The Hunter Hunted

: The Invisible Man

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 subsequently to be reminded, did. He insisted

upon walking about his garden just as if nothing was the matter,

and he went to sleep in the afterno
n 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, but 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 over 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. 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 himself

to shut the French windows 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 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.







THE EPILOGUE





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.



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