If you are reading this letter then I am right and in the future time travel will be possible. I do not know who will deliver this to you. I can only assure you she will be a descendant of yours, and of mine, for as you will have guessed from the handwriting, I am you. I am a Wells from the future. From a very distant future. It is best you assimilate this before reading on. Since I am sure the fact that our handwriting is identical will not be enough to convince you, as any skilled person could have copied it, I shall try to prove to you that we are one and the same person by telling you something only you know about. Who else knows that the basket in the kitchen full of onions and potatoes is not just any old basket? Well, is that enough, or must I be crude and remind you that during your marriage to your cousin Isabel you masturbated thinking about the nude sculptures at Crystal Palace? Forgive me for alluding to such an upsetting period of your life, only I am certain that, like the secret meaning the basket has for you, it is something you would never mention in any future biography, proving beyond doubt that I am not some impostor who has found out everything about you. No, I am you, Bertie. And unless you accept that, there is no point in reading on.
Now I shall tell you how you became me. The three of you will be in for a nasty surprise tomorrow when you go to give Rhys your manuscripts. Everything the traveller has told you is a lie, except that he is a great admirer of your work. That is why he will be unable to stop himself smiling when you deliver his precious haul to him in person. Once this is done, he will give the order to one of his henchmen, who will fire at poor James. You have already seen what their weapons can do to a human body so I shall spare you the details, but it is not hard to imagine that your clothes will be sprayed with a grisly spatter of blood and entrails. Then, before either of you has a chance to react, the henchman will fire again, this time at a stunned Stoker, who will suffer the same fate as the American. After that, paralysed with fear, you will watch as he takes aim at you, except that before he pulls the trigger Rhys will stop him with a gentle wave of his hand. And he will do this because he respects you enough not to want to let you die without telling you why. After all, you are the author of The Time Machine, the novel that started the vogue for time travel. At the very least he owes you an explanation, and so, before his henchman kills you, he will go to the trouble of telling you the truth, even if it is only to hear himself recount aloud how he managed to outsmart the three of you. Then he will confess to you, as he bounces round the hallway in that ridiculous way of his, that he is not a guardian of time, and that in fact, had it not been for a chance encounter he would have known nothing of the existence of the Library of Truth or that the past was being guarded by the state.
Rhys was an eccentric millionaire, a member of that select group of people who go through life doing only what they wish to, and who had been obliged to let the government study him when they opened the Department of Time. He had not found the experience too objectionable, despite being forced to rub elbows with people from all walks of life. It was a small price to pay for finding out the cause of his ailment (which is what he assumed it was, after suffering a couple of spontaneous displacements at moments of extreme tension) and, above all, discovering the exciting possibilities it opened up.
When the department was closed down, he decided to hone the skills he had already learned to control remarkably well by doing some sightseeing through time. For a while, he devoted himself to travelling back into the past at random, wandering through the centuries until he grew tired of witnessing historic naval battles, witches being burned at the stake and fecundating the bellies of Egyptian whores and slave girls with his seed of the future. It was then that it occurred to him to use his talents to take his passion for books to the limit. Rhys had a fabulous library in his house, containing a fortune in sixteenth-century first editions and incunables, but suddenly his collection seemed to him ridiculous and utterly worthless. What good was it to him to own a first edition of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage if the verses he was reading could be perused by anyone else? It would be quite different if he possessed the only copy in the world, as if the poet had written it exclusively for him.
With his newly discovered abilities, this was something he could achieve quite easily. If he travelled back in time, stole one of his favourite author’s manuscripts before he published it, then killed the writer, he would be able to build up a unique library of works no one else knew even existed. Murdering a handful of writers to add a private literary archive to his library did not trouble him in the slightest, for Rhys had always thought of his favourite novels as originating out of nowhere, independently of their authors, who were human beings, and, like all human beings, pretty despicable. Besides, it was too late for him to start having scruples, especially since he had amassed his fortune in a way conventional morality would doubtless have deemed criminal.
Happily, he no longer needed to judge himself by others’ moral codes, for he had long ago elaborated his own morality. He had been obliged to do so to be able to get rid of his stepfather in the way that he had. Still, even though he had poisoned him when the man had included Rhys’s mother in his will, that did not stop him going to put flowers on his grave every Sunday. After all, he had him to thank for who he was.
The vast fortune he had inherited from this brutal, uncouth man was nothing compared to his legacy from his real father: the precious gene that enabled him to travel in time, placing the past at his feet. He began dreaming of his unique library, on whose shelves Treasure Island, The Iliad and Frankenstein, or his three favourite novels by Melvyn Aaron Frost, would sit secretly side by side. He picked up a copy of Dracula by Frost and studied his photograph carefully. Yes, the sickly little man with eyes that oozed corruption, showing he was as riddled with vices and weaknesses as any other, would be the first of a long list of writers who would meet their end in a series of freak accidents that would help Rhys amass his phantom library.
With this in mind, he travelled to our time accompanied by two of his men, arriving a few months before Frosts rise to fame. He needed to find him, make sure he had not delivered his manuscripts to his editor, and force him at gunpoint to hand over the only thing that differentiated him from all the other wretches who gave the world a bad name. Then he would end Frost’s ridiculous life by staging some sort of accident. But, to his surprise, he could find no trace of Melvyn Frost. No one seemed to have heard of him. It was as though he had never existed. How could he possibly have guessed that Frost was also a time traveller and would reveal his identity only once he was in possession of your works?
But Rhys had no intention of leaving empty-handed. This was the writer he had chosen to start his literary bloodbath, and he would find him come hell or high water. His plan was not notable for its subtlety: the only thing he could think of to force Frost out into the open was to kill three innocent bystanders and write the opening sentence of each of his three novels at the scene of each crime, lifting them from the published copies he had brought with him. This could not fail to arouse Frosts curiosity.
As Rhys had predicted, it was not long before the passages appeared in the newspapers. But still Frost did not come forward, seemingly not taking the hint.
By turns desperate and infuriated, Rhys lay in wait day and night with his men at the scenes of the crimes, but to no avail until a man in the crowd caught his eye. It was not Frost, yet his presence gave Rhys a similar frisson of excitement. He had been staring like any other spectator at Miss Ellis’s slender corpse, which, hours before, he himself had propped against the wall, and at the inspector from Scotland Yard, standing next to the dead woman, when he noticed the middle-aged man on his right. He was wearing all the typical accoutrements of the period: an elegant blue suit, a top hat, a monocle and a pipe hanging out of his mouth, all of which revealed themselves to Rhys as a deliberate disguise. Then he noticed the book the man was carrying. It was Melvyn Frost’s hitherto unpublished novel The Turn of the Screw. How could this man possess a copy of it? Clearly he was a fellow time traveller.
Scarcely able to contain his excitement, Rhys discreetly watched as the man compared the
