Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the ninth chapter of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

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Welcome to Byte At A Time Books, where we read you your favorite classics one Byte At a Time.

My name is Brie Carlyle and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

If you enjoy our show, be sure to follow us so you can at all the new episodes.

If you want to see exclusive behind the scenes of our show, join our Patreon.

We would also love for you to drop us a rating on your favorite podcast platform and share our show with your friends.

You can catch us on all the social medias at Bite At A Time Books.

We are now part of the Bite At A Time Books Productions Network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world at the time, check out Byte At A Time Books Behind the Story.

Wherever you listen to podcasts today, we'll be continuing The Time Machine by H.

G.

Wells nine The More Locks It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the newfound clue in what was manifestly the proper way.

I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.

They were just the half bleached color of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a Zoological Museum, and they were filthy cold to the touch.

Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Loi, whose disgust of the More Locks I now began to appreciate.

The next night I did not sleep well.

Probably my health was a little disordered.

I was impressed with perplexity and doubt.

Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I perceived no definite reason.

I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the little people were sleeping in the moonlight that night.

Wina was among them and feeling reassured by their presence.

It occurred to me even then that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter, and the nights grow dark when the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more abundant.

And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty.

I felt assured that the time machine was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating these mysteries of underground.

Yet I could not face the mystery.

If only I had had a companion, it would have been different.

But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me.

I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.

It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps, that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions.

Going to the southwestward towards the rising country that is now called Comb Wood, I observed far off in the direction of 19th century Bandstead, a vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen.

It was larger than the largest of the places or ruins I knew, and the Sacade had an Oriental look, the face of it having the luster as well as the pale green tint, a kind of bluish green of a certain type of Chinese porcelain.

This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore.

But the day was growing late, and I had come upon the site of the place after a long entireing circuit.

So I resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day, and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of Little WINA.

But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of selfdeception to enable me to shirk by another day, an experience I dreaded.

I resolved I would make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminum.

Little WINA ran with me.

She danced beside me to the well, but when she saw me lean over the mouth and looked downward, she seemed strangely disconcerted.

Goodbye, Little WINA, I said, kissing her and then putting her down.

I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing hooks rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away.

At first she watched me in amazement.

Then she gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands.

I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed.

I shook her off, perhaps a little, roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well.

I saw her agonized face over the parapet and smiled to reassure her.

Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung.

I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps 200 yards.

The descent was affected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter than myself.

I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent, and not simply fatigued.

One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath.

For a moment I hung on by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again, though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on clamoring down the sheer descent with as quick emotion as possible.

Glancing upward, I saw Wiener's head showed as a round black projection.

The sudden sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive.

Everything saved.

That little disc above was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again, Wiena had disappeared.

I was in an agony of discomfort.

I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft again and leave the Underworld alone.

But even while I turned this over in my mind, I continued to descend.

At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly coming up a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall.

Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest.

It was not too soon.

My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall.

Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes.

The air was full of the throbbing of machinery pumping air down the shaft.

I do not know how long I lay.

I was aroused by a soft hand touching my face.

Staring up into darkness, I snatched at my matches and hastily striking one I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the lights, living as they did in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness.

Their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way.

I have no doubt they could see me in that Rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light.

But so soon as I struck a match in order to see them, they fled inconsiently, vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different from that of the overworld people, so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind.

But I said to myself, you are in for it now.

And feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder.

Presently the walls fell away from me and I came to a large open space and, striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my light.

The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match.

Necessarily my memory is vague.

Great shapes, like big machines, rose out of the dimness and cast grotesque black shadows in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare.

The place by the by was very stuffy and depressive, and the faint heldice of freshly shed blood was in the air.

Some way down the central Vista was a little table of white metal laid with what seemed a meal.

The more locks, at any rate, were carnivorous.

Even at the time.

I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to furnish the red joint I saw it was all very indistinct.

The heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again.

Then the match burnt down and stung my fingers and fell a wiggling red spot in the blackness.

I have thought since how particularly illequipped I was for such an experience.

When I had started with the time machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves and all their appliances.

I had come without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke.

At times I missed tobacco frightfully even without enough matches.

If only I had thought of a Kodak, I could have flashed that glimpse of the underworld in a second and examined it at leisure.

But as it was, I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that nature had endowed me with hands, feet, and teeth.

These and four safety matches that still remained to me.

I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run low.

It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishing the overworlders to whom fire was a novelty.

Now, as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark a hand touched mine.

Lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar, unpleasant odor.

I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me.

I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing.

The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.

The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing, came home to me very vividly in the darkness.

I shouted at them as loudly as I could.

They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again.

They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other.

I shivered violently and shouted again, rather discordantly this time.

They were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me.

I will confess I was horribly frightened.

I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare.

I did so, and eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket.

I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel, but I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out, and in the darkness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves and pattering like the rain as they hurried after me.

In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.

I struck another light and waved it in their dazzled faces.

You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked.

Those pale chinless faces and great lidless pinkish Gray eyes as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.

But I did not stay to look.

I promise you.

I retreated again and when my second match had ended, I struck my third.

It had almost burnt through when I reached the opening into the shaft, I lay down on the edge for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.

Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks and as I did so, my feet were grasped from behind And I was violently tugged backwards.

I lit my last match and it incontinently went out.

But I had my hand on the climbing bars now and kicking violently.

I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft while they stayed peering and blinking up at me.

All but one little wrench who followed me for some way.

And when I secured my boot as a trophy, that climb seemed intermittent to me.

With the last 20 or 30ft of it, a deadly nausea came upon me.

I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold.

The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness several times.

My head swam and I felt all the sensations of falling.

At last, however, I got over the well mouth somehow and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.

I fell upon my face.

Even the soil smelled sweet and clean.

Then I remembered Wiener kissing my hands and ears and the voices of others among the loi.

Then for a time, I was insensible.

Thank you for joining Bite At A Time Books today while we read A Bite of One of your favorite classics.

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We are now part of the Bite At A Time Books Productions Network.

If you ever wondered what inspired your favorite classic Novelist to write their stories, what was happening in their lives or the world At The time, check out Bite At A Time Books Behind the Story Tuesdays.

Wherever you listen to podcasts again.