The Map of Chaos (70 page)

But alas, dear readers, I am not telling you the story of any of those worlds, but rather of this one, in which events took place the way I have already described. And so, a few days after Clayton stopped following Baskerville, Wells and Doyle went to Clayton's office to inform him that Baskerville had been slain with a rusty sword wielded by an invisible man. Needless to say, the news left Clayton reeling. The old man was dead, and although Doyle and Wells described his killer as completely invisible, it was clearly the Villain. Just as Mrs. Lansbury had predicted twelve years before, he had come back for the book, although for some reason he thought Wells had it.

In short, those days had brought a flurry of revelations, each more surprising than the last. Yet they had only added to the list of questions Clayton had been asking himself for the past twelve years: Had the old lady been referring to those Hunters when she told him to give the book to those who came from the Other Side? And if so, how was he supposed to find them? And what if, like the Villain, they wanted to destroy the book as well? After all, they were killers, too. Moreover, if what Baskerville had said was true and they were living in a multiple universe, there might be more than one Villain, just as there was more than one Wells and more than one Clayton . . . The inspector heaved a sigh. The threats to the book were multiplying, and he still had no idea whom he ought to give it to.

All these musings led him back to Valerie de Bompard. How could he not think about her? How could he not wonder whether in this universe brimming with fantastical worlds taking shape before him, there might not be more than one Countess de Bompard? Was the Valerie he knew a traveler from another world? That would have accounted for her strange nature, he reflected, remembering what he had experienced the first time he met her: that unnerving feeling of being in the presence of something extraordinary, a creature so fascinating she couldn't possibly belong to the humdrum universe that surrounded her. He felt a pang in his heart as he imagined the torment of that lost little girl, alone in a world that must have seemed terrifyingly strange to her, abandoned by the only man who had truly understood her. And as if that weren't enough, years later she had fallen in love with him, an arrogant fool, who only wanted to understand her because, as she herself had pointed out, it was the closest he could come to possessing her. But at least there was one world among that cluster of possible worlds where they were happy, where Valerie was still alive and was not a monster but rather part of a world that was as miraculous and sublime as her own spirit, even if he could only visit her there during his fainting fits.

A sound of frantic knocking on the door brought him back to reality. The inspector breathed a sigh and went to open it, wending his way through the piles of junk filling the room and negotiating peculiar columns draped with wires and lightbulbs, sprouting from them like tree limbs in a mechanical forest. When he reached the door, he took a deep breath and opened it to discover Wells and his wife, both in their nightclothes, as if they had just gotten out of bed.

“Mr. and Mrs. Wells . . . what the devil . . . ?”

“Inspector Clayton,” Wells gasped, “how glad we are to find you here! We needed to see you, and as you told us you spent a lot of time in this chamber, we decided to try our luck before going to your office, given how early it is.”

Clayton nodded suspiciously.

“What brings you here? It must be something very urgent if you haven't even had time to get dressed,” he remarked sarcastically.

“Indeed, indeed. You see . . . ,” Wells began, a note of alarm in his voice, “my wife and I wanted to talk to you about a very important matter, relating to the . . . um . . . the . . .”

“Oh, the
book,
” replied Clayton cautiously. “Yes, yes. Let us talk about the
book.
Please, follow me.”

The inspector guided them toward his desk through the sea of objects. As they walked behind him, Wells glanced fleetingly at some of the marvels they passed—a mermaid's skeleton, a Minotaur's head, the skin of a gigantic werewolf—but all the while his eyes returned again and again to the knife hovering at Jane's back, the tip of the blade almost touching the nape of her neck.

“I would offer you some tea,” Clayton remarked as they reached his desk, “but I am afraid it has gone cold. I doubt it is drinkable . . .”

“Oh, don't worry, Inspector, we have had our breakfast,” Wells said, and then, pointing timidly at the book on the table, he added, “Er . . . isn't that
The Map of Chaos
?”

“Yes, it is,” replied Clayton.

All at once, Wells was propelled toward the inspector, as if he had been seized by a sudden urge to embrace him. Then a knife appeared from behind Jane and its sharp tip pressed into her neck.

“Good morning, Inspector Clayton,” a voice said. “We meet again. It has been a long time.”

Clayton, who had just dodged Wells's hurtling body, contemplated the knife no one was holding with a look of revulsion but said nothing.

“George, while the inspector is recovering from the shock,” the creature went on, “relieve him of his pistol, would you? And don't try anything, or I shall trace a pretty smile on your wife's neck!”

Clenching his jaw, Clayton opened his jacket to enable Wells to take his pistol.

“Forgive me, forgive me,” Wells implored. “What could I do? He was going to wound my wife.”

Clayton looked at him scornfully. Wells hung his head and turned round, but he had scarcely taken a step toward the creature when the voice made him stop in his tracks.

“Oh, I am sorry, George, I forgot . . . I don't wish to abuse your kindness, but while you are at it, bring me the book, would you? Remember, I came here to destroy it.”

M
EANWHILE, IN A CONSERVATORY CREATED
in the image and likeness of the Taj Mahal, Arthur Conan Doyle was listening to the feeblest defense he had heard in his entire life.

“Actually, I was only making them dream, Arthur,” Murray was saying. “And dreams are necessary. They are humanity's pick-me-up!”

“ ‘Making them dream'! Is that what how you would describe it?” Doyle said indignantly, his booming voice echoing through the empty conservatory.

“You did the same with Sherlock Holmes,” Murray protested. “You provided your readers with the balm they needed to be able to bear their wretched lives. And then you snatched it from them!”

“Holmes was a character in a book, damn it,” Doyle objected, increasingly irritated. “I never tried to pass him off as a real person.”

Murray snorted and tried a fresh approach. “True. But what about the Great Ankoma? Didn't you and George pass him off as a genuine medium capable of putting me in touch with Emma? You thought if I believed your charade I would forget about killing myself.”

“That lie was meant to save your life, which is why I agreed to be part of it. But the aim of Murray's Time Travel was very different. And to think I defended you! I wrote dozens of articles pleading your cause!”

“And didn't I thank you for it at the time? It is hardly my fault if you are gullible!”

“I am not gullible!” Doyle roared, beside himself with rage.

Murray raised his eyes to heaven, but before he had time to let out the chortle rising up his throat, a speck in the sky drew his attention. He narrowed his eyes in an attempt to focus on it, and as the shape grew clearer, his jaw began to drop. When he realized what it was, he said with a splutter, “And would you believe me if I told you a pterodactyl is about to fly overhead?”

“A pterodactyl? For God's sake, Gilliam!” Doyle said, incensed. “What do you take me for! Of course I wouldn't!”

He had scarcely finished speaking when a sound like sheets whipped by a gale began to grow steadily louder. Then the sky suddenly clouded over as an enormous shadow passed overhead. Taken aback, Doyle looked up, and, through the roof of the conservatory, witnessed an enormous pterodactyl flying over their heads. Identical to the reconstructions he had seen in engravings, it had a narrow skull and an elongated jaw bristling with teeth, while its greenish-grey wings must have measured over six feet.

When the creature had vanished into the distance, Doyle asked in a trembling voice, “How the devil did you do that?”

Murray shrugged, the blood draining from his face. “Would you believe me if I tell you it isn't my doing?”

Doyle concealed his astonishment. So, what had just crossed the sky was real? They had seen a flying reptile extinct for millions of years? It was then the two men heard the sound that their heated argument and the subsequent noise of the creature's flapping wings had drowned out: the frenzied tinkling of a hundred bells. They rushed out of the conservatory, only to find Elmer running toward them.

“Mr. Gilmore, sir!” cried the butler as he reached them. “The mirrors . . . the servants . . . fantastical things . . . centaurs . . . dragons.”

“Elmer, my good man, try to speak properly. Otherwise, how do you expect Mr. Doyle and me to understand you?” Murray said good-naturedly.

“Er, forgive me, sir,” replied Elmer, attempting to summon the unflappable composure befitting his station. “I shall do my best, sir, though I fear I still may not make any sense. It is the servants, sir: they have just informed me that the mirrors have stopped reflecting, er . . . reality.”

“And what are they reflecting?” asked Murray.

“Well . . . I am not sure I can tell you, sir. There seems to be some disagreement: Billy, the stable boy, assures me that his mirror shows a knight slaying a dragon, while Mrs. Fisher, the cook, claims to have seen a group of hoofed children playing panpipes. For his part, Ned, the assistant butler, glimpsed a man with a falcon's head, while Mrs. Donner, the housekeeper, says she saw a sinister vehicle driving round a snow-covered field, blowing flames out of an enormous tube . . .”

Murray and Doyle exchanged glances, then hurried toward the circle of mirrors. Once they got there, they could see for themselves that it was true: none of the mirrors reflected the banal reality in front of them; they all seemed to be dreaming of other worlds, each more incredible than the last.

“My God . . . ,” whispered Murray. Then he turned to the butler and commanded: “Elmer, go back to the house and calm the servants.”

“Calm them? Why, of course. At once, sir,” Elmer retorted, and he went off to carry out his master's simple command.

After he had gone, Murray and Doyle took a closer look at the miraculous reflections, but they soon realized that the phenomenon wasn't confined only to the mirrors. Outside the circle, a few yards away, translucent trees had started sprouting from the lawn. They emitted a faint glow, as if the light were passing through them.

“What the devil is going on, Arthur?” exclaimed Murray. “I ordered those trees to be cut down when I bought the house.”

“Then in some other world you decided to leave them there,” Doyle mused, gazing in astonishment at the horizon, where two red moons were now hovering. “Good God . . . the infinite worlds in the universe seem to be closing in on one another, or even overlapping . . . Is this the end of the world that the old lady predicted?”

“What old lady?” Murray asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What old lady?'?” Doyle snapped. “The old lady who gave the book to Inspector Clayton, of course. Damn it, Gilliam, didn't you hear a word I said? When Wells and I went to see Clayton, he told us that . . .”

But Murray was no longer listening. One of the mirrors had caught his attention. The glass had misted up suddenly, turning into a bright, silvery haze that instantly evaporated to reveal the bedroom of a house, where a woman was frantically packing a suitcase while a man stared in horror out of the window. Murray moved closer to the mirror until his face was almost touching the glass.

“I know those people,” he murmured, somewhat startled. “It is Mr. and Mrs. Harlow, Emma's parents.”

Doyle glanced over his shoulder at the image. Judging from the horrified expression of the man looking out of the window, the end of the world, or whatever the hell it was, was happening there, too. Their voices were distorted yet audible.

“What is going on, dear?” the woman was saying as she grabbed more clothes out of the wardrobe.

The man did not answer immediately, as if he was having difficulty interpreting what he was seeing.

“I think . . . they are attacking New York,” he said at last, in a somber voice.

“My God. But who?”

“I don't know, Catherine.” The man paused. “The buildings are . . . going hazy. And our garden . . . oh, God, it's like someone is drawing another garden on top of it.”

The woman looked at him, trying to understand what he was saying, and then she shouted, “Emma, if you're done packing, come and give me a hand!”

Doyle felt Murray shudder. At that moment, Emma entered the room.

“Oh, my God . . . ,” Murray whispered.

The girl began to help her mother squeeze all the clothes she was rescuing from the wardrobe into the suitcase, from time to time casting worried glances at her father, who remained transfixed by the scenes outside. She was dressed in black, her face still stricken with grief.

“Do you think we need take all this with us, Mother? And where are we supposed to be going, anyway?” they heard her protest.

“We'll follow the Brittons down to the sewers,” her father replied without looking at her. “We'll be safe down there.”

Then Murray breathed in, cleared his throat, and called her name:

“Emma!”

And his voice must have reached her, for she instantly raised her head and turned very slowly toward the mirror in the room and opened her mouth in astonishment. Her parents also looked at the mirror, bemused. For a few seconds, none of them spoke or did anything. Then, very slowly, the girl began to approach the mirror. Murray watched her walk toward him with faltering steps, her face reflecting a tumult of emotions. When at last she reached the mirror, the two of them stared into each other's eyes.