The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(153)

I also found an article that both bewildered and saddened me. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker and Henry James, who had died attempting to spend the night confronting the ghost in number 50 in Berkeley Square. That same night another equally tragic event in the world of letters had occurred: H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine, had mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again. “Had he gone time traveling? the journalist had asked ironically, unaware of how close he was to the truth.

In that article, they referred to you as the father of science fiction. I can imagine you asking what the devil that term means. A fellow named Hugo Gernsback coined it in 1926, using it on the cover of his magazine Amazing Stories, the first publication devoted entirely to fiction with a scientific slant in which many of the stories you wrote for Lewis Hind were reedited, together with those of Edgar Allan Poe, and, of course, Jules Verne, who competed with you for the title of father of the genre. As Inspector Garrett had predicted, novels that envisioned future worlds had ended up creating a genre of their own, and this was largely thanks to his discovery that Murray’s Time Travel was the biggest hoax of the nineteenth century. After that, the future went back to being a blank space no one had any claims on, and which every writer could adorn as he liked, an unknown world, an unexplored territory, like those on the old nautical maps, where it was said monsters were born.

On reading this, I realized with horror that my disappearance had sparked off a fatal chain of events: without my help, Garrett had been unable to catch Marcus and had gone ahead with his plan to visit the year 2000 and arrest Captain Shackleton, thus uncovering Gilliam’s hoax, resulting in him going to prison. My thoughts immediately turned to Jane, and I scoured hundreds of newspapers and magazines, fearing I might come across a news item reporting the death of H. G. Wells’s “widow” in a tragic cycling accident. But Jane had not died. Jane had gone on living after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. This meant Gilliam had not carried out his threat. Had he simply warned her to convince me to cooperate with him? Perhaps.

Or perhaps he simply had not had time to carry out his threat, or had wasted it searching for me in vain all over London to ask why on earth I was not trying to discover the real murderer. But despite his extensive network of thugs, he had failed to find me. Naturally, he had not thought to look in 1938. In any case, Gilliam had ended up in prison, and my wife was alive. Although she was no longer my wife.

Thanks to the articles about you, I was able to form an idea of what her life was like, what it had been like after my sudden upsetting departure. Jane had waited nearly five years in our house in Woking for me to come back, and then her hope ran out. Resigned to continuing her life without me, she had returned to live in London, where she had met and married a prestigious lawyer by the name of Douglas Evans, with whom she had a daughter they named Selma. I found a photograph of her as a charming old lady who still had the same smile I had become enamored of during our walks to Charing Cross. My first thought was to find her, but this of course was a foolish impulse. What would I say to her? My sudden reappearance after all this time would only have upset her otherwise peaceful existence. She had accepted my departure, why stir things up now? And so I did not try to find her, which is why from the moment I disappeared, I never again laid eyes on the sweet creature who must at this very moment be sleeping right above your head. Perhaps my telling you this will prompt you to wake her up with your caresses when you finish reading the letter. It is something only you can decide: far be it from me to meddle in your marriage. But of course, not looking for her was not enough. I had to leave London, not just because I was afraid of running into her or into one of my friends, who would recognize me immediately, since I had not changed, but purely for my own self-protection: it was more than likely Marcus would carry on trawling the centuries for me, searching through time for some trace of my existence.

I assumed a false identity. I grew a bushy beard and chose the charming medieval town of Norwich as the place where I would discreetly start to build a new life for myself. Thanks to what you had learned at Mr. Cowap’s pharmacy, I found work at a chemist’s, and for a year and a half I spent my days dispensing ointments and syrups, and my nights lying in my bed listening to the news, alert to the slow buildup of a war that would redefine the world once more. Of my own free will I had decided to live one of those redundant, futile lives that I had always been terrified my mother’s stubbornness would finally condemn me to, and I could not even compensate for its simplicity by writing for fear of alerting Marcus. I was a writer condemned to live like someone who had no gift for writing. Can you imagine a worse torture? Nor can I. Yes, I was safe, but I was trapped in a dismal life, which made me wonder at times whether it was worth the trouble of living. Happily, someone came along to brighten it up: she was called Alice, and she was beautiful. She entered the chemist’s one morning to buy a bottle of aspirin—a preparation of acetylsalicylic acid marketed by a German company that was very popular at the time—and when she left, she took my heart with her.

Love blossomed between us amazingly quickly, outstripping the war, and by the time it broke out, Alice and I had much more to lose than before. Luckily, it all seemed to be taking place far away from our town, which apparently presented no threat to Germany, whose new chancellor intended to conquer the world under the dubious pretext that the blood of a superior race pulsed through his veins. We could only glimpse the terrible consequences of the conflict through the ghastly murmurings carried to us on the breeze, a foretaste of what the newspapers would later report, but I already understood this war would be different from previous ones, because science had changed the face of war by presenting men with new ways of killing one another. The battle would now take place in the skies.