AS I walked away from the Dunwidge home, I heard the sound of screaming and shouting, and windows breaking. Before I had gone barely half a mile, the noise of the fire engines was ringing in the distance.
I had no cause to return to my lodgings. I had a gun, and I had left some spare clothing at Maulding’s house. My business in the city was concluded. There was only one more task to be accomplished before I returned to Norfolk, and so I made my way on foot to Chancery and the chambers of the lawyer Quayle.
I was perhaps a mile from my destination when I had the sensation of being followed. I turned and saw a little girl wearing a blue-and-white dress on the opposite side of the road from me but about thirty feet behind. She had her back turned to me, so I could not see her face. Then, from the shadows between the streetlamps, again a similar distance but this time on the same side as me, a boy emerged, walking backward. He wore short trousers and a white shirt. His movements were jerky and unnatural, and I was reminded of a moving image slowly being projected and simultaneously rewound.
Somehow the boy, like the girl, seemed to realize that he had been spotted, and he ceased all movement with one leg still suspended in the air. It was only then that I noticed his feet were bare and strangely deformed. I was reminded of limbs I had seen in the trenches, swollen by gangrene or distorted by broken bones. The girl’s feet were also bare, but she was splayfooted, giving her the aspect of a large, pale penguin.
“Go away,” I said, then, louder: “Go away! Go home. This is no hour for children to be abroad.”
But even as I spoke, I felt that any home they had was far, far from this place; or, if Eliza Dunwidge had spoken true, this was now their home, and had always been, and I was the stranger, the intruder.
I did not want to give my back to them, so I, too, began to walk backward, and a peculiar sight we would have presented had there been anyone to see us, but there was no one. And as I moved, so, too, did the boy and the girl, and I heard their joints crack as they came, as though in that short time ice had formed on their limbs. The boy advanced with his irregular, loping gait, his feet twisting beneath him, while the girl waddled, her knees at an angle from the side of her body, and now she was not so much a penguin as a toad that had somehow managed the feat of walking upright, an impression reinforced by her girth, for she was a swollen child.
Eventually I ran. I confess it. I turned tail and fled. I could hear them coming after me, their feet slapping faster on the ground, and I prayed that someone might appear, a fellow night traveler who would force them to leave me be, or confirm, at least, that I was not yet completely mad. But I saw nobody: no people, no cars, not even a horse and cart. The city slumbered, or perhaps there was no city left, and the London that I had once known was entirely gone, replaced by a shadow of itself in which dwelt only deformed children and eyeless men.
I was still running when I recognized the silence. They were gone. I stopped, my hands on my knees, and gasped deep, painful breaths. My lungs were not as they once were. I had gone to France a young man, but now I was old in all but years. Ahead of me was the West End: there, at least, would be people, even at this hour, and dawn could not be far away. I cast one final glance behind me to ascertain that I was alone, then turned to be on my way.
They were there, of course. I should have known it. I had read enough ghost stories in my time, and passed an hour or two with the penny dreadfuls. The children, if that was what they were, had circled me just as troops in wartime will do, seeking the advantage in coming at the enemy from an unexpected direction. They were now only ten feet ahead, their backs still to me, but slowly they began to revolve—yes, revolve, as a weight suspended on a line will revolve—until I saw their faces at last.
Monstrous children, foul things: a random scattering of small black eyes cast over the upper part of their features, a dozen or more, like raisins in dough; no nose on either, but twin slits divided by a thin stretch of septum; and their mouths were lipless grimaces drawn back over jagged, rodentlike teeth, with sharp protuberances at either side like the venomous jaws of a spider.
I did not pause. I did not think. An elemental fear had overcome me. I pointed the gun at the girl’s face and pulled the trigger. The bullet took her in the forehead and exited in a stream of fluid that was not red but yellow, like the innards of an insect. She fell back without a sound, but the boy let out a shriek from somewhere in his maw. He sprang at me, and I shot him, too, but the fury of his reaction took me by surprise, and the first bullet hit him in the shoulder, twisting him and sending him to the ground, so that I was forced to finish him off as he writhed beneath me, his jaws clicking as though, even in his dying, he desired to consume me.
When I was done with them, I dragged their remains into an alley and hid them behind overflowing bins that stank of rotting meat. There was no time for police, no time for explanations. I had to find the book: to find it, and destroy it.