The Map of Time (48 page)

“And what state is our world in, have you discovered any anomalies?” Stoker asked, amused. “Are there more flies than there should be?” The time traveler indulged the Irishman’s jest but with a strangely sinister chuckle.

“I usually always find some anomaly,” he declared in a somber voice. “Actually, my job is rather entertaining: the nineteenth century is one of the time travelers” 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 this visit, of course.” “What has gone wrong this time?” asked James.

Wells could not help noticing 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 travelers 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.

Marcus nodded.

“I’m afraid so. He was arrested because a time traveler 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 this time traveler from the future, Bryan Reese, the sailor known as Jack the Ripper, after murdering the prostitute on November 7, 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, leaving 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 favorite pastime of researchers, detectives, and amateurs, who would all root around in Scotland Yard’s archives, desperate to be the first to put a face to the shadow 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 traveler responsible for the modification couldn’t resist finding out the monster’s true identity. And as you deduced, Mr. Wells, no alteration was detected and 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 only need travel back to November 7 to prevent the time traveler from 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 offense.” “Does this mean we are living in … a parallel universe?” asked Wells.

Marcus 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 traveler, 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 the past was not immutable, that it could be changed. What would happen, for instance, if someone traveled 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 traveler 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, only 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 travelers, for the only way to verify whether changes to the past produced parallel worlds or not would be by comparing it 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.”

39

With an amused grin on his lips, the time traveler began to climb the stairs. The writers hesitated for a moment, then followed him, escorted by his two henchmen. On the top floor, Marcus led them with his athletic gait to a room containing a bookcase on one wall filled with dusty books, 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, Marcus pulled on a lamp attached to the wall and the fake bookcase opened in the middle to reveal a spacious room beyond.

The traveler waited for his henchmen to scuttle through the shadows and light the lamps in the room, before he beckoned the authors in. As James and Stoker seemed reluctant to do so, Wells took the lead and ventured into the mysterious place with cautious, mouselike 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 traveler examined the face of the century, in search of possible inaccuracies. But at the back of the room, he glimpsed something that aroused his interest far more. It was some kind of spider’s web made out of multicolored pieces of cord, hanging from which was a collection of newspaper cuttings. James and Stoker had also noticed the network of strings, towards which the traveler was now walking, jerking his head for them to follow.

“What is it?” asked Wells, drawing level with him.

“A map of time,” replied Marcus, beaming with pride.

Wells gazed at him in surprise, then stared once more at the shape the colored strings made, studying it more carefully. From a distance, it looked like a spider’s web, but now he could see 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, like a master rope. The ends of the green and blue colored strings hanging from the white cord were tacked to the sidewalls.

Each string, 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 began browsing some of the headlines. After Marcus nodded his approval, the two other writers followed suit.

“The white cord,” explained the traveler, pointing at the master rope, “represents the original universe, the only one that existed before the travelers 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 color 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 of the cord hung a cutting announcing 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 announcing important events. Wells was familiar with many of these 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. He felt suddenly dizzy as he realized these were things that had not yet happened, events that lay in wait for him somewhere along the time continuum, most of them strangely sinister.

Before resuming his examination, Wells glanced at his companions to see whether they were experiencing the same mixture of excitement and dread as him. Stoker appeared to be concentrating on one particular cutting, which he was reading, mesmerized, while, after an initial cursory glance, James had turned his back on the map, as though this frightening, incomprehensible future felt less controllable than the reality it was his lot to inhabit and in which he had learned to navigate like a fish in water. The American appeared greatly 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 behavior might be affected by knowing about future events, and yet a perverse curiosity compelled him to devour as many headlines as he could, aware 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 sensationalist headline: “A Lady Time Traveler,” the article described how when employees at Olsen’s department store went to open the shop on the morning of April 12, 1984, they 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 she came from the future, from the year 2008, to be exact, as her strange clothes 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, the woman suddenly felt giddy. A second later, she found herself in Olsen’s department store, twenty-four years earlier in time, 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 once more. Could she have gone back to the future? the journalist speculated darkly.

“The Government suspects it all began with this woman,” Marcus 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 travelers 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 travelers” ability to connect with the area of the brain which for the rest of the population remained switched off. Research showed that the gene was handed down from generation to generation, meaning all the travelers shared the same distant ancestor. The Government never managed to discover who the first carrier was, although they thought it might be this woman. It is widely believed she had a child with a man, possibly also able to travel in time, and that their offspring inherited a reinforced gene, establishing a line of time travelers who, by mixing with the rest of the population, would decades later trigger the epidemic of time travelers. However, every effort to find her has failed. The woman vanished hours after turning up at Olsen’s department store and hasn’t been seen since, as the article says. I won’t deny some of us time travelers, 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 Marcus 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 Marcus, 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 of her 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 favorite parallel universes,” said Marcus. “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, carrying a monkey around on your shoulder became a fad, and a walk through the streets of London turned into a rather amusing spectacle. Unfortunately, reality was far less exciting and had to be reestablished.” 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 timelines I have not yet corrected,” Marcus went on to explain. “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 Marcus 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 murdered the prostitutes.

“But as you can see, this is not the only blue string,” said the traveler, 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.” Marcus tore off 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, nor did he know much about Stoker, save for the three or four already mentioned facts. He could never have imagined, for instance, that this unassuming, methodical man who observed society’s norms, this man who by day adapted with tragic subservience to the frenetic social life of his conceited employer, at night indulged in endless drinking sessions run by whores of every category and condition, wild orgies whose admirable aim was to alleviate the bitterness of a marriage, which, 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 traveler 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 traveler came from, his work would be regarded as a classic.

His novel would elevate him to a prominent position in the pantheon of present-day authors, exactly as his mother had predicted after reading his manuscript, in a note he had carried round in his pocket ever since. And did he not deserve it? he said to himself.

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 Wallchia, Vlad Tepes, 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,” Marcus 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 Marcus. “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 own fingers, preferring to hire the services of a typist instead.

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 guest houses 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 windowpane, and a stranger hanging on his every word, fingers poised over the keys of the monstrous machine, that James had found the courage to write a novel inspired by a story the Archbishop of Canterbury had told him long before, 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 a ghost story it was where the ghosts were not really ghosts, and yet perhaps they were after all, although in all probability they were not, because you were meant to think that they were.

“And Frost’s third novel,” said Marcus, turning to address 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 pantheon of modern legend, beside Mr. Stoker’s Dracula.” “Was it his turn now to swell with pride?” Wells wondered.