The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(94)
“What the devil are you doing?” he shouted.
The reply was a whiplash, urging the horses on. The coach rattled forward to meet the tripod.
“You’ve gone mad, Murray!” he cried.
“I’m sure that thing can’t turn as quickly as we can,” he heard the millionaire cry above the wheels’ infernal screeching.
As the coach began hurtling toward the tripod, Wells realized in astonished disbelief that Murray was hoping to pass beneath the colossus as if it were a bridge.
“Good God . . . the man is insane,” he muttered, seeing how the tripod had halted to take aim at them.
He fell back into the coach and held the girl as tightly as he could.
“He’s going to pass under its legs,” he explained in a voice choked by fear.
“W-what?” she stammered.
“He’s crazy . . .”
Emma clung to him desperately, trembling. Wells could feel her fragility, her warmth, her perfume, her womanly shape pressing itself into the hollows of his body. He could not help but lament the fact that the only chance a man like him would have to hold a woman like her was when they were fleeing a Martian invasion together, even though this was a fleeting notion that had no place at a moment like this, when both of them were being thrown at high speed against this metal monster, which in a few seconds would reduce them to ashes with its heat ray. But while waiting for death, in those few seconds when their lives extended beyond any reason, Wells had time to realize that the quandary in which they found themselves could not only make one a hero or a coward but also drive one insane.
XXIII
AND WHILE THE REAL WELLS’S HEART WAS racing fearfully, that of the other Wells, of whose existence he was completely unaware, was beating calmly, like a gentle melody on a xylophone. For the invasion he was heading was going according to plan. In a couple of hours, the tripods would arrive at the gates of London, where the brave and admirable British army waited behind their Maxim guns, unaware they were about to be slaughtered. Studying the map of the planet pinned to the wall of his headquarters, the other Wells smiled as he imagined the coming massacre.
I hope that despite the time that has elapsed, you will not have forgotten about the creature that adopted Wells’s appearance and that, like the conductor of an orchestra, is currently directing the attack from his hiding place. How did he get there? you will ask. Let us go back a few weeks, to the point where we left our story to travel to the Antarctic wastes, and peer inside the copper-riveted sarcophagus lying forgotten in the basement of the Natural History Museum. There, amid the industrious sounds of shifting flesh and bone, a being from another planet is rearranging its physiognomy by taking on that of the author H. G. Wells. Wells has just been steered out of the chamber by another, less brilliant author named Garrett P. Serviss. Both authors left the building unaware of the fatal consequences of their actions, in particular Wells’s fleeting stroke of the extraterrestrial’s arm. That gesture of timid admiration deposited on the creature’s skin was the greatest gift Wells could ever have given it: a minuscule and insignificant drop of his blood, which nevertheless contained everything he was. And everything the creature needed in order to come back to life.
And so, in the seclusion of its coffin, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, the being from outer space slowly took on a human appearance, nurtured and guided by Wells’s blood. The creature’s spine had shrunk to the length imprinted in Wells’s blood, and while its skull was reforming at one end, at the other a narrow pelvis was sprouting two rather short femurs, brittle as twigs, which were instantly attached to two tibias and fibulas by a pair of knee joints. Gradually the creature fabricated the framework of a skeleton, cloaking it in a mantle of flesh, nerves, and tendons. Once the sternum and ribs were in place, the spongy lungs appeared, emitting through the narrow conduit of the newly installed trachea a puff of vapor that filled the urn with the moist novelty of breath. The liver and intestines were formed, while the deltoids, triceps, biceps, and other muscles threaded themselves around the bony frame, like armor plating. Through the intricate calligraphy of veins and arteries a furtive current of blood now flowed, fed by the heart, which was already pulsing in the chest cavity. From a blurry mass of skin on the thing’s face emerged the birdlike countenance of the author, an exact replica of Wells upon the carbon paper onto which the hazy features of a few sailors from the Annawan, and even those of another author, Edgar Allan Poe, had previously been imprinted. A freshly formed mouth gave an almost triumphant, fierce smile that betrayed a festering desire for revenge, decades old, while a slender pair of pale human hands clutched the chains binding it before snapping them with an otherworldly strength. Then the lid of the coffin lifted from inside with an ominous creak, shattering the surrounding silence. Yet had anyone happened to be in the room to witness the miraculous resurrection, they would not have seen a sinister creature of the Cosmos rising from its tomb, but rather H.G. waking up following a drunken spree that, God only knew how, had ended with him in that coffin. However, despite its ordinary appearance, what emerged from that box was a deadly creature, a fearful being, or, if you prefer, Evil incarnate. Evil in all its glory, bursting once more into the world of rational man, as it had done before in the form of Frankenstein’s monster, or of Count Dracula, or any of the monsters with which Man had disguised the intangible horror that haunted him from birth; that unnerving darkness that began poisoning his wretched soul from the moment his nanny blew out the candle shielding his cradle.