Drood

  As we approached the sweating walls and black iron fence of the place, I wondered who would pay even a penny to be buried here. There had once been large trees within the churchyard, but these were only calcified skeletons now, dead for generations, with their amputated arms rising towards the black buildings leaning over the site on every side. The stench from within this walled and fenced space was so terrible that I reached for my handkerchief before remembering that Dickens had taken it earlier in the night to drape across the dead babies. I half expected to see an actual green cloud of miasma hanging over this place and—in truth—there was a sick glow to the mist that had arrived to serve as harbinger for the next warm-blanket of rain.

  Dickens reached the high, closed, black iron gate first and tried to open it, but it was locked with a massive padlock.

  Thank God, I thought.

  But Detective Hatchery reached under his coat and brought a heavy ring of keys from his impossibly burdened belt. He had Dickens hold the bullseye lantern while he fumbled through the clanking keys before finding the one he wanted. It fit in the lock. The huge gate, all black arches and scallops, opened slowly with such a creaking that it seemed as if it had been decades since anyone had paid to open it to rid themselves of a loved one’s corpse.

  We walked between the dark headstones and sagging sepulchres, passing under the dead trees and down uneven paving stones on narrow lanes between ancient vaults. I could tell by the spring in his step and the clack of his cane that Dickens was enjoying every second of this. I was concentrating on not retching from the stink and not stepping, in the darkness, on anything soft and yielding.

  “I know this place,” Dickens said suddenly. His voice in the darkness was loud enough to make me leap a small distance into the air. “I have seen it in daylight. I have written about it in The Uncommercial Traveller. But I was not within its gates before tonight. I called it the ‘City of the Absent’ and this particular place ‘Saint Ghastly Grim’s.’ ”

  “Aye, sir,” said Hatchery. “It once were exactly that.”

  “I did not see the skulls and crossbones decorating the iron spikes on the gate,” said Dickens, his voice still far too loud for the circumstances.

  “They are still there, Mr Dickens,” attested Hatchery. “I did not feel it politick to shine my light up on ’em. ’Ere we are, sirs. Our entrance to Undertown.”

  We had stopped before a narrow, sealed crypt.

  “Is this a joke?” I asked. My voice may have sounded a bit brittle to my companions. I was overdue for an application of my medicinal laudanum; the gout was causing many parts of my body to hurt and I could feel a terrible headache tightening like a metal band around my temples.

  “No, Mr Collins, no joke, sir,” said Hatchery. He was fumbling at his key ring again and now he set yet another massive key into an ancient lock on the metal door of the crypt. The tall door groaned inward when he leaned his weight against it. The detective shone the light inside and waited for Dickens or me to enter.

  “This is absurd,” I said. “There can be no Undertown or underground anything here. Our boots have been squelching in the reeking muck of the Thames for hours. The water table here must be shallower than these graves around us.”

  “That does not prove to be the case, sir,” whispered Hatchery.

  “This part of the East End lies over rock, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Ten feet down and it is solid rock. Certainly you know the geology of your city! That is why they chose to build them here.”

  “Build what?” I asked, attempting, without total success, to keep the asperity I felt out of my voice.

  “The catacombs,” said Dickens. “The ancient underground spaces of a monastery crypt. The Roman loculi before that, even deeper here, almost certainly beneath the Christian catacombs.”

  I did not choose to ask what “loculi” meant. I had the sense that I would learn its dark etymology soon enough.

  Dickens entered the crypt, then did the detective, then I. The cone of light from the bullseye moved over and around the tiny interior. The pedestal bier in the centre of the small mausoleum, just long enough to hold a coffin or sarcophagus or shrouded body, was empty. There were no obvious niches or other places for bodies.

  “It’s empty,” I said. “Someone’s pilfered the corpse.”

  Hatchery laughed softly. “Bless me, sir. There was never a corpse ’ere. This partic’lar house o’ the dead is—’as always been—just an entrance to the land o’ the dead. If you’ll move aside, Mr Collins.”

  I stepped back against the sweating stone wall at the rear of the crypt as the detective bent low, set his shoulder to the cracked marble bier, and shoved. The sound of stone scraping across solid stone was extremely unpleasant.

  “I noticed the arcs gouged into the old pavers as we came in,” Dickens commented to the still-labouring detective. “As clear a clue as the grooves the post of a sagging gate makes in the mud.”

  “Aye, sir,” panted Hatchery, still shoving. “But usually leaves and dirt an’ such in ’ere hide that, even in direct lantern light. You’re very observant, Mr Dickens.”

  “Yes,” said Dickens.

  I was sure that the screech and moans of the slowly shifting bier were loud enough to bring mobs of curious ruffians into the graveyard. Then I remembered that Hatchery had locked the cemetery gate behind us. We were locked in. And since the door of the crypt itself had taken much of Hatchery’s considerable bulk and strength to open—he had shouldered it shut after we entered—we might as well have been locked into this tomb as well. As steep stone stairs became visible in the black wedge beneath the floor now growing wider as the bier was moved, the sense of that weight being set back in place, essentially entombing us below the stone beneath the locked tomb within the locked cemetery, I felt cold shivers running down my back despite the thick heat of the night.

  Finally Hatchery stopped pushing and stood upright. The triangular wedge of the dark opening was not large, little more than two feet wide, but when Dickens shone the bullseye down into it, I could see very steep stone steps descending.

  Dickens’s face was lighted from below by the lantern as he looked at the detective and said, “You’re sure you will not come down with us, Hatchery?”

  “No, sir, thank you, sir,” said the big man. “I have agreed not to.”

  “Agreed not to?” Dickens’s tone was one of mild curiosity.

  “Aye, sir. An old arrangement that many of us former and current constables and inspectors ’ave with those in Undertown. We don’t go down to complicate their lives, sir; they don’t come up to complicate ours.”

  “Rather like the arrangement most of the living attempt to make with the dead,” Dickens said softly, his gaze returning to the dark hole and steep steps.

  “Exactly, sir,” said the detective. “I knew you would understand.”

  “Well, we should be going down,” said Dickens. “Will you be able to find your way home without a lantern, Detective? We’ll obviously need this one below.”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said Hatchery. “I ’ave another one on my belt should I need it. But I won’t be going ’ome yet. I’ll wait here until dawn. If you’re not back by then, I’ll go straight to Leman Street Station and report two gentlemen missing.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Detective Hatchery,” said Dickens. He smiled. “But as you said, the constables and inspectors won’t go below to look for us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sir,” said the detective, shrugging. “What with you both being famous authors an’ fine gentlemen, perhaps they’d see fit to make an exception in this case. I just ’ope we don’t have to find out, sir.”

  Dickens laughed at this. “Come along, Wilkie.”

  “Mr Dickens,” said Hatchery, reaching under his coat and coming out with a huge pistol of the revolver variety. “Perhaps you should take this with you, sir. Even if just for the rats.”

  “Oh, posh,” said Dickens, waving the weapon away with his white gl
oves. (You need to remember, Dear Reader, that in our era—I have no idea of the custom in yours—none of our police carried firearms of any sort. Nor did our criminals, for the most part. Hatchery’s talk of “agreements” between the underworld and law enforcement was true in many unspoken ways.)

  “I will take it,” I said. “And gladly. I hate rats.”

  The pistol was as heavy as it looked and it filled my right jacket pocket. I felt strangely off balance with the massive thing pulling me down on one side. I told myself that I might soon feel far more off balance should I need such a weapon and not have one.

  “Do you know how to fire a pistol, sir?” asked Hatchery.

  I shrugged. “I assume that the general idea is to aim the end with the opening at one’s target and to pull the trigger,” I said. I was hurting all over now. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jug of laudanum on my locked kitchen’s cupboard shelf.

  “Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His bowler was pulled down so tight that it seemed to be compressing his skull. “That is the general idea. You may have noticed it ’as two barrels, Mr Collins. An upper one and a larger lower one.”

  I had not taken notice of this. I tried to pull the absurdly heavy weapon from my pocket, but it snagged on the lining, ripping the cloth of my expensive jacket. Cursing softly, I managed to extricate it and study it in the lamplight.

  “Ignore the lower one, sir,” said Hatchery. “It’s made for grapeshot. A form of shotgun. Nasty thing. You won’t be needin’ that, I ’ope, sir, and I have no ammunition for it anyway. My brother, who was in the army until recently, bought the gun from an American chap, although it was made in France… but not to worry, there are good English proof marks on it, sir, from our very own Birmingham Proof ’ouse. The cylinder for the smoothbore barrel is loaded, sir. There are nine shots in the cylinder.”

  “Nine?” I said, putting the huge, heavy thing back in my pocket while taking care not to rip the lining any worse than it had been. “Very good.”

  “Would you like more bullets, sir? I ’ave a bag of them an’ caps in my pocket. I’d ’ave to show you ’ow to use the ramrod, sir. But it’s fairly simple, as such skills go.”

  I almost laughed then, thinking of all the things that might be in Detective Hatchery’s pockets and on his belt. “No, thank you,” I said. “Nine balls should suffice.”

  “They’re forty-two calibre, sir,” continued the detective. “Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

  I shuddered at that.

  “We’ll see you before dawn, Hatchery,” said Dickens, tucking his watch into his waistcoat and leading the way down the very steep steps, the bullseye lantern held low. “Come, Wilkie. We have less than four hours before the sun rises.”

  WILKIE, DO YOU know Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “No,” I said. We were ten steps down with no end of the steep shaft in sight. The “steps” were more like pyramid blocks, at least three feet from one level down to the next, each step and slab slick with trickles of underground moisture, the shadows thrown by the small lantern ink black and deceptive, and if either of us stumbled here, it would certainly result in broken bones and most probably a broken neck. I half-stepped, half-jumped to the next step down, panting as I tried to keep up with the tiny cone of bobbing light emanating from Dickens’s hand. “A friend of yours, Charles?” I asked. “An expert on crypts and catacombs, perhaps?”

  Dickens laughed. The echo was wonderfully awful in the steep stone shaft. I hoped with all my heart that he would not do it again.

  “A definitive ‘no’ to your first question, my dear Wilkie,” he said. “Quite possibly a ‘yes’ to the second surmise.”

  Dickens had stopped on a level area and now he turned the lantern to illuminate steep walls, a low ceiling ahead, and a corridor stretching off into the dark. Black rectangles on both sides of the corridor suggested open doorways. I jumped down onto the last step to join him. He turned to me and rested both hands and the bullseye on the brass beak of his stick.

  “I met Poe in Baltimore during the last weeks of my 1842 tour in America,” he said. “I must say that the fellow forced first his book, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, on me, and then his attention. Freely conversing as if we were equals or old friends, Poe kept us talking—or kept himself talking, I should say—for hours, about literature and his work and my work and again about his work. I never did get around to reading his stories while I was in America, but Catherine did. She was quite enthralled. Evidently this Poe loved to write about crypts, corpses, premature burials, and hearts ripped out of living breasts.”

  I kept peering into the darkness beyond the tiny circle of light from the bullseye. Straining so hard—my eyes are not strong—made the shadows everywhere coalesce and shift, like tall forms stirring. My headache grew worse.

  “I presume that all this has some relevance, Dickens,” I said sharply.

  “Only in the sense that I am receiving the distinct impression that Mr Edgar Allan Poe would be enjoying this outing more than you are at the moment, my dear Wilkie.”

  “Well then,” I said a bit sharply, “I wish your friend Poe were here now.”

  Dickens laughed again, the echo not so intense this time but even more unnerving as it bounced off unseen walls and niches in the dark. “Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is. I remember reading that Mr Poe died only six or seven years after I met him, quite young and under odd and perhaps unseemly circumstances. From our brief but intense acquaintanceship, this place seems to be exactly the kind of stone barrow his ghost would enjoy haunting.”

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  As if in answer, Dickens raised the lantern and led the way down the corridor. The doorways I had sensed on both sides were actually open niches. Dickens aimed the bullseye into the first niche on our right as we reached it.

  About six feet into this space, an elaborate iron grille rose from the stone floor to stone ceiling; the grille was massive, its cross-members solid, but had openings in the shape of florettes. The blood-red-and-orange iron looked so ancient and rusted that I felt that it would crumble away if I stepped in and struck it with my fist. But I had no intention of stepping into the niche. Behind the iron grille were rows and columns of stacked coffins so solid that I guessed them to be lined with lead. I counted about a dozen in the shifting light and shadows.

  “Can you read that plate, Wilkie?”

  Dickens was referring to a white stone plaque set high on the iron grille. Another plaque had fallen into the accumulated dirt and heaps of rust on the floor of the niche and a third was lying on its side at the base of the grille.

  I adjusted my glasses and squinted. The stone was streaked and stained white by the rising damp and was pockmarked with dark red from the rusted grille beneath and around it. The letters appeared to be—

  E. I.

  THE CAYA[obscured]OMB

  OF

  [missing]HE REV[obscured]D

  L.L. B [stain obscured]

  I read this to Dickens, who had stepped inside for a closer look, and then I said, “Not Roman, then.”

  “These catacombs?” said Dickens in his distracted manner as he crouched to try to read the plate that had fallen into the dirt like a tumbled headstone. “No. They were built in the essential Roman manner—deep corridors lined on both sides with burial niches—but original Roman catacombs would be labyrinthine in layout. These were Christian, but very old, Wilkie, very old, and therefore designed, as some of our city is above, on the grid. In this case, it is laid out as a central cross surrounded by these burial niches and smaller passages. You notice the arched brick rather than stone above me here…” He aimed the lantern higher.

  I did notice the arched brick vault then. And for the first time I realised that the reddish “dirt” on the floor, several inches deep in places, was detritus from the crumbling bricks and mortar falling from that vaulted ceiling.

  “This was a Christ
ian catacombs,” repeated Dickens. “Installed directly under the chapel above.”

  “But there is no chapel above,” I whispered.

  “Not for many years,” agreed Dickens, rising and trying to flick the dirt from his gloves while still holding the lantern and his stick. “But there was long ago. A monastery chapel would be my guess. Part of the Monastery of the Church of Saint Ghastly Grim’s.”

  “You made that up,” I said accusingly.

  Dickens looked at me oddly. “Of course I did,” he said. “Shall we move on?”

  I hadn’t liked standing in the dark corridor with no light behind me, so I was grateful when Dickens emerged from the niche and prepared to press on. But first he shone the light back into the vault again, passing its beam over the rows and columns of coffins stacked behind the rusting grille.

  “I neglected to mention,” he said softly, “that as with their Roman originals, these burial niches are called loculi. Each loculus is reserved for a family or perhaps for members of a specific order of monks over many decades. The Romans tended to excavate their catacombs logically, all at one time, but these later Christian tunnels were dug out over a much longer period of time and tend to stray and wander. Do you know Garraway’s Coffee House?”

  “On Exchange Alley?” I said. “Cornhill? But of course. I’ve had coffee there many a time while waiting for a sale to begin in the adjoining auction house.”

  “There is a similar old monastery crypt under Garraway’s,” said Dickens, whispering now as if he were afraid some spectral form had joined us. “I have been in it, down there among the port wine. I have often wondered if Garraway’s is taking pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their lives by giving them that cool crypt down below to hold the rest of those gone missing from what fools call ‘real life’ up there on the surface.” He glanced at me. “Of course, my dear Wilkie, the catacombs of Paris—and you have been there, I know, since I took you there—the catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of the truly missing souls of London if we were all forced to go below, out of the light, down into the mouldy dark where we belong when we forget how to live well among upright men.”