The Map of Time

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 facade 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 naive 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