The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  Coming out of his daydream, he suddenly found himself looking at a young woman who was staring back at him. She was about twenty, slender and pale, with reddish hair, and the intentness of her gaze struck Wells as odd. She was wearing an ordinary dress with a cloak over it, and yet there was something strange about her, something about her expression and the way she was looking at him which he was unable to define, but which marked her out from the others.

  Instinctively, Wells started towards her. But to his astonishment, his bold gesture scared the girl, who turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd, her fiery tresses billowing in the breeze. By the time the writer had managed to make his way through the throng, she had slipped away. He peered in every direction but could see no trace of her. It was as though she had vanished into thin air.

  “Is something the matter, Mr. Wells?” The author jumped on hearing the voice of the inspector, who had come after him, no doubt intrigued by his strange behavior.

  “Did you see her, Inspector?” Wells asked, still scanning the street anxiously. “Did you see the girl?” “What girl?” the young man asked.

  “She was standing in the crowd. And there was something about her …” Garrett looked at him searchingly.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Wells?” The writer was about to respond but realized he did not know how to explain the strange impression the girl had made on him.

  “I … never mind, Inspector,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and sighing. “She was probably an ex-pupil of mine, that’s why she looked familiar …” The inspector nodded, not very convinced. He clearly thought Wells’s behavior odd. Even so, Garrett followed his advice, and the next day the two passages from both his and the unknown author’s books appeared in all the London newspapers. And if Wells’s suspicions were well founded, the information would have ruined the breakfast of one his fellow authors. Wells did not know who at that precise moment was being seized by the same panic that had been brewing inside him for the past two days, but the realization that he was not the only person the time traveler was trying to contact brought him some relief. He no longer felt alone in all this, nor was he in any hurry to learn what the traveler wanted from them. He was certain the riddle was not yet complete.

  And he was not mistaken.

  The following morning, when the cab from Scotland Yard pulled up at his door, Wells was already sitting on the porch steps dressed and breakfasted. The third corpse was that of a seamstress by the name of Chantal Ellis. The sudden change in the victim’s gender unsettled Garrett, but not Wells, who knew that the corpses were unimportant; they were simple blackboards on which the time traveler scribbled his messages. The words on the wall in Weymouth Street up against which the unfortunate Miss Ellis was propped, read as follows: The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

  “Does this one ring a bell, Mr. Wells?” asked Garrett, no hope in his voice.

  “No,” replied the author, omitting to add that the intricate prose struck him as vaguely familiar, although he was unable to identify its author.

  While Garrett barricaded himself in the London Library together with a dozen officers, intent on scouring every novel on its shelves for the one from which Shackleton, for some sinister and as yet unknown reason, was quoting, Wells made his way home, wondering how many more innocent victims would die before the traveler’s riddle was complete.

  The next day however, no carriage from Scotland Yard came to fetch him. Did that mean the time traveler had made contact with all his chosen authors? The answer was awaiting him in his letter box. There Wells found a map of London, by means of which the traveler not only indicated the meeting point, but at the same time flaunted his ability to move through the time continuum at will, as the map was dated 1666 and was the work of the Czech engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. Wells admired the exquisite chart representing a city whose countenance had been transformed: months later London had been obliterated by an inferno, which, if he remembered correctly, had started in a bakery in central London, and, fanned by the neighboring coal, timber, and alcohol warehouses, had spread rapidly, reaching St. Paul’s Cathedral and leaping over the Roman wall surged into Fleet Street.

  But what really astonished Wells was that the map showed no sign of having traveled across two centuries to reach him. Like a soldier holding his rifle aloft as he forges a river, the traveler had protected the map from the ravages of time, saving it from the stealthy caress of the years, the yellow claws of the decades and the ruinous handling of the centuries.

  Having recovered from his astonishment, Wells noticed the circle marking off Berkeley Square and next to it the number 50.

  This was undoubtedly the place the three authors must go to meet the traveler. And Wells had to admit he could not have chosen a more appropriate location, for number 50 Berkeley Square was considered the most haunted house in London.

  38

  Berkeley Square had a small park at its center. This was rather gloomy for its size but boasted some of the oldest trees in central London.

  Wells crossed it almost at a march, greeting with a perfunctory nod the languid nymph that the sculptor Alexander Munro had contributed to the relentless melancholy of the landscape, then came to a halt outside a house with the number 50 displayed on its front wall. It was a modest building that looked out of place next to others bordering the square, all of which were designed by well-known architects of the period. It looked as though no one had lived there for decades, and although the façade did not appear too dilapidated, the windows on the upper floors, as well as those downstairs, were boarded up with moldering planks to keep prying eyes from discovering the dark secrets that surely lay within. Was he wise to have come there alone? Wells wondered with an involuntary shudder. Perhaps he should have informed Inspector Garrett, for not only was he about to meet someone who apparently had few scruples when it came to killing ordinary citizens, but he had gone to the meeting with the naïve intention of catching him and handing him over to the inspector on a platter so that he would forget about going to the year 2000 once and for all.

  Wells studied the austere front of what was allegedly the most haunted house in London and wondered what all the fuss was about. Mayfair magazine had published a highly sensationalist piece about the strange events which had been going on in the house since the start of the century. Everyone who entered it had apparently either died or gone insane. For Wells, who had no interest in the spirit world, the article was no more than a lengthy inventory of gruesome gossip, rumors to which not even the printed word could lend any authority. The articles were full of servant maids who, having lost their wits, were unable to explain what they had seen, or sailors who on being attacked had leapt from the windows and been impaled on the railings below, or the inevitable sleepless neighbors who, during those periods when the house was unoccupied, claimed they could hear furniture being dragged around on the other side of the walls and glimpsed mysterious shadows behind the windows.

  This concoction of spine-tingling events had led the building to be classed as a haunted house, the home of a ruthless phantom, and thus the perfect place for young nobles of the realm to show their bravery by spending a night there. In 1840, a rake by the name of Robert Warboys, who had made a virtue of his skepticism, took up his friends” challenge to sleep the night there in exchange for a hundred guineas. Warboys locked himself in, armed with a pistol and a string attached to a bell at the entrance which he vowed he would ring if he found himself in any difficulty, although he dismissed that possibility with a scornful smirk. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed when the tinkle of the bell was heard, followed by a single shot that shattered the silence of the night. When his friends came running, they found the aristocrat lying on a
bed, stone dead, his face frozen in a grimace of horror. The bullet had lodged in the wooden skirting board, perhaps after passing through the specter’s vaporous form. Thirty years later, by which time the house had gained notoriety among the ranks of England’s haunted houses, another valiant youth by the name of Lord Lyttleton was brave enough to spend the night there. He was more fortunate, surviving the phantom’s assault by firing silver coins at it from a gun he had taken the precaution of carrying with him to bed. Lord Lyttleton claimed he even saw the evil creature fall to the ground, although during the subsequent investigation no body was found in the room, as he himself recounted with palpable unease in the well-known magazine Notes and Queries, which Wells had once read with amusement when he came across it in a bookshop. All the rumors and legends were at odds over the origin of the alleged ghost. Some claimed the place had been cursed after hundreds of children had been mercilessly tortured there.

  Others believed the phantom had been invented by neighbors to explain the bloodcurdling screams of a demented brother a previous tenant kept locked up in one of its rooms and fed through a trapdoor owing to his violent behavior. There were also those—and this was Wells’s favorite theory—who maintained the origin of the ghost was a man named Myers, who, finding it impossible to sleep after being jilted on the eve of his wedding, spent his nights desperately traipsing round the house bearing a candle. But during the past decade there had been no further reports of any disturbances in the house, from which it was not unreasonable to assume that the ghost had descended to hell again, bored perhaps by all these young bucks eager to prove their manliness. However, the ghost was the least of Wells’s concerns. He had too many earthly cares to worry about creatures from the other world.

  He glanced up and down the street, but there was not a soul in sight, and as the moon was in the last quarter, it was absolutely dark, and the night seemed to have taken on that sticky consistency so often described in Gothic novels. Since no time was specified on the map, Wells had decided to go there at eight o’clock in the evening because it was the hour mentioned in the second passage. He hoped he was right and would not be the only one to turn up to meet the time traveler. As a precaution, he had come armed, although as he did not have a gun, he had brought his carving knife instead. He had hung it on his back by a piece of string, so that if the traveler decided to frisk him he would not notice the sharp utensil. He had bid Jane farewell like the hero in a novel, with a lingering, unexpected kiss that had startled her at first, but which she had finally accepted with gentle abandon.

  Wells crossed the street without further delay, and after taking a deep breath, as though rather than enter the house he were about to plunge into the Thames, he pushed open the door, which yielded with surprising ease. He instantly discovered he was not the first to arrive. Standing in the middle of the hallway with his hands in the pockets of his immaculate suit as he admired the stairway vanishing into the gloom of the upper floor, was a plump, balding man of about fifty.

  Seeing him come in, the stranger turned to Wells and held out his hand, introducing himself as Henry James. So, this elegant fellow was James. Wells did not know him personally, for he was not in the habit of frequenting the sort of club or literary salon which were James’s preserve and where, according to what Wells had heard, this prudish man of private means sniffed out the secret passions of his fellow members in order to commit them to paper in a prose as refined as his manners.

  The difficulty in meeting him did not cause Wells to lose any sleep. Besides, after reading The Aspern Papers and The Bostonians, Wells felt almost comforted to know that James lived in a world far from his own, for, after ploughing laboriously through the two works, Wells concluded the only thing he and James had in common was that they both spent their lives tapping away on typewriters, and this was only because he was unaware that his fellow author was too fastidious to perform such a laborious mechanical task, preferring instead to dictate his work to a stenographer. If Wells recognized any merit in James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. And James must have felt the same disdain for Wells’s work as he felt for James’s world of lace handkerchiefs and indolent ladies tormented by unmentionable secrets, because his colleague could not help pulling a face when he introduced himself as H. G. Wells. A number of seconds passed by, during which the two men confined themselves to looking suspiciously at one another until James obviously decided they were about to infringe some obscure law of etiquette and hastened to break the awkward silence.

  “Apparently we have arrived at the correct time. Our host was clearly expecting us this evening,” he said, gesturing towards the various candelabra distributed around the room, which although they did not completely disperse the shadows, at least cast a circle of light in the center of the hall, where the meeting was meant to take place.

  “It would seem so,” Wells acknowledged.

  Both men began gazing up at the coffered ceiling, the only thing there was to admire in the empty hallway. But luckily this tense silence did not last long, because almost at once a creaking door announced the arrival of the third author.

  The man opening it with the timid caution of someone entering a crypt was also in his fifties. He had a shock of flaming red hair and a neatly clipped beard that accentuated his jaw. Wells recognized him at once. It was Bram Stoker, the Irishman who ran the Lyceum Theatre, although he was better known in the London clubs as the agent and lapdog of the famous actor, Henry Irving. Seeing him creep in, Wells could not help also recalling the rumors that Stoker belonged to the Golden Dawn, an occult society of which other fellow writers such as the Welsh author Arthur Machen or the poet W. B. Yeats were members.

  The three writers shook hands in the circle of light before lapsing into a deep, uneasy silence. James had retreated into his precious haughtiness, while beside him Stoker was fidgeting nervously. Wells was enjoying this awkward meeting of three individuals who apparently had little or nothing to say to one another, despite all three of them, in their own separate ways, devoting their time to the same activity: dredging up their lives on paper.

  “I’m so glad to see you’re all here, gentlemen.” The voice came from above. As one, the three writers glanced towards the staircase, down which the supposed time traveler was slowly descending, as though relishing the suppleness of his movements.

  Wells studied him with interest. He was about forty years old, of medium height and an athletic build. He had high cheek-bones, a square chin, and wore a short, clipped beard, whose purpose seemed to be to soften his angular features as much as possible. He was escorted by two slightly younger men, each with a peculiar-looking rifle slung over his shoulder. At least that is what the writers assumed they were, more from the way the men were carrying them than from their appearance, which resembled two crooked sticks made of a strange silvery material. It did not take much intelligence to realize that these were the weapons which emitted the heat ray that had killed the three victims.

  The time traveler’s ordinary appearance disappointed Wells somehow, as though because he came from the future he ought to have looked hideous, or at the very least disturbing. Had the men of the future not evolved physically, as Darwin had predicted? A few years before, Wells himself had published an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, where he envisaged the evolution of man’s appearance over the centuries: mechanical devices would finally eliminate the need for limbs; advances in chem-istry would render the digestive apparatus obsolete; ears, hair, teeth, and other superfluous adornments would suffer the same fate. Only the two truly vital organs man possessed would survive this slow pruning process: the brain and the hands, which of course would increase in size considerably. The product of such speculation would necessarily be terrifying to behold, which was why Wells felt cheated by the mundane appearance of this man from the future standing in front of him. The traveler, who to add to his frustration, was dressed like his henchmen in an elegant brown suit, came to
a halt and gazed at them in satisfied silence, a mischievous smile playing about his lips. Perhaps the faintly animal look in his intense black eyes and the grace of his gestures were the only qualities that delivered him from ordinariness. But such traits were not exclusive to the future either, for they could be found in some men in the present, which thankfully was inhabited by more athletic, charismatic specimens than those exemplified in the current gathering.

  “I imagine this place could not be more to your liking, Mr. James,” the traveler remarked, smiling sardonically at the American.

  James, a past master at the art of innuendo, smiled back at him coldly but politely.

  “I shall not deny you are correct, although if you will allow me, I shall defer my admission, for I shall only be able to give it truthfully if, by the end of this meeting, I consider the outcome a worthy enough recompense for the dreadful toll the journey from Rye has taken on my back,” he replied.

  The traveler pursed his lips for a few moments, as though uncertain if he had entirely understood James’s convoluted response.

  Wells shook his head.

  “Who are you and what do you want from us?” Stoker then asked in a quailing voice, his eyes fixed on the two henchmen, who were looming like a pair of inscrutable shadows at the edge of the lighted area.

  The traveler fixed his gaze on the Irishman and studied him with affectionate amusement.

  “You needn’t address me in that timorous voice, Mr. Stoker. I assure I only brought you here with the intention of saving your lives.” “In that case, forgive our reticence, but you will understand that murdering three innocent people in cold blood with the sole aim of drawing our attention leads us to doubt your philanthropic intentions,” retorted Wells, who was just as capable, when he wanted, of stringing together sentences as tortuous as those of James.