The Map of Time

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