"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 country-side must begin hunting and keep hunting. I tell you, Adye, he is a danger, a disaster; unless he is pinned 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 a.s.similated. So that he has to hide after eating. You must keep on beating. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 gla.s.s," said Kemp. "It"s cruel, I know. But think of what he may do!"
Adye drew the air in sharply between his teeth. "It"s unsportsmanlike. I don"t know. But I"ll have powdered gla.s.s 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 the Invisible Man pa.s.sed out of human perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can imagine him hurrying 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 to most probable refuge for him, for there it was he re-a.s.serted himself in a grimly tragical manner about two in the afternoon.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been 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 he had evidently counted on Kemp"s co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from human ken 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 mult.i.tude 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 drily 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 pa.s.senger train along the lines on a great parallelogram between Southampton, Manchester, 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 the 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. Going from whispering mouth to mouth, swift and certain over the length and breadth of the country, pa.s.sed the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed.
If our supposition that the Invisible Man"s refuge was the Hintondean thickets, 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 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. 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, 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 broken piece of 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. One is the circ.u.mstance 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 a.s.sertion 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 pa.s.sed 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, lifts the murder out of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention of using it in 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--finally striking at it.
No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circ.u.mstances, 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 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, b.l.o.o.d.y and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he would seem to have struck across the country 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.
That afternoon 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 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 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 to-day. 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 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 it the postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic detail "2d. 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, "to you." He remained meditative for a s.p.a.ce after doing this, and then returned to his cooling lunch.
He ate with gaps of thought. Finally he struck the table sharply. "We will have him!" he said; "and I am the bait. He will come too far."
He went up to the belvedere, carefully shutting every door after him. "It"s a game," he said, "an odd game--but the chances are all for me, Mr. Griffin, in spite of your invisibility. Griffin contra mundum ... with a vengeance."
He stood at the window staring at the hot hillside. "He must get food every day--and I don"t envy him. Did he really sleep last night? Out in the open somewhere--secure from collisions. I wish we could get some good cold wet weather instead of the heat.
"He may be watching me now."
He went close to the window. Something rapped smartly against the brickwork over the frame, and made him start violently back.
"I"m getting nervous," said Kemp. But it was five minutes before he went to the window again. "It must have been a sparrow," he said.
Presently he heard the front-door bell ringing, and hurried downstairs. He unbolted and unlocked the door, examined the chain, put it up, and opened cautiously without showing himself. A familiar voice hailed him. It was Adye.
"Your servant"s been a.s.saulted, Kemp," he said round the door.
"What!" exclaimed Kemp.
"Had that note of yours taken away from her. He"s close about here. Let me in."
Kemp released the chain, and Adye entered through as narrow an opening as possible. He stood in the hall, looking with infinite relief at Kemp refastening the door. "Note was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of her hand. Scared her horribly. She"s down at the station. Hysterics. He"s close here. What was it about?"
Kemp swore.
"What a fool I was," said Kemp. "I might have known. It"s not an hour"s walk from Hintondean. Already?"
"What"s up?" said Adye.
"Look here!" said Kemp, and led the way into his study. He handed Adye the Invisible Man"s letter. Adye read it and whistled softly. "And you--?" said Adye.
"Proposed a trap--like a fool," said Kemp, "and sent my proposal out by a maid servant. To him."
Adye followed Kemp"s profanity.
"He"ll clear out," said Adye.
"Not he," said Kemp.
A resounding smash of gla.s.s came from upstairs. Adye had a silvery glimpse of a little revolver half out of Kemp"s pocket. "It"s a window, upstairs!" said Kemp, and led the way up. There came a second smash while they were still on the staircase. When they reached the study they found two of the three windows smashed, half the room littered with splintered gla.s.s, and one big flint lying on the writing table. The two men stopped in the doorway, contemplating the wreckage. Kemp swore again, and as he did so the third window went with a snap like a pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering triangles into the room.
"What"s this for?" said Adye.
"It"s a beginning," said Kemp.
"There"s no way of climbing up here?"
"Not for a cat," said Kemp.
"No shutters?"
"Not here. All the downstairs rooms--Hullo!"
Smash, and then whack of boards. .h.i.t hard came from downstairs. "Confound him!" said Kemp. "That must be--yes--it"s one of the bedrooms. He"s going to do all the house. But he"s a fool. The shutters are up, and the gla.s.s will fall outside. He"ll cut his feet."
Another window proclaimed its destruction. The two men stood on the landing perplexed. "I have it!" said Adye. "Let me have a stick or something, and I"ll go down to the station and get the bloodhounds put on. That ought to settle him! They"re hard by--not ten minutes--"
Another window went the way of its fellows.
"You haven"t a revolver?" asked Adye.
Kemp"s hand went to his pocket. Then he hesitated. "I haven"t one--at least to spare."
"I"ll bring it back," said Adye, "you"ll be safe here."
Kemp, ashamed of his momentary lapse from truthfulness, handed him the weapon.
"Now for the door," said Adye.
As they stood hesitating in the hall, they heard one of the first-floor bedroom windows crack and clash. Kemp went to the door and began to slip the bolts as silently as possible. His face was a little paler than usual. "You must step straight out," said Kemp. In another moment Adye was on the doorstep and the bolts were dropping back into the staples. He hesitated for a moment, feeling more comfortable with his back against the door. Then he marched, upright and square, down the steps. He crossed the lawn and approached the gate. A little breeze seemed to ripple over the gra.s.s. Something moved near him. "Stop a bit," said a Voice, and Adye stopped dead and his hand tightened on the revolver.
"Well?" said Adye, white and grim, and every nerve tense.
"Oblige me by going back to the house," said the Voice, as tense and grim as Adye"s.
"Sorry," said Adye a little hoa.r.s.ely, and moistened his lips with his tongue. The Voice was on his left front, he thought. Suppose he were to take his luck with a shot?
"What are you going for?" said the Voice, and there was a quick movement of the two, and a flash of sunlight from the open lip of Adye"s pocket.
Adye desisted and thought. "Where I go," he said slowly, "is my own business." The words were still on his lips, when an arm came round his neck, his back felt a knee, and he was sprawling backward. He drew clumsily and fired absurdly, and in another moment he was struck in the mouth and the revolver wrested from his grip. He made a vain clutch at a slippery limb, tried to struggle up and fell back. "d.a.m.n!" said Adye. The Voice laughed. "I"d kill you now if it wasn"t the waste of a bullet," it said. He saw the revolver in mid-air, six feet off, covering him.
"Well?" said Adye, sitting up.
"Get up," said the Voice.
Adye stood up.
"Attention," said the Voice, and then fiercely, "Don"t try any games. Remember I can see your face if you can"t see mine. You"ve got to go back to the house."
"He won"t let me in," said Adye.
"That"s a pity," said the Invisible Man. "I"ve got no quarrel with you."
Adye moistened his lips again. He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head, and the mult.i.tudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet. His eyes came back to this little metal thing hanging between heaven and earth, six yards away. "What am I to do?" he said sullenly.
"What am I to do?" asked the Invisible Man. "You will get help. The only thing is for you to go back."
"I will try. If he lets me in will you promise not to rush the door?"
"I"ve got no quarrel with you," said the Voice.
Kemp had hurried upstairs after letting Adye out, and now crouching among the broken gla.s.s and peering cautiously over the edge of the study window sill, he saw Adye stand parleying with the Unseen. "Why doesn"t he fire?" whispered Kemp to himself. Then the revolver moved a little and the glint of the sunlight flashed in Kemp"s eyes. He shaded his eyes and tried to see the source of the blinding beam.
"Surely!" he said, "Adye has given up the revolver."
"Promise not to rush the door," Adye was saying. "Don"t push a winning game too far. Give a man a chance."
"You go back to the house. I tell you flatly I will not promise anything."
Adye"s decision seemed suddenly made. He turned towards the house, walking slowly with his hands behind him. Kemp watched him--puzzled. The revolver vanished, flashed again into sight, vanished again, and became evident on a closer scrutiny as a little dark object following Adye. Then things happened very quickly. Adye leapt backwards, swung around, clutched at this little object, missed it, threw up his hands and fell forward on his face, leaving a little puff of blue in the air. Kemp did not hear the sound of the shot. Adye writhed, raised himself on one arm, fell forward, and lay still.
For a s.p.a.ce Kemp remained staring at the quiet carelessness of Adye"s att.i.tude. The afternoon was very hot and still, nothing seemed stirring in all the world save a couple of yellow b.u.t.terflies chasing each other through the shrubbery between the house and the road gate. Adye lay on the lawn near the gate. The blinds of all the villas down the hill-road were drawn, but in one little green summer-house was a white figure, apparently an old man asleep. Kemp scrutinised the surroundings of the house for a glimpse of the revolver, but it had vanished. His eyes came back to Adye. The game was opening well.