The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  ALSO BY ROBERT MASELLO

  FICTION

  The Night Crossing

  The Jekyll Revelation

  The Einstein Prophecy

  The Romanov Cross

  The Medusa Amulet

  Blood and Ice

  Vigil

  Bestiary

  Black Horizon

  Private Demons

  The Spirit Wood

  NONFICTION

  Robert’s Rules of Writing

  A Friend in the Business

  Writer Tells All

  The Things Your Father Never Taught You

  What Do Men Want from Women?

  Fallen Angels and Spirits of the Dark

  Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Robert Phillip Masello

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542093781

  ISBN-10: 1542093783

  Cover design by Damon Freeman

  For my brother David,

  always my most enthusiastic and supportive reader.

  Thanks, Da.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Mons, Belgium, the Western Front, August 23, 1914

  “Hold the line!” the captain shouted. “Hold the damned line!”

  But the German onslaught was simply too overwhelming, the line of British soldiers holding them off too thin. Already the trench was littered with the dead, and Captain Mills was certain that he would soon be lying among them. If this rear guard action failed, then the entire British Expeditionary Force, now in retreat, could be overrun and annihilated by the advancing horde.

  Right now that annihilation looked inevitable.

  A hand grenade, hurled by one of the advancing Huns, arced above the last tattered line of barbed wire, looking oddly like a blackbird swooping down to earth. It landed on top of one of the few remaining Vickers machine guns, blowing the gunners to smithereens. Mud and blood, flesh and bones, rained down on the soldiers still clinging to their rifles and firing as rapidly as they could.

  As Mills hunkered down to reload, the clatter of exploding shells grew deafening. When he dared raise his head again above the lip of the trench, he saw what looked like another great gray wave of soldiers, bayonets extended, marching implacably forward. My God, how many could there be? They’d been coming all morning—mown down like grass—but there were always more, and more, and more.

  He fired a shot and a man went down, instantly replaced by another stepping over the fallen body, and a dozen others behind him. They were only fifty or sixty yards off, and Mills knew that the soldiers left in his battalion could no more hold them at bay than they could turn back an ocean tide.

  Nothing but a miracle could save them now.

  Wiping the sweat from his eyes—there was so much dirt and debris in the air that Mills could barely see what he was shooting at—he prayed for just that: a miracle. There was a plaque to St. George, the patron saint of England, which had once hung on the schoolroom wall where he taught mathematics. Its motto, which he now murmured under his breath, read Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius. May St. George be a present help to the English. That was all the Latin he’d ever mastered, but he had no sooner uttered the words than a cold shudder went down his spine. He felt an icy tingling in his fingertips, and for a second, he thought he must have been shot.

  The cloud of smoke that clung to the no man’s land before him seemed to thicken, obscuring the oncoming Huns. Damn, now he wouldn’t even be able to spot the bastards before they were close enough to stick him with their bayonets.

  “Where are they?” Foster shouted from down the line. “I can’t see a bloody thing anymore!”

  And yet, the battlefield had not grown darker, but lighter. There were shapes coalescing in the fog, shapes that seemed to be somehow . . . radiant. What was going on?

  To the constant rattle of machine gun fire and blasts of artillery, another sound was added—a strange whistling noise, a whishing like wind through the rushes . . . and archaic cries of “Array! Array!” They seemed to be coming from all around.

  And then, Mills thought he saw something equally impossible.

  Archers, wearing the leather doublets and round helmets worn by the English bowmen who had won the Battle of Agincourt hundreds of years before . . . they were standing, ranks of them, in front of the fragile English lines, dispatching volley after volley of arrows at the approaching horde.

  He heard the sound of galloping hooves, and glimpsed a knight in armor riding a white horse, rallying his ghostly troops with a raised sword, before being swallowed up in the mist.

  Again, Mills wondered if he was still alive. None of this could be real. Maybe he had been shot, after all, and this was all the dream of a dying m
an.

  But his prayer to St. George kept repeating in his head. He could hear the thwang of the bowstrings, letting fly another shot. Before long the onslaught had abated and the shining archers were gradually enveloped in the fog. The Germans fell back, the battlefield saturated with their blood, and even their artillery fire let up.

  Thunderstruck, Mills lowered his rifle, resting the barrel on a sandbag, and glanced over at Foster, who had done the same, as had all the others left defending the trench.

  “Did you see that?” Foster said.

  Mills nodded, speechless, glad that someone else could attest to it.

  “Because I still don’t believe that I did,” Foster added. A butcher in civilian life, he was not one to engage in flights of fancy. “I thought we were all goners for sure.”

  So had Mills. So had every man still peering in disbelief out over the barren wasteland.

  When the glowing fog lifted, Captain Mills stood up on the firing step and raised his binoculars, but there was no sign of the golden bowmen, nor of the knight on the white horse, anywhere.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured.

  There was no reason to believe that the phantoms had ever been there at all . . . were it not for the inexplicable arrow wounds found in so many of the enemy corpses examined the next day.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Easton Glebe, Essex, England, February 1915

  Although he usually did most of his writing earlier in the day, tonight H. G. Wells was at it long past dark, his head bent low over the desk tucked away in the sitting area off his bedroom. His pen scratched quickly across the pages, in an idiosyncratic handwriting that his wife, Jane, could read—and then transcribe on her typewriter—even when no one else could. Sometimes, she even took the liberty of improving some of his hastily written prose, finding a more precise word, or recasting a bit of dialogue altogether, and though he liked to chide her for her gall, secretly he appreciated it. She was his best reader, most capable editor, and, if the occasion called for it, bluntest critic.

  So absorbed was he in his work that he must not have heard her footstep on the stairs, or the sound of the bedroom door opening. Ensconced in the warm nimbus of light from the banker’s lamp on the desk, he was startled when he heard her say, “H. G.? Don’t you think you’ve done enough for tonight?”

  “What?” he muttered, his pen still flying across the page before the words escaped him.

  “Dr. Gruber said you needed to take it easy. You’re not out of the woods quite yet.”

  “I feel fine,” he said, still not raising his head. “Gruber worries too much.” He finished a sentence, pressing the period home. “And so do you.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Right you are,” he said, shifting the completed page to the stack on his left. “And I am grateful beyond measure.” Looking up with a smile, he said, “But you may cease worrying now.”

  She was a compact woman, no nonsense about her, brown hair tidily gathered in a bun.

  “You have an early day tomorrow,” she added. “Time you got into bed.”

  She was probably right. He was feeling a cramp in his neck, and his shoulders were stiff. When he was a young man, he’d been able to write all night long if the deadline called for it, but now—at forty-nine—even writing required a stamina he could not always muster. He put the pen, one of a dozen kept at the ready, back in its brass holder, and stretched his arms out in the silk dressing gown. Perhaps he was written out for the day; better to start fresh in the morning.

  “By the way, I’ve had a telegram from the War Office, asking me to come in next week to confer about something,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. “Not the worst idea to show the colors in London now and then, anyway.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

  He knew why she was saying that. “Despite any present infirmities, I’m still nimble enough to dodge the occasional bomb,” he replied. “And it might be a good idea to make sure that one hasn’t dropped right through the roof of our place on St. James’s Court.”

  “The neighbors would have alerted us.”

  “What if it had landed on the neighbors?”

  “Don’t even joke about such things.”

  The war made Jane surly; Wells was accustomed to that. It was one of the many idiocies, as unforgivable as it was destructive, that Jane felt men, with their ungovernable urge to aggression, inflicted on the rest of the human race. Wells, a man who had long championed in his essays a socialist and utopian future, had no cause to argue with that; in fact, he quite agreed. But once the war had begun, he’d felt in his bosom an undeniable patriotic stirring. So many of his books—The War of the Worlds, The War in the Air, even The Time Machine—had focused on the violence that men do, and the ingenious ways in which they do it (why, he’d even predicted the invention of armored tanks and the scourge of poison gas), but once the Germans had invaded Belgium and France, once the reports of their atrocities had started to filter home, his mind had begun to change. And once their airships had crossed the Channel to drop their bombs and incendiary devices on the civilian populations of England, he had reverted to this more traditional stance. Now was not the moment for the pacifism he had once preached; now was the time to repel the barbarians at the gates, and in so doing, perhaps put a stop to this monstrous behavior once and for all. This cataclysm, already dubbed the Great War, with its dreadful death tolls and no immediate end in sight, might prove to be the one to end all wars forever. He had put that very sentiment in writing, and if it turned out to be true, then this war was well worth fighting.

  Maybe that was why, when he heard the bugle call off in the distance, he thought for a moment that he had imagined it. The look on Jane’s face told him otherwise. She ran to the window, and yanked the curtains back with both hands; across a sloping lawn lay a country road, and beyond that, on the other side, were cornfields lying fallow in the moonlight. The bugle was coming closer, and as Wells watched over her shoulder, he saw the Boy Scout on his bicycle pedaling past, blowing his lungs out, heading toward the village.

  “Here?” Jane murmured. They were forty-five miles from London, in the middle of nowhere, a stretch of nothing but fields and farms and ancient forest.

  Wells scanned the sky, but he could see only a sliver from this vantage point. “Come on!” he said, racing toward the door, his slippers scuffing on the carpet. At the bottom of the stairs, he kicked them off his feet, pulled on a pair of rubber boots, and with his overcoat thrown over his robe and pajamas, darted out onto the lawn.

  The moon—bright silver, dotted with its familiar craters, and as usual quite stationary—had a rival in the sky that night, a moving rival. Pewter-colored, shaped like a cucumber, and drifting just below the clouds . . . a zeppelin—called a “baby-killer” by the British public because of its indiscriminate attacks on the innocent civilians of London—whose engines could be heard thrumming.

  “What could they want to target here?” Jane said, coming to his side, clutching the collar of her own coat against the cold night wind.

  “It’s probably been blown off course.”

  There was something both malignant and magnificent about the great lumbering beast in the sky, a machine measuring as much as six hundred feet long, kept aloft by hydrogen gasbags, and carrying a crew of perhaps a dozen or more, along with a load of thermite bombs bound with tar. Although it appeared from below to be moving at a glacial pace, Wells knew that it was actually cruising at perhaps fifty miles per hour, and was well defended by gunners in glass gondolas at both ends.

  “Will it just move on?”

  One could only hope so, Wells thought, although there was something that gave him pause. Why was it flying so low? The great advantage to the German airships was that they could travel at altitudes high enough to be out of range of anti-aircraft fire from the ground, as well as attacks from British fighter planes. This one was descending even lower, its nose tilting down, and it was only then
that Wells spotted a lick of flame from its rear.

  “I think it’s been hit,” he said.

  “By what?”

  That he could not know. But some damage had been done, and now it was even more evident—the fire was spreading its livid fingers across the duralumin fuselage, like a tracery of red veins, and the thrumming of its engines became louder and more high-pitched, the cry of a wounded animal.

  “My God,” Jane said, her breath fogging the air, “it’s going to crash!”

  Though its propellers were still whirring, its rounded ribs were already showing in the spots where the outer fabric skin had been burnt away. Something fell—jumped?—from the burning shell, and was lost once it dropped below the treetops. Wells started running.

  “What are you doing?” Jane cried. “You must come back inside!”

  But he was already across the road.

  “H. G.!”

  As best he could judge, the zeppelin would crash in the open meadows surrounding Lady Warwick’s extensive property. Maybe the pilot, in one last desperate attempt to save himself and his crew, had even been trying to land there. With his open coattails flapping around his pajama bottoms, Wells picked his way across the barren earth matted with corn husks. He tried to keep one eye on the ground to keep from tripping, and the other on the airship, its metal struts popping loose as the flames coursed toward its bow. He was dimly aware of other people, here and there, racing along in the same direction, pointing at the sky and shouting to each other.

  Breaking through a copse of trees and scrambling over a low stone wall, he saw the zeppelin turn on one side and then the other, as if writhing in pain, before its nose nudged the ground . . . gently at first, but then crumpling as the rest of its massive frame plowed deeper into the earth with a great grinding noise. There was a series of explosions, like fireworks going off, and a shudder went through the entire craft; its front gun turret was squashed against the ground and the propellers threw up a last massive gout of soil, a geyser of dirt and dead grass, before stopping dead. The carcass settled on the ground, crackling with orange flames from one long end to the other.

  He heard villagers’ voices—“It’s down!” and “We got it!” and “Fetch the fire brigade before the sparks catch the trees!”—and then he was close enough that he could feel the heat. He slowed down, his breath labored by the run, and plodded toward the blaze. Impregnable as it had looked in the sky, it was now just an immense pile of twisted wreckage, reeking of chemicals and canvas and oil . . . and burning flesh. When Wells saw several of his neighbors getting too close, he warned them to stay back: “There might yet be a hydrogen pocket, or a bomb, that hasn’t exploded yet.”