Book 1 · Chapter 4

When I got back to the common, the sun was setting. Scattered groups were rushing from the direction of Woking, and a few people were heading back. The crowd around the pit had grown, standing out dark against the yellow sky - maybe a couple of hundred people.

Voices were raised, and it looked like there was a struggle going on near the pit. Weird thoughts popped into my head. As I got closer, I heard Stent’s voice: Hold back! Hold back! A boy ran toward me. It’s movin’, he said as he zipped past; screwing and screwing out. I don’t like it.

I’m going home. I pushed my way into the crowd. There were really, I’d guess, two or three hundred people bumping and shoving, and the few women there were super active too. "He fell in the pit!" someone yelled. "Hold back!" several people said. The crowd shifted, and I elbowed my way through."

Everyone seemed really worked up. I heard a strange humming sound coming from the pit. "Hey!" said Ogilvy; "help keep these goofballs back. We don’t know what’s in the crazy thing, you know!"

I saw a young guy - I think he was a shop assistant from Woking - standing on the cylinder, trying to scramble out of the hole. The crowd had pushed him in. The end of the cylinder was being screwed out from the inside. Almost two feet of shiny screw were sticking out.

Someone bumped into me, and I almost fell on top of the screw. I turned, and as I did, the screw must have come out, because the lid of the cylinder fell onto the gravel with a loud clang. I shoved my elbow into the person behind me, and turned my head back toward the Thing.

For a moment, that circular hole seemed totally black. I had the sunset in my eyes. I think everyone expected to see a man emerge - maybe something a little different from us humans, but basically a man. I know I did.

But, looking, I quickly saw something moving in the shadow: greyish, wavy movements, one above the other, and then two glowing disks - like eyes.

Then something that looked like a little grey snake, about as thick as a walking stick, coiled up from the twisting middle, and wiggled in the air toward me - and then another. A sudden chill went over me. A woman behind me let out a loud scream.

I half turned, keeping my eyes fixed on the cylinder, from which more tentacles were now sticking out, and started pushing my way back from the edge of the pit. I saw shock turning into horror on the faces around me. I heard confused shouts all around. There was a general movement backward.

I saw the shopman still struggling on the edge of the pit. I found myself alone, and saw the people on the other side of the pit running off, Stent among them. I looked again at the cylinder, and overwhelming terror hit me. I stood frozen and staring.

A big, greyish, rounded mass - the size, maybe, of a bear - was slowly and painfully rising out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather. Two large, dark-coloured eyes were staring at me steadily.

The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and you could almost say it had a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless edge of which quivered and panted, and dripped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsed uncontrollably.

A long, tentacle-like arm gripped the edge of the cylinder, another waved in the air.

Those who'd never seen a real Martian probably couldnn't even imagine how truly horrifying it looked.

The weird V-shaped mouth with that pointed upper lip, no brow ridges, no chin under the wedge-shaped lower lip, that constant quivering of the mouth, the clusters of tentacles like a Gorgon’s head, the heavy, strained breathing in this unfamiliar air, the obvious struggle and pain with every move because Earth’s gravity was so much stronger - and especially those huge, intense eyes - it was all so alive, intense, inhuman, broken, and monstrous.

There was something like fungus on the oily brown skin, and the slow, awkward way it moved was just...gross. Even seeing it for the first time, I felt a wave of disgust and fear. Then, suddenly, the creature vanished.

It had tumbled over the edge of the cylinder and fallen into the pit with a thud like a huge pile of leather hitting the ground. I heard it make a strange, muffled cry, and then another one of these things popped up from the deep shadows of the hole.

I spun around and, running like crazy, headed for the first group of trees, maybe a hundred yards away. But I ran at an angle, stumbling, because I couldn't look away from those things. There, among some young pine trees and furze bushes, I stopped, panting, and waited to see what would happen next.

The area around the sand-pits was full of people, all standing like me in a kind of frozen terror, staring at these creatures, or rather, at the piles of gravel where they lay in the pit. And then, with a fresh wave of horror, I saw a round, black thing bobbing up and down on the edge of the pit.

It was the shopman's head, just a tiny black spot against the bright, orange sunset. Now he managed to lift his shoulder and knee, but then he seemed to slip back down until only his head was showing. Suddenly, he was gone, and I could have sworn I heard a faint scream reach me.

For a second, I thought about going back to help him, but my fear got the better of me. Everything was then completely hidden, blocked by the deep pit and the pile of sand that the cylinder’s fall had created.

Anyone driving along the road from Chobham or Woking would have been shocked to see a shrinking crowd of maybe a hundred people or more standing in a big, uneven circle.

They were huddled in ditches, behind bushes, behind gates and hedges, saying very little - just short, excited shouts - and staring, staring hard, at a few piles of sand. A barrow full of ginger beer stood out, a strange, abandoned thing, black against the burning sky.

And in the sand-pits were a line of empty vehicles with their horses munching hay or pawing the ground.