The result was spectacular. The dome above the central chamber flared with light, and instantly the parasite began to thrash in agony, as though dropped into boiling water. Contorting madly, it began to throw itself around the chamber, its body booming off the transparent walls, leaving grey smears behind. With each shuddering impact, Will expected the walls to shatter, but they were thick enough to hold firm. Within thirty seconds the contortions of the parasite began to grow weaker, its flesh blackening and splitting, releasing a black smoke that stank of carrion. Meg gagged and put a hand over her mouth and nose; Will breathed into the collar of his shirt. The charred patches on the creature’s body spread and blended together, and then all at once it burst into flame. The parasite shriveled into itself, curling up as the flames devoured it. They burned in all colours of the rainbow—green and blue, violet and yellow. Less than a minute later they too began to die away, leaving nothing but a mound of black ash.
Fendlesham switched off the machine and sighed. “It was a magnificent creature.”
“It killed people,” said Will.
“Even so...”
Without another word the scientist began to move around the room once more, tinkering with the machinery. Will and Meg watched him, wafting at the odious smoke, both still feeling a little ill. Eventually Fendlesham rejoined them and spent a minute or so studying various readings on the control panel. At last, seemingly satisfied, he turned to Meg.
“Step into the chamber,” he said.
She took a step back. Her eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”
Fendlesham frowned. “You want to be rid of the appetite, do you not?”
“Yes, but...”
“Then step into the chamber. It is the only way.”
Meg glanced at the ashen remains of the parasite. Will asked, “Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s safe,” snapped Fendlesham. “I have made the necessary adjustments. The appetite is not an illness as such, and has therefore not been integrated into the body. It is a separate entity, like a tapeworm. My cell-splitter should be able to identify it and extract it.”
“And if it doesn’t?” said Meg.
“Then you shall be no worse off than you are now,” said Fendlesham curtly.
Meg looked at Will. “What should I do?”
Instead of answering her, Will turned to Fendlesham. “Do you give your word that Meg will not be harmed by your machine?”
Fendlesham scowled. “Yes, yes.”
“Then I shall do it,” said Meg. She clasped Will’s hands briefly, then turned and marched to the door of the chamber. After a moment’s hesitation she went inside, stepping gingerly over the powdery remains of the parasite.
“Where shall I stand?” she asked, looking nervously at the domed ceiling above her.
“It’s not important,” said Fendlesham. “As long as—”
“Meg, look out!”
It was Will who shouted. He had glimpsed movement at the open doorway of the building, and next moment Mrs Roebuck lurched into the room. Twisted, hair awry, drenched in blood, she looked like the victim of some terrible accident—but even so, she moved with remarkable speed. Before Will could react she scuttled across the room and entered the central chamber. Meg looked round in horror as the woman released a bird-like screech and launched herself at her, arms raised, hands hooked into talons.
Meg grappled with the woman, trying to hold her off. She reared back as Mrs Roebuck’s hand clawed at her face, missing her cheek by inches. Pedaling backwards, she slipped on the greasy ash coating the floor and fell, landing on her back with a thump.
“Meg!” Will yelled, just as Fendlesham threw a switch on his machine.
Once again the transparent chamber filled with light, though it was not so harsh this time. Indeed, it was a soft, golden effulgence that seemed to flow downwards from the ceiling, accompanied by a throbbing, like a rapid but soothing heartbeat.
The instant it flowed over the two women they froze in place—Meg lying on the floor, Mrs Roebuck looming over her—like insects trapped in amber. Will, a few feet from the door of the chamber, halted too, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the bright light. Through the golden haze he saw Meg smile and close her eyes, as if she were sinking into a deep sleep. He saw Mrs Roebuck crumple slowly, almost gracefully, to the floor. The golden light played over them for a few more seconds, and then it began to ebb, the radiance and the throbbing fading slowly away.
For a few seconds there was silence, and then Fendlesham said, “You can go in now.”
Will looked at him, not entirely sure whether he could trust the scientist. But then, taking a deep breath, he entered the chamber, glancing at Mrs Roebuck. She looked as inert and fragile as a collection of twigs, her skull-like head turned to one side, eyes glazed and mouth partly open.
“I think she’s dead,” Will said.
Fendlesham nodded, and Will thought he detected a hint of sadness in the scientist’s voice. “It was only the appetite keeping her alive, and that has gone now.”
Lying just beyond Mrs Roebuck’s body, Meg stirred and groaned.
“Meg!” Will said, and ran across to her, falling to his knees in the ash.
Her eyes opened. She looked up at him. For an instant she seemed to recognize neither him nor her surroundings. Then she smiled.
“It’s gone,” she murmured.
“It?”
“The appetite. It’s no longer inside me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.” Her smile widened into something wondrous, and she reached out a hand, which he grasped. “I’m free of it, Will.”
He helped her sit up, and suddenly she threw her arms around him. Will responded, wrapping her in his embrace. He felt wild, abandoned, almost delirious with joy.
When they broke apart, he was surprised to see tears running down her cheeks.
“Whatever’s the matter?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m an orphan,” Meg said, as though, now that the terror was over, she was finally allowing the truth of her circumstances to sink in. “My parents are dead. I have no one.”
“You have me,” Will said. “And my father. We’ll look after you. From now on, you’ll be part of our family.”
She looked at him, eyes shining with tears. “Your father will not agree to such a thing.”
“He will,” Will said firmly. “I know he will.”
He helped her to her feet, and then, arm in arm, the two of them took the first steps towards their new life.
The Alarmist
a tell-all account, by
DAN WHITEHEAD
SLEEP WAS NOT a comfort to Herbert George Wells tonight. Nor had it been for many nights. Not since the business beneath the Thames. Not since the creature in the jar.
Lucid and aware despite his slumber, he realised with disappointment that the dream was once again the same. Even in the dark folds of his subconscious it seemed the gift of imagination had abandoned him.
In the dream, which was now almost a nightly occurrence, he sat behind his office desk. In this liminal state the desk’s dimensions had become distorted, stretching before him and to either side like a vast beechwood expanse. Spread all over were what appeared at first glance to be documents and papers relating to his job as a general dogsbody and underling to Dr Davenport Spry.
As always Wells looked back across the papers and noticed a newsprint pamphlet poking conspiratorially from the mess. The bold masthead identified the publication as The Alarmist, with a slogan that promised the reader “the unpalatable truth behind the new Imperialism”. No sooner had Wells spotted one copy, hidden among the reams of paper, than he spotted another, then two more, then dozens, until he realised that the entire impossibly vast surface of the desk was covered by this tabloid interloper. The pamphlet that threatened the very government for which Wells worked. The pamphlet that he himself edited and published, anonymously.
“Wells!” The rasping voice of
Sir Davenport Spry echoed down the corridor outside the room, followed by the methodical plod of his footsteps as he heaved his considerable bulk towards Wells’ office. The journey, in reality, would have taken no more than a matter of seconds, but time was as elastic as the surface of his desk in this dream state, and the anticipation of Spry’s arrival stretched out agonisingly. Wells scrambled to hide the hundreds of copies of the forbidden newspaper, but no sooner had he scooped one armful into a drawer than more had appeared.
Panic spread from an icy pit in his stomach and manifested as a clammy chill which wrapped itself around him, distracting him further as he fought against the endless tide of inky treason. Soon, he was buried up to his neck in the paper, its screaming headlines and standfirsts closing in on him from all sides, just as the door handle gave its tell-tale squeak heralding Spry’s imminent presence...
WELLS WOKE WITH a start, his heart pounding. Wiping sweat-slick fingers on the blankets, he reached for the bedside table and found his glass. A gulp of slightly stale water allowed him to slow his breathing and mentally rebuke himself for once again being driven to the brink of mania by the same nightmare.
Mostly, he was annoyed with himself for the tiresomely obvious nature of the dream, as well as its repetition. It was all glaring metaphor, its meaning barely even concealed behind any narrative flourish. Nor had the scenario evolved or grown more complex over the dozens of times his sleeping mind had confronted him with it. This was what stung the most. Not that he was wracked with fearful paranoia that his odious employer might discover his involvement in a noted journal of insurrection, but that his subconscious could not turn the base metal of his fears into narrative gold.
The Alarmist was tame stuff, by most standards. Mostly intellectual screeds and exercises in blunt satire, not Fawkesian calls for violent rebellion. He had taken the name from a similarly insolent newsletter he had created as a child, documenting the foibles and gossip of Uppark house in West Sussex, where his mother had worked below stairs. Written on kitchen paper, and with a circulation that never rose above single digits, it nevertheless awoke in Wells a passion for using the written word to set the world to rights. Its latest incarnation was doing somewhat better in terms of readership, with a few thousand copies passed surreptitiously under alehouse tables or slipped from one academic briefcase to another. Writing it allowed Wells to give voice to the clamouring objections that his official work entailed, though he was careful not to include anything that might reveal the source of this rebellious journal to his employer, the aforementioned and odious Spry.
Wells heaved himself upright with a grunt, glancing at the shapeless form of Amy, his former student and more recently his second wife, gently snoring under blankets and eiderdown. Once she had seemed like a new start, a doorway to a life outside of a smothering first marriage. He had been bright and ambitious then, so sure of his insights and opinions. Now... well, he pushed those thoughts aside, just as one dismisses an unwanted bill they are unable to pay, banishing it to the bottom of the pile. From outside, he heard the tell-tale skittering clatter of a hansom cab, ferrying its first passenger of the day on mechanical spider legs of bronze and steel. He shuddered. Sliding feet into threadbare slippers, he shuffled quietly from the room.
THE SUN WAS just starting to creep through the window in his study, creating a rhombus of pale light that would spend the morning slowly inching across the rug, along the stacks of papers and books, up the side of the desk and towards the typewriter waiting ominously in the centre. Wells settled into his hard-backed chair with a comfortingly familiar creak and gazed at his opponent. It gazed back, a goading grin made of fading keys, a stern brow of inked ribbon.
These were both his most treasured moments, and his darkest. An hour or so alone, with nothing to do but commit his thoughts to paper, still carried enough of an echo of life before the invasion that he could take some comfort from it. Those years when his brain had fizzed with ideas, with concepts that explored human frailty and hubris through fantastical inventions or otherworldly adventure. He had moved to Woking with Amy, intent on committing this swarm of thoughts to the page, shaping them into stories, novels maybe, that might finally give him some direction and satisfaction in life. The alternatives—a return to education or, heaven forbid, the toil of drapery—could not be countenanced.
But then they had come. Flashes of green light seen from Mars. The strange pod that crashed into Horsell Common, the pods that followed, and from them the terrible creatures, and mechanical tripods and heat rays and red weeds. The world had been upended, and with it all the great plans Herbert George Wells had once made.
When the rubble had been cleared, the bodies committed to the earth, the Martian machines and the corpses of their fragile occupants dragged from the streets and into government laboratories for dissection and study, England had returned to normal. Or, rather, it had settled into a new definition of normal. The Martian technology opened up incredible new vistas of opportunity, but when spacemen could thunder from the sky and alien engines of war could prowl across leafy meadows and serene suburbs alike, what use did the world have for fiction? Ten years hence, and reality was more than fantastic enough now, as the spoils of the Martian war had propelled Britain to a new gilded age of power and influence. Unlike previous glories, however, this new era required no invention. Everything needed had been scavenged from the fallen invaders. Far from building itself up through grit and determination, the glorious second age of British Empire had been handed on a plate, requiring no more imagination or ambition than a feckless scoundrel inheriting someone else’s fortune. And, as the world’s need for imagination had diminished so Wells’ literary ambitions had sickened and died, as surely as the Martians themselves had before the common cold.
He scolded himself. The past was past, yet his restless mind kept returning to the cloying terror of those first days of the war, when the idea of Martians still seemed too fanciful to believe. He had been quicker to accept the unthinkable nature of the invasion than most, for hadn’t a similar idea been swirling in his imagination for some months before? Had he not toyed with the idea of a story about alien invaders, rampaging across England in the very same tripod vehicles, stamping their dominion into Albion’s sovereign soil?
He was a practical man, an atheist by nature and one who sought rational truth in all things. The thought of predestination and prophets was ludicrous, let alone the idea that he himself may have glimpsed the future in all its dreadful detail. And yet there it was, and here he sat, both world and man in alignment as proof of the impossible. He had dreamed of Martians, and Martians had indeed come, just as he pictured them. The moral dimension he intended to lay upon the story, however, had not followed suit. Instead, the empire he wished to chastise had been instead emboldened, and now seemed certain to endure for centuries more to come. The Martians had gone and left in their place men like Davenport Spry, and no mere parable would contain him.
Wells sighed, a shuddering exhalation dredged up like riverbed silt. He gazed listlessly out of the window, catching the faintest reflection of himself as the dawn chased the last of the night away. He was barely 40, yet already the promise of youth was giving way to the slow collapse of middle age, his face rounder, his hair retreating a little more from the forehead, the moustache neatly trimmed as ever but noticeably flecked with grey.
He turned back from the window but found no respite in the blank page that confronted him. It taunted him with its emptiness, an unspoiled field of snow, daring him to leave a footprint. Would this be the day? Would his fingers begin their dance, and a story would spring to life? Perhaps the one about the doctor and his island of half-breed creatures? The whimsical tale of the inventor who floats to the moon? Or some other half-finished idea, still hoping to be plucked from the ether and made real on the page?
He looked down at the dark leather bag by the desk. He thought of the device inside, its disruptive power hidden only by small metal clasps. No, the time for
fictional escape was as dead and buried as the Martians. His fingers brushed the keys, at first too fearful to commit, then tentatively pushed one. It made a mechanical clack sound, as tiny levers moved a tiny arm, striking the inked ribbon, hoisted aloft to receive it.
The sound unspooled a slippery coil of nausea in him. Too similar to the clattering Martian engines that still scuttled about the streets. His fingers hovering, he exhaled slowly, and began to write. Not stories, but facts. He would drain the poison that sickened his soul using the one gift he retained: language. All the things he had seen in Spry’s underground laboratories. All the secrets. All the sins. It would all come out. It would all end, one way or another.
After an hour of writing, at a pace which quickly increased from uncertain to feverish, he pushed the typewriter away, rose and shuffled back to the bedroom to get dressed for work. It was time to return to the mire. Appropriately attired, and with no appetite for breakfast, he went out into the world to look for one of the few cabs still pulled by flesh and blood horses.
DAVENPORT SPRY CHUGGED down the corridors of Whitehall, a stocky traction engine in a tailored suit. Arms clasped behind his back, his fingers intertwined in a fleshy tangle that constantly twitched and fidgeted as he stamped relentlessly along. Civil servants ducked out his path and whispered fearfully after he had passed. Wells caught fragments of their gossip as he trailed behind at an appropriately subservient distance.
Spry pursed his lips. The sound created was little more than a faint wet pucker, a warning that he was about to speak and all present should prepare to receive his wisdom. It was a sound that never failed to turn Wells’ stomach, a reaction that had only got worse since the incident under the Thames. Worse, Wells knew that Spry’s most skin-crawling habits were entirely deliberate, a method of psychological control that had proven worryingly effective.
Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds Page 19