you wrote for Lewis Hind were re-edited, together with those of Edgar Allan Toe and, of course, Jules Verne, who competed with you for the title of father of the genre.
As Inspector Garrett had predicted, novels that envisaged future worlds had ended up creating a genre of their own, and this was largely thanks to his discovery that Murray’s Time Travel was the biggest hoax of the nineteenth century. After that, the future went back to being a blank space no one had any claims on, and which every writer could adorn as he liked, an unknown world, an unexplored territory, like those on the old nautical maps, where it was said monsters were born.
On reading this, I realised with horror that my disappearance had sparked off a fatal chain of events: without my help, Garrett had been unable to catch Rhys and had gone ahead with his plan to visit the year 2000 and arrest Captain Shackleton, thus uncovering Murray’s hoax, resulting in him going to prison. My thoughts immediately turned to Jane, and I scoured hundreds of newspapers and magazines, fearing I might come across a news item reporting the death of H. G. Wells’s ‘widow’ in a tragic cycling accident.
But Jane had not died. She had gone on living after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. This meant Murray had not carried out his threat. Had he simply warned her to convince me to co-operate with him? Perhaps. Or perhaps he had not had time to carry out his threat, or had wasted it searching for me in vain all over London to ask why on earth I was not trying to discover the real murderer. Despite his extensive network of thugs, he had failed to find me. Naturally, he had not thought to look in 1938. In any case, he had ended up in prison, and my wife was alive. Although she was no longer my wife.
Thanks to the articles about you, I was able to form an idea of what her life was like, what it had been like after my sudden upsetting departure. Jane had waited nearly five years in our house in Woking for me to come back, and then her hope ran out. Resigned to continuing her life without me, she had returned to live in London, where she had met and married a prestigious lawyer by the name of Douglas Evans, with whom she had a daughter they named Selma. I found a photograph of her as a charming old lady who still had the smile I had become enamoured of during our walks to Charing Cross. My first thought was to find her, but this, of course, was a foolish impulse. What would I say to her? My sudden reappearance after all this time would only have upset her otherwise peaceful existence. She had accepted my departure, why stir things up now? I did not to try to find her, which is why from the moment I disappeared I never again laid eyes on the sweet creature who must at this very moment be sleeping above your head.
Perhaps my telling you this will prompt you to wake her with your caresses when you finish reading the letter. It is something only you can decide: far be it from me to meddle in your marriage. But, of course, not looking for her was not enough. I had to leave London, not just because I was afraid of running into her or into one of my friends, who would recognise me immediately since I had not changed, but purely for my own protection: it was more than likely Rhys would carry on trawling the centuries for me, searching through time for some trace of me.
I assumed a false identity. I grew a bushy beard and chose the charming medieval town of Norwich as the place where I would discreetly start to build a new life for myself. Thanks to what you had learned at Mr Cowap’s pharmacy, I found work at a chemist’s, and for a year and a half I spent my days dispensing ointments and syrups, and my nights lying in bed listening to the news, alert to the slow build-up of a war that would redefine the world once more. Of my own free will I had decided to live one of those redundant, futile lives that I had always been terrified my mother’s stubbornness would finally condemn me to, and I could not even compensate for its simplicity by writing for fear of alerting Rhys. I was a writer condemned to live like someone who had no gift for writing. Can you imagine a worse torture? Neither can I. Yes, I was safe, but I was trapped in a dismal life, which made me wonder at times whether it was worth the trouble of living.
Happily, someone came along to brighten it up: she was called Alice and she was beautiful. She entered the chemist’s one morning to buy a bottle of aspirin – a preparation of acetylsalicylic acid marketed by a German company that was very popular at the time – and when she left she took my heart with her.
Love blossomed between us amazingly quickly, outstripping the war, and by the time it broke out Alice and I had much more to lose than before. Luckily, it all seemed to be taking place far away from our town, which apparently presented no threat to Germany, whose new chancellor intended to conquer the world under the dubious pretext that the blood of a superior race pulsed through his veins. We could only glimpse the terrible consequences of the conflict through the ghastly murmurings carried to us on the breeze, a foretaste of what the newspapers would later report. I already understood this war would be different from previous ones, because science had changed the face of war by presenting men with new ways of killing one another.
The battle would now take place in the skies. But do not think of dirigibles firing at one another to see who could burst the enemy’s hydrogen balloons first. Man had conquered the skies with a flying machine that was heavier than air, similar to the one Verne had envisaged in his novel Robur-the-Conqueror, only these were not made of papier-mache glued together, and they dropped bombs. Death came from above, announcing its arrival with a terrifying whistle.
And although, because of complex alliances, seventy different countries had been drawn into the atrocious war, in no time England was the only country left standing, while the rest of the world contemplated, astonished, the birth of a new order. Intent on breaking England’s resistance, Germany subjected our country to a remorseless bombardment, which to begin with was confined to airfields and harbours (in keeping with the curious code of honour that sometimes underlies acts of war) but soon spread to the cities. After several nights of repeated bombing, our beloved London was reduced to smoking rubble, from which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral emerged miraculously, the embodiment of our invincible spirit.
Yes, England resisted, and even counter-attacked with brief sallies over German territory. One of these left the historic town of Lubeck, on the banks of the river Trave, partially destroyed. In angry retaliation, the Germans decided to increase their attacks two-fold. Even so, Alice and I felt relatively safe in Norwich, a town of no strategic interest whatsoever. Except that Norwich had been blessed with three stars in the celebrated Baedeker guide, and this was the one Germany consulted when it resolved to destroy our historic heritage. Karl Baedeker’s guide recommended visiting its romanesque cathedral, its twelfth-century castle and its many churches, but the German chancellor preferred to drop bombs on them.
The intrusion of the war took us by surprise as we listened to Bishop Helmore’s sermon in the cathedral. Sensing it would be one of the enemy’s prime targets, the bishop urged us to flee the house of God, and while some people chose to remain – whether because they were paralysed by fear or because their faith convinced them there could be no safer refuge, I do not know – I grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her towards the exit, fighting my way through the terrified crowd blocking the nave.
We got outside just as the first wave of bombs began to fall. How can I describe such horror to you? Perhaps by saying that the wrath of God pales beside that of man. People fled in all directions, even as the force of the bombs ripped into the earth, toppling buildings and shaking the air with the roar of thunder. The world fell down around us, torn to shreds. I tried to find a safe place, but all I could think of as I ran hand in hand with Alice through the mounting destruction was of how little we valued human life.
Then, in the middle of that frenzied running, 1 felt a familiar dizziness steal over me. My head began to throb, everything around me became blurred, and I realised what was about to happen. Instantaneously, I
