The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(176)
Clayton scarcely had a grip on Wells’s fingers now. Out of the corner of his eye, Wells thought he saw the captain coming toward them from the other side, clutching the guardrail.
“Try to hang on a bit longer!” Charles’s voice appeared much closer now. Hold on, yes. Wells made a supreme effort to tear his thoughts away from the roar of the water, from his physical discomfort, from the anguish beginning to overwhelm him as he realized he could not see Jane anywhere, and above all from Clayton’s hysterical shouting. He tried instead to focus only on his hands, his two pale, slender writer’s hands, which were ill equipped for their present task of clinging desperately to the inspector’s one good hand, resisting the inevitable slide.
“You have to travel back to a time before the inevitable happens! Try to remember your dream at the farm, the nightmare that sparked off the journey I witnessed!” Clayton cried, his face turning purple. “Remember . . . and try . . . to do it . . . again!”
Then Wells lifted his birdlike face and looked at the inspector, the tendons of whose neck were stretched to the snapping point and who looked back at him for an eternal moment during which Wells knew he was about to fall, that Clayton was about to let go of him, because what he saw in the inspector’s eyes was a farewell and an unspoken apology.
“Do it! Trust me, you can do it! Only you can save us!” he cried out for the last time.
Close by, Wells heard Charles’s voice ring out and even glimpsed an arm reaching out to him.
“Give me your hand, Wells!”
But he was too late. The inspector looked at Charles, smiling, and at that very moment Wells felt Clayton’s fingers go limp, releasing Wells’s hands and letting him plummet into the murky water. And as he flailed in the air, trying desperately to cling to nothing, Wells must have remembered the nightmare he had at the farm. Or perhaps he remembered it later, after he felt the brutal impact of the water and the force of the whirlpool dragging him toward the Thames, or in that no-man’s-land between the present and the past called the fourth dimension. He wasn’t sure. All these events had happened in such a confused, dizzying, unreal way. But he certainly remembered it, and it was the same recurring nightmare that had tormented him over the past few years, in which he was falling through an endless space, yet without the feeling that he was moving. This sensation had always puzzled him. But not any longer, he told himself, for at last he had understood that his body was moving solely through time. He was falling through time.
Wells shook his head, smiling to himself as he remembered how he had resisted the notion that he could travel through time, despite Clayton’s having assured him he had seen Wells vanish for four hours into the time continuum. However, he had no choice now but to accept it: he, H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, could travel through time thanks to the mechanism Clayton had assured him was lodged in his brain, the same one to which the Envoy had referred, something he must have activated because of all the accumulated tension, as he had done while asleep at the farm. But, whereas that time he had traveled only four paltry hours, now he must have activated it with the force of a colossus, for he had tumbled almost seventy years down the precipice of time.
Still unable to believe it, Wells threw the newspaper back into the bin and, like a bewildered ghost, began traipsing through the unfinished city, trying to assimilate the fact that he was now in the past, more than half a century before the time to which he really belonged. He ambled almost mechanically through the streets of his city, feeling the same fascination Murray’s time tourists must have felt when he sent them to the year 2000. Captivated, Wells glanced around him with a strange feeling of incredulity and a certain unease, astonished to find himself in a London he knew only from history books and old newspapers. And his fascination intensified because he knew how the city would change over the years, into something that those now crossing its streets paved with Scottish granite or fired clay, where public transport was limited to a few mule-drawn omnibuses, could scarcely imagine. Wells walked for what seemed like hours, unable to stop, still refusing to accept the situation. He knew that the moment he did, his vague unease would give way to terror, because, much as this familiar yet alien landscape thrilled him, he could not forget he was stranded in the past, where things were very different from in his own time. London was reduced to the City and a few neighborhoods such as Pimlico, Mayfair, Soho, and Bloomsbury, and south of the river, Lambeth and Southwark. There were almost no buildings to the west of Hyde Park or south of Vauxhall Gardens. Chelsea was scarcely more than a village, linked to London by the King’s Road, and like a green tide, the countryside reached in as far as Islington, Finsbury Fields, and Whitechapel, right to the foot of the Roman wall. From Knightsbridge to Piccadilly, Wells found signs of a rural London that was still clinging on: everywhere there were farmhouses, orchards, stables, and even mills. Trafalgar Square was no more than an empty lot where the royal carriages were parked.
Tired from walking for so long, Wells sat on a bench and tried once and for all to accept that what he was seeing was not a fake backdrop but the real 1829, where time ended, for on the other side was an abyss. Incredible though it seemed, the tomorrow he had traveled from had yet to happen. And now he was adrift in a time where he did not belong, where none of the people he knew had been born, and from which he had no idea how to return, or whether such a thing was even feasible. He had traveled there because of the tension that seemed to set in motion the strange machinery lodged in his brain. He was not sure he could reproduce this effect through suggestion. But even if he could, what good would it do unless he was able to choose his destination? He would be traveling blindly and might end up even farther back in time, something that horrified him, for the deeper into the past he ventured, the more alien and hostile the world would seem to him. It was best to stay where he was, in 1829, and wait for something, he knew not what, to happen.