Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

He grabbed her arm. “You must stay quiet,” he hissed. “They accept me now. It’s taken me months to achieve that much. And this is where I want to be. Where I must be, with them. Can’t you feel it?”

The trapped man screamed, his voice high, boyish. The Neanderthal lifted his blade.

Again Nathan clamped his hand over Zena’s mouth.

The blade swept with a single rasp across the man’s throat. Blood gushed, the colour a vivid red against the pale ground. As the victim writhed on the floor, the Neanderthals stood back.

Then one heavy-set fellow grabbed the wounded man by the ankles, and lifted him up, with one hand , so he dangled upside down over the bowl where lay the corpse of the child. The man, gurgling, his neck spewing blood, thrashed and struggled still – he was like a landed fish, Zena thought, displayed for the weighing. But a sharp punch to the temple by another of the Neanderthals stilled him. Now the blood simply poured out, like wine from a bottle, into the leather bowl and over the infant corpse.

Zena broke away from her brother and ran. He pursued her, calling her name in urgent whispers, but she evaded him.

When she wrote to Walter about this episode, she omitted the details of her own terrified flight back through the Wood. One can only guess at the fearful struggle through the clinging, suffocating forest – the fragment of relief when one of her own paint marks was found on the bark of a tree, so she knew she was not lost – the tremendous release when she at last burst out of the Wood, in sight of the Lodge itself.

And the shock, which she did report to Walter, of discovering once she got back into the house that only three hours had passed since she had left it.

When Walter received her latest letter, he decided he must visit in person.

It was early March of 1908 by the time Walter freed himself sufficiently of other commitments to be able to visit Holmburgh, and Zena Gardner.

He had been staying with his brother Frank, then my fiancé, in London. And, with the rail links in the south of England still under repair, to get to Sussex he decided to take one of the German airships that at that time ran regular if expensive passenger services from London to Brighton and other destinations. Back in ’08 such journeys were still a novelty for the British, and he recorded his impressions with boyish eagerness in his daily journal.

The highlight of the trip was an entirely trivial expedition, led by one of the Hermann ’s senior officers, into the interior of the great craft. Walter’s party were led first to the upper deck of the gondola, and then to a series of metal staircases that led to hatches in the ceiling. Up the party climbed. Though they had been warned to wrap up, still the cold of the upper air hit Walter immediately as they exited the heated interior of the gondola, and a couple of people turned back at that point.

Those who persisted ascended into wonderland. The craft was built around a stout metal spine that ran the length of the main envelope, and from it radial ribs supported the essentially cylindrical frame of the craft. But one only got the vaguest of impressions of this architecture, for the space was crowded with lift balloons. It was like exploring St. Paul’s, Walter thought, on a day when the dome happened to have been crammed full of hot-air balloons. The sacs were lit from inside by electric lamps, the purpose being for the crews to detect any leaks or other problems by easy visual inspection. The effect was magical, as if one were in a cloud, glowing from within.

I like to think of dear Walter, his mind as well as his body still badly scarred from his experiences of the First Martian War – he was then forty-two years old – and yet here he was clambering around the insides of an airship like a wide-eyed schoolboy.

And I like to imagine the reaction of poor Zena Gardner when his hired car brought him to Holmburgh at last: on her doorstep, the man who would narrate the most famous account of our first War of the Worlds.

It was early spring when Walter arrived at Holmburgh. Yet, he says, he immediately had a sense of something not right. It seemed too cold . The pretty flowers of late winter and early spring were nowhere in evidence. The fields were bare; the farm animals, the cattle and sheep and horses, seemed sullen, oddly perturbed. And the birds were silent too, he remembers.

Walter was made welcome at the Lodge. He says the servant, Pierce, was grave, rough-spoken but kindly, and Walter was immediately struck by his fatherly devotion to the troubled young woman who paid his wages.

When he was settled, his single bag unpacked – the plan was for him to stay at least one night – Walter and Zena sat down to a plain but nourishing afternoon tea, in a parlour whose walls were cluttered with portraits of hard-eyed ancestors. Walter, when he was less self-obsessed, could be a good listener, and it took only a little encouragement before Zena opened up to him with her account of her troubled brother and his wanderings.

“Much of your detail is quite compelling,” he told her. “During the Ice Ages there were indeed Neanderthals in Britain – in England at least, below the line of the ice sheets on which nothing can live. And though the ice came and went, and the island was depopulated and recolonised over and over, there must have been occupation by those fellows across a great depth of time.”

“But the other – the one whose blood was let – he looked more like a modern human to me, in the body at least. Which I saw naked.” She was no tender flower; Walter says she repeated this word analytically and unembarrassed.

“But the head sounds odd,” Walter said. “The sloping brow you mention. The jaw especially, the long teeth. Just last year – while we were fighting the Martians – the Germans dug up a peculiar jawbone in Heidelberg, which sounds as if it might have been a match for the feature you describe. Don’t be too impressed. Given the sketchy account in your letter, I prepared for this visit by reading the appropriate journals.” I imagine him steepling his fingers and slipping into the comfortable lecturing mode of the self-appointed expert. But he was always well informed, I’ll give him that. “It’s very easy to imagine there was more than one kind of human predecessor running around in the wilds of Europe in those days. We humans must have encountered the Neanderthals. And it’s easy to imagine interaction between the subspecies. Even cross-breeding, as one may breed domestic dogs. Or – mutual destruction.”

She nodded. “They say that chimps hunt monkeys, their cousins, for the meat.”

“That is uncomfortably true.”

“But this was different, Mr Jenkins. The Neanderthals, if that was what they were, looked like brutes killing someone – beautiful.”

He smiled. “Looks can deceive. There’s a chap, you know, I keep running into over this business of the Martians – bumptious little fellow with a damnable squeaky voice – well, a few years back he published a potboiler of a romance about travel into the future. And his hapless hero comes upon two races of devolved post-humans – not under-evolved pre-humans, as your vision suggests – in which the smarter, ugly sort similarly preyed upon the stupider but pretty sort. And the time traveller naturally sympathised with the pretty lot. Yours was an understandable reaction, Miss Gardner. But you must remember these fellows were not human, either of them, despite how they looked. As you said, one wild ape killing another – that’s closer to the scenario. Nothing but nature at work, in its mindless way.