For those who prefer their text on the screen. Here is the written version of the classic story.

Happy Holidays everyone!

​John

The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good-luck, as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps - for the thing has happened again and again - there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler coloration or unexpected mimicry.

Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia!" There have been worse names.

It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made Winter-Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales - that hope, and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.

"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to happen to me today."

He spoke - as he moved and thought - slowly.

"Oh, don't say THAT!" said his housekeeper, who was also his remote cousin. For "something happening" was a euphemism that meant only one thing to her.

"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant...though what I do mean I scarcely know."

"Today," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a batch of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they have. It may be I shall buy something good, unawares. That may be it."

He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.

"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of the other day?" asked his cousin as she filled his cup.

"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.

"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to think aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There is Harvey. Only the other week, on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of excitement - compared to me."

"I think I would rather be without so much excitement," said his housekeeper. "It can't be good for you."

"I suppose it's troublesome. Still...you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never married...I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something really remarkable."

"That orchid-collector was only thirty-six-twenty years younger than myself when he died. And he had been married twice, and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very troublesome, but then it must have been very interesting, you know, except, perhaps, the leeches."

"I am sure it was not good for him," said the lady, with conviction.

"Perhaps not." And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. "Twenty-three minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket - it is quite warm enough - and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose---"

He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and then nervously at his cousin's face.

"I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London," she said, in a voice that admitted of no denial. "There's all between here and the station coming back."

When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a purchase. It was rarely that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy, but this time he had done so.

"There are Vandas," he said, "and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonophis." He surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for her and his own entertainment.

"I knew something would happen today. And I have bought all these. Some of them - some of them - I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will be remarkable. I don't know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if someone had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable."

"That one" - he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome - "was not identified. It may be a Palaeonophis - or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected."

"I don't like the look of it," said his housekeeper. "It`s such an ugly shape."

"To me it scarcely seems to have a shape."

"I don't like those things that stick out," said his housekeeper.

"It shall be put away in a pot tomorrow."

"It looks," said the housekeeper, "like a spider shamming dead."

Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. "It is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful orchid indeed. How busy I shall be tomorrow! I must see tonight just exactly what to do with these things, and tomorrow I shall set to work.

They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp - I forget which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain."

"I think none the better of it for that."

"Men must work though women may weep," said Wedderburn, with profound gravity.

"Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine - if men were left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine - and no one round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most disgusting wretches - and, anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have orchids!"

"I don't suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that kind of thing," said Wedderburn. "Anyhow, the natives of his party were sufficiently civilized to take care of all his collection until his colleague, who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they could not tell the species of the orchid and had let it wither. And it makes these things more interesting."

"It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat another mouthful of dinner!"

"I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the windowseat. I can see them just as well there."

The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little hot-house, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new orchids to his friends, and over and over again he reverted to his expectation of something strange.

Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once, directly he made the discovery.

"That is a bud," he said, "and presently there will be a lot of leaves there, and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets."

"They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown," said his housekeeper. "I don't like them."

"Why not?"

​"I don't know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can't help my likes and dislikes."

"I don't know for certain, but I don't THINK there are any orchids I know that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You see they are a little flattened at the ends."

"I don't like 'em," said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning away. "I know it's very silly of me - and I'm very sorry, particularly as you like the thing so much. But I can't help thinking of that corpse."

"But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of mine."

His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. "Anyhow I don't like it," she said.

Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in particular, whenever he felt inclined.

"There are such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been found with seed."

"But how do they form new plants?"

"By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?"

"Very likely," he added, "MY orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish you would come and see them!"

But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache. She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams, growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to her entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary broad form, and deep, glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red towards the base. He knew of no other leaves quite like them.

The plant was placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange plant.

And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little glass house he knew that the spike had burst out, although his great Palaeonophis Lowii hid the corner where his new darling stood There was a new odour in the air - a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse.

Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And, behold! the trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of blossom, from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped before them in an ecstasy of admiration.

The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes.

He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the floor were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green leaves behind them, the whole green house, seemed to sweep sideways, and then in a curve upward.

* * * * * * * * * * *

At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable custom But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea.

"He is worshipping that horrid orchid," she told herself, and waited ten minutes. "His watch must have stopped. I will go and call him."

She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name. There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hotwater pipes.

For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.

He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands.

She did not understand. Then she saw from one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their sap dripped red.

Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel. How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not. She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and, after she had panted for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn's motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.

Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and in another minute she had released him and was dragging him away from the horror.

He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.

The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.

"Bring some water!" she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When, with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping with excitement, and with Wedderburn's head upon her knee, wiping the blood from his face.

"What's the matter?" said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and closing them again at once.

"Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Dr. Haddon at once," she said to the odd-job man so soon as he had brought the water, and added, seeing he hesitated: "I will tell you all about it when you come back."

Presently, Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and, seeing that he was troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him: "You fainted in the hothouse."

"And the orchid?"

"I will see to that," she said.

Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. "Come to the orchid-house and see," she said.

The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and hesitated.

The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn's orchids

Author's Note:

While I have elaborated somewhat on the concept of possession, it is actually quite a remarked field of study...at least as far as the intellectuals are concerned.

There are many, who substantially believe in life after death, and not based on any kind of intellectual discernment, but on the actual experience of communing with, or experiencing the visibility of those who have departed the physical world, but still co-exist with us on what some call the astral plane of existence.

The only trouble as far as I have been able to discern is that those souls who cling to our earth plane do so out of fear, or anger, or needs to hold onto what they had, and therefore will sometimes, if not on a permanent basis actually take over a human body, with the owner of that body being totally unware of such occuring.

This is what possession is as far as Wells saw it. He and most of his fellow artists of his time perceived death as a mere transitory time and that the outcome of death is one goes on into the Light...the tunnel of white light spoken of so much in movies and books...or they cling to the earth and cause troubles, if not actual physical harm to the living over time.

The Hindu faith believes that man is immortal and has many lives.

In the orient some cultures worship their ancestors, whom they believe still live among them...perhaps a way of acknowledging the dead are not truly dead, but still walk among us.

I am not trying to frighten anyone, but only to open up the windows of consciousness to accept that there are many, many possibilities open to us as humans that we either consciously ignore, or do so out of ignorance.

Myself, if death is the end, then no problem. But if not, I'd surely like to have a first class ticket to the other side.

I have, myself, written several stories which deal with the concept of life after death.  (Notably,  the Samuel Light series of stories and novels, which are all available at Amazon.Com.) What I believe as a human being is not as important as what you believe, for we each must make that last step on our own, and all of us will one day learn if what we have read or heard is right...or wrong!

Now to the story of the truly great writer, H.G. Wells.

Yours truly,
John

The Stolen Body

Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in conjunction with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged possibility of projecting an apparition of one's self by force of will through space.
Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a pre- arranged hour Mr. Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the Albany and Mr. Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr. Bessel had acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he attempted first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a "phantom of the living" across the intervening space of nearly two miles into Mr. Vincey's apartment. On several evenings this was tried without any satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion Mr. Vincey did actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr. Bessel standing in his room. He states that the appearance, although brief, was very vivid and real. He noticed that Mr. Bessel's face was white and his expression anxious, and, moreover, that his hair was disordered. For a moment Mr. Vincey, in spite of his state of expectation, was too surprised to speak or move, and in that moment it seemed to him as though the figure glanced over its shoulder and incontinently vanished.
It had been arranged that an attempt should be made to photograph any phantasm seen, but Mr. Vincey had not the instant presence of mind to snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and when he did so he was too late. Greatly elated, however, even by this partial success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took a cab to the Albany to inform Mr. Bessel of this result.
He was surprised to find Mr. Bessel's outer door standing open to the night, and the inner apartments lit and in an extraordinary disorder. An empty champagne magnum lay smashed upon the floor; its neck had been broken off against the inkpot on the bureau and lay beside it. An octagonal occasional table, which carried a bronze statuette and a number of choice books, had been rudely overturned, and down the primrose paper of the wall inky fingers had been drawn, as it seemed for the mere pleasure of defilement. One of the delicate chintz curtains had been violently torn from its rings and thrust upon the fire, so that the smell of its smouldering filled the room. Indeed the whole place was disarranged in the strangest fashion. For a few minutes Mr. Vincey, who had entered sure of finding Mr. Bessel in his easy chair awaiting him, could scarcely believe his eyes, and stood staring helplessly at these unanticipated things.
Then, full of a vague sense of calamity, he sought the porter at the entrance lodge. "Where is Mr. Bessel?" he asked. "Do you know that all the furniture is broken in Mr. Bessel's room?" The porter said nothing, but, obeying his gestures, came at once to Mr. Bessel's apartment to see the state of affairs. "This settles it," he said, surveying the lunatic confusion. "I didn't know of this. Mr. Bessel's gone off. He's mad!"
He then proceeded to tell Mr. Vincey that about half an hour previously, that is to say, at about the time of Mr. Bessel's apparition in Mr. Vincey's rooms, the missing gentleman had rushed out of the gates of the Albany into Vigo Street, hatless and with disordered hair, and had vanished into the direction of Bond Street. "And as he went past me," said the porter, "he laughed--a sort of gasping laugh, with his mouth open and his eyes glaring--I tell you, sir, he fair scared me!--like this."
According to his imitation it was anything but a pleasant laugh. "He waved his hand, with all his fingers crooked and clawing--like that. And he said, in a sort of fierce whisper, 'life!' Just that one word, 'life!'"
"Dear me," said Mr. Vincey. "Tut, tut," and "Dear me!" He could think of nothing else to say. He was naturally very much surprised. He turned from the room to the porter and from the porter to the room in the gravest perplexity. Beyond his suggestion that probably Mr. Bessel would come back presently and explain what had happened, their conversation was unable to proceed. "It might be a sudden toothache," said the porter, "a very sudden and violent toothache, jumping on him suddenly-like and driving him wild. I've broken things myself before now in such a case . . ." He thought. "If it was, why should he say 'life' to me as he went past?"
Mr. Vincey did not know. Mr. Bessel did not return, and at last Mr. Vincey, having done some more helpless staring, and having addressed a note of brief inquiry and left it in a conspicuous position on the bureau, returned in a very perplexed frame of mind to his own premises in Staple Inn. This affair had given him a shock. He was at a loss to account for Mr. Bessel's conduct on any sane hypothesis. He tried to read, but he could not do so; he went for a short walk, and was so preoccupied that he narrowly escaped a cab at the top of Chancery Lane; and at last--a full hour before his usual time--he went to bed. For a considerable time he could not sleep because of his memory of the silent confusion of Mr. Bessel's apartment, and when at length he did attain an uneasy slumber it was at once disturbed by a very vivid and distressing dream of Mr. Bessel.
He saw Mr. Bessel gesticulating wildly, and with his face white and contorted. And, inexplicably mingled with his appearance, suggested perhaps by his gestures, was an intense fear, an urgency to act. He even believes that he heard the voice of his fellow experimenter calling distressfully to him, though at the time he considered this to be an illusion. The vivid impression remained though Mr. Vincey awoke. For a space he lay awake and trembling in the darkness, possessed with that vague, unaccountable terror of unknown possibilities that comes out of dreams upon even the bravest men. But at last he roused himself, and turned over and went to sleep again, only for the dream to return with enhanced vividness.
He awoke with such a strong conviction that Mr. Bessel was in overwhelming distress and need of help that sleep was no longer possible. He was persuaded that his friend had rushed out to some dire calamity. For a time he lay reasoning vainly against this belief, but at last he gave way to it. He arose, against all reason, lit his gas, and dressed, and set out through the deserted streets--deserted, save for a noiseless policeman or so and the early news carts--towards Vigo Street to inquire if Mr. Bessel had returned.
But he never got there. As he was going down Long Acre some unaccountable impulse turned him aside out of that street towards Covent Garden, which was just waking to its nocturnal activities. He saw the market in front of him--a queer effect of glowing yellow lights and busy black figures. He became aware of a shouting, and perceived a figure turn the corner by the hotel and run swiftly towards him. He knew at once that it was Mr. Bessel. But it was Mr. Bessel transfigured. He was hatless and dishevelled, his collar was torn open, he grasped a bone-handled walking-cane near the ferrule end, and his mouth was pulled awry. And he ran, with agile strides, very rapidly. Their encounter was the affair of an instant. "Bessel!" cried Vincey.
The running man gave no sign of recognition either of Mr. Vincey or of his own name. Instead, he cut at his friend savagely with the stick, hitting him in the face within an inch of the eye. Mr. Vincey, stunned and astonished, staggered back, lost his footing, and fell heavily on the pavement. It seemed to him that Mr. Bessel leapt over him as he fell. When he looked again Mr. Bessel had vanished, and a policeman and a number of garden porters and salesmen were rushing past towards Long Acre in hot pursuit.
With the assistance of several passers-by--for the whole street was speedily alive with running people--Mr. Vincey struggled to his feet. He at once became the centre of a crowd greedy to see his injury. A multitude of voices competed to reassure him of his safety, and then to tell him of the behaviour of the madman, as they regarded Mr. Bessel. He had suddenly appeared in the middle of the market screaming "Life! Life!" striking left and right with a blood-stained walking-stick, and dancing and shouting with laughter at each successful blow. A lad and two women had broken heads, and he had smashed a man's wrist; a little child had been knocked insensible, and for a time he had driven every one before him, so furious and resolute had his behaviour been. Then he made a raid upon a coffee stall, hurled its paraffin flare through the window of the post office, and fled laughing, after stunning the foremost of the two policemen who had the pluck to charge him.
Mr. Vincey's first impulse was naturally to join in the pursuit of his friend, in order if possible to save him from the violence of the indignant people. But his action was slow, the blow had half stunned him, and while this was still no more than a resolution came the news, shouted through the crowd, that Mr. Bessel had eluded his pursuers. At first Mr. Vincey could scarcely credit this, but the universality of the report, and presently the dignified return of two futile policemen, convinced him. After some aimless inquiries he returned towards Staple Inn, padding a handkerchief to a now very painful nose.
He was angry and astonished and perplexed. It appeared to him indisputable that Mr. Bessel must have gone violently mad in the midst of his experiment in thought transference, but why that should make him appear with a sad white face in Mr. Vincey's dreams seemed a problem beyond solution. He racked his brains in vain to explain this. It seemed to him at last that not simply Mr. Bessel, but the order of things must be insane. But he could think of nothing to do. He shut himself carefully into his room, lit his fire--it was a gas fire with asbestos bricks--and, fearing fresh dreams if he went to bed, remained bathing his injured face, or holding up books in a vain attempt to read, until dawn. Throughout that vigil he had a curious persuasion that Mr. Bessel was endeavouring to speak to him, but he would not let himself attend to any such belief.
About dawn, his physical fatigue asserted itself, and he went to bed and slept at last in spite of dreaming. He rose late, unrested and anxious, and in considerable facial pain. The morning papers had no news of Mr. Bessel's aberration--it had come too late for them. Mr. Vincey's perplexities, to which the fever of his bruise added fresh irritation, became at last intolerable, and, after a fruitless visit to the Albany, he went down to St. Paul's Churchyard to Mr. Hart, Mr. Bessel's partner, and, so far as Mr. Vincey knew, his nearest friend.
He was surprised to learn that Mr. Hart, although he knew nothing of the outbreak, had also been disturbed by a vision, the very vision that Mr. Vincey had seen--Mr. Bessel, white and dishevelled, pleading earnestly by his gestures for help. That was his impression of the import of his signs. "I was just going to look him up in the Albany when you arrived," said Mr. Hart. "I was so sure of something being wrong with him."
As the outcome of their consultation the two gentlemen decided to inquire at Scotland Yard for news of their missing friend. "He is bound to be laid by the heels," said Mr. Hart. "He can't go on at that pace for long." But the police authorities had not laid Mr. Bessel by the heels. They confirmed Mr. Vincey's overnight experiences and added fresh circumstances, some of an even graver character than those he knew--a list of smashed glass along the upper half of Tottenham Court Road, an attack upon a policeman in Hampstead Road, and an atrocious assault upon a woman. All these outrages were committed between half-past twelve and a quarter to two in the morning, and between those hours--and, indeed, from the very moment of Mr. Bessel's first rush from his rooms at half-past nine in the evening-- they could trace the deepening violence of his fantastic career. For the last hour, at least from before one, that is, until a quarter to two, he had run amuck through London, eluding with amazing agility every effort to stop or capture him.
But after a quarter to two he had vanished. Up to that hour witnesses were multitudinous. Dozens of people had seen him, fled from him or pursued him, and then things suddenly came to an end. At a quarter to two he had been seen running down the Euston Road towards Baker Street, flourishing a can of burning colza oil and jerking splashes of flame therefrom at the windows of the houses he passed. But none of the policemen on Euston Road beyond the Waxwork Exhibition, nor any of those in the side streets down which he must have passed had he left the Euston Road, had seen anything of him. Abruptly he disappeared. Nothing of his subsequent doings came to light in spite of the keenest inquiry.
Here was a fresh astonishment for Mr. Vincey. He had found considerable comfort in Mr. Hart's conviction: "He is bound to be laid by the heels before long," and in that assurance he had been able to suspend his mental perplexities. But any fresh development seemed destined to add new impossibilities to a pile already heaped beyond the powers of his acceptance. He found himself doubting whether his memory might not have played him some grotesque trick, debating whether any of these things could possibly have happened; and in the afternoon he hunted up Mr. Hart again to share the intolerable weight on his mind. He found Mr. Hart engaged with a well-known private detective, but as that gentleman accomplished nothing in this case, we need not enlarge upon his proceedings.
All that day Mr. Bessel's whereabouts eluded an unceasingly active inquiry, and all that night. And all that day there was a persuasion in the back of Vincey's mind that Mr. Bessel sought his attention, and all through the night Mr. Bessel with a tear-stained face of anguish pursued him through his dreams. And whenever he saw Mr. Bessel in his dreams he also saw a number of other faces, vague but malignant, that seemed to be pursuing Mr. Bessel.
It was on the following day, Sunday, that Mr. Vincey recalled certain remarkable stories of Mrs. Bullock, the medium, who was then attracting attention for the first time in London. He determined to consult her. She was staying at the house of that well-known inquirer, Dr. Wilson Paget, and Mr. Vincey, although he had never met that gentleman before, repaired to him forthwith with the intention of invoking her help. But scarcely had he mentioned the name of Bessel when Doctor Paget interrupted him. "Last night--just at the end," he said, "we had a communication."
He left the room, and returned with a slate on which were certain words written in a handwriting, shaky indeed, but indisputably the handwriting of Mr. Bessel!
"How did you get this?" said Mr. Vincey. "Do you mean--?"
"We got it last night," said Doctor Paget. With numerous interruptions from Mr. Vincey, he proceeded to explain how the writing had been obtained. It appears that in her seances, Mrs. Bullock passes into a condition of trance, her eyes rolling up in a strange way under her eyelids, and her body becoming rigid. She then begins to talk very rapidly, usually in voices other than her own. At the same time one or both of her hands may become active, and if slates and pencils are provided they will then write messages simultaneously with and quite independently of the flow of words from her mouth. By many she is considered an even more remarkable medium than the celebrated Mrs. Piper. It was one of these messages, the one written by her left hand, that Mr. Vincey now had before him. It consisted of eight words written disconnectedly: "George Bessel . . . trial excavn. . . . Baker Street . . . help . . . starvation." Curiously enough, neither Doctor Paget nor the two other inquirers who were present had heard of the disappearance of Mr. Bessel--the news of it appeared only in the evening papers of Saturday--and they had put the message aside with many others of a vague and enigmatical sort that Mrs. Bullock has from time to time delivered.
When Doctor Paget heard Mr. Vincey's story, he gave himself at once with great energy to the pursuit of this clue to the discovery of Mr. Bessel. It would serve no useful purpose here to describe the inquiries of Mr. Vincey and himself; suffice it that the clue was a genuine one, and that Mr. Bessel was actually discovered by its aid.
He was found at the bottom of a detached shaft which had been sunk and abandoned at the commencement of the work for the new electric railway near Baker Street Station. His arm and leg and two ribs were broken. The shaft is protected by a hoarding nearly 20 feet high, and over this, incredible as it seems, Mr. Bessel, a stout, middle-aged gentleman, must have scrambled in order to fall down the shaft. He was saturated in colza oil, and the smashed tin lay beside him, but luckily the flame had been extinguished by his fall. And his madness had passed from him altogether. But he was, of course, terribly enfeebled, and at the sight of his rescuers he gave way to hysterical weeping.
In view of the deplorable state of his flat, he was taken to the house of Dr. Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a sedative treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis through which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second day he volunteered a statement.
Since that occasion Mr. Bessel has several times repeated this statement--to myself among other people--varying the details as the narrator of real experiences always does, but never by any chance contradicting himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is in substance as follows.
In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his experiments with Mr. Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr. Bessel's first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr. Vincey, were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of the body--"willing it with all my might," he says. At last, almost against expectation, came success. And Mr. Bessel asserts that he, being alive, did actually, by an effort of will, leave his body and pass into some place or state outside this world.
The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. "At one moment I was seated in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the arms of the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey, and then I perceived myself outside my body--saw my body near me, but certainly not containing me, with the hands relaxing and the head drooping forward on the breast."
Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes in a quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He felt he had become impalpable--so much he had expected, but he had not expected to find himself enormously large. So, however, it would seem he became. "I was a great cloud--if I may express it that way--anchored to my body. It appeared to me, at first, as if I had discovered a greater self of which the conscious being in my brain was only a little part. I saw the Albany and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the rooms and places in the houses, very minute and very bright and distinct, spread out below me like a little city seen from a balloon. Every now and then vague shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the vision a little indistinct, but at first I paid little heed to them. The thing that astonished me most, and which astonishes me still, is that I saw quite distinctly the insides of the houses as well as the streets, saw little people dining and talking in the private houses, men and women dining, playing billiards, and drinking in restaurants and hotels, and several places of entertainment crammed with people. It was like watching the affairs of a glass hive."
Such were Mr. Bessel's exact words as I took them down when he told me the story. Quite forgetful of Mr. Vincey, he remained for a space observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped down, and, with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of, attempted to touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not do so, though his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented his doing this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares the obstacle to a sheet of glass.
"I felt as a kitten may feel," he said, "when it goes for the first time to pat its reflection in a mirror." Again and again, on the occasion when I heard him tell this story, Mr. Bessel returned to that comparison of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a precise comparison, because, as the reader will speedily see, there were interruptions of this generally impermeable resistance, means of getting through the barrier to the material world again. But, naturally, there is a very great difficulty in expressing these unprecedented impressions in the language of everyday experience.
A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place--he was in a world without sound.
At first Mr. Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of the body--out of his material body, at any rate--but that was not all. He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will he had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both from without and from within in this other world about us. For a long time, as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the exclusion of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement with Mr. Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all, but a prelude.
He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of his simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to be whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap he saw his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop sideways, and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange place of shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy of London spread like a model below.
But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by faces! that each roll and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an elusive streak of trailing darkness. Never a word they said, never a sound from the mouths that seemed to gibber. All about him they pressed in that dreamy silence, passing freely through the dim mistiness that was his body, gathering ever more numerously about him. And the shadowy Mr. Bessel, now suddenly fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active multitude of eyes and clutching hands.
So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr. Bessel to attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon of being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and craving for life that was their one link with existence.
It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of these noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr. Vincey. He made a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how, stooping towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in his arm-chair by the fire.
And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.
For a space Mr. Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend's attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in his room, to touch him. But Mr. Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr. Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.
And at last Mr. Bessel did a desperate thing. I have told how that in some strange way he could see not only the outside of a man as we see him, but within. He extended his shadowy hand and thrust his vague black fingers, as it seemed, through the heedless brain.
Then, suddenly, Mr. Vincey started like a man who recalls his attention from wandering thoughts, and it seemed to Mr. Bessel that a little dark-red body situated in the middle of Mr. Vincey's brain swelled and glowed as he did so. Since that experience he has been shown anatomical figures of the brain, and he knows now that this is that useless structure, as doctors call it, the pineal eye. For, strange as it will seem to many, we have, deep in our brains--where it cannot possibly see any earthly light--an eye! At the time this, with the rest of the internal anatomy of the brain, was quite new to him. At the sight of its changed appearance, however, he thrust forth his finger, and, rather fearful still of the consequences, touched this little spot. And instantly Mr. Vincey started, and Mr. Bessel knew that he was seen.
And at that instant it came to Mr. Bessel that evil had happened to his body, and behold! a great wind blew through all that world of shadows and tore him away. So strong was this persuasion that he thought no more of Mr. Vincey, but turned about forthwith, and all the countless faces drove back with him like leaves before a gale. But he returned too late. In an instant he saw the body that he had left inert and collapsed--lying, indeed, like the body of a man just dead--had arisen, had arisen by virtue of some strength and will beyond his own. It stood with staring eyes, stretching its limbs in dubious fashion.
For a moment he watched it in wild dismay, and then he stooped towards it. But the pane of glass had closed against him again, and he was foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about him the spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way to furious anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered heedlessly into a room and is beating at the window- pane that holds it back from freedom.
And behold! the little body that had once been his was now dancing with delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts; he saw the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his cherished furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his books apart, smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments, leap and smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these actions in paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself against the impassable barrier, and then with all that crew of mocking ghosts about him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell him of the outrage that had come upon him.
But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the disembodied Mr. Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried out into Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr. Bessel swept back again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy down the Burlington Arcade. . . .
And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr. Bessel's interpretation of the first part of this strange story. The being whose frantic rush through London had inflicted so much injury and disaster had indeed Mr. Bessel's body, but it was not Mr. Bessel. It was an evil spirit out of that strange world beyond existence, into which Mr. Bessel had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held possession of him, and for all those twenty hours the dispossessed spirit-body of Mr. Bessel was going to and fro in that unheard-of middle world of shadows seeking help in vain. He spent many hours beating at the minds of Mr. Vincey and of his friend Mr. Hart. Each, as we know, he roused by his efforts. But the language that might convey his situation to these helpers across the gulf he did not know; his feeble fingers groped vainly and powerlessly in their brains. Once, indeed, as we have already told, he was able to turn Mr. Vincey aside from his path so that he encountered the stolen body in its career, but he could not make him understand the thing that had happened: he was unable to draw any help from that encounter. . . .
All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr. Bessel's mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant, and he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried to and fro in his ineffectual excitement, innumerable spirits of that world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went upon his glorious career.
For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.
But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the earth, or whether they were closed forever in death against return. That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness on the earth.
At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through them he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her portraits to be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the pineal eye in the brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful; sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on talking and writing with one hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the crowding shadows of men about him, and a great multitude of the shadow spirits of that shadowland, were all striving and thrusting to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one gained her brain or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing of her hand changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused for the most part; now a fragment of one soul's message, and now a fragment of another's, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the spirits of vain desire. Then Mr. Bessel understood that she spoke for the spirit that had touch of her, and he began to struggle very furiously towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at that time he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went away to find what had happened meanwhile to his body. For a long time he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street, writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry because his time had been so short and because of the painmaking violent movements and casting his body about.
And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room where the seance was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the seance should presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the seance was almost over only made Mr. Bessel the more earnest, and he struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he gained the woman's brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil spirits about him had thrust Mr. Bessel away from her, and for all the rest of the seance he could regain her no more.
So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed, writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr. Bessel entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did so, the silence--the brooding silence--ended; he heard the tumult of traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that is the shadow of our world--the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual desire and the shadows of lost men--vanished clean away.
He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found. And in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim damp place in which he lay; in spite of the tears--wrung from him by his physical distress--his heart was full of gladness to know that he was nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.

​The Star - H.G. WellsH.G. WellsIt was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind. 


      Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it. 


      On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. 'A Planetary Collision,' one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the old familiar stars just as they had always been. 


      Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea by seamen watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky! 


      Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star. 


      And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night. 


      And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star. 
      'It is brighter!' cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. '_It is nearer_,' they said. '_Nearer!_'
 
      And voice after voice repeated, 'It is nearer,' and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. 'It is nearer.' Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, 'It is nearer.' It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. 'It is nearer.' Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. 'Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!'
 
      Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves--looking skyward. 'It has need to be nearer, for the night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth from it if it _is_ nearer, all the same.'
 
      'What is a new star to me?' cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead. 


      The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself--with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. 'Centrifugal, centripetal,' he said, with his chin on his fist. 'Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this--! 


      'Do _we_ come in the way? I wonder--'


      The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African City a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. 'Even the skies have illuminated,' said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered. 'That is our star,' they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light. 


      The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star. 


      He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. 'You may kill me,' he said after a silence. 'But I can hold you--and all the universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now.'


      He looked at the little phial. 'There will be no need of sleep again,' he said. The next day at noon--punctual to the minute, he entered his lecture theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing. 'Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyond my control,' he said and paused, 'which will debar me from completing the course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly and briefly, that--Man has lived in vain.'


      The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained intent upon his calm grey-fringed face. 'It will be interesting,' he was saying, 'to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume--'


      He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that was usual to him. 'What was that about 'lived in vain?' whispered one student to another. 'Listen,' said the other, nodding towards the lecturer. 


      And presently they began to understand. 


      That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yellow and wan. 


      And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country side like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earth rolled on its way and the night passed, rose the dazzling star. 


      And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all night long. And in all the seas about the civilised lands, ships with throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over the world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the earth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide of its sunward rush, would 'describe a curved path' and perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth. 'Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea wa ves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit'--so prophesied the master mathematician. 


      And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed the star of the coming doom. 


      To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened towards a thaw. 


      But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing toward mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared through the night, and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000; for then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star--mere gas--a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take. The master mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world left the star unheeded. 


      And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed. 


      But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys. 


      And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it reached the sea. 


      So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific, trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it came--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night; a flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death. 


      China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of men--the open sea. 


      Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships. 


      And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc of black. 


      Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together across the heavens. 


      So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun. 


      And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the country side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued. 


      But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now fourscore days between its new and new. 


      But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and the passing of the Star. 


      The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. 'Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,' one wrote, 'it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole.' Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles. 

James didn't want to die, but his friends were in grave danger. He threw himself down, rolled up and kicked. But no one was there.

Simultaneously, the air opened up and Moriarity, who had felt James about to attack, had stepped aside, and aimed his weapon at James head. "Now you will die, shame on my name!"Moriarity cried out.

Before he could fire, Challenger blasted out of nowhere and tumbled into him.

Also, at the same time, Jules and Wells blasted from nowhere also.

Moriarity's gun went off.

The two assassins were so alarmed that they ran.

Watson took his weapon out and fired upon them, bringing one man down. The other risked a magical strike on the run, and seared the sidewalk in front of Sherlock and Watson, causing it to boil and bubble from magical heat.

Watson fired again and the second man was down.

"Over here!" Jules cried out.

Sherlock and Watson leaped over the burning energies and ran to the alley where Challenger had Moriarity in a headlock, his face flushed with blood as he exerted pressure on the struggling villain. Wells had the man's arms behind his back as well.

Jules had his weapon trained on him, as did James.

"It would seem we have everything under control." Watson snickered.

Then the Moriarity pressed to the pavement began to thrash violently.

Sherlock grabbed Watson's arm. "Run. Run for your lives!"

Everyone let go and ran the direction Sherlock took. James hesitated, looking into the fallen Moriarity's eyes. "Tell your Dark Master we know who he is now!"

James rolled the body into the alley and ducked to the other side, as a massive explosion ripped the air. Pieces of the masonry near James flew apart, shredding the clothing on his right arm, but only leaving scratches and bruises.

He and the others went back into the alley and watched as the fake Moriarity's remains caused the alley brick and mortar to bubble like boiling water, portions of it subsiding into the wet pavement and vanishing from view.

"It's over." Wells said.

Jules shook his head. "Non, Mon Ami. It is far from over."

Sherlock stood there, watching as the last remains of Moriarity sank into the bubbling, melting pavement.

***

"All roads lead to Rome." James said as he warmed his palms with a fresh brew of tea that Watson so kindly served up. He still heard the klaxons of the Constable Wagons outside, so he knew the Inspector and his son, Constable Evans, would still be there working the crime sight, striving to glean whatever evidence they could.

Watson came up the stairs with a tray of tiny sandwiches, cut with pickles, lettuce and salmon. "Food anyone?"

"Don't mind if I do." James said, helping himself to three of them.

He and Watson exchanged glances that spoke much of the deep bond between them. Sherlock observed it silently, basking in the warmth between the two men, who were also two of his closest friends as well.

Watson parsed out sandwiches to all in the room, and then sat the nearly empty tray on the table, where a map was spread out. Conan nibbled on a sandwich, sipped at his tea, then nibbled some more, studying the map.

Challenger sat near him, silent. He was thinking about all they had experienced since the implosion. Ned was still sullen after the experience. He still had his up moments, but lately he'd been more withdrawn.

***

"What's wrong, Ned?" Challenger had asked him, impatient about his reticence and withdrawal.

Ned wouldn't speak at first, but then he finally did. "It's so wrong."

"What?"

"All of it!" Ned had exploded, jumping to his feet and pacing the observation deck where they stood. "I had no idea of the magnitude of power we were dealing with. It boggles my mind. Giant kraken and undersea cities I can deal with, but interdimensional demons, holes in time and space, whirlpools that can suck down entire buildings...."

He trailed off, his exasperation finally freezing his words.

He couldn't stand it anymore. He whipped out his harmonica and began to play it.

Nemo, who had been watching quietly from the Pilot's station, turned on the intercom so the whole ship could hear.

Ned started off with a melancholy piece, but not being the sort to stay down forever, he bounced back with a jig, which left him dancing about the observation deck, the other crew tapping their toes with the beat of his music, on that deck and in all the others.

***

James stirred a lump of sugar into his fresh cup of tea and watched it dissolve as a cat might puzzle the problem of a commode's waters swishing in circles, finally to be gobbled up. James smiled at that metaphor, and then threw another lump in for good measure. He looked up and smiled at Watson, who was seated opposite him and Sherlock.

They were playing a game of poker. Chips were made up of coins, which Watson kept a stash of for quiet moments like this one.

"Well." He said, eyeing the silver platter where the last sweet cake lay untouched.

"Take it!" Both Sherlock and James said at the same time.

They burst into laughter when Watson nearly jumped out of his chair at the simultaneity of their commands. He settled down and reached for the cake.

"But do remember your weight, Watson." Sherlock admonished him.

"And you wouldn't want Mrs. Watson to know you have been ignoring your diet." James added.

Watson let go and gave them both stern glances to show his anger at their reminders.

James and Sherlock exchanged glances, then James cut the last piece in two and handed one to Sherlock and he took the other.

"Divide and conquer." James said, stuffing his mouth.

Watson sighed as the last half went into that of Holmes, and eyed the silver platter longingly.

"Don't Worry, Old Man." James said putting a friendly hand on Watson's shoulder. "She's coming back in two more days."

"Yes. And then you can be your old nasty self again...." Sherlock added.

"With scones." James laughed.

They all three laughed. Were silent a long time, then Watson got up. "I just remembered something. At that same moment the front door was pounded upon. Watson descended the stairs and Jules and Wells stood there with Harry. They all held packages neatly wrapped with bows on them. Behind them stood Harry, carrying another package, even larger, that was vaguely human shaped.

"Are we on time?"

"Exactly!" Watson said with a nod.

He no sooner let them inside, then a Tesla Cab pulled up and Lord Graystone and Lady Shareen stepped out, also clutching packages.

They hurried up the steps and Watson let them in as well.

He turned to close the door, when a honk sounded.

Conan drove up with a new Tesla, his face beaming. He waved from the driver's side and shouted. "I'm learning how to drive."

Einstein and Tesla climbed out. Both dropped to their knees and kissed the pavement.

Watson laughed. "I imagine it was an adventure for all!"

Conan gave the other two a scalding glance, and then parked the Tesla by driving it up over the curb and nearly smashing into a fence. He got out and examined his parking position, then shrugged. He brought out a huge package and marched for the flat.

***

The room became especially crowded when the Inspector and Constable Evans showed up, both with packages in their hands. Another few minutes later Madame Curie showed up with three men in tow, all carrying cakes and sandwiches, neatly wrapped and on huge silver trays.

"I hope I'm not too late." She pleaded, her eyes on Watson.

He took her hand and kissed it. "You could never be too late, Madame Curie!"

She blushed and then took her hand away and helped the three men set up the sitting room table and another one that Watson and Challenger brought up from the kitchen.

In a matter of minutes they had both tables back to back and covered with a splendid red cloth with sparkly blue balls of light on its surface. "I made it." Harry bragged.

"You made it with magic." Jules reminded him.

"Yes. But so?"

Everyone laughed, and then settled into a chair about the tables.

Sherlock and Watson both rose from opposite sides of the table, then turned towards James, who seemed surprised at what was going on, but quietly amused as well.

"To James."

"Too James." Watson joined in.

Sherlock continued. "Our friend has been with us but a year at this point, but in that year he has accumulated a wealth of friend."

"If not money." James quipped.

Everyone laughed.

James glanced over at Madame Curie and she smiled gently. She reminded him sometimes of the mother he would never see again, though a bit younger and stronger.

"And so." Watson continued. "In honor of that event, we are having a birthday party for James. A coming to our world party and thanks for his kindness, courage and...Need I say helpfulness over that time in our small brotherhood of Baker Street...?"

"Helping us to face a challenging world." Sherlock finished.

James rose and nodded. "And I thank each and every one of you. And I am grateful to see that all are well and alive, but I must warn you." He went on. His face growing dark with his thoughts. "That man who died out in the alley. That was not the last Moriarity! And he was not the Dark Master."

Jules rose. "But the Demon said we were going straight to him."

James frowned. "And you trust demons more than your friends?"

Jules blushed and sat back down.

James eyed each one of his friends, giving each a measure of his friendship through a nod, or smile, or small gesture of his hand. "But let us not talk about demons and darkness, but rather the Light that we of the Brotherhood of Baker Street bring to this beleaguered world."

He lifted a glass filled with champagne. "To a just world, a fair world, a kind world!"

Everyone rose and joined in. "To a just world, a fair world, a kind world!"

They clinked glasses together, then smiling, laughing, chatting they settled down into the friendly and sometimes combative conversations they inevitably dove into when so many great minds and hearts were gathered together.

***

Korath and his Monkey Men were chatting beneath the veils of mist in the Hidden Realms, where mystical stars rose on curtains of magic, simulating a real night sky. They were feeling content and at peace with the world. Finding the Black Tower empty and devoid of evil had done much to settle them.

Korath laughed heartily at the joke of his mate, and then froze along with the others when a blast of powerful red light emerged from the cone of the Black Tower. They all jumped to their feet and turned in terror as the ground beneath their feet began to tremble and shake.

Whatever had been gone from the Black Tower had returned to claim its home!

It was no easy feat for Jules and Wells to track down the path of the Druids from the highlands of the Scots. They had made every effort to erase their magical footprints, but with the help of Tesla and Edison, they had managed to build a tracking device that Harry Houdini had made possible with his understanding of the laws of magix...the core principles and foundation of both white and black magic.

The Master of the World settled to the top of the hill where the Druid stones, standing more than thirty meters tall, and almost even with the top of the Master of the World, which itself was an immense vessel, were ominous to look at. They were hewn from volcanic rock, black with pits of red embedded in them.

Harry, who had rode with them to make sure their tracking device was accurate, got off last. He was not impressed by the huge pillars, which had been weathered and worn by the centuries, if not millennium they had been standing there.

He, Jules and Wells remained well outside the center of the ring of stones, which dominated the view for many meters in all directions, dwarfing even the nearby hills, with their ominous brooding presence. Harry felt a nagging energy at the back of his neck and swatted at it.

Jules looked at him questioningly.

"Just a disembodied Druid trying to take over my body."

Jules eyebrows shot upwards in alarm.

Harry patted him on the shoulder. "Don't worry; they're the least of your worries. I have the attraction to them because of my own powers, which sometimes border on dark, because of the risks I am sometimes required to take."

"Such as now." Wells stated.

"Such as now." Harry sighed. He surveyed the nearest of the huge stones and whistled. "It must have taken a thousand men to move that." He smirked. "Or one helluva fine sorcerer."

Jules chuckled. "Or one fine vessel like ours."

Harry looked at him. "You know something you're not talking about?"

Jules spread his arms in a gesture of innocence. "Moi? Never!"

He and Wells exchanged glances. They always did that when they had history they didn't want to explain. Harry had become quite close to them, but those two had traveled far and wide, and he knew also in time, and they hardly ever talked about those adventures, as if they were a dark book of evil they dared not open.

"Look at this!" Jules cried out. He pointed to what appeared to be a seam in the side of the nearest stone.

They ran to it and began probing it with their fingers. The moment Harry touched it; he recoiled as if having received an electric shock.

Jules and Wells looked at him in surprise, and then grasped his arms when he looked ready to collapse.

"It's some kind of portal." Harry gasped, his lungs trying desperately to draw air into them after the shock which had blasted them free of air.

He finally got enough air back, and steadied on his feet, his companions still holding onto his arms to support him.

"Thank you, I'm all right now."

"What happened, Harry?" Wells asked, his eyes steeped with sympathy for his friend.

"It's a curse on the portal. Obviously quite old, or my body would have exploded, instead of just my air being forced from my lungs."

Harry took out a well chiseled wand from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and then touched the edges of the seam again, muttering ancient mystical words as he did so. The wand touched the seam and where it first touched a sparkle of light exploded into being, and then began to line the seam like fire lit to a fuse. Within moments the entire seam was lit up.

The men had to shield their eyes from the power of the light.

"What now?" Jules asked.

Harry grinned. "Why we enter the portal of course?"

Wells glared at Harry. "That sounds awfully dangerous!"

"It is." Harry admitted. "But isn't that why we joined the team with Sherlock, after all? To boldly go where no idiot has gone before."

He laughed at his stupid joke, then stepped into the framework of the glowing light and vanished.

Jules looked to Wells. "You sealed the Master?"

"Of course."

Jules stepped into the Portal and vanished as well.

Wells looked back at the security and familiarity of the Master of the World, then at the Portal. "In for a penny..." He sighed, and then also stepped through the Portal.

***

Doctor Watson unstoppered a vial he kept in his black bag, which never left his side. The vial had skull and crossbones on it. He raised it to James' lips. Lord Graystone grasped his hand, stopping him from tilting it into James' mouth.

"Poison?"

Watson gave Lord Graystone a stern look. "I do not advise you how to fling through trees, do you then assume to tell me how to doctor?"

Lord Graystone let go, humbled. "My apologies, Watson. I should have realized you would never poison a friend."

"Oh, but you're wrong, Grayson, I am going to do precisely that."

Before Lord Graystone could react, Watson titled the vial between James' lips.

Lord Graystone gave Watson a shocked look.

James began to thrash about violently.

Lord Graystone's face turned fierce-some as he looked at Watson again. "You're killing him!"

Watson shook his head. "Have you not heard the old wise saying of sometimes it takes a thorn to remove a thorn? In this case...poison. So shut up and let James get well!" He ordered sternly.

Lord Graystone fell back, stunned, never having been spoken to by Watson like that before. He started to move forward again, when James suddenly stopped thrashing. His face relaxed and the lines in his forehead began to smooth out, and then the pale color in his face began to turn pink as was its usual wont.

Watson raised his stethoscope and placed it to James' chest. He glanced over at Lord Graystone, who still was glaring at him like a lion about to pounce. "His heart is now beating at a normal rate." He felt his pulse, and then smiled further. "I'd say my job is done here." He rose and headed for the door.

"Watson, wherever are you going?" Sherlock inquired.

"Deduce it!" Watson told him with a grin, and then exited.

Lady Shareen barked with laughter at the surprised look on Sherlock's face. "It seems our mild mannered Doctor has turned into a savage beast, gentlemen."

"I must save her!" James hollered, sitting up on his hospital bed, his eyes gazing off into the unknown.

***

Challenger and Conan met Captain Nemo at the docks as he disembarked from the Nautilus. He was wearing all white, which contrasted his darker skin. His bright eyes locked on theirs as he reached the base of the ramp joining his giant submarine.

"It's so good to see you again, gentlemen, but where's Harry?"

"Off to the Scots, investigating a lead there." Challenger explained.

"I trust it will be safe for him."

"He's with Jules and Wells." Conan said.

"I see. Then perhaps I will only worry for him half as much." Captain Nemo said with a handsome smile.

"Now. What is the urgency which has drawn me back to you so quickly?"

Conan and Challenger explained what had happened to James.

Captain Nemo's face darkened. "He is a good lad. He deserves better and you say the intent was not to harm him, but the Lady Shareen?"

"Oh no, it was to hurt him, he just turned out to be a bonus for the assassin." Challenger explained further.

Captain Nemo's eyebrows knit together. "How can I help?"

Conan pulled a long tube that he had slung over his right shoulder, and unmindful of the dirty, grimy dock he laid his knees upon; he spread the contents of the tube out, revealing a blue print. "Few know this, but I did because of my research for a Sherlock Holmes novel I never completed...The Tunnels of Despair."

"But deep beneath London there is an underground river leading from the Thames." He pointed to an approximation of where they stood with the Nautilus, and then drew his finger along a line he had traced on the map. This line...the underground river...follows to the opposite side of London, where it drops off into a vast cavern of some kind that I expect Jules Verne might have a better idea about. But we need not risk that far. We need only to go thus far." He said punching a point on the map.

Captain Nemo dropped to a knee and examined the point. "I know that place. Isn't that where the Noddington is built? The old Druid Mansion?"

"Exactly!" Challenger and Conan said at the same time.

***

James was in tears as he held Lady Shareen's hands in his large ones that engulfed them like elephant's feet might a monkey's paws. "I thought you were dead for sure."

She smiled at him, took her hands free, then leaned forward and brushed her lips to his forehead. "How could I be dead with such valiant friends as you around?"

Lord Graystone, Grayson, as he preferred being called by his friends, nodded. "Again, we owe you for your kindness towards us."

"I suspect, it's much more the other way around." James said with a dead pan face, and then grinned. "But I accept anyway."

They all broke into laughter.

Watson came back into the room, holding a huge silver tray with a huge mound of sweet cakes on it, and a pot of steaming tea and cups.

"Anyone ready for a spot of tea?"

Sherlock helped Watson distribute the food and tea, and then sat next to him on the opposite side of James bed, with Watson watching James with the eyes of a hawk. James noticed and smiled at him. "Fear not, Watson. Poisoning me was the best thing you could do, and I would have done the same for you as well."

"And no doubt deprived Mrs. Hudson of her fiancée." Watson responded with a straight face.

Everyone broke into laughter again.

When it became quieter again, Sherlock rapped lightly on the tray Watson had set near him on a nightstand. Everyone looked at him. He held the silence a long pause, then spoke. "I think it has become abundantly clear that this cult of Druids has no intention of letting up, nor of stooping as low as possible to achieve their goals."

"You mean the Count!" Watson blurted out, spitting some cake out as he spoke.

Sherlock gave him a tolerant look, and then continued. "Yes. The Count. Watson and I encountered him once before some time back and that did not turn out as either of us expected. At that time we didn't know who he was."

"And you do now?" Lord Graystone asked, his right hand clutching Lady Shareen's left hand tightly.

"The Grandmaster!" Sherlock said.

"Oh God help us!" Lady Shareen gasped.

"Oh, he most certainly has." James quipped, raising his tea cup in a mock toast. "For had he not, I would most assuredly be dead at this point."

That sobered everyone up, even the joke that Watson had on the tip of his tongue, fell to ashes before him. He rose. "Then I must tell you more."

They all looked to him.

"Even as we sit here, safe in this hospital, three of our dearest friends, are now risking their lives to put an end to this crisis."

"Can it be ended so easily?" James asked, already knowing the answer.

Watson looked to James. "You yourself have told us about the man you suspected entering the Noddington, and we know that the Count frequents the place on a daily basis." He nodded to Sherlock, who nodded back.

"Therefore, we must assume that the enemy has been hiding in plain sight."

"And now?" Lady Shareen asked, her eyes narrowed in consideration of what was being revealed.

"And now we must prepare to strike the first blow!" Sherlock said, rising.

James fumbled with his bed clothes, raising his feet to place on the floor.

He looked to James. "I'm sorry, James, but the doctor has ordered you to remain in bed for the next twenty-four hours."

James froze a moment. "Not going to happen."

Then he gave a startled glance to Watson, who had wandered to the other side of the bed next to him when his attention was on Sherlock. He looked down and saw the tip of a needle withdrawing from his arm.

"Sorry, James, but Doctor's orders!" Watson said with a solemn grin.

And as Watson's image faded away to James, and he slid back down on his bed into unconsciousness, the others gathered closer to make plans, as if the very walls might be listening.

"The Case of the Tormented Lip has now been solved, thanks to James." Sherlock lectured. "But now we must solve the Puzzle of the Dark Druids."

"What does that mean?" Lord Graystone asked, fearing what he might hear next.

Sherlock looked to Lord Graystone. "This part of the puzzle you are going to play a big part in. I only hope you won't mind if you have a few brave companions to share your journey?"

Lord Graystone rose to his towering height and was about to pound his chest and let out his bull dragon roar, then smiled, restrained himself and smoothed out his shirt and jacket. "When can we start?"

"Why...at once, old man. At once!" Sherlock replied, to his feet as well.

The Spider of War

A Sherlock Holmes Tale

By John Pirillo

 

"What is dark and large

And throbs with the night,

Comes down by a thread

To give us a fright?

It is fearsome and loathsome

And everything we fear.

For now it has started,

The Dark Wars are here!"


-- From the Spider of War, a realistic retelling of the Dark Wars by Doctor Watson and Mrs. Hudson. --

"We must prepare for anything!" Queen Mary of Scots told Lord Barley as he poked a finger into a tactical map that had been given him by their new friend, Captain Nemo. Lord Barley was a cumbersome man. Slow of speech. Slow of movement. But his mind was like a razor. He could hone in on the practicalities of any battle consequences as easily as she could slip on her gown.

"Here is where they are most likely to land, Your Majesty." He pointed to a protected cove that was up the coast a ways. "But why there?" She asked. "Wouldn't it involve a rather large amount of logistics in moving their soldiers and weapons?"

Lord Barley coughed politely into his hand. "Your Majesty, they don't have weapons other than their teeth!"

"Barbarians." She uttered, once more being brought back to reality by the harsh demands of her kingdom. "Then I shall ask you, why they would delay their entry into our ports then?"

"To turn the common folk."

Queen Mary shuddered. For despite her well known fortitude when it came to the horrors of war, this kind of war was something unholy and brutal beyond measure to her.

She turned to her attendant, an older man with tired eyes that sagged wearily to his cheeks. "You will summon Mister Holmes and Doctor Watson at once."

"Your majesty..." The attendant started.

"I shall brook no delay!" She ordered.

The attendant shook with fear for a moment, for he knew that look. Men had died for disagreeing with her majesty when she was in such a space of decision.

He bowed. "At once, Your Majesty."

Queen Mary turned away, ignoring the sound of the massive doors to her office opening and closing. She turned to Lord Barley.

"Very well. They shall attempt..."

"No, Your Majesty. They shall not attempt. They shall do so. They shall turn all in their path!"

Queen Mary pounded a fist so hard on her desk that the poor man almost had a heart attack. It was at that moment that the horrid spider had poked its spiny head over the lip of her large window sill, whose window she always kept open for the view and fresh air of the Thames.

She spotted it first. "Oh my!" She had exclaimed.

Lord Barley turned to look as the spider had perched on the windowsill and then without pause launched into the air.

But that had been at least an hour or more ago. Now she was alone. He dead. Her life spared only by the height of the table, which stood a good two feet taller than her desk. She had leaped to the top of her desk, then to the top of the table, toppling several vases which had been in the family treasury for centuries. She didn't even hear them smash on the floor. Her only thought was of survival.

The Good Queen, Her Majesty Queen Mary of Scots, frowned as the rather large spider, with freckles of red on the crest of its spiky head circled the table she stood upon. She had managed to jump onto it, while her Minister; Lord Barley had tried to attend to the dreadful creature. He hadn't. She glanced at his swollen body where the giant spider had struck him and lanced his throat with a blood red set of fangs, and shuddered.

"Whatever is this world coming to?" She thought.

No one was likely to come to her rescue this time of night. She kept much later hours than her subjects and her attendants had been sent off to rest for the next day. She was not a slave master and had no intentions of starting then, but at this particular moment a bit more of company would have been nice, not dead, of course. She glanced at Lord Barley on the floor and trembled yet again.

Then the spider did a rather unlikely thing for an insect, it hopped onto her desk chair, and then onto her desk. Slowly it turned about to face her. It had only a distance of several feet to launch itself to take her down with its horrid fangs. She looked around desperately for something to use as a weapon. Lord Barley had a sword, but it was on the floor by his swollen body. Were she to go for that the horrid creature would reach her even more easily, having to only leap down, rather than upwards several feet.

She gasped as the creature lowered its spiky legs in preparation for a leap. And then she screamed as it flung its ugly, terrible body with its horrid red eyes and red fangs glistening with deadly venom at her.

======================================================

Holmes paced his sitting room nervously, hands clasped behind his back, while Watson dozed lightly in his favorite chair. Mrs. Hudson came into the room, saw her sleeping love and went over and brushed his forehead with her lips, then began tidying up.

"Would you be needing anything, Mister Holmes?"

"No, my dear Mrs. Hudson."

She nodded to Watson.

Sherlock gave her a thin smile. "I'll see to him."

She gave him a look of gratitude and took the tray of tea, silverware, plates and napkins downstairs to the kitchen. At the same time a pounding on the front door started.

Holmes froze in place, listening, and then he nudged Watson, who made a choking sound, rubbed his nose and eyes, and then sat up straight. "Must you always ruin my beauty sleep?"

"Far too late for that, dear fellow." Holmes said in an amiable voice.

The attendant came running up the steps, gasping for air. "The Good Queen, Mary of Scots, demands your immediate attention, Mister Holmes!"

Watson snorted. "And since when has that never been the case, my good man?"

The attendant gave Watson a look like he'd just spoken heresy. Sherlock took the man by his arm. "We'll be there promptly."

"Thank you very much, Mister Holmes. You're a gentleman and a scholar."

He gave Watson a scowl, and then departed down the stairs.

Watson rose, straightening out his crumpled pants with swipes of his hands. "No sleep for the wicked."

"Or the saint." Sherlock added.

Watson laughed.

Then he choked.

Sherlock spun around.

A giant spider with menacing red eyes and a pair of glistening fangs that dripped poison was perched on the windowsill.

"What in God's name?" Watson managed before Sherlock slammed into him, knocking him to the side.

The spider's leap missed and it slammed into the fireplace, where it caught fire. It let out a horrid screech, spun around on its spiny legs and looked for the men.

Watson ran for his coat, where he kept his weapon. Sherlock grabbed the chair near him and fended off the creature. The spider swatted the chair from his hands and prepared to launch at his throat.

"BLAM!"

A bullet slammed into the face of the spider's head.

The spider still leaped, but it fell short and landed at Sherlock's feet. Watson ran over and kicked the foul thing away. "Horrid creature!"

Sherlock eyed the still burning remains. "Better get some help from Mrs. Hudson. She'll be most displeased if we despoil the place."

Then a loud humming sound entered through the open window. Watson spun on his heels at the head of the staircase and ran back inside as the humming grew louder and louder. Sherlock stood there looking at the window, as if nothing out of the unusual were happening. Watson raised his weapon to fire. Then froze!

=================================================

Queen Mary swatted the spider on its thick body with a painting from behind her, thus destroying a portrait of her Queen Mother, and a family heirloom of inestimable value. But it worked. It defrayed the course of the spider, knocking it back to the floor, stunning it. But unfortunately, it caused her to lose her balance and her footing.

She fell to the floor, knocking the wind from herself. She lay there glaring angrily at the spider, which it seemed now would be tearing her throat out in any case, when the doors to her office flung open and the Attendant rushed inside.

"They are on their way, your Majesty!"

Then he froze as both the spider and the Queen came into his view.

"Run! You fool!" The Queen ordered.

He did. Back out the doors, which slammed in the face of the spider, stunning it again. It gave her time to reach Lore Barley's body and grab the sword, but it wouldn't come out. And then as the spider spun about to attack her again, she realized in one bloody second that the sword was purely ornamental and never meant to be drawn forth.

She grabbed hold of her heavy desk chair and scooted it in front of her, blocking the spider's path, hoping to reach the doors and exit to safety.

Then she heard something flop behind her.

She peered over her shoulder as a second spider dropped to the floor, then a third from the windowsill.

"Oh Bloody Hell!" She cursed.

She looked desperately about her room, but there was no safety from them. From one perhaps, maybe even two with luck, but three. Never.

She let go of the chair and faced the three spiders as they converged on her. "I may die, but I s hall not die a gibbering idiot either!"

She straightened her collar, her gown and her jeweled necklace and prepared to die.

The three spiders leaped into the air at the same time.

All three exploded at the zenith of their leaps. Pulped masses that burned with electric energies collided to the floor.

"I trust that shall put the end to that." She told them, then turned and smiled as first Sherlock, and then Doctor Watson stepped through the windowsill from the hatch of the Master of the World where Jules and Wells stood in the hatchway waving at her. She smiled and waved back like a silly young girl, before she recovered her sense of dignity again.

"About time you gentleman arrived." She snorted grumpily.

Sherlock smiled.

Watson shivered at the sight of the still burning mass of dead spiders. "Bloody hell!"

"You're pardoned, Doctor." The Queen told him.

He remembered himself and bowed. "So sorry, Your Majesty."

The doors to the office flung open and a squad of Royal Guard entered, ready for battle. When they saw the burning spiders, Sherlock, Doctor Watson and the hovering Master of the World outside the window, they hurriedly backed out again.

The Attendant entered, surveyed the scene, then went to a closet door in the office, took out a large broom and began sweeping the bloody pulps of the spiders who continued to burn into the center of the room. Then he went back into the closet, came out with a large metal bucket and a metal pan and began scooping up the remains into the bucket.

The Queen, satisfied that everything was returning to normal again, started to sit in her c hair behind her desk, when she suddenly realized it wasn't there. Watson and Sherlock caught her before she could fall.

"Your Majesty." Sherlock spoke gently.

"Thank you Sherlock. I will be fine now." She said.

The two men let go and she straightened herself.

The Attendant went into the closet again, came out with a bucket of water and began cleaning the highly polished floor, as they watched.

"This was a co-ordinated attack. Your Majesty." Sherlock told her.

She gave him a surprised look.

"We also were attacked." Doctor Watson commented. He waved to Jules and Wells outside and they waved back, then shut the hatch to the Master of the World and it vanished from view.

They placed her chair back behind her desk and she sat down.

"Then it's already begun." She observed, her mood dark and gloomy.

"I'm afraid so." Sherlock said.

"The Dark Wars are here." She said, still stunned at what had happened over the last several hours.

"And it shall only get worse." Sherlock told her. "I suggest that you leave no more windows..."

The sound of the window slamming shut caught both he and the Queen off guard. They turned to see Watson brushing his hands together. "No more of those buggers will be coming in that way. For certain!"

Sherlock turned to the Queen.

"This is just the first of many volleys."

"But why would they attack your Brotherhood." She demanded.

"Because we know who they are!" Sherlock said, his voice low and filled with anger.

Doctor Watson cleared his throat. They looked at him. "We do?"

The Queen burst into laughter.

Crash
"A Jules and Wells Story"
By John Pirillo
A great writer, H.G. Wells, once wrote that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King. But that is only half the story. Here is a tale of love and friendship caught at the gates of hell itself with two authors whose adventures in real life far exceeded their tales of wonder and fantasy on the written page. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells!


Wells lifted himself on his elbow, his face strained with great pain. Jules lay to the left of him, flung from his chair by the violence of their crash. Wells didn't actually see that. At that particular moment, he couldn't see a thing. Not a blasted thing, bloody hell and all! He thought to himself, ready to snap off a turtle's head, so angry he was at the co-ordinates he had fed Jules to put into the Strings navigator.

The forces hadn't been kind to either him or his best friend, he suspected. By the smell...acrid and bitter...he realized that the Master of the World was at best a wounded animal.

"Jules."

A moan.

"What happened?"

Another moan. This time louder and with more pain in the sound of it.

"My legs are crushed."

"Oh Jules. I'm so sorry." Wells croaked, his voice cracking as his emotions surfaced. They were both probably about to die.

"Mon Frere?"

"It is I."

"I can't lift the weight from my legs. I am flat on my belly and it is behind me."

"I..."

He felt Jules, rather than saw him strain to see Wells. "You're hurt!"

"My eyes."

Jules moaned again, but not because of his own pain. "Oh, dear friend, what a fine pair we are."

"The finest."

"I cannot walk. You cannot see."

"Think, Jules, what happened?"

"The String Space rejected our drive and flung us from it."

"That is impossible."

"Qui, but..."

Wells hurt in every inch of his body, but nothing appeared to be broken. He sat up, inch by inch, by drawing himself upwards with the strength of his hands upon the command console, which was obviously broken in many places. It was a miracle that either of them had survived the crash, let alone with such small physical loss.

He laughed.

"I am glad you find this amusing."

Wells grinned, and then felt blood spattering his lips. He wiped it away. "Not at you, or us, but this whole bloody thing. Here we are in the middle of...bloody hell, I don't know, maybe God does, but here we are. Two cocky young rogues who have had more than their share of close calls and managed to squeeze by."

"Not this time, Mon Frere. Not this time."

Wells heard the agony in Jules voice. "Keep speaking. I will see..." He laughed.

"You're laughing again."

"I see nothing."

Jules was silent. He mourned for his friend, but he could do nothing. He strained to break free from the weight on his legs, but could not turn or move. "Then do the best you can."

"Do I not always?"

Again, Jules was silent. Wells dragged himself across the debris between them carefully. Without eyes he had no idea what might be in his path and didn't need to skewer him on some bit of compromising metal by accident. His knee struck something hard. "Jules?"

"That would be my head."

Wells laughed again.

"I am growing tired of this laughter."

"And I." He laughed some more.

Jules laughed as well.

"We are such a sorry pair of fools." Jules finally was able to gasp out between laughs.

"Yes, we are." And Wells burst into a new line of laughter.

Finally, they both settled down, exhausted by their physical pains and the fear of the unknown. Wells used his right hand to probe along Jules body, and finally stopped when he felt something hard and unyielding. "It is the arms panel."

"But it has my legs." Jules remarked.

That sparked another burst of laughter from the two friends. When that subsided, Wells managed to maneuver himself closer to Jules and position himself so he could wrap both arms about the panel. "If I remember correctly, we had bolts holding it in place. It weighs about five hundred pounds."

"Yes. And we both nearly got broken by lifting it."

"Yes. And my wife thanks you for the design."

"As does mine, it gave her relief for almost a month."

They both burst into laughter again.

Finally, Wells stopped. "Do not move, I am going to try lifting it, then shoving it to the right."

"Oh trust me, Wells, move I shall not."

Wells almost laughed again, but when Jules let out another involuntary gasp of pain, the laughter fled from his lips. He strained with all his might, but the panel would not move.

"Well, that is good and proper." Wells finally croaked, gasping for breath.

"Yes. You can't see. I can't walk."

"I have not given up." Wells stubbornly replied.

He slid past Jules. "Can you see the closet door? Is it open or shut?"

"I cannot turn my head that far."

"No problem. I shall see to it myself."

They broke into laughter again, and then subsided as Wells slid to the position of the closet. He felt along the floor for its base, felt its edges, then slowly got to his feet, even though every muscle in his body screamed with pain.

Something made a loud whooshing sound in the back of the Master of the World.

"Wells, I suspect we have another problem brewing."

"As always, you are right, my friend." Wells responded, even as his hand sought the latch of the closet and sprung it. Another miracle. The compartment was whole. He felt the rod within it. He had stored it there from their last trip. It was some kind of artifact they had found on an abandoned version of Earth. Neither could figure out its function, though it generated an enormous amount of chronic energy.

"Have it." Wells grunted, as he allowed himself to slide down to the floor again.

He began to sniff the air. "Smoke."

"Mon Frere, where there is smoke..."

"...There is fire. I know. I know. I'm hurrying as fast as I can."

Well managed to get over to Jules again. He felt around and found a slightly rounded slab of metal that was near the panel fallen on Jules' legs. He slid the rod between the slab and the panel. "I don't know if this is positioned properly. You must let me know if anything is going wrong."

"Trust me; I will be the first to let you know."

They were both silent a long moment, then Wells slowly applied pressure to the rod, which was acting as a fulcrum to moving the panel. He heard grinding and screeching. Was the panel mixed with some other fallen object?

"Ow!" Jules cried out.

Wells started to lower the rod.

"Non, non, Mon Frere. The pain is a good one. Keep on. I can feel my legs loosening."

Wells grunted as he applied more pressure.

There was an explosion in the rear of the ship and the blast wave knocked him to the left. His rod flew from his hands to the right.

Jules cried out as if he had been crushed to death.

Wells recovered himself and scrambled to help Jules, but instead of finding Jules' body, he discovered only a mass of metal. "Jules!" He cried out.

He felt two hands clasp his shoulders and slowly raise him to his feet. "Mon frère." Jules whispered to his dear friend.

They gave each other a long hug, and then Jules turned Wells. "We must hurry while there is an exit from the vessel. As Jules walked, he stumbled on the rod. He started to kick it aside, then thought better of it and stooped to pick it up with his free hand, allowing Wells to lean against him as he did so. Finally, he was able to stand again.

"What is it?"

Jules eyed the rod. "Either our salvation or our destruction."

Another explosion. They were both slammed into a wall.

Jules hurriedly recovered and grabbed Wells to his feet. He used the rod to help push fallen and crushed debris from their path, and then reached the emergency exit. He kicked the control box at the base of it. It had three boxes like such. One at the top. One at the middle and one at the bottom in case someone was unable to reach the other two.

The door made a loud groaning sound and didn't want to open.

"Oh damn it to hell anyway!"

Wells kicked with all his might. His aim was true. The door made a loud protesting sound, and then swung open.

Jules practically flung them to the ground as the Master of the World gave one loud rumbling sound after another. "We must run!"

"I will trust your eyes."

"That is good, for I trust little else."

"Then lean on me, and guide us both."

Jules did so.

Wells bolstered his friend as they both ran from the debris of the broken ship. Its beautiful golden lines of radiant beauty were marred by debris from its crash and from the fires that now raged throughout it. They had gotten about twenty yards away, when a wave of explosions rippled the rough the vessel, sending debris showering them and the land about them.

Jules threw himself and Wells down and covered Wells with his body.

The explosions stopped.

Jules rolled off and gasped for air.

Wells did the same, not because he was relieved, but because Jules had crushed the air from his lungs.

"Safe." Wells said.

"But for how long?"

Jules surveyed the land they had crashed into. It was late. The sun barely peeked above the craggy mountains that ringed in their crash site. On the horizon was a thick forest. It seemed a livable place. And then he saw something move in the forest. It moved temporarily into the light. It was enormous. At least ninety feet in height. Jules could see very long teen in its mouth.

Wells stomach grumbled. "I can't believe I'm hungry at a time like this."

"You're not the only one." Jules whispered.

"Why are you whispering, blast it?" Wells almost hollered.

Jules clapped a hand over his friend's face. "Something is coming our way."

"Something very, very big."

Wells clasped the rod that lay between him and Jules. "Well, worst comes to worse, we can always use this as a club."

"I don't think that's going to work." Jules said as the huge beast stomped towards them, closing the distance with huge steps that covered yards of ground at a time.

"What's wrong?"

Jules let go of Wells. "From the kettle into the fire."

Wells stiffened. "Death yet again?"

"Yes, Mom Frere, it would appear that the Old Man enjoys playing with us."

Wells drew himself to his feet, leaning on the rod. He reached a hand out and Jules took it, and then rose to stand beside him.

"I think I could run now." Jules remarked in a forced casual voice.

"I think our time of running has come to an end."

Jules looked at his friend. "Perhaps so."

Jules grabbed the rod from his friend's grasp, causing him to fall to the ground.

"What kind of madness is this, Jules?"

"The only kind that has ever been our friend." Jules uttered back, his face resolute and fixed. He turned to face the beast, which now towered over the both of them.

"I shall not go out without a fight." Wells uttered, forcing himself to his feet.

Jules nodded. "Then as always."

"We live together. We..."

"Die together."

Jules raised the rod over his shoulder to strike the beast in the face as it opened its massive jaws, revealing row after row of jagged teeth. Its gigantic bloodshot eyes swirled with delight as it eyed its easy snack.

"For love." Jules hollered, and then swung the rod.

It struck the beast in its nose as it reached for them.

The creature gave the two of them a stunned look for a moment, and then it raised itself up on its hind feet and prepared to crush them with its front.

"Farewell, dear friend." Jules said calmly and with great clarity.

"Forever friends." Wells agreed, taking Jules free hand.

"Forever." Jules repeated.

Then as the beast's massive front feet dropped to crush them, the rod in Jules' hand lit up brighter than the sun for a moment. Both men were seared by its intensity. The beast cried out in fear, but continued to press downwards. When its feet had crushed into the bright light, it felt nothing but soil.

It lowered its great head to look at the spot it had crushed. Nothing was there, not even the stick that had struck it. The beast groaned angrily, then turned to retreat back to its forest, where maybe another meal could be found.

==========================================================

Jules stood in the cockpit of the Master of the World, the rod raised before his face. Wells lay at his feet next to the navigation controls.

"Mon Frere. I think dinner has been avoided."

"Where are we? This sounds like..."

"The Master of the World." Jules finished for him.

Jules hurried his friend to the small infirmary in the back and even though he was unsettled still by the abrupt transition to an intact vessel, devoid of any human life, he didn't forget his friend's injuries. He carefully cleaned his friend's face, then his eyes, using medicated solutions to cleanse the cuts and bruises. He had laid his friend down on the small cot there and sat beside him. He placed a strip of thick gauze over his friend's eyes.

Wells fell into a deep sleep, which Jules would not disturb. He only rose the once to check on their navigation headings, then satisfied with them, returned to keep watch on his friend. It must have been many hours later that Wells groaned and rubbed at the gauze over his eyes.

"What the blasted, bloody hell have you put over my vision? I can't see a thing! Bloody hell, Jules!"

Jules pressed a hand to the gauze to stop him from removing it. "It's for your own good, Mon Frere. Your eyes were hurt badly."

"Like bloody hell they were!" Wells said, and then swept Jules' hand and the gauze from his face. He looked at Jules, who gave him a startled look, then smiled. "I can see you are quite disturbed."

"You would be too if you had been through what I had with you." Jules countered.

They both broke into peals of laughter.

When they had landed the Master of the World, their wives were waiting for them. They rushed to them and held them close a long time, saying nothing. Both women were used to such conduct from their men and knew when they were ready; they would speak of what had happened, though they couldn't tell a thing by looking at the state of the Master of the World, which was perfect and untouched by flame or explosion.

That night both men gave their women more attention than usual, but neither wife complained. They loved their men, even though they often times were gone in their explorations. Love is a most bounteous and generous energy, and the love between these four was enough to satisfy them all.

But as both men went to sleep that night, comfortable and warm against their wives, the one thought they had in common was...What had triggered the rod to activate? What had caused the erasure of time itself?

Even though that thought weighed heavily upon both men for a time, they could not hold it for long, for weariness now claimed its own and they descended into the blissful ignorance of sleep and dreams well earned.