2
With his hands on the French window locks Sebastian became still, petrified by the sound. Laura caught his arm.
“What is it?” Elfrida cried. “What is it?”
“An aircraft,” Sebastian said, his voice so dry they could not bear him. “A plane. Coming right overhead! ”
“Go on! ” Robert said. “Get out and see! ”
“Don’t!” Laura held John Sebastian as tightly as she had strength for. “There’s a chance Don’t! ”
And in that instant, the heat turned off. Robert came forward.
“Let me go!” he said “Let me go. It may help us. Wc can signal—if it wasn’t for these bloody blinds. Let me go out there! ”
“Don’t jump to anything,” Sebastian said, his voice tinged with a screaming note as the sudden hope of relief surged up in him
“It may not be… ”
“It’s going away,” Jill said. “Oh, don’t let it go. Don’t let it go! ”
“What can it do?” Harris said breathlessly, almost pleading for a hopeful answer. “What can it do?”
No one answered. They stood still, not daring to make a sound, listening for the sound of the aircraft engine. Then it came again like the sound of a great sigh.
“It’s coming back!” Jill whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “It’s coming back! ”
Sebastian tore his arm from Laura’s slackened grip and ran to a side window.
“They’re going! They’re moving away towards the road. If only we could see where…”
Robert grabbed the handles and burst the French windows open. He rushed out beyond the shield of .the blinds and stood there as the noise of the plane engine became loud overhead.
“Great clappers!” Robert yelled hysterically. “Look! Look at it! ”
And as if danger mattered no more they ran out, stumbling and pushing, to the terrace and looked up as the plane roared by fifty feet above the promenade, just about high enough to clear the buildings towards the town.
And from each lower wingtip a great stream of bluish vapour trailed out into the air above the beach, growing as it fell towards the ground.
“It’s a crop sprayer!” Robert shieked. “It’s a bloody crop sprayer! ”
And his voice echoed in the silence that followed as the blue dye came down to the ground, and there began to appear such a scene as none who had suffered through that night even had begun to imagine.
In great streams of the blue from the roaring wasp, shapes were beginning to appear, fantastic, formless moving masses of blue glass, moving away, like mighty ants disturbed, running anywhere, slowly, as if trying to escape the gradual appearance of their own vision.
“Good God Almighty!” Harris said. He put his hands over his eyes a moment, then spread his fingers, then looked.
The plane roared over the roadway and the fighting firemen,
from them a ragged cheer rose up as, like phantoms in a fog, the invisible gradually appeared to their horrified
The police vans began to speed down the road towards the battle. Darrow’s loudspeaker blared orders as it led them on.
“Oh my Kissen, my Kissen! ” Elfrida moaned, petrified with horror, holding the cat so tightly she did not notice the scared, scratching claws against her.
Sebastian ran down the side of the house, blue spotted now from the drifting clouds. On the dunes to the right there seemed to be hundreds of the blue glass monsters moving clumsily down towards the sea, their great spoor now open and clear on the sand.
The plane turned over the town hall, banked steeply and roe streaking back again. The rattle of light gunfire sounded along the promenade from the police forces, but the bullets seemed to have no effect on the slow, shambling forms of the invaders, making slowly back, across the beach and the dunes, towards the sea.
“They’re running away,” Laura said, catching up Sebastian at the corner of the house. “They’re running away! ”
“They can be seen,” he said. “They can be seen at last. There’s nothing now to protect them.”
The aircraft roared overhead while they watched and then gradually the blue cloud enveloped them. She coughed, closed her eyes and clung tightly to him until the wet, drifting cloud thinned and fell to the ground around them. For a moment he stood without breathing, fearing the slow, magic appearance of one of the monsters near them, but they stood alone on the lawn before the house, blue-spotted and stained by the drifting cloud.
Robert jumped the wall, fell to the sand and went lumping heavily towards the fleeing, straggling mass of the monsters as they began to splash and break into the sea.
“Bastards! ” he yelled, and he kept on shouting it until he tripped, went headlong and sprawled in an exhausted heap on the sands.
Harris just stayed leaning heavily on the parapet, staring. The first wonder and excitement of the sight faded into sudden shame, the terrifying vision of himself as he had been in that room.
Elfrida turned to go into the room again, hugging the cat. Jill was standing, white-faced, by the French windows. Elfrida stopped, horrified by her expression.
“You know he’s dead, don’t you?” she whispered.
The old woman stopped, staring.
“He died when he told us what he did,” Jill said. “And I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care. It was just me that mattered.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, child,” Elfrida said. “Wc were all the same.”
“No” Jill said, quickly. ‘‘He risked everything for us. Look! Supposing he had let us go——” She pointed, then her finger shook, she bit her lip and turned her head from the sight of the fleeing things on the beach.
The plane raced .over again, its shadow skimming along the beach, the blue trails still streaming from its wings. Sebastian camc back with Laura.
“There are none left round here,” he said. “That’s sure now.
I think the fire engine must have started them running
They have no arms, you see. It was true what they told me…”
All along the edge of the sea the foaming breaks where the things went in increased, but where one reached the water he vanished almost immediately, finding speed at last. Following them across the beaches the fire engine tried hose jets, but the water burst off the shellbacks in great white plumes and could not bring them down. It was only when batteries of rockets, brought to the beach by radio from the Shropshire, that the slaughter began.
It was then that Laura turned to Sebastian.
“Oh, no!” she moaned. “I can’t stand…”
“It’s nearly over,” he said huskily.
3
It was not over. The front was evacuated, watched, radar- swept, listened to. The cliffs where explored by armed men, the new tunnels searched with flame-throwers ahead.
The Naval Commander, hastily put in charge of the area, said:
“They came from the sea, but, thank Heaven, we’ve driven them back in again. Maybe wc should have watchcd for what’s there under our noses than get scared for each other’s submarines.”
But John Sebastian was chief witness to help the operations, and he did not agree. .
“They’ll come back,” he said. “They promised me that this was just an exploring party. Now they know what’s here, they’ll come back. But now they know what to expect—bullets and rockets and flame-throwers. They don’t understand we only use such things because we’re frightened. They don’t intend to understand us at all. They’ll come back and destroy us, if it takes a thousand years to find the means.”
“Well, let’s hope it is a thousand years,” the Commander said, and laughed to break the chill sensation as of a sea wind breaking over him.
webkit-filter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
The Coming of The Strangers Page 19