The Map of Time (50 page)

It was then he noticed the woman with the fiery red hair.

40

Thin and pale, her reddish hair glow ing on her shoulders, like embers escaped from a fire, the girl looked at him with that peculiar gaze that had caught his attention a few days before, when he had noticed her among the crowd of onlookers milling around the scene of Marcus’s third crime.

“You?” exclaimed Wells, stopping in his tracks.

The girl said nothing. She simply walked over to where he was standing as silently as a cat and held something out to him. The author saw it was a letter. Puzzled, he took it from the girl’s lily-white hand. To H. G. Wells. To be delivered on the night of November 26, 1896, he read on the back. So, this girl, whoever she might be, was some sort of messenger.

“Read it, Mr. Wells,” she said, with a voice that reminded him of the sound of the early afternoon breeze rustling the net curtains. “Your future depends on it.” With that, the woman walked away towards the gate, leaving him motionless in the doorway, his face frozen in a frown.

When he managed to rouse himself, Wells turned and ran after the woman.

“Wait, Miss … ” He came to a halt halfway. The woman had disappeared: only her perfume lingered in the air. And yet Wells could not recall having heard the gate squeak. It was as though after handing him the letter, she had literally vanished without trace.

He stood stock still for a few moments, listening to the silent throb of night and breathing in the unknown woman’s perfume until finally he decided to enter the house. He made his way as quietly as possible to the sitting room, lit the little lamp, and sat down in his armchair, still startled by the appearance of the girl, whom he could have mistaken for one of Doyle’s fairies had she measured eight inches and worn a pair of dragonfly wings on her back. Who was she? He wondered. And how had she suddenly vanished? But it was foolish to waste time surmising when he would no doubt find the answer in the envelope he was holding.

He tore it open and took out the pages it contained. He shuddered when he recognized the handwriting, and, his heart in his mouth, began to read: Dear Bertie, If you are reading this letter, then I am right, and in the future time travel will be possible. I do not know who will deliver this to you, I can only assure you she will be a descendant of yours, and of mine, for as you will have guessed from the handwriting, I am you. I am a Wells from the future. From a very distant future. It is best you assimilate this before reading on. Since I am sure the fact that our handwriting is identical will not be enough to convince you, as any skilled person could have copied it, I shall try to prove to you that we are one and the same person by telling you something only you know about. Who else knows that the basket in the kitchen full of tomatoes and peppers is not just any old basket? Well, is that enough, or must I be crude and remind you that during your marriage to your cousin Isabel, you masturbated thinking about the nude sculptures at Crystal Palace? Forgive me for alluding to such an upsetting period of your life, only I am certain that, like the secret meaning the basket has for you, it is something you would never mention in any future biography, proving beyond doubt that I am not some impostor who has found out everything about you. No, I am you, Bertie. And unless you accept that, there is no point in reading on.

Now I shall tell you how you became me. The three of you will be in for a nasty surprise tomorrow when you go to give Marcus your manuscripts. Everything the traveler has told you is a lie, except that he is a great admirer of your work. That is why he will be unable to stop himself from smiling when you deliver his precious haul to him in person. Once this is done, he will give the order to one of his henchmen, who will fire at poor James. You have already seen what their weapons can do to a human body so I shall spare you the details, but it is not hard to imagine that your clothes will be sprayed with a grisly spatter of blood and entrails. Then, before either of you have a chance to react, the henchman will fire again, this time at a stunned Stoker, who will suffer the same fate as the American. After that, paralyzed with fear, you will watch as he takes aim at you, except that before he pulls the trigger, Marcus will stop him with a gentle wave of his hand. And he will do this because he respects you enough not to want to let you die without telling you why. After all, you are the author of The Time Machine, the novel that started the vogue for time travel.

At the very least he owes you an explanation, and so, before his henchman kills you, he will go to the trouble of telling you the truth, even if it is only to hear himself recount aloud how he managed to outsmart the three of you. Then he will confess to you, as he bounces round the hallway in that ridiculous way of his, that he is not a guardian of time, and that in fact, had it not been for a chance encounter, he would have known nothing of the existence of the Library of Truth or that the past was being guarded by the State.

Marcus was an eccentric millionaire, a member of that select group of people who go through life doing only what they wish to, and who had been obliged to let the Government study him when they opened the Department of Time. He had not found the experience too objectionable, despite being forced to rub elbows with people from all walks of life. It was a small price to pay for finding out the cause of his ailment (which is what he assumed it was after suffering a couple of spontaneous displacements at moments of extreme tension) and above all if he could discover the exciting possibilities it opened up. When the department was closed down, Marcus decided to hone the skills he had already learned to control remarkably well by doing some sightseeing through time. For a while, he devoted himself to traveling back into the past at random, wandering through the centuries until he grew tired of witnessing historic naval battles, witches being burnt at the stake, and fecundating the bellies of Egyptian whores and slave girls with his seed of the future. It was then it occurred to him to use his talents to take his passion for books to the limit. Marcus had a fabulous library in his house containing a fortune in sixteenth-century first editions and incunables, but suddenly his collection of books seemed to him ridiculous and utterly worthless. What good was it to him to own a first edition of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage if in the end the verses he was reading could be perused by anyone else’s eyes? It would be quite different if he possessed the only copy in the world, as if the poet had written it exclusively for him. With his newly discovered abilities this was something he could achieve quite easily.

If he traveled back in time, stole one of his favorite author’s manuscripts before he published it, and then killed the writer, he would be able to build up a unique library of works no one else knew even existed. Murdering a handful of writers in order to add a private literary archive to his library did not bother him in the slightest, for Marcus had always thought of his favorite novels as originating out of nowhere, independently of their authors, who were human beings, and like all human beings, pretty despicable. Besides, it was too late for him to start having scruples, especially since he had amassed his fortune in a way conventional morality would doubtless have deemed criminal. Happily, he no longer need judge himself by others” moral codes, for he had long ago elaborated his own morality. He had been obliged to do so to be able to get rid of his stepfather in the way that he had. Still, even though he poisoned him the moment he included Marcus’s mother in his will, this did not stop him from going to put flowers on his grave every Sunday. After all, he had him to thank for who he was. Although the vast fortune he had inherited from this brutal, uncouth man was nothing compared to the legacy from his real father: the precious gene that enabled him to travel in time, placing the past at his feet.

He began dreaming of his unique library, on whose shelves Treasure Island, The Iliad, and Frankenstein, or his three favorite novels by Melvyn Aaron Frost, would sit secretly side by side. He picked up a copy of Dracula by Frost and studied his photograph carefully. Yes, the sickly little man with eyes that oozed corruption, showing he was as riddled with vices and weaknesses as any other, and only worthy of admiration when he had a pen in his hand, would be the first of a long list of writers who would meet their end in a series of freak accidents that would help Marcus amass his phantom library.

With this in mind, he traveled to our time accompanied by two of his men, arriving a few months before Frost’s rise to fame. He needed to find him, make sure he had not delivered his manuscripts to his editor, and force him at gunpoint to hand over the only thing that differentiated him from all the other wretches who gave the world a bad name.

Then he would end Frost’s ridiculous life by staging some sort of accident. But to his surprise, he could find no trace of Melvyn Frost. No one seemed to have heard of him. It was as though he had never existed. How could he possibly have guessed that Frost was also a time traveler and would only reveal his identity once he was in possession of your works? But Marcus had no intention of leaving empty-handed. This was the writer he had chosen in order to start his literary bloodbath, and he would find him come hell or high water.

His plan was not notable for its subtlety: the only thing he could think of to force Frost out into the open was to kill three innocent bystanders and write the opening sentence of each of his three novels at the scene of each crime, lifting them from the published copies he had brought with him.

This could not fail to arouse Frost’s curiosity. As Marcus had predicted, it was not long before the passages appeared in the newspapers. But still Frost did not come forward, seemingly not taking the hint.

By turns desperate and infuriated, Marcus lay in wait day and night with his men at the scenes of the crimes, but to no avail, until a man in the crowd caught his eye. It was not Frost, and yet his presence gave Marcus a similar frisson of excitement. He had been staring like any other spectator at Mrs. Ellis’s slender corpse, which hours before he himself had propped up against the wall, and at the inspector from Scotland Yard standing next to the dead woman, a young man who appeared to be trying not to vomit, when he noticed the middle-aged man on his right. He was wearing all the typical accoutrements of the period: an elegant blue suit, a top hat, a monocle, and a pipe hanging out of his mouth, all of which revealed themselves to Marcus to be part of a deliberate disguise. Then he noticed the book the man was carrying. It was Melvyn Frost’s hitherto unpublished novel The Turn of the Screw. How could this man possess a copy of it? Clearly, he was a fellow time traveler.

Scarcely able to contain his excitement, Marcus discreetly watched as the man compared the beginning of the novel with the passage Marcus had scribbled on the wall, and then frowned, surprised to find they were identical.

When he slipped the book into his pocket and began to walk away, Marcus decided to follow him. Unawares, the stranger guided him to a deserted-looking house in Berkeley Square, which he entered after making sure no one was watching. Seconds later, Marcus and his men forced their way inside. In no time they overpowered the stranger. It took only a few blows for him to confess how he came to be in possession of a book that did not yet exist. This was when Marcus found out about the Library of Truth and everything else. He had traveled there in order to murder his favorite author and become his only reader, but had ended up discovering much more than he had bargained for.

The name of the fellow in front of him with the bloody nose and two black eyes was August Draper, the real librarian responsible for guarding the nineteenth century. He had gone there in order to repair changes made to the fabric of time when a traveler named Frost murdered the authors Bram Stoker, Henry James, and H. G. Wells and published their novels in his own name. Marcus was astonished to find that Melvyn Frost was not the real author of his favorite novels, that they were the works of the three writers his hostage had mentioned, who although in Marcus’s reality had died just as they were becoming famous, in the original universe had gone on to write many more novels. Almost as astonished as he was to learn that Jack the Ripper had never been caught. He felt an almost metaphysical revulsion when he realized he had been simply traveling between parallel universes created at will by other travelers like him, but who, unlike him, had not been content merely to fornicate with Egyptian slave girls. However, he tried to put it out of his mind and concentrate on Draper’s explanations. The stranger planned to rectify the damage, warning the three authors what was about to happen by leaving a copy of their respective novels published under the name Melvyn Frost in each of their letter boxes, together with a map showing them where they could meet him. He was about to set his plan in motion when news of Marcus’s mysterious murders began appearing in the papers, and this led him to go to the scene of one of the crimes. You can imagine what happened next: Marcus killed him in cold blood and decided to step into his shoes and pass himself off to you as the real guardian of time.

These are the facts, and if you study them carefully, certain things become clearer. For example, did it not strike you as odd that Marcus chose such an indiscreet way of contacting you: reports in the press and alerting every policeman in the city by brutally murdering three innocent people, who, by the way I doubt very much were going to die anyway in a few days” time. But what you think now is irrelevant, actually: you should have thought of it then, and you did not. You cannot imagine how much it pains me to tell you this, Bertie, but you are not as intelligent as you think you are.

Where was I? Oh yes. You will listen to Marcus’s explanation, eyes fixed on his henchman’s weapon pointing at you as your heart begins to beat faster and faster, the sweat starts to pour down your back, and you even begin to feel overcome with a strange dizziness. I imagine if you had been shot as promptly as James and Stoker were, nothing would have happened. But Marcus’s lengthy explanation had enabled you to “prepare yourself” so to speak, and when he had finished his little talk, and his henchman took a step forward and aimed at your chest, all of your built-up tension exploded, and a flood of light enveloped the world.