Chapter 7

GRIFFIN

“Mr Vavasour Holmes,” said Griffin, smiling broadly (without showing his teeth). His appearance was the same as ever: the wide-brimmed hat, the violet-tinted spectacles, the scarf around his neck, white-kit gloves – and whiter even than they, the face-paint smeared all upon his visage.

“Mr Griffin,” Holmes replied. “Do you know what? I am afraid I do not know your Christian name.”

“It’s of no consequence,” Griffin assured him.

The locomotive at the head of the train hooted, puffed, and shook itself into life. The compartment trembled and then rocked and Holmes felt the slow gathering of motion, like a knot being tied inside his stomach. Through the windows Watford station slid to the right and disappeared.

The train passed along the long High Street of the town, past the backs of many houses, giving Holmes the fleetest passing glimpses, moments of life: a woman emptying a slop bucket into a slender back yard; a man smoking a pipe in his shirt and braces and watching the train pass with a heavy look of satisfaction; an old woman sat on a stool in her back yard and peeling onions – holding them underwater, in a bowl balanced in her lap, to avoid the tearful fumes, and yet weeping anyway, at some other cause than onions; a dog leaping and bouncing, barking hard and determined at the train. Then, with a swerve and a shudder the train passed beyond the remit of Watford and into the countryside beyond.

The locomotive rumbled slowly as yet, picking up speed in increments, casting red glowing embers upon the ground like rose petals. At every turn, no matter how shallow, the wheels shrieked and groaned and ground, their banshee song hurting the ear, as if they were alive and being tortured. At a level-crossing the locomotive slowed to a walking pace, and Holmes found himself staring directly into the face of a row of cattle, all pressed together in the dawn light, horns entangled, eyes puzzled at the motion they were observing, long icicles of frozen saliva hanging from their lips. The driver deciding the crossing could be navigated without danger, the locomotive trembled and strained, and its small earthquake passed along the whole length of the train.

“I fear,” said Griffin, “that I abandoned our last meeting somewhat precipitously.”

“If you refer,” Holmes replied, still looking through the carriage window, “to our luncheon at Middlemarch, I must inform you, Mr Griffin, that I have no memory – “but he was enough of a natural scientist to abhor imprecision and inaccuracy, so he corrected himself – “almost no memory of our Middlemarch encounter.”

“Oho!” said Griffin, leaning forward. “That’s a curious thing! I’ll confess I join ye in that, Mr Holmes, famous father of the other Holmes.’

‘What other Holmes?’

Griffin simpered. ‘Common-enough name, though, what? And as for me remembering him—oh, I’m so used to my memory being fragmented, chopped up with a jigsaw, it has become second nature to me. But for you: a shock, I would think!”

“A shock,” said Holmes, turning, finally, to face Griffin.

“I am, for reasons that will become apparent, most curious as to your experience. Believe me, despite our radical differences, despite the radical estrangement that exists between us, your experience and mine will not prove so different.”

“What do you mean, radical estrangement?” Holmes asked.

“So you have forgotten that too? Very well. I see we must proceed from first principles.”

“Mr Griffin,” said Holmes, sitting up straight and speaking boldly. “Might I suggest you explain exactly who you are?”

Griffin favoured Holmes with another tight-lipped grin. “It is a large request, Mr Holmes.”

“You will forgive me,” Holmes continued. “I have had a number of days by turns baffling and stressful. I and a friend – Mr Aster, whom I think you have met – were pursued across the downs by men, violent men, with kidnap and even murder in their hearts. I do not know where Mr Aster is, presently, or even if he still lives. I myself was captured, and escaped by only the most extraordinary, and bizarre, circumstances. If I am honest I am not quite sure how I escaped. But your name came up, Mr Griffin.”

“Did it now,” said Griffin.

“These men pursuing us were revolutionaries. A violent revolution – such as is happening across the Continent – is planned, and for soon. Perhaps this very week.”

“I know all about this,” said Griffin.

“You do?”

“I am here, Mr Holmes, to prevent it.”

“To prevent it?”

“Where I come from, Mr Holmes, there was a violent revolution in this country, just as there was – is, I should say – in France, Germany, Italy, all across Europe. It had a catastrophic effect upon the development of Britain. It caused the break-up of the Empire, a civil war, huge disruption and human misery. I have set myself the task of preventing it.”

“You talk,” said Holmes, slowly, “as if these events, yet to happen, are in your past.”

“Well,” said Griffin. “It is my present now, of course. But your intuition is correct. I am from your future.”

Holmes considered this extraordinary claim. Eventually he asked: “How?”

“As to that,” said Griffin, “it is a curious tale. You may, when you hear it, judge me harshly. That is as nothing. I am here to do good for the world, or for this country at any rate. But I am not motivated by disinterested humanitarianism. On the contrary, I am seeking my own personal ambition. The fact is, Mr Holmes, that moments of great political instability, as this moment is, are times when a canny operator can orchestrate events to their own advantage. I plan to become a man of power, Mr Holmes: a great leader, first of this country and its wide empire, and then of the whole world. Perhaps such ambition shocks you, Mr Holmes. I am merely honest.”

“And how, precisely, do you propose to achieve this world-spanning ambition?”

“With your help,” smiled Griffin.

“I think not,” said Holmes.

“Surely you will not permit bloody revolution to overtake this country? No, no, I think you will help me.”

Holmes stared at the man. “I have had,” he said, “some issues with a toxin that was blown into my face, some days ago.”

“I was there,” said Griffin. “I saw!”

“I thought I heard you – though I did not see you.”

“I can avoid being seen, when it pleases me.”

“You can?”

“Indeed. Observe.” Griffin pulled off the glove from his left hand. There was no hand inside the glove. The hand had been, Holmes thought, amputated, and the glove was actually a prosthesis: but no, the glove was a piece of tailored cloth, and hung limply. It was being held between finger and thumb, but Holmes could not see either digit.

“What I mean to say,” said Holmes, “is that I am currently unable entirely to trust my perceptions. Your presence here may be real, or it may be a kind of dream. You may be nothing but a phantom.”

“I am real,” returned Griffin. “You can see with your own eyes my condition. Or rather – you can’t.”

“You are… invisible?”

“I worked for years on the technology to render my living body’s diffraction equivalent to the air around me. I was a medical student, you know – or, from where we sit now, I will be. But I dropped medicine and took up physics, because I was fascinated by light. Optical density! I vowed to find a solution and I went to work. Prodigies of work, heroisms of effort. In doing so I found a general principle of pigments and refraction – a formula, a geometrical expression by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter – except, in some instances colours – to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air.”

“Astonishing!”

“You are a man of science yourself, of course. And so you do understand the principle. Visibility depends on the action of the opaque bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects light or it refracts it – most objects, in fact, do all these things in varying proportions. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects only the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. A glass box would not be so brilliant, nor so clearly visible, as a diamond box, because there would be less refraction and reflection. Yes? From certain points of view you would see quite clearly through it. Some kinds of glass would be more visible than others. A box of very thin common glass would be hard to see in a bad light, because it would absorb hardly any light and refract and reflect very little. And if you put a sheet of common white glass in water, still more if you put it in some denser liquid than water, it would vanish almost altogether, because light passing from water to glass is only slightly refracted or reflected or indeed affected in any way. It is almost as invisible as hydrogen is in air. And for precisely the same reason!”

“I understand.”

“The technique I developed – well, it is not an absolute. I must walk about in air, I cannot exist entirely underwater. If a sheet of glass is smashed, Holmes, into a powder, it becomes much more visible: an opaque white powder. This is because the powdering multiplies the surfaces of the glass at which refraction and reflection occur. And you can see, as I flex my hand…” Griffin took hold of his empty glove with his other gloved hand. Holmes stared at the invisible limb. “I am waggling my fingers, and if you concentrate you will see – “Griffin said.

It was true: there was the vaguest, ghostliest sense of something, an intimation of something shifting or moving.

“My fingers are a complex shape, and their edges interfere with the refraction dynamic. But it is only partially visible, and then only in good light, direct sunshine. In darker, or mistier environments, I am impossible to see. I pick my moments, unless I am obliged to come out in bright sunlight, as I sometimes am. But I prefer to work in other lights.”

“This is extraordinary.”

“I am the Invisible Man,” said Griffin. “My name – Hawley Griffin – is what I was Christened. Under it I grew up, a lad in Middlemarch, the town you and I have recently left. But I grow beyond that name. I am a new being. I am the Invisible Man.”

“The boy – in Middlemarch?”

“Come now, Holmes. Where I come from, your son is famous for his intellectual powers. He surely inherited his abilities from someone. Don’t tell me it was only from your wife?”

“My son? Mycroft?”

“Not he,” said Griffin, obscurely. “But you have the data now to deduce the truth. I am here, a full-grown man, though invisible, before you right now. I am also a small boy, growing up – as I did – in Middlemarch. How can I be both?”

“It is as if,” Holmes said, “as if you come from – “

“Go on: complete the thought.”

“The future?”

“Bravo. You are capable of intellectual agility, after all.”

“How can that be? How can invisibility confer upon you the ability to travel through time?”

“No, no,” said the Invisible Man, pulling the glove back onto his invisible left hand. “Nothing like that. How could it? Invisibility is a matter of refractive index. Time travel is a much more profound scientific intervention – one beyond my scope as a researcher, I am sorry to say. I don’t say I couldn’t have cracked that nut, if I had chosen to make it my goal. I believe I could. There is no merit in false modesty.”

“Another scientist developed it?”

“Indeed. As a technology. A machine. His name was William Reynolds. My contemporary.”

“When?”

“The last decade of this century. The 1890s. I am in my fifties, though my skin of course displays no wrinkles, no blotches. I live a healthy life. I plan to live into my hundreds. When I have consolidated my position here – in this year of our lord 1848 – I intend to open a new avenue of scientific research: longevity. I see no reason why my lifespan could not be very markedly extended. Perhaps I could render myself immortal.”

“I cannot believe,” said Holmes, “the things I am hearing.”

“And I cannot believe,” returned the Invisible Man, “that we must go through all this again!”

“Again?”

“We have conversed for hours. I have explained – for hours. Have you truly forgotten our long luncheon in Middlemarch?”

“My memory – “said Holmes. But then he decided he did not wish to stoop to explaining himself to Griffin. “Pray continue,” he said.

“With my explanations? Very well. If we must go through all this again, we must,” said the Invisible Man. “Reynolds developed a machine that could travel through time. A remarkable piece of equipment. Then he used it to travel into the further reaches of the future – the year eight hundred thousand, or thereabouts. He saw some sights there!”

“And you travelled with him?”

“Not I. Frankly there developed a certain professional jealousy – on his part, I should specify – that occasioned a breach between us. I was willing to collaborate, but he took against me. No, no, I heard about his adventures when he related them, to his friends: me standing, invisible, eavesdropping! It was a fanciful narration, and to be frank with you, I am not sure how much of it I believe. Reynolds was never too exact when it came to truth.” At this, the Invisible Man laughed, and Holmes understood why he smiled with his mouth closed and lips tight: for opening his mouth revealed teeth whited with paint, and beyond them a void, a vacancy. It was most unnerving to see.

“I do not see the occasion for hilarity,” said Holmes.

“Oh, it is just that I am talking about an event in the future, but using the past tense. It strikes me as comical.”

“The future pluperfect is always available to you.”

“Reynolds was a young man. He is not yet born, as we sit here, you and I, gaily conversing in 1848. I do not know his exact birthday, but when I knew him in the 1890s he was, I would say, thirty years of age. So he will be born some-time in the 1860s I suppose. It is odd to think that though he roamed England in the year 800,000, he will never see the year 1900.”

Holmes grasped what the Invisible Man was saying. “He is dead. In the 1890s, he is dead.” Then, as realisation sank further in: “You killed him, and stole his machine.”

“I could have developed my own machine,” said the Invisible Man, haughtily. “Had I enough time, and resources – the wealth at Reynolds’s disposal was prodigious. It’s no wonder he beat me to the pip. But I do not have time. And I did not have wealth: I was a poor chemist, and trained only in chemistry.” He waved his hand, dismissively. “As a chemist I am a genius. I could be a genius in engineering, and technology, and the manipulation of time – of course I could. If I chose to. But I have other aims. Yes, I took his machine. He would not simply give it to me, after all; and my need was greater than his. What… he, gallivanting through the far distant future with leprechaun men and women, and trolls out of caves, indulging himself? No, no. I had a better use for it.”

“You killed him, stole his machine for travelling in time, and came – here.”

“Unfortunately,” the Invisible Man said, “the machine had malfunctioned. Sir Percy Hawk thinks I broke it, by using it incorrectly.”

“Sir Percy knows of this?”

“Of course. It took me a while to convince him of the veracity of my tale, but he believes now. He and I are working to repair the machine. Today’s electrical piles are feeble things, only able to activate parts, and then only in a very limited way. We need the machine as a whole to operate at full potency. It is in need of a more powerful electrical source than can be obtained in the 1840s, and so we have approached your good self, to develop precisely such a motor.”

“I am flabbergasted,” said Holmes. “To think I have been working towards such an aim!”

“We need the motor,” shrugged the Invisible Man. “Obviously we could not explain to you why we need it; but fortunately you were incurious on the matter. It was enough that we requested it, and that we paid you.”

“I did not wish to pry into your private affairs.”

“I make it a matter of principle,” said Griffin, “always to pry.”

“Are such electrical motors commonplace in the 1890s? If so, could you not have instructed me in the advances in technology from this year to then?”

“Chemical advances, certainly,” said the Invisible Man. “But electricity is a different magisteria. I am not a physicist, and have little interest in that discipline. It matters not: with influence – with money – one can always buy the expertise one requires.”

“With Sir Percy Hawk’s money.”

“Since I have none of my own, why: yes! And it is not truly his money. It is the London and Middlemarch Grand Congruence Railway Company’s money, to which Sir Percy has access, and from which he is not inhibited by petty moralities or legalities from availing himself. We have grander aims than keeping a railway company profitable. Come now! Can’t you think a little bigger?”

“What you have said is as extraordinary as it is terrifying,” said Holmes. “If you repair this device – this temporal displacement machine – you will be able to move freely along the tracks of time, as the locomotive currently pulling his carriage can move freely up and down these railway tracks.”

“Reynolds, the inventor, the time traveller, did not understand what he had wrought. He thought only as a tourist does, to visit exotic locations and enjoy himself. He did not see how the machine could be used as a tool – to leverage power for its owner.”

“To turn you into a tyrant?”

“First things first, Mr Holmes. And that first thing is: we can use the machine to avert the revolution currently simmering in our country. That is the first order of business. Observe the ringleaders, the organisers, the pinch-points and key moments. Step back in time a week, a day, perhaps even an hour, and prevent them from leading, organizing, agitating.”

“You mean to kill them?”

“It is one of the options at our disposal. But we need not be so absolutist. There are other ways.”

“This is appalling!”

“You forget, Vavasour, that I know – as you do not, yet – the consequences of the successful revolution. If you did, what price would you set upon peace and stability, and the continuation of Britain as an Imperial power?”

“You set yourself arbiter over us all,” snapped Holmes. “You oppose Providence, and pretend to know what is best for the entire nation – for the world. It is monstrous, man! Monstrous!”

“Hark,” drawled the Invisible Man. “The bleating of the lamb.”

The train shook itself, and began to decelerate, gathering slowness to itself like a kind of consummation. They were rolling in towards its final destination. Through the windows of the carriage he saw the tall backs of town-houses slide past, and then, with a change in the timbre of the sound of their chuntering onrolling to a more echoey and reverberatory clang, the train slid into the great wrought-iron shed at Euston.

“Mr Griffin,” Holmes said. “Did you kill Sir Martin Malprelate?”

“I?” returned the Invisible Man, smiling his old smile: lips tight together. “No, my dear fellow. Not I. You’re barking up the wrong tree there.”

“You were there, at the London Zoological Gardens,” Holmes persisted. “With Sir Percy. Just before Bryde died.”

“Was I?” He seemed uninterested in this. “I often meet with Hawk. He’s as keen to get the machine up and running again as I, and is constantly badgering me for this and that – stock investment advice (as if I know anything about the stock market in the 1840s!) and engineering advances and specifics relating to the time machine – though he only half-believes its potential. Where I have first-hand experience.”

“Did you kill Bryde?”

“No, my dear fellow. I did not. That harmless drudge? Why would I kill him?”

“I don’t know. But you could have done it.”

“By metamorphosing into – what was it? A maddened ox? Such is not within my powers. I am no different to you, in most respects… except that I have altered the refractive index of my flesh. Come now! Holmes, my friend. Come with me now. Great events are afoot! We can change the course of history.”

The train had halted. Holmes got to his feet and grasped the compartment doorhandle. He stopped.

“Griffin,” he said, turning his head to look at the still-seated man. “What were we doing in Middlemarch?”

“We went there to meet me of course,” said Griffin.

“You went to meet you?” The truth broke in upon Holmes in a rush. “Your younger self?”

“Yes.”

“You drugged me – gave me a hallucinogenic powder, shattered my memory… for that?”

“There was no hallucinogenic powder, my dear fellow. It was a simple soporific. I only needed to get you to Reading, which I and my hired help did by bundling you into a cab to Paddington. From there we shot up the railway line.”

“To Reading.”

“We needed to be out of town for a day. And I wanted time to talk to you. It was you who insisted on hiring a carriage and running up to Middlemarch. Have you truly forgotten?”

“Because of the drug you dealt me!”

“No, no. You have again misunderstood. You wanted to see the young me. I was curious, but wary – for I believed, and now am certain, that to meet yourself is a dangerous matter. It is what we, in my era, call a feedback loop: a shriek, a destructive wrench to the matter of existence. You took this as proof that I was a liar, about the time travel story. So I agreed we should go, provided only that my child-self and my adult-self should not be in the same room at the same time. And I’ll confess I was curious too… curious to see myself from the outside. For that is something few people ever manage to do. And, I will make another confession: though Reynolds had warned me, I did not understand the depths of the danger. But you proved it!”

“I proved it?”

“Indeed. You paid my younger self a sixpence to walk up and down the street outside the inn – the very hostelry in which we were having luncheon. The strange thing, or so I said, was that I had no memory of this incident, of being paid the sum as a lad, and of parading in that manner. But I’m sure there is some explanation, folded into the world of physical sciences, as to why this might be. My younger self, though, did not stay where he was supposed to: out on the road. No, he – I – crept into the room, unbeknownst to us. I suppose I – he – wanted to know who these strange gentlemen were, and insinuated his way into our conversation.”

As he said this, Holmes had a sharp moment of clarity. He had been there! He remembered now: conversing with Griffin over lunch. And then, a growing sense of unease, something awry in the nature of things, a fizz in his stomach and a migraine slapping across his brain pan, and at that precise moment, the boy’s face, from the doorway.

Then Griffin reeling back, overturning his chair, rushing for the other exit. And Holmes caught in the explosion of –

Of – whatever it was.

“That was what shattered your memory,” said the Invisible Man. “Not the simple soporific I administered. Memory is of course very sensitively calibrated to time, and that encounter was a rip, a wrench, in time itself.”

“Did it shatter your memory too?”

“To some degree. To a lesser degree than yours, it seems. I remember most of our conversation. I had won you round, I think. I was explaining to you the strategy when… a sound like a screech inside my head, a devastating pain, and I staggered away. By the time I had recovered myself you had gone.”

“A shock,” said Holmes.

“And now here we are again. Having to start from first principles. Do you still have the money I gave you?”

“I,” said Holmes, unnerved, discombobulated. More memories were recurring to him.

“Come with me, Vavasour,” said the Invisible Man. “We must save the world, you and I.”

But Holmes’s hand turned the handle, almost without conscious instruction from his mind. The door opened and he stumbled through it, down the steep step and onto the platform. People were milling, walking up and down, waiting for the train. Overhead the complect of iron spars and lines, woven into the pattern that upheld the roof. Holmes hurried along the stone platform. Behind him he heard Griffin call out: “Holmes! Holmes!” – but he was away, and through the giant stone arch at Euston entrance and onto the concourse beyond.