Mr. Heelas, Mr. Kemp's nearest neighbour among the villa holders,
was asleep in his summer house when the siege of Kemp's house began.
Mr. Heelas was one of the sturdy minority who refused to believe
"in all this nonsense" about an Invisible Man. His wife,
however, as he was to be reminded subsequently, did. He insisted
upon walking about his garden just as if nothing was the matter, and
he went to sleep in the afternoon in accordance with the custom of
years. He slept through the smashing of the windows, and then woke
up suddenly with a curious persuasion of something wrong. He looked
across at Kemp's house, rubbed his eyes and looked again. Then he
put his feet to the ground, and sat listening. He said he was
damned, and still the strange thing was visible. The house looked as
though it had been deserted for weeks--after a violent riot. Every
window was broken, and every window, save those of the belvedere
study, was blinded by the internal shutters.
"I could have sworn it was all right"--he looked at his
watch --"twenty minutes ago."
He became aware of a measured concussion and the clash of glass,
far away in the distance. And then, as he sat open-mouthed, came a
still more wonderful thing. The shutters of the drawing-room window
were flung open violently, and the housemaid in her outdoor hat and
garments, appeared struggling in a frantic manner to throw up the
sash. Suddenly a man appeared beside her, helping her--Dr. Kemp! In
another moment the window was open, and the housemaid was struggling
out; she pitched forward and vanished among the shrubs. Mr. Heelas
stood up, exclaiming vaguely and vehemently at all these wonderful
things. He saw Kemp stand on the sill, spring from the window, and
reappear almost instantaneously running along a path in the
shrubbery and stooping as he ran, like a man who evades observation.
He vanished behind a laburnum, and appeared again clambering a fence
that abutted on the open down. In a second he had tumbled over and
was running at a tremendous pace down the slope towards Mr. Heelas.
"Lord!" cried Mr. Heelas, struck with an idea;
"it's that Invisible Man brute! It's right, after all!"
With Mr. Heelas to think things like that was to act, and his
cook watching him from the top window was amazed to see him come
pelting towards the house at a good nine miles an hour.
"Thought he wasn't afraid," said the cook. "Mary,
just come here!" There was a slamming of doors, a ringing of
bells, and the voice of Mr. Heelas bellowing like a bull. "Shut
the doors, shut the windows, shut everything! the Invisible Man is
coming!" Instantly the house was full of screams and
directions, and scurrying feet. He ran to shut the French windows
himself that opened on the veranda; as he did so Kemp's head and
shoulders and knee appeared over the edge of the garden fence. In
another moment Kemp had ploughed through the asparagus, and was
running across the tennis lawn to the house.
"You can't come in," said Mr. Heelas, shutting the
bolts. "I'm very sorry if he's after you, but you can't come
in!"
Kemp appeared with a face of terror close to the glass, rapping
and then shaking frantically at the French window. Then, seeing his
efforts were useless, he ran along the veranda, vaulted the end, and
went to hammer at the side door. Then he ran round by the side gate
to the front of the house, and so into the hill-road. And Mr. Heelas
staring from his window--a face of horror--had scarcely witnessed
Kemp vanish, ere the asparagus was being trampled this way and that
by feet unseen. At that Mr. Heelas fled precipitately upstairs, and
the rest of the chase is beyond his purview. But as he passed the
staircase window, he heard the side gate slam.
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 to 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 running 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 tramline 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--"
"Aha!" shouted a voice.
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 a 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 eyes 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 bloodstained 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 were suddenly wide open. Very little was said.
Kempt 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, every one 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 beard 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.
Some one brought a sheet from the Jolly Cricketers; and having
covered him, they carried him into that house
The Epilogue
So ends the story of the strange and evil experiment 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 protrusion, 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 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, and Adye has
questioned closely, 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.
The
End
