We went into the deserted hall of Exeter Castle. "Look, Colonel," I said, "will you tell them about this? They'll be upstairs. Tell 'em that it works, that I can see as Jerry Wolfe saw, and everything he told Alec was true. I'll be all right after a while, but now I want to be alone. I don't want to be hedged in by close walls, or have to talk. I'll just roam around down here for a bit. You tell 'em it's okay, that I'll speak to them later."
"Absolutely." The Colonel was the best stuff there is. "Come up when you feel like it, son." He was gone.
I strolled over to one of the great mullioned windows and touched its dusty glass lightly. That glass was older, probably, than all our little band put together. I thought: when it was placed here, were the usurping devils abroad in England? How long have they been filtering through into our world—a hundred years, a thousand? If you start with one and he lets in others, then figuring by the birth rate and the multiplying branches of his horrid clan, how long would it take to let in a million of them? How many figures of our glorious history were just that—figures, puppets, marionettes pulled by fourth-dimensional strings, flesh-and-bone shadows fronting for demons....
We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go....
Jerry had asserted that when the human body died, the alien was relegated to his own world again. Then it had to come back, I presumed, via another birth. It must be centuries, then, at the very least a couple of centuries, since the first one came through. It takes time to corrupt the blood of six-thirteenths of all England.
But was it six-thirteenths? Jerry had taken his census in Charing Cross Station. At Exeter Parva I had seen exactly one usurper. Were they then centered in London? Were there perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty thousand of them altogether? That brought down the odds!
I laughed loudly, and the age-old echoes waked in the oak rafters and laughed after me. Oh, the odds were in my favor, all right.
Opposing me, say (conservatively) twenty thousand foemen: great livid beasts like nothing a sane mind could conceive, that had a system of communication outside my dimension which could gather a score or a thousand of them to down me if I showed fight.
On my side, a regular Colonel Blimp of a retired officer, a Boer War veteran, a skeptical middle-aged physician, a blind man, another chap with no left arm, and a girl.