THE SIEGE OF KEMP’S HOUSE
Kemp read a strange missive, written in pencil on
a greasy sheet of paper.
“You have been amazingly energetic and clever,”
this letter ran, “though what you stand to gain
by it I cannot imagine. You are against me.
For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried
to rob me of a night’s rest. But I have
had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of
you, and the game is only beginning. The game
is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but
to start the Terror. This announces the first
day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer
under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and
the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror!
This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the
Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man
the First. To begin with the rule will be easy.
The first day there will be one execution for the
sake of example—a man named Kemp.
Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself
away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put
on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen
Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it
will impress my people. Death starts from the
pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in
as the postman comes along, then off! The game
begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people,
lest Death fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is
to die.”
Kemp read this letter twice, “It’s no
hoax,” he said. “That’s his
voice! And he means it.”
He turned the folded sheet over and saw on the addressed
side of it the postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic
detail “2d. to pay.”
He got up slowly, leaving his lunch unfinished—the
letter had come by the one o’clock post—and
went into his study. He rang for his housekeeper,
and told her to go round the house at once, examine
all the fastenings of the windows, and close all the
shutters. He closed the shutters of his study
himself. From a locked drawer in his bedroom
he took a little revolver, examined it carefully,
and put it into the pocket of his lounge jacket.
He wrote a number of brief notes, one to Colonel Adye,
gave them to his servant to take, with explicit instructions
as to her way of leaving the house. “There
is no danger,” he said, and added a mental reservation,
“to you.” He remained meditative for
a space after doing this, and then returned to his
cooling lunch.
He ate with gaps of thought. Finally he struck
the table sharply. “We will have him!”
he said; “and I am the bait. He will come
too far.”
He went up to the belvedere, carefully shutting every
door after him. “It’s a game,”
he said, “an odd game—but the chances
are all for me, Mr. Griffin, in spite of your invisibility.
Griffin contra mundum ... with a vengeance.”
He stood at the window staring at the hot hillside.
“He must get food every day—and I
don’t envy him. Did he really sleep last
night? Out in the open somewhere—secure
from collisions. I wish we could get some good
cold wet weather instead of the heat.
