The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  Circe dropped her grip and staggered back in shock, her knees instantly wobbling. Rebecca leapt away, crashing into a couple sharing one of the jugs. The jug shattered on the floor, the wine splashing up.

  Rebecca backpedaled into a corner, hitting the wall, and then, assessing the situation, made a mad dash for the archway leading to the hall.

  Machen, absorbed in his incantations, droned on, oblivious to the drama unfolding in the back shadows of the vast chamber.

  Graf, whipping off the goggles and face mask, swiveled to catch Rebecca, but she was too nimble and quick, slipping past him.

  “Help me!” Circe whimpered, collapsing in a puddle to the floor.

  But Graf gave her no thought. Rebecca was already halfway out, and he raced after her, tripping over a woman writhing on the floor, then scrambling back to his feet as Rebecca entirely disappeared from the salon.

  He hurtled into the hall and saw the flash of her white robe in the torchlight, heading for the stairs. The dress was so long, she had to hold it up with one hand as she ran. A wreath flew from her hair. Grabbing the banister with the other hand, she rounded the staircase and scuttled down, two or three steps at a time. Before she reached the bottom, a sandal spun off one foot, she stumbled, and slid to the floor of the foyer. She ripped the mask away, gasping, and in her eyes he saw naked fear.

  Was there anything more delicious, he thought, than the terror of cornered prey?

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  As it was the last train to London that night, Wells found it sparsely occupied. He had the entire compartment to himself, and leaving his coat and hat on the rack, he made his way to the dining car, where one elderly gent was snoozing with his head against the blackout shade and another was largely obscured behind an open newspaper page. Ordering a whiskey and soda—“and make it a double”—from the barman, Wells turned, saw the newspaper page come down and heard, “I thought that sounded like you.”

  It was Dr. Grover, looking particularly haggard and worn.

  Wells joined him at his small table, littered with empty glasses, lime rinds, and an ashtray filled with burnt matches and cigarette butts.

  “What takes you into the city at this hour?” Wells asked.

  The doctor sipped from a glass still containing a finger or two of gin, and said, “I need to see my solicitor, first thing in the morning.”

  Wells did not need to ask him what about. It had to be Kurt.

  “When they saw the boy’s cast, and knew that his ankle had been set, the authorities came calling earlier today.”

  “What did you tell them?” Wells knew that Jane’s decision to rescue Kurt had directly embroiled Grover, too.

  “I took cover behind my Hippocratic oath. But it failed to make much of an impression.”

  Wells felt a great responsibility for the trouble the man was now in. He looked sick with worry.

  “And Maude, of course, is ready to have my head. The watch commander, of all things, and this happening right under her nose.”

  Wells drank from his glass, welcoming the bite of the whiskey, and said, “The domestic problem, I cannot help you with. My apologies.”

  “No need to. I made my own decisions.”

  “But as to the larger issue—the legal predicament—there, I believe I can.”

  Grover lifted his downcast gaze.

  “I’m to see my friend Winston soon. Let me assess the situation, and see what can be done to contain the damage.”

  A spark of hope ignited in Grover’s eyes. “Do you think you can?”

  Wells recognized that he had asked a great deal of his friend Winston already—exoneration for Jane, a safe berth in an internment camp for Kurt—and that asking for yet another favor might be pushing him to the limit. But on the other hand, Churchill had not trusted him enough to let him peacefully enlist Kurt’s cooperation, and look at how that had wound up. In a telegram that morning, Churchill had apologized for the bungled capture the night before, adding “at times like this, sometimes even friendship must yield to the exigencies of war.” Winston had always been a man in a hurry, and this was one instance where his haste had backfired, drastically.

  “Let’s just say, that he will owe me a debt of gratitude after our meeting.” Wells planned to share whatever news it was that Rebecca had been so eager to share with him, the identity or whereabouts of a mysterious German agent. “I will barter it wisely, and on your behalf.”

  Now that the doctor saw some glimmer of good news, he shook out another cigarette from the pack, offered it to Wells, who declined—“strictly a pipe man”—and then searched for a match. Wells offered him his lighter.

  Grover inhaled deeply, and sat back in his chair. The train ground to another halt, with screeching brakes. Unlike the regular trains, this last of the day stopped at virtually every station to pick up mail and produce, along with its few passengers. The man dozing at the other end of the car sat up in his chair at the cessation of the rumbling wheels, straightened his shirtfront, and returned to his compartment.

  “But tell me,” Grover said, “about the problem we discussed in my office. The Veronal, has it helped you to sleep?”

  In truth, Wells had not used it since the night he had discovered Kurt in the attic, and almost shot him. Even though he knew he had taken it improperly, on top of several glasses of port, he still did not trust himself under its influence, and continued to sleep poorly, snatching an hour or two at most before awakening, often with a start.

  “I am holding it in reserve,” Wells said, diplomatically, removing a silver pill case from his vest pocket, and opening it. “An aspirin, however, might not be amiss.” He felt that warning twinge between his eyes.

  “You have had no more . . . visitations?”

  “Not for several days,” Wells said, his mind flashing back to his last such encounter, with the dead German officer at Guy’s Hospital. “I can only hope that I am free of that sort of disturbance.”

  “That’s good,” Grover replied, though Wells could see that he was chiefly preoccupied with the fortunate turn in his own affairs. Only minutes ago the doctor was picturing himself in the docket for aiding and abetting a German spy, and now he had seen redemption. His sense of relief was palpable.

  Wells drained his glass, stood up from the table, and said, “I’m going to try to catch a bit of shut-eye. With all these stops, it’ll be midnight before we get to London.” He offered his hand to Grover, who took it gratefully.

  “Thank you again, H. G. You’ve saved my life.”

  As the train lurched back into motion, the gas lamps flickering, Wells headed back to his carriage and, he hoped, some brief, and whiskey-assisted, rest.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Rebecca had hit the marble floor so hard, the breath had been knocked out of her, and the only reason she didn’t crack a kneecap was the padding provided by the robe and the dress underneath. The bone buttons had already saved her from the prick of the needle.

  But glancing back, she saw Graf, ripping away his goggles and mask, letting them fall, as he slowly descended the stairs, confident that he had her dead to rights.

  She struggled to her feet, gasping for air, and was staggering toward the door when she heard him shout, “Heinrich! Hören Sie auf! Stop anyone!”

  The brute who had answered the door planted himself squarely in front of it, arms across his chest.

  The only other way to run was toward the back of the house, and she did, but what she really wanted was a weapon. All she could see was another torch, burning at the top of a cellar door, and she made for it, wrenching it back and forth until it came loose from its stanchion. Graf was approaching, warily, and she waved the unwieldy torch to keep him at bay.

  “Stay back!” she warned.

  “Or what?” he sneered.

  “I’ll set fire to the house.”

  He laughed, and took another step forward. In another few seconds, he would be on top of her, and though she was loath to descend into a
cellar, it was the only option she had. There had to be another way out down there; all of these old townhouses had back entries for coal deliveries and such. She yanked the door open, jumped inside, and found a feeble latch up top—a mere hook and ring—that she fastened with fumbling fingers, before turning to hold the torch out to light her way. It was a steep set of stairs, made of old and buckling wood, and at the bottom she glimpsed a chain dangling from a light fixture in the ceiling.

  She hurried down the steps, kicking off the one remaining sandal, and jerked the lights on just as she heard Graf rattling the door. That latch wouldn’t hold for more than a minute.

  Although she saw a bed and dresser and a coatrack crammed against one wall, the room was for all intents and purposes a secret laboratory. Everywhere she looked she saw flasks and vials, test tubes and petri dishes, and a stack of cages—just like the ones she had seen in the flat above the penny arcade—teetering in front of an old iron door that was boarded over with two heavy planks of wood to keep it sealed.

  The door above burst open—she could hear the crack as it split apart—and Graf shouted down, tauntingly, “Can’t we just have a civilized conversation?”

  She ran to the cages, frantically hurling them aside with one hand while clinging to her weapon with the other, to get at the door leading to the coal stairs. Graf’s footsteps, deliberately loud and plodding, echoed into the chamber.

  “I must ask you to be careful,” she heard him warn. “I’m conducting some important experiments down there.”

  She bet that he was! This was undoubtedly the breeding ground, the central headquarters, for the plague that was afflicting the horses at the parade grounds and that had already killed Silas Drummond. Now that she had seen it, she knew for certain that Graf could not allow her to live to tell the tale.

  He was in the room now—she could see his shadow on the coal door as she labored to remove the planks—but instead of coming for her, he had stopped. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that he had gone to the worktable, where he was removing something from a tin box. He appeared to be in no hurry.

  “It’s a pity you came this way,” he said. “But a human subject is something I have longed for.”

  He held something up to the light—a spurt of liquid darted from the top of the needle.

  The first plank tumbled loose, but the other was stuck harder. She dropped the torch and using both hands struggled to pry the plank loose from its iron slat.

  “That’s enough now,” Graf complained, in the tone one would use to stop a willful child. “No one’s going anywhere.”

  Rebecca gave up on the plank, snatched the torch from the floor, and jabbed it at Graf as he approached with the syringe in hand. He ducked each thrust, carefully guarding the needle.

  “You English, such indomitable spirit,” he said, “however misguided.”

  She swung the torch like a club, and he backed off. From the smile on his face, he was enjoying the match.

  But he was also moving in such a way as to protect the laboratory behind him. It was the only thing Rebecca thought he might fight to save.

  She shoved the blazing torch, sparks and ashes dropping from its end, at his chest, over and over again, each time maneuvering him toward the bed and dresser, and the moment she saw enough of an opening, she rushed toward the worktable, where the tin box and the dozens of beakers were arrayed, banging it with her hip so hard that the glassware spilled to the floor. Graf looked stricken, but when she tried to outflank him, she sliced her bare foot on the broken glass. He lunged with the needle, the game over now, and snarled, “You’ll regret that!”

  Dodging the syringe, she smacked his arm with the torch. He grabbed for its wooden shaft. For a moment, they fought for control, but his grip was tighter and she let go so suddenly that the torch flew from his hands, too, and skidded under the bed; there, it butted up against what looked like a violin or viola case.

  “Mein Gott!” he exclaimed, running to the bed and dropping to his knees to bat wildly at the burning torch, trying to push it away from the instrument case. A hem of the sheet caught flame.

  Rebecca leapt past him and scrambled up the stairs, past the door that was dangling from its broken hinge. Poking her head out, she saw that the giant, Heinrich, was still standing guard, but an unruly group of masked revelers were clamoring and pushing to leave. Keeping her head down, Rebecca scurried into their midst, throwing her arms lasciviously around a fat man in an extravagant fur coat—who welcomed her embrace—and with her face buried in his collar, she was out on the front steps and into the night air before her bloody footprints on the marble had alerted the sentry that the quarry had just slipped through the trap.

  Machen was standing at the curb, peering up and down the street. “Ah, so there you are,” he said, taking in her bloody foot and disheveled clothes, and looking quite confused. “They said you had gone.”

  She clung to him like a sailor clinging to the mast.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “We must get away,” she murmured, slinging her arm through his and dragging him down the street.

  “I say,” the abandoned fat man shouted, “what’s your name? Where can I find you?”

  Rebecca waved him off, as a wisp of smoke rose like a cobra from a sidewalk grate. Looking back, she saw a faint orange glow from under the front stoop of the townhouse. “We need to sound the fire alarm at once!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  On the way back to his train compartment, Wells reflected on the situation in which Jane’s impulsive act of humanity had landed them all, and regretted that he had been quite so sharp with her about it. Yes, it had been dangerous, in a myriad of ways, none of which he needed to elaborate on any further—he had already done so, in spades—but he also understood, and respected her for, the difficult choice she had had to make, and under the worst and most exigent circumstances. She had found herself in an untenable spot—torn between wartime duty and her own instinctive decency and compassion—and the latter had won out. That decency was precisely the sort of thing that had made him fall in love with her in the first place, and for him to chastise her for it now was, even in his own estimation, reprehensible. When he got to his flat, he would have to sit down in his library and write her a letter expressing that very sentiment.

  Assuming he would find the place untenanted.

  He had not heard from Rebecca, nor she from him, during his sojourn in the country. It was safer that way. But was she still residing at St. James’s Court, or had she retreated, tail between her legs, to her mother’s home? Why, Wells wondered, did he insist on making his own life so complicated? Why could he not rule his heart with the same cool mastery that he ruled his professional life?

  The train rumbled onto a siding, no doubt to take on some additional cargo, and Wells plopped onto the seat in his compartment just before losing his balance. Too much whiskey, too little sleep the night before. Fortunately, he had his quarters all to himself. The seat was old and worn, the tufted buttons missing in several spots, the flooring was warped, and the very fact that this train had no electrification confirmed that it had been mothballed and only brought back into service because of the increased wartime demand. The gas lamps, which had replaced the oil lamps of a previous generation, were fueled by Pintsch gas, a compressed fuel derived from distilled naphtha, which cast a brighter glow and could withstand the vibrations of a bumpy railroad journey better than most gases.

  Its inventor, Julius Pintsch, was German.

  How had it come to this? How had two nations, who had traded together to their mutual benefit, whose populations had mingled freely and in peace, once again come to such a disastrous crossroads? These were among the great questions that Wells hoped to confront in the book he had long been contemplating—The Outline of History—a book inspired by Diderot’s Encyclopédie, but encompassing the entire scope of h
uman history, from the Neanderthals to the present day. It would be a monumental undertaking, and one that did not promise the same easy rewards as his popular novels, but he felt a growing compulsion to do it. Humanity needed a lesson in its common origins, its most significant achievements, and its most unfortunate failings, or else this war—the bloodiest and most barbaric in human history—would one day be superseded by something so monstrous and destructive as to be unimaginable by the standards of the present day. In a story written years before, he had already predicted something he called an atom bomb, a weapon that could be dropped from a high-flying plane and whose power, unleashed by a nuclear reaction, could level whole cities.

  There was a clanging of bells, a hiss of releasing steam, and a grinding of wheels as the train rolled back onto the main line and resumed its journey toward London. Wells extinguished the gas lamp, and once the compartment was fully black, fumbled to lift the shade. Once his eyes adjusted, he could make out, through the shivering pane of glass, the signal box, where a railway worker was huddled over a glowing stove, and the empty fields beyond. The sky was clear and strewn with stars.

  He leaned back against the headrest, but it was so hard that he took his hat and overcoat down from the rack and put them on. He raised the coat collar to cushion his neck and tilted the hat down to cover his face. He settled into the seat, closing his eyes, letting the steady rumble of the wheels lull him into something akin to sleep—a meditative doze, perhaps, one in which his mind roamed free while remaining, vaguely, aware of his immediate surroundings. It was a familiar state, one in which he often came up with the most original ideas for his novels and stories. It was in just such a state that he had first envisioned such creatures as his hydrocephalous Martian invaders . . . his Selenites on the moon . . . his hulking Morlocks burrowed beneath the earth like worms.