The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  “Yes, in fact.”

  “Are they still banging on then about the bowmen at Mons?”

  “They are.”

  “How many times have I had to tell them? I made the whole thing up. It never happened. Some incompetent typesetter stuck it in the paper in the wrong place, and ever since I’ve had entreaties from earnest ministers in every parish in the land, asking me to elaborate on the appearance of the so-called angels—which, let me say, was a word that never so much as appeared in the tale—and requesting further proofs to bolster their arguments. The Society for Psychical Research has gone so far as to undertake its own study.” He ran a hand in exasperation over the vast expanse of his pallid forehead, his lank gray hair beginning only halfway back on his skull. Although he’d lived in London for years, his speech still carried a strong flavor of his Welsh upbringing. “But the more I deny it, the more I declare it nothing more than a wild taradiddle, the more firmly people seem to believe in it.”

  “As a fellow practitioner, what was the wellspring of the piece, then?”

  “It was that,” Machen said, gesturing widely with one arm at the window. “There’s a newsstand across the street, and the paper boy for the Weekly Dispatch was bellowing about our headlong retreat toward Paris. My heart sank into my boots, as did everyone’s. The war had barely begun and already we were running for our lives from the German hordes. I wrote it, I suppose, to buck myself up.”

  “So there was no actual sighting, or reporting, involved in it?”

  “I haven’t even been to the Front.”

  “And the valiant Captain Mills, and his compatriot Foster?”

  “Purely characters. Sprung from the Olympian brow,” he said, tapping his own forehead.

  Wells nodded, and sipped the sherry—better than he’d expected it to be—from the chipped glass.

  “But what do they want from you?” Machen asked. “Did they send you to persuade me to come around in the interest of national unity? To get me to affirm that yes, every word was God’s own truth?”

  “Not exactly. But they do want me to tour the Front, and come back with heart-lifting news of some kind, something to offset the endless rolls of carnage.”

  “No easy task, that. On some nights, when the wind is right, I swear I can hear the endless thunder of the guns, all the way from France.” Machen’s weary eyes turned to the window. “And oh, how I pity the poor blokes huddling under that relentless barrage. It goes on for hours on end.”

  Soon, Wells reflected, he would be one of those blokes himself.

  “But don’t tell me you’re going to take them up on it? Risk getting your head blown off for a bit of propaganda?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re a better man than I, Wells, though that’s not saying much. If there is anything I can do to help—anything at all—you have only to ask. I may know the bowmen are a figment of my own imagination, but I at least believe in the possibility of these things. I suspect you don’t.”

  “It’s true,” Wells conceded, “that I extrapolate more from the seen than the unseen. My science background, you know.”

  “But that’s only because you’re not looking at things properly. You can’t see an atom, after all, but you know it exists.”

  “True enough, but one day we’ll have the means of doing so.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The problem is, people can’t see what’s right in front of them even now. There’s a veil that stands between us and true reality. I believe that we perceive, with our limited senses, only the slightest portion of all that surrounds us. We’re the proverbial blind men, with groping fingers, trying to feel our way around an elephant and gather some description of it. It is only by means of other avenues—introspection and meditation, ancient rites and hypnagogic states—that we can access otherwise underutilized parts of the mind—”

  Wells had heard it all before.

  “—and thereby explore the universe. Incidentally, a properly ingested substance can help immeasurably in that regard.”

  What substance? Wells wondered, casting a suspicious glance at his sherry. As the author of many groundbreaking books of scientific speculation, he had long been considered a ripe recruit for every paranormal society and occult group in Britain, ranging from the Theosophists to the Order of the Golden Dawn, to which he knew Machen—not to mention the Great Satan himself, Aleister Crowley—belonged. But he preferred to keep his own speculations firmly rooted in science, in empirical facts rather than woolly conjecture, and as a consequence he made a practice of declining their overtures.

  “You wouldn’t care to join me,” Machen said, as Wells might have expected, “for a symposium on the Eleusinian Mysteries tonight, would you?”

  “I’m afraid I must get back home on the next train.”

  “Ah, another time, then . . .”

  “But before I go, is there anything else you can tell me about the origins, or the composition, of that very original and timely story?”

  “I can only tell you that credulity, wedded to desire, cannot be denied. The world wants that story to be true, and so it shall be.”

  Without warning, a black cat leapt up onto Wells’s lap, smack on top of the portfolio.

  “That one’s Beelzebub. He loves to have the groove between his ears stroked.”

  Wells, a cat fancier himself, ran a finger back and forth, and the cat closed its eyes and purred.

  “You’ve made a friend,” Machen said.

  “It’s never wise to make an enemy of Beelzebub,” Wells replied, before gently lifting the cat onto the edge of the desk and rising from his chair. Taking his card from his wallet, he laid it down and said, “Should anything else occur to you, I’ve taken a flat in town. You may always reach me there.”

  The moment Wells stepped out of the flat, the air became slightly less fetid, but he had barely rounded the landing when a man in full Scottish garb, his face concealed beneath a hat, barged past him on his way up. Another man, a hulking brute with a square head and a thatch of dirty blond hair, followed close on his heels. Making no allowance for anyone else, he brushed Wells’s shoulder roughly enough that the portfolio of papers was dislodged and fell on the stairs, the pages scattering loose.

  “Excuse me,” Wells protested, “but are you blind?”

  The man didn’t so much as pause, his only reply a cold sneer as he continued on his way.

  The Scotsman, if that was what he was, was banging on the door above and Wells heard Machen call out, “Did you forget something, Wells?” before opening the door. “Oh, it’s you, Crowley.”

  “Who’s Wells?” the man boomed, in a voice that bore no Scots accent.

  “H. G.”

  “That’s who we just passed on the stairs?”

  Wells, scrunched down and picking up the papers, stayed silent.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll have to tell me what business such an eminence had to conduct with the likes of you,” Crowley said, his voice becoming less audible as he and his cohort entered the flat, and the door slammed shut behind them.

  Wells waited, gathering up the last of the papers and wondering precisely the same thing. What business had Aleister Crowley, the most controversial figure in all of England, the grand master of magic and devilry, come here to conduct with Machen?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Since Jane was at the back of the house, peering into the ash can, she did not hear her husband, home from London, until he poked his head out the door and said, “Reading the tea leaves?”

  “Something like that.”

  He stepped outside, still in his coat and hat.

  “How was your appointment at the War Office?” she asked, putting the lid back on the can and jamming it down hard.

  “Badgers?”

  “Must be. Or a local vagabond who’s become partial to our kitchen scraps.” She raised her eyes and looked around at the empty back lawn, herb garden, and barn. “If I knew it was a person, I’d be inclined to leave
something more substantial.”

  “Come inside,” Wells said. “It’s cold out here.”

  Once in the front parlor, and settled into their usual places, Wells started in on a very roundabout account of his day, which was Jane’s first clue that he was withholding something that he knew she would not be pleased to hear. Whenever he did not come straight to the heart of the matter, he was prevaricating.

  “But Machen’s situation must be far more dire than anyone knows,” he was saying. “I would have thought his fortunes had improved, what with the popularity of that story about Mons. In fact, I daresay—”

  “Enough about Arthur Machen,” Jane interrupted, putting down her knitting. “And Colonel Bryce. Or your old friend Winston. What is it about that meeting that you are still not telling me? Surely, they didn’t have you come to London just to congratulate you on your latest novel. It’s the War Office, after all.”

  “Yes, well, we did talk about what’s going on at the Western Front.”

  “And?”

  “They’d like me to write something about it.”

  “You’ve already written several pieces about the war. Haven’t they seen them?”

  “They have. Only in this instance, they would like me to write something more immediate, something more visceral . . . something from the Front itself.”

  Ah, so that was it. “I hope you told them that a man of your age, and one who is not, I might add, in the best of health, was a poor candidate for open warfare?”

  Wells didn’t reply, which answered her question. “H. G., you cannot do this.”

  “And why can’t I?” Now his back was up.

  “Because you are too old.”

  “I resent that.”

  “And because the best use of your talents is in writing the sort of pieces you’ve already been doing, pieces assuring the public that one day soon this terrible war will end, and that when it’s done, it will be the last of its kind. The war to end all wars, as you’ve so deftly put it. You don’t need to put your own head up, like some target in a shooting gallery, to prove the point. What was the War Office thinking?”

  “They were thinking that every man has his duty these days, and that this might be mine.”

  “Winston was behind it, wasn’t he?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  So she’d scored another direct hit. “Because Winston approaches war as if it were a game, and a game he can’t wait to play.”

  “I’m the one who wrote the books on that, Little Wars and such.”

  “And those were books for children playing with tin soldiers and tiny wooden ships and planes. Churchill is playing with real lives and real artillery and real casualties, and I won’t have you be one of them. No, and that’s an end of it.”

  Now he was fuming; she could see that. Jane seldom laid down the law—Wells could be as stubborn as a mule and as proud as a prima donna—but this was one time she saw no other course. He was forty-nine years old, he had two children (three, if you counted the illegitimate child with Amber Reeves), and the most exercise he normally got was a walk in the woods or a round of croquet on the back lawn. But she had pricked—no, pierced—his vanity, and she feared that he would go forward with the plan now at least as much out of spite as patriotism. “H. G.” she said, in a more mollifying tone, “you have supported the war effort in the best way possible. No one could ever fault you. And if you wish to put aside some of your more literary work and devote yourself to working in some capacity in Whitehall—where I am quite sure they would be delighted to have you—I would back you to the hilt. We have the flat on St. James’s Court now; you could live there during the week, and come up here on weekends, or I could come down sometimes and—”

  “I’m going to the Front,” he blurted, rising from his chair and leaving the parlor in a huff, “and that’s an end of it.”

  Undressing in her room later that night, Jane conceded that she had mishandled it. She still wasn’t sure what else she could have done, how else she could have persuaded him of the folly of this, but what she had done had backfired in spectacular fashion, and Wells had stormed up to his bedroom, where she had heard him scrounging about in the closet, no doubt to unearth his best boots and warmest woolen vests to withstand the hardships of life in the trenches.

  Pulling the nightgown down over her head, she did think of one thing that she had failed to say, one thing that she had neglected to include in her argument—and that was her overwhelming love for him, coupled with an equally overwhelming fear for his safety. For all its shortcomings—most notably his extramarital affairs, or “passades,” as he liked to call them to diminish their importance—theirs was a marriage of intellectual equals, of soul mates whose lives, for twenty years now, had been bound together by mutual respect and interests and regard. She could not imagine going on without him.

  Turning off the bedside lamp, she went to draw the curtains, but sat instead on the window seat, her knees drawn up to her chest—just as she had sat and read in her bedroom when she was a little girl. It was a dark night, the stars obscured by banks of clouds, and she could barely make out anything more than the outline of the barn and the covered well.

  It was a good life they led—far better than most people were able to enjoy, that much she freely acknowledged—but that didn’t diminish the sense of loss she felt, too. H. G. had been married to his first wife when they met, and so it had taken some time before they had embarked on their own love affair—but once they had, it had been the greatest adventure of her life. Passionate, intense, sensual. She could still remember those days (though sometimes she wished she could not), and she often wondered what had happened to all that. Gradually, it had just dissipated, his interest had waned, until one night he had taken the bull by the horns and explained that he was not constitutionally capable of remaining monogamous. He was and would always be attracted to other women, in need of their vitality and freshness, the way that they sparked his curiosity and reinvigorated his imagination. For him sex could even be a purely recreational experience, but one that he was unwilling to give up.

  “Are you saying that you want to leave me?” she had finally asked, the words barely able to escape her lips.

  And he had rushed in to make the case—as strongly as he had made the case for his own infidelities—to reassure her that she was his Gibraltar, his lodestar, his boon companion, the one woman on whose judgment he relied, on whose care he counted, and whose affection he most prized. He could no sooner imagine his life without her than he could imagine life on the moon.

  “But you did imagine life on the moon,” she had said, referring to his novel about the first men to travel there, and, catching himself, he had laughed.

  “A bad analogy,” he’d conceded, before gathering her in his arms and consoling her. “Will you be able to accommodate yourself to such an unorthodox modus vivendi? Can you allow me these trifling passades, secure in the conviction that you are the one immutable constant in my life? The only one without whom my life would surely founder on the rocks?”

  It had not been easy, but she had done so. They slept in separate bedrooms, but that did not mean she didn’t wait for those rare occasions when she heard a gentle rapping on her door . . . to which she always acquiesced. And by now, they had come to the point where he would speak openly of some of his transgressions, even going so far as to ask her advice and counsel—which, to her own astonishment, she gave. If history was her guide, she would soon be hearing more of that young Rebecca West.

  There was a squeaking from the yard, and though the tree branches betrayed no sign of wind, the wooden bucket was swinging on its chain. She cracked open the casement window, to see outside better, but if she had hoped to spot some enterprising badger or hungry vagrant, she was disappointed. Everything else remained still.

  Leaving the window ajar, she slipped into bed, piling the coverlet high around her shoulders, and fell into a troubled sleep, filled with images of lines of men
, gaunt and gloomy, in matching brown suits, with rifles tucked under their arms as if they were furled umbrellas, crowding into an underground station from which a suspiciously infernal glow emanated. Wells was among them, and she was trying to give him something important, something precious, but when she finally spotted him and waved wildly, he looked at her with no recognition. His eyes were glassy and vacant, and on his lapel there was a circular stain that she at first took for a shiny medal, before she realized it was wet like blood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  For a man of science, whose books had explored everything from space travel to bacterial warfare, Wells was inordinately averse to needles.

  “Come now,” Colonel Bryce scoffed, “the nurse’s time is valuable, and your typhoid inoculation is mandatory. Get that jacket off.”

  Wells had come by the Ministry Office to pick up the last of his official papers, in preparation for his departure for France the next day, and to receive his final instructions. It seemed he was to be stationed close to the site where Machen’s short story had been set, and would be entrusted to the protective custody of the Northumberland Fusiliers and a Captain Gerald Lillyfield.

  “We haven’t advanced from that spot?” Wells asked.

  “We have since lost that ground, and then recaptured it. Even now our grip on it is tenuous. The line has extended in a lateral direction for close to five hundred miles, from the Channel to Switzerland.”

  In other words, stalemate, Wells thought. If you insist on fighting a new war with the same old strategies and armaments, this was bound to happen. He had already written about it—about the need to concentrate on the newer weapons of war, from armored land vehicles to a system of overhead cables and poles, capable of transporting everything from rations to ammunition far more swiftly and effectively than mules and muddy roads could do—but most of his proposals fell on deaf ears. In fact, it was only Churchill who had taken up the pulley idea, and tried to promote it, “but they’re as deaf at the Admiralty as they appear to be at the army,” he’d grumbled. Churchill had also floated, unsuccessfully, Wells’s suggestion that the nation build fewer battleships, which would only be sunk by the other side’s battleships, and more airplanes, loaded down with bombs that the pilot could fling from the cockpit instead.