"Right." He gave me a long blank stare. Then he batted his lids up and down. "'Ow did you know? I never told you all that!"
"Garn!" he said scornfully. "Wotcher givin' us?"
"If I didn't see it, then how did I know just what it looked like?"
He thought that over, sucking his yellow teeth. Then he gasped. "My Gawd! You got 'em too?"
"And if I were, would I have seen exactly what you saw, unless it were really there?"
Arold Smiff sank back in the rocker and let out a wheeze that began in the tips of his toes. "My old mother! I'm off it for good. The snykes are catchin'. Ow! _'O are you, mister?_"
I threw my whole hand into the center of the table, staking everything on it.
He recoiled. His brown face, incapable of turning pale, nonetheless gave the effect of blanching in some mysterious manner of its own. The common little thief and garden-variety mugger quailed before the celebrated Mad Ghoul of Manchester. He drew out a large clasp knife and snapped open the blade, his hand shaking. "'Ere, now, you keep back from me, you 'ear? I'm not to be trifled wiff, see? You touch me and you're a deader, that's wot."
"Oh, put it away," I said fiercely. When he refused, I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and struck it a stinging judo blow with my right: the knife fell.
"Ow-er!" he yelled. "You keep back!" Cowering, he gazed at me with those muddy-crimson eyes wide, his mouth stretched in a nervous, sickly grimace of fear. "Twenty you done in, all in a couple of dyes," he whispered. "And I been and gone and drunk wiff you lyke you was my brother. You're mad-dorg crazy, you are."
"I'm as sane as you are," I said, "or saner. For heaven's sake, man, get hold of yourself. Do you think I stood you a bucket of gin and wasted two hours on you just to murder you in my own room?"
"Up north I killed four in the time I've taken to talk to you," I said, to impress him further. "Now listen closely, because I don't want to go over this more than a couple of times. In the first place, those people I killed weren't people."
"They were beasts like the purple lizard. Some of 'em were worse. I killed one that was like a giant hoptoad with fangs."
"I've seen 'em like that.... 'Ere, wotcher giving us? _I_ know them 'orrors is all in my mind. _I_ ain't no common lushington. _I_ knows it's the gin. _I_ know they're folks like everyone."