The stairs, narrow and steep, weren’t easy at the best of times, but right now they were teeming with people, some carrying precious articles, others foodstuffs and pillows, and on the way down Machen was lost in the crowd, borne away on the seething tide. Wells himself felt the rising fear in his chest that he experienced whenever he was asked to descend into some subterranean space; it was a fear that had been growing ever since the events of 1915. His time below the earth, buried among the ghouls, had made a lasting impression, one that had only become stronger over time, like a stubborn weed that resisted any attempt at extirpation. Perhaps sensing it, Rebecca tightened her grip on his arm, and kept him shuffling down.
At the bottom, a civil defense volunteer was admonishing everyone by saying, “Don’t congregate here, we need to make way for those behind you. Move on into the tunnel.”
Although the lights were on overhead, the electric current to the tracks had been cut off. Still, the tunnel was oppressively hot from the trains that had been passing through all day, and from the heat of all the bodies now cramming the platforms. The smell, too, was well-nigh unbearable—hundreds of panicky people jostling for a few inches of space, and already spilling over the second white line painted on the floor—the one that marked the closest proximity permitted to the edge of the platform. Wells and Rebecca proceeded gingerly, stepping over and between the people sprawled every which way they could manage.
“Under that arch ahead,” she said. “I think I see a bit of space against the wall.”
Wells allowed himself to be led to a niche below a vaulted archway, and Rebecca laid claim to it. On one side, an old man was clutching an ornate clock, on the other a family had laid a blanket down and three small children were already spread out on it.
“I should never have accepted this damn award,” Wells grumbled, propping the plaque against the dirty brown brick. “I’d be at home right now with a newspaper and a glass of whiskey.” Unbuttoning his coat, he flapped it open. How on earth would he make it through the next several hours? He could barely breathe already.
“Let’s just make the best of it,” Rebecca said, sitting down with her back against the wall.
“And how do we do that?” he said, taking a place beside her. “A game of gin rummy?”
“Shh—listen,” she said, and though it was muffled, he could hear the low drone of airplanes, dozens of them, and then the rattle of anti-aircraft fire. Everyone in the tunnel had fallen silent, listening to the battle high above. Wells knew what would be coming next, a sound that never failed to remind him of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. It was the heavy plodding of a giant’s feet, one after the other, as bomb after bomb landed somewhere in London, demolishing streets and homes, killing any living thing unlucky enough to be within range of its lethal blast.
He put an arm around Rebecca’s shoulders and pulled her to him just as the giant stamped his foot, sending a shiver through the concrete platform. The train tracks zinged, a fine silt descended from the vaulted roof, and the lights flickered on and off.
“That was a close one,” Rebecca murmured, and Wells nodded. Even here, he knew, they were not safe—in September, a bomb had landed smack on the Marble Arch Station and killed twenty; in October, six hundred had been killed or injured at Balham. It was all just a matter of luck—good or bad.
The old man was reciting the Lord’s Prayer over his keepsake clock; the children on the blanket were sniffling and crying. Out of nowhere, a calico cat appeared, eyes wild with terror, racing headlong into the black depths of the tunnel.
As if things could not get worse, Wells felt that old tingling at the bridge of his nose, herald of the sharp pain that used to precede some of his attacks. The foul odor of the trenches came back to him.
Another of the giant’s footfalls, even closer than before, thumped overhead; bolts shot up from the rails, pinging into the ceiling. He felt a strange pressure on his shoulder, as if someone had laid a hand there, and he heard a gruff voice whisper in his ear, “Move down!”
Wells turned his head, but no one was there. It didn’t matter. “We have to move!” he said to Rebecca, before alerting the old man and the family on the blanket.
“Why?” Rebecca said.
“Just do it,” he barked, as the family took his order and scrambled in confusion farther into the tunnel. The old man stayed put.
Seconds later, there was a greater explosion up above than ever, and a fiery cloud of dust and debris billowed from the stairs leading down into the station. Cries and screeches echoed off the walls, the reverberations from the blast shaking a whole section of brick loose and sending it crashing down onto the very spot where Wells and Rebecca had huddled . . . and where the old man, now fatally crushed beneath the wreckage, had remained. Wells pulled Rebecca into his embrace, shielding her face inside his open coat, as smoke and ash engulfed them. Just before the lights went out altogether, Wells glimpsed, in the reddish glow from the detonation, the faintly glimmering image of a stocky man, in a tattered khaki uniform with St. George on the sleeve.
Still on duty, Sergeant, he thought, after all these years.
For the next half hour or more—time passed strangely in the pitch-black of the tunnel—they held each other and waited for the giant to stomp away. Eventually, the all-clear was sounded, and Wells was able to check on the old man, whose heart had indeed stopped, but whose hands still clung to the shattered clock. Amid much shouting and shoving from all quarters, the wardens and constables, using electric torches and tin whistles, herded the survivors back up the rubble-strewn steps and into the street. On the opposite side, an immense black hole marked the spot where a grocery store and haberdasher had stood. Timbers burned and crackled, as the fire brigade, looking as if they were wrestling with immense black pythons, deployed their rubber hoses.
“I pray that no one was in there,” Rebecca said.
It was a vision from his own celebrated book, but this destruction had not been inflicted by alien invaders from Mars. This was all humanity’s own folly.
“Thank God you ordered us to move when you did,” Rebecca said. “How did you know?”
“A hunch.”
But he knew that she had long ago guessed at the source of his intuitions.
Squeezing his arm as they picked their way around the crater, she said, “Be sure to thank Sergeant Stubb for me.”
“If I see him again,” Wells assured her, as he directed their steps toward Hanover Terrace, where he hoped his home still stood, “I shall.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Since I so freely mix fact and fiction in my books, it has become my custom to add a few notes straightening things out in the end. Most of what you’ve just read is grounded in historical fact, but I’m afraid I have taken my usual liberties, compressing time and events somewhat in order to make a more coherent tale.
For instance, the short story by Arthur Machen (a popular Welsh writer and mystic in his day) that launches this narrative is real—it was called “The Bowmen,” and it was published in the Evening News on September 29, 1914. But I have made my own rendition of it—much abbreviated and more accessible in respect to its language—for the opening chapter of this book. If you want to read the original, and in its entirety (which I highly recommend), it is available online for free at several sites.
The affair between the young Rebecca West and H. G. Wells is also quite real—and they really did call each other, respectively, Panther and Jaguar (that was a fact just too good to pass up)—though their relationship actually began a couple of years earlier than presented here. Rebecca went on to a long and illustrious career as a journalist and author, until her death at the age of ninety on March 15, 1983. Rebecca’s two older sisters, only sketchily presented in this book, were accomplished in their own right: Winifred (Winnie) trained as a teacher, and Letitia (Lettie) as a physician and later barrister.
Although Aleister Crowley, the magus, did indeed exist, and pursued all the deviant and occult pract
ices herein described (and then some), he didn’t play the particular role I have assigned him in this story. (Nor did I burn his house down gratuitously; that really did happen.) The Earl of Boleskine was one of his many monikers, and “Do What Thou Wilt” was the slogan he lived by—and died by, in the Netherwood boarding house in Hastings, Sussex, on December 1, 1947. He was seventy-two. The funeral—sparsely attended, and held at a Brighton crematorium—was dubbed a “Black Mass” by the tabloid press.
His accomplice in this story, Dr. Anton Graf, is not a real person, though he was inspired by Anton Dilger, a German bacteriologist and saboteur who did indeed work on nefarious schemes, some of them successful, to poison British and American livestock during the First World War. That full and true story is powerfully presented in The Fourth Horseman by Robert L. Koenig (Public Affairs, 2006). Mr. Koenig had nothing to do with this novel, so don’t blame him for any of my mistakes, etc., but do be forewarned—his harrowing book is not for the faint of heart, or animal lovers (like me).
As for Wells, he died several years after the close of this story—on August 13, 1946, at the age of seventy-nine, of unspecified causes. But he had been in declining health for years. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in London (as, so it happens, was Bram Stoker, the subject of my previous novel, The Night Crossing), and his ashes were scattered to the four winds above the English Channel. By way of epitaph, Wells had provided his own. When one of his old novels, The War in the Air (first published in 1908), was reissued in 1941, he wrote a new preface for it. In this updated introduction to the book, a novel which had been written long before anyone had ever heard of anything like the Luftwaffe or the Blitz, or seen so many of its author’s dire predictions come true, Wells declared that the only proper words on his tombstone should be, “I told you so. You damned fools.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It may not take a village to write a book, but it does take a village to publish one.
First and foremost, there’s my indefatigable literary agent, Cynthia Manson, who has seen me through the long and arduous publication of this and many another book.
Then there’s my editor, Caitlin Alexander, who never fails to encourage and challenge me at the same time.
And finally, my astute haiku master and publisher, Jason Kirk, who has enthusiastically shepherded my last three books into print—along with the help of all the unsung heroes on the 47North marketing and publicity team.
To all of them, I extend my deepest gratitude. Truly, I couldn’t have done it without you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2013 Martha Melvoin
Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and bestselling author of many novels and nonfiction books. His historical thrillers with a supernatural bent have been published in seventeen languages and include The Night Crossing, The Jekyll Revelation, The Romanov Cross, The Medusa Amulet, Blood and Ice, and the Amazon Charts bestseller The Einstein Prophecy. His articles and essays have appeared in such prominent publications as the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, New York magazine, People, Newsday, Parade, Glamour, Town & Country, Travel + Leisure, and the Wilson Quarterly. An honors graduate of Princeton University, Masello has also taught and lectured nationwide, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to Claremont McKenna College, where he served as visiting lecturer in literature for six years. A long-standing member of the Writers Guild of America, he now lives in Santa Monica, California. You may visit him at www.robertmasello.com.
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