The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (59 page)

“Oh for Heaven’s sake!”

“Marlene —”

She snatched up the
torch and flicked it on. It slipped from her hands, hit the table and dropped
to the floor. And in those couple of seconds, as the beam of light span across
the café, I saw two briefly illuminated images of Marlene.

The torch hit the floor
and went out.

“No!”
I stood quickly, knocking over my chair. Heads turned, but Marlene
was the only person I could see, the only pair of eyes I could face looking
into. Ironic, as I had just seen them melted away by fire. “Oh, no!”

Something in my voice
convinced her. Doubt was extinguished, her anger faded, her face paled, and for
those few quiet seconds after the disturbance she wanted to know what I had
seen. I could see it in her eyes. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image
that had stuck there like a subliminal message.

those flames that scream
the cries . . .

Marlene gasped out loud,
stood and fled the café. As the door swung shut behind her I thought,
I’m
the one who should be running.
I watched her cross the street and disappear
behind a building, waiting for a car to run her down and explode at any second.
None came. Her image had been of no definable age. Perhaps we had years left
yet, meeting at Cicero’s and mourning a past that had not worked out.

Or perhaps I would never
see her again.

I snatched up the torch.
I had intended following Marlene, but as I left the café I turned in the
opposite direction and ran.

What use was a tool that
would let someone see their own death? Why would someone strive to invent such
a device? Where would Marlene encounter the fire that would kill her? Had my
seeing Marlene’s death brought it closer in any way? Had Orfanik used the torch
himself? How had it left his possession and found its way through the centuries
to me? Was I really related to a fictional character, or was this some cruel
cosmic joke?

OLD LIGHT                                                              
381

Sitting in the park, the
answers to these questions — and many more besides — eluded me. I ascribed each
question to a garden opposite my bench, and watched as bees went from one to
another, unable to provide any answers. Time would take these flowers and make
them mulch, and in time perhaps my fears and questions would fade as well. But
for now — this exact moment, the one instant in life that held greatest
importance — all I had were more questions. Soon, I would need to find a larger
flower bed.

Guilt took me home and
stood me in front of my bathroom mirror.

I held the torch,
pointed it up at my face, fingered the button.

I looked into my eyes,
seeing myself as no one else ever had.

And like a suicide
seeking only attention, I could not go through with the act. If the torch had
been a .45 I would have thrown it away then, but it was too precious to damage
like that. I lowered it, continued staring into my own eyes, watching the tears
form and flow.

I stayed that way for a
long time. I cried because I wished my father had known the
truth,
rather
than the
myth.
The tears were also for what I had seen of Marlene. I
hated the selfishness of that, the thoughtlessness, but I was already grieving
for her, even though I still had no idea of when she would meet her horrible
death.

In the end the torch
slipped from my grasp and fate visited me again. It hit the floor, snapped on
and bathed me with its strange light.

I saw through my tears.

Over the next few days I
fell in love with Marlene all over again.

I eventually persuaded
her to meet me at Cicero’s and we sat there for hours, talking about everything
except what had happened. I was never sure whether she truly believed that I
had seen something, and I did my best to keep the haunting truth from my eyes.
I think I succeeded. In all that time, I never saw the shadow of fear cross her
face.

We met again a day
later, and three time the following week, and the week after that we sat
outside at a pavement table. This was a huge step for us, eschewing the
neutrality of the café’s interior, and it turned the meeting into a date. As I
rose to leave Marlene stood up, closed in and kissed me on the lips. It did not
surprise either of us, yet my heart paused for long seconds.

I walked away smiling
and stepped carelessly into the street, knowing that no car would knock me down.
That was not my way.

We take it one day at a
time. The image of Marlene’s death haunts me still, but there is an unspoken
agreement that it will never be mentioned again. Mystery cannot come between
us, as it did before. Love holds so much more power over me.

Especially knowing what
I know.

Having seen my own old,
weathered face wither and bubble in flames, at least I know that we will be
together until the end.

Gradually writing
himself out of his depression, Verne produced another sequel.
Sans dessus dessous
(1890), translated as
Topsy-Turvy
but
better known as
The Purchase of the North Pole,
brings back the members
of the Baltimore Gun Club, twenty years after their moon venture. The Gun Club
acquire the land at the North Pole where they believe are vast mineral
deposits. In order to get at them they need to melt the ice cap and decide the
best way to do this is to shift the axis of the Earth. Despite the cataclysmic
consequences the Gun Club continue in their project only to fail because of a
mathematical
error
in their calculations. While it appears to be another
preposterous novel, it is in fact, like
Hector Servadac
and
Robur
the Conqueror,
another parable about the potential irresponsibility of man
in trying to act like God.

Although Verne did not
write again about the fellows of the Gun Club there is no doubt that these
individuals would stop at nothing. We have already learned of their further
adventures in space in two earlier stories. In the next two we learn of their
later escapades.

An open-topped carriage
turned up the long drive to one of the grandest houses in New Park, Baltimore.
The mansion’s doors flew open, a stream of servants filing out into the
afternoon sun to greet their mistress, the former Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt.

Evangelina patted the
large box on the seat beside her. It contained her latest purchase: a
wide-brimmed hat garnished with a cluster of tall feathers. Despite having invested
— and lost — nearly half of the late Mr Scorbitt’s fortune in the Baltimore Gun
Club’s failed scheme to melt the polar ice cap, she was still one of the
wealthiest women in Maryland, well able to afford the occasional new hat. And
this hat was something special.

At the age of
forty-seven, Evangelina was painfully aware that, even as a girl, she had never
been a beauty. But the moment she’d tried on that hat, she’d felt transformed.
The milliner insisted she looked ten years younger, and for the first time in
her life, this overweight middle-aged woman with hair the colour of dirty straw
had actually liked what she saw in the mirror. It was the most wonderful hat in
the world, and she couldn’t wait for her new husband to see her in it.

Her driver was slowing
the horses to a walk when the ground beneath them was rocked by an explosion.
Evangelina was thrown back in her seat as the horses reared up, then bolted
across the lawn.

She calmly grabbed hold
of the side of the carriage as it careered across the grass, pursued by a
gaggle of uniformed servants. And every dog in the neighbourhood was barking. “You’d
think they’d be used to it by now,” she sighed.

She was sitting in front
of her dressing table when the house was shaken by another explosion. The maid standing
behind her jumped, nearly skewering her with a hat pin. “Sorry, Ma’am.”

Evangelina shook her
head. The staff were as skittish as the horses. And the neighbourhood dogs were
at it again. She told her maid to close the window.

Melting the North Pole
had seemed a good idea at the time. There must be limitless supplies of coal in
the Arctic — once you got past all that ice. So a plan was devised to
straighten the Earth’s axis by firing a gigantic cannon set into the side of
Mount Kilimanjaro, the idea being that the recoil from the shot would nudge the
planet into the desired position.

Despite the cannon’s
failure to affect the Earth’s orbit — due to a slight mathematical error
involving the accidental erasure of three zeros — and the loss of all that money,
Evangelina continually reminded herself that everything had worked out for the
best in the end. Everyone now agreed that melting the polar ice would have
drowned half the civilized world, including Baltimore. And so the mistake in
calculations became a cause for celebration, and the man who had made it became
a hero. And that hero was none other than Mr Jefferson Thomas Maston, generally
known as J. T.

J. T. Maston was nearly
sixty, with an iron hook at the end of one arm (the result of an accident with
a mortar during the Civil War), but he was a great man: not only a renowned
mathematician, but an inventor (he’d designed the mortar that removed his hand
himself). It was not long after their first meeting that Evangelina had decided
she wanted nothing more than to be this great man’s wife, and it was now a
little over three months since Evangelina had got her wish, and had become Mrs
J. T.
.
Maston.

She should have been
deliriously happy, if not for one thing: J. T. Maston had taken up gardening.

She found her husband
bending over a howitzer in a far corner of the grounds. “I thought that would
be a good spot for the azaleas,” he said, pointing at a patch of cleared soil
between the fountain and the grotto.

She positioned herself
directly in her husband’s line of sight. “Well?”

“Well what?”

She did a little twirl, raising a hand to indicate her hat.

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

She stopped twirling. “Never mind.”

Her husband shrugged and turned his attention back to the cannon. “Stand
back.”

Evangelina covered her ears as the gun went off, discharging a
cloud of seeds.

“I wouldn’t even mention
it,” Evangelina said, “but the neighbours are complaining, the staff are
threatening to leave, and now he’s dug up all my rose bushes and is talking
about turning the ornamental pond into an onion patch.”

The monthly gathering of
the New Park Ladies’ Gardening Society burbled their sympathy. They were meant
to be discussing their annual “Best Delphiniums” award, but the conversation
had drifted off-topic.

It was a warm day, and
the various scents of lavender, musk, rose, and vanilla emanating from the
ladies around her seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the reek of
garbage wafting in through the windows of the Methodist meeting hall.

“And he didn’t even
notice my new hat,” she added, fanning herself. This was greeted with such an
eruption of clucking and tsk’ing that Fiona Wicke was forced to bring down her
gavel.

Once the most beautiful
woman in Baltimore, these days the thrice-widowed chair of the gardening
society contented herself with being the most fashionable. She leaned back in
her seat — at least as far back as the stiff horsehair-padded bustle beneath
her dress would allow — and formed a temple with her lace-gloved fingers. “I
take it Mr Maston and Mr Barbicane are still not speaking?”

It seemed everyone in
Baltimore knew about the rift between J. T. Maston and the president of the Gun
Club. It all went back to those three silly little zeros. The one thing Mr
Impey Barbicane refused to forgive was an error in calculations — even an error
that had saved the world — with the end result that Mr Maston had not only
resigned his position as club secretary, but had completely forsworn
mathematics. And taken up gardening instead.

“Therein lies the source
of your problem,” Fiona said, “and also the solution. Find a way to reconcile
those two men, and you shall have your garden back.”

“But how?”

“You might distract the
men from their quarrel by providing them with a new goal on which to focus
their attention.”

“As you might distract a
vicious dog by throwing it a piece of meat,” the society’s first vice-chair
(and one of its youngest members), the forty-three-year-old Hermione Larkin,
added.

Fiona raised an eyebrow
at her vice-chair before turning back to address Evangelina. “Give them a new
project to work on and all past differences will quickly be forgotten.”