Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  What on earth was I to do next? The answer came unexpectedly. A light flashed suddenly across the ceiling, darting its bright beam swiftly from point to point, and with it came the sound of footsteps. Someone was moving cautiously along the landing above, and the flash came obviously from a shifting electric torch. I slipped back into the comer, every nerve taut with horrified anticipation.

  “Who’s there?” called a man’s voice loudly. “Who is it?”

  I made an attempt to answer, but no sound left my throat. The same second the steps quickened, left the upper landing, and began to come down the carpetless stairs. I saw the dark outline of a man shading his eyes with one hand from the glare of a torch he shifted to and fro in front of him. He came down slowly, cautiously, treading each board with care. A dozen steps from the bottom he stopped and turned the full light of the brilliant torch upon me where I crouched in the angle against the wall. I stood helpless in this dazzling blaze, the stream showing me up mercilessly from head to foot, the man who held it of course invisible.

  “Oh, it’s you!” came a voice of startled surprise. “So you’re back in England! That explains it . . .” as the speaker turned the light upon himself, so that I recognised, with a surprise equal to his own, but with a relief he could hardly have guessed, the face and figure of Dr. Vronski.

  I could think of nothing to say or do except what I did say and do:

  I pointed overhead. “Hush! Hush!” I cried in a stifled whisper. “He’s up there. I’ve just seen him. He tapped on the window—beckoned. He’s come back, by God . . .”

  “Who?” he asked, his voice, it seemed to me, strangely calm, his manner quiet and matter of fact, the odd composure of the man adding to my horror.

  “Mantravers,” I whispered. “I saw him at the window. He tapped. Somebody was with him. Up there on the next floor close behind you.”

  He did not even turn. He had reached my side by now. His face was close to mine, so that I saw the fierce light shining in his eyes, but there was no excitement in him. Cold and collected as a fish he seemed.

  “He is expecting you,” he said, as quietly as you please. “The other will not stay—stay here, I mean. He has led him to the point where you are needed. The point you left him at four years ago.” His eyes ran over me like a moving flame. “To him—remember if you can—it’s not even a minute.”

  I felt my body slipping down against the wall as though my legs were gone. The whole house, it seemed, was listening to our whispered words. I heard the staircase creak. The rumble of street traffic was audible outside. I caught myself thinking that I would have given my very soul to see an omnibus, a good, everyday red omnibus, a taxi cab, a policeman. What was to come next I dared not even think about. Vronski stood close beside me, our shoulders touching. His inescapable eyes ran over me in liquid fire. What would he say next? What would he ask of me?

  And then a crackling voice rang out upstairs, a voice I knew and recognised. Though a curious distance was in it, yet a distance that could not muffle, it was sharp and distinct. It called my name.

  “Come,” said Vronski calmly. “You must come up and help him. He is expecting you.”

  It came over me suddenly that the entire experience was a dream. Things in a dream happened just like this. The sense of surprise, the power of criticism, are absent. Mantravers, Vronski, myself were all figures in a dream. Tire whole business belonged to a dream. I, the dreamer, should presently wake up. Yet while this thought flashed, its opposite, appearing concurrently, flashed with it: that my consciousness, namely, had changed, and that I was beyond the emotions that pertain to normal consciousness. As consciousness changes, grows, the universe it perceives grows and changes with it . . .

  “In a sense that’s exactly true,” I heard Vronski murmur as we crossed the silent hall, and it did not occur to me as in the least odd that he should know what I was thinking. “We are in a dream-world here and now, a dream condition, a dream civilisation. We are, that is, so little conscious that what we think real is actually hardly more than a dream-state . . .” and his voice died away among the shadows.

  I heard this without an atom of surprise, without a tremor of disbelief. Philosophical talk at such a moment! And yet somehow occasioning no astonishment! Obviously, the experience was all a dream.

  “He woke up,” the voice ran on as we reached the staircase, “and consequently he disappeared. That is, he left our dream-conditions.”

  I could not quite follow that. I was suddenly stiff with terror too, thinking of the man waiting for us up that dark flight of stairs. It seemed absurd and horrible, comic and tragic, that we should be exchanging philosophical comments at such a moment.

  “He became aware of other conditions, though these are about us always, and only a change in our perceptive apparatus is needed.”

  I gave a little sharp cry unwittingly, as though the terror had crawled into my throat, and his voice fell away while he took my arm firmly, for I had stumbled over the first step as we began to mount the stair case. “Don’t be frightened, don’t feel fear, or anything negative,” he concluded, his arm preventing me falling. “Feel sympathy, curiosity, interest, even scepticism if you like. But don’t feel fear,” he repeated. “I have come to this house four times a week ever since he left us. I have sat here waiting, hoping for hours on end, without result, though once—once only—I saw de Frasne—rushing—rushing with the speed of light and through every room and passage simultaneously—rushing, I tell you, with etheric speed, etheric omnipresence—but of him, no sign, and I knew at last that only you could get him back, because you were with him when he went. You are a sign-post, if you like, the point of departure and so the point of return—of simultaneous return. Above all, therefore, feel no fear, for fear repels and blocks.”

  A cry interrupted this amazing flow. It sounded overhead again, in the dark space of the landing. It called my name, but it was fainter than before and held a curious touch of fading distance. We were halfway up the stairs. I stopped dead.

  “Answer him, answer,” urged Vronski quickly, almost passionately. “Say you’re here.” And making a great effort, I obeyed.

  “I’m here, Sydney, I’m coming to you,” my voice rose out of some kind of automatism. “Hold on!” And Vronski, hastening his step, dragged me with him. “Remember,” he whispered in my ear, “remember all he says, for he can tell marvellous things, though probably to you only.”

  We reached the landing, and Vronski flashed his torch along the corridor, flooding it with light, illuminating several doors, a whole series of doors belonging, apparently, to bedrooms, and one of these doors stood open. It was standing ajar. These details showed up with vivid clearness instantly, but it was something else I saw simultaneously that my attention fastened on with immediate horror, although horror is not the accurate word, since the amazement in me—I can only call it an explosion of amazement—was of too vast, too strange a kind to include a negative emotion such as horror. For I saw several figures, a series of them, all moving with great rapidity, moving in the three directions known to us, up, down, across, yet all moving in some incredible manner simultaneously—a figure I recognised, the figure of de Frasne. It is of course impossible to describe, it lies entirely beyond words, beyond our three-dimensional experience, which is all we have. For, in addition to this multiplication of one figure into numerous duplicates, it, or they, were moving in other places than this stretch of illuminated corridor. They moved along other passages, through other rooms on floors upstairs and downstairs, moved up and down between floors and ceilings elsewhere in the house. They were, in fact, all over the building, and in the same instant, while yet the whole series of figures, as I have said, was always one and the same, the figure of de Frasne.

  Pages of description cannot make any clearer this instant flash that overwhelmed me with complete conviction. I know what I witnessed, and I know that this certainty of positive knowledge lay in me. No surprise accompanied it, no touch of criticism,
as in a dream I accepted it merely as true and possible. There was in me, perhaps, a momentary extension of consciousness, a change of consciousness, that involved some sudden awareness of a changed, extended universe. It went as quickly as it came. I had, in any case, no instant for reflection. The figures vanished. Round the door that was standing ajar, peering at us, fingers gripping the edge, I saw the face of Sydney Mantravers. Vronski saw it too, though whether he had seen de Frasne or not I did not know, and, feeling me shrink back involuntarily, he pulled me sharply, even violently forward, so that together we took half a dozen rapid steps in the direction of the face. I saw the hand that gripped the edge of the door advance; it pushed out; an arm came next; the face, with shoulders behind it, followed; the entire figure pushed into full view. There was a blaze.

  “Hold out your hand,” Vronski whispered. “Say something. A welcome.”

  As in a nightmare, I made the effort. My own hand moved out. My voice spoke, made a sound at any rate, a hoarse whisper, half choked with terror: “Here I am, Sydney. Come on—come back to me—back to us.”

  It seemed to me my mind and senses were registering only certain things of limited kind, and that a whole world of other occurrences going on at the same time about me now passed entirely unrecognised. While aware of their existence, I could not perceive them.

  The full-length figure then drove forward at what seemed terrific speed through the now wide-open door. There was a rush, a roar too, I believe, as though a comet swept through space, and I felt my hand grasped in a clutch of ice, while a tremendous blow seemed to strike me, not in the face and chest alone and not outward only, but over my whole body, and somehow inside as well, knocking me backwards as with some gigantic energy behind it. I reeled at the shock. I lost my balance. As I fell against the wall at my back, I saw the face and figure of Mantravers come rushing at me with the speed and power as of some awful projectile. I cannot over-emphasise this impression of appalling speed and power. In the flash of a second it happened. Memory and consciousness then collapsed together simultaneously, but before the darkness swept over me, I caught the laughter of both men on the tail of broken sentences.

  “. . . too much for him, but I’m here again . . . he’s got me out . . . damned idiot to come . . . just going back into sleep once more . . . de Frasne refused . . . enjoying his boyhood too much . . .”

  The words roared past me like a clap of thunder, but the heavy thump I heard was evidently my own body as it reached the floor.

  “Hold on—for God’s sake don’t forget—grip your memory—hold on to that—tell us all you can.” I just caught in Vronski’s voice as I sank into oblivion.

  Memory, apparently, is but a clumsy, ineffective process. No man can recall accurately the details of the accident that knocked him out. People who claim to remember past lives usually have blank minds about what happened a month ago. At any rate, to remember in a calm moment what occurred in a time of violent stress seems quite impossible. The chief detail I recalled clearly of this amazing scene was that Mantravers looked exactly the same as when I had last seen him four years before, but that his face had a brilliant whiteness and that he was thin to emaciation. Against the surrounding darkness of the landing he looked radiant, he shone, he rushed at me like a stream of lightning. And hence, of course, the blaze already mentioned.

  His words, the words of Vronski too, held equally clear and definite, audible memories being perhaps more vividly impressed than visual ones. His return to our three-dimensional conditions he regarded thus as a limitation of life and an idiotic one, for it was “falling into sleep again.” The glimpse accorded me, moreover, of the conditions he had left, conditions possible to an extended consciousness, were “too much” for me, while de Frasne, being in different time, could choose his period at will, and preferred his “boyhood” years to anything to be found in our world. Yet of those few pregnant words I caught, it was the word “here” that impressed me most. My cousin said “here” as though he had never left or gone away.

  It was later that I was able to note and label other changes . . .

  If his clothing betrayed no passage of the years, there were alterations in his appearance that impressed me profoundly. These testified to something, though what this something was I leave to others cleverer than myself. He looked no older, I can swear to that. He still wore, indeed, that air of mighty resistance to the years already mentioned before he vanished, that extraordinary retention of youth, as though the usual decay had hardly touched him for a generation, as though this natural process had been arrested in his physical being. And this resistance to time, even with these four years added, was what struck me as his radiant face rushed at me in that empty house. I have thought later, if a good deal later, that in earlier experiments with Vronski, he had so outdistanced his companion, left him so far behind, that intelligible communication between the two had blocked. Myself, ignorant, untrained, sympathetic and open-minded, he could make contact with, while Vronski, stopped at a certain point, lay out of his reach . . .

  Yet, if he looked no older, he certainly did look different. Different is the word, though to analyse this difference precisely puzzles me completely. Things had passed over him, he had enjoyed, suffered, worn, while it was not, I swear, the physical envelope that had worn, and his body at sixty-four looked forty still. There lay the imprint of signatures on his soul perhaps, of vigils due to an intensity of experience ordinary humans cannot know. I say “perhaps,” for it is imagination that interprets such strange markings, and I cannot expect the report of my imagination to pass as evidence. Were I forced to find strictly truthful terms, I should say that Mantravers, during this four years’ interlude which left him physically untouched, had inwardly endured things we may hardly guess at, much less define, things possible only to an altered consciousness in altered conditions of space and time, and whether in the body or out of the body, to borrow from an expert, we need not dare to fathom, since they are not knowable to our three-dimensional faculties. Personally, I phrased it thus—that he had been out of the cage we know as life and living. He had escaped.

  The fact remains that, of outward physical signs, his face and skin alone at first betrayed him—their incalculable, sweet, fiery radiance. It was this effect of light that had struck me so vividly, even with a burst of horror, before, an instant later, I lost consciousness.

  This momentary weakness in myself I have always bitterly regretted, for it robbed me of witnessing any coherent interchange of words and action between Vronski and himself. Its duration was brief, yet long enough for several minutes to have passed, during which we all three reached the hall below. Vronski was chafing my hands. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to find a taxi,” he said clearly, as soon as he saw I was all right. “Wait here with your cousin.” He placed the hand of Mantravers in my own, and the front door closed behind him with a bang, leaving us together, sitting side by side on two wooden chairs.

  Some wholesome magic lay perhaps in that word “taxi,” for a measure of control came back to me, though of those next minutes I remember only one thing clearly: that while I searched feverishly, frantically even, for something to say, or rather to ask, a thousand questions boiling in me, Mantravers spoke himself. In the gloom of that dreary hall, lit only by a gleam through the narrow windows from the street, he turned his radiant face towards me. The blaze had dimmed, but it still shone as with an interior lamp.

  “I have been awake,” he said quietly, sadly, “but I am now falling back into sleep again. I have been elsewhere and otherwise, but time now separates things idiotically here. I’ve been out of the cage . . .”

  He said much more, his words, each like a great eagle on the wing, rushing past me, into some region where I could not follow. For understanding left me, even while something just beyond reason beckoned dangerously. With those shining eyes fixed on my own, I felt myself caught up, rapt away, ravished into something beyond experience. Only the feeblest flash of his meaning came—namel
y, that our earthly consciousness, even at its best and highest, is so limited that it is little better than a state of dream, and that his return to it was like falling into sleep. But before I could frame a single question, much less utter an intelligible comment, the front door had opened again, and I heard Vronski’s rather harsh voice calling: “The taxi’s here. Come on!”

  Mantravers was legally dead; in the eyes of authority he had no existence; he could neither be taxed, fined, nor arrested and imprisoned. He lived—went to bed, rather, and stayed there—in Dr. Vronski’s house in Westminster, and to me, ignorant, stupid, scared, but “open-minded,” was allotted by Vronski the task of watching over him. “He’ll talk to you, at least he may,” said Vronski, emphasising “you” and “may,” “if he talks at all. Not,” he added bluntly, resentfully a trifle too, “because you know anything, or will even understand what he says, but because you’re a link of sorts, a link with his dream-existence here, you see, before he left.”

  I was too uneasy to feel flattered, as I listened, but it did occur to me to ask why he, Vronski, couldn’t be that link himself. His reply only set my mind going in whirls and whorls. He couldn’t, he explained, because he, Vronski, was still in the state of sleep—what most people called life—whereas Mantravers had been “awake for a long time, for twenty-five years or more. I woke up for moments, but I never could hold it. I dropped back again into—into this,” and he waved his arms over London, as it were. “He left me more than a quarter of a century ago, a whole generation. But you,” he looked hard at me with a bitter envy in both voice and eyes, “though you don’t know it”—he hesitated a moment—“are more awake than I—for longer periods anyhow.” He turned away with a half angry shrug. “Anyhow, he may talk to you, and if he does, treasure his words like gold. I can’t get a syllable out of him.”