Leila started visibly and made to turn away, but he put a hand under her chin and forced her to continue looking at him.
“He ran away, Leila. And a long time ago—twenty or thirty years ago, perhaps even during the war—he came down on Earth, probably falling at random, and I don’t think I need to spell out exactly where. A couple of houses have been chopped out of the row behind Raby Street, and I’d say that’s where his ship went in. The damage could have been put down to a bomb, or maybe a gas explosion, and nobody has ever had any reason to suspect otherwise or dig deep underneath.
“That’s how it all started, but you can’t understand what’s been going on all these years unless you know more about these aliens. They’ve got psi powers, Leila. Their bodies are pretty useless as machines, but they compensated by evolving a whole range of talents that enabled them to beat the competition— telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, other abilities that we haven’t even got names for. Mental control of animals is one of them, and it was probably developed for feeding purposes. Tele-hypnosis, you might call it, though I doubt if…”
“John, can we have some tea?” Leila said, her throat vibrating in his fingers. “This is all so…I’d love some tea.”
“Good idea.” He made his voice warm and encouraging, anxious to demonstrate that he was entirely rational and reasonable, and in that way give extra credence to his words. A sense of desperate urgency was pounding at the doors of his mind, but nothing could be done until Leila was fully convinced and won over. He stood back, allowing her to rise, and then followed her into the kitchen. She looked cold and tired as she filled the electric kettle. He resolved to proceed with even greater care.
“The mental control aspect is one of the things that scares me most, because it’s so insidious. There’s no way of telling how deep and how far back it goes, but we know this alien is intelligent and devious, and it’s been drawing up its plans for a long time. A dentist used to have that house in Raby Street—now, did he choose it by accident, merely because it was suitable for his needs and the district hadn’t yet declined at that time? Or was he influenced in his decision because a dentist’s surgery draws in a lot of people and the thing that was waiting under the ground wanted access to as many minds as possible?
“I was in that house when I was a kid—is that anything to do with my developing a vestige of telepathic ability? Is that why I volunteered for the screening tests at the Jeavons? And you heard Henry Nevison suggest that the house had been used by a dentist—is that what led to his interest in parapsychology in the first place?
“How many local bigwigs, who might otherwise have blocked an off-beat research project in a place like the Jeavons, were manipulated into going along with it? And what about all the people who live nearby? Is their natural curiosity damped down in some way so that they pay no attention to odd activities?”
Leila set out cups and saucers, then opened a lacquered tin and brought out a rectangular madeira cake. She looked around, strangely hesitant, took a long knife from the wall rack and began to cut the cake into thin slices, working with painstaking care.
“I don’t understand that part,” she said, in something like her normal tones. “What would be the point of all that mind-control and manipulation?”
“Life or death—it’s as simple as that. Our visitor is being hunted by another member of its own race, a killer with a spectrum of senses you and I can’t even visualize, and it had to lie low. For a human fugitive that could mean not moving or making a sound; for the monster we’re talking about it meant not using many of its natural abilities. The problem was that it couldn’t survive without those abilities, so what did it do? How did it get out of the dilemma?”
Leila paused in her meticulous slicing of the cake. “By using substitutes.”
“Exactly right,” Redpath said, encouraged. For minutes he had been listening to his own voice with growing dismay and wondering if any person who had not been directly involved could ever believe a story of such extravagance. He had set out to soothe and coax Leila into acceptance, then it had seemed to him that his calmness was defeating its own purpose, that it would have been right and appropriate for him to give way to his dread, to howl out to all the world his foreknowledge of the fact that the megadeaths were coming and there was very little time in which to do anything about it. Leila, however, was responding better than he had at first anticipated, and it appeared he was getting his message across to her.
“Exactly right,” he repeated. “That’s what the people in that house really are—substitutes, stand-ins, prosthetics. That’s the common factor I was looking for. You can see how they all work together, each one serving in his or her own way and allowing the…the puppet master to remain in hiding. The hunter has no interest in human beings and our activities, even our rare paranormal activities, apparently don’t register with it. And that other thing has been living under the house in Raby Street for years, decades, using human beings the way we use pack animals and discarding them when they become useless.”
“Without anybody noticing?”
“It tries hard to be inconspicuous—and it’s done a bloody good job over the years considering that we’re as alien to it as it is to us. The concept of the family unit must be completely foreign to it, but it tries to present the outside world with the right sort of picture. They have a sing-song in the front parlour every night, and everybody smiles and looks happy, and Miss Connie knits the way an old lady is supposed to, but she doesn’t knit anything in particular. She just knits. I had one night of that, Leila, but the others have been going through it for years, night after night after night…”
Redpath paused, momentarily distracted. “Did you ever think of hell as a shabby old room, with rexine armchairs and luncheon meat sandwiches, where you’re not allowed to scream in case you disturb the neighbours?”
Leila toyed thoughtfully with the knife. “It’s hard to credit that a group of people could be held and controlled that way against their wills.”
“But it’s true, Leila—though I’ve a feeling it isn’t an entirely straightforward or consistent effect. I think you have to get within close range of the beast in the early stages. That’s why Betty York was sent out to bring me to the house any way she could. If you ask me, Albert is the only one who might be awkward at times. I’m nearly sure he…what do they call it in that kids’ TV show?…‘jaunts’ over to the States every now and then just to buy American cigarettes. Possibly he would be the hardest one to control because of the way he can flit about. There’s that business of whipping me off to the house in Gilpin-ston with him—I’ll bet you that was a nasty little trick of his own. He wanted to…”
Redpath hesitated again, frowning. “You were right about the bodies in the bathtub, Leila. That wasn’t in the nightmare, was it? It must have really happened, but why would anybody want to peel dead bodies? There must be something I don’t…” He stopped speaking as a familiar but loathsome sensation manifested itself behind his eyes. There was a slithering coldness in his brain. Inside his head was a worm, a giant worm which had begun to coil and uncoil.
“There’s something I still don’t understand.” Leila turned to face him, still casually holding the long knife. “If you were in that house, fully under the thing’s control, how did you break free?”
Redpath pressed both hands to his temples and gave her a numb, lop-sided smile. “Can’t you guess? I thought that part was obvious.” He swayed slightly as the disturbance in his mind intensified, and when he spoke again his voice was pitched unnaturally high. “I’ve been wasting time…thought I was safe…I’m needed, you see…it needs me to give warning—just before the bomb comes…the Thrice-born is going to bomb the ship, and he’ll use a big bomb, an area weapon…there’ll be no more England, Leila…perhaps no more Europe…”