Never, in all my journeying among their foul kind, had I felt the concentrated effluvia of so much hate, so many noxious, diabolic waves of damnable ferocity beating against me like the wind off the Styx, turning me weak and sick. Malignant powers from the poisonous womb of Hell! I shook with uncontrollable nausea, with the dreadful revulsion caused by the towering, smashing, soul-wrenching blast of hatred flung at me by the group of beast-folk in that moment. It was beyond words. Nor was it my warped vision, affecting my other senses in the relatively mild way it had done before this. No, this was a feral force, a raging thing which knew no bonds of dimension or of the senses. It stabbed to the soul itself. Marion gave a muffled scream and huddled down on the step, clasping my knees; even the Colonel, the last man to be disturbed by an abstruse sensation, gasped audibly. As for poor Arold, he sat down with a bump and hid his face in his hands, whimpering; having as we did the added receptivity, that terrible blow nearly killed us both. The hall was blotted from my sight, a gulf opened below me, I felt myself hurtling down into unmentionable depths of agony. When I opened my eyes I did not know what to expect: perhaps the unknown wastes and plains of the silver land, whither their foul thrust, I thought, might very well have hurled me. As a matter of fact, I was still standing upright on the staircase. I have never been more surprised.
Then I saw that they were in the process of leaving their human bodies, wrenching and hauling backward as though caught in a tight box.
"We accept your ultimatum," said the scholarly voice of the beast who was Sir Lawrence Hockling. "We are rational beings. We have been beaten, and we will return to our own plane, which lies at an angle to your space-time continuum. Please spread the word of the capitulation abroad, so that no more may die. Agreed?"
"Agreed," I said. I leaped down the steps to stand face to face with his robot. "I give you three days of grace," I cried, "and then we begin to slay you all over England."
I looked from him to the others of that group of inferno-bred ogres, shining like so many luminous bloated corpses at the bottom of the sea, with the colors of malice and savagery changing, coming and going in their rotten bodies; feeling the last exhalations of their enmity touching me like a palpable force. It had not begun to dawn on me that we had won. My head throbbed and racketed like a gourd full of thunder. Then I saw two men coming toward me through the mob, and my headache died to a near-forgotten dull throb; for they were John Baringer and Geoff Exeter.
"Look what I found on the lawn," said the doctor. "Sitting out there as calm as ice, whistling Lili Marlene!"
"What ho," said Geoff, groping with his hand until I had gripped it with mine. "You boys have fun?"
"I knew it," said I. "I knew you were the one. How'd you get out? How'd you find your way to Birmingham?"
"Long story, son ... everyone okay?"