CHAPTER XXVII

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.