Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (6 page)

Before I could say anything to him, he was over the railing. He landed with a squish of mud on the bank. A match flared under the bridge, and for the first time I comprehended how thin the wood of the bridge was. I could see the flame through the planks.

Raffles yelled with horror. The match went out. I shouted, “What is it?” Suddenly, I was falling. I grabbed at the railing, felt it dwindle out of my grip, struck the cold water of the brook, felt the planks beneath me, felt them sliding away, and shouted once more. Raffles, who had been knocked down and buried for a minute by the collapsed bridge, rose unsteadily. Another match flared, and he cursed. I said, somewhat stupidly, “Where’s the bridge?”

“Taken flight,” he groaned. “Like the chair!”

He leaped past me and scrambled up the bank. At its top he stood for a minute, staring into the moonlight and the darkness beyond. I crawled shivering out of the brook, rose even more unsteadily, and clawed up the greasy cold mud of the steep bank. A minute later, breathing harshly, and feeling dizzy with unreality, I was standing by Raffles. He was breathing almost as hard as I.

“What
is
it?” I said.

“What
is it, Bunny?” he said slowly. “It’s something that can change its shape to resemble almost anything. As of now, however, it is not what it is but
where
it is that we must determine. We must find it and kill it, even if it should take the shape of a beautiful woman or a child.”

“What are you talking about?” I cried.

“Bunny, as God is my witness, when I lit that match under the bridge, I saw one brown eye staring at me. It was embedded in a part of the planking that was thicker than the rest. And it was not far from what looked like a pair of lips and one malformed ear. Apparently, it had not had time to complete its transformation. Or, more likely, it retained organs of sight and hearing so that it would know what was happening in its neighborhood. If it scaled off all its organs of detection, it would not have the slightest idea when it would be safe to change shape again.”

“Are you insane?” I said.

“Not unless you share my insanity, since you saw the same things I did. Bunny, that thing can somehow alter its flesh and bones. It has such control over its cells, its organs, its bones—which somehow can switch from rigidity to extreme flexibility—that it can look like other human beings. It can also metamorphose to look like objects. Such as the armchair in the bedroom, which looked exactly like the original. No wonder that Hopkins and Mackenzie and even the redoubtable Holmes failed to find Mr. James Phillimore. Perhaps they may even have sat on him while resting from the search. It’s too bad that they did not rip into the chair with a knife in their quest for the jewels. I think that they would have been more than surprised.

“I wonder who the original Phillimore was? There is no record of anybody who could have been the model. But perhaps it based itself on somebody with a different name but took the name of James Phillimore from a tombstone or a newspaper account of an American. Whatever it did on that account, it was also the bridge that you and I crossed. A rather sensitive bridge, a sore bridge, which could not keep from groaning a little when our hard boots pained it.”

I could not believe him. Yet I could
not
not believe him.

Raffles predicted that the thing would be running or walking to Maida Vale. “And there it will take a cab to the nearest station and be on its way into the labyrinth of London. The devil of it is that we won’t know what, or whom, to look for. It could be in the shape of a woman, or a small horse, for all I know. Or maybe a tree, though that’s not a very mobile refuge.

“You know,” he continued after some thought, “there must be definite limitations on what it can do. It has demonstrated that it can stretch its mass out to almost paper-thin length. But it is, after all, subject to the same physical laws we are subject to as far as its mass goes. It has only so much substance, and so it can get only so big. And I imagine that it can compress itself only so much. So, when I said that it might be the shape of a child, I could have been wrong. It can probably extend itself considerably but cannot contract much.”

As it turned out, Raffles was right. But he was also wrong. The thing had means for becoming smaller, though at a price.

“Where could it have come from, A. J.?”

“That’s a mystery that might better be laid in the lap of Holmes,” he said. “Or perhaps in the hands of the astronomers. I would guess that the thing is not autochthonous. I would say that it arrived here recently, perhaps from Mars, perhaps from a more distant planet, during the month of October, 1894. Do you remember, Bunny, when all the papers were ablaze with accounts of the large falling star that fell into the Straits of Dover, not five miles from Dover itself? Could it have been some sort of ship which could carry a passenger through the ether? From some heavenly body where life exists, intelligent life, though not life as we terrestrials know it? Could it perhaps have crashed, its propulsive power having failed it? Hence, the friction of its too-swift descent burned away part of the hull? Or were the flames merely the outward expression of its propulsion, which might be huge rockets?”

Even now, as I write this in 1924, I marvel at Raffles’ superb imagination and deductive powers. That was 1895, three years before Mr. Wells’
War of the Worlds
was published. It was true that Mr. Verne had been writing his wonderful tales of scientific inventions and extraordinary voyages for many years. But in none of them had he proposed life on other planets or the possibility of infiltration or invasion by alien sapients from far-off planets. The concept was, to me, absolutely staggering. Yet Raffles plucked it from what to others would be a complex of complete irrelevancies. And I was supposed to be the writer of fiction in this partnership!

“I connect the events of the falling star and Mr. Phillimore because it was not too long after the star fell that Mr. Phillimore suddenly appeared from nowhere. In January of this year Mr. Phillimore sold his first jewel to a fence. Since then, once a month, Mr. Phillimore has sold a jewel, four in all. These look like star sapphires. But we may suppose that they are not such because of our experience with the monsterlet in Persano’s matchbox. Those pseudo jewels, Bunny, are eggs!”

“Surely you do not mean that?” I said.

“My cousin has a maxim which has been rather widely quoted. He says that, after you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. Yes, Bunny, the race to which Mr. Phillimore belongs lays eggs. These are, in their initial form, anyway, something resembling star sapphires. The star shape inside them may be the first outlines of the embryo. I would guess that shortly before hatching, the embryo becomes opaque. The material inside, the yolk, is absorbed or eaten by the embryo. Then the shell is broken and the fragments are eaten by the little beast.

“And then, sometime after hatching, a short time, I’d say, the beastie must become mobile, it wriggles away, it takes refuge in a hole, a mouse hole, perhaps. And there it feeds upon cockroaches, mice, and, when it gets larger, rats. And then, Bunny? Dogs? Babies? And then?”

“Stop,” I cried. “It’s too horrible to contemplate!”

“Nothing is too horrible to contemplate, Bunny, if one can do something about the thing contemplated. In any event, if I am right, and I pray that I am, only one egg has so far hatched. This was the first one laid, the one that Persano somehow obtained. Within thirty days, another egg will hatch. And this time the thing might get away. We must track down all the eggs and destroy them. But first we must catch the thing that is laying the eggs.

“That won’t be easy. It has an amazing intelligence and adaptability. Or, at least, it has amazing mimetic abilities. In one month it learned to speak English perfectly and to become well acquainted with British customs. That is no easy feat, Bunny. There are thousands of Frenchmen and Americans who have been here for some time who have not yet comprehended the British language, temperament, or customs. And these are human beings, though there are, of course, some Englishmen who are uncertain about this.”

“Really, A. J.!” I said. “We’re not all that snobbish!”

“Aren’t we? It takes one to know one, my dear colleague, and I am unashamedly snobbish. After all, if one is an Englishman, it’s no crime to be a snob, is it? Somebody has to be superior, and we know who that someone is, don’t we?”

“You were speaking of the thing,” I said testily.

“Yes. It must be in a panic. It knows it’s been found out, and it must think that by now the entire human race will be howling for its blood. At least, I hope so. If it truly knows us, it will realize that we would be extremely reluctant to report it to the authorities. We would not want to be certified. Nor does it know that we cannot stand an investigation into our own lives.

“But it will, I hope, be ignorant of this and so will be trying to escape the country. To do so, it will take the closest and fastest means of transportation, and to do that it must buy a ticket to a definite destination. That destination, I guess, will be Dover. But perhaps not.”

At the Maida Vale cab station, Raffles made inquiries of various drivers. We were lucky. One driver had observed another pick up a woman who might be the person—or thing—we were chasing. Encouraged by Raffles’ pound note, the cabbie described her. She was a giantess, he said, she seemed to be about fifty years old, and, for some reason, she looked familiar. To his knowledge, he had never seen her before.

Raffles had him describe her face feature by feature. He said, “Thank you,” and turned away with a wink at me. When we were alone, I asked him to explain the wink.

“She—it—had familiar features because they were Phillimore’s own, though somewhat feminized,” Raffles said. “We are on the right track.”

On the way into London in our own cab, I said, “I don’t understand how the thing gets rid of its clothes when it changes shape. And where did it get its woman’s clothes and the purse? And its money to buy the ticket?”

“Its clothes must be part of its body. It must have superb control; it’s a sentient chameleon, a superchameleon.”

“But its money?” I said. “I understand that it has been selling its eggs in order to support itself. Also, I assume, to disseminate its young. But from where did the thing, when it became a woman, get the money with which to buy a ticket? And was the purse a part of its body before the metamorphosis? If it was, then it must be able to detach parts of its body.”

“I rather imagine it has caches of money here and there,” Raffles said.

We got out of the cab near St. James’ Park, walked to Raffles’ rooms at the Albany, quickly ate a breakfast brought in by the porter, donned false beards and plain-glass spectacles and fresh clothes, and then packed a Gladstone bag and rolled up a traveling rug. Raffles also put on a finger a very large ring. This concealed in its hollow interior a spring-operated knife, tiny but very sharp. Raffles had purchased it after his escape from the Camorra deathtrap (described in
The Last Laugh).
He said that if he had had such a device then, he might have been able to cut himself loose instead of depending upon someone else to rescue him from Count Corbucci’s devilish automatic executioner. And now a hunch told him to wear the ring during this particular exploit.

We boarded a hansom a few minutes later and soon were on the Charing Cross platform waiting for the train to Dover. And then we were off, comfortably ensconced in a private compartment, smoking cigars and sipping brandy from a flask carried by Raffles.

“I am leaving deduction and induction behind in favor of intuition, Bunny,” Raffles said. “Though I could be wrong, intuition tells me that the thing is on the train ahead of us, headed for Dover.”

“There are others who think as you do,” I said, looking through the glass of the door. “But it must be inference, not intuition, that brings them here.” Raffles glanced up in time to see the handsome aquiline features of his cousin and the beefy but genial features of his cousin’s medical colleague go by. A moment later, Mackenzie’s craggy features followed.

“Somehow,” Raffles said, “that human bloodhound, my cousin, has sniffed out the thing’s trail. Has he guessed any of the truth? If he has, he’ll keep it to himself. The hardheads of the Yard would believe that he’d gone insane, if he imparted even a fraction of the reality behind the case.”

Just before the train arrived at the Dover station, Raffles straightened up and snapped his fingers, a vulgar gesture I’d never known him to make before.

“Today’s the day!” he cried. “Or it should be! Bunny, it’s a matter of unofficial record that Phillimore came into the East End every thirty-first day to sell a jewel. Does this suggest that it lays an egg every thirty days? If so, then it lays another
today!
Does it do it as easily as the barnyard hen? Or does it experience some pain, some weakness, some tribulation and trouble analogous to that of human women? Is the passage of the egg a minor event, yet one which renders the layer prostrate for an hour or two? Can one lay a large and hard star sapphire with only a trivial difficulty, with only a pleased cackle?”

On getting off the train, he immediately began questioning porters and other train and station personnel. He was fortunate enough to discover a man who’d been on the train on which we suspected the thing had been. Yes, he had noticed something disturbing. A woman had occupied a compartment by herself, a very large woman, a Mrs. Brownstone. But when the train had pulled into the station, a huge man had left her compartment. She was nowhere to be seen. He had, however, been too busy to do anything about it even if there had been anything to do.

Raffles spoke to me afterward. “Could it have taken a hotel room so it could have the privacy needed to lay its egg?”

We ran out of the station and hired a cab to take us to the nearest hotel. As we pulled away, I saw Holmes and Watson talking to the very man we’d just been talking to.

The first hotel we visited was the Lord Warden, which was near the railway station and had a fine view of the harbor. We had no luck there, nor at the Burlington, which was on Liverpool Street, nor the Dover Castle, on Clarence Place. But at the King’s Head, also on Clarence Place, we found that he—it—had recently been there. The desk clerk informed us that a man answering our description had checked in. He had left exactly five minutes ago. He had looked pale and shaky, as though he’d had too much to drink the night before.