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 Oligocene 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
