A man, and a man, and then a beast....
I slid along in his tracks, glancing quickly behind me to make sure we were unobserved, and swiftly performed the now-familiar operation of driving the impalpable demon back to its own dimension by hacking the throat of the man-shape. Standing above the dead thing, I knew for a second or two the feeling that must have held Jack The Ripper as he stood over his victims: I wanted to stab and slash and mutilate, I wanted to let out some of the terrible hatred that boiled in my heart.
Civilization won, however, and I sheathed the knife after wiping it clean on the man's leather jacket.
At that moment one of them came round the corner and stood staring at me, not twenty feet off!
It was a gorgon of a brute, with several repulsive "heads" on lean stalks of necks; the biggest one looked rather like a hippopotamus whose mother had been frightened by a Ubangi, and I was so used to the weird beings by now that, had I seen this one on a daylit street, I think I would have chuckled. In that deserted lane, though, with the shell of its brother's puppet at my feet, I didn't chuckle. I turned and ran like hell.
A whistle split the air; I turned my head as I pelted away, and squinted my eyes. By all the gods! The hippo gorgon was a bobbie! A ruddy P.C.!
The garage where my Jaguar champed at her inactive gears was only a couple of blocks from the lane. I made for it, taking an extra turning or two in order to lose my pursuer. Coming to the big double doors, I slowed to a business-like stride, went in and demanded my car with a brisk tone, and bestowed a couple of notes on the attendant who brought her to me.
"Be coming back again?" he asked me cheerily.
"Oh, very likely," I lied, and because he was a blessedly human little man, I tipped him an extra pound, which made him goggle and stutter as he thanked me.