his Oxford Street experiences may have returned to him, for evidently he had counted on Kemp's co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate, he vanished from human ken[2] about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction.
During that time a growing multitude of men scattered over the countryside were busy. In the morning he had still been simply a legend, a terror; in the afternoon, by virtue chiefly of Kemp's dryly worded proclamation, he was presented as a tangible antagonist, to be wounded, captured, or overcome, and the countryside began organising itself with inconceivable rapidity. By two o'clock even, he might still have removed himself out of the district by getting aboard a train, but after two that became impossible, every passenger train along the lines, on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Winchester, Brighton and Horsham, travelled with locked doors, and the goods traffic was almost entirely suspended. And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port Burdock men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out in groups of three and four, with dogs, to beat roads and fields.
Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes, stopping at every cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses and keep indoors unless they were armed, and all the elementary schools had broken up by three o'clock, and the children, scared and keeping together in groups, were hurrying home. Kemp's proclamation—signed, indeed, by Adye—was posted over almost the whole district by four or five o'clock in the afternoon. It gave briefly but clearly all the conditions of the struggle, the necessity of keeping the Invisible Man from food and sleep, the necessity for incessant watchfulness, and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements. And so swift and decided was the action of the authorities, so prompt and universal was the belief in this strange being, that before nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent state of siege. And before nightfall, too, a thrill of horror went through the whole watching, nervous countryside, and going from whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and breadth of the country passed the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed.
If our supposition that the Invisible Man's refuge was the Hintondean thickets is correct, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied out again, bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron rod in his hand before he met Wicksteed is to me, at least, overwhelming.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that encounter. It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord Burdock's lodge gate.[3] Everything points to a desperate struggle—the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr. Wicksteed received, his splintered walking-stick—but why the attack was made, save in a murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed, the theory of madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of forty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive habits and appearance, and the very last person in the world to provoke such a terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible Man used an iron rod, dragged from a piece of broken fence. He stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal, attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled him, and smashed his head to a jelly.
Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing, before he met his victim—he must have been carrying it ready in his hand. Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear on the matter.[4] One is the circumstance that the gravel-pit was not in Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred yards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl, to the effect that going to her afternoon school she saw the murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel-pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight depression in the ground.
Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, certainly lifts the murder out of the realm of the absolutely wanton.[5] We may imagine that Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention of using it to murder. Wicksteed may then have come by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air. Without any thought of the Invisible Man—for Port Burdock is ten miles away—he may have pursued it. It is quite conceivable that he may not even have heard of the Invisible Man. One can, then, imagine the Invisible Man making off quietly in order to avoid discovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed, excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotive object,[7] finally striking at it.
No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the ill-luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the gravel-pit. To those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine.
But this is a pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts—for stories of children are often unreliable—are the discovery of Wicksteed's body, done to death, and of the blood-stained iron rod flung among the nettles. The abandonment of the rod by Griffin suggests that in the emotional excitement of the affair the purpose for which he took it—if he had a purpose—was abandoned. He was certainly an intensely egotistical and unfeeling man, but the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long-pent fountain of remorse to flood for a time whatever scheme of action he had contrived.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across the country[7] towards the downland. There is a story of a voice heard about sunset by a couple of men in a field near Fern Bottom. It was wailing and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and ever and again it shouted. It must have been queer hearing. It drove up across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the hills.
In the interim the Invisible Man must have learnt something of the rapid use Kemp had made of his confidences. He must have found houses locked and secured, he may have loitered about railway stations and prowled about inns, and no doubt he read the proclamations and realised something of the nature of the campaign against him. And as the evening advanced the fields became dotted here and there with groups of three or four men, and noisy with the yelping of dogs. These men-hunters had particular instructions in the case of an encounter as to the way they should support one another. But he avoided them all. We may understand something of his exasperation, and it could have been none the less because he himself had supplied the information that was being used so remorselessly against him. For that day at least he lost heart; for nearly twenty-four hours, save when he turned on Wicksteed, he was a hunted man. In the night he must have eaten and slept, for in the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry and malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.
Chapter XXVII
The Siege Of Kemp's House
Kemp read a strange missive, written in pencil on a greasy sheet of paper.
"You have been amazingly energetic and clever," this letter ran, "though what you stand to gain by it[1] I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me—you have tried to rob me of a night's rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it but[2] to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with, the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him today. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions—it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar-box[3] by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die."
Kemp read this letter twice. "It's no hoax," he said. "That's his voice! And he means it."
He turned the folded sheet over and saw on the addressed side of the postmark Hintondean and the prosaic detail, "2d.[4] to pay."
He got up slowly, leaving his lunch unfinished—the letter had come by the one o'clock post—and went into his study. He rang for his housekeeper, and told her to go round the house at once, examine all the fastenings of the windows, and close all the shutters. He closed the shutters of his study himself. From a locked drawer in his bedroom he took a little revolver, examined it carefully, and put it into the pocket of his lounge jacket. He wrote a number of brief notes, one to Colonel Adye, gave them to his servant to take, with explicit instructions as to her way of leaving the house. "There is no danger," he said, and added a mental reservation,[5] "to you." He remained meditative for a space after doing this, and then returned to his cooling lunch.
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