The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(171)

“Hang on, Clayton!” I cried, clambering to my feet to help the inspector hoist Wells up.

I dragged myself over to them as fast as my bruised body would allow, trying to ignore the stabbing pain coming from my ribs, even as I saw Clayton shout something at Wells, trying to make himself heard above the din of the water. A few yards beyond where Wells and Clayton were suspended above the pool, I saw the captain, who had managed to scale the ladder and was approaching them with his muscular arms. Even so, I was closer to them than he was.

“Try to hang on a bit longer!” I cried, gritting my teeth to stop myself fainting from the pain.

But they were too busy shouting at each other, and neither of them seemed to hear me. When at last I reached them, I could hear what at that very moment Clayton was shouting to Wells, his neck straining, the thick tendons stretched to the snapping point: “Do it! Trust me, you can do it! Only you can save us!”

Not understanding what the inspector was referring to, I also cried out. “Give me your hand, Wells!” I stretched out my arm, gripping the guardrail with my other hand.

The inspector looked at me and smiled, exhausted from his terrible exertion. Then his eyes rolled back and he passed out. Unable to grab the two men in time, I watched as they plummeted into the basin forty feet below. The captain, arriving from the other direction, dived after them and managed to grab Clayton before he disappeared underwater. But I realized he couldn’t rescue Wells as well and so, without considering that I might lose consciousness as I hit the water, I leapt over the guardrail, plunging into that dirty, foul-smelling pond. The impact increased the pain in my ribs, but not so much that I lost consciousness. The water was terribly murky, and when I had managed to collect myself, I dived down, swimming desperately back and forth, struggling against the terrible power of the whirlpool threatening to suck me down to the bottom. Try as I might, I could not see Wells. When my lungs felt as if they were going to burst, I came up to the surface. And then I felt the tail coil around my neck and lift me into the air.

That was the end of our desperate flight. When one of the monsters fished me out of the water with its tail and hurled me onto the side of the basin, together with the rest of my companions, I realized we had been taken prisoner. The Envoy was standing before us, once more in the guise of Wells, leading us to deduce that Clayton’s exploding hand must have annihilated only the few of his fellow Martians who were heading the chase. Two years on, I can still remember vividly the look of defeat on our faces as we glanced at one another beside the basin, breathless and weak, and our anxiety about our future, an anxiety that today seems almost laughable compared to the dismal fate that awaited us. But my clearest memory was of Jane frantically calling to Wells, crying out his name over and over until her voice cracked. But her cries paled in comparison to the Envoy’s bellow of rage when his fellow Martians emerged from the depths of the basin to announce that the author was nowhere to be seen: his most precious cockroach had escaped, taking his secret with him. And, unfortunately for the Envoy, this changed the universe into an unfathomable place, where anything was possible. To this day, I have no idea what became of Wells. I assume he must have passed out when he hit the water and then drowned, his body flushed out into the Thames. And, although it might not seem so, he could not have wished for a better end.

Just now, beyond the gloomy forests that surround the Martian camp, the sun is sinking behind the ruined city of London, and in my cell I am hurrying to finish writing this diary, hours before my own life ends, for I am certain I shall not survive another day. My body is going to give out at any moment, or perhaps it will be my heart, this morass of despair and bitterness I carry around in my chest. Fortunately, I have succeeded in reaching the end of my story. I only hope that whilst I did not manage to be the hero of this tale, whoever reads these pages will at least have found me an adequate narrator. My life ends here, a life I wish I could have lived differently. But there is no time to make amends. All I can do now is record in these pages my belated yet heartfelt remorse.

From my cell I can see night gathering over the Martian pyramid, this structure that symbolizes better than any flag the conquest of a planet, a planet that once belonged to us, the human race. On it we forged our History, we gave the best and the worst of ourselves. Yet all this will be forgotten when the last man on Earth perishes, ending an entire species. With him, all our hopes will die.

And that is something that, although I still don’t understand it, I have come to accept.

Charles Leonard Winslow, model prisoner, the Martian Camp, Lewisham





XXXVII

ALTHOUGH DAWN FOUND HIM STILL ALIVE, Charles had nevertheless hidden the diary in his trousers before descending into the depths of the pyramid, convinced this would be his last day. Having spent the whole night wracked with fever and convulsions, he was forced to confront the day’s work, putting up with the inquisitive stares of the Martians, who were no doubt expecting him to collapse at any moment. But to his surprise, he managed to stay upright, transporting the barrels, willing his body not to give way, not to dissolve like a cloud unraveled by the breeze, reminding himself now and then to conserve enough energy to bury the diary.

When he reemerged aboveground, more dead than alive, he stumbled over to the feeding machines, where a line of prisoners was already waiting to be given their second ration of the day, before retiring finally to their cells. Charles walked past, averting his gaze, then came to a halt a few yards from where he believed the invisible ray that interacted with their neck shackles began to operate. He burrowed a hole in the ground with trembling hands, and, making sure no one was looking, buried the diary there. He wished he could have sent it by carrier pigeon, in a bold act of resistance, to a country in the old Europe where there might still be free human beings, but he had to be content with burying it within the confines of the camp. He spread a few stones on top and gazed at the tiny mound for a few moments. He didn’t know for whom he was leaving the diary there. Conceivably no one would ever find it, and time would disintegrate the pages before they were read. Or perhaps a Martian would stumble on it in a few days’ time and destroy it immediately. On reflection, he would prefer this than the creature reading it aloud to his companions, making fun of Charles’s lamentable prose, his banal meditations on the nature of love, or the futile attempts he and his companions made to escape the inevitable. But it made little difference whether the diary was found or not, he told himself, for now he felt ashamed of his reasons for writing it. He hadn’t done it to celebrate Gilliam and Emma’s love, or to document what he had discovered about the Martians, as he claimed in the diary. No, he had been compelled to write it, he acknowledged in a sudden fit of sincerity, by the same selfishness that had always motivated his actions: to show himself to the world in a good light, to record for posterity that despite having wasted his life, at least in his final days on Earth he had managed to act like any other dignified human being.