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.