The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  I opened the end. It unscrewed easily, as though it had been made yesterday. Such craftsmanship, I thought, such care, none of that nowadays. As I tilted the torch and looked inside, time whispered around me. It flowed through the tree, leaves kissing though there was no breeze. It ruffled the grass, shifted the air around my garden, as if to gain a better view of whatever I was about to see. The world had shrugged in defeat at something it sought to hide.

  “Maybe it’s all true.” Silence was my only answer as nature withheld its secrets.

  Inside the torch was a battery. It had the appearance of granite inlaid with large buttons of quartz. It was fixed, not replaceable, bound in by thin strips of twisted steel. If this was truly that old . . .

  “It can’t be true.” But inside, I knew that I had been living my life a lie. The dead man had sought me out, spoken that mysterious name, and given me this weird and wonderful creation for a reason. I knew the story of the Castle of the Carpathians, and my own alleged common ancestry with the fictional inventor. But now, sitting holding this torch, readying myself to turn it on and see what it would reveal, I tried the name in my mouth.

  “Orfanik.”

  It sounded so familiar.

  I did not switch on the torch that evening. It rested by my bed as I tried to sleep, and in those dark hours strange dreams visited me, whether nightmares or oddities of my waking mind I could not tell. I saw flashes outside the uncurtained window, though the sky was bare of clouds. They forked across the glass again and again, and I began to believe that they were inside the room. I tried to close my eyes but still I saw them, blood-red wounds etched against my inner-eyelids.

  I remembered my father telling me these tales when I was a teenager, handing me Verne’s classic novel to read, and the weird feeling I had upon finishing it. “It’s only a story,” I said to him, and he smiled and nodded, then shook his head. “There’s always doubt,” he replied. His appearance changed to that of the dead man with his severe Slavic looks, and in my dream their faces were not dissimilar. The dead man spoke to me again, and though I could not hear the words I knew that he was angry at my doubt.

  You’re a man open to mystery, yes? a voice said from the dark. I nodded in my sleep, shook myself awake, not sure whether the owner of the voice was actually there.

  I reached for the torch to find out.

  The beam of light that sprang out shocked me. I had not expected the old torch to work. My surprise set the beam quivering across the walls, furniture and reflecting from the window, and I rested my hand on my raised knee to keep the torch steady. There was something about the beam and what it revealed, as if this old battery made old light.

  There was a spider on the wall, a huge wolf spider, its legs curled up to its body in death. I shifted the torch and sensed sudden movement in the dark, aiming it back at the spider again. Light passed across the window.

  There was someone outside. Someone with a melting face.

  I shouted and dropped the torch. It struck the floor and blinked off, leaving the bedroom in darkness. I closed my eyes for several terrifying seconds, letting them adjust to the dark again before opening them to stare at the window. I could see nothing, and somehow I reigned in my fear long enough to go and close the curtains.

  “Orfanik.” I whispered that name again, the fictional character whom my father had often claimed to be real. “Orfanik, what have you made this time?”

  I retrieved the torch and hid it beneath a pillow. Come daylight, I would see if it was still working. But not now.

  Sleep eluded me as images of the melted face combined with my memories of the dying man. They were not the same, and yet surely they were linked

  At least, my imagination was making me believe so.

  As dawn broke the darkness I was still sitting on my bed, aware of the weight of the torch lying beside me. Daylight bled some of the fear, and my conviction that I had had a supernatural experience faded away. There was an explanation for what I had seen, I was convinced of that. Orfanik has supposedly been an inventor, not a conjuror, and whatever the torch had shown me had been through science, not super-science.

  I opened the curtains quickly, jumping back as a huge spider scurried away behind them. Maybe it had just been asleep.

  As the sun poured in I mused on the speed of light. Outside there were still a few stars fighting the dawn, and I wondered whether they were even still there. I was seeing them as they had been thousands, even millions of years ago. As a child the prospect of travelling faster than light, then looking back and seeing myself, had disturbed me greatly. It knocked me from the centre of things, which is where every child believes itself to be, and it was that more than my realization of death that marked the point when I started growing up.

  And now light was playing with me again.

  I decided to return to the canal to find the dead man. Even as a corpse, he could have answers.

  The man was gone. I was not really surprised. What did surprise me was the total lack of evidence that he had ever been there. No blood soaked into the towpath, no impression in the grass, no barriers, tape or fences erected by police.

  Here was yet another mystery. This weekend seemed rich with them.

  I started walking along the towpath, the torch heavy in my pocket. I had yet to turn it on again, although the chance of it being broken seemed remote. It was old. If it had been made by Orfanik (and acceptance of my ancestry had come without my being able to identify the point at which doubt turned to belief), then it was hundreds of years old. Unlikely – hell, impossible! – but still there it was, hanging in my trousers and banging against my leg with each step.

  I saw the future in a beam of light. The dying man’s words rang inside my head, and I thought of the brief image of the face I had seen outside my bedroom window. I shook my head. Light glinted from the surface of the canal and blinded me for a few seconds, and when I looked at the woods the world had changed. Of course it had. It changes every instant.

  I took out the torch, bent down and found a snail crawling along a twig.

  I turned on the torch. The circle of yellow light was weak in the daylight, but it was still there. I lifted and lowered it, pleased that the light behaved as it should. Then I moved it over the snail.

  Instantly the snail’s body vanished leaving a hollowed, brittle shell behind. It was holed, probably by a bird.

  I shifted the torch away and the live snail was still making its way along the twig. Back again, empty shell. Away, live snail.

  I was seeing two times. The only question was, just how far apart were they? I could turn off the torch and wait to see when the snail would meet its end . . . but it may be days or months from now.

  Amazed though I was, understanding still seemed to come easily to me. Perhaps it was the open mind handed down from my father, the belief in things we could not see, the acceptance of more things than we could ever know. Or maybe it was the face I had seen in my bedroom window, and the familiarity in its eyes.

  I stood and walked away, pocketing the torch once again. Surely it must have its uses. I simply had to figure out what they were.

  Back home in my sitting room, I sat in the leather rocker and looked around. All about me were hints to my heritage, yet I had never taken them seriously. A few trinkets my father had bequeathed me; a pocket watch from the last century that ran backward, a voodoo doll supposedly from Haiti, a crystal ball that could fly, or so it was said. Some of the pictures hanging on the walls showed scenes of technological genius from the past; the Wright Brothers on their first flight, Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon. The book-lined walls contained at least a hundred volumes on popular science, and many more on sciences not so well known. I was surrounded by the wonders of discovery and the vicarious pleasures in confounding expectations.

  The torch showed time, and the man had wanted me to have it. He must have been a relative, perhaps a distant cousin from Eastern Europe, descended from Orfanik or some distant bra
nch of my wild family tree.

  I suddenly felt the need for company. I had become very aware of my own death, and knowing that the flick of a switch may reveal it to me – however far in the future it may be – made me feel very vulnerable.

  Outside in the hallway I called Marlene. As I dialled I hoped that she would shed some light on the subject, and I found myself giggling at the literal image.

  “Marlene,” I said, “I think I’m going mad.”

  “Going?”

  “Ha ha. I mean it.” There was silence for a while, and I heard her drawing on her ever-present cigarette. She used the time to think.

  “Alex, you sound strange,” she said. “Seen a ghost?”

  “Not exactly. Well . . . are there ghosts of the future, do you think? Can the dead haunt themselves?”

  “Erm . . . .” Another pull on her cigarette. She never had been able to understand the way my mind worked, and that had driven us apart. It was hardly surprising. I barely understood it myself.

  “Honey, the last day has changed everything, and I need grounding, I need pulling back down.”

  “I’m painting for the next hour, but we could meet at Cicero’s if you like?”

  “That would be good. And Marlene . . . thanks.” Marlene and I had been separated for almost six years. I adored her.

  Being outside made me feel better. I had brought the torch with me; perhaps that was a bad idea, but behind all the threat it still felt so precious. Leaving it behind would have felt like denying the point of the journey. I could tell Marlene about it, or I could show her. And there was a small sense of smugness at her anticipated reaction.

  Cicero’s was a great little café, and Marlene and I had continued meeting there ever since our break-up. It felt like neutral ground, somewhere we could discard our gripes at the door and sit in the pleasant, informal atmosphere with a latte and a slice of peach cake. After every one of these meetings I hated going outside on my own, feeling the familiar hurt descending again as I glanced back at where Marlene sat inside, waiting for me to leave. There was something calming about Cicero’s. Nothing bad ever happened there.

  Marlene was waiting in a window seat and she waved as I walked by. I raised the torch in greeting, and her eyes tracked it as I lowered it to my side once again. She looked more worried than interested.

  The café was buzzing already, and I had to weave my way between occupied chairs to reach Marlene.

  “Hey honey,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  “Hi.” She smiled as I sat down, but I could see her gaze drawn again and again to the torch in my pocket. “That it?”

  I had not even mentioned the torch to her on the phone, and for a second her question threw me. “What?”

  “The cause of all your troubles.”

  I grabbed the coffee menu from the table and scanned the list, even though I had the same drink and cake every single time we came here together. I liked the regularity; it seemed to preserve something of our past, hold back the change.

  “You look tired,” she said, suddenly sounding truly concerned.

  “I am.”

  “Been up late? Anyone I know?”

  I snorted and shook my head.

  “You spend too much time thinking about time.”

  I glanced up at her, surprised yet again at how perceptive she could be. “What do you mean?”

  “Dwelling on the past . . . on us. Thinking about what the future may bring. You should live in the here and now. Every moment is an instant in your life that you can live without worry.”

  “So when did you become the great psychologist?”

  “I’m a painter. I philosophise, I don’t psychoanalyse.”

  “Very droll.”

  Marlene must have ordered for both of us. The waitress brought over our coffee and cake and we sat silently for a moment, sugaring, pouring cream, enjoying the familiar smells and processes.

  “So are you going to tell me what that thing is?”

  I took the torch from my pocket and laid it on the table. It looked so old set against the clean, crisp furniture of Cicero’s. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s a torch,” Marlene said. “A bit ostentatious, isn’t it?”

  “That’s how they built things two hundred years ago.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  I did not care about her disbelief. There was no need to persuade her as to the age of this thing, nor even its origins. Once I showed her what it could do, all such doubts would evaporate.

  I took a sip of my coffee, looked around at the other people in the café. Hands waved, smiles were given, a dozen stories were being told, and everyone here was unaware of their future. I could shine their fates upon them, but would they really want to know? Would anyone, given the chance, truly wish to know the moment of their death? I doubted it. But being able to know would be a terrible temptation.

  “What would you do if you knew you were going to die?” I said.

  “I do know.”

  She’d seen! She’d seen the torch!

  “Everyone dies,” Marlene continued. “Most people just don’t think about it that much. You’re not ill, are you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But with this, I could find out.”

  “I thought it was a torch.”

  I stirred my coffee unnecessarily, watching the bubbles spin on its surface. “You remember me telling you about my father’s thoughts on our family heritage? The fact that he connected us with a character in a Jules Verne book?”

  “Orfanik,” Marlene said.

  “Yes, the inventor. A mad genius. He made things that no one understood at the time, but reading the book now it’s so easy to see what he was doing. I always thought that was the book’s fall-down. It didn’t age well.”

  “But you never believed your father.”

  “Not really, no. But now . . .” I rolled the torch on the table, back and forth, trying to imagine the source of the power that lay inside.

  “You’re confusing me,” Marlene said, and she hated that. Her confusion over my thoughts and interests is what essentially ended our life together. She did not have a mind receptive to mystery.

  “What if you could see your future. What if you could see the moment you were going to die. Would you choose to see it?”

  “No.”

  “Even if you could? Even if seeing might help you prevent it?”

  “How could it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I rolled the torch. It grumbled over the table.

  “And you think this thing here can show you the future?”

  “It shows the moment of your death. Orfanik made it, for whatever strange reasons he had. It found its way to me. And now I have the power –”

  “Oh for Heaven’s sake!”

  “Marlene –”

  She snatched up the torch and flicked it on. It slipped from her hands, hit the table and dropped to the floor. And in those couple of seconds, as the beam of light span across the café, I saw two briefly illuminated images of Marlene.

  The torch hit the floor and went out.

  “No!” I stood quickly, knocking over my chair. Heads turned, but Marlene was the only person I could see, the only pair of eyes I could face looking into. Ironic, as I had just seen them melted away by fire. “Oh, no!”

  Something in my voice convinced her. Doubt was extinguished, her anger faded, her face paled, and for those few quiet seconds after the disturbance she wanted to know what I had seen. I could see it in her eyes. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image that had stuck there like a subliminal message.

  those flames that scream the cries . . .

  Marlene gasped out loud, stood and fled the café. As the door swung shut behind her I thought, I’m the one who should be running. I watched her cross the street and disappear behind a building, waiting for a car to run her down and explode at any second. None came. Her image had been of no definable age. Perhaps we
had years left yet, meeting at Cicero’s and mourning a past that had not worked out.

  Or perhaps I would never see her again.

  I snatched up the torch. I had intended following Marlene, but as I left the café I turned in the opposite direction and ran.

  What use was a tool that would let someone see their own death? Why would someone strive to invent such a device? Where would Marlene encounter the fire that would kill her? Had my seeing Marlene’s death brought it closer in any way? Had Orfanik used the torch himself? How had it left his possession and found its way through the centuries to me? Was I really related to a fictional character, or was this some cruel cosmic joke?

  Sitting in the park, the answers to these questions – and many more besides – eluded me. I ascribed each question to a garden opposite my bench, and watched as bees went from one to another, unable to provide any answers. Time would take these flowers and make them mulch, and in time perhaps my fears and questions would fade as well. But for now – this exact moment, the one instant in life that held greatest importance – all I had were more questions. Soon, I would need to find a larger flower bed.

  Guilt took me home and stood me in front of my bathroom mirror.

  I held the torch, pointed it up at my face, fingered the button.

  I looked into my eyes, seeing myself as no one else ever had.

  And like a suicide seeking only attention, I could not go through with the act. If the torch had been a . 45 I would have thrown it away then, but it was too precious to damage like that. I lowered it, continued staring into my own eyes, watching the tears form and flow.

  I stayed that way for a long time. I cried because I wished my father had known the truth, rather than the myth. The tears were also for what I had seen of Marlene. I hated the selfishness of that, the thoughtlessness, but I was already grieving for her, even though I still had no idea of when she would meet her horrible death.