This decimation must have shaken them to their toes, for the morning wore on and no assault came.
Johnson brought each of us a bowl of soup and a plate of biscuits at noon. Staying at my post in the eastern corner, I watched the trees and thought of Geoff Exeter.
Could that have been Geoff whom I followed down the secret stair two nights since? Certainly it was not one of _them_; and Geoff of all people would have known of its existence, for he had spent his childhood here in the castle. If it was him, where had he gone from the great hall? And what had moved in the black shadows of the fireplace? Had Geoff been spirited away by ghosts? I could credit anything, after these past months of hellish experience.
As I was chewing my last biscuit, firing broke out at the front of the castle; first a single shot or two, then heavy volleys, as though all my friends were engaged in it. I shifted from foot to foot, wondering what to do. Finally, after a searching look at the groves and lawns where nothing moved, I ran for the hallway.
Marion and Alec were shooting from the windows of our sitting room. I dashed in, said foolishly, "What is it, an attack?" and looking out saw line after line of the beast-folk advancing rapidly on the castle, their numbers not bunched this time but spread out so that they presented more difficult targets. I judged them to be at least two hundred and fifty strong. "Shoot low," I snapped, even as I brought the elephant gun to bear on a blue octopus-like brute and sent him sprawling. "Remember you're aiming downhill."
The thunder of a battering-ram smiting at the big door seemed to jar the floor beneath our feet. It ceased in a moment, and I heard the Colonel bawl, "They're in! Come to the stairs!"
We gathered there behind our lumber-and-furniture barricade, six against an army. We did not say anything coherent, I believe, but continually shouting encouraging noises to one another, we fired and fired until our weapons grew hot to the touch. The beasts were thronging the hall below us, converging on the stairs and tearing at the mass of impeding obstacles which the Colonel and John had strewn down the length of the steps that morning. It was at once a hideous and a thrilling sight. The monsters were swarming up at us, a foot at a time, clawing at planks and barrels and broken chairs, hurling them back onto their comrades' heads; none of them seemed to be firing at us, though in the heat of battle I may not have noticed if they had. It looked to me as if they were too infuriated to bother with guns. Like so many enraged baboons, they wanted to get at us and tear us to bloody tatters with their hands and teeth alone. As they fought upward, those in the fore exploded soundlessly, horribly, and quickly, like multicolored bags of gaudy rubber stabbed with sharp knives, leaving their dead robots to roll and flounder to the bottom again. I had run out of ammo for the big gun; howling with a kind of mad glee, I blazed away into the thick of them with my twin Colts, putting my bullets into the dark human forms within the hybrid monsters. The castle rocked and echoed with the fury of the fight. Cordite and spilt blood reeked in my nostrils. One of the devils, a rhinocerous-brute with a towering ivory-tinted "horn" that wobbled as he moved, came scrambling on all fours up over the mess of wreckage toward us; I took him for my very own, waiting until he was within a yard of me and then presenting both my revolvers to his face and pulling the triggers.