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- Author: Ray Cummings
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“I would like to know you two better. Much better—but not tonight.”
He moved as though to take his leave of us. Then he added to Don, “That most beautiful young lady with you in the restaurant—did I not see you there? Is that your sister?”
Don made his decision. He said abruptly, “That’s none of your business.”
It took the fellow wholly by surprise. “But listen—”
“I’ve had enough of your insolence,” Don shouted.
The man’s hand made an instinctive movement toward his belt, but I seized his wrist. And I added my loud voice to Don’s. “No, you don’t!”
A GROUP of onlookers was at once collecting around us. The giant tried to cast me off, but I clung to him with all my strength. And suddenly we were struggling to keep the fellow from breaking away from us. He muttered a strange-sounding oath.
“Let me go! You fools!”
“Not such fools,” Don shouted. “Officer! I say—officer!”
Don’s revolver was in his hand; people were pressing around us, but when they saw the revolver they began scattering. The giant made a lunge and broke away from us, heedless that Don might have shot him.
“What’s all this? I say, you three, what are you up to?”
The policeman came on a run. A group of soldiers passing on bicycles, flung the machines aside and came dashing at us. The giant stood suddenly docile.
“Officer, these young men attacked me.”
“He’s a liar!” Don shouted. “Watch him! He might be armed—don’t let him get away from you!”
The law surrounded us. “Here’s my weapon,” said Don. “Bob, give up your revolver.”
In the turmoil Don plucked the policeman aside.
“I’m nephew of the Honorable Arthur Dorrance. Take us to your chief. I made that uproar to catch that big fellow.”
The name of the Honorable Arthur Dorrance was magic. The policeman stared at our giant captive who now was surrounded by the soldiers.
“But I say—”
“Take us all in and send for Mr. Dorrance. He’s at the Government House.”
“But I say—That big blighter—”
“We think he’s one of the ghosts!” Don whispered.
“Oh, my Gawd!”
With the crowd following us we were hurried away to the police station nearby.
THE sergeant said, “The Chief will be here in a few minutes. And we’ve sent for Mr. Dorrance.”
“Good enough, Brown.” It chanced that Don knew this sergeant very well. “Did you search the fellow?”
“Yes. No weapon in his clothes.”
I whispered, “I saw a wire under his collar.”
“Sh! No use telling that now, Bob.”
I realized it. These policemen were frightened enough at our captive. Don added, “Before my uncle and the Chief arrive, let me have a talk with that fellow, will you?”
They had locked him up; and in the excitement of our arrival at the station both Don and I had completely forgotten the wire we had seen at his collar. But we remembered it now, and the same thought occurred to both of us. We had locked up this mysterious enemy, but would the prison bars hold him?
“Good Lord!” Don exclaimed. “Bob, those wires—Sergeant, we shouldn’t have left that fellow alone! Is he alone! Come on!”
With the frightened mystified sergeant leading us we dashed along the little white corridor to the windowless cell in which the giant was confined. At the cell-door a group of soldiers lounged in the corridor.
“Smooth talker, that fellow.”
“Gor blime me, who is he?”
We arrived with a rush. “Is he in there?” Don shouted. “Open the door, you fellows! See here, you watch him—we’ve got to get his clothes off. He’s got some mechanism—wires and things underneath his clothes!”
“Get out of the way!” ordered the sergeant. “I’ll open it!”
There was silence from behind the door. The prisoner had been in the cell no more than a minute or two.
WE burst open the door. The cell was dimly illumined. The figure of the giant stood backed in its further corner. But at the sight of him we all stood transfixed with horror. His shoes, trousers, shirt, jacket and cap lay in a little pile at his feet. He stood revealed in the short tight-fitting silvery garments. The wires were looped about his arms and legs and he had pulled a mesh of them over his head in lieu of a helmet.
He stood regarding us sardonically. And in that instant while we were stricken with the shock of it, I saw that the figure was fading. It was a solid human form no longer! A silvery cast had come upon it. Another second passed; it was visibly growing tenuous, wraithlike! It was melting while we stared at it, until in that breathless instant I realized that the wall behind it was showing through.
A wraith! An apparition! The vision of a ghost standing there, leering at us!
The soldiers had retreated back into the corridor behind us. The sergeant gripped me, and his other hand, wavering with fright, clutched a revolver.
“But it’s—it’s going!”
Don gasped, “Too late! Sergeant, give me that gun!”
“Wait!” I shouted. “Don’t shoot at it!”
The shimmering glowing white figure was slowly moving downward as though floating through the cell-floor. Its own invisible surface was evidently not here but lower down, and it was beginning to drop. I don’t know what frenzied courage—if courage it could be called—was inspiring me. I was wholly confused, but nevertheless I struck Don and the sergeant aside and rushed at the thing.
IT was a sensation most horrible. From the waist up it was still above the floor of the cell. My wildly flailing arms went through the chest! But I felt nothing. It was not even like waving aside a mist. There was nothing. I saw my solid fist plunge through the leering ghostly face. I fought wildly, with a panic upon me, against the glowing phosphorescent nothingness of the apparition. My feet were stamping on its chest and shoulders. Then, as it sank lower, only the grinning face was down there.
Panting, and with the cold sweat of horror upon me, I felt Don shoving me aside.
“Too late!”
And then the sergeant’s shot rang out. The bullet clattered against the solid stone floor of the cell. The acrid smoke of the powder rolled over us; and cleared in a moment to show us the apparition several feet below the floor level. It seemed to strike its solidity of ground. I saw it fall the last little distance with a rush; land, and pick itself up. And with a last sardonic grin upward at us, the dim white figure ran. Dwindling smaller, dimmer, until in a moment it was gone into the Unknown.
As though a light had struck upon me came the realization.
“Don, this is rational, this thing! Some strange science!”
All day we had been vaguely realizing it. Intangible, but rational enemies were stealing white girls of Bermuda. Invaders from another planet? We had thought it might be that. Certainly it was nothing supernatural. These was not ghosts.
But now came a new realization. “Don! That’s another world down there! Another realm! The fourth dimension—that’s what it is! These things everybody’s calling ghosts—it’s the fourth dimension, Don! People of the fourth dimension coming out to attack us!”
And already the real menace had come! At that moment, half a mile away across the harbor on the slope of the little hill in Paget, an army of the White Invaders suddenly materialized, with dull, phosphorescent-green light-beams flashing around the countryside, melting trees and vegetation and people into nothingness!
The attack upon Bermuda had begun!
CHAPTER IV
Ambushed!THE events which I have now to describe are world history, and have been written in many forms and by many observers. I must, however, sketch them in broadest outline for the continuity of this personal narrative of the parts played by my friends and myself in the dire and astounding affair which was soon to bring chaos, not only to little Bermuda but to the great United States as well, and a near panic everywhere in the world.
On this evening of May 15th, 1938, the White Invaders showed themselves for the first time as rational human enemies. The residential suburb of Paget lies across the little harbor from the city of Hamilton. It is a mile or so by road around the bay, and a few minutes across the water by ferry. The island in the Paget section is a mere strip of land less than half a mile wide in most places, with the sheltered waters of the harbor on one side, and the open Atlantic with a magnificent pink-white beach on the other. The two are divided by a razor-back ridge—a line of little hills a hundred feet or so high, with narrow white roads and white stone residences set on the hill-slopes amid spacious lawns and tropical gardens; and with several lavish hotels on the bay shore, and others over the ridge, fronting the beach.
The invaders landed on the top of the ridge. It seemed that, without warning, a group of white-clad men were in a cedar grove up there. They spread out, running along the roads. They seemed carrying small hand-weapons from which phosphorescent-green light-beams flashed into the night.
The first reports were chaotic. A few survivors appeared in Hamilton who claimed to have been very close to the enemy. But for the most part the descriptions came from those who had fled when still a mile or more away. The news spread as though upon the wings of a gale. Within an hour the hotels were emptied; the houses all along the shore and the bayside hill-slope were deserted by their occupants. Boats over there brought the excited people into Hamilton until no more boats were available. Others came madly driving around the harbor road, on bicycles, and on foot—and still others escaped toward distant Somerset.
A THOUSAND people or more came in within that hour. But there were others who did not come—those who were living in the score or two of houses up on the ridge in the immediate neighborhood of where the invaders appeared….
Don and I met Mr. Dorrance at the police station within a few minutes after the news of the Paget attack reached us. We hurried back to the restaurant and found Jane still there with the Blakinsons. Ten minutes later we were all in the Government House, receiving the most authentic reports available.
From the windows of the second floor room where Mr. Dorrance sat with a number of the officials, Don, Jane, and I could see across the harbor and to the ridge where the enemy was operating. It was not much over two miles from us. The huge, slightly flattened moon had risen. The bay and the distant little hills were flooded with its light. We could see, off on the ridge-top, the tiny flashing green beams. But there was no sound save the turmoil of the excited little city around us.
“They don’t seem to be moving,” Don murmured. “They’re right where they were first reported.”
It seemed as though the small group of light-beams, darting back and forth, nevertheless originated from one unshifting place. The beams, we realized, must be extremely intense to be visible even these two miles or so, for we could see that they were very small and of very short range—more like a hand-flashlight than anything else. How many of the enemy were there? They were men, we understood: solid, human men garbed in the fashion of the apparitions which had been so widely seen.
The patrolling airplane, connected with us here by wireless telephone, gave us further details. There seemed to be some fifty of the invaders. They stood in a group in what had been a small cedar grove. It was a barren field now; the trees had melted and vanished before the silent blasts of the green light-beams. They had, these beams, seemingly a range of under a hundred feet. The invaders had, at first, run with them along the nearby roads and attacked the nearest houses. Part of those houses were still standing, save for the wooden portion of them which had vanished into nothingness as the green light touched it. The people, too, were annihilated. The airplane pilot had seen a man running near the field trying to escape. The light touched him, clung to him for a moment. There was an instant as he fell that he seemed melting into a ghostly figure; and then he was gone.
FIFTY invaders. But they were human; they could be attacked. When they first appeared, the nature of them still unrealized, a physician’s automobile, manned by three soldiers, had been coming along the bay road at the foot of the ridge. The soldiers turned it into a cross road and mounted the hill. Two of them left it, scouting to see what was happening; the other stayed in the car. One of the enemy suddenly appeared. His ray struck the car. Its
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