Drood, Page 44

  Dickens scowled at me. “We have admirals in the Royal Navy in their eighties, Wilkie. No, it’s not Field’s age that is laughable, nor even his ambition. Merely his means of reaching his goal.”

  “But,” I said quickly, realising that I had offended Dickens with talk of old age, “you yourself told me that Inspector Field was out of favour with all of the Metropolitan Police for irregularities he committed as a private enquiries man. They denied him his pension, for heaven’s sake! Certainly he could never reclaim his former position in the newer, larger, more modern London police force!”

  “He might, my dear Wilkie. He might… if he were to bring to justice the purported mastermind of a nest of murderers whose crimes ran to the hundreds of victims. Field learned years ago how to use the city newspapers and he would certainly do so now.”

  “So you agree with the inspector, Charles, that Drood is a murderer and a mastermind of other murderers?”

  “I agree with nothing that Inspector Field has said or imagined,” said Dickens. “I am trying to explain something to you. Tell me, my dear Wilkie, do you enjoy Plato’s Socrates?”

  I blinked through my growing headache at this dizzying change of subject. Charles Dickens was, as everyone knew, a self-educated man and somewhat sensitive about the fact, despite his rigorous attempts at self-education throughout his lifetime. I had never heard him bring up Plato or Socrates before and could not guess at any connection these philosophers might have to the topics of our conversation.

  “Plato?” I said. “Socrates? Yes, of course. Marvellous.”

  “Then you will forgive me if I put to you a few Socratic questions in our mutual quest of discovering and bringing out an innate—but perhaps not obvious—truth.”

  I nodded.

  “Assuming that the man we are referring to as Drood is more than an hallucination or cynically created illusion,” Dickens said softly, setting down his brandy glass and steepling his fingers, “have you wondered, my dear Wilkie, why I have continued seeing him over the past two years?”

  “I had no idea you had continued seeing him, Charles,” I lied.

  Dickens smiled sceptically at me from behind the pyramid of his long fingers.

  “But if you had continued his acquaintance… for argument’s sake,” I went on, “then I would assume your earlier explanation to me would be the reason.”

  “Learning the finer and higher arts of mesmerism,” said Dickens.

  “Yes,” I said. “And details of his ancient religion.”

  “All worthy goals,” said Dickens, “but do you think such minor curiosity would justify the very real risks one would have to take? The hounding by Inspector Field’s zealous agents? The repeated descents into Undertown? The mere proximity to a madman who—according to our esteemed inspector—has killed hundreds?”

  I had no idea what Dickens was asking me now. After a laudanum-fuzzy moment of what I hoped was taken as deep contemplation, I said, “No… no, I think not.”

  “Of course not,” said Dickens. He was using his schoolmaster voice. “Have you ever considered, my dear Wilkie, that I might be defending London from the monster’s wrath?”

  “Defending?” I repeated. The rheumatical gout had now encircled my head and enveloped both eyes and my cranium with pain.

  “You have read my books, my friend. You have heard me speak. You have visited the homes for the poor and for the lost women that I have helped start and have funded. You know my views on social issues.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course, Charles.”

  “Then do you have any idea of the anger seething and fomenting there in Undertown?”

  “Anger?” I said. “Drood’s anger, you mean?”

  “I mean the anger of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men, women, and children driven into those subterranean vaults, sewers, basements, and slums,” said Dickens, his voice rising to the point that Caroline might have heard it from downstairs. “I mean, my dear Wilkie, the anger of those thousands in London who cannot eke out a daily living even in the worst slums of the surface and who are driven down into the darkness and stench like rats. Like rats, Wilkie.”

  “Rats,” I repeated. “What are we speaking of, Charles? Surely you are not saying that this… Drood… represents the tens of thousands of London’s poorest residents. I mean, you yourself said that the man is grotesque… a foreigner.”

  Dickens chuckled and tapped the ends of his fingers together in a manic rhythm. “If Drood is an illusion, my dear Wilkie, he is an illusion in the form of upper London’s worst nightmare. He is a darkness in the heart of the soul’s deepest darkness. He is the personified wrath of those who have lost the last meagre rays of hope in our modern city and our modern world.”

  I had to shake my head. “You have lost me, Charles.”

  “Let me begin again. It is growing late. Why would such a creature as Drood seek me out and select me in the fields of death that were the Staplehurst accident, Wilkie?”

  “I wasn’t aware that he had sought you out, Charles.”

  Dickens flicked his right hand in a quick gesture of impatience and raised his cigar again. Through the blue smoke he said, “Of course he sought me out. You need to listen, my dear Wilkie. As both novelist and dear friend, it is the one area in which your sensitivities should seek improvement. You are the only person on earth to whom I have revealed the existence of Drood and my relationship to him. You must listen if you are to understand the dire importance of this… drama. This drama that Inspector Field insists on treating as if it were a game and a farce.”

  “I am listening,” I said coolly. I did not care for Dickens—a mere author whom I had outsold in numbers of recent books published and a man who had never received an advanced payment from a publisher on the level I had—when he chose to criticise me.

  “Why would Drood choose me? Of all the survivors at Staplehurst, why would the awakened-from-his-coffin Drood choose me?”

  I thought about this while I covertly massaged my throbbing right temple. “I am not sure, Charles. You were certainly the most famous man on the train that day.” With your mistress and her mother, I silently appended.

  Dickens shook his head. “It is not my fame that drew Drood to me and which now holds him in check,” he said softly between long exhalations of blue smoke. “It is my ability.”

  “Your ability.”

  “As a writer,” Dickens said almost impatiently. “As… you will pardon my immodesty due to the centrality of this point… as perhaps the most important writer in England.”

  “I see,” I lied. Then, perhaps, I did finally see. At least a glimmer. “Drood wants you to write something for him.”

  Dickens laughed. It was not a cynical or derisive laugh—I might have taken my headache and gone off to bed at that moment if it had been—but rather Dickens’s usual boyish, deep, head-back, sincere laugh.

  “I would say, yes,” he said, tapping ashes into the onyx ashtray at his chairside. “He insists that I write something. Nothing less than his biography, my dear Wilkie. Certainly an effort that would require five long volumes, perhaps more.”

  “His biography,” I said. If Dickens was weary of my repeating his statements, he was not as weary of it as I was. The evening that had started with a fine meal and laughter had now risen—or descended—into the realm of pure insanity.

  “It is the only reason that Drood has not unleashed the full extent of his wrath upon me, upon my family, upon the accursed Inspector Field, upon you, upon all of London,” Dickens said wearily.

  “Upon me?” I said.

  It was as if Dickens had not heard me. “Almost every week I descend into the Hades that is London Undertown,” he went on. “Every week I take out my notebook and I listen. And I write notes. And I nod. And I ask questions. Anything to draw out the interviews. Anything to postpone the inevitable.”

  “The inevitable?”

  “The inevitable explosion of this monster’s anger when he discov
ers that, in truth, I have written not a word of his execrable ‘biography,’ my dear Wilkie. But I have heard much… too much. I have heard of ancient rituals disgusting beyond all abilities of a sane Englishman to comprehend them. I have heard of mesmeric magnetic influence turned to outrageous and unspeakable ends—seduction, rape, sedition, the use of others in revenge, terror, murder. I have heard… too much.”

  “You must cease going down into that world,” I said, thinking of King Lazaree’s quiet and pleasurable alcove deep beneath St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.

  Dickens laughed again, but more raggedly this time. “If I do not go to him, he comes to me, Wilkie. On my reading tour. At railway stations. In hotels in Scotland and Wales and Birmingham. At Gad’s Hill Place. In the night. It was Drood’s face floating outside my first-storey window that night Dickenson went sleepwalking.”

  “And did Drood kill young Dickenson?” I asked, seeing my chance to pounce.

  Dickens blinked at me several times before he said slowly, wearily, perhaps guiltily, “I have no idea, Wilkie. The boy asked me to be his guardian for a few weeks, in name only. He had his inheritance paid through my bank and my cheque. Then he… went away. That is all I can tell you.”

  “But certainly,” I said, pressing my advantage, “Drood would have liked to have the boy’s money as well as a biography written. Could he have used his evil mesmeric influence to have someone kill the lad and steal his gold to be used in his—Drood’s—service?”

  Dickens looked at me so steadily and so coldly that I flinched back in my chair.

  “Yes,” said the Inimitable. “With Drood, anything is possible. The monster could have had me kill young Dickenson and bring his money to the Undertown temple and I would not remember it. I would have thought it a dream, a half-memory of some stage drama from long ago.”

  My heart pounded and my breathing all but stopped at this confession.

  “Or,” continued Dickens, “he could have had you do that deed, my dear Wilkie. Drood knows of you, of course. Drood has plans for you.”

  I exhaled, coughed, and tried to slow the pounding of my heart. “Nonsense,” I said. “I have never met the man, if man he is.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Dickens. The wicked smile was there again beneath his whiskers.

  I thought of Dickens’s earlier, inexplicable mention of my experience in Birmingham. This was the right time to ask him about it—the only time, perhaps—but the pounding of my headache was now as rapid and insistent as the pounding of my heart there in that small, overheated room. Instead, I said, “You say he comes to your home, Charles.”

  “Yesss.” Dickens sighed back into his chair. He stubbed out the short remnant of his cigar. “It has worn on me, Wilkie. The secrecy. The constant sense of terror. The dissembling and playacting in his presence. The trips into London and the effect of the descents into Undertown and its horrors. The constant sense of threat to Georgina, Katey, the children… Ellen. It has worn on me.”

  “Of course,” I murmured. I thought of Inspector Field and the others out in the rain. Waiting.

  “So you see, I must go to America,” whispered Dickens. “Drood will not follow me there. He cannot follow me there.”

  “Why not?”

  Dickens sat bolt upright and stared at me with wide eyes and, for the first time in our long association, I saw pure terror on my friend’s countenance. “He cannot!” he cried.

  “No, of course not,” I said hurriedly.

  “But while I am gone,” whispered Dickens, “you will be in great danger, my friend.”

  “Danger? Me? Why on earth should I be in danger, Charles? I have nothing to do with Drood or this dreadful game you and Field are playing with him.”

  Dickens shook his head but for a moment did not bother to speak or even look at me. Finally he said, “You shall be in great danger, Wilkie. Drood has already passed the black wings of his control over you at least once—almost certainly more than once. He knows where you live. He knows your weaknesses. And—most terribly for you—he knows that you are a writer and that you are now widely read both here in England and in America.”

  “What does that have to do with anything…” I began. When I stopped in mid-sentence, Dickens nodded again.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I am his biographer of choice, but he knows he can find another should I die… or should he discover the extent of my desperate game and decide to dispose of me. I shall not depart for America until November at the earliest—I have much to do and much convincing of Drood that I go to the United States only to prepare the way for the publication of his biography—and you and I shall talk again many times and of many things before I sail, Wilkie, but promise me now that you will be very careful.”

  “I promise,” I said. I knew at that moment that my friend Charles Dickens had gone mad.

  We spoke of other things, but I ached abominably and Dickens was obviously exhausted. It was not even eleven PM when we said our goodnights and Dickens went off to his guest room and I to my bedroom.

  I let the girl douse all the lamps in the house.

  CAROLINE WAS WAITING in my bed, sleeping, but I woke her and sent her downstairs to her own room. This was no night for her to be up on the first floor where Dickens and I slept.

  I got into my night gown and drank down three tall glasses of laudanum. The usually competent medicine did little to allay either my pain or my anxiety this June night. After lying in bed in the dark for an undetermined period, feeling my heart pound in my chest like the pendulum of some thudding but silent clock, I rose and went to the window.

  The rain had stopped, but a summer fog had risen and was now creeping through the hedges and shrubs in the small park across the way. The moon had not worked free of the low overcast, but the clouds hurrying above the rooftops were limned with an almost liquid grey-white light. Puddles threw back a multitude of yellowed reflections from the corner streetlamp. There was no one out this night, not even the boy who had replaced Gooseberry. I tried to imagine where Field and his many operatives had positioned themselves. In that empty house near the corner? In the darkness of the alley to the east?

  A real clock—the one in our downstairs hallway—slowly struck twelve.

  I went back to bed, closed my eyes, and tried to slow my mind.

  From somewhere far below, borne up by the medium of the hollow walls and occasional grates, there came a subtle rustling. A scuttling. A door opening? No, I thought not. A window, then? No. A cellar-dark slow shifting of bricks, perhaps, or some slow but minded movement amidst heaps of black coal. But definitely a scuttling.

  I sat up in bed and clutched my bedclothes to my chest.

  My accursed novelist’s imagination, perhaps aided by the laudanum, offered up clear visions of a rat the size of a small dog pressing its way through the renewed hole in the coal cellar wall. But this oversized rat had a human face. The face of Drood.

  A door creaked. Floor boards moaned ever so softly.

  Dickens sneaking out into the night, as Inspector Field had so confidently predicted?

  I slipped out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to one knee, opening the lowest drawer of my dresser with exaggerated care so as not to make a sound. The huge pistol given to me by Detective Hatchery was there where I had left it under my folded summer linens. It felt absurdly heavy and bulky in my hand as I tip-toed to my door and opened it with a wince-producing protest of hinges.

  The hallway was empty, but now I could hear voices. Whispering voices. Men’s voices, I thought but could not be certain.

  Glad that I had left my stockings on, I moved out into the hall and stood at the head of the dark staircase. Other than the pendulum thud and inner ticking of the hallway clock downstairs, there was no noise coming up from the ground floor.

  The whispers rose again. They came from just down the hall.

  Could Caroline—angry at me for sending her away—have come up to talk to Dickens? Or Carrie, who had always considered
Charles Dickens her favourite visitor to our house?

  No, the whispers were not coming from Dickens’s guest room. I saw a vertical slice of soft light coming through the partially opened study door and moved carefully down the hall, the heavy pistol pointing towards the floor.

  There was a single lighted candle in there. By pressing my face against the door, I could make out the three chairs and three figures sitting near the cold fireplace. Dickens in a red Moroccan robe was sitting in the wing chair he had occupied earlier. He leaned forward above the only candle, his expression lost to shadows, but his hands busy working the air as he whispered urgently. Listening from the desk chair was the Other Wilkie. His beard was slightly shorter than mine, as if he had trimmed it recently, and he wore my spare set of spectacles. The two circles of glass reflected the candle and made his eyes look demonic.

  In the tall chair I had occupied an hour earlier, the back of the chair now towards me, I could make out only a black arm, long pale fingers, and a hint of bare scalp rising above the dark leather. I knew who it was, of course, even before the form leaned forward into the candlelight to hiss-whisper some response to Dickens.

  Drood was in my house. I remembered the image of the rat in the coal cellar, then saw instead a curling tendril of smoke or fog creeping between the bricks down there, coalescing into this simulacrum of a man.

  I felt very dizzy. I leaned back against the doorjamb to steady myself, realising as I did so that I could open the door, stride in, kill Drood with two shots, and then turn the pistol on the Other Wilkie. And then, perhaps… upon Dickens himself.

  No… I could shoot Drood, but could I kill him? And as for shooting the Other Wilkie, would that not be tantamount to shooting myself? Would the Metropolitan Police come at Caroline’s hysterical behest in the grey light of morning to find three dead bodies on the floor of Wilkie Collins’s study, one of them being the cold corpse of Wilkie Collins?

  I leaned forward to hear what they were saying, but the whispering stopped. First Dickens raised his head to look at me. Then the Other Wilkie, his round face bunched up like a rabbit’s above his beard and below that endless forehead, turned his pale face to stare at me. Then Drood turned… slowly, terribly. His lidless eyes gleamed as red as embers from Hell.