The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(142)

The one thing they knew for sure was which of those Marcus Rhyses deserved the title of Villain. You will know him by his wickedness, Wells told Jane each time they lost track of him in the chaos of the multiverse. And by his cunning, Jane added, unable to conceal the fear his attributes instilled in her. With good reason: the Villain was the only one among his evil twins who never gave up the chase; he was so obsessed with finding the wretched scribbler who had slipped through his fingers that he had sworn he would not stop until he had caught him. He went on searching tirelessly, and whenever he found one of Wells’s twins he would brutally murder him, convinced he had killed the only Wells that existed. However, each time he returned to what he mistakenly believed was the future or the past in his own world, eager to contemplate the fruits of his vengeance and to savor a world where the only trace of the exasperating H. G. Wells was a forgotten grave, he would bump into a live version of the author again. Unable to comprehend how this was possible, he would kill him again. Thus, many Wellses died in many parallel worlds at the hands of the Villain, who was growing increasingly angry and disturbed. Not only that: he was becoming transparent.

By following the trail of that deranged killer through the unfortunate Wellses whom he killed, the couple discovered that another side effect of jumping between universes was molecular loss: Marcus Rhys was becoming more and more translucent in what appeared to be a one-way journey toward invisibility. This could only mean that each time one of the cronotemics jumped, he left some of his molecules in hyperspace, causing his body mass to realign, eventually giving him that extraordinary see-through quality. The molecular loss resulting from one jump was negligible, so that the cronotemics who had jumped only two or three times in their lives barely noticed it. In contrast, those firmly in the grip of the disease, who were subjected to an unending succession of leaps, could only watch in horror as first their skin and eventually their muscles, their organs, and finally their blood became more and more transparent, until the light pierced their bodies like a lance. Fortunately, by that time, the majority had already lost their minds and no longer remembered who they were or where they came from.

The Villain, however, never forgot who he was or whom he was chasing. And if he had any inkling of the terrible havoc his burning desire for vengeance was wreaking on his body, it did not seem to bother him in the slightest. On the contrary, he appeared to welcome his progressive invisibility as an unexpected boon, which made him feel even more powerful and intimidating. That accursed Wells would have nowhere left to hide once Rhys attained complete invisibility. What other tricks could he resort to in order to escape from him? None. When Rhys became Invisible Death, Wells would finally be trapped.

? ? ?

ALL THESE FRESH PERILS lying in wait for their twins had cast a pall over the wonderful stories the Wellses exchanged by the hearth as they took an increasingly sinister turn. The couple could not help shuddering at the thought of the as-yet-unknown effects the epidemic might have on the fabric of the universe, or simply when contemplating the travails of those cronotemics forced to rebuild their lives in parallel worlds, without any clue as to what was happening to them. They could consider themselves fortunate in comparison to those whom the virus forced to jump endlessly from universe to universe, their minds and bodies unraveling until, in the most extreme cases, they ended up dissolving in hyperspace like the vague memory of some deranged universal consciousness.

Many of those poor wretches spent their final days prey to a phenomenon that was related to the nature of parallel worlds, which Wells referred to as the Maelstrom Coordinates. He had discovered that in many universes there were certain places that acted like gigantic ocean sinkholes that sucked toward the centers of their powerful vortexes any strange elements that fell into them from other worlds. So, when a cronotemic jumped, instead of reappearing in the same spot, or wherever the equivalent coordinates might be, one of those cosmic whirlpools often dragged him to a different place. The Maelstrom Coordinates might be located somewhere specific like a house, a moor, or a cave, but also could be in a person. A cronotemic might leap from a snowy peak in the Himalayas or the scorching dunes of the Sahara Desert and reappear in a parallel London through a haunted house or the body of a medium conducting a séance.

Wells could not help smiling to himself when he discovered that this epidemic of leaping through worlds was responsible for the obsession with spiritualism and the hordes of mediums blighting so many parallel worlds in that multiple universe. Those worlds, which were so removed from the Supreme Knowledge, did their best to make sense of the strange plague, whether by designating those infected as Homo temporalis, as in Rhys’s world, or mistaking them for lost souls, spirits doomed to haunt bewitched places and communicate with the living through mediums until they laid to rest their unfinished business. In actual fact, all those haunted houses and those remarkable people with an apparent gift for speaking to the dead were simply each universe’s Maelstrom Coordinates sucking up the cronotemics in mid-leap only to regurgitate them later as terrifying apparitions, whether in the form of a woman in black suddenly appearing at the top of a tower in a deserted house or a nebulous ectoplasm emerging from the body of a medium in a trance.

The Wellses also discovered that once a cronotemic had been sucked up by a Maelstrom he would remain bound in some way to that universe, doomed to return there again and again, and always through the same portal. As a result, some cronotemics became trapped in a crazed vicious circle made up of a few worlds, forced to appear in the same haunted houses, or through the same mediums, shedding with every jump an increasing number of molecules and memories. Many ended up in the thrall of the mediums, their virtual slaves, pathetic puppets who believed blindly everything the mediums said: that they were dead, and that their hazy memories were merely visions of the Hereafter, where they now belonged, and that was no doubt an exact replica of the world of the living. Until one day, during a jump, their delicate molecular structure would fragment into a million scattered apparitions. When that happened, the curse of the haunted house would be lifted, until another cronotemic took up the vacant post of resident ghost or a medium would lose contact with her enslaved spirit, believing that he or she had at last found the path into the light.