The White Invaders (Sci-Fi Classic). Ray Cummings
to kill him.”
The shape had stopped again. It was fifty feet from us now, and we could clearly see that it was a man, taller than normal. He stood now with folded arms—a man strangely garbed in what seemed a white, tight-fitting jacket and short trunks. On his head was a black skull cap surmounted by a helmet of strange design.
Don’s voice suddenly echoed across the rocks.
“Who are you?”
The white figure gave no answer. It did not move.
“We see you. What do you want?” Don repeated.
Then it moved again. Partly toward us and partly sidewise, away from the sea. The swing of the legs was obvious. It was walking. But not upon the path, nor upon the solid surface of these Bermuda rocks! A surge of horror went through me at the realization. This was nothing human! It was walking on some other surface, invisible to us, but something solid beneath its own tread.
“Look!” Jane whispered. “It’s walking—into the cliff!”
There was no doubt about it now. Within thirty feet of us, it was slowly walking up what must have been a steep ascent. Already it was ten feet or more above our level. And it was behind the rocks of the cliff! Shining in there as though the rocks themselves were transparent!
Or were my senses tricking me? I whispered, “Is it back of the rocks? Or is there a cave over there? An opening?”
“Let’s go see.” Don took a step forward; and called again:
“You—we see you. Stand still! Do you want me to fire at you?”
The figure turned and again stood regarding us with folded arms. Obviously not Don’s voice, but his movement, had stopped it. We left the path and climbed about ten feet up the broken cliff-side. The figure was at our level now, but it was within the rocks. We were close enough now to see other details: a man’s white face, with heavy black brows, heavy features; a stalwart, giant figure, six and a half feet at the least. The white garment could have been of woven metal. I saw black, thread-like wires looped along the arms, over the shoulders, down the sides of the muscular naked legs. There seemed, at the waist, a dial-face, with wires running into it.
The details were so clear that they seemed substantial, real. Yet the figure was so devoid of color that it could have been a light-image projected here upon these rocks. And the contour of the cliff was plainly visible in front of it.
We stood gazing at the thing, and it stared back at us.
“Can you hear us?” Don called.
Evidently it could not. Then a sardonic smile spread over the face of the apparition. The lips moved. It said something to us, but we heard no sound.
It was a wraith—this thing so visibly real! It was apparently close to us, yet there was a limitless, intervening void of the unknown.
It stood still with folded arms across the brawny chest, sardonically regarding us. The face was strangely featured, yet wholly of human cast. And, above all, its aspect was strangely evil. Its gaze suddenly turned on Jane with a look that made my heart leap into my throat and made me fling up my arms as though to protect her.
Then seemingly it had contemplated us enough; the folded arms swung down; it turned away from us, slowly stalking off.
“Stop!” Don called.
“See!” I whispered. “It’s coming out in the open!”
The invisible surface upon which it walked led it out from the cliff. The figure was stalking away from us in mid-air, and it seemed to fade slowly in the moonlight.
“It’s going!” I exclaimed. “Don, it’s getting away!”
Impulsively I started scrambling over the rocks; unreasoningly, for who can chase and capture a ghost?
Don stopped me. “Wait!” His shotgun went to his shoulders. The white shape was now again about fifty feet away. The gun blazed into the moonlight. The buckshot tore through the stalking white figure; the moonlit shorefront echoed with the shot.
When the smoke cleared away, we saw the apparition still walking quietly forward. Up over the sea now, up and out into the moonlit night, growing smaller and dimmer in the distance, until presently it was faded and gone.
A ghost?
We thought so then.
CHAPTER II.
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
This was our first encounter with the white invaders. It was too real to ignore or treat lightly. One may hear tales of a ghost, even the recounting by a most reliable eye-witness, and smile skeptically. But to see one yourself—as we had seen this thing in the moonlight of that Bermuda shorefront—that is a far different matter.
We told our adventure to Jane’s father when he drove in from Hamilton about eleven o’clock that same evening. But he, who personally had seen no ghost, could only look perturbed that we should be so deluded. Some trickster—or some trick of the moonlight, and the shadowed rocks aiding our own sharpened imaginations. He could think of no other explanation. But Don had fired pointblank into the thing and had not harmed it.
Arthur Dorrance, member of the Bermuda Parliament, was a gray-haired gentleman in his fifties, a typical British Colonial, the present head of this old Bermuda family. The tales or the ghosts, whatever their origin, already had forced themselves upon Governmental attention. All this evening, in Hamilton, Mr. Dorrance had been in conference trying to determine what to do about it. Tales of terror in little Bermuda had a bad enough local effect, but to have them spread abroad, to influence adversely the tourist trade upon which Bermuda’s very existence depended—that presaged economic catastrophe.
“And the tales are spreading,” he told us. “Look here, you young cubs, it’s horribly disconcerting to have you of all people telling me a thing like this.”
Even now he could not believe us. But he sat staring at us, eyeglasses in hand, with his untouched drink before him.
“We’ll have to report it, of course. I’ve been all evening with the steamship officials. They’re having cancellations.” He smiled faintly at me. “We can’t get along without you Americans, Bob.”
I have not mentioned that I am an American. I was on vacation from my job as radio technician in New York. Don Livingston, who is English and three years my senior, was in a similar line of work—at this time he was technician in the small Bermuda broadcasting station located in the nearby town of St. Georges.
We talked until nearly midnight. Then the telephone rang. It was the Police Chief in Hamilton. Ghosts had been seen in that vicinity this evening. There were a dozen complaints of ghostly marauders prowling around homes. This time from both white and colored families.
And there was one outstanding fact, frightening, indeed, though at first we could not believe that it meant very much, or that it had any connection with this weird affair. In the residential suburb of Paget, across the harbor from Hamilton, a young white girl, named Miss Arton, had vanished. Mr. Dorrance turned from the telephone after listening to the details and faced us with white face and trembling hands, his expression more perturbed and solemn than ever before.
“It means nothing, of course. It cannot mean anything.”
“What, father?” Jane demanded. “Something about Eunice?”
“Yes. You know her, Bob—you played tennis down there with her last week. Eunice Arton.”
I remembered her. A Bermuda girl; a beauty, second to none in the islands, save perhaps Jane herself. Jane and Don had known her for years.
“She’s missing,” Mr. Dorrance added. He flashed us a queer look and we