The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(120)
“I suspect God is too busy today to concern Himself with us, Mr. Murray. We are going to a place outside His jurisdiction,” he said, striding down the corridor.
Wells trotted after him, shaking his head. Murray found himself imitating the author’s gesture, and he stepped aside for Emma, who, before leaving the room, glanced over her shoulder at the Map of the Sky.
“Don’t you want to take it with you? Are you going to leave it here?” the millionaire asked her uneasily. “We could roll it up and—”
“There’s no need,” she interrupted, smiling. “I carry it inside me. You saw, remember?”
Murray nodded, closing the door quietly behind them, as though out of respect for the map lying asleep on the floor, depicting a benevolent but evidently erroneous universe.
XXIX
“IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF A SAFE PLACE?” MURRAY asked, casting a dejected glance at his surroundings. “I think you overrate your home, Clayton.”
The inspector’s house was a modest dwelling on the Euston Road. It comprised a sitting room and a study on the ground floor and several bedrooms on the upper floors, each smaller than the last, so that the house diminished in size as it ascended. Wells knew those cramped houses that lined the streets of Bloomsbury better than he would have liked, for he had lived in one as a student, and they had always struck him as perfect examples of the criminal lack of planning that was endemic throughout London. They had traveled via Blackfriars Bridge, the Victoria Embankment, Covent Garden, and Bloomsbury, and had driven down the narrowest streets, only emerging when absolutely necessary into the main thoroughfares, where an ever-thickening multitude of panic-stricken people were running hither and thither as the explosions came gradually closer. Clearly, Londoners had finally realized the city was not the impregnable fortress they had been led to believe, even though none had yet seen the tripods. As he watched them scatter in all directions, Wells reflected that those poor wretches were fleeing the terrors created by their own imaginations, encouraged by the deafening explosions. As the carriage with the ornate “G” made its way through the human tide flooding the streets, and the author scanned the crowd in the hope of glimpsing Jane, they could hear snippets of conversation confirming their fears. They heard, for example, that Queen Victoria had been assassinated, that someone had broken into Windsor Castle, brutally murdering her guard and servants, leaving not a single person alive in the building. A similar thing had happened at the London Fire Brigade’s headquarters, the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Hospital Chelsea, and others of the city’s institutions. They also heard that someone had let out all the prisoners in Pentonville and Newgate prisons. Everyone was at a loss as to how others could use the situation to commit seemingly gratuitous acts of violence, how anyone could do something so insane as to release criminals and slay ministers. The four in the carriage knew, of course. They knew these brutal attacks were not arbitrary, much less human. Creatures like the one they had come across at Scotland Yard were perpetrating them, following a plan to destabilize the city’s defenses from within that had probably been elaborated over years. In fact, the tripods were simply assault troops, the heralds of destruction, crude symbols of a campaign that also had a more calculating side.
There, in Clayton’s house, the deafening blasts of the tripods seemed to reach them from several directions at once. The noise was coming from Chelsea, Islington, and Lambeth, and even from the other side of Regent’s Park, toward Kilburn. As they had suspected, not only had the invaders from space broken through the line of defense at Richmond, they were also breaching the army’s blockade elsewhere and were at that very moment overrunning the city from different, if not all directions. The whole of London would soon be at the mercy of the Martians, and there would be nowhere for them to hide, in any case not in Clayton’s house, which seemed to them flimsy at best. However, the inspector apparently did not share this view. He simply smiled enigmatically at the millionaire’s remark and asked them to follow him. He led them to the basement, a poorly lit, airless part of the house where the kitchen and the coal cellar were located. Still smiling, he began rooting around in the oven.
“What are you doing?” Murray asked angrily. “Are you going to offer us a cup of tea? It’s very kind of you, Clayton, but I doubt we will be able to relax sufficiently to enjoy it with the sound of those accursed tripods closing in on us—”
The millionaire was unable to finish his sentence, for at that moment Clayton pulled a lever inside the oven, and, thanks to some hidden mechanism, the kitchen wall began to move. They all looked on in astonishment as it parted like a stage curtain, revealing a space no bigger than a closet, with a trapdoor set in the floor. With a polite grin, Clayton ushered them through, and once they were all packed inside, he waited for the wall to slide back to its original position. Then he opened the trapdoor and began walking down a narrow flight of steps into the gloom below.
“Follow me,” he commanded. “And would the last one down please close the trapdoor.”
To everyone’s surprise, the stairs led to a vast stone chamber, furnished in a luxurious and exotic fashion, as though it were the refuge of a king. Clayton was already lighting the small lamps scattered about the luxurious room, while the others studied the refuge with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Shelves of books with embossed bindings lined the walls, the floor was covered in silk Persian rugs, Chinese vases stood in every corner, a set of Venetian glasses glistened in a cabinet, and armchairs and couches of varying styles had been arranged throughout the room. There was even a magnificent marble hearth, whose chimney must have climbed through the house above, or twisted through the rock, spewing out its smoke God knew where. The chamber appeared to contain everything necessary to spend a reasonable amount of time there, for next to the vast room was a tiny pantry, seemingly stocked with all manner of provisions and useful objects.