The only trouble was that I hadn't the faintest idea of _how_ to begin it!
One could move among these usurpers for a lifetime, I thought, and learn nothing about them except that they were more hideous than leprous two-headed baboons, more incomprehensible than might be the dwellers of Mars. I watched them talking among themselves where they sat at the little oak tables. While their earthly husks chatted of prosaic things, the forms around the husks spoke--inaudibly to me--with twisting tentacles, gesturing pseudopods, flowers of rotten-looking "flesh" that grew upon their bodies and swelled and burst and subsided to nothingness again. I knew they were speaking of terrible things....
"Let's go," I said to Geoff. "Time we were thinking of bed."
I gave the barman good-night in a pleasant voice, and we emerged from that ninth circle of Hell into the cool and lovely air. Seven Dials lay about us, all a-murmur with the homely human sounds of earth's evening. I could not stand it.
"Geoff," I whispered, "I'm going to start the ball rollin'. I'm going to find out something."
"I want to ascertain something. Just come along a bit."
We went up a dingy street and turned down a lane or two, until at last we were alone on a length of grubby pavement, shadowed by the rickety houses on either side. "Stand here," I said to Geoff Exeter. "It's black in this corner and you won't be noticed. I'll come for you in half a tick."
He saluted carelessly. What nerve he had! To stand alone, blind and helpless, ignorant of what I meant to do--I think Geoff was the bravest of all our little band.
I slunk up the street to a place some forty yards off, and hid myself in a time-battered doorway. The street lay empty and deserted in the early moonlight. I drew the great keen knife that lived on the side of my belt these days, and I waited.
A man came down the road, staggering drunkenly. He was a man. I let him pass.
Another came toward me. I heard his footsteps in the dark, echoing valley of brick, and shortly thereafter saw him pass beneath a fading street lamp.
Do you remember the passage in Doyle's _Lost World_, where the hero is pursued along a jungle trail by a prehistoric carnivore?
"_This beast had a broad, squat, toad-like face ... the moonlight shone upon his huge projecting eyes, the row of enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms. With a scream of terror I turned and rushed wildly down the path._"