The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(123)

Then his hand collided with what appeared to be three manuscripts. The first two were entitled, respectively, The Map of Time and The Map of the Sky, but it was the third that caught his attention. It was entitled The Map of Chaos, and on its cover the author had carefully traced in ink an eight-pointed star. The Executioner propped his cane against the table and seized the third manuscript, standing there in the darkness, reading with growing absorption what appeared to be a novel whose plot soon began to appear oddly familiar. He read without stopping up to the page where Mr. and Mrs. Wells, together with their dog, Newton, leapt through a wormhole in the laboratory of their deceased friend Charles Dodgson toward an unknown destination, leaving behind them the evil Gilliam Murray and his henchmen. When he reached that part, the Executioner paused. Raising his eyes, still clutching the pages, he stared into the distance. He remained so still that the darkness began to settle over him like a shroud of black butterflies, until he all but vanished. Then, pulling up the desk chair, he sat down and gathered up the remainder of the manuscript with what might have been a sigh. After all, he had to amuse himself somehow until his victim arrived.

And now allow me, dear readers, to tell you what the Executioner read in those pages, as if you yourselves were in that darkened room, reading over his shoulder—or, better still, through those very eyes that thought they had witnessed things beyond any of their victims’ wildest imaginings.

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A BLINDING LIGHT SEEMED to envelop the couple as they leapt through the hole, as though a circular ray were spinning around at breakneck speed, while a mass of contradictory sensations struck them: they felt that they were plunging headlong into a void, floating in zero gravity, and that a monstrous force was pressing down on them, flattening them until they believed they had been reduced to the ridiculous thickness of a hair . . . Then everything stopped abruptly, as if the river of time had suddenly frozen over.

Wells opened his eyes, which he had instinctively closed when he entered the tunnel, and he found himself falling down some kind of well, although he didn’t have the sensation of falling, perhaps because the walls were going up, or possibly down, so that he was falling upward. In any event, he was moving (whether he in relation to the well or the well in relation to him it didn’t matter) as the various objects rushing past him confirmed. Wells noticed several shelves lined with books (he even had time to take one out, leaf through it, and then leave it afterward on a subsequent shelf), his favorite armchair, several lamps and clocks, a sarcophagus, a gigantic deck of cards, the crown of Queen Victoria herself . . . And yet, among all that junk, he didn’t see Jane, which might have worried him had he not felt so sleepy: his eyelids kept closing and he couldn’t stop yawning. He thought perhaps he had been falling through that well for hundreds or thousands of years, but if that was so, then nothing mattered, and he might as well have a little nap while he continued his descent. But scarcely had he begun to snore when all of a sudden, thump!—down he came on something hard and cold. And he understood that this absurd, extraordinarily lengthy fall was over.

Wells kept his eyes closed, vaguely aware that he was lying on a solid surface. Resisting the desire to carry on sleeping, he tried to open his eyes, although he was afraid of confronting some nameless, or nameable, horror—or, worse still, of seeing nothing, having been blinded by the intense light at the beginning and having lost consciousness, so that everything that had happened afterward had been no more than an absurd dream woven by his unconscious. Then a couple of vigorous licks stoked his fears, forcing him to open his eyes. The horror confronting him was none other than Newton’s cold, wet nose looming over him. When he managed to push the dog aside feebly, he discovered Jane sprawled beside him on the floor, whose black and white tiles resembled a checkerboard. Wells pulled himself up, overwhelmed by an unpleasant dizziness, and shook Jane’s shoulder. After blinking a few times, she looked at him, somewhat bewildered, then flung her arms round Newton, glancing about uneasily.

“Bertie . . . Where are we?”

But her husband didn’t reply. He was staring intently at the tile beneath his right hand, and he had such a strange expression on his face that Jane felt more scared by that than anything that had happened to them so far.

“What is it, my dear?”

“I—I . . . ,” Wells stammered, “I can’t tell whether the tile my hand is resting on . . . is black or white.”

Jane contemplated him in silence for a few seconds, without understanding what he was talking about, until she followed her husband’s astonished gaze toward the tile beneath his hand.

“It’s black,” she assured him, but a moment later she blinked, confused. “No, wait . . .” She examined the tile with a frown. “It’s white! . . . No, no, it’s definitely black, but . . . how strange: it keeps changing to white . . .”

Closely scrutinized by Jane, Wells raised his hand and lowered it again, placing it very carefully on the same tile.

“I put my right hand down on the black tile. That is what I did, nothing else. You saw me, didn’t you, Jane?” Wells asked anxiously.

“I think so,” she replied uneasily, “and yet . . . oh, goodness me, Bertie, I don’t know. Perhaps not. After all, you could also have placed your hand on the white tile. Why did you choose the black one? And . . . wait, are you sure that is your right hand? You could also be leaning on your left hand.”