The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(149)
“You?” exclaimed Wells, stopping in his tracks.
The girl said nothing. She simply walked over to where he was standing as silently as a cat and held something out to him. The author saw it was a letter. Puzzled, he took it from the girl’s lily-white hand. To H. G. Wells. To be delivered on the night of November 26, 1896, he read on the back. So, this girl, whoever she might be, was some sort of messenger.
“Read it, Mr. Wells,” she said, with a voice that reminded him of the sound of the early afternoon breeze rustling the net curtains. “Your future depends on it.” With that, the woman walked away towards the gate, leaving him motionless in the doorway, his face frozen in a frown.
When he managed to rouse himself, Wells turned and ran after the woman.
“Wait, Miss … ” He came to a halt halfway. The woman had disappeared: only her perfume lingered in the air. And yet Wells could not recall having heard the gate squeak. It was as though after handing him the letter, she had literally vanished without trace.
He stood stock still for a few moments, listening to the silent throb of night and breathing in the unknown woman’s perfume until finally he decided to enter the house. He made his way as quietly as possible to the sitting room, lit the little lamp, and sat down in his armchair, still startled by the appearance of the girl, whom he could have mistaken for one of Doyle’s fairies had she measured eight inches and worn a pair of dragonfly wings on her back. Who was she? He wondered. And how had she suddenly vanished? But it was foolish to waste time surmising when he would no doubt find the answer in the envelope he was holding.
He tore it open and took out the pages it contained. He shuddered when he recognized the handwriting, and, his heart in his mouth, began to read: Dear Bertie, If you are reading this letter, then I am right, and in the future time travel will be possible. I do not know who will deliver this to you, I can only assure you she will be a descendant of yours, and of mine, for as you will have guessed from the handwriting, I am you. I am a Wells from the future. From a very distant future. It is best you assimilate this before reading on. Since I am sure the fact that our handwriting is identical will not be enough to convince you, as any skilled person could have copied it, I shall try to prove to you that we are one and the same person by telling you something only you know about. Who else knows that the basket in the kitchen full of tomatoes and peppers is not just any old basket? Well, is that enough, or must I be crude and remind you that during your marriage to your cousin Isabel, you masturbated thinking about the nude sculptures at Crystal Palace? Forgive me for alluding to such an upsetting period of your life, only I am certain that, like the secret meaning the basket has for you, it is something you would never mention in any future biography, proving beyond doubt that I am not some impostor who has found out everything about you. No, I am you, Bertie. And unless you accept that, there is no point in reading on.
Now I shall tell you how you became me. The three of you will be in for a nasty surprise tomorrow when you go to give Marcus your manuscripts. Everything the traveler has told you is a lie, except that he is a great admirer of your work. That is why he will be unable to stop himself from smiling when you deliver his precious haul to him in person. Once this is done, he will give the order to one of his henchmen, who will fire at poor James. You have already seen what their weapons can do to a human body so I shall spare you the details, but it is not hard to imagine that your clothes will be sprayed with a grisly spatter of blood and entrails. Then, before either of you have a chance to react, the henchman will fire again, this time at a stunned Stoker, who will suffer the same fate as the American. After that, paralyzed with fear, you will watch as he takes aim at you, except that before he pulls the trigger, Marcus will stop him with a gentle wave of his hand. And he will do this because he respects you enough not to want to let you die without telling you why. After all, you are the author of The Time Machine, the novel that started the vogue for time travel.
At the very least he owes you an explanation, and so, before his henchman kills you, he will go to the trouble of telling you the truth, even if it is only to hear himself recount aloud how he managed to outsmart the three of you. Then he will confess to you, as he bounces round the hallway in that ridiculous way of his, that he is not a guardian of time, and that in fact, had it not been for a chance encounter, he would have known nothing of the existence of the Library of Truth or that the past was being guarded by the State.
Marcus was an eccentric millionaire, a member of that select group of people who go through life doing only what they wish to, and who had been obliged to let the Government study him when they opened the Department of Time. He had not found the experience too objectionable, despite being forced to rub elbows with people from all walks of life. It was a small price to pay for finding out the cause of his ailment (which is what he assumed it was after suffering a couple of spontaneous displacements at moments of extreme tension) and above all if he could discover the exciting possibilities it opened up. When the department was closed down, Marcus decided to hone the skills he had already learned to control remarkably well by doing some sightseeing through time. For a while, he devoted himself to traveling back into the past at random, wandering through the centuries until he grew tired of witnessing historic naval battles, witches being burnt at the stake, and fecundating the bellies of Egyptian whores and slave girls with his seed of the future. It was then it occurred to him to use his talents to take his passion for books to the limit. Marcus had a fabulous library in his house containing a fortune in sixteenth-century first editions and incunables, but suddenly his collection of books seemed to him ridiculous and utterly worthless. What good was it to him to own a first edition of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage if in the end the verses he was reading could be perused by anyone else’s eyes? It would be quite different if he possessed the only copy in the world, as if the poet had written it exclusively for him. With his newly discovered abilities this was something he could achieve quite easily.