The Map of the Sky (5 page)

“Are you afraid?” Serviss inquired, surprised. “Ah, I see, perhaps this is all too much for you, George. Perhaps you prefer your monsters to stay safely within the confines of your imagination, where the most they can do is send a shiver down the spines of your readers. Perhaps you haven’t the courage to face them in reality, off the page.”

“Of course I have, Garrett,” Wells retorted, irritated at Serviss’s presumption. “It is just that—”

“Don’t worry, George. I understand, I really do.” Serviss tried to console him. “Seeing a Martian is a terrifying experience. It’s one thing to write about them, and quite another to—”

“Of course I can face them in reality, confound it!” Wells cried, leaping unsteadily to his feet. “We shall go to the museum this instant, Garrett, and you can show me your Martian!”

Serviss looked up at him with amusement, then rose to his feet with the same gusto.

“All right, George, it’s up to you!” he roared, barely able to stand up straight. “Waiter, the bill! And be quick about it, my friend and I have an appointment with a creature from the stars!”

Wells tried to dissuade him from another outburst, but Serviss had already turned toward the other tables.

“Does anyone here wish to accompany us? Does anyone else wish to see a Martian?” he declared to the astonished customers, spreading his arms. “If so, come with me, and I’ll show you a bona fide inhabitant of the planet Mars!”

“Shut your mouth, tosspot!” someone bawled from the back of the room.

“Go home and sleep it off, leave us to eat in peace!” another man suggested.

“You see, George?” Serviss said, disheartened, hurling a handful of coins onto the table and weaving his way over to the door, head held high. “Nobody wants to know, nobody. People prefer living in ignorance. Well, let them!” He paused at the door, jabbing a finger at the customers as he tried not to fall over. “Go on with your miserable lives, fools! Stay in your rotten reality!”

Wells noticed a few burly looking characters making as if to get up, with what seemed like a none-too-friendly attitude. He leapt forward and began wrestling Serviss’s skinny frame out of the pub, gesturing to the locals to keep calm. Out in the street, he stopped the first cab he saw, pushed Serviss inside, and shouted their destination to the driver. The American fell sideways onto the seat. He remained in that position for a while, his head propped against the window, grinning foolishly at Wells, who had sat down opposite him in an equally graceless posture. The jolting of the coach as it went round Green Park sobered them slightly.
They began laughing over the spectacle they had created in the pub, and, still fueled by drink, spent the rest of the journey inventing crazy theories as to why beings from Mars, or from some other planet, would want to visit Earth. The carriage pulled up in the Cromwell Road in front of a magnificent Romanesque Revival structure whose façade was decorated with friezes of plants and animals. Wells and Serviss got out and tottered toward the entrance, while the driver stared after them aghast. The man’s name was Neal Hamilton, he was approximately forty years of age, and his life would never be the same again. For he had just overheard those two respectable, sophisticated-looking gentlemen confirm that life had been brought to Earth in vast flying machines by intelligent beings from outer space, whose responsibility it was to populate the universe and make it flourish. Neal cracked his whip and headed home, where a few hours later, glass in hand, he would gaze up at the starry sky and wonder for the first time in his life who he was, where he came from, and even why he had chosen to be a cabdriver.

•   •   •

E
NVELOPED IN A THICK
haze, Wells allowed Serviss to lead him through the galleries. In his current state, he was scarcely aware of what was going on. The world had taken on a surreal quality: objects had lost their meaning, and everything was at once familiar and alien. One moment he had the impression of walking through the famous whale room, filled with skeletons and life-sized models of cetaceans, and the next he was surprised to find himself kneeling beside Serviss in the midst of a group of primates to escape the watchful eye of the guards. Eventually, he found himself staggering behind Serviss along the corridors in the basement until they reached the door the American had told him about at lunch, whereupon Serviss plucked the stolen key from his pocket. Unlocking the door with a ceremonious gesture, he bowed somewhat unsteadily and ushered Wells into the realm of the impossible.

Some things I would rather see sober, Wells lamented to himself, stepping cautiously over the threshold. The Chamber of Marvels was exactly as the American had described: a vast room crammed with the
most wondrous things in the world, like a vast pirate’s treasure trove. There was such an array of curiosities scattered about that Wells did not know where to look first, and the irritating little prods Serviss kept giving him to speed him along through the fantastic display did not help matters. He observed that a great deal of what was there had been labeled. One revelation succeeded another as Wells found himself gazing at a fin belonging to the Loch Ness monster, what looked like a curled-up kitten inside a glass jar marked
FUR OF THE YETI
, the purported skeleton of a mermaid, dozens of photographs of tiny, glowing fairies, a crown made of phoenix feathers, a giant bull’s head allegedly from a minotaur, and a hundred other marvels. The fantastical tour came to an end when, suddenly, he found himself standing before a painting of a hideously deformed old man labeled
PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY.

Still recovering from the shock, he noticed some familiar objects next to him: a chemical flask containing a reddish liquid, and a small sachet of white crystals. The label on it said: “Last batch of chemicals salvaged from the warehouse of Messrs. Maw, indispensable for making Doctor Henry Jekyll’s potion.” Almost without thinking, the astonished Wells grasped the glass beaker: he needed to touch some of these wonders simply to be sure they were not a figment of his drunken imagination, inflamed by Serviss’s storytelling. He needed to know they existed outside books, tales, and myths. As he held the beaker, he could smell the sharp odor of the blood-colored liquid. What would he change into if he drank the mixture? he wondered. What would his evil side be like? Would he suddenly get smaller, would he acquire the strength of a dozen men, a brilliant mind, and an overwhelming desire for wicked pleasures, as had happened to Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll, in what he had always assumed was a made-up story?

“Hurry up, George, we haven’t got all day!” the American barked, yanking Wells’s arm and giving him such a fright that the beaker slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. Wells watched the red liquid spread over the tiles. He knelt down to try to clean up the mess but only succeeded in cutting his hand on one of the shards of glass.

“I broke it, Garrett!” he exclaimed in dismay. “I broke Doctor Jekyll’s potion!”

“Bah! Forget about that and come with me, George,” Serviss replied, gesturing to him to follow. “These are nothing more than fanciful baubles compared to what I want to show you.”

Wells obeyed, threading his way through the hoard of objects as he tried to stanch the cut. Serviss guided him to a corner of the large room, where the flying saucer awaited. The machine rested horizontally on its stand, exactly as Serviss had described, like an enormous upside-down soup plate, tapered at the edges and crowned with a dome. Wells approached the object timidly, overawed by its sheer size and the strange shiny material it was made from, which gave it the appearance of being both solid and light. Then he noticed the peculiar carvings that dotted the surface and gave off a faint coppery glow. They reminded him of Asian characters, though more intricate. What did they symbolize?

“It doesn’t look like they’ve managed to open it yet,” Serviss remarked over his shoulder. “As you can see, there are no openings, and it doesn’t seem to have any engine either. Although it looks like it must be extremely easy to fly, and probably incredibly fast.”

Wells nodded absentmindedly. He had just noticed the large table piled high with papers beside the machine. This was where Serviss had told him he had found the files documenting the amazing discovery. He approached it, mesmerized, and began rummaging through the piles of notebooks and documents. Among them two thick albums containing photographs and newspaper clippings stood out. During his random search, Wells came across the burnt vessel’s logbook, kept by the captain, a man by the name of MacReady. The handwriting was plain, devoid of any flourishes, and suggested a man with a stern, no-nonsense character, in complete contrast to that of Jeremiah Reynolds, who had been in charge of that expedition to the South Pole, whose diary seemed much more rambling and unmethodical. Wells browsed through the numerous articles in one of the albums describing the terrible fate of what the press had nicknamed the Ill-Fated Expedition, which had set
sail from New York bound for the Antarctic on October 15, 1829. With some alarm, Wells read a few of the lurid front-page headlines, accompanied by bloodcurdling photographs of the sailors’ bodies and the remains of the vessel: “Who or
what
slaughtered the crew of the
Annawan
? What horrors are buried beneath the Antarctic ice?” Yet, as far as he could make out, none of the articles mentioned the two main discoveries: the flying machine and the Martian. In the second album, however, he found several photographs of the strange machine half buried in the ice, glistening against the menacing grey sky, as if a giant had dropped a shiny coin from a great height. Next to these was a pile of scientific reports, which Wells could scarcely make sense of, and which by all appearances were secret and consequently had been kept from journalists and the public alike.

“Don’t waste time on that, George. The important thing is in there,” Serviss declared, breaking Wells’s intense concentration and walking over to what looked like a wooden trunk covered in copper rivets, to which a small refrigerator had been attached. He placed his hands solemnly on the lid, turned to Wells, and said, with a mischievous grin, “Are you ready to see a Martian?”

Needless to say Wells was not ready, but he nodded and swallowed hard. Then, with exasperating slowness and a conspiratorial air, Serviss began lifting the lid, which let out a blast of icy vapor. When at last it was open, Serviss stood back to allow Wells to look inside. With gritted teeth, Wells leaned gingerly over the edge. For a few moments, he could not understand what the devil he was seeing, for the thing in front of him resisted any known form of biological classification. Unable to describe the indescribable, in his novel Wells had placed the Martians somewhere on the spectrum between amoebas and reptiles. He had depicted them as slimy, amorphous lumps, loosely related to the octopus family and thus intelligible to the human mind. But the strange creature in the coffin defied his attempts to classify it, or to use familiar words to describe it—which, by definition, was impossible. All the same, Wells endeavored
to do so, aware that however precise he aimed to be, his portrayal of that creature’s appearance would be nowhere near the truth. The Martian had a greyish hue, reminiscent of a moth, although darker in places. He must have been at least ten feet tall, and his body was long and thin, like an evening shadow. He was encased in a kind of skinlike membrane, which appeared to be part of his structure. This sprouted from his shoulders, covering his body down to the tops of his slender legs, which were made of three segments, like a praying mantis. His equally slender upper limbs also poked out from beneath the mantle, ending in what looked to Wells like a pair of sharp spikes. But the most remarkable thing of all was the Martian’s head, which seemed to be tucked inside a hood of the same textured cartilaginous skin as the mantle. Although it was scarcely visible among the enveloping folds, Wells could make out a triangular shape, devoid, of course, of any recognizable features, except for a couple of slits, possibly the eyes. The presumed face was dark and terrifying and covered in protrusions. He thought he saw a thick cluster of cilia around the creature’s jaw, from which emerged a kind of proboscis, like that of a fly, which now lay inert along his long throat. Naturally, the Martian looked nothing like how he remembered the phantasmagoric Spring-Heeled Jack, Wells thought. Unable to stop himself, he reached over and stroked one of the Martian’s arms, curious to know what the incredibly alien skin felt like. Yet he could not tell whether it was smooth or rough, moist or dry, repulsive or pleasant. Strange as it seemed, it was all those things at once. But at least he could be sure of one thing, Wells thought: judging from his expressionless face and lifeless eyes, the terrifying creature was dead.

“All right, George, it’s time for us to get out of here now,” Serviss announced, closing the casket lid. “It won’t do to stay here too long.”

Wells nodded, still a little light-headed, and took care to avoid knocking over any of the wondrous objects as he followed Serviss toward the door.

“Remember everything you’ve seen, George,” Serviss recommended,
“and whether you believe these marvels are real or fake, depending on your intellectual daring, never mention this room to anyone you wouldn’t trust with your life.”

Serviss opened the door and, after making sure the coast was clear, told Wells to step outside. They walked through the interminable corridors of the basement until they finally emerged on the ground floor. There they slipped in among the crowd, unaware that beneath their unsteady feet, inside the wooden casket, the skin of the creature from the stars was absorbing the drops of blood Wells had left on its arm. Like a clay figure dissolving in the rain, his shape began to change, taking on the appearance of an extraordinarily thin, pale, youngish man with a birdlike face, identical to the one who at that very moment was leaving the museum like an ordinary visitor.

•   •   •

O
NCE OUTSIDE,
S
ERVISS SUGGESTED
to Wells that they dine together, but Wells refused, claiming the journey back to Worcester Park was a long one and he would prefer to set off as soon as possible. He had already gathered that meals with Serviss were conspicuous by their lack of food, and he felt too inebriated to go on drinking. Besides, he was keen to be alone so that he could reflect calmly about everything he had seen. They bade each other farewell, with a vague promise of meeting again the next time Serviss was in London, and Wells flagged down the first cab he saw. Once inside, after giving the driver the address, he tried to clear his mind and reflect on the day’s astonishing events, but he was too drowsy from drink and soon fell asleep.