The Map of Time (51 page)

For a split second, you became weightless, released from your own body that felt more than ever like an unnecessary shell, a focus for pain and futile distractions, and you had the impression of being a creature of the air. But a moment later the weight of your body returned, like an anchor securing you to the world, and although you were relieved to feel solid again, it also left you with a vague sense of nostalgia for the fleeting experience of being out of your body. You found yourself once more trapped inside the organic casing that contained you while blinkering your vision of the universe.

A sudden surge of vomit filled your throat, and you released it with violent retching. When your stomach stopped heaving, you dared look up, unsure if Marcus’s henchman had already fired or was relishing drawing out the moment.

But there was no weapon aimed at you. In fact, there was no one around you, no trace of Marcus, or his henchmen, or Stoker, or James. You were alone in the darkened hallway, for even the candelabra had disappeared. It was as if you had dreamed the whole thing. But how could such a thing have happened? I’ll tell you, Bertie: simply because you were no longer you. You had become me.

So now, if you have no objection, I shall carry on narrating events in the first person. To begin with, I did not understand what had happened. I waited for a few moments in the by now pitch-black hallway, trembling with fear and alert to the slightest sound, but all around me was silence. The house was apparently empty. Presently, as nothing happened, I ventured out into the street, which was equally deserted. I was utterly confused, although one thing was clear: the sensations I had experienced were too real to have been a dream.

What had happened to me? Then I had an intuition. With trepidation, I plucked a discarded newspaper out of a refuse bin and after verifying the date with amazement, realized my suspicions were true: the unpleasant effects I had felt were none other than those of spontaneous time travel.

Incredible though it may seem, I had traveled eight years back in time to November 7, 1888! I stood in the middle of the square for a few moments, stunned, trying to take in what had happened, but I did not have much time, for it suddenly remembered why that date seemed so familiar: it was the day Jack the Ripper had murdered young Harrington’s beloved in Whitechapel and was subsequently captured by the Vigilance Committee who had gone to Miller’s court after being alerted by a time traveler who … was it me? I wasn’t sure, but there seemed to be every indication it was. Who else could have known what was going to happen that night? I glanced at my watch.

In less than half, an hour the Ripper would commit his crime. I had to hurry. I ran in search of a cab, and when at last I found one I told the driver to take me to Whitechapel as fast as he could. As we crossed London towards the East End, I could not help wondering whether it was me who had changed history, who had made the whole universe abandon the path it was on, and take this unexpected detour represented by the blue string, moving further and further away from the white cord, as Marcus had explained to us; and if so, had I done so by my own free will or simply because it was preordained, because it was something I had already done? As you will imagine, I arrived in Whitechapel in a state of extreme agitation, and once there I did not know what to do: naturally, I had no intention of going to Dorset Street alone to confront the bloodthirsty monster; my altruism had its limits. I burst into a busy tavern crying out that I had seen Jack the Ripper at the Miller’s Court flats. It was the first thing that came into my head, but I suspect whatever I had done would have been the right thing to do. This was confirmed to me when a stocky fellow with a shock of blond hair named George Lusk sprang out from among the throng of customers gathered round me, and, twisting my arm behind my back and pressing my face against the bar, said he would go and take a look, but that if I was lying I would live to regret it. After this display of strength, he released me, gathered his men together, and headed towards Dorset Street in no particular haste. I went as far as the door, rubbing my arm and cursing the brute who was about to take all the credit. Then amongst the crowd out in the street, I glimpsed young Harrington. Pale as a ghost, he was stumbling through the crowd, a dazed expression on his face, burbling incoherently and every now and then shaking his head. I understood that he must have just discovered the disemboweled corpse of his beloved. He was the image of despair. I wanted to comfort him; I even took a few steps towards him, but I stopped when I realized I had no memory of having performed this kindly gesture in the past, and so I confined myself to watching him until he disappeared down the end of the street. My hands were tied: I had to follow the script, any improvisation on my part could have had an incalculable effect on the fabric of time.

Then I heard a familiar voice behind me, a silky voice that could belong to only one person: “Seeing is believing, Mr. Wells.” Marcus was leaning against the wall, clutching his rifle. I looked at him as though he had stepped out a dream. “This is the only place I could think of to look for you, and I was right to follow my instinct: you are the traveler who alerted the Vigilance Committee which then captured Jack the Ripper, changing everything. Who would have thought it, Mr. Wells? Although I imagine that’s not your real name. I expect the real Wells is lying dead somewhere. Still, I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the masked ball time travelers” actions have transformed the past into. And the fact is I couldn’t care less who you are, I’m going to kill you anyway.” With that, he smiled and aimed his gun very slowly at me, as though he were in no hurry to finish me off, or wanted to savor the moment.

But I was not just going to stand there and wait for him to blast me with his heat ray. I wheeled round and ran as fast as I could, zigzagging down the street, playing the role of quarry to the best of my ability in that game of cat and mouse. Almost at once, a ray of lava shot over my head, singeing my hair, and I could hear Marcus’s laughter.

Apparently, he meant to have some fun before murdering me. I continued running for my life, although as the seconds passed, this felt like an ever more ambitious endeavor. My heart was knocking against my chest, and I could sense Marcus advancing casually behind me, like a predator intent on enjoying the hunt. Luckily, the street I had run down was empty, so no innocent bystanders would suffer the deadly consequences of our game. Then another heat ray passed me on the right, shattering part of a wall; after that, I felt another one cleave the air on my left, blowing away a streetlamp in its path. At that moment, I saw a horse and cart emerge from one of the side streets, and, not wanting to stop I speeded up as fast as I could, just managing to pass in front of it. Almost at once, I heard a loud explosion of splintering wood behind me, and I realized Marcus had not hesitated to fire at the cart blocking his way. This was confirmed to me when I saw the flaming horse fly over my head and crash to the ground a few yards ahead of me. I dodged the burnt carcass as best I could, and leapt into another street, aware of a wave of destruction being unleashed behind me. Then, after turning down another side street, I caught sight of Marcus’s elongated shadow thrown onto the wall in front of me by a streetlamp. Horrified, I watched him stop and take aim, and I realized he was tired of playing with me. In less than two seconds I would be dead, I told myself.

It was then that I felt a familiar dizziness coming over me. The ground beneath my feet vanished for a moment, only to reappear a second later with a different consistency, as daylight blinded me. I stopped running and clenched my teeth to prevent myself from vomiting, blinking comically as I tried to focus. I succeeded just in time to see a huge metal machine bearing down on me. I hurled myself to one side, rolling several times on the ground. From there, I looked up and saw the fiendish machine continue down the street while some men who were apparently traveling inside shouted at me that I was drunk. But that noisy vehicle was not the only one of its kind. The whole street thronged with the machines, hurtling along like a stampede of metal bison.

I picked myself up off the ground and glanced about me, astonished but relieved to see no sign of Marcus anywhere. I grabbed a newspaper from a nearby bench to see where my new journey in time had brought me, and discovered I was in 1938. Apparently, I was becoming quite skilled at it: I had traveled forty years into the future this time.

I left Whitechapel and began wandering in a daze through that strange London. Number 50 Berkeley Square had become an antique bookshop. Everything had changed, and yet happily it still seemed familiar. I spent several hours wandering aimlessly, watching the monstrous machines crisscrossing the streets; vehicles that were neither drawn by horses nor driven by steam—whose reign, contrary to what people in your time imagined, would end up being relatively brief. No time had passed for me, and yet the world had lived through forty years. Yes, I was surrounded by hundreds of new inventions, machines testifying to man’s indefatigable imagination, despite the fact that the director of the New York patent office had called for its closure at the end of your century, because, he claimed, there was nothing left to invent.

Finally, weary of all these marvels, I sat down on a park bench and reflected about my newly discovered condition of time traveler. Was I in Marcus’s future, where there would be a Department of Time I could turn to for help? I did not think so. After all, I had only traveled forty years into the future. If I was not the only time traveler there, the others must have been as lost as I was. Then I wondered whether if I activated my mind again, I could travel back to the past, to your time, to warn you about what was going to happen.

But after several failed attempts to reproduce the same impulse that had brought me there, I gave up. I realized I was trapped in that time. But I was alive, I had escaped death, and Marcus was unlikely to come looking for me there. Should I not be happy about that? Once I had accepted this, I set about finding out what had happened to my world, but above all, what had become of Jane and all the other people I knew. I went to a library and after hours spent trawling through newspapers, I managed to form a general idea of the world I was living in. With great sorrow, I discovered not only that the world was moving stubbornly towards a world war, but that there had already been one some years earlier, a bloody conflict involving half the planet in which eight million people had died. But few lessons had been learned, and now, despite its graveyards piled with dead, the world was once more teetering on the brink. I recalled some of the clippings I had seen hanging from the map of time, and understood that nothing could prevent this second war, for it was one of those past mistakes which the people of the future had chosen to accept. I could only wait for the conflict to begin and try my best to avoid being one of the millions of corpses that would litter the world a year from then.

I also found an article that both bewildered and saddened me. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker and Henry James, who had died attempting to spend the night confronting the ghost in number 50 in Berkeley Square. That same night another equally tragic event in the world of letters had occurred: H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine, had mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again. “Had he gone time traveling? the journalist had asked ironically, unaware of how close he was to the truth.

In that article, they referred to you as the father of science fiction. I can imagine you asking what the devil that term means. A fellow named Hugo Gernsback coined it in 1926, using it on the cover of his magazine Amazing Stories, the first publication devoted entirely to fiction with a scientific slant in which many of the stories you wrote for Lewis Hind were reedited, together with those of Edgar Allan Poe, and, of course, Jules Verne, who competed with you for the title of father of the genre. As Inspector Garrett had predicted, novels that envisioned future worlds had ended up creating a genre of their own, and this was largely thanks to his discovery that Murray’s Time Travel was the biggest hoax of the nineteenth century. After that, the future went back to being a blank space no one had any claims on, and which every writer could adorn as he liked, an unknown world, an unexplored territory, like those on the old nautical maps, where it was said monsters were born.

On reading this, I realized with horror that my disappearance had sparked off a fatal chain of events: without my help, Garrett had been unable to catch Marcus and had gone ahead with his plan to visit the year 2000 and arrest Captain Shackleton, thus uncovering Gilliam’s hoax, resulting in him going to prison. My thoughts immediately turned to Jane, and I scoured hundreds of newspapers and magazines, fearing I might come across a news item reporting the death of H. G. Wells’s “widow” in a tragic cycling accident. But Jane had not died. Jane had gone on living after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. This meant Gilliam had not carried out his threat. Had he simply warned her to convince me to cooperate with him? Perhaps.

Or perhaps he simply had not had time to carry out his threat, or had wasted it searching for me in vain all over London to ask why on earth I was not trying to discover the real murderer. But despite his extensive network of thugs, he had failed to find me. Naturally, he had not thought to look in 1938. In any case, Gilliam had ended up in prison, and my wife was alive. Although she was no longer my wife.

Thanks to the articles about you, I was able to form an idea of what her life was like, what it had been like after my sudden upsetting departure. Jane had waited nearly five years in our house in Woking for me to come back, and then her hope ran out. Resigned to continuing her life without me, she had returned to live in London, where she had met and married a prestigious lawyer by the name of Douglas Evans, with whom she had a daughter they named Selma. I found a photograph of her as a charming old lady who still had the same smile I had become enamored of during our walks to Charing Cross. My first thought was to find her, but this of course was a foolish impulse. What would I say to her? My sudden reappearance after all this time would only have upset her otherwise peaceful existence. She had accepted my departure, why stir things up now? And so I did not try to find her, which is why from the moment I disappeared, I never again laid eyes on the sweet creature who must at this very moment be sleeping right above your head. Perhaps my telling you this will prompt you to wake her up with your caresses when you finish reading the letter. It is something only you can decide: far be it from me to meddle in your marriage. But of course, not looking for her was not enough. I had to leave London, not just because I was afraid of running into her or into one of my friends, who would recognize me immediately, since I had not changed, but purely for my own self-protection: it was more than likely Marcus would carry on trawling the centuries for me, searching through time for some trace of my existence.