Then he saw the short grass stir, flatten, and raise near at hand, and let out a cry of alarm. Wrenching off his riding boot, he swung it in an arc, low above the ground. It struck something concealed in thin air. Almost at once, he received a terrific kick in the thigh, and fell backwards. Despite the hurt, fear made him jump up almost at once.
Mrs. Grendon was changing. Her mouth collapsed as if it would run off one corner of her face. Her head sagged to one side. Her shoulders fell. A deep crimson blush momentarily suffused her features, then drained, and as it drained she dwindled like a deflating rubber balloon. Gregory sank to his knees, whimpering, buried his face in his hands, and pressed his hands to the grass. Darkness overcame him.
His senses must have left him only for a moment. When he pulled himself up again, the almost empty bag of women’s clothes was still settling slowly to the ground.
“Joseph! Joseph!” he yelled. Nancy had fled. In a distracted mixture of panic and fury, he dragged his boot on again and rushed round the house towards the cowsheds.
Neckland stood halfway between barn and mill, rubbing his skull. In his rattled state, the sight of Gregory apparently in full pursuit made him run away.
“Neckland!” Gregory shouted. He ran like mad for the other.
Neckland bolted for the mill, jumped inside, tried to pull the door to, lost his nerve, and ran up the wooden stairs. Gregory bellowed after him.
The pursuit took them right to the top of the mill. Neckland had lost enough wit even to kick over the bolt of the trapdoor.
Gregory, burst it up and climbed out panting. Throughly cowed, Neckland backed towards the opening until he was almost out on the little platform above the sails.
“You’ll fall out, you idiot,” Gregory warned. “Listen, Neckland, you have no reason to fear me. I want no enmity between us. There’s a bigger enemy we must fight. Look!”
He came towards the low door and looked down at the dark surface of the pond. Neckland grabbed the overhead pulley for security and said nothing.
“Look down at the pond,” Gregory said. “That’s where the -Aurigans live. My GodBert, look, there one goes!”
The urgency in his voice made the farmhand look down where he pointed. Together, the two men watched as a depression slid over the black water; an overlapping chain of ripples swung back from it. At approximately the middle of the pond, the depression became a commotion. A small whirlpool formed and died, and the ripples began to settle.
“There’s your ghost, Bert,” Gregory gasped. “That must have been the one that got poor Mrs. Grendon. Now do you believe?”
“I never heard of a ghost as lived under water,” Neckland gasped.
“A ghost never harmed anyonewe’ve already had a sample of what these terrifying things can do. Come on, Bert, shake hands, understand I bear you no hard feelings. Oh, come on, man! I know how you feel about Nancy, but she must be free to .make her own choice in life.”
They shook hands and grinned rather foolishly at each other.
“We better go and tell the farmer what we seen,” Neckland said. “I reckon that thing done what happened to Lardie last evening.”
“Lardie? What’s happened to her? I thought I hadn’t seen her today.”
“Same as happened to the little pigs. I found her just inside the barn. Just her coat was left, that’s all. No insides! Like she’d been sucked dry.”
It took Gregory twenty minutes to summon the council of war on which he had set his mind. The party gathered in the farmhouse,, in the parlor. By this time, Nancy had somewhat recovered from the shock of her mother’s death, and sat in an armchair with a shawl about her shoulders. Her father stood nearby with his arms folded, looking impatient, while Bert Neckland lounged by the door. Only Grubby was not present.
He had been told to get on with the ditching.
“I’m going to have another attempt to convince you all that you are in very grave danger,” Gregory said. “You won’t see it for yourselves. The situation is that we’re all animals together at present. Do you remember that strange meteor that fell out of the sky last winter, Joseph? And do you remember that ill-smelling dew early in the spring? They were not unconnected, and they are connected with all that’s happening now. That meteor was a space machine of some sort, I firmly believe, and it brought in it a kind of life thatthat is not so much hostile to terrestrial life as indifferent to its quality. The creatures from that machine1 call them Aurigansspread the dew over the farm. It was a growth accelerator, a manure or fertilizer, that speeds growth in plants and animals.”