The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(51)

“I’m off—I have lots of work to do!” Higgins stood up, suddenly pale. “I promise to be in touch with the latest news, gentlemen . . .” Taking his leave of them all with a quick nod, he hurried away.

In the meantime, the waiter lit the fire, which was soon blazing pleasantly in the grate a few yards from the four men.

In the meantime, let us take this opportunity to leave the four gentlemen and return to Inspector Clayton. However, if you will permit me, I’ll pass over the next ten years, since I am anxious above all to discover whether the Cavaliers of Chaos, aided by the evil Executioners, will finally succeed in saving the world. During those years nothing important has happened related to our case (or in the life of the inspector, in my opinion), and so you will not miss anything crucial if we leap forward to the first of August 1898, a date some of you may be familiar with. That is the day when our tale, after flowing underground for ten years, springs forth on the surface once more.





9


TEN YEARS AFTER THE SéANCE, the wax cylinder still preserved Inspector Cornelius Clayton’s voice urging Sir Henry Blendell to confess. And as on many other occasions during those years, the inspector’s words, uttered in a different time and place, were now being broadcast in the Chamber of Marvels, drifting over the mermaids’ skeletons, photographs of fairies, werewolf hides, and stuffed Minotaur head stored in its confines. In one corner, elbows resting on a table and lit up dramatically by a small lamp, sat the inspector. During the ten years that had passed, he had changed greatly in appearance, and who hadn’t? He was more wan, more haggard, more stooped; in short, he had less sparkle. But those changes only affected the outside. He had experienced the odd turmoil, but nothing on the seismic scale of his first case; and, as time passed, his soul had begun to resemble one of those much-thumbed volumes that always fall open at the same page. It could be said that, contrary to what he had predicted at the time, he still recognized himself in the disenchanted, arrogant youth whose voice was recorded on the cylinder.

Perhaps the only noticeable difference was that he was far less eager to understand the world around him, which had turned into an even more absurd place over those years. There were many events that had made his hair stand on end, throwing up connections as tangled as they were futile for a mind such as his, alert as it was to that kind of detail: after slaying five prostitutes, Jack the Ripper, as the Whitechapel murderer was called, had vanished without trace, taking with him the mystery of his identity. Also, some years later his literary equivalent, Dorian Gray, had unleashed his depravity on London’s poorest neighborhoods while his author languished in jail, convicted of sodomy—the same reprehensible activity Prince Albert Victor, the queen’s grandson, had been discovered (by Clayton’s colleagues at the Yard) engaging in at a male brothel in Cleveland Street. However, the queen’s nephew hadn’t been locked up anywhere, and the monarchy had chosen to divert the public’s attention toward the conquest of South Africa, where heroic deeds no longer celebrated in storybooks still occurred, and where the English race could display its courage and heroism in all its glory by massacring poor Africans. Added to that was the continuous worker unrest, the suffragette demonstrations, and the wars in the colonies, or other events that are more germane to our tale: Margaretta Fox had retracted the statements she had made to The New York Herald condemning the spiritualist movement and confessed she had done so for money, and Professor Crookes, who as rumor suggested had finally been knighted, had confirmed in his address to the British Association the existence of that psychic force he had first championed thirty years earlier. And so, much to the displeasure of some, thanks to the abovementioned events and many others, during the ten intervening years the belief in spirits and their emissaries, mediums, had only intensified, something which is crucial to this tale, as you will soon discover.

Despite having surrendered to the world’s complex mystery, Clayton still endeavored to bring as much order to it as possible, rather like the fastidious guest who upon encountering a wrinkled tablecloth can’t help unconsciously smoothing out the part in front of him. And so he had gone on solving cases, some deadly dull, self-evident almost to the point of being offensive, others interesting enough to occupy his inquiring mind, thus distracting him for a while from the demons that forever plagued him. Although a few of those cases had confronted him once more with the realm of the fantastic, I will refrain from elaborating on them here, in order not to stray from the path I have set myself, possibly never to find it again. Suffice to say, not because it was one of his most exciting cases but owing to the relevance of one of its protagonists to our story, the inspector still felt a desire to investigate a company called Murray’s Time Travel. For those of you who don’t know, or have forgotten, the aforementioned company had opened for business in the autumn of 1896, shortly after the author H. G. Wells published his famous novel The Time Machine, with the aim of bringing Wells’s novel to life. For the paltry sum of one hundred pounds, Murray’s Time Travel boasted that it could take you to the future—to the year 2000, to be precise. There a battle for possession of the planet was raging between the brave Captain Shackleton, leader of the human resistance army, and his archenemy, the automaton Solomon.

Naturally, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch had felt obliged from the outset to investigate the supposed miracle so as to rule out any possibility of fraud, although the reports given by the first time travelers to be interviewed had been so extraordinary that neither Sinclair nor Clayton could imagine anyone being capable of inventing such a brilliant hoax. From their accounts, it appeared that the travelers reached the nebulous future on a time tram called the Cronotilus, which traversed the fourth dimension, a pink plain inhabited by dangerous, time-eating dragons. As you will easily appreciate, the two inspectors were more than keen to climb aboard this remarkable tram, but Gilliam Murray, who owned the company, had become a very powerful man overnight and, sheltering behind an army of lawyers, managed to spare his company from inspection. Finally, after a laborious legal battle, a judge had approved the long-awaited warrant that gave Captain Sinclair and his future successor (no one at the Yard doubted that Clayton would step into his boss’s shoes when he retired) complete freedom to snoop into Murray’s affairs. But just then an unfortunate tragedy had occurred that plunged the country into a long period of mourning: Gilliam Murray, the Master of Time, the man who had opened the doors of the future to the inhabitants of the present, had passed away, devoured by a dragon from the fourth dimension. His company had been closed down and all that remained of Murray’s Time Travel was a ramshackle theater in Soho whose dusty fa?ade appeared to conceal no other mystery than decay.