Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds

by Edited by Ian Edginton

  Britain had managed to reverse engineer much of the Martian technology left behind following the invasion of 1898, and that technology fueled a good deal of Britain’s exports. Martians, as advanced as they were, hadn’t invented the wheel. Nor did they invent the vacuum cleaner, but that didn’t stop British industry exploiting the technology every which way they could.

  Under his right arm, Sweet carried a Mainwaring Model 550 All-British; chrome finish. It wasn’t shaped like a regular vacuum cleaner; the cleaning head looked more like the circular tray of a carousel slide projector. From its undercarriage protruded an array of spidery mechanical legs and numerous motorised brushes, all powered by a spherical electric motor activated at the push of a button. An empty bag was attached to the top of the unit—no handle like most modern uprights. This particular vacuum cleaner could scuttle about the house autonomously; its obstruction sensors operated on a gyroscopic principle so that if the cleaner encountered an obstruction such as skirting or a door, it would simply realign and navigate elsewhere. And all the while it would gather dust and debris through the intake port into the porous bag, like an enormous soft-bodied tick feeding on a host. Not a mental image Sweet cared to share with his customers, but that was exactly what they reminded him of.

  Still no reply.

  He knocked again.

  The wide gable of the house afforded him shade but little relief from the enveloping heat of the afternoon sun. He wore a light, pale blue sport coat, pink shirt, dark blue necktie and matching pants, and a narrow brim straw hat with a blue and grey silk band. It was an expensive suit, but he kept telling himself it would be worth it, because it afforded him the air of confidence and authority he needed to close a sale.

  He looked down at his black and white saddle Oxford shoes. Around his feet there had gathered a cluster of ants, and without giving it a second thought, he scraped them with the leather underside of his shoe, smearing their dark guts across concrete. He admired their work ethic, but he had to draw a line somewhere. They had crawled out from under the pristine lawn, in the middle of which there was ant hill.

  The door opened.

  Standing in the doorway in the half light was the Widow Mann—dressed in subdued tones of bottle green and black, with the blonde voluminous curls of Victory Rolls that framed high cheekbones, ice cold eyes and thin, red lips that didn’t ask “can I help you?” or “what do you want?”

  Sweet tipped his hat, saying, “Afternoon, m’am” and “I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” and “I promise not to take up too much of your time.”

  The Widow Mann breathed in sharply.

  Sweet spoke softly and slowly. Not too slow, but fast talk was for liars. “I’m with the Mainwaring All-British Electrical Vacuum Cleaner Company, and I’d like to talk to you about—”

  “I already have a vacuum cleaner,” she said with a voice that was deep, smokey and carried the hint of an Appalachian accent. “Hoover. Very reliable. I only buy American.”

  Sweet congratulated himself with a smile, and said how he understood and that he had seen the car in the drive and figured on this being the case, and she complimented him on his observation skills at which point he realised he was losing, not closing the sale, and she began to push the door to, so Sweet said he understood, but wondered if he could trouble her for a glass of water. “Only it’s hot out here, and—”

  The Widow Mann breathed in sharply, rolling her eyes this time and stepped back and said, “come in,” and, “wipe your feet,” and with no hesitation at all he picked up the vacuum cleaner and stepped into the house.

  SOMETHING SWEET.

  Six letters long.

  The name was written on a schoolbook in his best handwriting, but he’d made a mistake and run his pencil through his first name more than enough times that the letters were completely obscured, and over the top he’d written the word “Mister”. Not because he’d been too full of his own self-importance at the age of five, but because someone needed to be the grownup, and at five years old he knew this all too well.

  It was the night before Halloween, 1938. It was a Sunday. It was somewhere between eight thirty and nine o’clock in the evening. Sweet should have been in bed already, but instead he was standing in the stairwell of an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, arguing with a girl twice his age. She had curly red hair, freckles and a name he would soon forget, about how he’d messed up his schoolbook and was very likely going to get into trouble for it.

  “Betcha can’t even spell it,” she said.

  “I can too,” he said, trying not to raise his voice.

  “You can’t spell your own name,” she sneered.

  “Yes I can,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, Mister Sweet’s got smelly feet. How do you like that, huh?”

  Sweet liked to play out on the stairwell but he preferred his own company. The door to his apartment was open. That way, if his father ever needed a beer from the cool box, Sweet would hear him calling. Just as the girl with the red hair and the unwelcome opinions was starting to round on Sweet, he heard his father call out, but it wasn’t for a beer this time. The tone of his father’s voice wasn’t of anger neither. The tone was of excitement, like the promise of something magical. “Hey, kid, come quick!”

  His father was sitting at the kitchen table and listening to the radio, hunched over it like a betting man praying for his horse to win. News had been coming in for sometime that the British Stellar Expeditionary Forces were getting their asses handed back to them on a plate, having taken the fight to the enemy in ’35. Scotland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand wanted to pull their troops out now that things were going south. But this wasn’t that, although it wasn’t entirely unrelated. “You’re never gonna believe this, kid,” his father said. According to the voices on the radio, Martians had invaded New Jersey. A cylindrical object had reportedly fallen from the sky and landed on a farm in Grover’s Mill. Martians had emerged from the cylinder and attacked the gathered crowd of onlookers with a heat-ray.

  And whilst all young Sweet could think about was the end of the world, his father was excited, like some religious fervour had taken hold, all wide-eyed and teeth. He hadn’t seen a smile on his father’s face before. “The Martians are here,” his father rejoiced, “they’ve come to America, kid, they’ve come to America!” And then he rushed over to the window, looking up at the night sky, looking for more cylindrical objects, praying, “Please, sweet Jesus, please!”

  “SOMETHING… SWEET,” THE Widow Mann said, regarding Sweet’s business card with a raised eyebrow, “something ending with D.” She’d managed to get a drop of water on it from when she’d turned the faucet too quickly, and so now the ink from the illegible first name had bloomed into a completely indecipherable mess.

  Sweet was sitting at the kitchen table of the Widow Mann’s home. A Westinghouse Air Conditioner, or “American made,” as the Widow Mann was quick to point out, kept the room nice and cool. The floor was a patterned linoleum—easy enough to clean, and decorations and furnishings were of a minimalist style.

  “Thank you ma’am,” he said as the Widow Mann handed him the glass of water, “very gracious of you.”

  “So, Mr… something… Sweet, this is Martian technology is it?” The Widow Mann sneered, looking down at the machine at Sweet’s feet.

  “Why, yes it is, ma’am,” Sweet said, “would you care for a demonstration?”

  “No, I would not,” she said, and for Sweet it was like coming back a move too late to a chess game.

  “Only, I can—”

  “It’s not made in Britain, is it?”

  Sweet smiled, awkwardly, “Ma’am, it’s—”

  “Save it,” she said, “they’re not made in Britain. They’re not even endorsed by the Mainwairing Company, are they? They’re just cheap knock-offs made in a factory in Tucson someplace for a tenth of the price.”

  Checkmate.

  “Now look here,” he said, even though that was the truth
of it.

  “No, you look here,” she said, and there was a fire and fury behind her glare, hotter than the sun, melting all the ice he’d seen in those eyes before, “my husband retired from the patent office twenty years ago,” she stabbed at the table with her finger, “and copies of blueprints of Martian technology from Britain were quite a racket, back then. I think the Feds will probably be very interested in you, Mister Something Sweet. They’ll went to know just how you managed to get your hands on those blueprints.”

  He sat back in his seat, defeated and deflated.

  “They’re made in an American factory, Mrs Mann,” he said hopelessly, holding the glass up to his lips and peering over the rim, “so, technically speaking, American made.”

  The Widow Mann snatched the glass of water out of his hand.

  “You’ve had your fill of my generosity, Mister Whatever-the-hell-your-name-is. This is why I buy American. Now, get the hell out of my house before I call the god damn cops.”

  SOMETHING SWEET.

  Two syllables.

  When his father was drunk and mad as hell, he’d yell out Sweet’s full name, but he was so drunk it often came out in a slur and the ‘something’ beginning with the letter L, was possibly the worst word his father could attempt to say after an entire bottle of whisky for breakfast, but the Sweet part he’d sneer out with such venom, his lips curled back and teeth bared like a vicious dog.

  “Sweet.”

  The Martians hadn’t come to America in 1938 and it might as well have been entirely young Sweet’s fault. There had been nationwide hysteria—thousands of New Yorkers had fled from their homes in panic, there had been riots on the streets, there had been suicides, but the whole damn thing had been a hoax, and by the next morning, some 23-year-old man had his name all over the front pages of the newspapers. His name was Orson Welles.

  And that rare excitement Sweet had seen in his father’s eyes went out like a light, and Sweet’s father drifted back into the catatonic state he had been in since Sweet’s mother had left them both, since Sweet’s father had stopped calling him ‘son’ and started calling him ‘kid’. From that day forth he would often find his father by the window looking up at the sky, day or night, listening to the radio, waiting.

  Hoping.

  Eventually the radio broke. It was a miracle it hadn’t set fire to the apartment.

  “Did you touch it?”

  “No, Pa. I didn’t touch it. It’s never been switched off.”

  “Then why’s it broke?” he said, raising his hand. And Sweet flinched. He was used to his father raising his voice all right, but raising his hand was another matter altogether. Sweet’s father glared at the boy, must have seen the fear in his eyes as he said, “I ain’t lyin’ to you, Papa” and that must have been enough to stay his hand.

  Sweet’s father wasn’t much good at anything, least of all radio repairs. With the radio broken, his father’s attention shifted to Sweet, and not in a good way. They didn’t have the money to replace the radio, so Sweet decided to fix it himself despite his father telling him, “don’t even bother” and “you’ll never make it work.” He borrowed a book on electronics from the building super, Mister Lewendowski, and used rubber cement to repair the speakers, thread for the tuning dial cord, and just about anything and everything he could get his hands on to keep that thing running.

  The first time Sweet tried to switch the radio back on, the dial cord broke.

  “Told you so,” his father said. “I don’t know why you bother.”

  So Sweet used heavy duty string instead of thread and a dab of wax to stop the ends from fraying.

  And it worked.

  “Sometimes you just need something big to shake things up a little,” his father said the day the radio came back on. But there was no news of any Stateside invasion. The Martians still hadn’t come to America, and Sweet’s father slipped back into a coma of self pity, like it was up to the rest of the world to pull him back out. “Might as well roll over and die.”

  Sweet loved his father, but he grew to hate the man his father had become. Sweet wanted to make something of himself, not wait and waste away. It was a cruel world, but you had to make your own luck in it.

  Over the years, Sweet would hear all about ‘the war to end all wars’ being fought on another planet, about how the British had tried using dirty bombs, but the Martians had become immune to anything the British could throw at them. They even managed to turn the moon into a giant cannon, firing rocks at Britain; the impact sending waves across the Atlantic, turned the tide on the Hudson, but it didn’t send Martians. Eventually a Commonwealth space fleet, sent to evacuate troops, arrived and managed to bring the war to an end.

  After over a decade of stalemated conflict, not just in space but at home in the tiny Brooklyn apartment, Sweet bought a bus ticket and headed ‘any-place-but-here’, ignoring his father’s warnings of “you’ll never make anything of yourself.”

  He wound up in Boulder, Colorado, by chance not by choice, bussing tables, working car pools—you name it. This was Sweet, busy trying to make his own luck, but he never seemed to be able to catch a break. He would see the newsreels and the headlines and learn all about how the Martians weren’t really Martians. They originally came from a planet between Mars and Jupiter that had been destroyed and became the asteroid belt. They had left the ruins of their world and invaded and conquered Mars, just as Sweet had left the ruins of his and headed West. Sweet was working as a fry cook at a diner outside Boulder when the news broke about a flotilla of Venusians arriving on Earth, having managed to escape their conquered home world, but again, not even Venusians seemed to want to come to America.

  “SOMETHING SWEET,” HE hissed in indignation through gritted teeth as he slammed the door to his Studebaker shut and threw the vacuum cleaner into the backseat alongside a dozen other tick-like brothers and sisters. If it don’t look professional, they won’t take you for a professional, he thought, rueing the day he’d accepted the discount over quality.

  As he turned to start the car, there was a sharp shock in his right calf. He slammed his foot forward, yelling, “son of a bitch!”, trying to straighten up in his seat but there wasn’t room. He kicked the door open and spilled out onto the pavement in a frantic panic, landing on his shoulder. Hundreds of ants had clustered around him. Sweet got up and stamped his foot repeatedly till the ant fell from his trouser leg and onto the sidewalk. He brought his shoe down on it, but when he lifted his foot he could see it still crawling around. He stamped again, and again, and again, until finally he managed to squish the little thing beneath his heel.

  Looking up at the house, Sweet could see the Widow Mann looking out of the window at him. The fire was out, and the cool blue eyes had frozen over once more.

  Sweet got back in his car and slammed the door.

  Damn it.

  He looked back at the house, at the Widow Mann standing in the window, watching him. He thought she would have delighted in his discomfort, but there was nothing. Just the ice cold eyes of an ice cold heart. “American made,” he thought, now looking at the Corvette. It had a split window rear design which offered limited visibility. Okay, so the Corvette wasn’t a heap of junk manufactured in a factory in Tucson, but it sure as hell wasn’t perfect. And neither was the ant infested lawn. Everything around him was covered in a thick enough lick of paint to cover the cracks. Nothing was perfect.

  He snatched a notebook out from his inside jacket pocket, grabbed a pencil off the dash, flipped to a page of names and gouged a line through ‘Mann’ with such force it almost broke the pencil and tore the page.

  Sweet looked over at the pristine lawn and the ant hill and the writhing mass of little black bodies. The word would spread, that much he knew: he was done in this town. He ran a line through all the names in his little black book, and when he was done, he threw it into the backseat.

  Sweet started the car and drove away.

  “SOMETHING SWEET,” THE trucker dr
iver had said. “I don’t remember. He had the same name as you, anyways. Said it had been happening to him since he was a kid.”

  The ‘it’ that had been happening had been a series of alien abductions, and the ‘something Sweet’ could have been a distant relative.

  “There’s probably hundreds of Sweets living in America,” said Sweet, “if not thousands.”

  “Probably, I guess,” said the truck driver, “but you kinda look like him.”

  Sweet was still working in a diner outside Boulder a year before his turn as a vacuum cleaner salesman. The truck driver had come in with the breakfast crowd early one Wednesday morning in May, 1965.

  “I kinda look like him?” said Sweet.

  “Yeah, sure. Only not like you could be brothers. He’s a lot older. More like a father/son resemblance, you know?” With those words Sweet felt a shudder. “Only he has real long hair and a big beard.” The relief almost overwhelmed him, and Sweet put the name and the resemblance down to simple coincidence. There were thousands of Sweets living in America after all.

  “Says he was stolen from his bed in the dead of night.”

  “He was kidnapped?”

  “Something like that,” said the truck driver, and “he’s from Brooklyn,” and “raised a son, so I figured you might be him,” all of which was beginning to sound like a good deal more than coincidence.

  When the news broke that the solar system had once been inhabited by numerous different species, before so-called ‘Martians’, it fired up the public’s imagination with speculation about what other life could have been out there and whether any of it could have survived. It shouldn’t have really come as any surprise to Sweet that his father’s imagination would be no exception. His father. The man who’d stood by the window and prayed for the sky to open up and rain down Martians.