The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(138)
While Garrett barricaded himself in the London Library together with a dozen officers, intent on scouring every novel on its shelves for the one from which Shackleton, for some sinister and as yet unknown reason, was quoting, Wells made his way home, wondering how many more innocent victims would die before the traveler’s riddle was complete.
The next day however, no carriage from Scotland Yard came to fetch him. Did that mean the time traveler had made contact with all his chosen authors? The answer was awaiting him in his letter box. There Wells found a map of London, by means of which the traveler not only indicated the meeting point, but at the same time flaunted his ability to move through the time continuum at will, as the map was dated 1666 and was the work of the Czech engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. Wells admired the exquisite chart representing a city whose countenance had been transformed: months later London had been obliterated by an inferno, which, if he remembered correctly, had started in a bakery in central London, and, fanned by the neighboring coal, timber, and alcohol warehouses, had spread rapidly, reaching St. Paul’s Cathedral and leaping over the Roman wall surged into Fleet Street.
But what really astonished Wells was that the map showed no sign of having traveled across two centuries to reach him. Like a soldier holding his rifle aloft as he forges a river, the traveler had protected the map from the ravages of time, saving it from the stealthy caress of the years, the yellow claws of the decades and the ruinous handling of the centuries.
Having recovered from his astonishment, Wells noticed the circle marking off Berkeley Square and next to it the number 50.
This was undoubtedly the place the three authors must go to meet the traveler. And Wells had to admit he could not have chosen a more appropriate location, for number 50 Berkeley Square was considered the most haunted house in London.
38
Berkeley Square had a small park at its center. This was rather gloomy for its size but boasted some of the oldest trees in central London.
Wells crossed it almost at a march, greeting with a perfunctory nod the languid nymph that the sculptor Alexander Munro had contributed to the relentless melancholy of the landscape, then came to a halt outside a house with the number 50 displayed on its front wall. It was a modest building that looked out of place next to others bordering the square, all of which were designed by well-known architects of the period. It looked as though no one had lived there for decades, and although the fa?ade did not appear too dilapidated, the windows on the upper floors, as well as those downstairs, were boarded up with moldering planks to keep prying eyes from discovering the dark secrets that surely lay within. Was he wise to have come there alone? Wells wondered with an involuntary shudder. Perhaps he should have informed Inspector Garrett, for not only was he about to meet someone who apparently had few scruples when it came to killing ordinary citizens, but he had gone to the meeting with the na?ve intention of catching him and handing him over to the inspector on a platter so that he would forget about going to the year 2000 once and for all.
Wells studied the austere front of what was allegedly the most haunted house in London and wondered what all the fuss was about. Mayfair magazine had published a highly sensationalist piece about the strange events which had been going on in the house since the start of the century. Everyone who entered it had apparently either died or gone insane. For Wells, who had no interest in the spirit world, the article was no more than a lengthy inventory of gruesome gossip, rumors to which not even the printed word could lend any authority. The articles were full of servant maids who, having lost their wits, were unable to explain what they had seen, or sailors who on being attacked had leapt from the windows and been impaled on the railings below, or the inevitable sleepless neighbors who, during those periods when the house was unoccupied, claimed they could hear furniture being dragged around on the other side of the walls and glimpsed mysterious shadows behind the windows.
This concoction of spine-tingling events had led the building to be classed as a haunted house, the home of a ruthless phantom, and thus the perfect place for young nobles of the realm to show their bravery by spending a night there. In 1840, a rake by the name of Robert Warboys, who had made a virtue of his skepticism, took up his friends” challenge to sleep the night there in exchange for a hundred guineas. Warboys locked himself in, armed with a pistol and a string attached to a bell at the entrance which he vowed he would ring if he found himself in any difficulty, although he dismissed that possibility with a scornful smirk. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed when the tinkle of the bell was heard, followed by a single shot that shattered the silence of the night. When his friends came running, they found the aristocrat lying on a bed, stone dead, his face frozen in a grimace of horror. The bullet had lodged in the wooden skirting board, perhaps after passing through the specter’s vaporous form. Thirty years later, by which time the house had gained notoriety among the ranks of England’s haunted houses, another valiant youth by the name of Lord Lyttleton was brave enough to spend the night there. He was more fortunate, surviving the phantom’s assault by firing silver coins at it from a gun he had taken the precaution of carrying with him to bed. Lord Lyttleton claimed he even saw the evil creature fall to the ground, although during the subsequent investigation no body was found in the room, as he himself recounted with palpable unease in the well-known magazine Notes and Queries, which Wells had once read with amusement when he came across it in a bookshop. All the rumors and legends were at odds over the origin of the alleged ghost. Some claimed the place had been cursed after hundreds of children had been mercilessly tortured there.