I watched my dials as the thousands hand approached its zero — for at zero I was home, and it took all my determination not to halt the machine there and then, for my longing to return to my own Year was strong in the extreme — but I kept the levers pressed over, and watched the dials run on into their negative region.
Around me the Hill flickered through night and day, with here and there a splash of color as some picnic party stayed on the grass long enough for them to register on my vision. At last, with the dials reading six thousand, five hundred and sixty days before my departure, I pressed the levers again.
I brought the Time Machine to rest, in the depths of a cloudy, moonless night. If I had got my calculations right, I had landed in July of 1873. With my Morlock goggles, I saw the slope of the Hill, and the river’s flank, and dew glittering on the grass; and I could see that — although the Morlocks had deposited my machine on an open stretch of hill-side, a half-mile from my house — there was nobody about to witness my arrival. The sounds and scents of my century flooded over me: the sharp tang of wood burning in some grate somewhere, the distant murmur of the Thames, the brush of a breeze through the trees, the naphtha flares of hawkers’ barrows. It was all delicious, and familiar, and welcome!
Nebogipfel stood up cautiously. He had slipped his arms into my jacket sleeves, and now that heavy garment hung from him as if he were a child. “Is this 1891?”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have brought us back further in time.” I glanced along the Hill, in the direction of my house. “Nebogipfel, in a laboratory up there, a brash young man is embarking on a series of experiments which will lead, ultimately, to the creation of a Time Machine…”
“You are saying—”
“That this is the year 1873 — and I anticipate, soon, meeting myself as a young man!”
His goggled, chinless face swiveled towards me in what appeared to be astonishment.
“Now come, Nebogipfel, and assist me in finding a place of concealment for this contraption.”
[2]
Home
I cannot describe how odd it seemed to me to walk through the night air along the Petersham Road, coming at last to my own house — with a Morlock at my side!
The house was an end terrace, with big bay windows, rather unambitious carvings about the door frame, and a porch with mock-Grecian pillars. At the front there was an area with steps which went down to the basement, railed off by a bit of delicate, black-painted metal-work. The whole effect was really a sort of imitation of the genuinely grand houses on the Green, or in the Terrace at the top of the Hill; but it was a big, roomy, comfortable place which I had bought as a bargain as a younger man, and from which I had since had no thoughts of moving away.
I walked past the front door and around towards the rear of the house. At the rear there were balconies, with delicate iron pilasters painted white, giving a view to the west. I could make out the windows of the smoking-room and dining-room, darkened now (it occurred to me that I was not sure what time of the night it was), but I was aware of an odd absence to the rear of the smoking-room. It took me some moments to remember what this represented — an unexpected absence of something is so much harder to identify than an incongruous presence — it was, in fact, the site of the bathroom which I would later have built there. Here, in 1873, I was still forced to wash in a hip-bath brought into my bedroom by a servant!
And, in that ill-proportioned conservatory protruding from the rear of the house, there was my laboratory, where — I saw with a thrill of anticipation — a light still burned. Any dinner guests had gone, and the servants had long retired; but still he — I — was working on.
I suffered a mixture of emotions I imagine no man has shared before; here was my home, and yet I could lay no claim to it!
I returned to the front door. Nebogipfel was standing a little way into the deserted road; he seemed cautious of approaching the area steps, for the pit into which they descended was quite black, even with the goggles.
“You don’t need to be fearful,” I said. “It’s quite common to have kitchens and the like underground in houses like this… The steps and railings are sturdy enough.”
Nebogipfel, anonymous behind his goggles, inspected the steps suspiciously. I supposed his caution came from an ignorance of the robustness of nineteenth-century technology — I had forgotten how strange my crude era must seem to him — but, nevertheless, something about his attitude disturbed me.
I was reminded, and it disconcerted me, of an odd fragment of my own childhood. The house where I grew up was large and rambling — impractical, actually — and it had underground passages which ran from the house to the stable block, larder and the like: such passages are a common feature of houses of that age. There were gratings set in the ground at intervals: black-painted, round things, covering shafts which led down to the passages, for ventilation. I recalled, now, my own fear, as a child, of those enclosed pits in the ground. Perhaps they had been simple air-shafts; but what, my childish imagination had prompted me, if some bony Hand came squirming through those wide bars and grabbed my ankle?
It occurred to me now — I think something in Nebogipfel’s cautious stance was triggering all this — that there was something of a similarity between those shafts in the grounds of my childhood, and the sinister wells of the Morlocks… Was that why, in the end, I had lashed out so at that Morlock child, in A.D. 657,208?
I am not a man who enjoys such insights into his own character! Quite unfairly, I snapped at Nebogipfel, “Besides, I thought you Morlocks liked the dark!” And I turned from him and walked up to the front door.
It was all so familiar — and yet disconcertingly different. Even at a glance I could see a thousand small changes from my day, eighteen years into the future. There was the sagging lintel I would later have replaced, for instance, and there the vacant site which would hold the arched lamp-holder I would one day install, at the prompting of Mrs. Watchets.
I came to realize, anew, what a remarkable business this time traveling was! One might expect the most dramatic changes in a flight across thousands of centuries — and such I had found — but even this little hop, of mere decades, had rendered me an anachronism.
“What shall I do? Should I wait for you?”
I considered Nebogipfel’s silent presence beside me. Wearing his goggles and with my jacket still drooped about him, he looked comical and alarming in equal measure! “I think there is more danger in the situation if you stay outside. What if a policeman were to spot you? — he might think you were some odd burglar.” Without his web of Morlock machinery, Nebogipfel was quite defenseless; he had launched himself into History quite as unprepared as I had been on my first jaunt. “And what of dogs? Or cats? I wonder what the average Tom of the eighteen-seventies would make of a Morlock. A fine meal, I should think… No, Nebogipfel. All in all, I think it would be safer if you stayed with me.”
“And the young man you are visiting? What of his reaction?”
I sighed. “Well, I have always been blessed by an open and flexible mind. Or so I like to think!… Perhaps I am soon to find out. Besides, your presence might convince me — him — of the veracity of my account.”
And, without allowing myself any further hesitation, I tugged at the bell-pull.
From within the house, I heard doors slamming, an irritable shout: “It’s all right, I’ll go!” — and then footsteps which clattered along the short corridor linking the rest of the house to my laboratory.