The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(128)
On closer examination, Wells saw with horror that the bird was trying to bore through a human skull with its beak. This discovery caused him to recoil a few paces, a rash response in that hostile environment. The next thing he knew, the ground gave way beneath him, and he realized too late that he had woken up at the top of a small incline, down which he was now unhappily tumbling. He landed with a thump, coughing and spluttering as he breathed in some of the thick dust cloud shrouding him.
Irritated by his own clumsiness, Wells rose to his feet. Luckily, he had no broken bones this time either, although as a crowning humiliation, his trousers had been torn in several places, leaving part of his scrawny white buttock exposed.
Wells shook his head. “What more could go wrong?” he thought, dusting himself down as best he could. As the dust settled, he stood stock still, contemplating aghast the figures slowly emerging from the gloom. Staring back at him in ghostly silence, he discovered an army of automatons. There were at least a dozen of them, all with the same inscrutable, intimidating expression, even the one standing slightly to the fore, who was wearing an incongruous gold crown. They looked as though they had halted in their tracks when they saw him roll down the incline. A terrible panic gripped Wells’s insides as he realized where he was.
He had traveled to the year 2000, and, amazingly enough, it was exactly as Gilliam Murray had portrayed it in his novel, for there in front of him, before his very eyes, stood Solomon himself, the evil king of the automatons responsible for the all the devastation around them. His fate was sealed: he was going to be shot by a mechanical toy. There, in the very future he had refused to believe in.
“I imagine right now you must be wishing Captain Shackleton would appear, correct?” The voice did not come from the automaton, although at that stage nothing would have surprised him, but from somewhere behind Wells. He recognized it instantly. He would have liked never to have to hear it again, but somehow, perhaps because he was a writer, he knew that sooner or later he would bump into Murray again; he knew the story they were both taking part in needed a satisfying conclusion, one that would not frustrate the readers” expectations. Wells would never have envisaged the encounter taking place in the future, though, for the simple reason that he had never believed in the possibility of traveling into the future. He turned around slowly. A few yards away, Gilliam Murray was watching him, an amused grin on his face. He was wearing a purple suit and a green top hat, like a human descendant of those beautifully plumed biblical birds of paradise. Sitting on its haunches next to him was an enormous golden-colored dog.
“Welcome to the year 2000, Mr. Wells,” Murray said, jovially, “or should I say to my vision of the year 2000.” Wells looked at him suspiciously, one eye on the eerily frozen group of automatons drawn up before them as though posing for a portrait.
“Are you afraid of my nice automatons? But how can you be scared of such an unconvincing future?” Gilliam asked sarcastically.
Murray walked slowly towards the automaton at the front of the group, and, grinning deliberately at Wells, like a child about to perpetrate some mischief, placed his fleshy hand on its shoulder and gave it a push. The automaton keeled over backwards, crashing noisily into the one behind it, which in turn toppled onto the one next to it, and so on until one after the other they collapsed onto the floor. They fell with the fascinating slowness of a glacier breaking off. When it was finally over, Gilliam spread the palms of his hands as if to apologize for the din.
“With no one inside, they’re just hollow shells, mere disguises,” he said.
Wells gazed at the pile of upturned automatons, then looked back at Gilliam, struggling with his dizzying feeling of unreality.
“Forgive me for bringing you to the year 2000 against your will, Mr. Wells,” apologized Murray, feigning dismay. “If you’d accepted one of my invitations, it wouldn’t have been necessary, but as you didn’t, I had no alternative. I wanted you to see it before I closed it down. And so I had to send one of my men to chloroform you while you were asleep, although from what he told me, you occupy your nights with other things. He got a real shock after he’d climbed through the attic window.” Murray’s words shed a welcome light on the author’s whirling thoughts, and he lost no time in tying up the necessary loose ends.
He realized immediately he had not traveled to the year 2000, as everything appeared to indicate. The machine in his attic was still just a toy, and the razed city of London was no more than a vast stage set designed by Gilliam in order to hoodwink people.
No doubt, on seeing him enter the attic, Gilliam’s henchman had hidden behind the time machine and waited, unsure of what to do, perhaps weighing up the possibility of carrying out Murray’s orders using force. But fortunately, he had not needed to resort to an ignoble act of violence, as Wells himself had given the man the perfect opportunity to use the chloroform-soaked handkerchief he no doubt had at the ready by sitting in the time machine.
Of course, once he realized he was standing on a simple stage set and that he had not undergone some impossible journey through time, Wells felt greatly relieved. The situation he found himself in was by no means pleasant, of course, but at least it was logical.
“I trust you haven’t harmed my wife,” he said, not quite managing to sound threatening.
“Have no fear,” Gilliam reassured him, waving a hand in the air, “Your wife is a deep sleeper, and my men can be very quiet when they have to be. I’m sure that the lovely Jane is at this very moment sleeping peacefully, oblivious to your absence.” Wells was about to make a riposte but finally thought better of it. Gilliam was addressing him with the rather overblown arrogance of people in high places who have the world at their feet. Evidently, the tables had turned since their last meeting. If during the interview at the author’s house in Woking, Wells had been the one wielding the scepter of power like a child brandishing a new toy, now it was Gilliam who held it between his fleshy fingers. Over the intervening months, Murray had changed: he had become an altogether different creature. He was no longer the aspiring writer obliged to kneel at his master’s feet, he was the owner of the most lucrative business in London before whom every one grotesquely bowed down. Wells, of course, did not think he deserved any kind of adulation, and if he allowed him to use that superior tone, it was because he considered Murray was entitled to do so: after all, he was the outright winner of the duel they had been fighting during the past few months. And had not Wells used a similar tone when the scepter had been in his hands? Gilliam Murray spread his arms wide, like a ringmaster announcing the acts at a circus, symbolically embracing the surrounding devastation.