The Invisible Man

by H.G. Wells

went out again, exasperated at my want of success, with only the vaguest plans of action in my mind."

"But you begin now to realise," said the Invisible Man, "the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again."

Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man—a bubble. And fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad—in the London air—I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from that cause also. But I saw clearly it could not be for long. "Not in London at any rate.

turned upon me abruptly and came into me, sending me into the road and almost under the wheel of a passing hansom. The verdict of the cab-rank was that he had had some sort of stroke.

"I came forward to follow him, and at the noise of my movement he stopped dead. I did so too, startled by his quickness of ear.

it was a confoundedly exasperating thing for me, Kemp, to have to sniff his coffee and stand watching while he came in and resumed his meal. And his table manners were irritating.

there was a draught down my back. Twice I strangled a sneeze just in time.

I returned upstairs and sat in his chair by the fire. It was burning low, and scarcely thinking, I put on a little coal. The noise of this brought him up at once, and he stood aglare.

Sure, just 'cause you're invisible doesn't mean you've forgotten how winter works, right?

at last he came up and opened the upstairs door. I just managed to get by him. "On the staircase he stopped suddenly, so that I very nearly blundered into him. He stood looking back right into my face and listening. 'I could have sworn,' he said.

He was becoming aware of the faint sounds of my movements about him. The man must have had diabolically acute hearing.

went blundering noisily and pugnaciously downstairs.

Several rooms I did inspect were unfurnished, and others were littered with theatrical lumber, bought second-hand, I judged, from its appearance.

I edged quietly out of the room, but a plank creaked. Then the infernal little brute started going all over the house, revolver in hand and locking door after door and pocketing the keys.

The common conventions of humanity—" "Are all very well for common people.

two lace curtains brown with dirt guarding the window.

the day was bright—by contrast with the brown shadows of the dismal house in which I found myself, dazzlingly bright.

I turned with spots of colour swimming before my eyes to the shadowy fixtures behind me.

a mask of the better type, slightly grotesque but not more so than many human beings,

I felt amazingly confident; it's not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass.

the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?

I had one hope. It was a half idea! I have it still. It is a full blown idea now. A way of getting back! Of restoring what I have done.

"At the end," said Kemp, "the day before yesterday, when they found you out, you rather—to judge by the papers—" "I did. Rather. Did I kill that fool of a constable?"

you don't know what rage is! ... To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course!

"Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying.

Let's talk it out over a nice Chinese meal--do some won ton killing.

Why dream of playing a game against the race? How can you hope to gain happiness?

He was staring aghast at the sudden appearance of Kemp, followed by the extraordinary sight of clothing tossing empty in the air. He saw Kemp felled, and struggling to his feet. He saw him rush forward, and go down again, felled like an ox. Then suddenly he was struck violently. By nothing! A vast weight, it seemed, leapt upon him, and he was hurled headlong down the staircase, with a grip on his throat and a knee in his groin.

"He is mad," said Kemp; "inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. I have listened to such a story this morning of brutal self-seeking.... He has wounded men. He will kill them unless we can prevent him. He will create a panic. Nothing can stop him. He is going out now—furious!"

He dreams of a reign of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you.

Heaven send us cold nights and rain!

He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head."

he vanished from human ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction.

the assertion of a little girl to the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the ground before him and striking at it ever 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 being hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight depression in the ground.

the sight of his victim, his first victim, bloody and pitiful at his feet, may have released some long pent fountain of remorse which for a time may have flooded whatever scheme of action he had contrived.

This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man.

saw on the addressed side of it the postmark Hintondean, and the prosaic detail "2d. to pay."

Griffin contra mundum ... with a vengeance."

the third window went with a snap like a pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering triangles into the room.

Another window proclaimed its destruction.

"I'd kill you now if it wasn't the waste of a bullet,"

There was a smash from below. He hesitated and went downstairs again. Suddenly the house resounded with heavy blows and the splintering of wood. He heard a smash and the destructive clang of the iron fastenings of the shutters.

He saw the revolver lying on the path outside, and then the little weapon sprang into the air.

The pistol snapped its penultimate shot and ripped a valuable Sidney Cooper. The second policeman brought his poker down on the little weapon, as one might knock down a wasp, and sent it rattling to the floor.

The second policeman's opinion of Kemp was terse and vivid.

He looked across at Kemp's house, rubbed his eyes and looked again. Then he put his feet to the ground, and sat listening. He said he was damned, but still the strange thing was visible. The house looked as though it had been deserted for weeks—after a violent riot. Every window was broken, and every window, save those of the belvedere study, was blinded by the internal shutters. "I could have sworn it was all right"—he looked at his watch—"twenty minutes ago."

stood up, exclaiming vaguely and vehemently at all these wonderful things.

He was hit hard under the ear, and went reeling, trying to face round towards his unseen antagonist. He just managed to keep his feet, and he struck a vain counter in the air. Then he was hit again under the jaw, and sprawled headlong on the ground. In another moment a knee compressed his diaphragm, and a couple of eager hands gripped his throat, but the grip of one was weaker than the other;

Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled over. There was, I am afraid, some savage kicking.

slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change continued. It was like the slow spreading of a poison.

his eyes were like garnets.

"if they didn't try to make me out a blooming treasure trove! Do I look like a Treasure Trove?