The Invisible Man

Kemp hears gunshots at the bottom of the hill. He sees a crowd gathered and wonders, “What are the asses at now?” (70). He ignores the noise and continues working until 2 a.m. When he prepares for bed, he notices a pool of blood on the floor—then on his bedroom doorhandle, and on his bedsheets. He then sees a bloody bandage, seemingly suspended in midair. The Invisible Man has snuck into Kemp’s house to dress his wound, but he is astonished to see Kemp because the two of them were once schoolmates. When the Invisible Man reveals himself to Kemp as “Griffin [...] almost an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red eyes” (73), Kemp is sure he is losing his mind. Eventually, he calms down and offers Griffin clothing and food. Kemp wants an explanation for Griffin’s invisibility. The Invisible Man says he cannot explain due to pain, fatigue, and lack of sleep. Kemp offers his room for the night.

Before the Invisible Man will allow himself to sleep, Kemp must assure him that he will not report his location. Kemp doesn’t understand his concern, but he assures the Invisible Man that he will not alert anyone. As the Invisible Man sleeps, Kemp looks through his old newspapers and reads the stories he previously ignored. He now knows that “he’s not only invisible [...] but he’s mad! Homicidal!” (79). Kemp must act. He begins a letter to Colonel Adye but is interrupted by the sound of the Invisible Man waking up in a rage.

Hearing Griffin’s sounds, Kemp goes upstairs to investigate. They discuss Griffin’s path to invisibility: Six years ago he was studying “optical density” (82) when he realized that nearly anything can be made transparent, and “a transparent thing becomes invisible if it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index” (83). The Invisible Man and Kemp discuss jellyfish and other translucent sea creatures as examples. When he realized he had all the knowledge required to turn himself invisible (knowledge contained in the books he has been carrying until Marvel hid them), Griffin resolved to get the funds for his experiments. So, he robbed his father. The money, however, was not really his father’s—and his father shot himself.

The Invisible Man recounts his father’s funeral, which interrupted his work: Any grief paled in the face of his obsessive experimentation. In a rented room in London, he first turned a piece of white cloth invisible. Next, he experimented on a white cat. The cat didn’t vanish, except for the eyes, but it made terrible yowling sounds which concerned the neighbors and landlord. After this, he turned the experiment on himself and learned that the process is incredibly painful (which must be why the cat howled so). The pain lasted all night, until he thought he may not survive it.

In the morning, he was fully invisible. His landlord and some concerned people came to his room, asking what all the noise had been. They broke down his door, and from his invisible perch on the windowsill he watched them search his room. He decided it was too dangerous to leave his instruments set up, so he set about dismantling them, confounding the onlookers. Then, he decided that the safest bet was simply to set the entire house on fire.

Kemp listens to the story, horrified by both the cat’s fate as well as the arson.