The Murderer Invisible

by Philip Wylie

  In ten days, in two weeks, he accomplished more than he had anticipated for a period of two years. New York was fermenting with fear, seething with a mighty effort to stabilize itself. The Capitol lay in ruins—a ton of explosive in a stolen Ford truck had effected that.

  One of the thoughts to which his ghastly enterprise gave rise in connection with Baxter was that the young scientist would be able to explain in some quarters precisely what was happening and by whose hand it was executed. If Baxter did that, Carpenter considered in some intervals, it would be a valuable service. When the world became aware that William Carpenter, the invisible man, the tycoon of science, was in the process of subjugating it—then the world would realize more quickly the futility of struggling against the goad. That reasoning by the experimenter of Sinkak was wholly unsound for the world, once the name of its enemy was known, would perhaps suffer an increase of a specialized dread but at the same time it would take heart and redouble its efforts to vanquish one mere man. Carpenter had reached the fallacious conclusion because he knew what the world would refuse to admit in the first furious recognition of its enemy—that his expanding powers had no limits and only a mishap could check his career.

  Carpenter expected to make no mistake. There his reason erred; all human beings are subject to occasional fault and the mighty scientist could conceivably become an Alexander, a Napoleon—his doom would yet lie in nature.

  At times he considered the United States, knowing that he, Carpenter, was the lone enemy within its borders, humbly submitting to whatever reorganizations he chose to institute. It required less than a week to make that notion a frequent fervency of his. He saw the President, Congress, the Senate publicly announcing that it was better to yield to the scourge than to bear it longer.

  A few men, notably Professor John Todder Boughten of Yale, actually wrote letters to the hectic press which sympathized with the original Carpenter document.

  Boughten had exulted: “The time has come when some mighty scientist with a colossal mind has seen fit to take the destiny of the world into his own hands. He has given us an inkling of his purposes. He has given us a sample of the power he can wield to force the stupid masses to his will. The sooner the intelligent minority brings pressure on the majority to submit to this unknown benefactor’s directions, the sooner will mankind be lifted bodily from the slough of contempory ‘civilization’.”

  Joseph Sandling, the radical novelist, had written, “If this man intends to promulgate the things he has intimated—the termination of all politics, the creation of an autocracy of science, the death of those fatuous institutions marriage, the home, public charity, private ownership—then I am for him and I invite him to enlist me in his cause! En avant with the destruction of the rabble! One omni-powerful man could in a generation lift this nation a thousand years ahead of modern crassness, vulgarity, brutality, slavery!”

  Over such writings Carpenter gloated and in his mental eye he marked their authors for important posts in the empire he would establish.

  Carpenter neglected two principles: the ineradicable desire of the individual to live his life free of social, mental and moral interference, and the unchangeable law of nature which makes man’s evolution a gradual process accomplished by education, by the slow alteration of outward circumstance, by infinitesimal degrees of upward growth. He might have seen that in the experiment of Prohibition (a mild effort compared to his ambitions) the government had met with such bitter and consistent hostility as to make the law a butt of national diatribe, a collection of words at which each independence-loving individual sneered and scoffed with an ineradicable enmity.

  He might have seen from history that no man, no idea, no invention had the intrinsic potency to accelerate by any fraction the ponderous and immutable evolution of the masses. Caesar tried to rule and civilize the world. After him the very barbarians he had conquered threw down his marble city. Jesus Christ brought a message of peace and toleration which was preached to every man and woman in a hundred nations for generations. Two thousand years after Him there were wars more terrible than any sadistic dream of a licentious legionary, corruption was as rampant in high places, and toleration existed nowhere on the face of the earth. Iron did not lift the character of mankind—or steel—or steam—or electricity—or radio—or medicine. One man could not do it even if he slew from the sanctuary of his invisibility until the last remnants of the combined races fled to the most remote wildernesses.

  However, the calm logic of philosophy has invariably rusted in the acid of human ambition—the lessons of time have been anesthetized in the heady vapors of megalomania. Carpenter believed he could do what no man had done before him.

  He made his mistake. He was a human being—the people with whom he dealt were human. Baxter was no superman who had come in a crisis to cope with the warped giant—although Baxter was a great man. When the fire of Sodom fell upon New York, Baxter operated frantically to discover a solution and during the ten days of terror he like all other human beings, was frustrated and without hope. Daryl was a fine sample of contemporary womanhood yet she did not have the divine intuition which led to Carpenter’s apprehension. She even indulged in the gross stupidity of giving him the opportunity to form a new liaison with herself and her lover.

  Quail could but remain the man he had always been—kindly, brave enough, helpful when help was needed. The men whom Baxter had told about Carpenter studied the problem of his capture with minds that were divided by the more personal business of watching the destruction of their own property and the lives of their own neighbors. Even the President of the United States, with all the resources at his command, would have made an easy victim of Carpenter’s seemingly invincible formula.

  Carpenter’s failure was in himself. When his first attack was ended and rounded out by his profound dispatch, when the smoke had been swept away by wind and a temporary tranquillity had descended, he had time to think of himself. On the streets, moving through the city, he was exalted. Alone, his emotions changed.

  Alone he perceived one tragedy of his circumstance. He was destined from now and forever afterward to be alone, to remain alone. He could never be free of invisibility. It made him in a sense like a man already dead. That stupendous idea sent him into a fever of fear. True, he could contact his fellows under the smothering guise of Mr. Williams. But he, Carpenter, was eternally obliterated. He thought then how fond and familiar had been the visible attributes of his body. He took from his closet a recent photograph of himself and cherished that face no one could ever look upon again with a sentimentality, a fervency, a regret that could scarcely be borne.

  He considered himself more closely and saw that he was destined to live like a man stranded on the moon—a man who could converse with the green earth by radio, who could inspect its goings and comings as minutely as he pleased by a telescope, who could hurl upon it from his lunar exile huge and devastating shells—but who could never return his person, his body to his native land—who could not even contemplate the rhapsodical solace of burial in the soil from which he had sprung.

  That thought, after the heat of event, shook Carpenter to his marrow. It was inescapable because despite the limits imposed upon him by his ambition, he had great emotions, a giant imagination.

  A second intellectual impasse was derived from it. Sitting at a high window in his Long Island house he contemplated it in sad solitude. Because he must always be alone—no one would share his plans, no one would delight in his triumphs. He could never enjoy the simple human process of sharing with another his successes. That hunger was increased by the very reason that it was denied.

  It was at that point that the desire for possessing Daryl was given new impetus and fresh purpose. Daryl commenced to exist in a different partition of his mind. The change was slight, almost indistinguishable to any one but himself. In Sinkak he had coveted her, yearned for her—emotions spurred by jealousy of Baxter. He had threatened her. He had even foreseen the need of a co
mpanion to share his life to come and tried at least twice to tell her of it. At both times the circumstances were unfavorable.

  He had not quite understood the reasons that led him to go to the Clariena before he put his invisibility to any other use. His threat at that time to make her go with him and love him had been composed partly of a vengeful wish to see her afraid of him, partly of the obscure existence of the very sentiments which now burst out within him.

  He wondered now if, at that time, he had really intended to take Daryl and make her his own property. So confused was his mind on the subject that, while he convinced himself that his original words and deeds—even to locking her in the cellar—had been nothing more than the activity of a parental dictatorialness and a romantic jealousy—he also convinced himself that the feelings he now had for her sprang from newly discovered tenets of his brain.

  He had threatened her, locked her up, struggled physically with her, invaded the privacy of her boudoir and told her that she was destined to be his, he had even intimated that he would kill her sweetheart. He admitted that to himself. He added to the admission a gentle pooh!—that was nothing—it was light dealing, sport, showing her her place and his power, pleasantry, the way of a man with a maid, hot blood—he had never meant to do anything serious about her. She was too young, too charming.

  He propped up his ogre-mindedness with such rationalization. To it he added the more mature dictum of a man who controlled the world; to it he added the inbred reasoning which had come from the poignant realization that he was a solitary and a tragic figure. Daryl? She was a woman. A woman! What a thing for a man to think about. She was not any woman—but the woman—the woman destined to share his future magnificence. He had said that before, but now he meant it—meant it in all the glorious significance the thought was taking on. Hadn’t people like Sandling said what a man he was? Now he would actually go to her, take her, make her his queen. Now he was purged of the pettiness that had hampered his relationship toward her. Now he could make her see his true stature and share his sublime estate—force at first, of course—but afterward she would do it voluntarily, gladly, magnificently.

  Some men would judge Carpenter’s leaping traumas as the first evidences of senility. Others and possibly the more acute, would consider his heredity and his environment, his passionate and terrible romanticism, as the keys to his contorted thinking. Some men would say he knew nothing about woman, nothing about people. Few would realize that this conclusion of Carpenter about himself, his motives, and about Daryl—was the last defense of a man who had sold his soul to the devil and stared down the corridor of a lifetime of repayment. Few would perceive that it was his supreme effort to try to sidestep the price of invisibility—which was absolute solitude.

  Carpenter’s one philosophic defense against the rapid inroads of his loneliness was the faint radiance of an allegorical idea: all he had done to himself was to accentuate the ostracism of every man. His fellows saw and talked, kissed and congregated together yet each man among them moved immutably in the space-wandering planet of his own brainpan, forever a stranger to the rest. He, Carpenter, had increased the distance of that normal exile, had furthered the great hiatus that exists between all men. In doing so he had increased his perspective and purchased the great rights that accompanied the increase. He was a special and graphic symbol of the perpetual solitude that is the agony of every mortal from birth to death. All men walk alone—he more alone than they. It was a beautiful conception of himself—but it was not enough. The flesh no one could see, the soul of him no one had ever seen craved Daryl. He decided to possess her at once.

  He left the Long Island house at once and stood on the rear end of a New York bound train for the duration of the trip into the city. Extricating himself with difficulty from the crowds in the Pennsylvania Station, he boarded a subway and was shortly standing in front of the Quail house. It was some time before the exodus of Amy gave him an opportunity to enter. Daryl was not down stairs. He listened at the door of her room. She was dressing for dinner, he guessed. She spoke to no one, so he judged that she was alone. He knocked.

  “Come.”

  He opened the door. Daryl was standing before a mirror fixing her hair. When her invitation to enter was not answered she looked up. The door was slowly closing—of its own accord. A puzzled frown crossed her brow. She walked to the door and would have opened it to see who was in the hall if the terrific significance of the situation had not dawned on her at that precise instant.

  “Carpenter!” she said.

  He replied in a low, guarded tone. “I am here.”

  The words forced her to believe her reeling senses. She found herself ransacking the room with her eyes while she backed away from the place whence his voice had issued. Immediately she thought of calling for help and the breath drawn in for that purpose was choked back by Carpenter’s great palm.

  He spoke swiftly and intensely. “I have caught your Baxter. I want to talk to you. His liberty is the bribe I offer you for an hour’s conversation. Will you come?”

  She remained rigid in his grasp, her eyes staring.

  “If you do not, I shall certainly send him—the way so many people have gone.”

  It was a crude device—but the very harsh reality of its bargaining was its insurance of success—that and the fact that she was smothering under the great hand. She nodded her head affirmatively.

  “You promise not to shout?”

  Her head shook. The hand was removed.

  “You will go down stairs. You will say that you are going to get a breath of air—if you encounter any one. You will walk around the block, hail a taxi, get in, and tell the driver to go down town.”

  Daryl accomplished precisely what she had been directed to do. Frozen in the grip of horror, her mind a thicket of frantic devices and fears, she walked down the stairs.

  Quail stood in the hall. “Whither bound?”

  “For a little air.”

  “Be careful and don’t let Carpenter get you.”

  “No,” she answered softly.

  The front door opened beneath her hand. She was in the street. The last rays of the sun poured through the parallel valleys that run across town to the Hudson. Her mind selected for wonderment the minute surprise that she had automatically adjusted her hat as she descended the steps.

  Mechanically, steadfastly, she walked to the corner, turned, hailed a cab, gave the driver his directions, and leaned back on the seat. Faintly she heard a whispered, “Excellent!” Carpenter was standing on the running board with his head inside the door window.

  When they reached Canal Street Carpenter whispered further directions and they went over a bridge into Brooklyn. The final address brought them near the waterfront in a tawdry district. She paid the driver and stepped from the cab.

  She was no longer totally inert to the new circumstance. Some of her first fear had been overcome by the mere pressure of necessity. She had entertained during the protracted ride fully a score of schemes. Most of them were absurd. All of them were dangerous.

  Daryl knew after the initial impulsive apprehension had passed that it was quite probable Carpenter was not holding Baxter. She felt that she did not dare take any chance which might result in Baxter’s death. She considered commencing to scream for help. The results of such an effort were exceedingly doubtful. Carpenter might cover her mouth at the first note of a scream. He might kill her on the spot. He might kill any one who investigated the scream. He might merely allow her to get out of the cab and continue to follow her. She was, of course, thoroughly cognizant of the small regard in which her foster uncle now held human life.

  The thing which gave her courage to go ahead calmly with the whole enterprise, the ideal that armed her with nerve and ingenuity, however, was different from any immediate and practical cause. As clearly as any one else, she appreciated the immense danger which Carpenter represented and the infinite difficulty of his capture. Almost with his entrance in the room she
understood that she, of all people, had crossed his path and made contact with him since the beginning of his depredations.

  The highest motive a human being can have was set in operation: self-sacrifice. She knew that she was in a position to do more good, or to try to do more good for all her fellow men than any of the other millions engaged in hunting down the invisible man. What did her life, her body, her reason matter if she could eventually bring about his downfall? The concept grew in her and its growth flushed her with the strength to control shuddering nerves, to answer in an obedient tongue, to seem if not content at least half persuaded to the inevitable.

  She acted almost with alacrity to the whispered instructions that came from the thin air of the Brooklyn street. She walked to the waterfront and out on a pier. She descended a wooden stairway and clambered into a small boat. She put her hand on Carpenter’s when he started the outboard motor, when he took the tiller and headed the craft toward the open water.

  They could not talk above the sound of the engine. The skyline of Manhattan receded. Twilight came and then darkness. No light was provided for the boat. The water was smooth. In the gloom they traversed its gently undulant bosom. Once he rose and refilled the gasoline tank from a large can. On his way back to the tiller he patted her head.

  It was late when they reached the harbor in the mouth of which Chrome Gables was located. Carpenter throttled down the motor and ran the boat into a shed. He helped her out. In the pitch dark, he was not terrifying—one did not expect to see. Together they crossed the broad lawn which surrounded the house. Carpenter unlocked the cellar door. They went down a few steps. A light was turned on.