Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings

I stood gaping, every sense within me shuddering at that soundless scene of ruin and death. And then it came upon me that now I could escape. Brutar had turned triumphantly to his underlings. I heard his voice: "The first success! Now let us try the others!"

No one seemed to be noticing me. I turned and swept myself away into the darkness.

I was aware of the grey outlines of New York floating by above me. A dim idea was in my mind that I must rejoin Will and Thone.

Out there beneath the Westchester hills the silent mob of Brutar's ghostly followers still waited. Near them was the main body of his army, inactive, waiting here while he with his chosen few were experimenting upon New York!

Experimenting! This little experimental test, and it had brought down the Woolworth Building! What then would they do with a general attack?

I passed around the mob -- silent, fleeing spectres -- and sped again into darkness. With no conscious thought of passing time, or direction to my flight. Yet there must have been some instinct to guide me. The thought of Bee came strong. A growing triumph, a relief, told me I was nearing her; and I think now that it was her thought of me which guided my flight.

Darkness. But overhead lay the shadows of my own world. Winding grey hills; towns that lay like grey, colorless pictures in a book, queerly distorted as I looked, upward and through them.

Shadows like myself were advancing from the gloom in front of me! A little group; behind them a vague sweep of shapes stretching out to seem a throng, a multitude. Thone! Will and Bee -- with the rescuing army of the Big-City behind them!

The rescuing army.

There came upon me with that meeting a great surging knowledge of my love for Bee. My love, born up there in my own world. And then, in the realm of the Egos, stripped of the physical, a changed love which had faded to a vague affection -- a knowledge that she was dear to me, but nothing more.

Now -- in the Borderland once more, at least of half-material substance, a very human love descended in a torrent. My arms went around her.

"Bee, my darling. " And she responded to my caresses, kissing me with an eagerness, a longing undisguised. "Rob! I've been so frightened, not having you -- " Murmured then that she loved me; and clung to me. The threshold of our own world.

But it was no time for love-making. I told Thone and Will what was transpiring, what already had come to pass, down there in New York. And with them we presently swept forward to the rescue.

Thone's army was at least as large as Brutar's; and it was not, like his, burdened by those who could not fight. In orderly array it advanced, and soon ahead of us we saw the shapes of Brutar's forces.

Strange ghostly battle into which now we plunged! I did not, could not fully understand it at the time -- but now I think I do. The very essence of it a physical inactivity. Fighting! The word to our Earthly minds is so full of movement! Yet a man battling with himself, pitting the good against the evil within himself, may sit in his easy chair and fight a fierce fight.

So it was here; unleashed forces of the mind, grappling silently -- a struggle without rules of combat in which no quarter could be given, and which could only end by complete annihilation of one side or the other. I knew all this, and standing with Bee, Thone and Will on a dark eminence above the scene, I watched, breathlessly.

We were under that same little Westchester town. Its streets and houses lay shadowy above us. Ghostly people were up there -- thronging the streets -- gazing down with fear and awe at these flowing masses of ghosts advancing to battle.

The mob of Brutar's followers, frightened now, were huddled compactly. In area, they spread under perhaps half the village. And around them in a great concentric ring, Brutar's fighters massed. This movement Thone did not disturb.

"Let them," he said. "It's what I wish, to have them massed like that."

From our eminence -- we were poised not very far beneath the ground level -- we could see over the whole area of the battle which was proceeding below us. The central mob who could not fight; the ring of Brutar's soldiers; and surrounding that, at a distance of some five hundred feet, another ring, Thone's fighters who now were massing to the attack.