The Map of Time

‘I imagine right now you must be wishing Captain Shackleton would appear. Correct?’

The voice did not come from the automaton, although at that stage nothing would have surprised him, but from somewhere behind Wells. He recognised it instantly. He would have liked never to hear it again, but somehow, perhaps because he was a writer, he had known that, sooner or later, he would bump into Murray: the story in which they were both taking part needed a satisfying conclusion, one that would not frustrate the readers’ expectations. Wells would never have envisaged the encounter taking place in the future, though, for the simple reason that he had never believed in the possibility of travelling into the future. He turned slowly.

A few yards away, Gilliam Murray was watching him, with an amused grin. He was wearing a purple suit and a green top hat, like a human descendant of those beautifully plumed biblical birds of paradise. Sitting on its haunches next to him was an enormous golden dog.

‘Welcome to the year 2000, Mr Wells,’ Murray said, jovially. ‘Or should I say to my vision of the year 2000?’

Wells looked at him suspiciously, one eye on the eerily frozen group of automatons drawn up before them as though posing for a portrait.

‘Are you afraid of my automatons? But how can you be scared of such an unconvincing future?’ Murray asked sarcastically. He walked slowly towards the automaton at the front of the group and, grinning deliberately at Wells, like a child about to perpetrate some mischief, placed his fleshy hand on its shoulder and gave it a push. The automaton keeled over backwards, crashing noisily into the one behind it, which in turn toppled on to the one next to it until, one after another, they had collapsed on to the ground. They fell with the fascinating slowness of a glacier breaking off.

When it was finally over, Murray spread the palms of his hands as if to apologise for the din. ‘With no one inside, they’re just hollow shells, mere disguises,’ he said.

Wells gazed at the pile of upturned automatons, then back at Murray, struggling with his dizzying feeling of unreality.

‘Forgive me for bringing you to the year 2000 against your will, Mr Wells,’ apologised Murray, feigning dismay. ‘If you’d accepted one of my invitations it wouldn’t have been necessary, but as you didn’t, I had no alternative. I wanted you to see it before I closed it down. I had to send one of my men to chloroform you while you were asleep, although from what he told me, you occupy your nights with other things. He got a real shock when you came in after he’d climbed through the attic window’

Murray’s words shed a welcome light on the author’s whirling thoughts, and he lost no time in tying up the necessary loose ends. He realised immediately he had not travelled to the year 2000, as everything appeared to indicate. The machine in his attic was still just a toy, and the razed city of London was no more than a vast stage set designed to hoodwink people. No doubt, on seeing him enter the attic, Murray’s henchman had hidden behind the time machine and waited, unsure what to do, perhaps contemplating carrying out Murray’s orders using force. Fortunately he had not needed to resort to an ignoble act of violence, as Wells himself had given the man the perfect opportunity to use the chloroform-soaked handkerchief he must have had at the ready by sitting in the time machine.

Of course, once he realised he was standing on a simple stage set and that he had not undergone some impossible journey through time, Wells felt greatly relieved. The situation he found himself in was by no means pleasant, of course, but at least it was logical.

‘I trust you haven’t harmed my wife,’ he said, not quite managing to sound threatening.

‘Have no fear,’ Murray reassured him, waving a hand in the air. ‘Your wife is a deep sleeper, and my men can be very quiet when they have to be. I’m sure that the lovely Jane is at this very moment sleeping peacefully, oblivious to your absence.’

Wells was about to make a riposte, but thought better of it. Murray was addressing him with the rather overblown arrogance of people in high places who have the world at their feet. Evidently, the tables had turned since their last meeting. If, during their interview at his house in Woking, Wells had been the one wielding the sceptre of power, now Murray held it between his fleshy fingers.

Over the intervening months, Murray had changed: he had become an altogether different creature. He was no longer the aspiring writer, obliged to kneel at his master’s feet, but the owner of the most lucrative business in London before whom everyone grotesquely bowed down. Wells, of course, did not think he deserved any kind of adulation, and if he allowed him to use that superior tone it was because he considered Murray was entitled to do so: after all, he was the outright winner of the duel they had been fighting during the past few months. And had not Wells used a similar tone when the sceptre had been in his hands?

Gilliam Murray spread his arms wide, like a ringmaster announcing the acts at a circus, symbolically embracing the surrounding devastation. ‘Well, what do you think of my world?’ he asked.

Wells glanced about him with utter indifference.

‘Not bad for a glasshouse manufacturer, don’t you agree, Mr Wells? That was my occupation before you gave me another reason to go on living.’

Wells could not fail to notice the responsibility Murray had ascribed to him in the forging of his destiny, but he preferred not to comment. Undeterred by Wells’s frostiness, Murray invited him with a beckoning finger, to take a stroll through the future. The author paused for a moment, then reluctantly followed him.

‘I don’t know whether you’re aware that glasshouses are a most lucrative business,’ said Gilliam, once Wells had drawn level with him. ‘Nowadays everyone sets aside part of their garden for these cosy spaces, where grown-ups like to relax and children play, and it is possible to grow plants and fruit trees out of season. Although my father, Sebastian Murray, had, as it were, loftier ambitions.’

They had scarcely walked a few paces when they came to a small precipice. Unconcerned about taking a tumble, Murray trotted absurdly down the slope, arms stretched out at his sides to keep his balance. The dog bounded after him. Wells let out a sigh before beginning the descent, taking care not to trip over the mangled bits of pipe and grinning skulls poking out of the ground. He did not wish to fall over again. Once was quite enough for one day.

‘My father sensed the beginning of a new future in those transparent houses rich people erected in their gardens,’ Murray shouted over his shoulder, ‘the first step towards a world of translucent cities, glass buildings that would put an end to secrets and lies, a better world where privacy would no longer exist!’

When he reached the bottom, he offered his hand to Wells, who declined, not bothering to conceal his impatience at the whole situation. Murray seemed not to take the hint, and resumed strolling, this time along an apparently gentler path.

‘I confess that as a child I was fascinated by the glorious vision that gave my father’s life meaning,’ he went on. ‘For a while I even believed it would be the true face of the future. Until the age of seventeen, when I began working with him. It was then that I realised it was no more than a fantasy. This amusement for architects and horticulturalists would never be transformed into the architecture of the future, not only because man would never give up his privacy in the interests of a more harmonious world, but because architects themselves were opposed to glass and iron constructions, claiming the new materials lacked the aesthetic values that they claimed defined architectural works.

‘The sad truth was that, however many glass-roofed railway stations my father and I built up and down the country, we could never usurp the power of the brick. I resigned myself to spending the rest of my life manufacturing fancy glasshouses. But who could content themselves with such a petty insignificant occupation, Mr Wells? Not I, for one. Yet I had no idea what would satisfy me either.

‘By the time I was in my early twenties I had enough money to buy anything I wanted, however whimsical, and as you might expect life had begun to feel like a card game I had already won and was beginning to tire of. To cap it all, around that time my father died of a sudden fever, and as I was his only heir I became even richer. But his passing also made me painfully aware that most people die without ever having realised their dreams. However enviable my father’s life may have seemed from the outside, I knew it hadn’t been fulfilling, and mine would be no different. I was convinced I would die with the same look of disappointment on my face. I expect that’s why I turned to reading, so as to escape the dull, predictable life unfolding before me.

‘We all begin reading for one reason or another, don’t you think? What was yours, Mr Wells?’

‘I fractured my tibia when I was eight,’ said the author, visibly uninterested.

Murray looked at him, slightly surprised, then finally smiled and nodded. ‘I suppose geniuses like you have to start young,’ he reflected. ‘It took me a little longer. I was twenty-five before I began exploring my father’s ample library. He had been widowed early on, and had built another wing on to the house, probably to use up some of the money my mother would otherwise have helped him to spend. Nobody but I would ever read those books. So I devoured every one – every single one. That was how I discovered the joys of reading. It’s never too late, don’t you agree? Although, I confess, I wasn’t a very discerning reader. Any book about lives that weren’t my own was of some interest to me.

‘But your novel, Mr Wells . . . Your novel captivated me like no other! You didn’t speak of a world you knew, like Dickens, or of exotic places such as Africa or Malaya, like Haggard or Salgari, or even of the moon, like Verne. No, in The Time Machine you evoked something even more unattainable: the future. Nobody before you had been audacious enough to visualise it!’

Wells shrugged off Murray’s praise, and carried on walking, trying not to trip over the dog, which had the irritating habit of zigzagging across his path. Verne, of course, had beaten him to it, but Gilliam Murray need not know that.

Murray resumed his monologue, again heedless of the author’s lack of interest. ‘After that, as you know, a spate of authors, doubtless inspired by your novel, hastened to publish their visions of the future. Suddenly bookshop windows were crammed with science-fiction novels. I bought as many as I could, and after several sleepless nights spent devouring them in quick succession, I decided this new genre of literature would be my only reading.’

‘I’m sorry you chose to waste your time on such nonsense,’ muttered Wells, who considered those novels a regrettable blot on the fin-de-siècle literary landscape.

Murray glanced at him before letting out a loud guffaw. ‘Oh, I know those potboilers have little merit,’ he agreed, when he had stopped laughing, ‘but I couldn’t care less about that. The authors of this “nonsense”, as you call it, possess something far more important to me than the ability to create sublime sentences: namely, a visionary intelligence that amazes me and which I wish I had. Most of those works confine themselves to describing a single invention and its effect on mankind. Have you read the novel about the Jewish inventor who devises a machine that magnifies things? It’s a truly awful book, yet I confess the image of an army of giant stag beetles swarming across Hyde Park truly terrified me. Thankfully, they are not all like that. Such ravings apart, some present an idea of the future whose plausibility I enjoy exploring.

‘And there was something else I couldn’t deny: after enjoying a book by Dickens, for example, it would never have occurred to me to try to imitate him, to see whether I was able to concoct a story about the adventures of a street urchin or the hardships of a boy forced to work in a blacking factory, because it seemed to me anyone with a modicum of imagination and time would be able to do that. But to write about the future . . .

‘Ah, Mr Wells, that was different. To me, that seemed a real challenge. It was an undertaking that required intelligence, man’s capacity for deduction. Would I be capable of creating a believable future? I asked myself one night after I’d finished another of those novels. As you will have guessed, I took you as my example because, besides our common interests, we are the same age. It took me a month to write my novel about the future, a piece of science fiction that would display my insight, my powers of invention. Naturally I made every effort to write well, but I was more interested in the novel’s prophetic side. I wanted my readers to find my vision of the future plausible. But most of all I valued the opinion of the writer who had been my guiding light. Your opinion, Mr Wells. I wanted you to be as intellectually stimulated by my novel as I had been by yours.’

The two men’s eyes met, in a silence broken only by the distant cawing of crows.

‘But, as you know, it didn’t happen like that,’ Murray lamented, shaking his head sorrowfully.

The gesture moved Wells, as he considered it the only sincere one Murray had made since they had set off on their walk.

They had come to a halt next to a huge mound of rubble, and there, hands dug into the pockets of his loud jacket, Murray paused for a few moments, staring at his shoes, clearly distressed. Perhaps he was waiting for Wells to place his hand on his shoulder and offer words of solace, which, like the shaman’s chant, would soothe the painful wound Wells himself had inflicted on Murray’s pride. However, the author simply studied him with the disdain of the poacher watching a rabbit struggle in a trap, aware that while seemingly responsible for what was happening, he was a simple mediator, and the animal’s torment was dictated by the cruel laws of nature.

When he realised that the only person capable of alleviating his hurt seemed unwilling to do so, Murray smiled grimly and carried on walking. They went along what – to judge by the grandiose wrought-iron gates and the palatial remains of the buildings amid the rubble – had been a luxurious residential street evoking a life that seemed incongruous amid the devastation, as though man’s proliferation on the planet had been no more than a divine blunder, a ridiculous flowering, doomed to perish under the elements.

‘I shan’t try to deny that at first I was upset when you doubted my abilities as a writer,’ Murray acknowledged, in a voice that seemed to ooze with the slowness of treacle from inside his throat. ‘Nobody enjoys having their work pilloried. But what most vexed me was that you questioned the plausibility of my vision, the future I had so carefully contrived. I admit my response was entirely unacceptable, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologise for having attacked your novel as I did. I’m sure you’ll have guessed that my opinion of it hasn’t changed. I still consider it the work of a genius,’ Gilliam said, laying a faintly ironic emphasis on the final words.

He had recovered his conceited smirk, but Wells had glimpsed a chink in his armour, the crack that from time to time threatened to bring this colossus crashing down. In the face of Murray’s intolerable arrogance, Wells felt almost proud to have been the cause of it.

‘That afternoon, however, I was unable to defend myself other than like a cornered rat,’ Wells heard Murray justify himself. ‘Happily, I came to see things in a different light. Yes, you might say I experienced a kind of epiphany.’

‘Really?’ commented Wells, with dry irony.

‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Sitting opposite you in that chair, I saw I’d chosen the wrong means of presenting my idea of the future to the world. In doing it through a novel I was condemning it to mere fiction, plausible fiction, but fiction all the same, as you had done with your future inhabited by Morlocks and Eloi. But what if I were able to put my idea across without confining it to the restrictive medium of the novel? What if I could present it as something real? Evidently the pleasure of writing a believable piece of fiction would pale beside the incredible satisfaction of having the whole country believe in the reality of my vision of the year 2000.

‘But was this feasible? the businessman in me asked. The conditions for realising such a project seemed perfect. Your novel, Mr Wells, had sparked off a polemic about time travel. People in clubs and tea rooms talked of nothing but the possibility of travelling into the future. It is one of life’s ironies that you fertilised the ground for me to plant my seed. Why not give people what they wished for? Why not offer them a journey to the year 2000, to “my” future? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off, but one thing was certain: I wouldn’t be able to go on living if I didn’t try. Purely by accident, Mr Wells, the way most things happen in life, you gave me a reason to carry on, a goal that, were I to achieve it, would give me the longed-for fulfilment, the elusive happiness I could never obtain from the manufacture of glasshouses.’

Wells was compelled to lower his head to conceal his sympathy for Murray. His words had reminded Wells of the extraordinary chain of events that had delivered him into the loving arms of literature, away from the mediocrity to which his not-so-loving mother had sought to condemn him. And it had been his way with words, a gift he had not asked for, that had spared him the need to find meaning in his life, had exempted him from having to tread the path taken by those who had no idea why they had been born, those who could only experience the conventional, atavistic joy found in everyday pleasures such as a glass of wine or a woman’s caress. Yes, he would have walked among those redundant shadows, unaware that the longed-for happiness he had scarcely glimpsed during his fits of melancholy lay in the keys of a typewriter, waiting for him to bring it to life.

‘On my way back to London I began thinking,’ he heard Murray say. ‘I was convinced people would believe the impossible if it were real enough. In fact, it was not unlike building a glasshouse: if the glass part of the structure was elegant and beautiful enough, nobody would see the solid iron framework holding it up. It would appear to be floating in the air as if by magic.

‘The first thing I did the next morning was to sell the business my father had built up from scratch. In doing so I felt no regret, in case you were wondering, quite the opposite, if anything, because with the money from the sale I would be able literally to build the future, which, ultimately, had been my father’s dream. From the proceeds, I purchased this old theatre. The reason I chose it was because right behind it, looking out over Charing Cross Road, there were two derelict buildings that I also bought. The next step, of course, was to merge the three edifices into one by knocking down the walls to obtain this vast space. Seen from the outside, no one would think it was big enough to house a vast stage set of London in the year 2000. Yet in less than two months, I had created a perfect replica, down to the smallest detail, of the scene in my novel. In fact, the set isn’t nearly as big as it looks, but it seems immense if we walk round it in a circle, don’t you think?’

Was that what they had been doing? Walking round in a circle? Wells thought, containing his irritation. If so, he had to acknowledge that the intricate layout of the debris had taken him in completely, for it made the already sprawling stage set appear even more gigantic, and he would never have imagined it might fit inside a tiny theatre.

‘My own team of blacksmiths made the automatons that gave you such a fright a while ago, as well as the armour worn by Captain Shackleton’s human army’ Murray explained, as he guided Wells through a narrow ravine created by two rows of collapsed buildings. ‘At first I thought of hiring professional actors to dramatise the battle that would change the history of the human race, which I myself had staged so that it would look as appealing and exciting as possible. I immediately discarded the idea because I felt that stage actors, who are famous for being erratic and vain, would be incapable of giving a realistic portrayal of brave, battle-hardened soldiers in an army of the future. More importantly, I thought that if they began to have qualms about the morality of the work they had been hired to do they would be harder to silence. Instead, I employed a bunch of bruisers who had far more in common with the veterans they were supposed to portray. They didn’t mind keeping the heavy metal armour on during the entire performance, and they couldn’t have cared less about my scheme being fraudulent. In spite of all that, I had a few problems, but nothing I wasn’t able to sort out,’ he added, smiling significantly at the author.

Wells understood that with this twisted grin Murray meant to tell him two things: first, that he knew about his involvement in the relationship between Miss Haggerty and Tom Blunt, the young man who had played Captain Shackleton, and second, that he was behind Tom’s sudden disappearance. Wells forced his lips into an expression of horrified shock, which appeared to satisfy Murray.

Wells wanted more than anything to wipe the arrogant smirk off the man’s face by informing him that Tom had survived his own death. Tom himself had told Wells so only two nights earlier when he had appeared at his house to thank him for all he had done for him, and to remind him that if Wells ever needed a pair of strong arms he could call on him.

The ravine opened on to what looked like a small square where a few gnarled, leafless trees still grew. In the middle, Wells noticed something resembling an overly ornate tramcar, whose sides were covered with a mass of chrome-plated tubes. Sprouting from these were dozens of valves and other elaborate accessories, which, on closer observation, he thought could only be for decoration.

‘And this is the Cronotilus, a steam-driven tram that seats thirty,’ declared Murray, proudly, banging one of its sides. ‘The passengers embark in the room next door, ready to travel into the future, unaware that the year 2000 is in a large adjoining space. All I have to do is to transport them here. This distance, about fifty yards,’ he said, gesturing towards a doorway hidden by fog, ‘represents a whole century to them.’

‘But how do you simulate the effect of travelling through time?’ asked Wells, unable to believe Murray’s customers would be satisfied by a simple ride in a tramcar, however ostentatious.

Murray grinned, as though pleased by his question. ‘My hard work would all have been for nothing if I’d failed to find a solution to the niggling problem you have so rightly identified. And, I assure you, it gave me many sleepless nights. Evidently I couldn’t show the effects of travelling into the future as you did in your novel, with snails that moved faster than hares or the moon going through all its phases in seconds. Therefore I had to invent a method of time travel that didn’t oblige me to show such effects, and which, in addition, had no basis in science. I was certain that once I told the newspapers I could travel to the year 2000, every scientist up and down the country would demand to know how the devil such a thing was done. A real dilemma, wouldn’t you say? And after giving the matter careful thought, I could think of only one method of travelling in time that couldn’t be questioned scientifically: by means of magic’

‘Magic?’

‘Yes, what other method could I resort to, if the scientific route wasn’t open to me? I invented a fictitious biography for myself. Before going into the time-travel business, instead of manufacturing dreary glasshouses, my father and I ran a company that financed expeditions, like the scores of others that exist today, intent on disclosing all the world’s mysteries. And, like everybody else, we were desperate to find the source of the Nile, which legend situated in the heart of Africa. We had sent our best explorer there, Oliver Tremanquai, who, after many gruelling adventures, had made contact with an indigenous tribe capable of opening a portal into the fourth dimension by means of magic’

With these words, Murray paused, smiling scornfully at Wells’s attempts to hide his disbelief.

‘The hole was a doorway on to a pink, windswept plain where time stood still,’ he went on, ‘which was no more than my portrayal of the fourth dimension. The plain, a sort of antechamber to other eras, was peppered with holes similar to the portal connecting it to the African village. One of these led to 20 May in the year 2000, on the very day humans fought the decisive battle for the survival of their race against the automatons, amid the ruins of a devastated London. And, having discovered the existence of this magic hole, what else could my father and I do but steal it and bring it to London to offer it to the subjects of Her Imperial Majesty? So that’s what we did. We locked it in a huge iron box purpose-built for the occasion and brought it here. Voilà! I had found the solution, a way of travelling in time that involved no scientific devices. All you had to do to journey into the future was pass through the hole into the fourth dimension aboard the Cronotilus, cross part of the pink plain, and step through another hole into the year 2000. Simple, isn’t it?

‘In order to avoid having to show the fourth dimension, I inhabited it with terrifying, dangerous dragons, creatures of such horrific appearance I was forced to black out the windows in the Cronotilus so as not to alarm the passengers,’ he said, inviting Wells to examine the porthole-shaped windows, painted black as he had said. ‘Once the passengers had climbed aboard the time-tram, I carried them away, using oboes and trombones to conjure up the roars of the dragons roaming the plain. I’ve never experienced the effect from inside the Cronotilus, but it must be very convincing, to judge by the pallor on many passengers’ faces when they return.’

‘But if the hole always comes out in this square at the exact same moment in the year 2000—‘ Wells began.

‘Then each new expedition arrives at the same time as the previous ones,’ Murray cut across him. ‘I know, I know, that’s completely logical. And yet time travel is still such a young idea that not many people have considered the many contradictions it can give rise to. If the portal into the fourth dimension always opens on to the exact same moment in the future, obviously there should be at least two Cronotiluses here, as there have been at least two expeditions. But, as I already said, Mr Wells, not everyone notices such things. In any event, as a precaution against questions the more inquisitive passengers might pose, I instructed the actor who played the guide to explain to them as soon as they arrived in the future, before they even stepped out of the vehicle, that we drove each Cronotilus to a different place, precisely in order to avoid this eventuality.’

Murray waited to see if Wells felt like asking any more questions, but the author appeared immersed in what could only be described as pained silence, a look of impotent sorrow on his face.

‘And,’ Murray went on, ‘as I had anticipated, as soon as I advertised my journeys to the year 2000 in the newspapers, numerous scientists asked to meet me. You should have seen them, Mr Wells. They came in droves, barely able to conceal their contempt, hoping I would show them some device they could gleefully demolish. But I was no scientist. I was just an honest businessman who’d made a chance discovery. Most of them left the meeting indignant, frustrated at having been presented with a method of travel they had no way of questioning or refuting: you either believe in magic or you don’t. Some, however, were thoroughly convinced by my explanation, like your fellow author Conan Doyle. The creator of the infallible Sherlock Holmes has become one of my most vigorous defenders, as you will know if you’ve read any of the numerous articles he devotes to defending my cause.’

‘Doyle would believe in anything, even fairies,’ said Wells, derisively.

‘That’s possible. As you have seen yourself, we can all be deceived if the fraud is convincing enough. And to be honest, far from upsetting me, the regular visits I received from our sceptical men of science gave me great pleasure. Actually, I rather miss them. After all, where else would I have found a more attentive audience? I enjoyed enormously relating Tremanquai’s adventures over and over. As you will have guessed, they were a veiled homage to my beloved Henry Rider Haggard, the author of Solomon’s Mines. In fact, Tremanquai is an anagram of one of his best-known characters, Quatermain, the adventurer who—‘

‘And none of these scientists demanded to see the . . . hole?’ interrupted Wells, still disinclined to believe it had all been so easy.

‘Oh, yes, of course. Many refused to leave without seeing it. But I was prepared for that. My instinct for survival had warned me to construct a cast-iron box identical to the one in my story, supposedly containing the portal to the fourth dimension. I presented it to anyone who wanted to see it, and invited them to go inside, warning them I would have to close the door behind them because, among other things, the box was a barrier that prevented the dragons entering our world. Do you think any of them dared to go in?’

‘I imagine not,’ responded Wells, despondently.

‘That’s correct,’ affirmed Murray. ‘In fact, the entire artifice is based on a box, in which the only thing lurking is our deepest fears. Don’t you think it’s both poetic and exciting?’

Wells shook his head with a mixture of sadness and disbelief at the gullibility of his fellow men, but above all at the scientists’ lack of spirit, their spinelessness when it came to risking their lives in the service of empirical truth.

‘So, Mr Wells, that is how I transport my customers into the future, escaping the time continuum only to plunge back into it somewhere else, like salmon swimming their way upstream. The first expedition was a resounding success,’ Murray boasted. ‘I confess to being surprised at how readily people were taken in by my hoax. But then, as I said before, people see what they wish to see. However, I scarcely had time to celebrate for a few days later the Queen herself asked to see me. Yes, Her Majesty in person requested my humble presence at the palace. I went there prepared to receive my just deserts for my impudence. To my astonishment, however, Her Majesty wanted to see me for a very different reason: to ask if I would organise a private trip to the year 2000 for her.’

Wells stared at him, flabbergasted.

‘That’s right. She and her entourage wanted to see the war of the future that the whole of London was raving about. As you can imagine, I wasn’t too keen on the idea, not only because, naturally, I would be expected to organise the performance free of charge but, given the distinguished nature of our guests, it had to be carried off to perfection – in other words, as convincingly as possible. Luckily there were no mishaps. I think I can even say it was our best performance. The distress on Her Majesty’s face when she saw London razed to the ground spoke for itself. But the following day, she sent for me a second time. Again, I imagined my fraud had been discovered, and again I was astounded to discover the reason for this new summons: Her Majesty wished to make a generous donation to enable me to carry on my research. It’s the honest truth: the Queen herself was willing to finance my swindle. She was keen for me to carry on studying other holes, to open up other routes to other times. But that wasn’t all. She also wanted me to build her a summer palace inside the fourth dimension so that she could spend long periods there, with the aim of escaping the ravages of time and prolonging her life. Naturally, I accepted. What else could I do? Although, of course, I haven’t been able to finish building her palace and I never will. Can you think why?’

‘It must be because the work is continually being delayed by attacks from the ferocious dragons that live in the fourth dimension,’ replied Wells, visibly disgusted.

‘Precisely’ declared Murray, beaming. ‘I see you’re beginning to understand the rules of the game, Mr Wells.’

The author refused to humour him, instead staring at the dog, which was furiously scrabbling in the rubble a few yards from them.

‘Not only did the fact that Her Majesty was taken in by my deception line my pockets, it also banished my fears. I immediately stopped fretting over the letters that appeared like clockwork in the newspapers, written by scientists accusing me of being a charlatan. In any case, people had stopped paying them any attention. Even the swine that kept smearing cow dung on the front of the building no longer bothered me. Actually, at that point, there was only one person who could have exposed me, and that was you, Mr Wells. But I assumed that if you hadn’t already, you never would. And I confess I found your attitude worthy of admiration, that of a truly sporting gentleman who knows when he has lost’

With a smug grin, Murray gestured to Wells to carry on walking with him. They left the square in silence, the dog tagging along behind, and turned into one of the streets obstructed by mounds of rubble.

‘Have you stopped to consider the essence of all this, Mr Wells?’ asked Murray. ‘Look at it this way: what if I had presented this as a simple play I had written about the future instead of passing it off as the real year 2000? I would have committed no offence, and people would have flocked to see it anyway. But I assure you that when they arrived home, none of them would have felt special, or seen the world in a different light. In reality, all I’m doing is making them dream. Isn’t it a shame to think I could be punished for that?’

‘You’d have to ask your customers whether they would be prepared to pay as much to watch a simple play’ replied the author.

‘No, Mr Wells. You’re wrong. The real question you’d have to ask them is whether they’d prefer to discover this had all been a hoax and get their money back or, on the contrary, whether they’d prefer to die believing they had visited the year 2000. And, I can assure you, the majority would prefer not to know. Aren’t there lies that make life more beautiful?’

Wells gave a sigh, but refused to acknowledge that in the end Murray was right. Apparently his fellow men preferred to believe they lived in a century in which science could ferry them to the year 2000, by whatever means, than to be trapped in a time from which there was no hope of escape.

‘Take young Harrington, for example,’ Murray went on, with a playful grin. ‘Do you remember him? If I’m not mistaken, it was a lie that saved his life. A lie in which you agreed to participate.’

Wells was about to remark that there was a world of difference between the purpose behind one lie and the other, but Murray headed him off with another question.

‘Are you aware that it was I who built the time machine you keep in your attic, the little toy that pleases you so much?’

This time Wells was unable to conceal his amazement.

‘Yes, I had it especially made for Charles Winslow, the wretched Andrew Harrington’s cousin.’ Murray chuckled. ‘Mr Winslow came on our second expedition, and a few days later he turned up at my offices asking me to organise a private trip for him and his cousin to the year 1888, the Autumn of Terror. They assured me money was no object, but unfortunately I was unable to satisfy their whim.’

Murray had wandered off the main road towards a pile of debris beyond which a row of shattered rooftops was visible in the distance, darkened by a few clouds looming above.

‘But Mr Winslow’s reason for wanting to travel into the past was so romantic it moved me to help them,’ said Murray, sarcastically, even as, to Wells’s horror, he began scrambling up the hill of rubble. ‘I explained to him that he could only make the journey in a time machine like the one in your novel, and together we hatched a plot, in which, as you know, you played the leading role. If Mr Winslow managed to persuade you to pretend you had a time machine, I would not only produce a replica of the one in your novel, I would also provide him with the actors necessary to play the parts of Jack the Ripper and the whore he murdered. You must be wondering what made me do it. I suppose devising hoaxes can become addictive. And I won’t deny, Mr Wells, that it amused me to involve you in a pantomime similar to the one I had already orchestrated, to see whether you’d agree to take part in it or not.’

Wells was scarcely able to pay attention to what Murray was saying. Clambering up the hill was making him feel distinctly uneasy: the distant horizon had drawn so near that it was within arm’s length. Once they reached the summit, he could see that what was in front of them was no more than a painted wall. Astonished, he passed his hand over the mural. Murray looked at him affectionately.

‘Following the success of the second expedition, and although things had calmed down a lot, I couldn’t help wondering whether there was any sense in carrying on with all this now that I had more than proved my point. The only reason I could think of to justify the effort it would take to organise a third expedition,’ he said, recalling with irritation Jeff Wayne’s pompous delivery of Shackleton’s lines, and how scrawny he looked brandishing his rifle on top of the rock, ‘was money. But I’d already made enough for a dozen lifetimes, so that was no excuse either. On the other hand, I was sure my critics would sooner or later mount a concerted attack on me that not even Conan Doyle would be able to head off.’

Murray seized the door handle protruding from the wall, but made no attempt to turn it. Instead he turned to Wells, seeming contrite.

‘Doubtless I should have stopped then,’ he said, with regret, ‘setting in motion the plan I’d prepared even before I’d created the company. I would stage my own accidental death in the fourth dimension, eaten alive by one of my imaginary dragons before the eyes of a group of employees who, filled with grief, would see to it that the newspapers were informed of the tragic news. While I began my new life in America under another name, all England would mourn the passing of Gilliam Murray, the man who had revealed the mysteries of the future to them. However, despite the beauty of such an ending, something compelled me to carry on with my deception. Do you want to know what that was, Mr Wells?’

The writer merely shrugged.

‘I’ll do my best to explain, although I doubt you will understand. You see, in creating all of this, not only had I proved that my vision of the future was plausible, I had become a different person. I had become a character in my own story. I was no longer a simple glasshouse manufacturer. In your eyes I’m no more than an impostor, but to everyone else I’m a time lord, an intrepid entrepreneur who has braved a thousand adventures in Africa and who sleeps every night with his magical dog in a place where time has stopped. I suppose I didn’t want to close the company because that would have meant becoming an ordinary person again – a terribly rich but terribly ordinary person.’

And with that, he turned the knob and stepped into a cloud.

Wells followed him a few seconds later, behind the magical dog, only to discover his bad-tempered face multiplied by half a dozen mirrors. He was in a cramped dressing room full of boxes and frames, hanging from which were several helmets and suits of armour. Murray was watching him from a corner, a serene smile on his lips.

‘And I suppose I’ll deserve what I get, if you refuse to help me,’ he said.

There it was at last. As Wells had suspected, Murray had not gone to all the trouble of bringing him there simply to offer him a guided tour. No, something had happened and he had come unstuck. And now he needed his help. This was the pièce de resistance he was expecting his guest to swallow after having force-fed him with explanations. Yes, he needed his help. Alas, the fact that Murray had never stopped addressing him in that condescending, almost fatherly tone suggested he had no intention of begging for it. He simply assumed he would get it. For Wells it only remained to be seen what kind of threat the charlatan would use to extort it.

‘Yesterday I had a visit from Inspector Colin Garrett of Scotland Yard,’ Murray went on. ‘He is investigating the case of a tramp found murdered in Marylebone, not exactly an unusual occurrence in that neighbourhood. What makes this case so special is the murder weapon. The corpse has a huge hole in the chest, which you can look through as if it were a window. It appears to have been caused by some sort of heat ray. According to the pathologists, no weapon capable of inflicting such a wound exists. Not in our time, anyway. All of which has led the young inspector to suspect that the wretched tramp was murdered with a weapon of the future, specifically one of the rifles used by Captain Shackleton and his men, whose devastating effects he was able to observe when he formed part of the second expedition.’

He took a rifle out of a small cupboard and handed it to Wells. The writer could see that the so-called weapon was simply a piece of wood with a few knobs and pins added for show, like the accessories on the tram.

‘As you can see, it’s just a toy. The automatons’ woundings are achieved by tiny charges hidden under their armour. But for my customers, of course, it’s a weapon, as real as it is powerful,’ Murray explained, relieving Wells of the fake rifle and returning it to the cupboard with the others. ‘In short, Inspector Garrett believes one of the soldiers of the future, possibly Captain Shackleton himself, travelled back to our own time as a stowaway on the Cronotilus, and all he can think of is to travel on the third expedition to apprehend him before he does so and thereby prevent the crime. Yesterday he showed me a warrant signed by the prime minister authorising him to arrest a man who, from where we’re standing, hasn’t even been born yet. The inspector asked me to reserve three seats on the third expedition for him and two of his men. And, as I’m sure you’ll understand, I was in no position to refuse. What excuse could I have made?

‘In a little more than a week the inspector will travel to the year 2000 with the intention of arresting a murderer, but in fact he’ll uncover the greatest swindle of the century. Perhaps, given my lack of scruples, you think I could get out of this fix by handing one of my actors over to him. But to make that believable, not only would I have to produce another Cronotilus out of thin air, I would also have to get round the difficult problem of Garrett seeing himself as part of the second expedition. As you can appreciate, all that is far too complicated even for me. The only person who can prevent Garrett travelling to the future as he intends is you, Mr Wells. I need you to find the real murderer before the day of the third expedition.’

‘And why should I help you?’ asked Wells, more resigned than threatening.

This was the question they both knew would bring everything out into the open. Murray walked towards Wells with an alarmingly calm smile and, placing a plump hand on his shoulder, steered him gently to the other side of the room.

‘I’ve thought a great deal about how to answer that question, Mr Wells,’ he said, in a soft, almost sweet-sounding voice. ‘I could throw myself on your mercy. Yes, I could slump to my knees and beg for your help. Can you imagine that, Mr Wells? Can you see me snivelling like a child, tears dripping on to your shoes, crying that I don’t want my head chopped off? I’m sure that would do the trick: you think you’re better than me and are anxious to prove it.’ Murray opened a small door and propelled Wells through it with a light shove. ‘But I could also threaten you by telling you that if you refuse to help me your beloved Jane will suffer a nasty accident while out on her afternoon bicycle ride in the suburbs of Woking. I’m sure that would also do the trick. However, I’ve decided instead to appeal to your curiosity. You and I, and the actors of course, are the only ones who are aware this is all a big farce. Or, to put it another way, you and I are the only ones who are aware that time travel is impossible. And yet someone has done it. Doesn’t that make you curious? Will you just stand by and watch while young Garrett devotes all his energy to pursuing a fantasy when a real time traveller could be roaming the streets of London?’

Murray and Wells stared silently at one another.

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Murray concluded.

And with these words, he closed the door of the future and deposited Wells back on 26 November 1896. The writer found himself in the dank alleyway behind Murray’s Time Travel, where a few cats were foraging in the rubbish. He had the impression that his trip to the year 2000 had been no more than a dream. On impulse, he thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, but they were empty: no one had slipped a flower into them.

Chapter XXXVII

The next day, when Wells called to see him at his office, Inspector Colin Garrett gave him the impression of being a shy, delicate young lad for whom everything appeared too big, from the sturdy desk where he was eating his breakfast, to his brown suit, and especially the murders, burglaries and other crimes spreading like unsightly weeds all over the city. If he had been interested in writing a detective novel, like those his fellow novelist Conan Doyle penned, he would never have described his detective as anything like the nervous, frail-looking individual in front of him, who, to judge by the excited way he shook Wells’s hand, was particularly susceptible to the reverential zeal of hero worship.

Once he was seated, Wells stoically endured, with his usual modest smile, the outpouring of praise for The Time Machine - although, to give the young inspector his due, he ended his eulogy with a novel observation.

‘As I say, I enjoyed your book enormously, Mr Wells,’ he said, pushing aside his plate, as though he wished to remove the evidence of his gluttony, ‘and I regret how hard it must be for you, and for all authors of futuristic tales, not to be able to continue speculating about the future now that we know what it is like. If it had remained unfathomable and mysterious, I imagine novels that predict tomorrow’s world would have become a genre in themselves.’

‘I suppose so,’ Wells agreed, surprised: the young inspector’s idea had never even occurred to him. Perhaps he was wrong to judge him on his youthful appearance.

Following this brief exchange, the two men smiled affably at one another, as the sun’s rays filtered through the window, bathing them in a golden light. Finally Wells, seeing that no more praise was forthcoming, decided to broach the matter that had brought him there. ‘Then, as you are a reader of my work, I imagine it will come as no surprise if I tell you I am here about the case of the murdered tramp. I've heard a rumour that the culprit might be a time traveller, and while I have no intention of suggesting I am an authority on the matter, I think I may be of some assistance.’

Garrett raised his eyebrows, as if he had no idea what Wells was talking about.

‘What Fm trying to say, Inspector, is that I came here to offer you my . . . support.’

The inspector cast him a sympathetic glance. ‘You’re very kind, Mr Wells, but that won’t be necessary’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve already solved the case.’

He reached into his desk drawer for an envelope and fanned the photographs it contained on the table. They were all of the tramp’s corpse. He showed them to Wells one by one, explaining in great detail, and with visible excitement, the chain of reasoning that had led him to suspect Captain Shackleton or one of his soldiers. Wells paid scant attention: the inspector was merely reiterating what Gilliam Murray had already told him. Instead he became engrossed in the intriguing wound on the corpse. He knew nothing of guns, but it did not take an expert to see that the grisly hole could not possibly have been inflicted by any present-day weapon. As Garrett and his team of pathologists maintained, the wound looked as though it had been caused by some sort of heat ray, like a stream of molten lava directed by a human hand.

‘As you can see, there is no other explanation,’ concluded Garrett, with a satisfied grin, placing everything back in the envelope. ‘To be honest, I’m waiting until the third expedition leaves. This morning I sent a couple of officers to the crime scene simply for appearance’s sake.’

‘I see,’ said Wells, trying not to show his disappointment.

What could he say to convince the inspector to investigate in a different direction without revealing that Captain Shackleton was not a man from the future, and that the year 2000 was no more than a stage set built of the rubble from demolished buildings? If he failed, Jane would almost certainly die. He stifled a gasp so that he did not betray his anguish to the inspector.

Just then, a bobby opened the door and asked to see Garrett. The young inspector made his excuses and stepped out into the corridor, beginning a conversation with his officer that reached Wells as an incomprehensible murmur. The talk lasted a couple of minutes, after which Garrett came back into the office in a visibly bad mood, waving a scrap of paper in his right hand. ‘The local police are a lot of bungling fools,’ he growled, to the astonishment of Wells, who had not imagined him capable of such an angry outburst. ‘One of my officers found a message painted on the wall at the scene of the crime which those imbeciles overlooked.’

Wells watched him re-read the note several times, leaning against the edge of his desk.

Then the young man shook his head in deep dismay. ‘Although, as it turns out, you couldn’t have come at a better time, Mr Wells,’ he said. ‘This could almost have been taken from a novel.’

Wells raised his eyebrows and took the scrap of paper Garrett was holding out to him. The following words were scrawled on it:

The stranger came in early February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station.

Wells looked up at the inspector, who stared back at him.

‘Does it seem familiar?’ he asked.

‘No,’ replied Wells, categorically.

Garrett took the note from him and read it again, his head swaying from side to side, like a pendulum. ‘Nor for me,’ he confessed. ‘What is Shackleton trying to say?’

After posing the rhetorical question, the inspector appeared to become lost in thought. Wells used the opportunity to rise to his feet. ‘Well, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I shan’t trouble you any longer. I’ll leave you to your riddles.’

Garrett roused himself and shook Wells’s hand. ‘Many thanks, Mr Wells. I’ll send for you if I need you.’

Wells nodded and walked out of Garrett’s office, leaving him to ponder, balanced precariously on the corner of his desk. He made his way down the corridor, descended the staircase and left the police station, hailing the first cab he saw, almost without realising what he was doing – like a sleepwalker, perhaps, or someone under hypnosis, or, why not?, an automaton.

During the journey back to Woking, he did not venture to look out of the window even once, for fear that some stranger strolling along a pavement, or a navvy resting by the side of a road would give him a significant look that would fill him with dread. When he arrived home, he noticed his hands were trembling. He hurried straight along the corridor into the kitchen, without even calling to Jane to tell her he was back.

On the table were his typewriter and the manuscript of his latest novel, which he had called The Invisible Man. Pale as a ghost, Wells sat down and glanced at the first page of the story he had finished the day before, and which no one but himself had read. It began with the following sentence:

The stranger came in early February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station.

There was a real time traveller, and he was trying to communicate with him. This was what Wells thought when he emerged from his daze. And with good reason: why else would the traveller have written on the wall the first lines of The Invisible Man, a novel that had not yet been published in Wells’s own time and whose existence no one but himself knew about? It was evident that killing a tramp with an unfamiliar weapon had only one purpose: to distinguish that murder from the many others perpetrated each day in the city and to attract the police’s attention – but the fragment of his novel left at the scene of the crime could only be a message for him. And although Wells did not rule out the possibility that the tramp’s strange chest wound had been inflicted by some present-day instrument that Garrett and the pathologists had not yet stumbled upon, no one could have known the beginning of his novel, except a man who came from the future. This fact alone dispelled any lingering doubts Wells might have had that he was dealing with a time traveller. He shuddered at the thought: not only had he discovered that time travel, which until now he had considered mere fantasy, was possible or, rather, would be in the future, but also that this time traveller, whoever he was, was trying to contact him.

He spent all night tossing and turning, unnerved by the unpleasant feeling of knowing he was being watched, and wondering whether he ought to tell the inspector everything, or whether that would anger the time traveller.

When dawn broke, he had still not come to any decision. Fortunately there was no need: almost immediately an official carriage from Scotland Yard pulled up in front of his house. Garrett had sent one of his bobbies to fetch him: another dead body had been found.

Without having breakfasted, and still wearing his nightshirt under his coat, the dazed Wells agreed to be driven to London. The coach stopped in Portland Street, where a pale-faced Garrett was waiting for him at the centre of an impressive police presence. Wells counted more than half a dozen officers trying to secure the scene of the crime against the crowd of onlookers who had flocked to the area. Among it he made out a couple of journalists.

‘The victim was no tramp this time,’ the inspector said. ‘He was the landlord of a nearby tavern, a Mr Terry Chambers. Although he was undoubtedly killed with the same weapon.’

‘Did the murderer leave another message?’ asked Wells, in a faint voice, managing just in time to stop himself blurting out, ‘for me’.

Garrett nodded, unable to disguise his irritation. Clearly he would have preferred Captain Shackleton to find a less dangerous way of amusing himself until he was able to travel to the year 2000 to arrest him. Clearly overwhelmed by the incident, he guided Wells to the crime scene, pushing his way through the police cordon.

Chambers was propped up against a wall, drooping slightly to one side, with a smouldering hole in his chest. The bricks behind him were clearly visible. Some words had been daubed above his head. His heart pounding, Wells tried not to step on the publican as he leaned over to read the inscription:

Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1 May, arriving at Vienna early next morning: should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.

This sentence was not from his novel. Wells let out a sigh of both relief and disappointment. Was the message meant for another author? It seemed logical to think so, and he felt certain the otherwise unremarkable words formed the beginning of another as yet unpublished novel, which the author had probably just finished. It seemed the time traveller was not only trying to make contact with himself, but with someone else as well.

‘Do the words mean anything to you, Mr Wells?’ asked Garrett, hopefully.

‘No, Inspector. However, I suggest you publish this in the newspaper. The murderer is giving us some sort of riddle, and the more people who see it the better,’ he said, aware that he must do all he could to ensure this message reached the person to whom it was addressed.

While the inspector knelt to examine the corpse at close quarters, Wells gazed distractedly at the crowd on the other side of the cordon. What business could the time traveller have with two nineteenth-century writers? he wondered. As yet he did not know, but there was no doubt he would soon find out. All he had to do was wait. For the moment, the time traveller was pulling the strings.

Coming out of his daydream, he found himself looking at a young woman, who was staring back at him. She was about twenty, slender and pale, with reddish hair, and the intentness of her gaze struck Wells as odd. She was wearing an ordinary dress with a cloak over it, yet there was something about her expression and the way she was looking at him that he was unable to define but marked her out from the others.

Instinctively, Wells started towards her. But his bold gesture scared her: she turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd, her fiery tresses billowing in the breeze. By the time he had managed to make his way through the throng, she had slipped away. He peered in every direction, but could see no trace of her. It was as though she had vanished into thin air.

‘Is something the matter, Mr Wells?’

The author jumped on hearing the voice of the inspector, who had come after him, no doubt intrigued by his behaviour.

‘Did you see her, Inspector?’ Wells asked, still scanning the street. ‘Did you see the girl?’

‘What girl?’ the young man asked.

‘She was standing in the crowd. And there was something about her . . .’

Garrett looked at him searchingly. ‘What do you mean, Mr Wells?’

He was about to respond, but realised he did not know how to explain the impression the girl had made on him. ‘I . . . Never mind, Inspector,’ he said. ‘She was probably a former pupil of mine – that must have been why she looked familiar . . .’

The inspector nodded, but seemed unconvinced. Evidently he thought Wells’s behaviour peculiar. Even so, he followed his advice, and the next day the two passages from his and the unknown author’s work appeared in all the London newspapers. And if Wells’s suspicions were well founded, the information would have ruined the breakfast of a fellow author. Wells did not know who at that moment was being seized by the same panic that had been brewing inside him for the past two days, but the realisation that he was not the only person the time traveller was trying to contact brought him some relief. He no longer felt alone in this. Neither was he in any hurry to learn what the traveller wanted from them. He was certain the riddle was not yet complete.

And he was not mistaken.

The following morning, when the cab from Scotland Yard pulled up at his door, Wells was already sitting on the porch steps, dressed and breakfasted. The third corpse was that of a seamstress by the name of Chantai Ellis. The sudden change in the victim’s sex unset-ded Garrett, but not Wells, who knew that the corpses were unimportant: they were blackboards on which the time traveller scribbled his messages. The words on the wall in Weymouth Street, against which the unfortunate Miss Ellis was propped, read as follows:

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

‘Mr Wells?’ asked Garrett, no hope in his voice.

‘No,’ replied the author, omitting to add that the intricate prose struck him as vaguely familiar, although he was unable to identify its author.

While Garrett barricaded himself in the London Library with a dozen bobbies, intent on scouring every novel on its shelves for the one from which Shackleton, for some sinister and as yet unknown reason, was quoting, Wells made his way home, wondering how many more innocent victims would die before the traveller’s riddle was complete.

The next day, no carriage from Scotland Yard came to fetch him. Did that mean the traveller had made contact with all of his chosen authors?

The answer was waiting for him in his letterbox. There, Wells found a map of London, by means of which the traveller not only indicated the meeting point, but at the same time flaunted his ability to move through the time continuum at will: the map was dated 1666 and was the work of the Czech engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. Wells admired the exquisite chart representing a city whose countenance had been transformed: months later London had been obliterated by an inferno, which, if he remembered correctly, had started in a bakery and, fanned by the neighbouring coal, timber and drink warehouses, had spread rapidly, reaching St Paul’s Cathedral, then leaping over the Roman wall into Fleet Street. But what really astonished Wells was that the map showed no sign of having travelled across two centuries to reach him. Like a soldier holding his rifle aloft as he forges a river, the traveller had protected the map from the ravages of time, saving it from the stealthy caress of the years, the yellow claws of the decades and the ruinous handling of the centuries.

Having recovered from his astonishment, Wells noticed the circle marking off Berkeley Square, and next to it the number fifty. This was undoubtedly the place the three authors must go to meet the traveller. And Wells had to admit he could not have chosen a more appropriate location, for number fifty Berkeley Square was considered the most haunted house in London.

Chapter XXXVIII

Berkeley Square had a small park at its centre. It was rather gloomy for its size, but boasted some of the oldest trees in central London. Wells crossed it almost at a march, greeting with a perfunctory nod the languid nymph that the sculptor Alexander Munro had contributed to the relentless melancholy of the landscape. He halted outside a house with the number fifty displayed on its front wall. It was a modest building that looked out of place next to others bordering the square, all of which were designed by well-known architects of the period. It looked as though no one had lived there for decades, and although the façade did not appear too dilapidated, the windows on the upper floors, as well as those below stairs, were boarded up with mouldering planks to keep prying eyes from discovering the dark secrets that surely lay within.

Was he wise to have come there alone? Wells wondered, with a shudder. Perhaps he should have informed Inspector Garrett, for not only was he about to meet someone who apparently had few scruples when it came to killing ordinary citizens, but he had gone with the naïve intention of catching him and handing him to the inspector so that he would forget about going to the year 2000 once and for all.

Wells studied the austere front of the most haunted house in London, and wondered what all the fuss was about. Mayfair magazine had published a highly sensational piece about the strange events that, since the beginning of the century, had taken place there. Everyone who entered it had apparently either died or gone insane. For Wells, who had no interest in the spirit world, the article was no more than a lengthy inventory of gruesome gossip, rumours to which not even the printed word could lend any authority. The articles were full of maids who, having lost their wits, were unable to explain what they had seen, or sailors who, on being attacked, had leaped from the windows and been impaled on the railings below, or sleepless neighbours who, during periods when the house was unoccupied, claimed they had heard furniture being dragged around on the other side of the walls and glimpsed mysterious shadows behind the windows. This concoction of spine-tingling events had led the building to be classed as haunted, the home of a ruthless phantom, and thus the perfect place for young nobles to show off their bravery by spending a night there.

In 1840, a rake by the name of Sir Robert Warboys, who had made a virtue of scepticism, took up his friends’ challenge to sleep the night there in exchange for a hundred guineas. He locked himself in, armed with a pistol and a string attached to a bell at the entrance, which he vowed he would ring if he found himself in any difficulty – he dismissed that possibility with a scornful smirk. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed when the tinkle of the bell was heard, followed by a single shot that shattered the silence of the night. When his friends came running, they found the aristocrat lying on a bed, stone dead, his face frozen in a grimace of horror. The bullet had lodged in the wooden skirting-board, perhaps after passing through the spectre’s vaporous form.

Thirty years later, by which time the house had gained notoriety among the ranks of England’s haunted houses, another valiant youth by the name of Lord Lyttleton was brave enough to spend the night there. He was more fortunate, surviving the phantom’s assault by firing silver coins at it from a gun he had carried with him to bed. Lord Lyttleton claimed he even saw the evil creature fall to the ground, although during the subsequent investigation no body was found in the room. He had recounted his adventure in the well-known Notes and Queries magazine, which Wells had once read with amusement when he came across it in a bookshop.

The rumours and legends were at odds over the origin of the alleged ghost. Some claimed the place had been cursed after hundreds of children had been mercilessly tortured there. Others believed the phantom had been invented by neighbours to explain the bloodcurdling screams of the demented brother a previous tenant had kept locked in one of its rooms and fed through a trapdoor. There were also those – and this was Wells’s favourite theory – who maintained that the legend began with a man named Myers, who, finding it impossible to sleep after being jilted on the eve of his wedding, spent his nights traipsing round the house with a candle. But during the past decade there had been no further reports of any disturbances, from which it was not unreasonable to assume that the ghost had descended to hell, bored with young bucks eager to prove their manliness.

However, the ghost was the least of Wells’s concerns. He had too many earthly cares to worry about creatures from the other world.

He glanced up and down the street, but there was not a soul in sight, and as the moon was in the last quarter, it was absolutely dark. The night seemed to have taken on that sticky consistency so often described in Gothic novels. Since no time was specified on the map, Wells had decided to go there at eight o’clock in the evening because it was the hour mentioned in the second quotation. He hoped he was right, and would not be the only one to turn up to meet the time traveller. As a precaution he had come armed – he did not own a gun so he had brought his carving knife. He had hung it on his back from a piece of string, so that if the traveller decided to frisk him he would not notice it. He had bade Jane farewell, like the hero of a novel, with a lingering, unexpected kiss that had startled her, but which she had accepted with gentle abandon.

Wells crossed the street without further delay and, after taking a deep breath, as though he were about to plunge into the Thames, he pushed open the door, which yielded with surprising ease. He instantly discovered he was not the first to arrive. Standing in the middle of the hallway, his hands in the pockets of his immaculate suit jacket, admiring the staircase that vanished into the gloom of the upper floor, was a plump, balding man of about fifty.

Hearing him come in, the stranger turned to Wells and held out his hand, introducing himself as Henry James. So, this elegant fellow was James. Wells did not know him personally, for he was not in the habit of frequenting the sort of club or literary salon which were James’s preserve and where, according to what Wells had heard, this prudish man of private means sniffed out the secret passions of his fellow members, then committed them to paper in a prose as refined as his manners. The difficulty in meeting him had not caused Wells to lose any sleep. Besides, having ploughed through The Aspern Papers and The Bostonians, he felt almost comforted to know that James lived in a world far from his own. He had concluded that the only thing he and James had in common was that they both spent their lives tapping away on typewriters. If Wells recognised any merit in James it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all.

Perhaps James felt similar disdain for Wells’s work because he could not help pulling a face when Wells introduced himself. A number of seconds passed, during which the two men confined themselves to looking suspiciously at one another, until James obviously decided they were about to infringe some obscure law of etiquette, and hastened to break the awkward silence.

‘Apparently we have arrived at the correct time. Our host was clearly expecting us this evening,’ he said, gesturing towards the various candelabra distributed around the space, which, although they did not completely disperse the shadows, cast a circle of light in the centre of the hall, where the meeting was apparently to take place.

‘It would seem so,’ Wells acknowledged.

Both men gazed up at the coffered ceiling, the only thing to admire in the empty hallway. Luckily this tense silence did not last long, because almost at once a creaking door announced the arrival of the third author.

The man opening it with the timid caution of someone entering a crypt was also in his fifties. He had a shock of flaming red hair and a neatly clipped beard that accentuated his jaw. Wells recognised him at once. It was Bram Stoker, the Irishman who ran the Lyceum Theatre, although he was better known in the London clubs as the agent and lapdog of the famous actor Henry Irving. Seeing him creep in, Wells could not help recalling the rumours that Stoker belonged to the Golden Dawn, an occult society of which other fellow writers, such as the author Arthur Machen or the poet W B. Yeats, were members.

The three men shook hands in the circle of light, before lapsing into a deep, uneasy silence. James had retreated into his precious haughtiness, while beside him Stoker was fidgeting nervously. Wells was enjoying this awkward meeting of three individuals who apparently had little or nothing to say to one another, even though all three, in their own separate ways, devoted their time to the same activity: dredging up their lives on paper.

‘I’m so glad to see you’re all here, gentlemen.’

The voice came from above. As one, the three writers glanced towards the staircase, down which the supposed time traveller was slowly descending, as though relishing the suppleness of his movements.

Wells studied him with interest. He was about forty years old, of medium height and athletic build. He had high cheekbones, a square chin, and wore a short, clipped beard, whose purpose seemed to be to soften his angular features. He was escorted by two slightly younger men, each with a peculiar-looking rifle slung over his shoulder. At least, that was what the writers assumed they were, more from the way the men were carrying them than from their appearance: they resembled two crooked sticks made of a strange silvery material. It did not take much intelligence to realise these were the weapons that emitted the heat ray that had killed the three victims.

The time traveller’s ordinary appearance disappointed Wells, as though because he came from the future he ought to have looked hideous, or at the very least disturbing. Had the men of the future not evolved physically, as Darwin had predicted? A few years before, Wells had published an article in the Pall Mall Budget in which he envisaged the evolution of man’s appearance over the centuries: mechanical devices would finally eliminate the need for limbs; advances in chemistry would render the digestive apparatus obsolete; ears, hair, teeth and other superfluous adornments would suffer the same fate. Only the two truly indispensable organs man possessed would survive this slow pruning process: the brain and the hands, which, of course, would increase in size considerably. The product of such speculation would necessarily be terrifying to behold, which was why Wells felt cheated by the mundane appearance of this man from the future standing in front of him.

The traveller – who, to add to his frustration, was dressed like his henchmen in an elegant brown suit – came to a halt and gazed at them in satisfied silence, a mischievous smile playing about his lips. Perhaps the faintly animal look in his intense black eyes and the grace of his gestures were the only qualities that delivered him from ordinariness. But such traits were not exclusive to the future either, for they could be found in some men in the present, which, thankfully, was inhabited by more athletic, charismatic specimens than most of those exemplified in the current gathering.

‘I imagine this place could not be more to your liking, Mr James,’ the traveller remarked, smiling sardonically at the American.

James, a past master at the art of innuendo, smiled back at him coldly but politely. ‘I shall not deny you are correct, although if you will allow me, I shall defer my admission, for I shall only be able to give it truthfully if, by the end of this meeting, I consider the outcome a worthy enough recompense for the dreadful toll the journey from Rye has taken on my back,’ he replied.

The traveller pursed his lips, as though uncertain if he had entirely understood James’s convoluted response.

Wells shook his head.

‘Who are you and what do you want from us?’ Stoker asked, in a quailing voice, his eyes fixed on the two henchmen, who were looming like a pair of inscrutable shadows at the edge of the lighted area.

The traveller fixed his gaze on the Irishman, and studied him with affectionate amusement. ‘You needn’t address me in that timorous voice, Mr Stoker. I assure you, I only brought you here with the intention of saving your lives.’

‘In that case forgive our reticence, but you will understand that murdering three innocent people in cold blood, with the sole aim of drawing our attention, leads us to doubt your philanthropic intentions,’ retorted Wells, who was just as capable, when he wanted, of stringing together sentences as tortuous as those of James.

‘Oh, that . . .’ said the traveller, waving his hand in the air. ‘I assure you those three people were going to die anyway. Guy, the tramp in Marylebone, would have been killed the following night in a fight with one of his fellow vagrants; Mr Chambers was to have died three days later when someone robbed him outside his tavern; and on the morning of the same day the lovable Miss Ellis would have been fatally knocked down by a runaway coach in Cleveland Street. In fact, all I did was bring forward their demise by a few days. Indeed, the reason I chose them was because they were doomed to die, and I needed three people I could eliminate with our weapons so that their murders, with the fragments from your unpublished novels, would be reported in the newspapers where you would learn about them. I knew that, once I had convinced you I came from the future, I had only to let you know the meeting place and your curiosity would do the rest.’

‘Is it true, then?’ asked Stoker. ‘Do you really come from the year 2000?’

The traveller gave a wry smile. ‘I come from a long way beyond the year 2000 where, by the way, there is no war with the automatons. If only those little toys were our main problem . . .’

‘What are you insinuating?’ said Stoker. ‘Everybody knows that in the year 2000 the automatons will have conquered—‘

‘What I’m insinuating, Mr Stoker,’ the traveller interrupted, ‘is that Murray’s Time Travel is nothing but a hoax.’

‘A hoax?’ the Irishman spluttered.

‘Yes, a rather clever hoax, but a hoax all the same, although unfortunately only the passage of time will reveal that,’ their host informed them, grinning. Then he looked again at the Irishman, touched by his gullibility. ‘I hope you aren’t one of Murray’s victims, Mr Stoker.’

‘No, no . . .’ murmured the writer, with gloomy relief. ‘The tickets are beyond my means.’

‘In that case you should be happy that at least you haven’t wasted your money’ the traveller congratulated him. ‘I’m sorry you’re so disappointed to discover the journeys to the year 2000 are no more than a charade, but look on the bright side. The man telling you so is a real time traveller. As you will have deduced from the maps I left in your letterboxes, not only do I come from the future, but I am able to move along the time continuum in both directions.’

The wind was howling, yet inside the haunted house all that could be heard were the sputtering candle flames, which cast suggestive shadows on the walls. The traveller’s voice sounded oddly smooth, as if his throat were lined with silk, when he said: ‘But before I tell you how I do it, allow me to introduce myself. I do not want to give you the impression that we in the future have forgotten the basic social graces. My name is Marcus Rhys, and I am, in a manner of speaking, a librarian.’

‘A librarian?’ said James, suddenly interested.

‘Yes, a librarian, although at a very special library. But allow me to begin at the beginning. As you have seen, man will gain the ability to travel in time, but don’t imagine that where I come from we have time machines like the one in your novel, Mr Wells, or that time travel is the order of the day. No, during the next century, scientists, physicists, mathematicians all over the world will become embroiled in never-ending debates about the possibility or impossibility of time travel. Theories will abound on how to achieve it, all of which will run up against the immutable nature of the universe, which, regrettably, lacks many of the physical characteristics necessary for them to test their theories. Somehow it seems as though the universe was created impervious to time travel, as though God Himself had reinforced His creation against this aberration of nature.’

The traveller fell silent for a few moments, during which he took the opportunity to scrutinise his audience with his forceful gaze, his eyes as black as two rat holes. ‘Even so, scientists in my time will refuse to admit defeat, and will persist in trying to find a way of fulfilling man’s deepest longing: to be able to travel along the time continuum in any direction he pleases. But all their efforts will prove in vain. Do you know why? Because in the end time travel will not be achieved through science.’

Then Rhys began to pace around the halo of light, as though to stretch his legs, pretending to be oblivious of the writers’ curious stares. Finally he went back to his position and his face cracked into a smile. ‘No, the secret of time travel has always been in our heads,’ he revealed, almost gleefully. ‘The mind’s capacity is infinite, gentlemen.’

The candles continued to sputter as the traveller, with his smooth, downy voice, sympathised with them because science in their time was still a long way from envisaging the enormous potential of the human mind, having scarcely moved on from studying the skull to examining its contents in a bid to understand the functioning of the brain, albeit through primitive methods such as ablation and applying electrical stimuli.

‘Ah, man’s brain . . .’ He sighed. ‘The greatest puzzle in the universe weighs only four hundred grams, and it may surprise you to know we use only a fifth of its capacity. What we might achieve if we could use it all remains a mystery even to us. What we do know, gentlemen, is that one of the many marvels hidden beneath its cortex is the ability to travel in time.’ He paused again. ‘Although, to be honest, even our scientists cannot identify the exact mechanism that enables us to travel along the time continuum. But one thing is clear: man’s brain is equipped with some sort of superior awareness that allows him to move through time in the same way as he moves through space. And even though he is far from being able to harness it, he can activate it, which is already a huge accomplishment, as I am sure you can imagine.’

‘Our brains . . .’ whispered Stoker, with childlike awe.

Rhys gazed at him fondly, but did not let this distract him from his explanation. ‘We don’t know exactly who the first time traveller was – that is to say, the first person to suffer a spontaneous displacement in time, as we call it – because the earliest cases were isolated. In fact, if we have any knowledge of those initial displacements it is thanks to the esoteric and other journals devoted to paranormal activity.

‘However, the numbers of people claiming they had suffered such episodes began to increase steadily, although at a slow enough rate for the strange phenomenon to continue to pass unnoticed, except by a handful of mad prophets whom people usually ignore. By the middle of our century, the world suddenly experienced an epidemic of time travellers, who appeared to come from nowhere. But the fact is they existed, as if the ability to move along the time continuum were the next step on Darwin’s evolutionary ladder. It seemed that, faced with an extreme situation, certain people could activate areas of their brains that snatched them from the present as if by magic, and propelled them forwards or backwards in time. Even though they were still a minority, and unable to control their ability, theirs was clearly a dangerous talent.

‘As you can imagine, it was not long before the government created a department responsible for rounding up people showing this ability to study them and help them develop their skills in a controlled environment. Needless to say, registration with the department was not voluntary. What government would have allowed people who possessed a talent like that to roam free? No, Homo temporis, as they came to be referred to, had to be supervised.

‘Be that as it may, the study of those affected did succeed in throwing some light on the strange phenomenon: it was discovered, for example, that the time travellers did not move through the time continuum at a constant speed until the inertia of the impulse was used up and they came to a halt, as in the case of Mr Wells’s machine. Instead they moved instantaneously from place to place, leaping through the void, as it were, only able to control whether they landed in the past or in the future through intuition, as with the initial leap.

‘One thing seemed clear: the further they travelled, the more their energy was depleted after the journey. Some took several days to recover, while others remained in a comatose state from which they never awoke. They also discovered that if they concentrated very hard, they could transport objects and even people with them on their leaps through time, although the latter proved doubly exhausting.

‘In any event, once they had understood as much as they could about the mechanism in the mind that enabled people to travel in time, the most pressing question, the one that had given rise to heated debates even before time travel became a reality, still remained to be answered: could the past be changed or was it unalterable?

‘Many physicists maintained that if someone travelled into the past, say, with the intention of shooting someone, the gun would explode in their hands because the universe would automatically realign itself. They assumed the universe must possess some sort of self-awareness designed to protect its integrity, which would prevent the person from dying, because they had not died. However, by means of a series of controlled experiments, based on making tiny adjustments to the recent past, they discovered time had no such protective mechanism. It was as vulnerable as a snail without its shell. History, everything that had already taken place, could be changed. And this discovery, as you can imagine, caused an even bigger uproar than time travel itself. Suddenly, man had the power to modify the past.

‘Unsurprisingly, most people saw this as God’s way of giving humanity a free hand to correct its mistakes. The logical thing was to prevent past genocides and afflictions, to weed out the errors of history, so to speak, for what lies ahead, gentlemen, is truly dreadful, far worse than in your innocent tale, Mr Wells. Imagine all the good that time travel could do for humanity – it would be possible to eradicate the plague that devastated London, causing a hundred thousand deaths, before the fire of 1666 ironically stamped it out.’

‘Or the books in the library at Alexandria that could be saved from the flames,’ suggested James.

Rhys gave a derisive smirk. ‘Yes, a million and one other things could be done. And so, with the blessing of the people, the government called on a group of doctors and mathematicians to analyse the set of aberrations that made up the past in order to decide which acts deserved to be wiped out and to predict how this would affect the fabric of time – there was no reason to make things worse.

‘However, not everyone was happy, and voices were instantly raised against the Restoration Project, as it was called. Some considered this happy manipulation of the past that the government was about to embark on unethical, and one section of the population did everything it could to try to sabotage it. This faction – let us call it conservative – which was gaining more followers by the day, argued that we must learn to live with the mistakes of the past, for better or for worse. Things being as they were, the government found it more and more difficult to continue with the project.

‘Then everything ground permanently to a halt when the time travellers, fearful of becoming the target of a new wave of xenophobia, began fleeing through time in all directions, creating an inevitable wave of panic throughout society. All at once, the past had become soft clay in the hands of anyone who felt like altering it for personal gain or simply by accident. Suddenly, the history of the world was in jeopardy’

‘But how can we know when someone has altered the past if in so doing they change the present?’ asked Wells. ‘We have no way of knowing whether someone is manipulating history. We would experience only the consequences.’

‘I applaud your perspicacity, Mr Wells,’ said Rhys, pleasantly surprised by the author’s question. ‘According to the laws of time, the consequences of any change to the past are transmitted along the time continuum, modifying everything in their path, like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. Consequently, as you have pointed out, it would be impossible to detect any manipulation because the ripples produced by this change would affect our present as well as our memories.’ He paused, then added, with a mischievous grin, ‘Unless of course we had a back-up copy of the world with which to compare it’

‘A back-up?’

‘Yes, call it what you will,’ replied the traveller. ‘I’m referring to a collection of books, newspapers and other material documenting as exhaustively as possible everything that has happened up until the present, the whole history of mankind. Like a portrait of the true face of the universe, you understand, one that enables us to detect at once any anomaly, however small.’

‘I see,’ murmured Wells.

‘And this is something the government has been working on since the first epidemic of time travellers, with the aim of preventing anyone from unlawfully manipulating the past,’ Rhys declared. ‘But there was one problem: where could such an archive be kept safe from the harmful ripples caused by any changes?’

The writers gazed at him, enthralled.

‘There was only one possible place.’ The traveller answered his own question. ‘At the beginning of time.’

‘The beginning of time?’ asked Stoker.

Rhys nodded. ‘The Oligocène epoch, the third epoch of the Tertiary period in the Cenozoic era, to be precise, before man had set foot on the Earth, when the world was the preserve of rhinoceroses, mastodons, wolves and the earliest versions of primates. A period no traveller could go to without linking various leaps – with all the risk entailed – and where there was no reason to go because there was nothing to change.

‘In tandem with the project aimed at training time travellers, the government had, in the strictest secrecy, organised what we could call an élite team, made up of the most gifted and loyal travellers. Evidently, the team’s mission was none other than to transport the world’s memory back to the Oligocène epoch. After countless journeys, the chosen travellers, of which, as you will have guessed, I was one, built a sanctuary there to house the world’s knowledge.

‘The place was also to become our home, for a large part of our lives would be spent in that epoch. Surrounded by immense grasslands we were almost afraid to step on, we would live and bring up our children, whom we would teach to use their talent, as we had done, in order to travel through the millennia, keeping watch over history, that time line which began in the Oligocène epoch and ended at the precise moment when the government decided to scrap the Restoration Project.

‘Yes, that is where our jurisdiction ends, gentlemen. Any time beyond that moment is unguarded, for it is assumed that the physiognomy of the future can absorb any changes the time travellers might bring about because it occurred after they appeared. The past, on the other hand, is considered sacred and must remain immutable. Any manipulation of it is a crime against the natural order of time.’

The traveller folded his arms and paused for a few moments, studying his audience warmly. His voice sounded eager when he took up again. ‘We call the place where the world’s memory is stored the Library of Truth. I am one of its librarians, the one responsible for guarding the nineteenth century. In order to carry out my task, I travel from the Oligocène epoch to here, stopping off in each decade to make sure everything is in order.

‘However, even I, who am capable of making jumps spanning tens of centuries, find the journey here exhausting. I have to travel more than twenty million years, and the librarians who guard what for you is the future have to cover an even greater distance. That is why the time line we are protecting is dotted with what we call nests, a secret network of houses and places where we travellers can stop off to make our journeys less exhausting. And this house, of course, is one of them. What better place than a derelict building that will stand empty until the end of the century, and is allegedly haunted by an evil ghost that keeps intruders at bay?’

Rhys fell silent again, giving them to understand he had finished his explanation.

‘And what state is our world in? Have you discovered any anomalies?’ Stoker asked, amused. ‘Are there more flies than there should be?’

The traveller indulged the Irishman’s jest, but with a strangely sinister chuckle. ‘I usually find some anomaly’ he declared, in a sombre voice. ‘Actually my job is rather entertaining. The nineteenth century is one of the time travellers’ preferred eras for tampering with, perhaps because in many cases their interference has extreme consequences. And no matter how many of their muddles I sort out, nothing is ever as I left it when I come back. I wasn’t expecting it to be any different on this visit, of course.’

‘What has gone wrong this time?’ asked James.

Wells heard the note of caution in the American’s voice, as though he were not completely sure he wanted to know the answer. Might it be the men’s clubs, those luxurious redoubts where he took refuge from the loneliness that stuck to him like a birthmark? Perhaps they had never existed prior to a couple of time travellers deciding to found the first one, and now they would all have to close down so that the universe could go back to its original form.

‘This may surprise you, gentlemen, but nobody should ever have captured Jack the Ripper.’

‘Are you serious?’ asked Stoker.

Rhys nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. He was arrested because a time traveller alerted the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Jack the Ripper was caught thanks to this “witness”, who chose to remain anonymous. But in reality that is not what should have happened. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of a time traveller from the future, Bryan Reese, the sailor known as Jack the Ripper, after murdering the prostitute on the seventh of November 1888, would have boarded a ship bound for the Caribbean as planned. There he would have pursued his bloodlust, murdering several people in Managua. Owing to the distances involved, no one would ever link these crimes with the murdered East End whores. Thus, for the purposes of history, Jack the Ripper would have disappeared off the face of the earth. He would have left behind him the unsolved mystery of his identity, over which as much ink would be spilled as the blood that had flowed under his knife, and which throughout the ensuing century would become the favourite pastime of researchers, detectives, and amateurs. They would all root around in Scotland Yard’s archives, desperate to be the first to put a face to the shadow that time had converted into a gruesome legend.

‘It may surprise you to know that some of the investigations pointed the finger of suspicion at a member of the Royal Household. It would appear that anyone can have a reason for ripping a whore’s guts out. In this case, as you can see, popular imagination outstripped reality. I imagine the traveller responsible for the modification couldn’t resist finding out the monster’s true identity. And as you deduced, Mr Wells, no alteration was detected. Everyone fell victim to the ripple effect, like the rest of the universe, for that matter. But this is an easy change for me to sort out. In order to set history straight I need only travel back to the seventh of November to prevent the traveller alerting George Lusk’s Vigilance Committee. Perhaps you don’t consider this particular change to be for the better, and I wouldn’t disagree, but I must prevent it all the same for, as I explained, any manipulation of the past is a criminal offence.’

‘Does this mean we are living in ... a parallel universe?’ asked Wells.

Rhys glanced at him in surprise, then nodded. ‘It does indeed, Mr Wells.’

‘What the devil is a parallel universe?’ asked Stoker.

‘It is a concept that will not be coined until the next century, well before time travel ceases to be a mere fantasy of writers and physicists,’ explained the traveller, still regarding Wells with awe. ‘Parallel universes were meant to be a way of avoiding the temporal paradoxes that might occur if it turned out that the past was not immutable, that it could be changed. What would happen, for instance, if someone travelled into the past and killed their grandmother before she gave birth to their mother?’

‘He would not be born,’ replied James, hastily.

‘Unless his grandmother wasn’t really his mother’s mother, which would be a roundabout way of finding out that his mother was adopted,’ Stoker jested.

The traveller ignored the Irishman’s observation and went on with his explanation: ‘But how could he kill his grandmother if he was never born? Many physicists in my time will argue that the only way around this paradox would be if important changes to the past created parallel universes. After killing his grandmother, the murderer would not vanish from that universe as one would expect, he would carry on living, but in a different world, in a parallel reality sprouting from the stem of the original universe at the exact moment when he pulled the trigger, changing his grandmother’s fate.

‘This theory will be impossible to prove even after time travel becomes a reality with the appearance of time travellers, for the only way to verify whether changes to the past produced parallel worlds or not would be by comparing the past with a copy of the original universe, as I explained before. And if we didn’t have one now, I wouldn’t be here talking to you about the mystery surrounding the identity of Jack the Ripper, because there would be none.’

Wells nodded silently, while Stoker and James exchanged puzzled looks.

‘But come with me, gentlemen. I’ll show you something that will help you understand.’

Chapter XXXIX

An amused grin on his lips, the time traveller began to climb the stairs. The writers hesitated for a moment, then followed him, escorted by his two henchmen. On the top floor, Marcus Rhys led them briskly to a room containing a bookcase on one wall filled with dusty tomes, a couple of dilapidated chairs and a ramshackle bed. Wells wondered whether this was the bed in which Sir Robert Warboys, Lord Lyttleton and the other plucky young nobles had boldly confronted the ghost, but before he had a chance to search the skirting board for signs of a bullet, Rhys pulled a lamp attached to the wall and the bookcase opened in the middle to reveal a spacious room beyond.

The traveller waited for his henchmen to scuttle through the shadows and light the lamps in the room before he beckoned them in. As James and Stoker seemed reluctant to do so, Wells took the lead, and ventured into the mysterious place with cautious, mouse-like steps. Next to the entrance he discovered two huge oak tables piled with books, annotated notebooks and newspapers from the period; no doubt this was where the traveller examined the face of the century, in search of possible inaccuracies.

At the back of the room he glimpsed something that aroused his interest far more. It was some kind of spider’s web, made of multicoloured pieces of cord, with a collection of newspaper cuttings hanging from it. James and Stoker had also noticed the network of strings, towards which the traveller was now walking, jerking his head for them to follow.

‘What is it?’ asked Wells, drawing level with him.

‘A map of time,’ replied Rhys, beaming with pride.

Wells gazed at him in surprise, then stared once more at the shape the coloured strings made, studying it carefully. From a distance it looked like a spider’s web, but now he was closer to it, the design was more like a fir tree or fish bone. A piece of white cord, approximately five feet above the floor, was stretched from wall to wall. The ends of the green and blue strings hanging from it were tacked to the side walls. Each one, including the master rope, was festooned with newspaper clippings. Wells ducked his head, venturing among the news items, hanging like washing on a line, and browsed some of the headlines. After Rhys nodded his approval, the two other writers followed suit.

‘The white cord,’ explained the traveller, pointing at the master rope, ‘represents the original universe, the only one that existed before the travellers began meddling with the past. The universe it is my task to protect.’

At one end of the white cord, Wells noticed a photograph shimmering faintly. Surprisingly it was in colour and showed a splendid stone and glass building towering beneath a clear blue sky. This must be the Library of Truth. At the other end a cutting announced the discontinuation of the Restoration Project and the passing of a law prohibiting any change in the past. Between these two items hung a forest of clippings, apparently detailing important events. Wells was familiar with many and had lived through some, like the Indian uprising and so-called Bloody Sunday, but as the cord stretched further into the future the headlines became more and more incomprehensible. When he realised they related to events that had not yet happened, that lay in wait for him somewhere along the time continuum, he felt dizzy.

Before resuming his examination, he glanced at his companions to see whether they were experiencing the same mixture of excitement and dread. Stoker appeared to be concentrating on one particular cutting, mesmerised, while, after an initial cursory glance, James had turned his back on the map. Perhaps this frightening, incomprehensible future was too far beyond his control, unlike the reality he inhabited and in which he had learned to navigate like a fish in water. The American appeared relieved to know that death would preclude him from having to live in the terrifying world charted on the map of time.

Wells also tried to tear his eyes away from the rows of cuttings, fearing his behaviour might be affected by knowledge of future events, yet a perverse curiosity compelled him to devour as many headlines as he could. He was aware that he had been given an opportunity many would kill for.

He could not help pausing to read one news item in particular, concerning one of the first ever cases of spontaneous time travel, or so he deduced from the esoteric title of the journal. Beneath the sensational headline ‘A Lady Time Traveller’, the article described how when employees at Olsen’s Department Store had gone to open the shop on the morning of 12 April 1984, they had discovered a woman inside. At first they thought she was a thief, but when asked how she came to be in the store the woman said she had just appeared there. According to the article, the most extraordinary thing about the case was that the unknown woman claimed to have come from the future, from the year 2008, to be exact, as her unusual garments confirmed. The woman maintained her house had been broken into by burglars, who had chased her into her bedroom, where she had managed to lock herself in. Terrified by the battering on the door as her assailants tried to break it down, she had suddenly felt giddy. A second later, she had found herself in Olsen’s Department Store, twenty-four years earlier, stretched out on the floor and bringing up her supper. The police were unable to interrogate the woman because, following her initial, rather confused declarations, she mysteriously disappeared. Could she have gone back to the future? the journalist speculated darkly.

‘The government suspects it all began with this woman,’ Rhys announced, almost reverentially. ‘Have you asked yourselves why some people and not others are able to travel in time? Well, so has the government, and genetic testing provided the answer: apparently the time travellers had a mutant gene, a concept still unknown to you. I think it will be a few years yet before it comes into use after a Dutch biologist coins the phrase. But it seemed very likely this gene was responsible for the travellers’ ability to connect with an area of the brain that, for the rest of the population, remained switched off. Research showed that the gene was handed down from generation to generation, meaning all the travellers shared the same distant ancestor. The government never managed to discover who the first carrier was, although they thought it might have been this woman. It is widely believed she had a child with a man who was also possibly able to travel in time, and that their offspring inherited a reinforced gene, establishing a line of time travellers who, by mixing with the rest of the population, would, decades later, trigger the epidemic of time travellers. Every effort to find her has failed. The woman hasn’t been seen since she vanished from the department store, as the article says. I won’t deny some of us time travellers, including myself, worship her like a goddess.’

Wells smiled, peering affectionately at the photograph of the ordinary-looking woman – obviously confused and afraid, unable to believe what had happened to her – whom Rhys had elevated to the status of Goddess of Time Travel. No doubt she had suffered another spontaneous displacement and was wandering around lost in some other distant era, unless, faced with the prospect of losing her mind, she had chosen to kill herself.

‘Each of the other strings represents a parallel world,’ said Rhys, requiring the writers’ attention once more. ‘A deviation from the path that time ought to have taken. The green strings represent universes that have already been corrected. I suppose I keep them for sentimental reasons because, I have to admit, I found some of the parallel worlds enchanting, even as I was working out ways of restoring them to the original.’

Wells glanced at one green string from which dangled several celebrated photographs of Her Gracious Majesty. They looked identical to the ones he had seen in his own time, except for one small detail: the Queen had an orange squirrel monkey perched on her shoulder.

‘This string represents one of my favourite parallel universes,’ said Rhys. ‘A squirrel monkey enthusiast had the eccentric idea of persuading Her Majesty that all living creatures radiate a magnetic energy that can be transmitted to other beings to therapeutic effect, in particular the squirrel monkey, which, according to him, worked wonders on people suffering from digestive problems and migraines. Imagine my surprise when, browsing the newspapers of the period, I found this startling addition to the photographs of the Queen. But that was not all. Thanks to Her Majesty, it became a fad to carry a monkey around on your shoulder, and a walk through the streets of London turned into a rather amusing spectacle. Unfortunately, reality was far less exciting and had to be re-established.’

Wells looked out of the corner of his eye at James, who appeared to heave a sigh, relieved at not having to live in a world where he was forced to go around with a monkey on his shoulder.

‘The blue strings, on the other hand, represent the time lines I have not yet corrected,’ Rhys went on. ‘This one represents the world we are in now, gentlemen, a world identical to the original, but where Jack the Ripper did not mysteriously disappear after murdering his fifth victim, thus becoming a legend, but where he was caught by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee after perpetrating his crime.’

The writers gazed curiously at the string to which he was referring. The first cutting related the event that had caused this bifurcation: Jack the Ripper’s capture. The next cutting described the subsequent execution of the sailor Bryan Reese, the man who had murdered the prostitutes.

‘But, as you can see, this is not the only blue string,’ said the traveller, fixing his attention on another cord. ‘This second string represents a bifurcation that has not yet taken place, but will happen in the next few days. It concerns you, gentlemen. It is why you are here.’

Rhys tore the first cutting from the string and kept it momentarily concealed from his guests, like a poker player pausing before he reveals the card that will change the outcome of the game. ‘Next year, a writer named Melvyn Frost will publish three novels that will bring him overnight fame and secure him a place in literary history’ he announced.

He paused, observing his guests one by one, until his eye rested on the Irishman. ‘One of them will be Dracula, the novel you have just finished, Mr Stoker.’

The Irishman looked at him with astonishment. Wells watched him curiously. Dracula? he said to himself. What was the meaning of that strange word? He did not know, of course. Neither did he know much about Stoker, save the three or four already mentioned facts. He could never have imagined, for instance, that this unassuming, methodical man, who observed society’s norms and by day adapted with tragic subservience to the frenetic social life of his conceited employer, indulged at night in drinking sessions run by whores of every condition, whose admirable aim was to alleviate the bitterness of a marriage that, following the birth of his son, Irving Noel, had turned into a sham.

‘Although you do not know it yet, Mr Stoker, although you would never dare even dream of it, your novel will become the third most popular book in the English language, after the Bible and Shakespeare’s Hamlet,’ the traveller informed him. ‘And your Count Dracula will enter by right into the pantheon of literary legends, where he will become a truly immortal creature.’

Stoker swelled with pride at the discovery that, in the future the traveller came from, his work would be regarded as a classic. His novel would elevate him to a prominent position in the first rank of present-day authors, exactly as his mother had predicted after reading his manuscript, in a note he had carried in his pocket ever since. And did he not deserve it? He had spent six long years working on the novel, ever since Dr Arminius Vambery, lecturer in Eastern languages at the University of Bucharest and an expert on the occult, had loaned him a manuscript in which the Turks spoke of the cruel practices of the Prince of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes. He had been better known as Vlad the Impaler, owing to his custom of impaling prisoners on pointed stakes and imbibing a cup of their blood as he watched them die.

‘Another of Frost’s novels is entitled The Turn of the Screw,’ Rhys went on, turning to the American. ‘Does the name ring a bell, Mr James?’

The American looked at him in mute surprise.

‘Of course it does,’ said Rhys. ‘As you can tell from his response, this is the novel Mr James has just finished, a charming ghost story that will also become a classic’

Despite his consummate skill at dissimulating his feelings, James was unable to hide his pleasure at discovering the happy fate of his novel, the first he had chosen not to hammer out with his fingers, preferring to hire the services of a stenographer. And perhaps for that very reason, because of the symbolic distance created between him and the paper, he had ventured to speak of something as intimate and painful as his childhood fears – although he suspected it might also have had something to do with his decision to give up residing in hotels and guesthouses and settle in the beautiful Georgian house he had acquired in Rye. It was only then, when he found himself in his study, the autumn sunlight shimmering around the room, a delicate butterfly fluttering at the window-pane, and a stranger hanging on his every word, that James had found the courage to write a novel inspired by a story the Archbishop of Canterbury had told him long before. It was about two children who lived in an isolated country house where they were haunted by the evil spirits of departed servants.

Watching James smile discreetly, Wells wondered what kind of ghost story it was where the ghosts were not really ghosts, and yet perhaps they were, although in all probability they were not because you were meant to think that they were.

‘And Frost’s third novel,’ said Rhys, turning to Wells, ‘could be none other than The Invisible Man, the work you have just finished, Mr Wells, the hero of which will also find his place in the annals of modern legend, beside Mr Stoker’s Dracula.’

Was it his turn now to swell with pride? Wells wondered. Perhaps, but he could find no reason to do so. All he wanted to do was to sit in a corner and weep, and to carry on weeping until not a drop of water was left in his body: he was only able to see the future success of his novel as a failure, just as he considered The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau to have failed. Rattled off at the same speed, alas, as he felt obliged to write all his works, The Invisible Man was yet another novel that conformed to the guidelines set down for him by Lewis Hind; a science-fiction novel intended as a cautionary tale about the dangers of misusing scientific knowledge. This was something Jules Verne had never ventured to do, always portraying science as a sort of transparent alchemy at man’s disposal. Wells, on the other hand, could not share the Frenchman’s unquestioning optimism, and had therefore produced another dark tale about the abuses of technology, in which a scientist, after managing to make himself invisible, ends up losing his mind. But it was clear no one would perceive the real message in his work: as Rhys had hinted, and as he had seen for himself in the horrific news items hanging from the master rope, man had ended up harnessing science for the most destructive purpose imaginable.

Rhys handed the cutting to Wells to read and pass on to the others. The author felt too dejected to wade through the handful of tributes that appeared to make up the bulk of the article. Instead, he confined himself to glancing at the accompanying photograph, in which the fellow Frost, a small, neat man, was leaning absurdly over his typewriter, the source from which his supposed novels had emanated. Then he passed the cutting to James, who cast a scornful eye over it before handing it to Stoker, who read it from beginning to end.

The Irishman was the first to break the deathly silence that had descended on the room. ‘How could this fellow have had the same ideas for his novels as we did?’ he asked, baffled.

James gave him the contemptuous look he would give a performing monkey. ‘Don’t be so naïve, Mr Stoker,’ he chided him. ‘What our host is trying to tell us is that Mr Frost didn’t write these novels. Somehow he stole them from us before we published them.’

‘Precisely, Mr James,’ the time traveller affirmed.

‘But how will he stop us suing him?’ the Irishman persisted.

Tm sure you don’t need me to tell you that, Mr Stoker,’ replied Rhys.

Wells, who had managed to thrust aside his despair and take an interest in the conversation again, was suddenly struck by a ghastly thought. ‘If I’m not mistaken, what Mr Rhys is trying to tell us,’ he said, with the aim of dispelling the fog the others were in, ‘is that the best way to silence a person is by killing him.’

‘By killing him?’ declared Stoker, horrified. ‘Are you saying this fellow Frost is going to steal our works and then . . . kill us?’

‘I’m afraid so, Mr Stoker,’ Rhys confirmed, accompanying his words with a solemn nod. ‘When, after arriving in your time, I came across the news item about a mysterious fellow named Melvyn Frost, who had published these novels, I hastened to learn what had become of you, their real authors. And I’m sorry to have to tell you this, gentlemen, but all three of you are going to die next month. You, Mr Wells, will break your neck in a cycling accident. You, Mr Stoker, will fall down the stairs of your theatre. And you, Mr James, will suffer a heart attack in your own home, although, needless to say, your death, like those of your colleagues, will also be murder. I don’t know whether Frost plans to carry out the deeds himself or to hire someone else, although judging from his frail physique, I would incline towards the latter.

‘In fact, Frost is a typical instance of a time traveller who, afraid to return to his own time, chooses a particular period in the past in which to settle down and build a new life. All perfectly understandable and legitimate. The problem arises because the majority of these time exiles consider earning a living in the traditional sense – that is to say, by the sweat of their brow – which is utterly absurd when their knowledge of the future could make them rich. Most give themselves away when they modify the past in order to implement their money-making schemes, like this fellow Frost. Otherwise it would be impossible for us to trace them.

‘But I didn’t bring you here to torment you with tales of your imminent demise, gentlemen, rather to try to prevent it happening.’

‘Can you do that?’ Stoker asked, suddenly hopeful.

‘Not only can I, but it is my duty, for your deaths represent a significant change to the century I have been assigned to protect,’ replied Rhys. ‘My sole aim is to help you, gentlemen. I hope I’ve convinced you of that. And that includes you, Mr Wells.’

Wells gave a start. How did Rhys know he had come to the meeting filled with misgivings? He found the answer when he followed the direction in which the traveller and his two henchmen were looking. All three were staring at his left shoe, where the knife he had strapped to his back was peeping out. It seemed the knot he had tied had been a little loose. Shamefaced, Wells picked up the knife and slipped it into his coat pocket, while James shook his head disapprovingly.

‘All of you,’ the traveller went on, attaching no further importance to the matter, ‘will live for many more years in your original universe, and will continue delighting your faithful readers, of whom I consider myself one, with many more novels. Forgive me, though, if I refrain from telling you any details about your future. It is so that once we have resolved this small matter you will continue to act naturally. In fact, I ought to have intervened without revealing myself to you, but this fellow Frost is devilishly clever and will eliminate you so stealthily that the information I need to prevent your deaths, such as the exact time you were pushed down the stairs, Mr Stoker, will not appear in the newspapers. I only know the days on which you will suffer your respective accidents, and in your case, Mr James, I won’t even know that because no one will notice you are dead until a neighbour discovers your body’

James nodded ruefully, perhaps aware for the first time of his entrenched loneliness, which would make his death a silent act, unseen by the world.

‘Let us say that bringing you here was a desperate measure, gentlemen, for I could think of no other way to prevent your deaths than by asking for your co-operation, which I feel sure will be forthcoming.’

‘Naturally’ said Stoker, hastily, apparently physically ill at the thought he could be dead within a few days. ‘What do we have to do?’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ said Rhys. ‘Providing this fellow Frost cannot find your manuscripts, he won’t be able to kill you. I therefore suggest you bring them to me at the first opportunity. Tomorrow, if at all possible. This simple act will create another bifurcation in the time line, because Frost will not have killed you. Once I am in possession of the novels, I shall travel forward to the year 1899, and take another look at reality. Then I shall decide what to do next.’

‘I think it’s an excellent plan,’ said Stoker. ‘I shall bring you my manuscript tomorrow’

James agreed to do the same, and although Wells had the impression they were mere pawns in a game of chess between Rhys and this fellow Frost, he had no choice but to consent. He felt too disoriented by events to think of a better way than the one Rhys was proposing. And so, like the others, he agreed to bring his manuscript the next morning, although if Rhys finally apprehended Frost and unravelled the muddle of the future, it did not guarantee that he would be able to ride his bicycle in complete safety without first resolving the matter pending with Gilliam Murray. To do this he had no choice but to help Inspector Garrett catch Rhys, the very man who was trying to save his life.

***

But if there was a more difficult undertaking than capturing a time traveller, it was undoubtedly catching a cab in London in the early hours of the morning. James, Stoker and Wells spent almost an hour trawling the area around Berkeley Square without success. Only when they decided to walk towards Piccadilly, shivering with cold and cursing their luck, did they catch sight of a berlin. They started as it emerged from the thick fog that had settled over London, rolling along the street towards them almost solely thanks to the horse’s efforts, because the driver was half asleep on his box. It would have passed straight by them, like a visitation from the beyond, had the driver not finally noticed the red-headed giant blocking the street and waving his arms wildly.

After the cab came to a hasty halt, the three men spent what seemed like eternity trying to explain their itinerary to the driver: first he would take Stoker to his house, then drop James at his hotel, and finally leave London for Woking, where Wells lived. When the man signalled that he had understood the route by blinking a couple of times and grunting, the three men clambered into the carriage and flopped on to the seats, like castaways reaching shore after days in a lifeboat.

Wells longed for some peace and quiet so that he could reflect on the events of the past few hours, but when Stoker and James launched into a discussion about their respective novels, he realised he would have to wait a little longer. He did not mind them leaving him out; in fact, he was relieved. Apparently, they had nothing to say to a writer of escapist literature who in addition came to meetings with a kitchen knife strapped to his back. He was not in the slightest bit interested in what they had to say either, so he gazed through the window at the turbulent swirls of mist. He soon realised that Stoker’s voice, when its owner was not cowed by fear, was too loud to ignore even if he wanted to.

‘What I’m trying to achieve with my novel, Mr James,’ the Irishman explained, waving his arms in the air, ‘is a deeper, richer portrayal of that elegant embodiment of evil, the vampire, whom I have attempted to divest of the burden of the romantic aesthetic that turned him into little more than a grotesque sex-fiend, incapable of inspiring in his victims any more than a sensual frisson. The protagonist of my novel is an evil vampire, whom I have endowed with the original attributes found in the myth of folklore, although I confess to having added a few of my own, such as him not having a reflection in mirrors.’

‘But if you embody it, Mr Stoker, evil loses most of its mystery and its potency!’ exclaimed James, in an offended tone that took his fellow writer by surprise. ‘Evil should always manifest itself in the subtlest way. It must be born of doubt, inhabit the shadowy realm between certainty and uncertainty.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t really understand what you mean, Mr James,’ murmured the Irishman, once the other man appeared to have calmed down.

James let out a long sigh, before agreeing to expand a little more on the sensitive subject, but Wells could tell from the bewildered look on Stoker’s face that the Irishman grew increasingly confused as the other man spoke. It was no surprise, then, that when they stopped in front of Stoker’s house, the red-haired giant had the air of someone punch-drunk as he stepped out of the cab. The situation only grew worse after Stoker’s desertion (for this was precisely how Wells experienced it) as the two men found themselves brutally exposed to silence. A silence that the urbane James naturally felt obliged to break by engaging Wells in a shallow discussion about the different kinds of material that could be used to upholster carriage seats.

When Wells was finally alone in the cab, he gave thanks to heaven, then eagerly became lost in his deliberations as they left the city behind. He had many things to think about, he told himself. Yes, matters of great import, ranging from the future he had glimpsed in the clippings, which he was unsure whether to forget or to commit to memory, to the exciting idea that someone had thought of charting time as though it were a physical space. Only this was a region that could never be properly charted, because there was no way of knowing where the white cord ended. Or was there? What if the time travellers had journeyed far enough into the future to discover the edge of time, the end of the thread, just as the traveller in his novel had tried to do?

But did such a thing exist? Was there an end to time, or did it carry on for ever? If it did end, then it had to happen at the exact moment when man became extinct and no other species was left on the planet: what was time if there was no one to measure it and nothing to experience its passing? Time could only be seen in the falling leaves, a wound that healed, a woodworm’s tunnelling, rust that spread, and hearts that grew weary. Without anyone to discern it, time was nothing, nothing at all.

Although, thanks to the existence of parallel worlds, there would always be someone or something to make time believable. And there was no doubt that parallel worlds existed. Wells knew this for sure now: they sprouted from the universe like branches from a tree at the minutest change to the past, just as he had explained to Andrew Harrington in order to save the young man’s life less than three weeks earlier. And discovering this gave him more satisfaction than any future success of his novel, because it spoke of his powerful intuition, the effective, even precocious workings of his brain. Perhaps his brain lacked the mechanism that enabled Rhys to travel in time, but his powers of reasoning set him apart from the masses.

He recalled the map the traveller had shown them, the figure made of coloured strings representing the parallel universes Rhys had untangled. It suddenly struck him that the map was incomplete because it included only the worlds created by the travellers’ direct interventions. But what of our own actions? The parallel universes not only grew from their wicked manipulations of the hallowed past, but from each and every one of our choices. He imagined Rhys’s map with this new addition, the white cord weighed down by a sudden flowering of yellow strings representing the worlds created by man’s free will.

Wells emerged from these reflections as the cab pulled up in front of his house. He climbed out and, after tipping the driver generously for having made him leave London in the small hours of the morning, he lifted the gate’s latch and entered the garden, wondering whether it was worth going to bed or not, and what effect it might have on the fabric of time if he decided to do one thing or the other.

It was then he noticed the woman with the fiery red hair.

Chapter XL

Thin and pale, her reddish hair glowing on her shoulders, like embers escaped from a fire, she looked at him with the peculiar gaze that had caught his attention a few days before, when he had noticed her among the crowd of onlookers milling around the scene of Rhys’s third crime.

‘You?’ exclaimed Wells, stopping in his tracks.

The girl said nothing. She simply walked as silently as a cat to where he was standing and held something out to him. The author saw it was a letter. Puzzled, he took it from her lily-white hand. To H. G. Wells. To be delivered on the night of 26 November 1896, he read on the back. So this girl, whoever she might be, was some sort of messenger.

‘Read it, Mr Wells,’ she said, with a voice that reminded him of the early-afternoon breeze rustling the net curtains. ‘Your future depends on it.’

With that, she walked away towards the gate, leaving him motionless in the doorway, his face frozen in a frown. When he managed to rouse himself, Wells ran after her.

‘Wait, Miss

He came to a halt halfway. The woman had disappeared: only her perfume lingered in the air. And yet Wells could not recall having heard the gate squeak. It was as though after handing him the letter she had literally vanished without trace.

He stood stock still for a few moments, listening to the silent throb of night and breathing in the unknown woman’s perfume, until finally he decided to enter the house. He made his way as quietly as possible to the sitting room, lit the little lamp and sat down in his armchair. He was still startled by the appearance of the woman, whom he might have mistaken for one of Conan Doyle’s fairies had she measured eight inches and worn a pair of dragonfly wings on her back. Who was she? And how had she suddenly vanished? But it was foolish to waste time surmising when he would no doubt find the answer in the envelope he was holding.

He tore it open and took out the pages it contained. He shuddered when he recognised the handwriting. His heart in his mouth, he began to read:

Dear Bertie,

If you are reading this letter then I am right and in the future time travel will be possible. I do not know who will deliver this to you. I can only assure you she will be a descendant of yours, and of mine, for as you will have guessed from the handwriting, I am you. I am a Wells from the future. From a very distant future. It is best you assimilate this before reading on. Since I am sure the fact that our handwriting is identical will not be enough to convince you, as any skilled person could have copied it, I shall try to prove to you that we are one and the same person by telling you something only you know about. Who else knows that the basket in the kitchen full of onions and potatoes is not just any old basket? Well, is that enough, or must I be crude and remind you that during your marriage to your cousin Isabel you masturbated thinking about the nude sculptures at Crystal Palace? Forgive me for alluding to such an upsetting period of your life, only I am certain that, like the secret meaning the basket has for you, it is something you would never mention in any future biography, proving beyond doubt that I am not some impostor who has found out everything about you. No, I am you, Bertie. And unless you accept that, there is no point in reading on.

Now I shall tell you how you became me. The three of you will be in for a nasty surprise tomorrow when you go to give Rhys your manuscripts. Everything the traveller has told you is a lie, except that he is a great admirer of your work. That is why he will be unable to stop himself smiling when you deliver his precious haul to him in person. Once this is done, he will give the order to one of his henchmen, who will fire at poor James. You have already seen what their weapons can do to a human body so I shall spare you the details, but it is not hard to imagine that your clothes will be sprayed with a grisly spatter of blood and entrails. Then, before either of you has a chance to react, the henchman will fire again, this time at a stunned Stoker, who will suffer the same fate as the American. After that, paralysed with fear, you will watch as he takes aim at you, except that before he pulls the trigger Rhys will stop him with a gentle wave of his hand. And he will do this because he respects you enough not to want to let you die without telling you why. After all, you are the author of The Time Machine, the novel that started the vogue for time travel. At the very least he owes you an explanation, and so, before his henchman kills you, he will go to the trouble of telling you the truth, even if it is only to hear himself recount aloud how he managed to outsmart the three of you. Then he will confess to you, as he bounces round the hallway in that ridiculous way of his, that he is not a guardian of time, and that in fact, had it not been for a chance encounter he would have known nothing of the existence of the Library of Truth or that the past was being guarded by the state.

Rhys was an eccentric millionaire, a member of that select group of people who go through life doing only what they wish to, and who had been obliged to let the government study him when they opened the Department of Time. He had not found the experience too objectionable, despite being forced to rub elbows with people from all walks of life. It was a small price to pay for finding out the cause of his ailment (which is what he assumed it was, after suffering a couple of spontaneous displacements at moments of extreme tension) and, above all, discovering the exciting possibilities it opened up.

When the department was closed down, he decided to hone the skills he had already learned to control remarkably well by doing some sightseeing through time. For a while, he devoted himself to travelling back into the past at random, wandering through the centuries until he grew tired of witnessing historic naval battles, witches being burned at the stake and fecundating the bellies of Egyptian whores and slave girls with his seed of the future. It was then that it occurred to him to use his talents to take his passion for books to the limit. Rhys had a fabulous library in his house, containing a fortune in sixteenth-century first editions and incunables, but suddenly his collection seemed to him ridiculous and utterly worthless. What good was it to him to own a first edition of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage if the verses he was reading could be perused by anyone else? It would be quite different if he possessed the only copy in the world, as if the poet had written it exclusively for him.

With his newly discovered abilities, this was something he could achieve quite easily. If he travelled back in time, stole one of his favourite author’s manuscripts before he published it, then killed the writer, he would be able to build up a unique library of works no one else knew even existed. Murdering a handful of writers to add a private literary archive to his library did not trouble him in the slightest, for Rhys had always thought of his favourite novels as originating out of nowhere, independently of their authors, who were human beings, and, like all human beings, pretty despicable. Besides, it was too late for him to start having scruples, especially since he had amassed his fortune in a way conventional morality would doubtless have deemed criminal.

Happily, he no longer needed to judge himself by others’ moral codes, for he had long ago elaborated his own morality. He had been obliged to do so to be able to get rid of his stepfather in the way that he had. Still, even though he had poisoned him when the man had included Rhys’s mother in his will, that did not stop him going to put flowers on his grave every Sunday. After all, he had him to thank for who he was.

The vast fortune he had inherited from this brutal, uncouth man was nothing compared to his legacy from his real father: the precious gene that enabled him to travel in time, placing the past at his feet. He began dreaming of his unique library, on whose shelves Treasure Island, The Iliad and Frankenstein, or his three favourite novels by Melvyn Aaron Frost, would sit secretly side by side. He picked up a copy of Dracula by Frost and studied his photograph carefully. Yes, the sickly little man with eyes that oozed corruption, showing he was as riddled with vices and weaknesses as any other, would be the first of a long list of writers who would meet their end in a series of freak accidents that would help Rhys amass his phantom library.

With this in mind, he travelled to our time accompanied by two of his men, arriving a few months before Frosts rise to fame. He needed to find him, make sure he had not delivered his manuscripts to his editor, and force him at gunpoint to hand over the only thing that differentiated him from all the other wretches who gave the world a bad name. Then he would end Frost’s ridiculous life by staging some sort of accident. But, to his surprise, he could find no trace of Melvyn Frost. No one seemed to have heard of him. It was as though he had never existed. How could he possibly have guessed that Frost was also a time traveller and would reveal his identity only once he was in possession of your works?

But Rhys had no intention of leaving empty-handed. This was the writer he had chosen to start his literary bloodbath, and he would find him come hell or high water. His plan was not notable for its subtlety: the only thing he could think of to force Frost out into the open was to kill three innocent bystanders and write the opening sentence of each of his three novels at the scene of each crime, lifting them from the published copies he had brought with him. This could not fail to arouse Frosts curiosity.

As Rhys had predicted, it was not long before the passages appeared in the newspapers. But still Frost did not come forward, seemingly not taking the hint.

By turns desperate and infuriated, Rhys lay in wait day and night with his men at the scenes of the crimes, but to no avail until a man in the crowd caught his eye. It was not Frost, yet his presence gave Rhys a similar frisson of excitement. He had been staring like any other spectator at Miss Ellis’s slender corpse, which, hours before, he himself had propped against the wall, and at the inspector from Scotland Yard, standing next to the dead woman, when he noticed the middle-aged man on his right. He was wearing all the typical accoutrements of the period: an elegant blue suit, a top hat, a monocle and a pipe hanging out of his mouth, all of which revealed themselves to Rhys as a deliberate disguise. Then he noticed the book the man was carrying. It was Melvyn Frost’s hitherto unpublished novel The Turn of the Screw. How could this man possess a copy of it? Clearly he was a fellow time traveller.

Scarcely able to contain his excitement, Rhys discreetly watched as the man compared the beginning of the novel with the passage he had scribbled on the wall, then frowned, surprised to find they were identical.

When he slipped the book into his pocket and began to walk away, Rhys decided to follow him. Unawares, the stranger guided him to a deserted-looking house in Berkeley Square, which he entered after making sure no one was watching. Seconds later, Rhys and his men forced their way inside. In no time they overpowered the stranger. It took only a few blows for him to confess how he had come to be in possession of a book that did not yet exist. This was when Rhys found out about the Library of Truth and everything else. He had travelled there in order to murder his favourite author and become his only reader, but had ended up discovering much more than he had bargained for.

The name of the fellow in front of him, with the bloody nose and two black eyes, was August Draper, the real librarian responsible for guarding the nineteenth century. He had gone there in order to repair changes made to the fabric of time when a traveller named Frost murdered the authors Bram Stoker, Henry James and H. G. Wells and published their novels in his own name. Rhys was astonished to find that Melvyn Frost was not the real author of his favourite novels, that they were the works of the three writers his hostage had mentioned. In Rhys’s reality they had died just as they were becoming famous, but in the original universe they had gone on to write many more novels.

He was almost as astonished to learn that Jack the Ripper had never been caught. He felt an almost metaphysical revulsion when he realised he had been simply travelling between parallel universes created at will by other travellers like him, but who, unlike him, had not been content merely to fornicate with Egyptian slave girls. However, he tried to put it out of his mind and concentrate on Draper’s explanations.

The stranger planned to rectify the damage, warning the three authors of what was about to happen by leaving a copy of their respective novels published under the name of Melvyn Frost in each of their letterboxes, with a map showing them where they could meet him. He was about to set his plan in motion when news of Rhys’s mysterious murders appeared in the papers, which led him to the scene of one of the crimes. You can imagine what happened next: Rhys killed him in cold blood and decided to step into his shoes and pass himself off to you as the real guardian of time.

These are the facts, and if you study them carefully, certain things become clearer. For example, did it not strike you as odd that Rhys chose such an indiscreet way to contact you: reports in the press and alerting every policeman in the city by brutally murdering three innocent people – who, by the way, I doubt very much were going to die in a few days’ time. But what you think now is irrelevant, actually: you should have thought of it then, and you did not. You cannot imagine how much it pains me to tell you this, Bertie, but you are not as intelligent as you think you are.

Where was I? Oh, yes. You will listen to Rhys’s explanation, eyes fixed on his henchmen’s weapons pointing at you, as your heart beats faster and faster, the sweat starts to pour down your back, and you even begin to feel overcome with a strange dizziness. I imagine if you had been shot as promptly as James and Stoker were, nothing would have happened. But Rhys’s lengthy explanation had enabled you to prepare yourself, so to speak, and when he had finished his little talk, and his henchmen took a step forward and aimed at your chest, all of your built-up tension exploded, and a flood of light enveloped the world.

For a split second, you became weightless, released from your own body, which felt more than ever like an unnecessary shell, a focus for pain and futile distractions. You had the impression of being a creature of the air. But a moment later the weight of your body returned, like an anchor securing you to the world, and although you were relieved to feel solid again, it also left you with a vague sense of nostalgia for the fleeting experience of being out of your body. You found yourself once more trapped inside the organic casing that contained you while blinkering your vision of the universe. A sudden surge of vomit filled your throat, and you released it with violent retching.

When your stomach stopped heaving, you dared look up, unsure if Rhys’s henchmen had already fired or were relishing drawing out the moment. But there was no weapon aimed at you. In fact, there was no one around you, no trace of Rhys, or his henchmen, or Stoker, or James. You were alone in the darkened hallway, for even the candelabra had disappeared. It was as if you had dreamed the whole thing.

But how could such a thing have happened? I’ll tell you, Bertie: simply because you were no longer you. You had become me.

So now, if you have no objection, I shall carry on narrating events in the first person. To begin with, I did not understand what had happened. I waited for a few moments in the by-now pitch-black hallway, trembling with fear and alert to the slightest sound, but all around me was silence. The house was apparently empty. Presently, as nothing happened, I ventured out into the street, which was equally deserted. I was utterly confused, although one thing was clear: the sensations I had experienced were too real to have been a dream. What had happened to me?

Then I had an intuition. With trepidation, I plucked a discarded newspaper out of a refuse bin. After verifying the date with amazement, I realised my suspicions were true: the unpleasant effects I had felt were none other than those of spontaneous time travel. Incredible though it may seem, I had travelled eight years back in time to 7 November 1888!

I stood in the middle of the square for a few moments, stunned, trying to take in what had happened, but I did not have much time. I suddenly remembered why that date seemed so familiar: it was the day Jack the Ripper had murdered young Harrington’s beloved in Whitechapel and was subsequently captured by the Vigilance Committee, who had gone to Millers Court after being alerted by a time traveller who . . . Was it me? I wasn’t sure, but there seemed to be every indication it was. Who else could have known what was going to happen that night?

I glanced at my watch. In less than half an hour the Ripper would commit his crime. I had to hurry. I ran in search of a cab, and when at last I found one I told the driver to take me to Whitechapel as fast as he could. As we crossed London towards the East End I could not help wondering whether it was I who had changed history: had I made the whole universe abandon the path it was on to take this unexpected detour represented by the blue string, moving further and further away from the white cord, as Rhys had explained to us? If so, had I done it of my own free will, or simply because it was pre-ordained, because it was something I had already done?

As you will imagine, I arrived in Whitechapel in a state of extreme agitation, and once there I did not know what to do: naturally I had no intention of going to Dorset Street alone to confront the bloodthirsty monster; my altruism had its limits. I burst into a busy tavern crying out that I had seen Jack the Ripper at the Miller’s Court flats. It was the first thing that came into my head, but I suspect whatever I had done would have been the right thing to do.

This was confirmed to me when a stocky fellow with a shock of blond hair named George husk sprang out from among the throng of customers gathered round me and, twisting my arm behind my back and pressing my face against the bar, said he would go and look, but that if I was lying I would live to regret it. After this display of strength, he released me, gathered his men together and marched towards Dorset Street in no particular haste. I went as far as the door, rubbing my arm and cursing the brute who was about to take all the credit. Then, among the crowd out in the street, I glimpsed young Harrington. Pale as a ghost, he was stumbling through the throng, a dazed expression on his face, burbling incoherently and shaking his head. I understood that he must just have discovered the disembowelled corpse of his beloved. He was the image of despair.

I wanted to comfort him; I even took a few steps towards him, but I stopped when I realised I had no memory of having performed this kindly gesture in the past. I confined myself to watching him until he disappeared at the end of the street. My hands were tied: I had to follow the script, any improvisation on my part could have had an incalculable effect on the fabric of time.

Then I heard a familiar voice behind me, a silky voice that could belong to only one person: ‘Seeing is believing, Mr Wells. ‘ Rhys was leaning against the wall, clutching his rifle. I looked at him as though he had stepped out of a dream. ‘This is the only place I could think of to look for you, and I was right to follow my instinct: you are the traveller who alerted the Vigilance Committee, which then captured Jack the Ripper, changing everything. Who would have thought it, Mr Wells? Although I imagine that’s not your real name. I expect the real Wells is lying dead somewhere. Still, I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the masked ball into which time travellers’ actions have transformed the past. And the fact is I couldn ‘t care less who you are, I’m going to kill you anyway. ‘

With that, he smiled and aimed his gun very slowly at me, as though he were in no hurry to finish me off, or wanted to savour the moment.

But I was not going to stand there and wait for him to blast me with his heat ray. I wheeled round and ran as fast as I could, zigzagging down the street, playing the role of quarry to the best of my ability in that game of cat and mouse. Almost at once, a ray of lava shot over my head, singeing my hair, and I could hear Rhys’s laughter. Apparently he meant to have some fun before murdering me. I continued running for my life, although as the seconds passed this felt like an ever more ambitious endeavour. My heart was knocking against my chest and I could sense Rhys advancing casually behind me, like a predator intent on enjoying the hunt. Luckily, the street I had run down was empty, so no innocent bystanders would suffer the deadly consequences of our game.

Then another heat ray passed me on the right, shattering part of a wall; after that I felt another cleave the air on my left, blowing away a streetlamp in its path. At that moment, I saw a horse and cart emerge from a side street and, not wanting to stop I speeded up as fast as I could, just managing to pass in front of it. Almost at once, I heard a loud explosion of splintering wood behind me, and I realised Rhys had not hesitated to fire at the cart blocking his way. This was confirmed to me when I saw the flaming horse fly over my head and crash to the ground a few yards ahead of me.

I dodged the burned carcass as best I could, and leaped into another street, aware of a wave of destruction being unleashed behind me. Then, after turning down another side street, I caught sight of Rhys’s elongated shadow thrown on to the wall in front of me by a streetlamp. Horrified, I watched him stop and take aim. I realised he was tired of playing with me. In less than two seconds I would be dead, I told myself.

It was then that I felt a familiar dizziness coming over me. The ground beneath my feet vanished for a moment, only to reappear a second later with a different consistency, as daylight blinded me. I stopped running and clenched my teeth to prevent myself vomiting, blinking comically as I tried to focus. I succeeded just in time to see a huge metal machine bearing down on me. I hurled myself to one side, rolling several times on the ground.

From there, I saw the fiendish machine continue down the street while some men who were apparently travelling inside it shouted at me that I was drunk. But that noisy vehicle was not the only one of its kind. The whole street thronged with the machines, hurtling along like a stampede of metal bison. I picked myself up off the ground and glanced about me, astonished, but relieved to see no sign of Rhys. I grabbed a newspaper from a nearby bench to see where my new journey in time had brought me, and discovered I was in 1938. Apparently, I was becoming quite skilled at it: I had travelled fifty years into the future this time.

I left Whitechapel and began wandering in a daze through that strange London. Number fifty Berkeley Square had become an antiquarian bookshop. Everything had changed, and yet happily it still seemed familiar. I spent several hours wandering aimlessly, watching the monstrous machines criss-crossing the streets; vehicles that were neither drawn by horses nor driven by steam — whose reign, contrary to what people in your time imagined, would end up being relatively brief. No time had passed for me, and yet the world had lived through fifty years. Yes, I was surrounded by hundreds of new inventions, machines testifying to man’s indefatigable imagination, even though the director of the New York patent office had called for its closure at the end of your century. He claimed there was nothing left to invent.

Finally, weary of all these marvels, I sat down on a park bench and reflected about my newly discovered condition of time traveller. Was I in Rhys’s future where there would be a Department of Time I could turn to for help? I did not think so. After all, I had only travelled fifty years into the future. If I was not the only time traveller there, the others must have been as lost as I was.

Then I wondered whether, if I activated my mind again, I could travel back to the past, to your time, to warn you about what was going to happen. But after several failed attempts to reproduce the same impulse that had brought me there, I gave up. I realised I was trapped in that time. But I was alive, I had escaped death, and Rhys was unlikely to come looking for me there. Should I not be happy about that?

Once I had accepted this, I set about finding out what had happened to my world, but above all what had become of Jane and all the other people I knew. I went to a library and, after hours spent trawling through newspapers, I managed to form a general idea of the world I was living in. With great sorrow, I discovered not only that the entire world was moving stubbornly towards war, but that there had already been one some years earlier, a bloody conflict involving half of the planet in which eight million people had died. Few lessons had been learned, and now, despite its graveyards piled with dead, the world was once more teetering on the brink.

I recalled some of the clippings I had seen hanging from the map of time, and understood that nothing could prevent this second war, for it was one of those past mistakes that the people of the future had chosen to accept. I could only wait for the conflict to begin, and try my best to avoid being one of the millions of corpses that would litter the world a year from then.

I also found an article that both bewildered and saddened me. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Bram Stoker and Henry James, who had died attempting to spend the night confronting the ghost at number fifty in Berkeley Square. That same night another equally tragic event in the world of letters had occurred: H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine, had mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again. Had he gone time travelling? the journalist had asked ironically, unaware of how close he was to the truth.

In that article, they referred to you as the father of science fiction. I can imagine you asking what the devil that term means. A fellow named Hugo Gernsback coined it in 1926, using it on the cover of his magazine Amazing Stories, the first publication devoted entirely to fiction with a scientific slant in which many of the stories you wrote for Lewis Hind were re-edited, together with those of Edgar Allan Toe and, of course, Jules Verne, who competed with you for the title of father of the genre.

As Inspector Garrett had predicted, novels that envisaged future worlds had ended up creating a genre of their own, and this was largely thanks to his discovery that Murray’s Time Travel was the biggest hoax of the nineteenth century. After that, the future went back to being a blank space no one had any claims on, and which every writer could adorn as he liked, an unknown world, an unexplored territory, like those on the old nautical maps, where it was said monsters were born.

On reading this, I realised with horror that my disappearance had sparked off a fatal chain of events: without my help, Garrett had been unable to catch Rhys and had gone ahead with his plan to visit the year 2000 and arrest Captain Shackleton, thus uncovering Murray’s hoax, resulting in him going to prison. My thoughts immediately turned to Jane, and I scoured hundreds of newspapers and magazines, fearing I might come across a news item reporting the death of H. G. Wells’s ‘widow’ in a tragic cycling accident.

But Jane had not died. She had gone on living after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. This meant Murray had not carried out his threat. Had he simply warned her to convince me to co-operate with him? Perhaps. Or perhaps he had not had time to carry out his threat, or had wasted it searching for me in vain all over London to ask why on earth I was not trying to discover the real murderer. Despite his extensive network of thugs, he had failed to find me. Naturally, he had not thought to look in 1938. In any case, he had ended up in prison, and my wife was alive. Although she was no longer my wife.

Thanks to the articles about you, I was able to form an idea of what her life was like, what it had been like after my sudden upsetting departure. Jane had waited nearly five years in our house in Woking for me to come back, and then her hope ran out. Resigned to continuing her life without me, she had returned to live in London, where she had met and married a prestigious lawyer by the name of Douglas Evans, with whom she had a daughter they named Selma. I found a photograph of her as a charming old lady who still had the smile I had become enamoured of during our walks to Charing Cross. My first thought was to find her, but this, of course, was a foolish impulse. What would I say to her? My sudden reappearance after all this time would only have upset her otherwise peaceful existence. She had accepted my departure, why stir things up now? I did not to try to find her, which is why from the moment I disappeared I never again laid eyes on the sweet creature who must at this very moment be sleeping above your head.

Perhaps my telling you this will prompt you to wake her with your caresses when you finish reading the letter. It is something only you can decide: far be it from me to meddle in your marriage. But, of course, not looking for her was not enough. I had to leave London, not just because I was afraid of running into her or into one of my friends, who would recognise me immediately since I had not changed, but purely for my own protection: it was more than likely Rhys would carry on trawling the centuries for me, searching through time for some trace of me.

I assumed a false identity. I grew a bushy beard and chose the charming medieval town of Norwich as the place where I would discreetly start to build a new life for myself. Thanks to what you had learned at Mr Cowap’s pharmacy, I found work at a chemist’s, and for a year and a half I spent my days dispensing ointments and syrups, and my nights lying in bed listening to the news, alert to the slow build-up of a war that would redefine the world once more. Of my own free will I had decided to live one of those redundant, futile lives that I had always been terrified my mother’s stubbornness would finally condemn me to, and I could not even compensate for its simplicity by writing for fear of alerting Rhys. I was a writer condemned to live like someone who had no gift for writing. Can you imagine a worse torture? Neither can I. Yes, I was safe, but I was trapped in a dismal life, which made me wonder at times whether it was worth the trouble of living.

Happily, someone came along to brighten it up: she was called Alice and she was beautiful. She entered the chemist’s one morning to buy a bottle of aspirin – a preparation of acetylsalicylic acid marketed by a German company that was very popular at the time – and when she left she took my heart with her.

Love blossomed between us amazingly quickly, outstripping the war, and by the time it broke out Alice and I had much more to lose than before. Luckily, it all seemed to be taking place far away from our town, which apparently presented no threat to Germany, whose new chancellor intended to conquer the world under the dubious pretext that the blood of a superior race pulsed through his veins. We could only glimpse the terrible consequences of the conflict through the ghastly murmurings carried to us on the breeze, a foretaste of what the newspapers would later report. I already understood this war would be different from previous ones, because science had changed the face of war by presenting men with new ways of killing one another.

The battle would now take place in the skies. But do not think of dirigibles firing at one another to see who could burst the enemy’s hydrogen balloons first. Man had conquered the skies with a flying machine that was heavier than air, similar to the one Verne had envisaged in his novel Robur-the-Conqueror, only these were not made of papier-mâché glued together, and they dropped bombs. Death came from above, announcing its arrival with a terrifying whistle.

And although, because of complex alliances, seventy different countries had been drawn into the atrocious war, in no time England was the only country left standing, while the rest of the world contemplated, astonished, the birth of a new order. Intent on breaking England’s resistance, Germany subjected our country to a remorseless bombardment, which to begin with was confined to airfields and harbours (in keeping with the curious code of honour that sometimes underlies acts of war) but soon spread to the cities. After several nights of repeated bombing, our beloved London was reduced to smoking rubble, from which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral emerged miraculously, the embodiment of our invincible spirit.

Yes, England resisted, and even counter-attacked with brief sallies over German territory. One of these left the historic town of Lübeck, on the banks of the river Trave, partially destroyed. In angry retaliation, the Germans decided to increase their attacks two-fold. Even so, Alice and I felt relatively safe in Norwich, a town of no strategic interest whatsoever. Except that Norwich had been blessed with three stars in the celebrated Baedeker guide, and this was the one Germany consulted when it resolved to destroy our historic heritage. Karl Baedeker’s guide recommended visiting its romanesque cathedral, its twelfth-century castle and its many churches, but the German chancellor preferred to drop bombs on them.

The intrusion of the war took us by surprise as we listened to Bishop Helmore’s sermon in the cathedral. Sensing it would be one of the enemy’s prime targets, the bishop urged us to flee the house of God, and while some people chose to remain – whether because they were paralysed by fear or because their faith convinced them there could be no safer refuge, I do not know – I grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her towards the exit, fighting my way through the terrified crowd blocking the nave.

We got outside just as the first wave of bombs began to fall. How can I describe such horror to you? Perhaps by saying that the wrath of God pales beside that of man. People fled in all directions, even as the force of the bombs ripped into the earth, toppling buildings and shaking the air with the roar of thunder. The world fell down around us, torn to shreds. I tried to find a safe place, but all I could think of as I ran hand in hand with Alice through the mounting destruction was of how little we valued human life.

Then, in the middle of that frenzied running, 1 felt a familiar dizziness steal over me. My head began to throb, everything around me became blurred, and I realised what was about to happen. Instantaneously, I stopped our frantic dash and asked Alice to grip my hands as tightly as she could. She looked at me, puzzled, but did as I said, and as reality dissolved and my body became weightless for a third time, I gritted my teeth and tried to take her with me. I had no idea where I was going, but I was not prepared to leave her behind as I had left Jane, my life, and everything that was dear to me.

The sensations that subsequently overtook me were the same as before: I felt myself float upwards for a split second, leaving my body then returning to it, slipping back between my bones, except that this time I could feel the warm sensation of someone else’s hands in mine. I opened my eyes, blinking sluggishly, struggling not to vomit. I beamed with joy when I saw Alice’s hands still clasping mine. Small, delicate hands I would cover with grateful kisses after we made love, hands joined to slender forearms covered with a delightful golden down. The only part of her I had managed to bring with me.

I buried Alice’s hands in the garden where I appeared in the Norwich of 1982, which did not look as if it had ever been shelled, except for the monument to the dead in the middle of one of its squares. There I discovered Alice’s name, among many others, although I always wondered whether it was the war that killed her, or Otto Lidenbrock, the man who loved her. In any event, it was something I was condemned to live with, for I had leaped into the future to escape the bombs. Another forty-four years: that seemed to be as far as I could jump.

The world in which I now found myself was apparently wiser, intent on forging its own identity and displaying its playful, innovative spirit in every aspect of life. Yes, this was an arrogant world that celebrated its achievements with a child’s jubilant pride, and yet it was a peaceful world where war was a painful memory, a shameful recognition that human nature had a terrible side that had to be concealed, if only under a façade of politeness. The world had been forced to rebuild itself, and it had been then, while clearing the rubble and gathering up the dead, while putting up new buildings and sticking bridges back together, patching up the holes that war had wreaked on his soul and his lineage, that man had become brutally aware of what had happened, had suddenly realised that everything which had seemed rational at first had become irrational, like a ball in which the music stops.

I could not help rejoicing: the zeal with which those around me condemned their grandfathers’ actions convinced me there would be no more wars like the one I had lived through. And I will tell you I was also right about that. Man can learn, Bertie, even if as with circus animals, it has to be beaten into him.

In any event, I had to start again from scratch, to build another wretched life from the very beginning. I left Norwich, where I had no ties, and went back to London where, after being astounded by the advances of science, I tried to find a job that might be suitable for a man from the Victorian age going by the name of Harry Grant. Was I doomed, then, to wander through time, floating from one period to another like a leaf blown in the wind, alone for ever? No, things would be different this time. I was alone, yes, but I knew I would not be lonely for very long. I had a future appointment to keep, one that did not require me to travel in time again. This future was close enough for me to wait until it came to me.

But apparently, before that, the mysterious hand of fate had made another appointment for me, with something very special from my past. And it happened at a cinema. Yes, Bertie, you heard right. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which cinema will develop from the moment the Lumière brothers first projected images of workers leaving their factory at Lyon Monplaisir. No one in your time had any inkling of the enormous potential of their invention. However, once the novelty wears off, people will soon tire of images of men playing cards, scampering children and trains pulling into stations -everyday things they can see from their windows and with sound -and they will want something more than dull social documentaries accompanied by the absent tinkle of a piano. That is why the projector now tells a story on the empty screen.

To give you an idea, imagine one of them filming a play that does not have to take place on a stage raised in front of rows of seats, but can use anywhere in the world as its setting. And if in addition I tell you that the director can narrate the story using not just a handful of painted backdrops but a whole arsenal of techniques, such as making people vanish in front of our eyes by means of manipulating images, you will understand why the cinema has become the most popular form of entertainment in the future, far more so than music hall. Yes, nowadays an even more sophisticated version of the Lumière brothers’ machine makes the world dream, bringing magic into people’s lives, and an entire industry commanding enormous sums of money has grown up around it.

I am not telling you this for pure pleasure, but because sometimes these cinema stories are taken from books. And this is the surprise, Bertie: in 1960, a director named George Pal will turn your novel The Time Machine into a film. Yes, he will put images to your words. They had already done this with Verne, of course, but that in no way diminished my joy. How can I describe what I felt when I saw the story you had written take place on screen? There was your inventor, whom they had named after you, played by an actor with a determined, dreamy expression, and there, too, was sweet Weena, played by a beautiful French actress whose face radiated a hypnotic calm, and the Morlocks, more terrifying than you could ever have imagined, and the colossal sphinx, and dependable, no-nonsense Filby, and even Mrs Watchett, with her spotless white apron and cap. And as one scene succeeded another, I trembled with emotion in my seat at the thought that none of this would have been possible if you had not imagined it, that somehow this feast of images had previously been projected inside your head.

I confess that, at some point, I looked away from the screen and studied the faces of the people sitting near me. I imagine you would have done the same, Bertie. I know more than once you wished you had that freedom: I still remember how downcast you felt when a reader told you how much they had enjoyed your novel, without you being able to see how they had responded to this or that passage, or whether they had laughed or wept in the proper places, because to do so you would have had to steal into their libraries like a common thief. You may rest assured: the audience responded exactly as you had hoped.

But we must not take the credit away from Mr Pal, who captured the spirit of your novel brilliantly – although I will not try to hide the fact that he changed a few things in order to adapt it to the times: the film was made sixty-five years after the book was written, and part of what for you was the future had already become the past. Remember, for example, that despite your concern over the ways man might use science, it never even occurred to you that he might become embroiled in a war that would engulf the entire planet. Well, he did, not once but twice, as I have already told you. Pal made your inventor witness not only the First and Second World Wars, he even predicted a third in 1966, although fortunately in that case his pessimism proved unfounded.

As I told you, the feelings I experienced in that cinema, hypnotised by the swirling images that owed so much to you, is beyond words. This was something you had written, yes, and yet everything that appeared on the screen was unfamiliar to me – everything, that is, except the time machine, your time machine, Bertie. You cannot imagine how surprised I was to see it there. For a moment I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. But, no, it was your machine, gleaming and beautiful, with its graceful curves, like a musical instrument, betraying the hand of a skilled craftsman, exuding an elegance that the machines in which I had been cast adrift had lost. But how had it ended up there, and where could it be now, more than twenty years after the actor called Rod Taylor, who played you, first climbed out of it?

After several weeks spent scouring the newspapers at the library, I managed to trace its eventful journey. I discovered that Jane had not wanted to part with it and had taken it with her to London, to the house of Evans the lawyer, who would contemplate with resignation the intrusion into his home of the absurd, seemingly useless piece of junk, which, to cap it all, was a symbol to his new wife of her vanished husband. I pictured him unable to sleep at nights, circling the machine, pressing the fake buttons and moving the glass lever, to satisfy himself it did not work, and wondering what mystery was contained in the object his wife referred to as the time machine, and why the devil it had been built. I was sure Jane would have explained nothing to him, considering the machine part of a private world that Evans the lawyer had no business knowing about.

When, many years later, George Pal began preparations for his film, he ran into a problem: he did not find convincing any of the designs his people had come up with for the time machine. They were clunky, grotesque and over-elaborate. None of the models bore any resemblance to the elegant, stately vehicle in which he envisaged the inventor travelling across the vast plains of time. That was why it seemed to him nothing short of a miracle when a woman named Selma Evans, close to bankruptcy after squandering the small fortune she had inherited from her parents, offered to sell him the Strange object her mother had dusted every Sunday in a languid, ceremonious manner that had made little Selma’s hair stand on end.

Pal was stunned: this was exactly what he had been looking for. It was beautiful and majestic and had the same lively air as the toboggans he had ridden as a boy. He remembered the wind whipping his face as he sped down the slopes, a wind that had taken on a magical quality over time, and he imagined if you travelled through time in that machine you would feel the same wind lashing your face. But what really decided him was the little plaque on the control panel that said: ‘Made by H.G. Wells’. Had the author really built it himself? And, if so, why?

This was an insoluble mystery, as Wells had disappeared in 1896, just as he was becoming famous. Who knows how many more remarkable novels he might have given the world? However, although he did not know why the machine had been built, Pal sensed it could not be put to better use than in his film, so he persuaded the production studio to buy it. That was how your machine gained the fleeting immortality of the silver screen.

Ten years later, the studios organised a public auction of scenery and other props from several of its productions, including the time machine. It sold for ten thousand dollars, and the buyer went round the United States showing it in every town, until finally, after getting his money’s worth from it, he sold it to an antiquarian in Orange County.

And that was where Gene Warren, one of the technicians on Pal’s film, stumbled on it in 1974. It was sitting in a corner, rusty and neglected, with all the other junk. Its seat had long since been sold. Warren bought it for next to nothing, and set about lovingly restoring the toy that had come to mean so much to everyone working on the film: he repainted all the bars, repaired the broken parts, and even made a replacement seat from memory. Once fully restored, the machine was able to continue its journey, being displayed in fairs and events with a science-fiction theme, and even occasionally driven by an actor dressed as you. Pal himself appeared sitting on it on the front cover of Star Log, smiling like a boy about to ride his toboggan down a snowy slope. That year, Pal even sent out Christmas cards to his friends of Santa Claus riding on your time machine.

As you can imagine, I followed its progress like a loving father contemplating the adventures of a son who has lost his way, knowing that sooner or later he will return to the fold.

And on 12 April 1984 I kept my appointment at Olserts Department Store. There she was, confused and scared, and it was I who whisked her out from under the noses of the press, holding her hand and whispering in her ear, ‘I believe you because I can also travel in time. ‘ We left the store through the emergency exit, taking advantage of the ensuing chaos. Once in the street, we scrambled into the car I had hired, and made our way to Bath, where a few weeks before I had acquired a charming Georgian house. There I intended us to make our home, far from London and all those time travellers from the future, who would doubtless be searching for her under orders from the government, which had decreed to sacrifice her was the only way to eradicate the root of the problem.

At first, I was not sure I had done the right thing. Should I have been the one to rescue her from Olsen’s, or had I usurped the role of another time traveller from the future who had proclaimed himself the saviour of the Madonna of Time? The answer came a few days later, one bright spring morning. We were painting the sitting-room walls when suddenly a little boy of three or four materialised on the carpet, gave a loud chortle, as though tickled with joy, then disappeared again, leaving behind a piece of the puzzle he had been playing with. Following that brief and unexpected glimpse of a son we had not yet conceived, we understood that the future began with us, that we were the ones who would produce the mutant gene that years, or possibly centuries, later would enable man to travel in time. Yes, the epidemic of time travellers Rhys had told us about would quietly originate in that secluded house, I said to myself, stooping to pick up the piece of puzzle, an unconscious gift from our son.

I kept this fragment of the future in the larder, among the tins of beans, knowing that in a few years’ time it would help me understand the puzzle someone would give to the boy at the precise moment they were supposed to.

After that there is not much more to tell. She and I lived happily ever after, like the characters in a fairy tale. We enjoyed life’s small pleasures, attempting to live as quiet and uneventful a life as possible so that neither of us would suffer an inopportune displacement that would separate us in time. I even indulged myself and bought your time machine when Gene Warren’s son put it up for sale, although I had absolutely no need of it: I travelled through time like everyone else now, letting myself be swept along by the delightful flow of the days, while my hair began falling out and I found it more and more difficult to climb the stairs. I suppose a mark of the calm happiness we enjoyed was our three children, one of whom we had already met.

Needless to say, their gift for time travel was far greater than ours. They were never in complete control of their ability, but I knew their descendants would be, and I could not help smiling when I saw our genes begin to propagate as they went out into the world. I did not know how many generations it would take before the government finally noticed the time travellers, but I knew it would happen sooner or later.

That was when I had the idea of writing you this letter with the aim of entrusting it to one of my grandchildren, who in turn would pass it down to one of his, until it reached someone who would be able to carry out my request: to deliver it to the author H. G. Wells, the father of science fiction, on the night of 26 November 1896. And I imagine that if you are reading it now then I was right about that too. I have no idea who will deliver this letter to you but, as I said before, he or she will be our own flesh and blood. And when that happens, as you will have guessed, these words will already be the voice of a dead man.

Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad, and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway.

For me it is too late, of course. I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.

I have given a great deal of thought to what might happen if you decide not to go to the meeting with Rhys tomorrow. If you do not go, no one will point a gun at you, your brain will not be activated, and you will not travel through time. Therefore you will neither bring about the Ripper’s capture, nor meet Alice, nor flee the German bombardment, nor rescue any woman at Olsen’s Department Store. And, without you, the mutant gene will not be created, so there will be no time travellers and no Rhys to travel into the past to kill you.

I imagine everything that happened from the moment he murdered the tramp in Marylebone will disappear from the time continuum as though a huge broom had swept it away. All the coloured strings dangling from the white cord of the map of time will vanish, for no one will have created any parallel universe where Jack the Ripper had been caught, or where Her Gracious Majesty went around with a squirrel monkey on her shoulder. Good God, the map of time itself will disappear! Who will be there to create it?

As you can see, Bertie, if you decide not to go you will annihilate an entire world. But do not let this put you off. The only thing that would remain unchanged would be her appearance at Olsen’s Department Store in 1984, although no one will take her by the hand and lead her away to a beautiful Georgian house where she will live happily ever after.

And what will happen to you? I imagine you will go back to the moment just before your life was altered by your own time travelling. Before Murray’s thug chloroforms you? Almost certainly, because if Rhys never travelled to your time and did not kill anyone, Garrett would never suspect Shackleton, and Murray would not send his thug to abduct you so that you could save his bacon. Therefore no chloroform-soaked handkerchief would be placed over your face on the night of 20 November 1896. Be that as it may, however far back you go, I do not imagine you will experience any of the physical effects of time travel: you will simply disappear from one place and reappear in another as if by magic, without being aware of any transition, although, of course, you will remember nothing of what you experienced after that moment.

You would not know that you had travelled in time, or that parallel universes exist. If you decide to change what happened, this is what will occur, I fear: you will know nothing of me. It would be like reversing the moves in a game of chess until you find the one that began the check mate. At that point, if instead of the bishop you ought to move you decide to use your rook, the game will take a different turn, just as your life will tomorrow if you do not go to the meeting.

And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook? Your life or mine? Do what you believe you have to do.

Yours ever,

Herbert George Wells

Chapter XLI

And what about predestination? Wells wondered. Perhaps he was fated to travel in time, first to 1888, then to the beginning of the atrocious war that would involve the entire planet, and so on, exactly as he had told himself in the letter. Perhaps he was fated to produce the first race of time travellers. Perhaps he had no right to change the future, to prevent man being able one day to travel in time because he refused to sacrifice his own life, because he wanted to stay with Jane in the past it had taken him so long to arrange to his liking. For wanting to go on being Bertie.

However, this was not only a consideration about the morality of his choice, but about whether he really had a choice. Wells doubted he could solve the problem simply by not turning up at the meeting, as his future self had suggested. He was certain that if he did not go, sooner or later Rhys would find and kill him in any case.

In the end, he was sure that what he was about to do was his only choice, and clutched to him the manuscript of The Invisible Man, as the cab skirted Green Park on its way to Berkeley Square, where the man who intended to kill him was waiting.

After he had finished reading the letter, he had put it back in the envelope and sat for a long time in his armchair. He had been irritated by the tone of mocking condescension that the future Wells had used to address him – although he could hardly reproach him for it, given that the author of the letter was himself. Besides, he had to recognise that if he had been in the future Wells’s shoes, considering all he had gone through, he would have found it difficult to avoid that patronising tone towards his callow past self, someone who had scarcely taken his first steps in the world.

But all that was immaterial. What he needed to do was assimilate as quickly as possible the astonishing fact that he himself was the author of that letter, in order to focus on the really important question: what he should do about it. He wanted his decision to take into account what he thought was the almost metaphysical principle of the matter. Which of the two lives branching off beneath him was the one he ought to live? Which path should he venture down? Was there any way of knowing? No, there was not. Besides, according to the theory of multiple worlds, changes to the past did not affect the present, but created an alternative present, a new universe that ran alongside the original, which remained intact. Accordingly, the beautiful messenger who had crossed time to give him the letter had slipped into a parallel universe, because in the real world no one had walked up to him outside his house. Consequently, even if he did not go to the meeting, in the world in which he did not receive the letter he would. His other life, then, the one in which the jocular future Wells had lived, would not disappear. It was redundant therefore to regard the act of not bowing to fate as some sort of miscarriage of time.

He must simply choose the life that most appealed to him without splitting moralistic hairs. Did he want to stay with Jane, write novels and dream about the future, or did he aspire to the life of that distant, future Wells? Did he want to go on being Bertie, or to become the link between Homo sapiens and Homo temporis? He had to admit he felt tempted to surrender quietly to the fate described in the letter, to accept that life punctuated by exciting episodes such as the bombardment of Norwich, which – why deny it? – he would not have minded experiencing, secure in the knowledge he would come out of it alive. It would be like rushing around calmly while bombs dropped out of the sky, admiring the terrifying force of man’s insanity, the hidden depths of beauty in that display of destruction. Not to mention all the wonders he would be able to see on his journeys into the future, brimming with inventions even Verne could not have imagined.

But that would mean giving up Jane and, more importantly, literature, for he would never be able to write again. Was he prepared to do that? He thought about it for a long time, before finally making up his mind. He went up to the bedroom, woke Jane with his caresses and, in the anguished, oppressive darkness of the night, which felt exactly like being down a mole hole, he made love to her as if for the last time.

‘You made love to me as if for the first time, Bertie,’ she said, pleasantly surprised, before falling asleep again.

And hearing her breathe softly by his side, Wells had understood that, as so often happened, his wife knew what he wanted much better than he did, and that if only he had asked her, he could have saved all that time he had taken coming to a decision that, in addition, now proved to be the wrong one. Yes, he had told himself. Sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want.

He pushed aside these thoughts when the cab pulled up in front of number fifty Berkeley Square, the most haunted house in London. Well, the moment had finally arrived. He took a deep breath, climbed out of the carriage and made his way slowly towards the building, savouring the aromas floating in the afternoon air, still with the manuscript of The Invisible Man tucked under his arm.

On entering, he discovered Stoker and James already there, engaged in a lively conversation with the man who was about to kill them in the halo of light cast by the candelabra dotted about the hallway. From then on, every time he heard some columnist praising the American’s uncanny powers of observation, he would be unable to stop himself guffawing.

‘Ah, Mr Wells,’ cried Rhys, on seeing him. ‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.’

‘Forgive the delay, gentlemen,’ Wells apologised, glancing despondently at Rhys’s two henchmen, who were firmly planted at the edge of the rectangle of light on the floor, waiting for Rhys to give them the order to finish off the foolish trio.

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ said his host. ‘The important thing is you’ve brought your novel.’

‘Yes,’ said Wells, waving the manuscript idiotically.

Rhys nodded, pleased, and pointed at the table beside him, signalling to him to leave it on top of the two already there. Rather unceremoniously, Wells added his own to the pile, then stepped back a few paces. He realised this placed him directly in front of Rhys and his henchmen, and to the right of James and Stoker, an ideal position if he wanted to be shot first.

‘Thank you, Mr Wells,’ said Rhys, casting a satisfied eye over the spoils on the table.

He will smile now, thought Wells. And Rhys smiled. He will stop smiling now and look at us, suddenly serious. And he will raise his right hand now.

But it was Wells who raised his. Rhys looked at him with amused curiosity. ‘Is something wrong, Mr Wells?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I hope nothing is wrong, Mr Rhys,’ replied Wells. ‘But we’ll soon find out’

With these words, he let his hand fall in a sweeping motion – as he had little experience at making gestures of this kind, it lacked authority looking more like the action of someone swinging a censer.

Even so, the person who was supposed to receive the message understood. There was a sudden noise on the upper floor, and they raised their heads as one towards the stairwell, where something, which for the moment they could only describe as vaguely human, came hurtling towards them. Only when the brave Captain Shackleton landed on the floor in the middle of the circle of light did they realise it was a person.

Wells could not help smiling at the position Tom had taken up, knees bent, muscles tensed, like a wild cat ready to pounce on its prey. The light from the candelabra glinted on his armour, the metal shell covering him from head to toe, except for his strong, handsome chin. He struck a truly heroic figure, and Wells understood now why he had asked his former companions to get him the armour, which they had stolen from Gilliam Murray’s dressing room that very morning.

While the others were still trying to understand what was going on, Shackleton unsheathed his sabre, performed a perfect flourish in the air and, following the movement through, plunged the blade into one of the two henchmen’s stomachs. His companion tried to take aim, but the distance between them was too short for him to manoeuvre, which gave the captain ample time to draw the sword from his victim’s stomach and swing round gracefully.

The henchman watched with horrified fascination as Shackleton raised his sword, slicing the man’s head off with a swift two-handed blow. Still gaping in terror, the head rolled across the floor, disappearing discreetly into the gloomy edge of the circle of light.

‘Have you brought an assassin with you, Wells?’ James exclaimed, scandalised by the bloody spectacle taking place before him.

Wells ignored him. He was too busy following Tom’s movements. Rhys finally responded. Wells saw him retrieve one of his men’s weapons from the floor and aim it at Tom who, gripping his bloody sabre, was that very moment turning towards him. They stood at least four paces apart, and Wells realised with horror that the captain would be unable to cover this distance before the other man fired. And he was not mistaken: Tom barely managed to take a step before he received the full blast of the heat ray in his chest. His armour shattered, like a crab shell hit by a hammer, and he was thrown backwards, his helmet flying off as he fell. The force of the shot sent him rolling across the floor until he finally came to a halt, a smouldering crater in his chest, his handsome face lit by the nearby candelabra. Blood trickled from his mouth, and only the candle flames glinted now in his beautiful green eyes.

Rhys’s roar of triumph broke the silence, forcing Wells to take his eyes off Tom and fix them on him. Rhys surveyed the three corpses strewn around him with amused incredulity. He nodded slowly, then turned towards the writers, huddled together on the far side of the hallway.

‘Nice try, Wells,’ he said, walking over to them with his springy gait, a ferocious grin on his face. ‘I have to admit you took me by surprise. But your plan has merely added a few more bodies to the count’

Wells did not reply. He felt suddenly dizzy as he watched Rhys raise his weapon and point it at his chest. He assumed the sensation announced that he was about to travel through time. So he would be going to the year 1888 after all. He had done his best to prevent it, but apparently his fate was sealed. There probably did exist a parallel universe where Shackleton had been able to finish off Rhys, and where he would not travel in time and could go on being Bertie, but unfortunately he was not in that universe. He was in one very similar to that of the future Wells, where he would also travel eight years into the past, but where Captain Shackleton had died, pierced by a heat ray.

Realising he had failed, Wells could only smile sadly, as Rhys slid his finger towards the trigger. At that very moment, a shot rang out, but a shot fired from an ordinary pistol. Then it was Rhys’s turn to smile sadly at Wells. A moment later, he lowered his weapon and let it drop to the floor, as though he had suddenly decided it was worthless. With the languid voluptuousness of a puppet whose strings have been cut one by one, Rhys slumped to his knees, sat down, and finally toppled over on to the floor, his blood-spattered face still smiling. Behind him, a smoking gun in his hand, Wells saw Inspector Colin Garrett.