The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(30)
On the other side, was a very different world from ours, a sort of plain of pinkish rock, swept by a harsh wind that blew the sand up from the surface: in the distance, blurred by the swirling dust, he was able to make out a range of sinister looking mountains.
Disoriented and unable to see, the Masai floundered around in the other world, gibbering and running each other through with their spears as those left standing fell one by one. Tremanquai watched this macabre dance of death, transfixed, sensing their bodies caressed by a wind not of his world, like the strange dust clogging their nostrils.
The Reed People, still lined up in the middle of the village, resumed their ghostly chanting, and the hole began to close up, slowly narrowing before Tremanquai’s astonished eyes until it disappeared completely. The explorer moved his hand stupidly across the space where the air had split open. Suddenly, it seemed as if there had never been anything between him and the choir of Reed People, which started breaking up, each wandering off to a different corner of the village, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But for Tremanquai, the world as he had known it would never be the same. He realized he now had only two choices. One was to see the world, which he had hitherto believed to be the only world, as one of many, superimposed like the pages of a book so that all you had to do was thrust a dagger into it to open up a pathway through all of them. The other was simpler: he could lose his mind.
That night, understandably, the explorer was unable to sleep.
He lay on his straw mattress, eyes wide open, body tense, alert to the slightest noise coming from the darkness. The knowledge that he was surrounded by witches, against whom his rifle and his God were useless, filled him with dread. As soon as he was able to walk more than one step without feeling dizzy, he fled the Reed People’s village. It took him several weeks to reach the port of Zanzibar, where he survived as best he could until he was able to stow away on a ship bound for London. He was back ten months after he had set out, but his experiences had changed him utterly.
It had been a disastrous voyage, and naturally enough Sebastian Murray did not believe a word of his story. He had no idea what had happened to his most experienced explorer during the months he had gone missing, but he was clearly unwilling to accept Tremanquai’s tales of Reed People and their ridiculous holes in the air, which he considered the simple ravings of a lunatic. And his suspicions were borne out as Tremanquai proved incapable of living a normal life with his ex-widow and their two daughters. His wife would doubtless have preferred to carry on taking flowers to his grave rather than live with the haunted misfit Africa had returned to her. Tremanquai veered between states of apathy and random fits of madness that swiftly turned the hitherto harmonious family home upside down. His accesses of insanity, which occasionally drove him to run naked through the streets or shoot at the hats of passersby from his window, were a constant menace to the otherwise peaceful neighborhood, and he was eventually carted off to the asylum at Guy’s Hospital where they simply locked him away.
Yet he was not entirely abandoned. Unbeknownst to his father, Gilliam Murray went to see him in the hospital as often as he could. He was moved by the grief he felt at seeing one of his best men reduced to such a wretched state, but also thrilled to hear him narrate that incredible story. Murray was then barely twenty and he visited the explorer with the eagerness of a child going to see a puppet show, and Tremanquai never disappointed him. Sitting on the edge of his cot, his gaze straying towards the damp patches on the walls, he needed no encouragement to retell the tale of the Reed People, embellishing it with new and extraordinary details each time, grateful for the audience and for being given time enough to inflate his fantasy. For a while, Gilliam believed he would regain his sanity, but after four years of being locked up, Tremanquai decided to hang himself in his cell. He left a note on a grubby piece of paper. In a spidery scrawl that could just as well have been his normal writing as distorted by his inner torment, he stated ironically that he was departing this world for another, which was only one of the many that existed.
By that time Gilliam had begun working in his father’s company. Although, despite the visits, Tremanquai’s story still seemed to him sheer madness, but perhaps for that very reason, and because becoming infected by the man’s madness was the only tribute he could pay him, without his father’s knowledge he sent two of his explorers to Africa to search for the nonexistent Reed People. Samuel Kaufman and Forrest Austin were a couple of numbskulls partial to showing off and going on drunken sprees, whose every expedition ended in disaster. But they were the only men his father would not miss, and the only two who would nonchalantly set off to Africa in search of a tribe of singing witches with the power to open doorways to other worlds in the air. They were also the only men to whom, because of their glaring ineptitude, he dared assign a mission as hopeless as that of locating the Reed People, which was really only a modest tribute to the memory of the hapless Oliver Tremanquai. And so Kaufman and Austin left England almost in secret. Neither they nor Gilliam Murray could have known that they would become the most famous explorers of their day. Following instructions, as soon as they set foot in Africa they began sending back telegrams giving news of their progress. Gilliam read these cursorily before placing them in his desk drawer with a sad smile.
Everything changed when, three months later, he received one telling him they had at last found the Reed People. He could not believe it! “Were they playing a joke on him in revenge for having sent them off on a wild goose chase?” Gilliam wondered. But the details contained in their telegrams ruled out any possibility of deceit, because, as far as he remembered, they agreed entirely with those embellishing Oliver Tremanquai’s story. And so, astonished though he was, Gilliam could only conclude that both Tremanquai and they were telling the truth: the Reed People did exist. From that moment on, the telegrams became Gilliam Murray’s reason for getting up in the morning. He awaited their arrival with eager anticipation, reading and rereading them behind the locked door of his office, unwilling for the time being to share the amazing discovery with anyone, not even his father.