“Yes, a moment ago. Why?”
“And you didn’t notice anything . . . odd?” Higgins inquired nervously.
Ramsey shook his head.
“Then take another look,” Higgins almost commanded him.
Ramsey lowered the hand in which he was clasping the fob and made his way tentatively over to the window, dragging Higgins’s face across the floor as if it were a dirty rag. He had no idea what he would find, but he was aware of what it would mean. His heart in his throat, he peered out, surveying the street from end to end: the two gentlemen were still calmly chatting, and at that moment a couple of mounted policemen were passing below his window, a nursemaid with a perambulator was buying a bunch of roses . . . It looked no different from any other morning, the same scenes as every day. What was it Higgins wanted him to see? Then, just when he was about to turn away, a deafening squawk tore through the air like a hacksaw. Everyone in the street raised his or her head to the sky, as did Ramsey. To his astonishment, he saw the silhouette of a gigantic pterodactyl, its membranous wings spread imposingly, circling the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“Can you see it, Ramsey?” he heard Higgins ask in a frantic voice. “It has started! We must leave this multiverse immediately! I have summoned an Executioner, and Melford, too . . . We must go back to the Other Side. At least there we will enjoy an easy death . . . This multiverse is going to explode . . . Ramsey, can you hear me?”
Ramsey’s watch slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor. He stepped on it, crushing its cogs under his shoe. Higgins’s puzzled face vanished abruptly. Ramsey leaned against the window frame and watched through eyes brimming with tears the policemen take off at a gallop, the nursemaid shriek, the two gentlemen wave their arms about and point up at the sky . . . “It has arrived,” he said. The Day of Chaos has finally arrived, as it had been written. And they had been unable to prevent it. All those worlds would vanish in the Great Annihilation, and the Other Side would freeze over. All their sacrifices, the attainment of the Supreme Knowledge, the terrible slaughter of innocents ordered by their superior civilization, had been in vain. They would all disappear, the learned and the ignorant, those who had known love and those who had not, victims and Executioners, and their only legacy would be their atoms floating in the endless void, tracing the symbol of barbarism for all eternity and for no one . . .
“Chaos is inevitable,” he whispered sadly.
“Chaos is inevitable,” a metallic voice rang out behind him.
Ramsey swung round knowing exactly what he would find. There, in the middle of the room, stood an Executioner, dark and shiny like a black flame. He recognized him.
“Why are you here, 2087V?” he snapped. “Did Higgins send you? Tell him I am not leaving. Go without me. Get out! I am tired. And in any case . . .” He shook his head, almost in despair. “What difference does it make dying in one world or another? What difference . . . ?”
Ramsey broke off his sad soliloquy. The Executioner was slowly spreading his arms, his cape rising like a curtain to reveal a cowering figure. When the light filtering through the window illuminated her, Ramsey saw an old lady, so frail she seemed to be made of fossilized tears. The woman stepped forward, rubbing her hands together nervously and gazing solemnly at Ramsey.
“Good morning, Doctor Ramsey. Do you remember me? I see you don’t . . .” She smiled at Ramsey’s unease. “We met a long time ago at Madame Amber’s house.”
Ramsey screwed up his eyes.
“Mrs. Lansbury . . . ?”
Jane nodded. “That was what I called myself, but my real name is Amy Catherine Wells. I am the widow of H. G. Wells, the famous biologist from the Other Side who synthesized the cronotemia virus.”
Ramsey stood gaping at her, fascinated and dumbfounded. He managed to nod. Then Jane took a deep breath. Here I go, Bertie, she said to herself.
“I am truly ashamed to admit that we were the ones who caused this epidemic. We brought the virus to this world, dooming it to destruction. However, fortunately, before he died, my husband . . . left a written account of how to save it.”
34
AND NOW, THE TIME HAS finally arrived for Cornelius Clayton to resume his prominent role in our story. We find him at the moment in a place he goes to whenever he does not want to be found, brooding over The Map of Chaos, which is lying on the table next to a cold teapot. He runs his fingers over the eight-pointed star embossed on its cover and then leans back in his chair, his eyes roaming sadly over the array of magic objects hidden in the Chamber of Marvels, that damp, dusty room that has served as his refuge over the years.
He sighed, glancing back at the book. It remained a mystery to him. A mystery that only grew, he thought, recalling Baskerville. A few months ago, the eccentric old man had turned up at his office and told him he came from a parallel world, a world where everyone had a twin, a potential variant of oneself. The old man himself, for example, was a variant of the author H. G. Wells, although rather more doddering than the one in Clayton’s world, as he could see, and that in the world he came from he and Clayton’s double had been friends. Any other police officer would have called him crazy and sent him packing, but the inspector’s job was to listen to people like him, and so he had told Baskerville to sit down, had closed the door, and within ten minutes he was persuaded that the old man was speaking the truth. How could he not have been, when Baskerville had told him that his twin from another world had lost his hand in a ferocious duel with the woman he loved, whose portrait was hanging in his cellar? For over half an hour, the inspector had listened spellbound to the adventures of the old man, who had sought his help because for the past two years he had been pursued by strange killers. Something about his description of them had made Clayton sit up in his chair: the weapons those Hunters carried bore the same star as the one on the cover of The Map of Chaos. Clayton had shown the old man the book, anxious that someone might finally be able to shed some light on that mystery. However, although they both recognized the symbol and acknowledged there must be some link between the book and the Hunters, neither could offer any fresh information.
After he had left, Clayton sent a patrol to scour the moor for anyone fitting the description the old man had given of his pursuers—impossibly tall men swathed in flowing capes, with broad-brimmed hats and peculiar-looking canes—while he himself resolved to pursue that alleged Wells from another world. Just as he had told Clayton, he worked for the famously wealthy Montgomery Gilmore, who at the time was plunged into deep despair after his fiancée died in a car accident. A tragic fact that had not only caused Clayton to view more leniently that man whom he couldn’t abide, and whom he had stopped investigating in the name of something as foolish as love (he still flushed when he remembered the arguments Wells had used to persuade him), but had also made his surveillance extremely tedious. Murray spent the entire time drinking himself into a stupor either at his house or that of the Wellses, obliging his coachman to sit around twiddling his thumbs most of the day. And so, after several months of fruitless surveillance, Clayton decided to stop shadowing the old man. He couldn’t keep putting his other inquiries on hold due to a case his superiors had long since filed away.
This was a great shame, for had he persisted just a few days longer, as many of his twins in other worlds did, he would have seen Arthur Conan Doyle show up at Murray’s house in the early hours, accompanied by Wells and his wife, and, intrigued by this untimely meeting, would have tailed the two famous authors for several days afterward. Increasingly bemused, he would have seen them visiting fancy dress shops, purchasing slates, and making secret excursions to Brook Manor. Finally, he would have followed them on the day of the fake séance with the Great Ankoma, during which the Invisible Man had appeared, and thus prevented Baskerville’s death, causing events to take a very different turn.
But alas, dear readers, I am not telling you the story of any of those worlds, but rather of this one, in which events took place the way I have already
described. And so, a few days after Clayton stopped following Baskerville, Wells and Doyle went to Clayton’s office to inform him that Baskerville had been slain with a rusty sword wielded by an invisible man. Needless to say, the news left Clayton reeling. The old man was dead, and although Doyle and Wells described his killer as completely invisible, it was clearly the Villain. Just as Mrs. Lansbury had predicted twelve years before, he had come back for the book, although for some reason he thought Wells had it.
In short, those days had brought a flurry of revelations, each more surprising than the last. Yet they had only added to the list of questions Clayton had been asking himself for the past twelve years: Had the old lady been referring to those Hunters when she told him to give the book to those who came from the Other Side? And if so, how was he supposed to find them? And what if, like the Villain, they wanted to destroy the book as well? After all, they were killers, too. Moreover, if what Baskerville had said was true and they were living in a multiple universe, there might be more than one Villain, just as there was more than one Wells and more than one Clayton . . . The inspector heaved a sigh. The threats to the book were multiplying, and he still had no idea whom he ought to give it to.
All these musings led him back to Valerie de Bompard. How could he not think about her? How could he not wonder whether in this universe brimming with fantastical worlds taking shape before him, there might not be more than one Countess de Bompard? Was the Valerie he knew a traveler from another world? That would have accounted for her strange nature, he reflected, remembering what he had experienced the first time he met her: that unnerving feeling of being in the presence of something extraordinary, a creature so fascinating she couldn’t possibly belong to the humdrum universe that surrounded her. He felt a pang in his heart as he imagined the torment of that lost little girl, alone in a world that must have seemed terrifyingly strange to her, abandoned by the only man who had truly understood her. And as if that weren’t enough, years later she had fallen in love with him, an arrogant fool, who only wanted to understand her because, as she herself had pointed out, it was the closest he could come to possessing her. But at least there was one world among that cluster of possible worlds where they were happy, where Valerie was still alive and was not a monster but rather part of a world that was as miraculous and sublime as her own spirit, even if he could only visit her there during his fainting fits.
A sound of frantic knocking on the door brought him back to reality. The inspector breathed a sigh and went to open it, wending his way through the piles of junk filling the room and negotiating peculiar columns draped with wires and lightbulbs, sprouting from them like tree limbs in a mechanical forest. When he reached the door, he took a deep breath and opened it to discover Wells and his wife, both in their nightclothes, as if they had just gotten out of bed.
“Mr. and Mrs. Wells . . . what the devil . . . ?”
“Inspector Clayton,” Wells gasped, “how glad we are to find you here! We needed to see you, and as you told us you spent a lot of time in this chamber, we decided to try our luck before going to your office, given how early it is.”
Clayton nodded suspiciously.
“What brings you here? It must be something very urgent if you haven’t even had time to get dressed,” he remarked sarcastically.
“Indeed, indeed. You see . . . ,” Wells began, a note of alarm in his voice, “my wife and I wanted to talk to you about a very important matter, relating to the . . . um . . . the . . .”
“Oh, the book,” replied Clayton cautiously. “Yes, yes. Let us talk about the book. Please, follow me.”
The inspector guided them toward his desk through the sea of objects. As they walked behind him, Wells glanced fleetingly at some of the marvels they passed—a mermaid’s skeleton, a Minotaur’s head, the skin of a gigantic werewolf—but all the while his eyes returned again and again to the knife hovering at Jane’s back, the tip of the blade almost touching the nape of her neck.
“I would offer you some tea,” Clayton remarked as they reached his desk, “but I am afraid it has gone cold. I doubt it is drinkable . . .”
“Oh, don’t worry, Inspector, we have had our breakfast,” Wells said, and then, pointing timidly at the book on the table, he added, “Er . . . isn’t that The Map of Chaos?”
“Yes, it is,” replied Clayton.
All at once, Wells was propelled toward the inspector, as if he had been seized by a sudden urge to embrace him. Then a knife appeared from behind Jane and its sharp tip pressed into her neck.
“Good morning, Inspector Clayton,” a voice said. “We meet again. It has been a long time.”
Clayton, who had just dodged Wells’s hurtling body, contemplated the knife no one was holding with a look of revulsion but said nothing.
“George, while the inspector is recovering from the shock,” the creature went on, “relieve him of his pistol, would you? And don’t try anything, or I shall trace a pretty smile on your wife’s neck!”
Clenching his jaw, Clayton opened his jacket to enable Wells to take his pistol.
“Forgive me, forgive me,” Wells implored. “What could I do? He was going to wound my wife.”
Clayton looked at him scornfully. Wells hung his head and turned round, but he had scarcely taken a step toward the creature when the voice made him stop in his tracks.
“Oh, I am sorry, George, I forgot . . . I don’t wish to abuse your kindness, but while you are at it, bring me the book, would you? Remember, I came here to destroy it.”
35
MEANWHILE, IN A CONSERVATORY CREATED in the image and likeness of the Taj Mahal, Arthur Conan Doyle was listening to the feeblest defense he had heard in his entire life.
“Actually, I was only making them dream, Arthur,” Murray was saying. “And dreams are necessary. They are humanity’s pick-me-up!”
“ ‘Making them dream’! Is that what how you would describe it?” Doyle said indignantly, his booming voice echoing through the empty conservatory.
“You did the same with Sherlock Holmes,” Murray protested. “You provided your readers with the balm they needed to be able to bear their wretched lives. And then you snatched it from them!”
“Holmes was a character in a book, damn it,” Doyle objected, increasingly irritated. “I never tried to pass him off as a real person.”
Murray snorted and tried a fresh approach. “True. But what about the Great Ankoma? Didn’t you and George pass him off as a genuine medium capable of putting me in touch with Emma? You thought if I believed your charade I would forget about killing myself.”
“That lie was meant to save your life, which is why I agreed to be part of it. But the aim of Murray’s Time Travel was very different. And to think I defended you! I wrote dozens of articles pleading your cause!”
“And didn’t I thank you for it at the time? It is hardly my fault if you are gullible!”
“I am not gullible!” Doyle roared, beside himself with rage.
Murray raised his eyes to heaven, but before he had time to let out the chortle rising up his throat, a speck in the sky drew his attention. He narrowed his eyes in an attempt to focus on it, and as the shape grew clearer, his jaw began to drop. When he realized what it was, he said with a splutter, “And would you believe me if I told you a pterodactyl is about to fly overhead?”
“A pterodactyl? For God’s sake, Gilliam!” Doyle said, incensed. “What do you take me for! Of course I wouldn’t!”
He had scarcely finished speaking when a sound like sheets whipped by a gale began to grow steadily louder. Then the sky suddenly clouded over as an enormous shadow passed overhead. Taken aback, Doyle looked up, and, through the roof of the conservatory, witnessed an enormous pterodactyl flying over their heads. Identical to the reconstructions he had seen in engravings, it had a narrow skull and an elongated jaw bristling with teeth, while its greenish-grey wings must have measured over six feet.
When the creature had vanished into the distance, Doyle asked
in a trembling voice, “How the devil did you do that?”
Murray shrugged, the blood draining from his face. “Would you believe me if I tell you it isn’t my doing?”
Doyle concealed his astonishment. So, what had just crossed the sky was real? They had seen a flying reptile extinct for millions of years? It was then the two men heard the sound that their heated argument and the subsequent noise of the creature’s flapping wings had drowned out: the frenzied tinkling of a hundred bells. They rushed out of the conservatory, only to find Elmer running toward them.
“Mr. Gilmore, sir!” cried the butler as he reached them. “The mirrors . . . the servants . . . fantastical things . . . centaurs . . . dragons.”
“Elmer, my good man, try to speak properly. Otherwise, how do you expect Mr. Doyle and me to understand you?” Murray said good-naturedly.
“Er, forgive me, sir,” replied Elmer, attempting to summon the unflappable composure befitting his station. “I shall do my best, sir, though I fear I still may not make any sense. It is the servants, sir: they have just informed me that the mirrors have stopped reflecting, er . . . reality.”
“And what are they reflecting?” asked Murray.
“Well . . . I am not sure I can tell you, sir. There seems to be some disagreement: Billy, the stable boy, assures me that his mirror shows a knight slaying a dragon, while Mrs. Fisher, the cook, claims to have seen a group of hoofed children playing panpipes. For his part, Ned, the assistant butler, glimpsed a man with a falcon’s head, while Mrs. Donner, the housekeeper, says she saw a sinister vehicle driving round a snow-covered field, blowing flames out of an enormous tube . . .”
Murray and Doyle exchanged glances, then hurried toward the circle of mirrors. Once they got there, they could see for themselves that it was true: none of the mirrors reflected the banal reality in front of them; they all seemed to be dreaming of other worlds, each more incredible than the last.