The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(151)
“What are you driving at, Professor?” he asked with a sardonic smile.
Disappointed at his double’s lack of observational skills, Wells shook his head and turned his attention to the young woman.
“What do you see, Jane? How do you imagine I looked when I was thirty-three?” he asked, alluding to his twin’s current age.
The young woman put on a serious face and tried to do what the old man had asked: she brushed away his wrinkles, shaved off his beard, covered his balding temples with hair, and replaced his weary expression with that of a young man brimming with belief in life. The result made her frown. Seeing her face, the old man smiled softly.
“Yes, Jane,” he told her, “don’t reject what your mind is trying to tell you. What you are thinking is exactly right.”
“But what I am thinking is absurd!” she exclaimed, almost amused.
“No, my dear girl,” the professor contradicted her. “It is exactly right.”
“What is absurd? What the devil are you thinking, Jane?” Wells’s twin demanded, puzzled.
“Henry Lansbury is an assumed name,” Wells said suddenly, looking at the young man solemnly. “My real name is Herbert George Wells. I am you, only a good few years older, as you can see. Then he pointed to his wife. “And this is Amy Catherine Robbins. My wife and yours. Because we are you.”
The young twins stared at each other in bewilderment, then examined the old couple again while they held hands as though posing for a portrait. A few seconds later, the younger woman mumbled, “Good heavens . . . But that’s impossible!”
“Not if you believe what I am about to tell you,” said Wells. And in a calm voice, aware of how bizarre his tale would sound to their twins, he began to narrate the story, a story with which, dear reader, you are more than familiar. He described in broad brushstrokes the world they had come from; he told them about the inevitable destruction of that universe, of how he and Jane had traveled to their adopted world in 1858 through a magic hole, about the years they had spent in Oxford with Dodgson, the disappearance of their dog, Newton, and the subsequent spread of the virus he was carrying. He told them about their gift for observing, the extermination of the cronotemics, and their reasons for writing The Map of Chaos, the book that contained the key to saving that and all other possible worlds. Their twins listened intently, with a mixture of wonder and dread. When Wells had finished, a heavy silence descended on the little sitting room.
Finally, after clearing his throat noisily, Wells’s twin declared, “Goodness me: cronotemics, Executioners, parallel worlds . . . It sounds just like one of my fantasy novels!”
“I wish it were,” sighed Wells. “But I assure you, George, everything I have told you is very real.”
Wells’s twin looked at his wife, then bit his lip before adding, “Don’t take offense, Professor, but you are asking us to believe a lot of implausible things based on the sole evidence of a . . . vague resemblance between us.”
Wells gave a sigh of disappointment, even though he had known convincing them wouldn’t be easy, especially his own twin, who, as was to be expected, was as stubborn as he. He was about to reply when a voice rank with Evil roared behind him, “Would a genuine cronotemic be proof enough?”
The two couples turned as one toward the entrance to the sitting room, from where the voice had emanated. And what they saw caused them to leap from their seats. Standing in the doorway, watching them with a baleful grimace, was a semitransparent man. He was dressed in a dark suit and had an athletic build, but the disturbing thing about him was that they could see through the veil of his flesh to what was behind him: the doorframe, the gloomy corridor, the pictures on the walls . . . The stranger let them admire him for a moment, a mocking expression on his face, before walking over to them with the supple, self-assured movements of a predator approaching its prey. Wells and Jane recognized him immediately and instinctively clung to each other. As the apparition drew closer, they all noticed with alarm that he was carrying a strange-looking pistol. Apart from the wooden grip, it was made entirely of metal, and although the barrel seemed very narrow in relation to the rest, it was undoubtedly a deadly weapon.
“Who the devil are you, and what are you doing in my house?” inquired the young Wells, trying to conceal the tremor in his voice.
The creature clicked his tongue, demonstrating his disappointment.
“My dear George, under any other circumstances, tired of hearing the same old greeting, I would have said to you, ‘Don’t you recognize me? My name is Marcus Rhys, and I have come to kill you—again,’?” he replied with a tone of reproach. The young Wells’s face turned pale. “However, now I know why you never remember me. Now I know everything.” He grinned ferociously at his terrified audience. Then, addressing the old man, he added, “And so, correct me if I am wrong, Professor, I am not Homo temporalis after all but rather a poor wretch infected with a virus you created in a parallel universe. Therefore, it would be more appropriate for me to say, ‘My name is Marcus Rhys, and I have come to kill you, as I have many of your twins in parallel worlds.’ Isn’t that right, Professor?”
Observer Wells remained silent. Clearly, Marcus Rhys had been listening to their whole conversation from behind the door (he remembered the noise of the attic window and concluded he must have been there awhile), and now he knew everything there was to know about his own nature and the secrets of the universe. But that information didn’t seem to have altered in the slightest his diabolical intentions. The creature had positioned himself strategically at the head of the table, cornering them against the wall, and as he pointed his strange-looking pistol at them, he cast a wild eye over the panic-stricken group until he came to a halt at the unfortunate Jane, who happened to be standing closest to him.