The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(180)

Wells leapt resolutely to his feet, firmly grasping the harpoon, and that was when he felt it. He glanced about for a few seconds, slightly dazed, sensing that something was wrong. Everything looked exactly as it had a moment before—the burnt-out ship, the bodies strewn over the snow, the monster about to rip his companions to shreds—and at the same time everything seemed far away. Not the actual distances, which remained the same, but everything else: the pale dawn light was even fainter, the cold was sharper, his clothes were not damp from the snow, and there was no smell of charred wood or corpses, not even of his own sweat. There was a lack of intensity, vividness, color, of whatever it was that made things look alive. It was as if everything had become remote, while remaining exactly where it was. As though he were no longer in that place, but in the memory of that place, in the moment that had already passed. And suddenly, it struck Wells with a painful, unassailable certainty that it was about to happen again, he was about to travel through time. With trembling hands, he hurriedly lit the fuses, praying his body would remain in the present a few moments longer. He did not know how far in advance these symptoms, this subtle fading of reality, announced the actual leap, because he had been unconscious both on the farm and in the sewer basin, but he hoped he at least had enough time to throw the harpoon. He saw the monster’s body tense, preparing to attack. Hang on, Wells told himself, don’t leap through time, damn it, not yet. Taking a run up, he swung his arm back and launched the harpoon at the figure of the Envoy, convinced he would miss, and that he might even hit Allan or Reynolds. To his astonishment, he saw the harpoon plunge into the creature’s back, easily piercing its bony carapace. The Envoy gave a terrible cry and tried hopelessly to pull the harpoon out as it writhed in agony, going through a frenzied series of metamorphoses that revealed to Wells the succession of bodies it had adopted until then. Then, with a muffled blast that sounded as distant to Wells as the mountains on the horizon, the creature was at last blown into a thousand pieces. Unable to get out of the way, Wells was sprayed with green blood and pelted with fragments of flesh and bone, which made him glow faintly as, exhausted, he fell to his knees in the snow. The smoke from the blast dispersed, and he was able to glimpse Reynolds and Allan gazing at him with a mixture of disbelief and gratitude, safe and sound on the ice, though oddly ethereal, as if they had been painted on a sheet lit from behind.

Realizing he had killed the Envoy, Wells finally gave in to that strange sensation. He had killed the Envoy, he told himself, as the accumulated fatigue and tension gave way to an increasing feeling of vertigo. Suddenly he seemed to become weightless, as though he had been torn out of his body and away from the painful weariness overwhelming him, which seemed to be keeping him in one piece. But this sensation was fleeting, and a moment later, Wells felt himself once more in his body, doubled over by his own weight. Suddenly he vomited, spraying a mouthful of bile over the snow. He coughed once, twice, three times, trying to recover from the dizziness. When his vision grew less blurred, he saw he was still kneeling in the snow, which seemed to have regained its proper consistency and was once again making him cold and wet the way snow always did. But when he could not see Allan or Reynolds in front of him, he realized he was in a different time.





XL

AND YET, HOW COULD HE KNOW WHAT YEAR HE was in if he was surrounded by the same endless expanse of snow as before, devoid of any trace of civilization? He could just as well have traveled into the past as into the future, but either way it did not matter very much, he was still facing the same conditions, was just as vulnerable to exposure and exhaustion. When he had recovered from his dizziness, Wells glanced about mournfully and confirmed he was utterly alone: there was no sign of the Annawan, the monster, or his companions. And what did that tell him? Not a great deal, in truth. The ship not being there could mean he was in the past, in a year preceding 1830. Alternatively, it could mean he had traveled sufficiently far into the future for the remains of the Annawan to have disintegrated. Whatever the truth, he was alone in the middle of a patch of ice in the Antarctic, exposed to the harsh elements, without food or equipment, and with no hope of survival. This thought caused him to panic, and for a few moments Wells vented his rage, shouting into the silence. He could not have found a better place: shouting there was like not shouting at all. After a while, slightly calmer, gently cradled by his exhaustion, Wells finally felt ready to accept calmly that he would die there, either from hunger or exposure. In both cases it would be a horrible death. His only consolation was that he had killed the Envoy, though there was no way of knowing whether or not he had also prevented the invasion. He wanted to believe he had, and that the Envoy’s brothers would one day become extinct, slowly poisoned by the Earth’s atmosphere. Yes, he wanted to die believing he had restored peace to his time.

He began walking for no reason, simply because the cold was much more bearable if he kept moving. He drifted aimlessly, indifferent to where he was going, doubting if he could find his bearings or that there was any point in trying, immersed in the depressing gloom of the landscape, each step heavy with despair. Nothing Wells had ever experienced in life had terrified him more than the situation in which he found himself at that moment. For what awaited him was a slow, agonizing, lonely death, probably plagued with hallucinations and delirium, and no one deserved to die like that, forgotten by the world, forgotten by friends. He would die without dignity, alone, as though his death were a depressing ceremony no mourner wanted to attend. He would be the only witness to his own death. He would not even know when he was dying, what date would be carved on his imaginary headstone.