“Strike me, there’s only one thing to do, Bunny!” Raffles said, after he’d put the last paper down. “We must get into Phillimore’s house and look for ourselves!”
I did not protest. I was more afraid of his scorn than of the police. However, we did not launch our little expedition that evening. Raffles went out to do some reconnoitering on his own, both among the East End fences and around the house in Kensal Rise. The evening of the second day, he appeared at my rooms. I had not been idle, however. I had gathered a supply of more corks for the gatetop spikes by drinking a number of bottles of champagne.
“The police guard has been withdrawn from the estate itself,” he said. “I didn’t see any men in the woods nearby. So, we break into the late Mr. Phillimore’s house tonight. If he is late, that is,” he added enigmatically.
As the midnight chimes struck, we went over the gate once more. A minute later, Raffles was taking out the pane from the glass door. This he did with his diamond, a pot of treacle, and a sheet of brown paper, as he had done the night we broke in and found our would-be blackmailer dead with his head crushed by a poker.
He inserted his hand through the opening, turned the key in the lock, and drew the bolt at the bottom of the door open. This had been shot by a policeman who had then left by the kitchen door, or so we presumed. We went through the door, closed it behind us, and made sure that all the drapes of the front room were pulled tight. Then Raffles, as he did that evil night long ago, lit a match and with it a gas light. The flaring illumination showed us a room little changed. Apparently, Mr. Phillimore had not been interested in redecorating. We went out into the hallway and upstairs, where three doors opened onto the first-floor hallway.
The first door led to the bedroom. It contained a huge canopied bed, a mid-century monster Baird had bought secondhand in some East End shop, a cheap maple tallboy, a rocking chair, a thunder mug, and two large overstuffed leather armchairs.
“There was only one armchair the last time we were here,” Raffles said.
The second room was unchanged, being as empty as the first time we’d seen it. The room at the rear was the bathroom, also unchanged.
We went downstairs and through the hallway to the kitchen, and then we descended into the coal cellar. This also contained a small wine pantry. As I expected, we had found nothing. After all, the men from the Yard were thorough, and what they might have missed, Holmes would have found. I was about to suggest to Raffles that we should admit failure and leave before somebody saw the lights in the house. But a sound from upstairs stopped me.
Raffles had heard it, too. Those ears missed little. He held up a hand for silence, though none was needed. He said, a moment later, “Softly, Bunny! It may be a policeman. But I think it is probably our quarry!”
We stole up the wooden steps, which insisted on creaking under our weight. Thence we crept into the kitchen and from there into the hallway and then into the front room. Seeing nobody, we went up the steps to the first floor once more and gingerly opened the door of each room and looked within. While we were poking our heads into the bathroom, we heard a noise again. It came from somewhere in the front of the house, though whether it was upstairs or down we could not tell.
Raffles beckoned to me, and I followed, also on tiptoe, down the hall. He stopped at the door of the middle room, looked within, then led me to the door of the bedroom. On looking in (remember, we had not turned out the gaslights yet), he started. And he said, “Lord! One of the armchairs! It’s gone!”
“But—but... whod want to take a chair?” I said.
“Who, indeed!” he said, and ran down the steps with no attempt to keep quiet. I gathered my wits enough to order my feet to get moving. Just as I reached the door, I heard Raffles outside shouting, “There he goes!” I ran out onto the little tiled veranda. Raffles was halfway down the gravel path, and a dim figure was plunging through the open gate. Whoever he was, he had had a key to the gate.
I remember thinking, irrelevantly, how cool the air had become in the short time we’d been in the house. Actually, it was not such an irrelevant thought since the advent of the cold air had caused a heavy mist. It hung over the road and coiled through the woods. And, of course, it helped the man we were chasing.
Raffles was as keen as a bill-collector chasing a debtor, and he kept his eyes on the vague figure until it plunged into a grove. When I came out its other side, breathing hard, I found Raffles standing on the edge of a narrow but rather deeply sunk brook. Nearby, half shrouded by the mist, was a short and narrow footbridge. Down the path that started from its other end was another of the half-built houses.
“He didn’t cross that bridge,” Raffles said. “I’d have heard him. If he went through the brook, hed have done some splashing, and I’d have heard it. But he didn’t have time to double back. Let’s cross the bridge and see if he’s left any footprints in the mud.”
We walked Indian file across the very narrow bridge. It bent a little under our weight, giving us an uneasy feeling. Raffles said, “The contractor must be using as cheap materials as he can get away with. I hope he’s putting better stuff into the houses. Otherwise, the first strong wind will blow them away.”
“It does seem rather fragile,” I said. “The builder must be a fly-by-night. But nobody builds anything as they used to do.”
Raffles crouched down at the other end of the bridge, lit a match, and examined the ground on both sides of the path. “There are any number of prints,” he said disgustedly. “They undoubtedly are those of the workmen, though the prints of the man we want could be among them. But I doubt it. They’re all made by heavy workingmen’s boots.”
He sent me down the steep muddy bank to look for prints on the south side of the bridge. He went along the bank north of the bridge. Our matches flared and died while we called out the results of our inspections to each other. The only tracks we saw were ours. We scrambled back up the bank and walked a little way onto the bridge. Side by side, we leaned over the excessively thin railing to stare down into the brook. Raffles lit a Sullivan, and the pleasant odor drove me to light one up too.
“There’s something uncanny here, Bunny. Don’t you feel it?”
I was about to reply when he put his hand on my shoulder.
Softly, he said, “Did you hear a groan?”
“No,” I replied, the hairs on the back of my neck rising like the dead from the grave.
Suddenly, he stamped the heel of his boot hard upon the plank. And then I heard a very low moan.
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.
&n
bsp; “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.
6
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 tu
rned 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.