Work Text:
I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind.
It should come as no surprise that you became the men in your novels.
A decent author spends time with her characters, becomes acquainted with them, develops a kinship that transcends the written word. You are no merely decent author. Your characters’ thoughts become yours, their desires meld with your own. Your life is theirs, and even after their story has been fully told they remain with you, an indelible facet of your psyche.
Perhaps they were always there, lurking inside some darkened corner of you, waiting to be drawn into the light of day by your pen. Perhaps you always were them, always had the potential to become them, any one of them, and all that was needed was the proper catalyst.
Perhaps you’ve simply gone mad.
Doctor Moreau was not who you would have hoped to become, had you been given the choice. But you would laugh now, were it at all within your ability, at how very fitting such a turn is. His particular bastardization of science was surprisingly the most complex of all your genius madmen for you to solve. You had spent endless months researching every scientific technique known to man, and several known only to yourself, tinkering and toiling and fighting to make plausible his grotesque animal hybrids.
You could have become Moreau then; you had the means, certainly, and the knowledge. But you also had Christina, and such things would have frightened her. No, you would not have experimented with performing vivisections yourself, then.
That came later.
Later, when Christina had been taken from you and your Time Traveler had failed you. Your Time Traveler who had seen such oblivion and could never escape from its shadows. Your Time Traveler who was you, your brainchild and your hope, your salvation, your ruin, your failure. Your Time Traveler who failed - you who failed. Your research into controlling time came to naught and your daughter, your Christina, was the one who paid the price.
What other recourse, then, but to turn to the knowledge you possessed but had never put into practice?
It was easy to find the men responsible for her death, of course. You had witnessed the act countless times through Sophie’s eyes, their faces were unmistakable. And with the resources of the Warehouse, incapacitating them and returning them to a makeshift laboratory outside of London was a simple matter. They were belligerent, naturally, although that quickly gave way to terror when they recovered enough of their senses to examine their surroundings.
There was no point in following through with Moreau’s dream to its end. No creature deserved to be bound to men such as they; it would be an unnecessary cruelty. The necessary cruelty was to be found in the rest of Moreau’s knowledge. Anatomy. Surgical methods. How to prolong a human life while its host body was being cut open.
It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice, you had described it in your novel.
You felt vindicated to find your turn of phrase held true.
You were uncertain of who among your cast of characters you had become in the ensuing century. It was perhaps only natural that even the most volatile of ingredients would achieve equilibrium when given over a hundred years to mix undisturbed. The isolation gave you time to recall each of their plights, to revise and craft them into the new tale that was your life.
Griffin, your Invisible Man, always on the cusp on madness and cast over its edge by his own actions that could not be undone.
I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide.
You were awakened in the twenty-first century to act as some pawn in a madman’s game. James MacPherson, who really should have known better than to trust you. His death was of no consequence to you, although it did leave you friendless in an unfamiliar land.
Moreau, long since deadened to the troubles of those around him, made indifferent by his studies of nature and driven only by his own morbid curiosities.
Sympathetic pain, - all I know of it I remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago.
You had loved, once. It seemed so long ago to you now, your memories of it clouded over in smoke and ashes and blood. You no longer believed yourself capable of it - certain, in fact, that it was no longer meant for you. In its place had been planted a seed of darkness, and in the fertile soil of the bronze it had thrived.
Edward Prendick, who had unwittingly been witness to such horrors on Moreau’s island, and found himself returned to civilization and utterly unable to cope.
I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert.
The citizens of the new century you found yourself inhabiting were somehow oblivious to their true nature. You had known that technological advancement would rise on the backs of the masses, but you had had no way of conceiving that it could have come so far in so short a time. You pored over history texts, learned of the wars you had missed, the weapons they had employed, and you looked around in horror at the teeming millions passing by, uncaring of the atrocities they had wrought upon themselves. Compassion and altruism were all that separated man from animal, and to witness the state of the world now was to wonder if humanity had truly gone extinct in your absence.
And finally your Time Traveler, most despaired of all, for he saw the truth of the future of humanity and succumbed to its crushing reality.
He saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.
It was remarkable, the manner of things that would cross one’s mind when it found itself utterly unoccupied for decades on end. You had composed six new novels while in the bronze, each one memorized down to the simplest comma, each one more fragmented and bleak than the last - your mind had no place for even an imagined utopia. Then you attempted to compose them without using the letter ‘e,’ eventually concluding it was a fool’s errand and even you were not yet mad enough to do such a thing.
You found yourself considering the Warehouse, and all the wonder contained therein. Every artifact you had ever encountered, every report of mysterious happenings, every historical account of Warehouses past - you recounted them all. All manner of scenarios played out in your mind: how the artifacts in this aisle could repel a Martian invasion, how ones in that aisle could prevent a war. Mysteries of artifacts that had been lost to the world were solved, and you even found the lost Warehouse itself.
You ultimately had devised seventeen separate methods for bringing about an apocalypse.
Of course, you had also determined no less than four ways of preventing each one. Such eventualities proved useless though, in the end, and after living in the new world for a time you knew what had to be done. You often thought of the narrative framework of The Time Machine, of the pitiable naivete of the man to whom the Time Traveler told his story. How he learned of the eventual outcome of mankind’s ceaseless advancement, and somehow found the smallest morsel of hope within it.
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
Perhaps you once felt such optimism, before you went into the bronze. But now, you knew, there was no place for it. If you could go back you would remove that damnable piece of text, prevent such ridiculous notions from ever being released into the world. The Time Traveler had it right: life is a poor dream, and none of them fit.
But then Myka forced you to hold a gun to her head, and you found you could not strike out that flower after all.
The time you spent living inside the Janus coin was short, but it afforded you the opportunity to reevaluate a world which could produce a woman such as Myka Bering.
Your folly, you ultimately realized, lay in failing to fully consider the implications of your characters living inside of you. You lived in the future as your Time Traveler, had lived in isolation as your Invisible Man, had mercilessly tortured several men as Moreau. You became them because you always were them, you had breathed life into them with parts of your own soul. Everything that they were, you had the potential to be.
Edward Prendick’s story did not end in despair. I hope, or I could not live. He had uttered such sentiments even after his ordeal on the island, after all that he had seen, after his struggle to readjust to human society. If it had been possible for him to find a measure of peace in a discordant world, surely there existed within you the same potential. His peace had come in the form of the stars in the heavens; yours, in the smile of a woman.
And Regent-mandated therapy after the incident with Walter Sykes, you will grant, but without Myka, you would never have been in a position to accept such help.
She had found you once, in your room at the bed and breakfast when you had first returned to the Warehouse. Clutched in her hands was an old copy of The Invisible Man, and you turned your attention from your newspaper to regard her hesitant yet animated expression.
“I don’t want to know the name of the Time Traveler,” she had said. “I mean, as a kid I’d always wondered, but I guess him not having a name is kinda the point and so...” Her head shook slightly and she perched beside you on the edge of your bed, opening the book and turning to a pair of marked pages. “But these always amused me.”
You had accepted the proffered book and read the lines in question - two similes regarding football, you found, and raised your eyes back to her in confusion as to why she had focused on these lines in particular. Myka had leaned closer to you, as if sharing in your secret.
“You’re a soccer fan, aren’t you?”
Nonsense, you had explained. Watching football matches merely served as an excellent opportunity to observe human physiology. Research, you said, for a novel you had never gotten the chance to write. She had merely smiled knowingly at you, said “okay,” and informed you of a curiosity in Delaware.
It was that smile, that freely given expression of camaraderie and understanding that showed you you weren’t alone in this new world, that your mind had recalled in the instant before you threw aside the gun she had forced into your hand at Yellowstone.
And it was two years later, when you were on assignment together near your hometown in Kent and she had surprised you with tickets to a Gillingham match, that you rediscovered your ability to love.
So many years have gone by since then; Arthur passed on, leaving Myka to take his place. Claudia became the new Caretaker, new agents came into the fold, Pete retired. Eventually Myka succumbed to the machinations of Fate, old age and disease accomplishing what artifacts never could.
And you have by you now, for your comfort in your final moments of life, two small flowers. Not shrivelled and brown, but carefully pressed and preserved, which you and Myka had worn on your wedding day. To witness that even when faith and hope had gone, compassion and love still lived on in the heart of man.
And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.