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The War of the Worlds
Chapter 18. UNDER FOOT
In the first book, I wandered from my own adventures to tell of my brother's experiences.
So, through the last two chapters, the curate and I hid in the empty house at Halliford.
We fled there to escape the Black Smoke, I'll continue from there.
We stayed there all Sunday night and all the next day, the day of the panic.
We were in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke from the rest of the world.
We could do nothing but wait in painful inactivity during those two weary days.
My mind was filled with worry for my wife.
I imagined her at Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, already mourning me as a dead man.
I walked through the rooms and cried aloud, thinking how I was separated from her and what might happen while I was away.
I knew my cousin was brave enough for any emergency.
But he wasn't the sort of man to realize danger quickly, to act promptly.
What was needed now wasn't bravery, but careful thought.
My only comfort was to believe that the Martians were moving toward London and away from her.
Such vague worries keep the mind sensitive and painful.
I grew very tired and irritable with the curate's constant cries.
I grew tired of seeing his selfish despair.
After useless attempts to argue with him, I kept away, remaining in a children's schoolroom with globes, desks and copybooks.
When he followed me, I went to a box room upstairs and locked myself in to be alone with my sorrows.
We were hopelessly trapped by the Black Smoke all that day and the morning of the next.
That Sunday evening there were signs of people next door, a face at a window, moving lights, and later a slamming door.
But I don't know who these people were, nor what happened to them.
We saw nothing of them next day.
The Black Smoke drifted toward the river all Monday morning, creeping closer and finally moved along the roadway outside the house hiding us.
A Martian came across the fields around midday.
It spread the stuff with a jet of superheated steam.
The steam hissed against the walls and smashed all the windows it touched.
It scalded the curate's hand as he fled out of the front room.
When at last we crept across the wet rooms and looked out again, the country northward looked as though a black snowstorm had passed over it.
Looking toward the river, we were surprised to see a strange redness mixing with the black of the burned meadows.
For a time we didn't see how this change affected our position, except that we were no longer afraid of the Black Smoke.
But later I realized that we were no longer trapped, that now we might escape.
As soon as I understood that the way out was open, my dream of action returned.
But the curate was slow and unreasonable.
"We're safe here," he repeated.
"Safe here."
I decided to leave him - I wish I had!
Wiser now from the artilleryman's teaching, I looked for food and drink.
I had found oil and rags for my burns.
And I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I found in one of the bedrooms.
When it was clear to him that I meant to go alone - I had accepted going alone - he suddenly woke up to come.
And since everything was quiet throughout the afternoon, we started about five o'clock, as I guess, along the blackened road to Sunbury.
In Sunbury and at intervals along the road, dead bodies lay in twisted positions, horses as well as men.
There were overturned carts and luggage, all covered thickly with black dust.
That cloud of ash-like powder made me think of what I had read about the destruction of Pompeii.
We got to Hampton Court without trouble, our minds full of strange, unfamiliar sights.
At Hampton Court we were relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift.
We went through Bushey Park, where deer moved back and forth under the chestnut trees.
Some men and women hurried in the distance toward Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham.
These were the first people we saw.
Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still burning.
Twickenham wasn't damaged by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and there were more people about here, though none could give us news.
For the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a quiet moment to move their homes.
I have an impression that many of the houses here were still occupied by frightened people, too scared even to run away.
Here too the evidence of a hasty escape was plentiful along the road.
I remember most clearly three smashed bicycles in a pile, pressed into the road by the wheels of later carts.
We crossed Richmond Bridge about half past eight.
We hurried across the open bridge, of course.
But I noticed floating down the stream a number of red masses, some many feet across.
I didn't know what these were - there was no time to look closely -.
I put a more horrible meaning on them than they deserved.
Here again on the Surrey side there was black dust that had once been smoke, and dead bodies - a pile near the entrance to the station.
But we had no sight of the Martians until we were some way toward Barnes.
We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a side street toward the river, but otherwise it seemed empty.
Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly.
Outside the town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.
Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, a number of people came running.
The upper parts of a Martian fighting-machine appeared over the housetops not a hundred yards away from us.
We stood frozen at our danger, and if the Martian had looked down we'd have died immediately.
We were so terrified that we didn't dare go on, but turned aside and hid in a shed in a garden.
There the curate crouched, crying silently, and refusing to move again.
But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead wouldn't let me rest, and in the twilight I went out again.
I went through shrubbery and along a passage beside a big house in its grounds, then came out onto the road toward Kew.
I left the curate in the shed, but he came hurrying after me.
That second start was the most foolish thing I ever did.
For it was clear the Martians were around us.
No sooner had the curate caught up with me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before.
Or another far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge.
Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green-grey field, and soon it was clear the Martian was chasing them.
In three strides he was among them, and they ran out from his feet in all directions.
He didn't use the Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one.
Apparently he threw them into the great metal carrier that stuck out behind him, much like a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
It was the first time I realized that the Martians might have any purpose other than destruction with defeated humanity.
We stood for a moment, frozen, then we turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled garden.
We fell into a lucky ditch, rather than found it.
We lay there, hardly daring to whisper until the stars were out.
It was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered courage to start again.
We no longer dared to go onto the road.
Instead, we sneaked along hedgerows and through plantations.
We watched keenly through the darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians.
They seemed to be all around us.
We stumbled upon a burned and blackened area.
It was cooling and full of ash.
Scattered dead bodies lay there, burned horribly about the heads and bodies.
Their legs and boots were mostly whole.
And dead horses, fifty feet, perhaps, behind a line of four broken guns and smashed gun carriages.
Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent and empty.
Here we found no dead, though the night was too dark for us to see into the side roads of the place.
In Sheen my companion suddenly complained of weakness and thirst, and we decided to try one of the houses.
The first house we entered, after a little trouble with the window, was a small semi-detached villa.
And I found nothing eatable left in the place except some moldy cheese.
There was, however, water to drink, and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our next house-breaking.
We then crossed to a place where the road turns toward Mortlake.
Here there stood a white house within a walled garden.
In the pantry of this house, we found a store of food.
There were two loaves of bread in a pan, an uncooked steak, and half of a ham.
I give this list so exactly because, as it happened, we were meant to live on this store for the next two weeks.
Bottled beer stood under a shelf, and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp lettuces.
This pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in this there was firewood.
There was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly a dozen bottles of burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of biscuits.
We sat in the kitchen, dark, not daring to light a match, ate bread and ham and drank beer from the same bottle.
The curate was still fearful and restless.
Oddly enough, he now wanted to push on.
I urged him to eat and keep up his strength.
Then the thing happened that trapped us.
"It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding flash of bright green light.
Everything in the kitchen jumped out, clearly visible in green and black, and vanished again.
And then followed such a crash as I have never heard before or since.
A thud came from behind me, almost instantly.
Glass clashed, bricks crashed and rattled around us.
The ceiling plaster fell on our heads, smashing into many pieces.
I was knocked headlong across the floor against the oven handle and stunned.
The curate told me I was unconscious for a long time.
When I came to, we were in darkness again.
He was dabbing water over me, I later found his face was wet with blood from a cut forehead.
For some time I couldn't remember what had happened.
Then things came to me slowly, a bruise on my temple made itself felt.
"Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper.
At last I answered him, I sat up.
"Don't move," he said.
"The floor is covered with broken dishes from the dresser. You can't possibly move without making a noise, and I think they're outside."
We both sat quite silent, so that we could hardly hear each other breathing.
Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near us, some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.
Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.
"That!" said the curate, when soon it happened again.
"Yes," I said.
"But what's it?"
"A Martian!" said the curate.
I listened again, straining to catch the faint metallic noises from outside.
"It wasn't like the Heat-Ray," I said.
For a time, I thought one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled against the house.
I had seen one stumble against the tower of Shepperton Church.
Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or four hours, until the dawn came, we hardly moved.
Then light filtered in, not through the window, which remained black.
It came through a triangular opening between a beam and a pile of broken bricks in the wall behind us.
The inside of the kitchen we now saw greyly for the first time.
Garden soil had burst in through the window, flowed over the table where we had sat, and lay around our feet.
Outside, the soil was piled high against the house.
At the top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe.
The floor was covered with broken hardware.
The end of the kitchen toward the house was broken, and daylight showed that most of the house had collapsed.
The neat dresser contrasted strongly with this ruin.
It was stained pale green in the fashion.
Below it were copper and tin vessels.
The wallpaper imitated blue and white tiles.
Above the kitchen range, colored pictures fluttered from the walls.
As dawn grew clearer, we saw through the wall gap the body of a Martian standing guard over the still-glowing cylinder.
At the sight of that we crawled as carefully as possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the scullery.
Suddenly the right meaning came into my mind.
"The fifth cylinder," I whispered, "the fifth shot from Mars, has struck this house and buried us under the ruins!"
For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered,
"God have mercy on us!"
I heard him soon crying softly to himself.
Except for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery.
I for my part hardly dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of the kitchen door.
I could just see the curate's face, a dim, oval shape, and his collar and cuffs, Outside there began a metallic hammering.
Then a violent hooting, and then again, after a quiet interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine.
These noises, for the most part unclear, continued on and off, and seemed if anything to increase in number as time went on.
Soon a steady thudding and a vibration that made everything around us shake and the vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued.
Once the light was blocked, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became completely dark.
For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and shivering, until our tired attention failed.
At last I found myself awake and very hungry.
I believe we must have spent most of a day before that awakening.
My hunger was so strong that it moved me to action.
I told the curate I was going to look for food, and felt my way toward the pantry.
He made me no answer, but as soon as I began eating the faint noise I made woke him up.
I heard him crawling quietly after me through the dark, hungry and afraid.