"I meant the ruddy ale, idiot. I'm not bragging about my accomplishments yet. Seen any of our chums lately?" he asked. "Oh, dozens. Run into 'em everywhere." It was a kind of simple code; I was telling him that the pub was full of the aliens. "Fine. Any of 'em give you any news? Anything startling been happening?" "Not much. Same old stuff." _Same old stuff!_ Same old fiends from Abaddon! Same old hosts of Hell! Same old ogres and ghouls, harpies and bugaboos, hobgoblins and hellhags! The barman, when I squinted, was a big jovial red-nosed Cockney. The barman, when I opened my eyes normally, was a writhing monster, a shapeless blob of intangible protoplasm in whose depths moved turgid lights of orange and mauve; from whose devilish form the waves of malevolence came and went like the roiled swell made by the sluggish moving of some hideous primeval entity beneath the surface of a grisly tarn.... I grinned at him. "Cool weather for June, mate," said I affably. "Ar, yus," he agreed. I was pleased with myself. Like a spy plunked down in a strange land, I had been feeling my way to confidence these last days, growing used to the shapes about me, learning to show an expression of bland normality when confronted with unnameable horrors. I believed I was perfectly ready now to begin our war. 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." "Righto." 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." "How, old son?" "I'm going to do a murder." "Think it's wise?" he asked. "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."