head. My dizziness and a ringing in my ears melted away and my tired legs stopped trembling.
Ambrose took away the nearly empty flask and stowed it in his coat. 'Got your heart back again?' he asked.
I nodded, then looked at the scene around us. Another wave of dismay swept against me. 'My God!' I cried. 'This is the worst yet! What's happened here? What's happened to the city?'
Over the vista broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed of vain hope and desire… If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever.
Such was the illumination by which I saw the ruins of London. But now they did not seem just freshly battered by war, but weathered away by passing centuries. The heaps of rubble had lost their jagged edges, sinking under mould and decaying vegetation. The road was cracked and riven, as though the Earth beneath was shrinking with age. As I surveyed the appalling scene a small, shinyblack thing like a salamander darted to the crest of one low mound, glared at us with eyes like two pinpoints of light, then darted away. Another one, but with inky bat wings, flapped up from one of the street's cracks, then curved away on the chilling breeze that came from the west.
'Not a pretty sight, eh, Hocker.' Ambrose lifted his walking stick and pointed with it to the horizon. 'This is the way it is all the way to the ocean, and in all the lands beyond as well.'
'My God,' I said. 'What have you brought me to? Is this some future time when Man and Morlock both have rotted away? What comes after this, for God's sake?'
'Nothing comes after this, actually,' said Ambrose briskly. 'And nothing before, either. Your good, comfortable year of 1892 and all the other years of Victoria's reign, and all the rest of the Earth's existence from its gaseous birth to its final fiery plunge back into the sun, are no more. What you see around you are the rocks and shoals of Eternity after the Sea of Time has been drained away. Such is the final upshot of all that mucking about with Time Travel.'
'You don't mean-' I stammered. 'Surely not- surely this isn't the end of it all.' The scene's oppressive gloom weighed heavier and heavier upon me.
'My dear fellow,' said Ambrose mildly, 'this is no end to everything, this is everything. The Alpha and Omega of the Earth's existence. Nothing but this through all Time, Past and Present – if those words still meant anything.'
'But how?' I seized his arm in desperation. 'How could it, have happened?'
'You yourself ate dinner with the man who built the Time Machine, and heard his story. Even such a trifling little excursion as his was in fact so gross a violation of the Universe's natural order as to make distant galaxies warp from their courses! That such power ever fell, however unwittingly, into a mortal man's control was no license for him to actually go and use it. And then when the Morlocks gained control of the Time Machine, and sent whole armies trooping back and forth between your century and theirs – can't you imagine what happened? A temporal implosion! Our little pocket of the Universe was sucked out of the flow of Time and into this dark, unchanging abyss.'
His language and manner of speaking had become more vehement, breaking through the cool demeanour with which he had first addressed me. Evidently the sight of the Earth forsaken by Time – and God? – affected him more deeply than he had wished to show.
'Then what are we to do?' I cried. 'If Time no longer exists – are we to stay like this without end?' I could conceive of no more cheerless hell than being condemned to this wretched spot.
'Well, Mr. Hocker,' said Dr. Ambrose, again smiling. 'Of all the questions that a man can ask, I do love that one. What are we to do? The best question that can ever be asked, indeed. Because you must know what to do before you can do it. Eh? Don't you think so, my good Hocker?'
'For God's sake, you torment me with these riddles.' Anger and indignation filled my breast, as I felt he was making mock of me. 'If you know of some way of escaping this dreadful place, show it to me. I've, near gone out of my head as it is from all you've done to me. To me, and to – Tafe!' A pang of guilt struck me as I realised I had forgotten the companion who had saved my life. 'Where is she?' I demanded. 'What's happened to her?'
'Calm down, Hocker. The woman's perfectly safe. I've tended her injuries and deposited her in a warm bed, elsewhere. You'll have to inform me of all the adventures you two had together.'
'Elsewhere!' I grabbed him by both shoulders and spun him roughly about to face me. 'Elsewhere! There's no end to your damned lies. This isn't the final doom of the Earth, then, is it?'
'But it is, Hocker.' He casually brushed my hands away from himself. 'This is the Earth when Time no longer exists for it. But you asked for a way out? Perhaps, Hocker, perhaps. Not an escape exactly but… a prevention. A thwarting.'
'What do you mean?'
'If this,' said Ambrose, striking the ground with his walking stick, 'is what remains when the Sea of Time – let's call it that, it's a nice metaphor – when the Sea of Time, as I say, has been drained away. Then obviously the thing to do is to go back and dam the hole through which it escaped. Eh? Doesn't it strike you that way?'
'I don't know.' I felt suddenly weary. 'I'm not sure I understand you. So much has happened. I'm very tired…'
'That's understandable,' soothed Dr. Ambrose's voice. 'Why don't you go to sleep?'
'I'd like to,' I murmured. The vista around us seemed to darken.
'Then just close your eyes. That's it,' came his voice, a little fainter. 'Don't worry about falling. You're not really standing upright anyway, are you?'
Dimly, I was aware I was lying on a bed. The soft yellow glow of a gas lamp seeped under my eyelids for a second, then was gone. 'Where's Tafe?' I mumbled.
'She's upstairs.' Ambrose's voice was far away now. 'Don't worry about her. Just sleep, Hocker. You're going to need all the strength you can summon very soon!'
The last I heard was the sound of a door being pulled shut.
I awoke with a calm, rested heart although my sleep had been full of nightmares. Visions of dark shapes moving in a dark world blurred and faded behind my eyes.
On a small table beside the bed in which I lay – and where in Creation was that? my refreshed mind was already wondering – I found a box of safety matches and a candle. I soon discovered my clothes draped across the ornately carved foot of the bed. They had through some miracle been restored to their original condition, clean and untorn.
I dressed quickly and hurried from the bedchamber. A murmur of distant voices led me down a short hallway to a wide staircase. The warm glow of gaslight diffused upward from the room at the base of the stairs. I snuffed the candle and descended.
Seated at a heavy oak table were Dr. Ambrose and a young man. Only when I was standing at the side of the table did I recognise the young man to be no man at all, but Tafe outfitted in a man's suit and collar. The elegant cut and the confidence with which she wore it all served to disguise her femininity from anyone who was not aware of her true status. She pulled a thick black cigar from her mouth and winked at me through a cloud of tobacco smoke. The only sign of her recent wounds was a white line, as of a long healed cut, beneath her jaw.
'Hocker,' said Ambrose genially, 'glad to see you up and about. Great things are afoot, me lad, and I want you to be in for your full share of them. Have a chair.'
From between the table's legs, carved into griffins, I drew a seat and joined them. Ambrose pushed a platter of roast beef, steaming from the blood-red centre of its slices, coarse bread and a glass of dark lager toward me. 'Much explaining to be done,' he said, 'and it would sit poorly on an empty stomach.'
In truth, I was famished and needed little persuasion. Ambrose refilled my glass when it was only half drained. 'From a little ale-house in the Berkshire moors,' he noted, stoppering the jug. Tafe leaned back in her chair and drew luxuriously on her cigar with all the aspect of one sunk fast into the grip of some new-found pleasure.
'Mmm. Yes. Quite good, really,' I managed to say between mouthfuls. 'Surely you're having some?'
'We've dined already,' said Ambrose, waving a hand at a pair of dirty dishes at the other end of the table.
