The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(166)
After he had left, Clayton sent a patrol to scour the moor for anyone fitting the description the old man had given of his pursuers—impossibly tall men swathed in flowing capes, with broad-brimmed hats and peculiar-looking canes—while he himself resolved to pursue that alleged Wells from another world. Just as he had told Clayton, he worked for the famously wealthy Montgomery Gilmore, who at the time was plunged into deep despair after his fiancée died in a car accident. A tragic fact that had not only caused Clayton to view more leniently that man whom he couldn’t abide, and whom he had stopped investigating in the name of something as foolish as love (he still flushed when he remembered the arguments Wells had used to persuade him), but had also made his surveillance extremely tedious. Murray spent the entire time drinking himself into a stupor either at his house or that of the Wellses, obliging his coachman to sit around twiddling his thumbs most of the day. And so, after several months of fruitless surveillance, Clayton decided to stop shadowing the old man. He couldn’t keep putting his other inquiries on hold due to a case his superiors had long since filed away.
This was a great shame, for had he persisted just a few days longer, as many of his twins in other worlds did, he would have seen Arthur Conan Doyle show up at Murray’s house in the early hours, accompanied by Wells and his wife, and, intrigued by this untimely meeting, would have tailed the two famous authors for several days afterward. Increasingly bemused, he would have seen them visiting fancy dress shops, purchasing slates, and making secret excursions to Brook Manor. Finally, he would have followed them on the day of the fake séance with the Great Ankoma, during which the Invisible Man had appeared, and thus prevented Baskerville’s death, causing events to take a very different turn.
But alas, dear readers, I am not telling you the story of any of those worlds, but rather of this one, in which events took place the way I have already described. And so, a few days after Clayton stopped following Baskerville, Wells and Doyle went to Clayton’s office to inform him that Baskerville had been slain with a rusty sword wielded by an invisible man. Needless to say, the news left Clayton reeling. The old man was dead, and although Doyle and Wells described his killer as completely invisible, it was clearly the Villain. Just as Mrs. Lansbury had predicted twelve years before, he had come back for the book, although for some reason he thought Wells had it.
In short, those days had brought a flurry of revelations, each more surprising than the last. Yet they had only added to the list of questions Clayton had been asking himself for the past twelve years: Had the old lady been referring to those Hunters when she told him to give the book to those who came from the Other Side? And if so, how was he supposed to find them? And what if, like the Villain, they wanted to destroy the book as well? After all, they were killers, too. Moreover, if what Baskerville had said was true and they were living in a multiple universe, there might be more than one Villain, just as there was more than one Wells and more than one Clayton . . . The inspector heaved a sigh. The threats to the book were multiplying, and he still had no idea whom he ought to give it to.
All these musings led him back to Valerie de Bompard. How could he not think about her? How could he not wonder whether in this universe brimming with fantastical worlds taking shape before him, there might not be more than one Countess de Bompard? Was the Valerie he knew a traveler from another world? That would have accounted for her strange nature, he reflected, remembering what he had experienced the first time he met her: that unnerving feeling of being in the presence of something extraordinary, a creature so fascinating she couldn’t possibly belong to the humdrum universe that surrounded her. He felt a pang in his heart as he imagined the torment of that lost little girl, alone in a world that must have seemed terrifyingly strange to her, abandoned by the only man who had truly understood her. And as if that weren’t enough, years later she had fallen in love with him, an arrogant fool, who only wanted to understand her because, as she herself had pointed out, it was the closest he could come to possessing her. But at least there was one world among that cluster of possible worlds where they were happy, where Valerie was still alive and was not a monster but rather part of a world that was as miraculous and sublime as her own spirit, even if he could only visit her there during his fainting fits.
A sound of frantic knocking on the door brought him back to reality. The inspector breathed a sigh and went to open it, wending his way through the piles of junk filling the room and negotiating peculiar columns draped with wires and lightbulbs, sprouting from them like tree limbs in a mechanical forest. When he reached the door, he took a deep breath and opened it to discover Wells and his wife, both in their nightclothes, as if they had just gotten out of bed.
“Mr. and Mrs. Wells . . . what the devil . . . ?”
“Inspector Clayton,” Wells gasped, “how glad we are to find you here! We needed to see you, and as you told us you spent a lot of time in this chamber, we decided to try our luck before going to your office, given how early it is.”
Clayton nodded suspiciously.
“What brings you here? It must be something very urgent if you haven’t even had time to get dressed,” he remarked sarcastically.
“Indeed, indeed. You see . . . ,” Wells began, a note of alarm in his voice, “my wife and I wanted to talk to you about a very important matter, relating to the . . . um . . . the . . .”
“Oh, the book,” replied Clayton cautiously. “Yes, yes. Let us talk about the book. Please, follow me.”