Strange Days

I have spent this last hour holed up inside the Abney Park laboratory, reading over and listening to journal entries I made almost seventy-five years ago. It seems incredible that I authored those documents, that I have just heard my own voice, recorded on wax cylinders three-quarters of a century in the past. But I know these things to be true. I have returned to New Babbage, and to its inhabitants, and to my colleagues in this place and time, I seem only to have been absent for the space of perhaps twelve hours, probably less.

Can I resume this journal? Should I? Certainly, I am not the woman I believed myself to be when I first arrived in here in June. Two months ago. Seventy-five years ago. I have become, instead, this paradox. This contradiction. Surely, I will not be speaking with the same voice.

I was blind when I left. Now I am only mute.

On August 31, according to my faded memories and to the ink still fresh in my ledger, I resolved to bring the Underwood woman back to Babbage, having come to understand the harm she could do, and the foolish decision I made when I entrusted her with such a terrible secret. I must have been in a panic, and I can even speculate that I might very well have been in a deranged state. That was, for me, so awfully long ago. She had become a problem to be solved, and I doubt I saw her as anything more. And, whatever else might have happened, I tried to get her to enter the temporal translocation cabinet at Abney Park. Knowing that it could only lead to her death, as the cabinet was not yet ready for tests on living organisms, still I bade her enter. In a flash, her molecules would have been strewn across the aether one hundred and fifty metres above the lab, and with her, the secrets I confided, of my true nature and the cipher I will not even here repeat. Artemisia arrived, though, and, from here, there are no notes to fall back upon and my recollections are too hazy to trust. But I have been told by Miss Paine that Molly Underwood escaped, and that I slit my own throat and entered the cabinet with a small weasel or ferret in my arms. It is almost too bizarre a tale to even credit as true.

As to what happened afterwards, well, that is something I may never fully write down anywhere. I left this world and entered yet another. One very near to this. And I lived a long life there, and in time, I understood that my affairs in New Babbage, in this universe, had been left incomplete and unfinished. And with great difficulty I returned, arriving in the city sometime late on Saturday, the day after my departure. Not even a full day had passed here, and yet for me, those seventy-five years came and went.

I am exhausted, and must rest. I will write more later, for this past evening, just before dawn, I did at last meet Mr. Jason Moriarty, the werewolf created by Alexander Eliot. And the meeting has left me weak and unable to regain strength without a constant application of alternating electrical current. There was a frightful occurrence at the Museum, shortly after dawn and my audience with whatever manner of hideous being Moriarty has become. He speaks of the return of the Old Ones, and he thinks me a compatriot in his campaign to ease their re-entry into this world. Am I? Is that what I have become? Even though I have only meant always the exact opposite? He has touched my mind. He has somehow stained me. I cannot get his foul reek out of my head. There will be another murder, one more he says, and soon, and I have no idea what I might do to prevent it.

I have sealed myself inside Abney Park laboratory. I pray my strength returns. The League is not strong enough to stand alone against what is coming, and Heaven help Bow Street and the bloody Freemasons and the 13 Club and anyone else who tries to hold back this rising tide.