The Invisible Man (20 page)

Emerging into the hill-road, Kemp naturally took the downward
direction, and so it was he came to run in his own person the very
race he had watched with such a critical eye from the belvedere
study only four days ago. He ran it well, for a man out of
training, and though his face was white and wet, his wits were cool
to the last. He ran with wide strides, and wherever a patch of
rough ground intervened, wherever there came a patch of raw flints,
or a bit of broken glass shone dazzling, he crossed it and left the
bare invisible feet that followed to take what line they would.

For the first time in his life Kemp discovered that the hill-road
was indescribably vast and desolate, and that the beginnings of the
town far below at the hill foot were strangely remote. Never had
there been a slower or more painful method of progression than
running. All the gaunt villas, sleeping in the afternoon sun,
looked locked and barred; no doubt they were locked and barred—by
his own orders. But at any rate they might have kept a lookout
for an eventuality like this! The town was rising up now, the sea
had dropped out of sight behind it, and people down below were
stirring. A tram was just arriving at the hill foot. Beyond that
was the police station. Was that footsteps he heard behind him?
Spurt.

The people below were staring at him, one or two were running, and
his breath was beginning to saw in his throat. The tram was quite
near now, and the "Jolly Cricketers" was noisily barring its doors.
Beyond the tram were posts and heaps of gravel—the drainage
works. He had a transitory idea of jumping into the tram and
slamming the doors, and then he resolved to go for the police
station. In another moment he had passed the door of the "Jolly
Cricketers," and was in the blistering fag end of the street, with
human beings about him. The tram driver and his helper—arrested
by the sight of his furious haste—stood staring with the tram
horses unhitched. Further on the astonished features of navvies
appeared above the mounds of gravel.

His pace broke a little, and then he heard the swift pad of his
pursuer, and leapt forward again. "The Invisible Man!" he cried to
the navvies, with a vague indicative gesture, and by an inspiration
leapt the excavation and placed a burly group between him and the
chase. Then abandoning the idea of the police station he turned
into a little side street, rushed by a greengrocer's cart,
hesitated for the tenth of a second at the door of a sweetstuff
shop, and then made for the mouth of an alley that ran back into
the main Hill Street again. Two or three little children were
playing here, and shrieked and scattered at his apparition, and
forthwith doors and windows opened and excited mothers revealed
their hearts. Out he shot into Hill Street again, three hundred
yards from the tram-line end, and immediately he became aware of a
tumultuous vociferation and running people.

He glanced up the street towards the hill. Hardly a dozen yards off
ran a huge navvy, cursing in fragments and slashing viciously with
a spade, and hard behind him came the tram conductor with his fists
clenched. Up the street others followed these two, striking and
shouting. Down towards the town, men and women were running, and he
noticed clearly one man coming out of a shop-door with a stick in
his hand. "Spread out! Spread out!" cried some one. Kemp suddenly
grasped the altered condition of the chase. He stopped, and looked
round, panting. "He's close here!" he cried. "Form a line across—"

He was hit hard under the ear, and went reeling, trying to face
round towards his unseen antagonist. He just managed to keep his
feet, and he struck a vain counter in the air. Then he was hit
again under the jaw, and sprawled headlong on the ground. In
another moment a knee compressed his diaphragm, and a couple of
eager hands gripped his throat, but the grip of one was weaker than
the other; he grasped the wrists, heard a cry of pain from his
assailant, and then the spade of the navvy came whirling through
the air above him, and struck something with a dull thud. He felt
a drop of moisture on his face. The grip at his throat suddenly
relaxed, and with a convulsive effort, Kemp loosed himself, grasped
a limp shoulder, and rolled uppermost. He gripped the unseen elbows
near the ground. "I've got him!" screamed Kemp. "Help! Help—hold!
He's down! Hold his feet!"

In another second there was a simultaneous rush upon the struggle,
and a stranger coming into the road suddenly might have thought an
exceptionally savage game of Rugby football was in progress. And
there was no shouting after Kemp's cry—only a sound of blows
and feet and heavy breathing.

Then came a mighty effort, and the Invisible Man threw off a couple
of his antagonists and rose to his knees. Kemp clung to him in
front like a hound to a stag, and a dozen hands gripped, clutched,
and tore at the Unseen. The tram conductor suddenly got the neck
and shoulders and lugged him back.

Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled over. There
was, I am afraid, some savage kicking. Then suddenly a wild scream
of "Mercy! Mercy!" that died down swiftly to a sound like choking.

"Get back, you fools!" cried the muffled voice of Kemp, and there
was a vigorous shoving back of stalwart forms. "He's hurt, I tell
you. Stand back!"

There was a brief struggle to clear a space, and then the circle of
eager faces saw the doctor kneeling, as it seemed, fifteen inches
in the air, and holding invisible arms to the ground. Behind him a
constable gripped invisible ankles.

"Don't you leave go of en," cried the big navvy, holding a
blood-stained spade; "he's shamming."

"He's not shamming," said the doctor, cautiously raising his knee;
"and I'll hold him." His face was bruised and already going red; he
spoke thickly because of a bleeding lip. He released one hand and
seemed to be feeling at the face. "The mouth's all wet," he said.
And then, "Good God!"

He stood up abruptly and then knelt down on the ground by the side
of the thing unseen. There was a pushing and shuffling, a sound of
heavy feet as fresh people turned up to increase the pressure of
the crowd. People now were coming out of the houses. The doors of
the "Jolly Cricketers" stood suddenly wide open. Very little was said.

Kemp felt about, his hand seeming to pass through empty air. "He's
not breathing," he said, and then, "I can't feel his heart. His
side—ugh!"

Suddenly an old woman, peering under the arm of the big navvy,
screamed sharply. "Looky there!" she said, and thrust out a
wrinkled finger.

And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent
as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and
bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a
hand limp and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.

"Hullo!" cried the constable. "Here's his feet a-showing!"

And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along
his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change
continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison. First came
the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the
glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first
a faint fogginess, and then growing rapidly dense and opaque.
Presently they could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and
the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.

When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect, there lay,
naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised and broken body of a
young man about thirty. His hair and brow were white—not grey
with age, but white with the whiteness of albinism—and his eyes
were like garnets. His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and
his expression was one of anger and dismay.

"Cover his face!" said a man. "For Gawd's sake, cover that face!"
and three little children, pushing forward through the crowd, were
suddenly twisted round and sent packing off again.

Someone brought a sheet from the "Jolly Cricketers," and having
covered him, they carried him into that house. And there it was, on
a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd
of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and
unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself
invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever
seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

So ends the story of the strange and evil experiments of the
Invisible Man. And if you would learn more of him you must go to a
little inn near Port Stowe and talk to the landlord. The sign of
the inn is an empty board save for a hat and boots, and the name is
the title of this story. The landlord is a short and corpulent
little man with a nose of cylindrical proportions, wiry hair, and a
sporadic rosiness of visage. Drink generously, and he will tell you
generously of all the things that happened to him after that time,
and of how the lawyers tried to do him out of the treasure found
upon him.

"When they found they couldn't prove who's money was which, I'm
blessed," he says, "if they didn't try to make me out a blooming
treasure trove! Do I
look
like a Treasure Trove? And then a
gentleman gave me a guinea a night to tell the story at the Empire
Music 'All—just to tell 'em in my own words—barring one."

And if you want to cut off the flow of his reminiscences abruptly,
you can always do so by asking if there weren't three manuscript
books in the story. He admits there were and proceeds to explain,
with asseverations that everybody thinks
he
has 'em! But bless you!
he hasn't. "The Invisible Man it was took 'em off to hide 'em when
I cut and ran for Port Stowe. It's that Mr. Kemp put people on with
the idea of
my
having 'em."

And then he subsides into a pensive state, watches you furtively,
bustles nervously with glasses, and presently leaves the bar.

He is a bachelor man—his tastes were ever bachelor, and there
are no women folk in the house. Outwardly he buttons—it is
expected of him—but in his more vital privacies, in the matter
of braces for example, he still turns to string. He conducts his
house without enterprise, but with eminent decorum. His movements
are slow, and he is a great thinker. But he has a reputation for
wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village, and his
knowledge of the roads of the South of England would beat Cobbett.

And on Sunday mornings, every Sunday morning, all the year round,
while he is closed to the outer world, and every night after ten,
he goes into his bar parlour, bearing a glass of gin faintly tinged
with water, and having placed this down, he locks the door and
examines the blinds, and even looks under the table. And then,
being satisfied of his solitude, he unlocks the cupboard and a box
in the cupboard and a drawer in that box, and produces three
volumes bound in brown leather, and places them solemnly in the
middle of the table. The covers are weather-worn and tinged with an
algal green—for once they sojourned in a ditch and some of the
pages have been washed blank by dirty water. The landlord sits down
in an armchair, fills a long clay pipe slowly—gloating over the
books the while. Then he pulls one towards him and opens it, and
begins to study it—turning over the leaves backwards and forwards.

His brows are knit and his lips move painfully. "Hex, little two up
in the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee. Lord! what a one he was for
intellect!"

Presently he relaxes and leans back, and blinks through his smoke
across the room at things invisible to other eyes. "Full of
secrets," he says. "Wonderful secrets!"

"Once I get the haul of them—
Lord
!"

"I wouldn't do what
he
did; I'd just—well!" He pulls at his
pipe.

So he lapses into a dream, the undying wonderful dream of his life.
And though Kemp has fished unceasingly, no human being save the
landlord knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of
invisibility and a dozen other strange secrets written therein.
And none other will know of them until he dies.