The Invisible Man (18 page)

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 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
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 passenger 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, passed 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 space
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 assaulted, 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 snatched 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 glass 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 glass, 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 hit 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 glass 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—"