The Haunting of H. G. Wells

by Robert Masello

  How long he had rested like that, before sensing that something in the compartment had changed, he didn’t know. Nor could he tell if it was something he had heard, or smelled, or simply felt, that stirred him back toward greater consciousness. He only knew that his skin had prickled and a distant alarm had begun to ring in his head. The pain between his eyes was sharper, the vagrant odor in his nostrils more pungent. At first, he was reluctant to acknowledge any of it—if ignored, the whole sensation might pass—but then it became too persistent for that. He felt as if his attention was being demanded.

  Slipping a hand out of his coat pocket, where it had retreated for the warmth, he tilted the brim of his hat up. He glimpsed a pair of scuffed boots, and khaki pants stuffed into their muddy tops. Lifting his gaze, he saw an equally soiled tunic, with the badge of St. George on the torn sleeve.

  He was afraid to look farther.

  The air in the cabin was tinged with the scent of the trenches—blood and soil, stale tea and cigarette butts, carnage and cordite.

  “You’ll have to look sometime,” a voice said.

  When had this person come in? he wondered. How had he not taken notice when the door must have slid open, when the soldier had stowed his gear, when he had taken his seat directly opposite?

  And why was the voice—filled with gravel—so familiar?

  He saw two dirty hands, unwrapping a packet of lozenges—Victory brand—and as the lozenge was raised to the man’s mouth, Wells’s eyes followed it.

  “You said we’d meet again,” the visitor said, “and now we have.”

  Sergeant Stubb. His protector and guide, the savior who had pulled him from the wreckage of the ghouls’ den. Wells was overwhelmed with relief, even joy—the man had survived, somehow, after all! But at the same time, his fear did not entirely subside. There was something about the sergeant, wreathed in shadow, which was not quite right. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus better.

  “How did you find me?” Wells asked.

  “A man as famous as you?” Stubb said, with a sly smile. “Not so hard.”

  Although that was not an answer, Wells let it go. “But what are you doing here?”

  “My job. Guarding you.”

  “Now? From what?”

  Stubb pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—a filthy, wadded-up affair that Wells would never have allowed to touch his own lips—and dabbed his mouth with it. Even in the darkness, Wells could see that it was matted with blood.

  “You don’t look well,” Wells said. “You should be in hospital, not here.”

  “Too late for that,” he said, raising lusterless eyes.

  A shudder ran down Wells’s spine, the joy vanishing, the fear surging. If he had harbored any doubt that his friend was dead, it was gone now. It was just as if he had encountered Corporal Norridge again, or Von Baden, or any of the ghouls who had been slaughtered in their bunker.

  “When did it happen?”

  Stubb shrugged, sucking on the lozenge. “Yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “Between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly,” he said, referring to the street signs placed in the trenches.

  Wells was not surprised that Stubb had died, with his comrades, at the Front. “How?”

  “Big Bertha.” Slang for the heaviest German artillery. “A direct hit, buried me alive.”

  “I’m sorry.” My God, how inadequate was that?

  “I was long overdue.”

  The train whistle blew, shrill and discordant, as they passed through a junction.

  “You know, you’re not the first . . . visitor I’ve had,” Wells said.

  “No, not surprised.”

  “You’re not?” He had to suppress his astonishment at conversing with a ghost, but with each exchange he was emboldened. “Why not?”

  “You lived among ’em.”

  “Who?”

  “The dead,” Stubb whispered, matter-of-factly, in his ravaged voice. “The ghouls—they were good as dead when you met ’em. You breathed the same air, slept in the same grave. You took their confessions, food from their hands, and drink. They’ve got a claim on you.”

  Wells had been to Hades, he reflected, and now its denizens had come back to haunt him.

  “And now I’m just another one,” Stubb said, as if admitting to something hardly worth a mention. “Another name on the casualty roster.”

  “You lived, and died, a hero,” Wells insisted.

  For the first time, the sergeant assessed him with a skeptical gaze. “There are no heroes in that bloodbath. The only difference is, some die standing, and some die cringing. Surely you can see that.”

  He could, though he would always hold the sergeant in a reverential regard. How could he not? The train rattled over a trestle bridge, the cabin shaking.

  “What is it like?” Wells finally dared to ask. “The afterlife?”

  Stubb seemed to fade from view for a moment. “If you’re not careful,” he said, in a voice even more sepulchral than before, “you’ll know too soon.”

  “What do you mean?” Wells said, leaning forward. “Can you see into the future?”

  “The future, the past . . . it’s all a bit like one of those magician’s tricks, you know. An illusion.”

  “But the war . . . how will it end? Will we achieve victory?”

  “Victory . . . another word. Hollow. Ask Wellington, entombed like me. Or Lord Nelson.”

  But there was something urgent in his tone, despite the fading in his volume. “Ask them,” the apparition repeated.

  Something remained unsaid. But before Wells could follow up, the door to the compartment slid open, and light from the corridor spilled in.

  “So there you are,” Dr. Grover said, holding out his hand. “You left your pillbox in the dining car.”

  Wells glanced at Grover, wondering why he did not react to the sight of the dead soldier in his tattered uniform, but by the time he glanced back, the sergeant was gone. Evaporated.

  “I say, Wells, did you just awaken from a nightmare? I hope you didn’t take a Veronal on top of that whiskey and soda.”

  Wells slumped back in his seat, feeling, he thought, as Coleridge must have done, when his visitor from Porlock interrupted the composition of “Kubla Khan.” Grover dropped the pillbox onto his lap, and sat down where the apparition had just been.

  “God, these old trains reek, don’t they?” the doctor said. “It smells like a pack of wet dogs in here.”

  Despite the bad air, Wells took a deep breath—the first he had taken in some time—and played over in his mind the counsel he had just received, or, more to the point, not received. The sergeant had hinted at Wells’s own fate, but never more than that. And he had skirted the query about the outcome of the war with talk of tombs and long-dead heroes.

  If only Wells had had another minute, even a few seconds, to pursue matters . . . but Grover, still basking in his friend’s promise to intercede on his behalf, was prattling on, mixing effusive praise with heartfelt gratitude. Under the circumstances, it was all Wells could do not to question his own senses, and wonder whether he had not entirely taken leave of them.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Not on your life,” Henry Morton declared from behind the penny arcade counter. “I’ve got half a mind to call the coppers on you, as it is.”

  Graf had expected just this sort of reception, but he was hard-pressed and hadn’t been able to think of any other safe haven on such short notice.

  “You still owe me two pounds from the last time!” Morton went on. “And all that junk you left is still upstairs.”

  Graf laid the viola case on the floor between his feet, then turned to Heinrich Schell, standing behind him like an overburdened donkey, with a bulging satchel in one hand and a wooden crate tucked under an arm, and said, “Give it to me.”

  Schell carefully put his things down, and fished a velvet pouch from his pocket, which he passed, grudgingly, to Graf.

  “Open it,” Gr
af said, and Morton did, his eyes widening at the glint of the golden nuggets and dust inside.

  “This real?”

  “Have it appraised, if you like.”

  But Morton looked sufficiently dazzled.

  “We just need to stay for a night or two,” Graf went on, “and then we will be gone. There will be another pouch for you, just like this one, when we leave.”

  Morton looked torn between his patriotic duty and the unbridled greed that Graf had been counting on. Graf knew enough not to trust the man, but he did trust in his avarice. Morton would wait until he’d extracted that last golden ounce from his tenants, and then, an instant later, try to turn them in to the authorities.

  But long before that, Graf would be gone, his apocalyptic mission complete and all of England reeling.

  “You know the way,” Morton said. “Door’s open.”

  On the way up the stairs, they were greeted by the racket of gunfire—two men were shooting what resembled muskets at the paper targets backed by the cork wall—and above that, the door standing ajar to the dusty room, where Graf saw his old cages, along with yellowed papers and cards, scattered about the floor, the detritus he had left behind in his haste. The place was a dismal wreck, but he would not need to be there long. He would need only the next day to complete his preparations, and by nightfall he would be ready to strike.

  “Hier ist der Ort?”

  “English, Heinrich, English, from now on. Even in private. And yes, this is the place.”

  “This is . . . bad.”

  “Yes, I know that. But we had little alternative.”

  None, in fact. The fire that had broken out in his cellar laboratory had quickly ignited the ceiling beams and from there raced into the upper floors of the house. Schell had barged down the smoldering stairs in time for Graf to point him at the rear door, where he had pulled the planks loose with his bare hands. Graf had thrown as many of his supplies as he could into the satchel and the wooden crate, and with the viola case cradled in his arms, he and Schell had escaped into a back alleyway.

  Crowley, like most of his half-naked guests, had barely managed to flee into the street as flames burst from all the windows and the ceiling caved in. The house was now a smoking ruin, as if it had been hit by a bomb in one of the zeppelin raids.

  Graf instructed Schell to sweep up this new refuge—an old broom lay in the corner, atop a pile of rags—and stack the fallen cages against the wall, while he dusted off the top of the table and then opened the satchel. From it, he removed a burner, several flasks and culture dishes, and other implements of his trade, which he arranged in the same places they had been on the counter in his cellar lab. In his line of work, one could never afford to absentmindedly reach for the wrong chemical or specimen. The gas masks, of the German prototype, he left in the bag.

  Then, he put the crate on the table, and as gently as if he were handling nitroglycerin, he lifted out the precious vials and tubes that contained the fruits of so many years of intensive labor. The weapons of Operation Ottershaw, as he had dubbed it in one of his more whimsical moods, were finally to be deployed. Too bad that H. G. Wells, the author of that famous tale from which he had drawn his inspiration, would never know. Graf had seen the man once, years before, when he gave a lecture in the Royal Albert Hall. Wells had been talking about certain scientific advancements, and Graf remembered thinking that, despite his reedy voice, his words were worthy of a German speaker. The highest compliment he could bestow. After the speech, Wells had mingled with the crowd, and although he had noticeably paid special attention to the young women, he had shaken Graf’s hand when he offered it and expressed his hope that the lecture had been interesting.

  “Oh, yes, very interesting indeed,” Graf had replied.

  “You are, if I’m not mistaken, German?”

  “My accent is still so strong as that?” He resolved to work harder to disguise it.

  “Your country has much to be proud of when it comes to science,” Wells said, citing the geographer Von Humboldt, the physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss, and, finally, the bacteriologist Robert Koch. When Anton said Koch’s work had been an inspiration to him, Wells replied, “Then let nothing daunt you, my friend. There are many great advances just waiting to be made,” before the swarm of other well-wishers had interrupted their colloquy. If only exceptional Englishmen like Wells, Graf thought, could be spared the mayhem that was to come.

  “I am hungry,” Schell said, leaning on the broom.

  Graf was, too. They had spent the better part of the night in transit, hiding from constables and air-raid wardens whenever necessary, and hadn’t dared to stop for a decent meal. Graf took a few pound notes from his wallet, and said, “Go out and get whatever you can find. Enough to last us until tomorrow night. We won’t be going out again until then.”

  Schell pocketed the money and stomped toward the door.

  “And try to make yourself inconspicuous,” Graf said, though that was like asking an elephant to disappear in an ant farm.

  Schell grunted, slamming the door behind him.

  And Graf swiftly went to work.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “I think you should see a doctor,” Winnie said, tilting Rebecca’s foot to one side to better catch the morning sun streaming through the bathroom window. Examining the cut on the sole more closely, she added, “It might need stitches.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Rebecca said, her foot propped on the edge of the bathtub, “if it gets worse. For now, just finish dressing it.”

  “What did you say you cut it on?” Lettie asked, as Winnie swabbed the wound with alcohol, then wrapped a strip of gauze around the foot.

  “A broken wine bottle,” Rebecca fibbed.

  “You weren’t having a squabble, were you . . . with Mr. Wells?”

  Even though Rebecca knew that her sisters were endlessly curious about her private life, it was as close as they had come that morning to probing into it.

  “No, nothing like that.” Imagine, she thought, if she told them how it had really happened—fleeing from an orgy in the home of Aleister Crowley, the most reviled man in London. “Did Mother hear me come in last night?”

  Her sisters exchanged a look, before Winnie, the middle sister, said, skeptically, “What do you think?”

  “Have you ever known her to miss a thing?” Lettie put in.

  “No.”

  Winnie tied off the bandage, and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t walk on it too much today.”

  Good as that advice probably was, Rebecca was not about to follow it. She had all the information she needed now—including the inscribed lighter she’d procured from the arcade owner—to establish who the enemy agent was, and she just had to figure out how to get that news to the proper authorities, so that it could be acted upon before he managed to strike again—in the parade grounds, or God knows where else.

  From downstairs, they heard a knock on the front door, and after Lettie craned her head out the window to try to see who it was, she pulled her head back in and said, “All I can see is a cab, idling at the curb.”

  “Plainly, not the postman,” Winnie said.

  But who was it, then? Rebecca wondered. Could it be? She had barely formed the thought when she heard, to her horror, her mother’s voice, saying, in response to another knock, “Coming.”

  “Quick,” she said, pulling on her shoe, “we have to go down!”

  But by the time she had rounded the stairs, it was too late. Her mother had opened the door, and found herself face-to-face with her nemesis, the defiler of her daughter. Rebecca had not heard the initial exchange, but if she was waiting for her mother to slam the door in his face, or give him a thorough tongue-lashing, she was much mistaken. Wells was being politely ushered into the parlor, and she could hear him saying something about the charming garden her mother had planted in front of the cottage.

  Her mother, even more surprisingly, was thanking him, an unaccustomed and timorous note in her voice.


  Rebecca hurried down to join them, her sisters close behind, and she was delighted to see a spark flare up in Wells’s eyes at the very sight of her.

  “Ah, here she is now,” Mrs. Fairfield said, and it was then that Rebecca understood, from the awestruck look on her mother’s face, what was happening. For all of her disapproval of Wells on moral grounds, she was no more impervious to his fame than anyone else. He was arguably the most famous writer in all of England, his books on everyone’s shelves, his photograph in the papers, his articles in the daily newspapers and monthly magazines, and she was astonished to find him occupying her own humble parlor.

  “And may I introduce her sisters, Letitia and Winifred.”

  The two young women, blushing and falling all over themselves, nodded, and Winnie had the courage to step forward and shake hands.

  After another minute or two of pleasant banter, during which Rebecca had to wonder what had prompted him to come all this way on no notice, and to leave a cab waiting outside, her mother offered to set out some tea and biscuits, but Wells declined, saying, “I’m afraid I’ve come to fetch your very talented daughter Cicily—”

  How clever of him to use her given name in front of her mother.

  “—on some pressing business matters.”

  “Business?” Mrs. Fairfield asked.

  “Literary stuff,” Wells said. “But on a rather tight deadline. She is one of the most astute readers, and editors, I have come across in many a year. I predict a bright future for her in journalism, if she should choose to pursue it.”

  Her sisters were dumbstruck, and her mother looked at her again, with—was it?—newfound appreciation in her eyes.

  “I’ll just get my coat and hat,” Rebecca said, going to the hall closet.

  Wells was offering up some other kind remarks as he took his leave of each one of them by name—her mother still uncharacteristically tongue-tied and unable to issue even the slightest remonstration—and then ushered Rebecca outside, and into the waiting cab. It was not until the car had turned the corner that he took her in his arms and said, “I’ve been looking forward to this for days.” He kissed her full on the lips. “And nights.”