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The Invisible Man
Chapter 25. THE WICKSTEED MURDER
The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp's house in a state of blind fury.
A little child playing near Kemp's gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken.
After that, for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human sight.
No one knows where he went or what he did.
One can imagine him hurrying through the hot June morning.
He went up the hill and onto the open grassland behind Port Burdock.
He raged and despaired at his terrible fate.
At last, hot and tired, he hid among the bushes of Hintondean.
There, he put together his broken plans against other people.
That seems the most likely place for him to hide, there he showed himself again at about two in a tragic way.
One wonders what his state of mind may have been during that time, and what plans he made.
He was almost wildly angry because of Kemp's trick.
We may understand the reasons for that trick.
Still, we can imagine and feel sorry for the fury caused by the attempted surprise.
Maybe some of the shock of his Oxford Street experiences came back to him.
He had clearly expected Kemp's help in his cruel dream of a world full of fear.
At any rate he disappeared from human sight at about midday, and no living person can tell what he did until about half past two.
It was a lucky thing, perhaps, for people, but for him it was a bad time of doing nothing.
During that time a growing number of men spread over the countryside were busy.
In the morning, he had still been simply a story, a terror.
In the afternoon, mostly because of Kemp's dryly written announcement, he was shown as a real enemy.
He could be hurt, caught, or beaten.
The countryside began organizing itself with amazing speed.
By two o'clock even he might still have left the area by getting on a train, but after two that became impossible.
Every passenger train in the large square between Southampton, Manchester, Brighton and Horsham ran with locked doors, and goods traffic stopped.
Around Port Burdock, in a circle of twenty miles, men with guns and heavy sticks began to set out.
They went in groups of three or four, with dogs, to search the roads and fields.
Mounted police rode along the country roads.
They stopped at every house and warned people to lock up and stay inside unless they had weapons.
All the elementary schools had closed by three o'clock.
The scared children, staying together in groups, were hurrying home.
Kemp's announcement, signed indeed by Adye, was put up over almost the whole area by four or five o'clock in the afternoon.
It gave briefly but clearly all the conditions of the fight.
They needed to keep the Invisible Man from food and sleep.
Constant watchfulness was required, Quick attention to any sign of his movements was also necessary.
The authorities acted quickly and decisively.
Belief in this strange being spread fast.
Before nightfall, an area of several hundred square miles was under strict siege.
And before nightfall, too, a wave of horror went through the whole watching, nervous countryside.
Going from whispering mouth to mouth, fast and certain over the whole country, passed the story of the murder of Mr. Wicksteed.
Our idea is that the Invisible Man hid in the Hintondean bushes.
If this is correct, he must have come out again in the early afternoon.
He had a plan that needed a weapon.
We cannot know what the plan was.
The signs that he had the iron rod in his hand before he met Wicksteed seem very strong to me.
Of course we can know nothing of the details of that meeting.
It happened on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord Burdock's gate.
Everything points to a desperate struggle, the trampled ground, the many wounds Mr. Wicksteed received, and his broken walking stick.
But why he attacked, except in a mad wish to kill, is impossible to imagine.
Indeed the idea of madness is almost impossible to avoid.
Mr. Wicksteed was forty-five or forty-six and was manager for Lord Burdock, with harmless habits and appearance.
He was the very last person in the world to make such a terrible enemy attack him.
Against him it seems the Invisible Man used an iron rod pulled from a broken piece of fence.
He stopped this quiet man, who was going home to his midday meal, and attacked him.
He beat down the man's weak defenses, broke his arm, knocked him down, and smashed his head to a pulp.
He must have pulled the rod from the fence before he met his victim and carried it in his hand.
Only two details beyond what has already been said seem to matter.
One is the fact that the gravel pit wasn't on Mr.
Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly two hundred yards out of his way.
Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly two hundred yards out of his way.
The other is the statement of a little girl that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the murdered man "trotting"
In a strange way across a field towards the gravel pit.
Her movements showed a man chasing something on the ground and striking at it again and again with his walking stick.
She was the last person to see him alive.
He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle was hidden from her by beech trees and a small dip.
Now this, to my mind at least, takes the murder out of the area of complete senselessness.
We may imagine that Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any real plan to use it for murder.
Wicksteed may then have come by and noticed this rod moving strangely through the air.
Without any thought of the Invisible Man, because Port Burdock is ten miles away, he may have chased it.
It's quite possible that he may not even have heard of the Invisible Man.
One can imagine the Invisible Man moving away quietly to avoid showing his presence in the area.
Wicksteed, excited and curious, chased the strangely moving object and finally hit at it.
The Invisible Man could easily have outrun his middle-aged chaser under normal conditions.
However, the position of Wicksteed's body suggests bad luck drove his prey into a corner.
This corner was between a patch of stinging nettles and the gravel pit.
To those who understand the very quick anger of the Invisible Man, the rest of the meeting will be easy to imagine.
But this is just a guess.
The only clear facts are the discovery of Wicksteed's killed body and the blood-stained iron rod thrown among the nettles.
The fact that Griffin left the rod suggests he gave it up in the heat of the moment.
It shows he gave up the reason he had taken the rod, if he had any reason.
He was certainly a very selfish and unfeeling man.
But the sight of his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released a hidden spring of regret.
This regret may have flooded whatever plan he had made.
After the murder of Mr. Wicksteed, he seems to have gone across the country towards the grassland.
There's a story of a voice heard at sunset by two men in a field near Fern Bottom.
It was crying and laughing, sobbing and groaning, and again and again it shouted.
It must have been a strange thing to hear.
It moved up across the middle of a clover field and died away towards the hills.
That afternoon the Invisible Man must have learned something of the quick use Kemp had made of his secrets.
He must have found houses locked and secured.
He may have waited around railway stations and moved about inns.
No doubt he read the announcements and understood the fight against him.
And as the evening came, the fields became dotted here.
There with groups of three or four men, and noisy with the barking of dogs.
These men-hunters had special instructions in case of a meeting about the way they should help each other.
But he avoided them all, we may understand something of his anger.
And it couldn't have been any less because he himself had given the information that was being used so cruelly against him.
For that day at least he lost heart, for nearly twenty-four hours, except when he turned on Wicksteed, he was a hunted man.
In the night he must have eaten and slept.
In the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry and evil, ready for his last great struggle against the world.