For those few score of hours I felt no remorse, no distaste for my butcher's job, no sorrow except a fleeting one for the human relatives and friends of these poor brainless husks I was destroying. And their grief, I was persuaded, was as nothing in the balance against the good I was actually doing them by ridding our plane of the invading beast-folk.
Then reaction set in, and I lay in my hotel room and shook as though I had blackwater.
I couldn't keep this up, week after week, month after month, for years--even if I were not discovered, either by our police or by _them_, I knew I could not go on. Give me what resounding titles you wish: savior of mankind, champion of humanity, valiant worker for the survival of the race--I was still only a kind of butcher. I knew I was glutted with killing. The papers put my total score at nineteen corpses. They were husks, puppets, yes: but even though what I killed had no life save that imparted by the guiding usurper, it still had the flesh and the blood of my own breed. When the alien was dispatched to his own place, what remained had the look and feel and smell of someone who might have been my brother. I had once quite callously shot a number of tigers in India: but when a tiger dies, he does not turn into the slashed corpse of a man. He remains a tiger. If only the usurpers had continued in their own true shapes after the slayings, I think I might have gone on killing them forever.
So again I moved harmlessly among my foemen, and watched them colloque together in their silent, loathsome fashion, and did nothing.
And a great melancholy took me; and I felt as helpless as a child surrounded by the dismal wraiths of all ghost-haunted England, as hopeless as a man alone in a jungle full of teeming ghouls.
I would have given a year of my life for one hour with Marion Black, but I would not write or telephone her to come to me. I didn't want _them_ to be able to connect me with any of my band, in case _they_ ever discovered my identity.
Then, on the last night I spent in Manchester, I got a little drunk (out of frustration and despondency, and my inarticulate, stupidly silent love for Marion) and I decided to put just one more of the enemy out of the fight, before I went on my way.