Chapter XI

"Where can we talk?" I asked him quietly, when I had got control of myself.

"Why, 'ere, General."

"No, no. A good safe place where we can talk privately and without interruption."

"Ow! Old Mag's, o' course. None better. Your room or mine."

"Mine," I said. "Let's go, old horse."

We went, taking along a bottle of gin for medicinal purposes. I sat him down in the dilapidated rocking chair, in my bedroom and, staring into his brown face intently, said, "I've got a proposition for you, Arold. It's a whopper, too."

"Big job?" he said. "You want me on a big job?"

"Yes, you. You'll be my partner in it."

"Me?" he repeated incredulously.

"You're the one chap who can help me."

The muddy eyes actually filled with tears; it was not a maudlin drunk's easy weeping, though, but the honest emotion of a humble workman who finds himself asked to assist a master. "You want me, Arold Smiff, to link up wiff you, a gent, a real gent, clarss, wot I mean a toff as ever was? Cor! I knowed I wasn't through yet," said he. "Just you lead on, General."

"I was only a Captain," said I.

"Then you didn't 'ave your deserts, I'll say. Wot's the gyme?"

"The biggest."

"Bank o' England?" he asked without much astonishment.

"No, not theft. We don't have to steal anything in this game."

He frowned. "'Old on, now, you mean I gotta knock somebody orf? Scrag 'em?"

"Not you personally, Arold. You'll be too high in the game for that."

"Ow, not that I objecks, mindjer," he hastened to assure me. "It just took me off guard, as you might say, you not lookin' lyke a basher." He grinned. "'Twouldn't be the first mug I've did in, General."

"I'll wager on that," said I under my breath, and aloud, "I told you: you'll be too important in this affair to do any murdering yourself, Arold." I prodded him in the chest with a finger. "You'll give the orders," said I.

He was deeply impressed by that. "Cripes!" he said. "Me?"

"Yes. Now listen closely, and I'll explain the whole business. Think back. Remember that purple monster you saw leaving the pub?"

"Not 'arf. Holy hell, not 'arf!"

* * * * *

"It was something like a lizard in shape," I said slowly. "It had a long trailing tail, and two big hind legs it walked on; it had two sets of little forearms, only they weren't like arms, but more like big snakes: no fingers, no hands, just oozy rounded arms. It looked as if it had just crawled out of the sea, and around it there were a lot of thin silvery-blue lines, running at a tangent like this--" I chopped my hands through the air at a forty-five degree angle--"that seemed like a background to the creature. There were glowing eyes in its chest, and for a head it had what looked like a dead fish. Right?"

"Right." He gave me a long blank stare. Then he batted his lids up and down. "'Ow did you know? I never told you all that!"

"I saw it too."

"Garn!" he said scornfully. "Wotcher givin' us?"

"If I didn't see it, then how did I know just what it looked like?"

He thought that over, sucking his yellow teeth. Then he gasped. "My Gawd! You got 'em too?"

"Do I look drunk?"

"No, but--"

"And if I were, would I have seen exactly what you saw, unless it were really there?"

Arold Smiff sank back in the rocker and let out a wheeze that began in the tips of his toes. "My old mother! I'm off it for good. The snykes are catchin'. Ow! _'O are you, mister?_"

I threw my whole hand into the center of the table, staking everything on it.

"I'm the Manchester Slasher," I said.

He recoiled. His brown face, incapable of turning pale, nonetheless gave the effect of blanching in some mysterious manner of its own. The common little thief and garden-variety mugger quailed before the celebrated Mad Ghoul of Manchester. He drew out a large clasp knife and snapped open the blade, his hand shaking. "'Ere, now, you keep back from me, you 'ear? I'm not to be trifled wiff, see? You touch me and you're a deader, that's wot."

"Oh, put it away," I said fiercely. When he refused, I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and struck it a stinging judo blow with my right: the knife fell.

"Ow-er!" he yelled. "You keep back!" Cowering, he gazed at me with those muddy-crimson eyes wide, his mouth stretched in a nervous, sickly grimace of fear. "Twenty you done in, all in a couple of dyes," he whispered. "And I been and gone and drunk wiff you lyke you was my brother. You're mad-dorg crazy, you are."

* * * * *

"I'm as sane as you are," I said, "or saner. For heaven's sake, man, get hold of yourself. Do you think I stood you a bucket of gin and wasted two hours on you just to murder you in my own room?"

"Welp, no," he said grudgingly.

"Up north I killed four in the time I've taken to talk to you," I said, to impress him further. "Now listen closely, because I don't want to go over this more than a couple of times. In the first place, those people I killed weren't people."

"Garn!"

"They were beasts like the purple lizard. Some of 'em were worse. I killed one that was like a giant hoptoad with fangs."

"I've seen 'em like that.... 'Ere, wotcher giving us? _I_ know them 'orrors is all in my mind. _I_ ain't no common lushington. _I_ knows it's the gin. _I_ know they're folks like everyone."

"Oh, _you_ know, do you? Open up that walnut you call your mind, chum. Why do we both see the identical brutes, if they're in your mind?"

"I dunno," he growled sullenly.

"Then just sit quiet--there's the gin beside you--and I'll explain it all in words of one syllable."

And this I did. I went over the whole frightful business, with a side dissertation on the theory of a fourth dimension. Then I went over it again. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck two. I summarized it again. I could see it beginning to penetrate to his submerged intellect. I went through it all a fourth time, and his murky gaze began to glow. The far-away clock struck three.

"'Ere," he said at last. "You ain't loony at all, are yer? Tell me agayn about them as is in it wiff yer."

"There's an old Colonel, a real big gun in his day, with pots of money. There's two veterans, gentlemen both, and one the son of a lord. There's a doctor with plenty of brains, and an old chap with more dignity than you ever saw in your misspent life. There's even a girl, a real lady. And there's me. Do you think we'd all be chucking our lives into this mess if we didn't know it was desperately real?"

* * * * *

He scratched his nose with a black nail. "No," he said, "no, you wouldn't. I can see as you're real clarss, ripper or no. What d'yer want of me, though? I'm plain dirt compared wiff you."

"Why, you were Manny Jarman's right-hand man," I said. "You haven't forgotten what it's like to be top dog?"

He was immensely flattered at that. "Thank you kindly, General. You sees deeper into a bloke than most. Go on."

"I've only a hazy idea of what I want you to do, Arold, when the time comes. But here's an important part of it. Could you find me a whole raft of fellows who'd be willing to commit murder for money, no questions asked?"

"Hell," he grinned, "could a cat find garbage cans?"

"They'd have to be given definite instructions, and be the kind of men who would carry them out to the letter. And no copper's narks, see? Nobody who'd take our cash and then squeal."

"I could do it," he said, thinking. "I could get bullies 'ere in Brummagem who'd cut their mothers' necks for three quid. And they could get others. Ow, trust Arold Smiff to find the right 'uns!"

"We might need a hundred."

"There's that many and more."

I was giving slow birth to a real plan now. "It might be that they'd have to go all over England, and do these murders in a hundred different places. And they'd have to do them in a certain manner you'd tell 'em about, see? No slipshod hatchet work, but well-planned assassinations."

"Might be harder to find them as would work precise to orders, but I could do it. I know every rogue in these parts, don'tcher doubt it, General."

"That's why you're so valuable, Arold: that's why you'll be my right-hand man. And only you and I must know that the men we'll be killing aren't truly men, but--"

"But oosluppers," agreed Arold, proud of the new word. "Oosluppers from the fourth demented, yus. Why, General, it's lyke a crusade, a bloody noble crusade, ain't it?"

"That's what we think, pal. But that part's a deep secret."

"Hot knives won't drag it outen me," he bragged. "Gawd, to think I been seein' these 'ere Frank and Stein's monsters for eight years more or less, and thought all the time it was the gin!" He made his apologies to the liquor by taking an enormous gulp of it.

"Now I've got to go away for a while, Arold," I told him. "I've got to travel all over this island, and collect some names. When I've done that I'll let you know. Meanwhile you can be lining up your lieutenants. With care, old horse, with the greatest care." Then it occurred to me that he had never asked what his reward would be. "You'll find yourself a rich man when this is over, Arold."

"Garn, what'd I do wiff a lot o' money? I don't need much but gin and a few comforts now and agayn, and maybe a bit o' cash to swank it wiff around town."

"You'll be able to build a swimming pool and fill it with Gordon's if you do your job right."

"Trust old Arold, General."

"I do," I said. "I do."

"That's damn near thanks enough," said he in a choked voice. There was a stratum of pretty fine stuff in Arold Smiff, besides the streak of sentimentality you'll usually find in your lower-class Briton.

"Now," I went on, "here's the plan. I'll go over it until we both know it word for word."

I sketched it out as it had come to me in this strange night of lengthy explanation. Then I repeated it, and re-repeated it, until I thought it would bubble out of our ears.

And when the clock rang five, we were nearly ready to begin. But first we laid ourselves down to sleep for a few hours, till the pubs had opened again; when we arose, and put on our coats, and sallied out together to commit a murder ... a most unpleasant but most necessary murder.