The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(143)

For five long years, the Wellses watched the epidemic spread, tormented by the terrible fate of their twins who had developed the disease and wondering anxiously how it would all end. Occasionally, eager to retain some hope amid that madness, they told themselves the situation might resolve itself: the day might dawn when those actively infected would end up disintegrating, including the evil Villain himself, leaving only the harmless carriers, who would develop some kind of immunity that they would then pass on to their offspring, and the universe would heal itself. But on the days when they were plagued with guilt, all they could tell each other was that Chaos, always inevitable, might come to that universe as predicted, but not for thousands of millennia, thanks to H. G. Wells and his wife.





27


THE ANSWER TO THEIR OMINOUS musings came a few weeks later, when Wells infiltrated the mind of a twin who had just jumped for the fourth time in less than two months. His first jump had interrupted a peaceful stroll through the streets of London, leaving him stranded in the middle of a deserted plain, where, trembling behind a rock, he had heard the distant blast of hunting horns and the thunderous gallop of a hundred horses. But before he could take a look, he had been dragged back to London scarcely two years before his own birth. There he had stayed for almost two months before being plucked afresh, this time while crossing Grosvenor Square, and transplanted to a London reduced to a heap of rubble from which plumes of hot vapor rose. He was expecting any moment to be devoured by one of the monstrous creatures resembling giant crabs that were scuttling amid the ruins, when another jump had sent him back to Grosvenor Square. And that was where Observer Wells connected with him, just as he was wondering when that crazy journey through time would end.

The square had changed a lot—a few of the houses surrounding the garden in the middle had been replaced by more functional-looking buildings—but at least it was still standing. At that moment it was filled with people. A large crowd had gathered in the square, mostly youngsters sitting in rows on the grass or huddled in the corners, singing and playing the guitar and waving banners bearing the slogan “Make Love Not War’ and other expressions Wells didn’t understand. The youngsters’ harangues were directed at an exceptionally ugly building on the west side of the square, in front of which was posted an army of policemen, many of them on horseback, who were observing the youths hostilely. For several minutes, Wells’s twin was content to wander, dazed, through the noisy crowd, staring in astonishment at the youths’ garish clothes and the flowers that seemed to blossom from their long, scruffy locks. Vaguely intoxicated by the sweet aroma of the cigarettes they were smoking, he accidentally bumped into one young lad.

“Hey, look where you’re going, Teddy Boy!” shouted the youth, who was wearing a suede jacket, his hair almost down to his waist.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Wells hurriedly apologized, slightly intimidated.

The youth appeared to calm down and stared at him in silence, a vaporous smile clinging to his lips. Taking advantage of this inadvertent contact with one of the natives of that era, Wells asked the youth what year it was, but before he could reply, several anguished cries rang out from the far end of the square followed by gunshots. In the distance, the crowd rose to its feet, and Wells saw a tide of alarmed youths hurtling toward him like a wave rolling toward the shore, and before he had time to react he was swept away. He only just managed to glimpse at the far end of the square a dozen or more mounted policeman riding through the crowd without a care. Suddenly, there was a deafening explosion, and the human tide became a raging sea. A cloud of thick black smoke floated up over the terrified crowd. Pandemonium reigned as people started scattering in all directions. The mounted policemen lashed out indiscriminately, while the youngsters fought back with stones, which bounced off the policemen’s helmets with an ominous crunching sound. Afraid of being trapped in the midst of that spontaneous battle royal whose logic he neither understood nor cared to understand, Wells tried to slip away through a gap in the crowd. He had no idea which way he was running, but he didn’t care, providing he managed to get away from the heat of the skirmish. He passed several dazed youths with bloodied faces, crying and pleading for help, but he kept on running.

All of a sudden, an explosion went off dangerously close, and Wells fell to the ground, entangled in an unseemly heap of bodies. For a few seconds, he thought he couldn’t hear, for the world seemed enclosed in a quilted cocoon of silence. He sat up as best he could and glanced about: through the smoke he saw some youths being helped up and starting to run about aimlessly. He felt an immense relief as the familiar dizziness came over him, heralding a jump. In a few seconds, he would be traversing the universe to another era, which, however inhospitable, could not be worse than this.

But before the giddiness intensified, Wells saw a huge figure wrapped in a black cape striding toward him through the smoke, apparently unperturbed by the uproar. With his cape billowing behind him, brandishing a cane with a glowing handle, his hat pulled down over his face, the figure seemed like something out of a dream. And yet he was more real to Wells than anything else around him. Was this Death coming for him? he wondered, petrified amid the turmoil. When the figure reached Wells, it took him by the arm, lifting him with a strength that could only be described as superhuman. Taken aback by the sinister apparition, the tide of youths seemed to part before him like the sea before Moses while the policemen’s horses whinnied and reared up in terror.