The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  “Of course. Who hasn’t heard about one of the biggest journalistic hoaxes of the century?” Gilmore replied, intrigued.

  “Well, that man was Richard Locke, and he was my great-grandfather.”

  “Your great-grandfather?” Gilmore said, startled.

  Emma nodded.

  “Then you will also know that even after the whole thing had been proved a fraud, many people went on believing his descriptions were genuine.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, Miss Harlow; people have a desperate need to believe in something,” said Gilmore. “But surely you’re not asking me to repeat that stunt? Now we know for a fact that the Moon is uninhabited; no one would believe the contrary. Today’s telescopes—”

  “Of course no one would, Mr. Gilmore,” Emma said, cutting him short. “But many people believe there is life on Mars.”

  “On Mars?”

  “Yes, on Mars. Have you heard about the canals? Some scientists believe they prove there is intelligent life on our neighboring planet.”

  “I have read something about it, yes,” said Gilmore, visibly ill at ease. “In that case, you want me to . . . ?”

  Emma interrupted him once more, sliding across the table a volume that looked familiar to him.

  “Do you know this, Mr. Gilmore?” she asked, gesturing toward the book she had placed next to the teacups. It was a novel with a light brown cover, published by Heinemann.

  Gilmore took it gingerly in his huge hands and read aloud the title:

  “The War of the Worlds . . . H. G. Wells.”

  “A well-known English author wrote it,” Emma said. “It’s a story about Martians invading the Earth.”

  “H. G. Wells . . . ,” Gilmore said under his breath.

  “The Martians land on our planet in giant cylinders fired from Mars. The first of them appears one morning on Horsell Common, not far from London. In the crater made by the impact, the Martians build a flying machine in the shape of a stingray, in which they then advance on the nearby capital. In less than a fortnight, the Martians conquer London.” She paused, then chuckled. “I want you to reproduce that invasion.”

  Gilmore raised his eyes from the book and looked at her, openmouthed.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You heard me: I want you to make everyone believe that Martians are invading the Earth.”

  “Have you gone mad?” Gilmore exclaimed.

  “You don’t have to reproduce the whole invasion, of course,” she explained. “The first stage would suffice.”

  “The first stage? But, Miss Harlow, that’s—”

  “Impossible?”

  “That isn’t w-what I was going to say . . . ,” Gilmore stammered.

  “Just as well, Mr. Gilmore; then you will have no problem carrying it out. If you succeed in making an alien cylinder appear on Horsell Common and have a Martian emerge from it and if the following day every newspaper in the world runs a headline about an invasion by our interplanetary neighbors, then I shall agree to become your wife.”

  “A Martian invasion . . . ,” Gilmore spluttered, “you’re asking me to re-create a Martian invasion . . .”

  “Yes, that’s what I desire,” confirmed Emma. “Think of it as a tribute to my great-grandfather, who made everyone believe the Moon was inhabited by unicorns and bat men.”

  Gilmore sat back in his chair and contemplated the book for a few moments, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “If you think you aren’t up to it, Mr. Gilmore, then I suggest you accept defeat,” said Emma. “And please, stop sending me those ridiculous messages assuring me you can attain the impossible.”

  Gilmore gazed at her and laughed defiantly.

  “The Martians will come to Horsell, Miss Harlow, I can promise you that,” Gilmore said, in the solemn tone of someone declaring his love. “They will come all the way from Mars so that I can marry you.”

  “When?” she declared boldly.

  Gilmore appeared to reflect.

  “When? Mmm . . . let me see. It is May now. I could arrange to leave for England in a week’s time, and the journey would take the better part of a fortnight. After that I would need at least a couple of months to carry out your request . . . that will take us up to August. Yes, that should give me enough time . . . All right, Miss Harlow, do you think August first is a good day for the Martians to invade Earth?”

  Emma nodded, smiling. “Perfect, Mr. Gilmore. And I promise to be on Horsell Common to see it,” she said, rising to her feet and stretching out her hand. “Until then, Mr. Gilmore.”

  Surprised by her sudden departure, Gilmore leapt to his feet, hurriedly pulling the service bell before kissing her hand.

  “Until then, Miss Harlow,” he repeated.

  Emma nodded politely, then headed for the library door. As the footman escorted her once more to the main entrance, she reflected about how well the meeting had gone.

  But let us leave the endless succession of rooms and return to the little patio. For our true concern is not what Emma might be thinking at that moment, still less the footman or for that matter the maid Daisy, who was waiting in the spacious hallway for her mistress to appear. Our true concern is what was going on inside the head of Montgomery Gilmore, who was completely baffled. Having said good-bye to Miss Harlow, he was seated once more, caressing the volume she had left behind, a pensive expression on his face. He ran his plump fingers over the author’s name in embossed letters below the title and shook his head in amused disbelief at life’s strange twists and turns.

  “A Martian invasion . . . ,” he muttered. Heaving a deep sigh of resignation, he gazed tenderly at his dog and declared: “Can you believe it, Eternal?”

  The golden retriever stared back at him with what his master liked to think was equal skepticism.

  XVII

  MONTGOMERY GILMORE WENT BACK TO England two years after his death.

  His first port of call after arriving in London was a certain square in Soho, at the center of which stood a bronze effigy of the man who had gone down in the annals of History as the Master of Time. Not everyone had the privilege of contemplating his own memorial statue. Montgomery Gilmore, the man once known as Gilliam Murray, carefully compared the figure to himself, as though he were looking in a mirror. Yet the fact was that after the changes he had imposed on his own body, he bore only a vague resemblance to his own statue. He had once weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds; he’d had to lose quite a bit in order to achieve a complete transformation. However, to be on the safe side, Murray had also grown whiskers and a beard, cut his hair, and even learned to dress less ostentatiously. He was pleased with the result. He grinned, amused at the conjuring gesture his supposed double was tracing in the air with one hand, like a perfect charlatan. He also appreciated the likeness the sculptor had achieved of his faithful dog, Eternal, whom on reflection he had left behind in New York in Elmer’s care, fearing that to bring him along might ruin his disguise.

  He grimaced as a pigeon’s dropping landed on the effigy’s head. Having indulged his desire to go and see the sculpture, he had no wish to linger and witness firsthand the humiliations it would suffer before someone finally ordered its removal: the slow but steady erosion by time and the elements, the desecration and acts of vandalism, the relentless shelling by countless generations of those delightful pigeons. Yes, that indignity was enough of a taste of things to come. Murray gave the statue a complicit smile and set off slowly toward Greek Street, greeting any passersby with a friendly nod. He grinned complacently when he realized that no one recognized him, despite his being immortalized only a few blocks away. Although in truth he was not unduly worried, for given the susceptibility of the English to spiritualism, anyone recognizing him would undoubtedly take him for Gilliam Murray’s ghost, an explanation that was more easily acceptable than someone successfully staging his own death.

  When he reached Greek Street, he came to a halt in front of his former business premises, for which he
had sacrificed his life. It was a disused theater, which Murray himself had remodeled, adorning its façade with a variety of ornamentation alluding to time, such as a frieze of carved hourglasses and an entablature depicting Chronos spinning the wheel of the zodiac, a sinister expression on his face. Between the carving of the god of time and the lintel, in flamboyant sculpted pink marble letters were the words MURRAY’S TIME TRAVEL. Murray ascended the steps and gazed wistfully at the poster beside the entrance inviting passersby to visit the year 2000. Murray waited until the street was clear before taking the key from his pocket and stealing into the building. The inside reeked of the past, of neglect, of faded memories. Murray paused in the vast foyer and listened to the silence—the only sound emanating now from the legions of clocks, which two years before had disrupted the place with their incessant ticking. The sculpture that took up the central area, and symbolized the passing of time with its gigantic hourglass turned over by a pair of jointed arms, had also ground to a halt and was shrouded in cobwebs. The same dust that jammed its mechanism had settled on the levers and cogs of the display of antique timepieces along one side of the vestibule and on the casings of the innumerable clocks lining its walls. Murray walked straight past the stairs leading up to his former office and made his way to the vast warehouse, where the Cronotilus stood like a tired old beast shivering from neglect. The vehicle had been adapted for venturing into dangerous territories, which was what had happened, for the Cronotilus had traveled to the future through the fourth dimension, where Murray had met his end.

  Murray had made millions from becoming the Master of Time. And when he decided he had amassed enough of a fortune, he could think of no other way to close down Murray’s Time Travel than by staging his own death. In fact, he had had no choice; no one would have accepted him closing down his business without good reason, thus denying the public the chance to travel in time, and it was impossible for him to sell it as one might a china shop or a tavern. His demise provided a horribly simple solution, and his legacy would retain a wonderfully tragic quality. And die was precisely what Murray had done: he had invented a grisly but perfect end for himself that had shaken the whole of society, which in his honor had erected a bronze statue of him in the middle of a square. Yes, Gilliam Murray had died as only heroes do, on a grand scale, and he had taken the secret of time travel with him to his grave. And while everyone resigned themselves to being once more hopelessly trapped in the present, Murray had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, his pockets lined with money, to begin a new life in the modern city of New York, under the name Montgomery Gilmore.

  His arrival had caused a small tidal wave in the otherwise tranquil sea of stuffy New York society. He soon realized he had fled to a place no less ambiguous and elusive than the one he had just left. For even as life appeared to flow like a serene river over its immaculate surface, kept from bursting its banks by a set of archaic rules, beneath there lay a world of passion and human frailty, meticulously documented by the spokespeople of that strange realm of appearances. Murray observed all that inherent hypocrisy from the outside. The way in which at every dinner someone would bring to the table a fresh snippet of gossip, an illicit affair, or the union through marriage of two well-to-do families. Disgusted by it all, and once the novelty of his presence had worn off, Murray showed his face little in society. Indeed, he would only attend very important business lunches, and his discreet, almost monastic existence ended up protecting him from those rumormongers, who soon grew tired of rummaging for scandal in what they must have considered his tedious life, beyond all earthly temptation. Murray finally blended into the wealthy New York landscape as a mysterious misanthropic magnate who posed no threat to the delicate fabric of its traditions.

  And yet the life he led, which he was the first to consider pathetic, was not so much voluntary as inescapable. Even if he had wanted to live in a different way, it would have been impossible: the city’s plethora of shows and exhibitions bored him, and rather than help refine his mind, that flurry of aesthetic emotions simply highlighted his unfortunate awkwardness in society, as did the dinners and dances and sundry entertainments he agreed to attend. Unable to enjoy the pleasures his wealth could afford, and not knowing what to do with his life after he had achieved his main goal, which had been the creation of his time travel company, Murray the millionaire cast a sorrowful eye over his vast dominion and felt that being forced to live was a harsh punishment. What was there in life that could excite him, fascinate him, free him from the deadly solitude that assailed him, and which even the monthly parcel of books from England failed to alleviate? He seemed to derive no pleasure or comfort from life, and so the simplest thing was to accept it, to face the facts, and to do absolutely nothing. Indeed, his only important task was to preserve his wealth, which he achieved every day without the slightest effort, but also without the slightest enthusiasm, meeting with businessmen, investing in this and that, for if Murray had one good quality it was his enviable sixth sense for discovering successful investments in mining, shipping, hotels, and even the fledgling subway system. In order that his wealthy neighbors should not suspect he was a dreamer, he even collected antiques, which his representatives acquired at auction houses and junk shops throughout Europe, and with which he crammed every room in his house, much to the despair of Elmer, who had a natural antipathy toward dust traps. Yet however many ruses he invented to pull the wool over others’ eyes, the truth was that Murray’s life was tedious, unproductive, and depressing.

  And so it would have gone on, had not a freak gust of wind quite literally changed everything. Until then, Murray, like most people, thought that wind was the result of masses of air moving in the atmosphere. However, after what occurred on that certain Sunday morning, Murray fancied it was something else, something far deeper, more decisive, transcendental, perhaps the very breath of the Creator Himself. The day was so luminous that to remain indoors would have been criminal, and the whole of New York seemed resolved to savor it. Even Murray could not help leaving his shell and enjoying a walk with his dog in Central Park.

  The moment he walked through the entrance, he could see the park was teeming with people who had had the same idea as he. Many were strolling in couples or in groups, reading on benches, or enjoying improvised picnics on the grass or teaching their children how to fly kites, and as Murray walked stiffly among them, as though to an altogether different tune, unable to blend in with his happy, lively surroundings, Eternal frolicked gaily up and down, jumping around eagerly. To Murray’s surprise, just like a normal dog Eternal seemed willing to fetch anything Murray threw for him, even things he had not thrown. And so it was that after retrieving a stick and then a stone, the dog dropped a pretty red sun hat at his master’s feet. Murray looked up, searching for the owner of the elegant bonnet he was now clasping. In the distance, he made out a group of young women sitting on the grass, near an artificial lake. At that precise moment, one of them had stood up and was gesturing to him to come over. As she was the only one not wearing a hat, Murray easily deduced that a gust of wind had sent hers rolling across the grass, providing an irresistible temptation for Eternal. And now the hat was in his possession. He cursed. Because of that evil conspiracy between the wind and his dog, he would now be obliged to go over and give it back, and no doubt strike up a conversation with that woman, something that, given his limited experience of talking to ladies, filled him with dread. He walked nervously over to the unknown woman, clearing his throat and practicing a few polite phrases that would smooth the progress of the unavoidable conversation.

  Moving with deliberate slowness over the grass, accompanied by his dog, Murray began to realize that the girl who his faltering steps were bringing into focus was lovely, although he did not appreciate how much so until he was much closer. As the gap between them closed, Murray took the opportunity to study her beguiling features. Taken one by one, they were not conventionally beautiful: her nose seemed too big, her eyes too narrow, her skin a peculiar c
olor, and yet together they created an effect that left anyone who saw her speechless. And then something happened to him that he had never believed could: he fell in love. Or at any rate he experienced, one by one, all the symptoms of love at first sight, descriptions of which he had so often read in novels, causing him invariably to stop reading in irritation, convinced that something so absurd and impulsive could only take place in the exaggerated world of romantic fiction. And yet now he was feeling every symptom! His heart throbbed painfully, as though straining inside his constricted chest like a trapped animal; he felt lighter, as though he were floating across the grass; the colors around him had taken on a dazzling intensity; even the breeze seemed to rumple his hair almost with tenderness. And by the time he had closed the distance between them, Murray was certain there was no other woman in the world more exquisite than the owner of that hat, and he knew it without any need for the rest of womankind to parade before him in all their finery. He came to a halt in front of her and stood, completely spellbound, while the young lady arched her eyebrows daintily, waiting for the gigantic fellow into whose hands her hat had found its way to say something. However, Murray had forgotten that what differentiated Man from the animals was his gift of speech. At that moment, Murray was only capable of one thing: contemplating that girl with adoration.

  Whoever had fashioned her appeared to know Murray’s tastes better than he did himself. Everything that appealed to him in a woman, and everything he did not know appealed to him, converged harmoniously in the young woman before him. Her delicate bone structure was enclosed in silky skin, which instead of the customary paleness seemed to have been sprinkled with cinnamon. From her face, framed by long dark locks grazing her brow, shone two intriguing eyes, which, besides surveying her surroundings, appeared to enfold them in a pleasant glow, as if they had been exposed to the winter sun. And as a finishing touch, Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom had added a mole to the only place where it would not look like a blemish: above the corner of her top lip, as though marking it out for a kiss. Yet for Murray none of that would have had more than a purely aesthetic meaning, had he not also been captivated by the soul that brought it all to life, making her move in a delightful series of gestures.