It was a mean street, one of the meanest in the whole city. The moon was vivid, and straight overhead, so that my shadow lay in a black little pool around my feet. I sought a dark doorway and waited, knife in hand, my brain full of liquor and loathing.
I slid along in his tracks, glancing quickly behind me to make sure we were unobserved, and swiftly performed the now-familiar operation of driving the impalpable demon back to its own dimension by hacking the throat of the man-shape. Standing above the dead thing, I knew for a second or two the feeling that must have held Jack The Ripper as he stood over his victims: I wanted to stab and slash and mutilate, I wanted to let out some of the terrible hatred that boiled in my heart.
Civilization won, however, and I sheathed the knife after wiping it clean on the man's leather jacket.
At that moment one of _them_ came round the corner and stood staring at me, not twenty feet off!
It was a gorgon of a brute, with several repulsive "heads" on lean stalks of necks; the biggest one looked rather like a hippopotamus whose mother had been frightened by a Ubangi, and I was so used to the weird beings by now that, had I seen this one on a daylit street, I think I would have chuckled. In that deserted lane, though, with the shell of its brother's puppet at my feet, I didn't chuckle. I turned and ran like hell.
A whistle split the air; I turned my head as I pelted away, and squinted my eyes. By all the gods! The hippo gorgon was a bobbie! A ruddy P.C.!
The garage where my Jaguar champed at her inactive gears was only a couple of blocks from the lane. I made for it, taking an extra turning or two in order to lose my pursuer. Coming to the big double doors, I slowed to a business-like stride, went in and demanded my car with a brisk tone, and bestowed a couple of notes on the attendant who brought her to me.
"Be coming back again?" he asked me cheerily.
"Oh, very likely," I lied, and because he was a blessedly human little man, I tipped him an extra pound, which made him goggle and stutter as he thanked me.
I shot the black car out into the street, turned left and lost myself in the maze of Manchester. The distant whistling of the searchers died out behind me.