“We have no time for that, Mr. Wells.” Clayton frowned, his limited patience wearing thin. “Can’t you hear the gunfire coming from Lambeth? I’m sure the tripods are invading London from that side, too. We must leave immediately, or else . . .”
As though to illustrate the inspector’s argument, a couple of blasts in quick succession lit up the horizon through the drawing-room window. They sounded much closer.
“I have no intention of traipsing around London in search of my aunt, gentlemen. I believe I’ve already fulfilled my duty as her niece,” Emma announced boldly. “However, if it’s all the same to you, Inspector Clayton, I’d like to go up to my rooms and change into something more comfortable. I have a riding outfit that is much better suited to fleeing Martians. I’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Go ahead, Miss Harlow,” Clayton conceded, “but I implore you to hurry.”
The girl gave Clayton a little nod and swept out of the room followed by her huge, faithful guardian.
“May I go with you, Miss Harlow?” Murray asked. “Only as far as the door, of course.”
“Oh please do,” replied the girl. “That way, if a Martian leaps unexpectedly out of my trunk, you can rush in and hurl us both out of the window.”
“I’d never do such a thing, miss. Perhaps to Wells or the inspector, but not to you.”
The millionaire’s reply scarcely reached Wells’s and the inspector’s ears, coming as it did after a series of loud creaks on the stairs. Clayton clapped Wells so hard on the back that he gave a start.
“Good! Now help me find something to write with, Mr. Wells,” the inspector ordered, pulling open drawers and rummaging around as though he were intending to steal the old woman’s jewelry. “Let’s use the time to work out the safest route from here to where we want to go. We’ll try to anticipate the path the tripods will take, even if we have to do so following the logic of Earthlings’ military advances. We’ll take the alleyways and backstreets leading away from the line of—Hells bells! Doesn’t anyone in this house use a pen? Perhaps in the library . . . Incidentally, Mr. Wells, are you familiar with this area?”
“Do I look like a cabby?” said Wells, visibly irritated, as he walked over to an elegant escritoire in a corner of the drawing room, where of course he found what he was looking for. “Here’s your ink and paper, Inspector. There’s no need to dig holes in the walls or lift up the flooring.”
“Good, there, that’s something,” Clayton replied, snatching them from Wells. He walked toward the table in the center of the room and without a second thought swept a pair of candlesticks from it with his arm. “However, since neither of us is familiar with the area, we’ll have to draw the route from memory. Let’s see, if the cathedral is here and Waterloo Bridge is over there . . .”
“Clayton,” Wells interrupted solemnly. “You don’t believe we’re going to get out of this alive, do you?”
The inspector looked at him in astonishment.
“What makes you think that? I’m sure that with a little luck . . .”
“You can’t fool me, Inspector. I saw the face you made when Murray told Miss Harlow he would take her back to New York safe and sound.”
“Don’t be mistaken, my friend.” Clayton smiled. “I wasn’t expressing disbelief at the possibility of getting out of London alive, but rather at the probability that New York is still a safe place to go.”
For a moment, Wells looked at him, demoralized.
“Do you mean to say . . . Good God . . . The Martians might be invading New York . . . and perhaps other cities, too?”
“It’s a possibility,” replied Clayton, turning his attention to the sheet of paper on the table, flattened beneath his battered prosthesis. “And as such, we ought to take it into consideration . . . No, the bridge is farther up . . .”
“But, in that case . . . ,” Wells murmured, ignoring the inspector’s lack of interest in the conversation, for he had to express this horror in words. “If the whole planet is being invaded, what is the use of fleeing?”
Clayton looked up from the sheet of paper. He gazed intently at Wells, his narrow eyes glinting.
“Staying alive for a single second is worthwhile, Mr. Wells. And each second we stay alive multiplies our chances of surviving the next one. I suggest you think of nothing else,” he said gravely, and then focused once more on his map. “Now, where’s Waterloo Bridge?”
• • •
WHILE MURRAY STOOD GUARD outside the door, Emma began changing out of her clothes. Exasperated at the difficulty of undoing all the fastenings of her dress without a maid, she took a small pair of silver scissors and simply cut the dress open, then tossed it under the bed. She slipped into her riding outfit, a Parisian ensemble consisting of a lightweight jacket, a pair of culottes, and a pale green belt. She tied her hair back in a low bun and, with the air of a delicate youth, gazed at herself in the mirror, unable to help wondering what Murray would think of her in that apparel. She was about to leave the room when something poking out of one of her trunks caught her eye.
She recognized it immediately, yet hesitated for a moment, her hand on the door, before flinging herself at the trunk and seizing the object, as if she feared it might dissolve in the air. Still kneeling on the floor, she clasped it to her for a few moments before untying the red ribbon around it and carefully unrolling it. The Map of the Sky, which her great-grandfather had drawn for his daughter Eleanor, opened out effortlessly, with a melodious crackle, like a fire in the hearth. Apparently it did not resent her having locked it away for so many years. Emma recalled the moment, seemingly ages ago, when she had decided to take it with her on her trip to London to see her aged aunt. What use could she possibly have had for it on such a voyage, the sole purpose of which was to humiliate the most insufferable of men? Yet now she was glad she had brought it with her, to be able to admire it once more, for perhaps the last time.
Spreading it out on the floor, Emma ran her hand over the familiar picture, just as she had done when she was a child. Her fingers moved fleetingly over the dark blue sky, a gigantic nebula, a cluster of stars, and several balloons filled with passengers before coming to rest at one corner of the map. There, funny little men with pointed ears and forked tails were flying through space astride a flock of orange herons, heading for the edge of the drawing, beyond which their home undoubtedly lay. Their home . . . Emma remained kneeling like that, motionless. She wanted to roll up the map, to stand up, but something forced her to remain there hovering in time. And then, very slowly, a heavy sorrow began to well up inside her. With great intakes of breath she attempted to swallow all the pain floating in the air around her, all the frustration, fear, and futility of life. When she thought she would burst from sorrow and despair, her body began shaking, and a wave of inconsolable sobs rose from her throat, carrying her far from there, tearing her away from herself.
Just then the door swung open, and a distressed Murray, poised to confront any possible horror, burst into the room.
“What the devil’s going on? Are you all right, Emma?” he demanded, pale with worry, eyes darting about the room in search of some enemy to hurl from the window.
Realizing there was no one there, Murray approached the girl, kneeling beside her and gingerly placing his great paw on her shaking back. Emma went on crying, but gradually calmed down, as though lulled by the sound of her own sobbing. Murray sat her up gently, leaning her head on his shoulder, and put a sturdy arm around her. His eyes were drawn to the map spread out before them.
“What is this, Emma?” Murray asked at last with infinite tenderness.
“It’s the Map of the Sky,” she said in a whisper. “A picture of the universe by my great-grandfather Richard Adams Locke. He gave it to my grandmother, who gave it to my mother, who gave it to me. All the women in our family have grown up believing this was what the universe looked like.”
“Is that why you were crying?” Murray asked, then added, “Well, it’s beautiful to dream.”
; Emma raised her head and peered into his eyes. Their faces were so close now that Murray could smell her tears.
“Yes, I realize that now. Isn’t it awful, Gilliam? Now . . . ,” the girl said, and Murray caught a whiff of sweet, faintly sour breath, like that of a little girl who has just woken up, a smell unknown to him and that melted his heart. “I wasn’t crying for the days when I dreamed the universe looked like that, or because in the last few hours dreaming has been obliterated from the face of the Earth forever. I was weeping over my own silly irresponsibility. Had I known dreaming would one day become impossible, I would never have stopped doing it. I would have done things differently. And now I don’t know how to recover that lost time. That’s why I was crying. For lost time, and lost dreams. Where do undreamt dreams go, Gilliam? Is there a special place for them in the universe?”
Murray noticed the girl’s eyes were not completely black, as they had looked from farther away. A few honey-colored flecks, and other finer ones, seeped from her pupils like filaments of gold floating in the unfathomable darkness of space.
“They don’t go anywhere. I think they stay inside us,” he replied. Then he gave a sigh and smiled at her gently before adding, “I saw you, Emma. I saw you as a little girl.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you. Don’t ask me how, Emma, because I couldn’t tell you. But I did,” he insisted, shrugging his shoulders. “I know it sounds crazy, but the day of our second meeting, in Central Park, just before you walked off in a huff leaving me alone in the middle of that little bridge, there was a moment when I looked into your eyes . . . and I saw you. You must have been about ten or eleven. You were wearing a yellow dress—”
“I don’t think I ever had a yellow dress.”
“And ringlets—”
“My God, Gilliam, my hair was never—”
“And you were clutching this rolled-up map to your chest,” Murray said finally, pointing to Locke’s drawing.
Emma remained silent and looked straight at the millionaire, trying to discover whether he was deceiving her. Yet she knew he was telling the truth. Gilliam had seen her. He had penetrated her eyes, entered her soul, and seen the little girl who dwelt there.
“I saw you, Emma, that was you. Inside you. Clutching your dreams,” Murray said, experiencing the same astonishment that was overwhelming her.
And then, if falling upward were possible, if gravity could stop working for a moment, stop pinning us to the floor like a paperweight, it happened to Emma. She felt she was falling upward, toward the sky. Emma slid toward Murray’s face, and such was the overpowering seriousness, the smoldering intensity of his gaze, that she imagined she was spinning into the sun and would burn up at the first touch of his lips. However, neither of them was able to test their skin’s flammability, because at that moment they heard Wells’s voice echoing down the corridor.
“Miss Harlow, Gilliam! Where the devil are you?”
“We’re in here! At the end of the corridor!” the girl’s voice rang out. She leapt to her feet, drying her tears, while Murray remained kneeling in front of her, as though waiting to be knighted. “Come on, Gilliam, get up,” Emma whispered.
Wells came in, followed by Clayton. The two men remained in the doorway, taken aback by the odd tableau before their eyes: Emma standing, dressed like a boy, her eyes red and puffy, Murray at her feet, genuflecting theatrically.
“But, what . . . did you trip over, Murray?” Clayton asked in astonishment.
“Don’t be absurd, Inspector,” the millionaire muttered, rising to his feet.
“Don’t you realize what’s happening?” Clayton said, exasperated. “Look out of the window. See those flames in the distance? The tripods are rampaging through Lambeth. We must leave at once!”
Murray gazed calmly out of the window, as though none of this concerned him. The inspector sighed.
“Well, let’s go. I’m taking you to a safe place where we can spend the night, and at dawn we shall join Mr. Wells on Primrose Hill,” he informed them sharply.
“Just a moment, Inspector! I have no intention of moving Miss Harlow from here until you tell us where we are going,” Murray protested angrily. “Is anywhere safe in London? You’re not taking us to a church, I hope. You don’t imagine God can protect us, do you?”
“I suspect God is too busy today to concern Himself with us, Mr. Murray. We are going to a place outside His jurisdiction,” he said, striding down the corridor.
Wells trotted after him, shaking his head. Murray found himself imitating the author’s gesture, and he stepped aside for Emma, who, before leaving the room, glanced over her shoulder at the Map of the Sky.
“Don’t you want to take it with you? Are you going to leave it here?” the millionaire asked her uneasily. “We could roll it up and—”
“There’s no need,” she interrupted, smiling. “I carry it inside me. You saw, remember?”
Murray nodded, closing the door quietly behind them, as though out of respect for the map lying asleep on the floor, depicting a benevolent but evidently erroneous universe.
XXIX
“IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF A SAFE PLACE?” MURRAY asked, casting a dejected glance at his surroundings. “I think you overrate your home, Clayton.”
The inspector’s house was a modest dwelling on the Euston Road. It comprised a sitting room and a study on the ground floor and several bedrooms on the upper floors, each smaller than the last, so that the house diminished in size as it ascended. Wells knew those cramped houses that lined the streets of Bloomsbury better than he would have liked, for he had lived in one as a student, and they had always struck him as perfect examples of the criminal lack of planning that was endemic throughout London. They had traveled via Blackfriars Bridge, the Victoria Embankment, Covent Garden, and Bloomsbury, and had driven down the narrowest streets, only emerging when absolutely necessary into the main thoroughfares, where an ever-thickening multitude of panic-stricken people were running hither and thither as the explosions came gradually closer. Clearly, Londoners had finally realized the city was not the impregnable fortress they had been led to believe, even though none had yet seen the tripods. As he watched them scatter in all directions, Wells reflected that those poor wretches were fleeing the terrors created by their own imaginations, encouraged by the deafening explosions. As the carriage with the ornate “G” made its way through the human tide flooding the streets, and the author scanned the crowd in the hope of glimpsing Jane, they could hear snippets of conversation confirming their fears. They heard, for example, that Queen Victoria had been assassinated, that someone had broken into Windsor Castle, brutally murdering her guard and servants, leaving not a single person alive in the building. A similar thing had happened at the London Fire Brigade’s headquarters, the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Hospital Chelsea, and others of the city’s institutions. They also heard that someone had let out all the prisoners in Pentonville and Newgate prisons. Everyone was at a loss as to how others could use the situation to commit seemingly gratuitous acts of violence, how anyone could do something so insane as to release criminals and slay ministers. The four in the carriage knew, of course. They knew these brutal attacks were not arbitrary, much less human. Creatures like the one they had come across at Scotland Yard were perpetrating them, following a plan to destabilize the city’s defenses from within that had probably been elaborated over years. In fact, the tripods were simply assault troops, the heralds of destruction, crude symbols of a campaign that also had a more calculating side.
There, in Clayton’s house, the deafening blasts of the tripods seemed to reach them from several directions at once. The noise was coming from Chelsea, Islington, and Lambeth, and even from the other side of Regent’s Park, toward Kilburn. As they had suspected, not only had the invaders from space broken through the line of defense at Richmond, they were also breaching the army’s blockade elsewhere and were at that very moment overrunning the city from different, if not all directions.
The whole of London would soon be at the mercy of the Martians, and there would be nowhere for them to hide, in any case not in Clayton’s house, which seemed to them flimsy at best. However, the inspector apparently did not share this view. He simply smiled enigmatically at the millionaire’s remark and asked them to follow him. He led them to the basement, a poorly lit, airless part of the house where the kitchen and the coal cellar were located. Still smiling, he began rooting around in the oven.
“What are you doing?” Murray asked angrily. “Are you going to offer us a cup of tea? It’s very kind of you, Clayton, but I doubt we will be able to relax sufficiently to enjoy it with the sound of those accursed tripods closing in on us—”
The millionaire was unable to finish his sentence, for at that moment Clayton pulled a lever inside the oven, and, thanks to some hidden mechanism, the kitchen wall began to move. They all looked on in astonishment as it parted like a stage curtain, revealing a space no bigger than a closet, with a trapdoor set in the floor. With a polite grin, Clayton ushered them through, and once they were all packed inside, he waited for the wall to slide back to its original position. Then he opened the trapdoor and began walking down a narrow flight of steps into the gloom below.
“Follow me,” he commanded. “And would the last one down please close the trapdoor.”
To everyone’s surprise, the stairs led to a vast stone chamber, furnished in a luxurious and exotic fashion, as though it were the refuge of a king. Clayton was already lighting the small lamps scattered about the luxurious room, while the others studied the refuge with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Shelves of books with embossed bindings lined the walls, the floor was covered in silk Persian rugs, Chinese vases stood in every corner, a set of Venetian glasses glistened in a cabinet, and armchairs and couches of varying styles had been arranged throughout the room. There was even a magnificent marble hearth, whose chimney must have climbed through the house above, or twisted through the rock, spewing out its smoke God knew where. The chamber appeared to contain everything necessary to spend a reasonable amount of time there, for next to the vast room was a tiny pantry, seemingly stocked with all manner of provisions and useful objects.
The Map of the Sky Page 39
