Drood, Page 55

  And the scarab would be dead—or at least would be left to eat and burrow in peace, since I would no longer be feeling this pain.

  I began shaking harder, weeping as I shook, but I did not remove the obscene pistol’s barrel from my mouth. The reflex to gag was very strong, and if I had not vomited half a dozen times already that afternoon and evening, I am sure I would have done so then. As it was, my stomach cramped, my throat spasmed, but I kept the barrel in place and angling upward in my mouth, feeling the steel circle touching the soft palate of which Macready had spoken.

  I set my thumb on the trigger and began applying pressure. My chattering teeth closed on the long barrel. I realised that I had been holding my breath but could do so no longer and gasped in a final breath.

  I could breathe through the pistol barrel.

  How many people knew this was possible? I could taste the sour-sweet bite of gun oil—applied long ago by the dead Detective Hatchery, no doubt, but still strong to the tongue—and the cold, vaguely coppery taste of the steel itself. But I could breathe through the pistol even as I bit down on the barrel on all sides, and as I did so, taking long racking breaths, I could hear the whistle of my inhalations and exhalations around the cavitied cylinder and out the echoing chamber near where the hammer was pulled back and cocked.

  How many men had ended their lives with this as the last, irrelevant thought passing through their brains so soon to be dead, scattered, cooling, and thoughtless?

  The novelist-sensed irony of this was more painful than the scarab-pain and I began laughing. It was a strange, muffled, and oddly obscene sort of laughter, distorted as it was around a pistol barrel. After a moment I pulled the pistol from my mouth—the otherwise dull metal glistening in the candlelight due to the film of my saliva along its length—and, still idly holding the cocked weapon, I lifted the candle and staggered out of my room.

  Downstairs, the doors to my new study were closed but not locked. I went in and pulled the broad double doors closed behind me.

  The Other Wilkie sat sideways behind my desk, reading a book in the near total darkness. He looked up at me as I came in and adjusted spectacles that reflected my candle, hiding his eyes behind two vertical, flickering columns of yellow flame. I noticed that his beard was slightly shorter and slightly less grey than mine.

  “You require my help,” said the Other Wilkie.

  Never, not in all the years since my first, vague childhood sense that my Other Self existed, had the Other Wilkie ever spoken to me or uttered any sound. I was surprised at how feminine his voice sounded.

  “Yes,” I whispered hoarsely. “I require your help.”

  I realised stupidly that the cocked and loaded pistol was still in my right hand. I could raise it now and fire five—six?—bullets into that too-solid-looking flesh sitting presumptuously behind my desk.

  When the Other Wilkie dies, will I die? When I die, will the Other Wilkie die? The questions made me giggle, but the giggle came out as a sort of sob.

  “Shall we start tonight?” asked the Other Wilkie, laying the book down open on my blotter. He removed his spectacles to wipe them on a kerchief (which he kept in the same jacket pocket in which I kept mine), and I noticed that even without the spectacle-glass in front of them to reflect, his eyes were still two flickering vertical cat’s irises of flame.

  “No, not tonight,” I said.

  “But soon?” He set the small spectacles back on his face.

  “Yes,” I said. “Soon.”

  “I will come to you,” said the Other Wilkie.

  I had just enough energy left to nod. Still in bare feet, still carrying the cocked pistol, I left my study, closed the heavy doors behind me, padded up the staircase, went into my room, collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep atop the tumbled bedcovers with the gun still in my hand and my finger still taut on its curved, cold trigger.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  For years I had explained to Caroline that I was not free to marry her because my high-strung mother, who had always suffered from excitability and who was now dying from it (according to Dr Beard), simply would never understand—or agree to—such an arrangement with a formerly married woman who, it would be discovered after marriage, had shared my home for years. I explained that I had to spare the delicate old woman (who, in truth, was not that delicate at all except for her excitability) such a shock. Caroline never fully accepted the argument, but after some years she had ceased to challenge it.

  Now Mother was dying.

  On Thursday, 30 January—a week and a day after I’d awakened in my bed after the Undertown burnings and Barris’s attack on me—Caroline helped dress me, and Charley all but carried me to a carriage that took us to the railway station. I had sedated the scarab into relative calm by doubling my usual high dosage of laudanum, sometimes drinking straight from a large decanter.

  My plan was to continue this high dosage and to do my writing at Mother’s cottage until she died. After that milestone was reached and passed, I would work out a way to deal with Caroline, the scarab in my brain, and my other problems.

  TRAVELLING BY RAIL to Tunbridge Wells and Southborough, I was so sick and shaky that poor Charley with his aching stomach had to put his arm around me and sit sideways on the outside seat so as to shield me somewhat from public view. I tried to stifle my moans, but I am sure that some were audible to the other passengers over the sounds of the locomotive, rails, and our hurtling passage through the cold air of the countryside. God alone knows what noises the scarab and I might have made if I had not taken the massive doses of laudanum.

  I had a sudden, terrible, total insight into what a hell it had been for Charles Dickens in the two and a half years since Staplehurst— especially on his exhausting and demanding reading tours, including the American one he was in the middle of at that moment—as he forced himself almost every day and night to ride the shaking, quaking, freezing or stifling, smoke-filled, rocking, coal-and-sweat-reeking carriages from city to city.

  Did Dickens have his own scarab? Does Dickens have a scarab now?

  This is all I could think about as the carriage rumbled on. If Dickens had a Drood-implanted scarab but somehow rid himself of it—by the public murder of an innocent man?—then Dickens was my only hope. If Dickens still carried the monster beetle but had learned to live and work and function with it, Dickens was still my best hope.

  The carriage rocked and I moaned. Heads turned. I buried my face in the wet-wool scent of Charley’s overcoat for solace and escape, then remembered doing precisely the same thing in the dark cloakroom of the boarding school when I was a boy.

  MY LETTER TO THE HARPER BROTHERS in America, I thought, opened with the perfect blend of masculine sadness and professionalism:

  “The dangerous illness of my mother has called me to her cottage in the country and I am working at my story as best I can, in intervals of attendance at her bedside.”

  I went on—equally professionally—about my revisions and shipping of the twelfth and thirteenth weekly parts of the novel and spent some time first praising and then correcting some of the illustration proofs they had sent me. (My first of a series of epistolary narrators, head-servant Gabriel Betteredge, had been depicted in the artist’s renderings as wearing livery. This would never do, as I explained to the Americans, since the head-servant in a fine house such as the one he served would wear plain black clothes and would look, with his white cravat and grey hair, like an old clergyman.) But I finished with what I considered to be a fine personal flourish—

  You may rely on my sparing no effort to study your convenience, after the readiness that you have shown to consider mine. I am very glad to hear that you like the story so far. There are some effects to come, which—unless I am altogether mistaken—have never been tried in fiction before.

  I confess that this last sentence sounded a trifle bold, perhaps even a tad presumptuous, but my plan for the mystery of the stolen Moonstone depended upon a long and accurate description of
a man walking and acting in the night totally under the influence of opium—performing complicated operations of which he would have absolutely no memory the next morning or any day thereafter until helped, by a more self-aware opium eater, to recover those memories—and I did believe that these scenes and themes were unprecedented in serious English fiction.

  As for working during intervals of attendance at my mother’s bedside, I did not feel it relevant or appropriate to explain that those intervals of attendance were very few and far apart, even though I was spending all my time in her cottage. The truth was, Mother could not abide my presence in her bedroom.

  Charley had warned me that in the almost two weeks of my absence, Mother had regained the ability to speak, but “speech” certainly is not the accurate descriptor of the screams, moans, inchoate shouts, and animal-like noises she made when anyone—but especially I—was in attendance.

  When Charley and I first stood in her presence that Thursday afternoon on the next-to-last day in January, I was shocked to the point of nausea by her appearance. Mother had seemed to lose all her living weight, so the figure in the bed, still distorted, was little more than mottled skin laid over bone and sinew. She reminded me—I could not help the association!—of a dead baby bird I had found in our garden once when I was very young. Like that young bird’s corpse (with its terrible featherless and folded wings), Mother’s dark and blotchy skin was translucent, showing the shape of things meant to be left unseen beneath.

  Her irises—just barely discernible between half-lowered lids—still fluttered like trapped sparrows.

  But she had indeed regained some vocal powers. When I stood next to her bed that afternoon she writhed, the folded bird wings flapped and vibrated, her twisted wrists fluttered her claw-hands back and forth wildly, and she screamed. It was, as I say, as much growl as scream—a calliope letting off terrible pressure—and the sound made what little hair I had left on the back of my head twist in terror.

  As Mother twisted and moaned, I began to twist and moan. It must have been terrible for Charley, who had to grab my arms to hold me upright. (Mrs Wells had hurried away at my arrival and continued to avoid me for the three days I spent at Mother’s. I had no way—and little reason—to explain to her what I had been doing the night she saw me raising Mother’s nightdress to check for beetle entry; one does not explain oneself to servants.)

  I could feel the scarab in my brain scuttling to and fro even as I writhed and moaned. I sensed—I knew—that an identical scarab in Mother was reacting to my (and my parasite’s) presence.

  There was nothing I could do but moan and collapse into Charley’s arms. He half-dragged, half-carried me to the sofa in the other room. Mother’s screams abated somewhat when we were out of her presence. My scarab quieted. I caught the shadow-glimpse out of the corner of my eye of Mrs Wells hurrying in as Charley tended to me near the fireplace in Mother’s main living area.

  And so it went for the three days I was with Mother—or that clawing, screaming, writhing, agony-filled thing which had been Mother—in her cottage at Southborough just beyond Tunbridge Wells.

  Charley was there the whole time, which was good, since Mrs Wells certainly would have given up her duties caring for Mother if he had not been there as a buffer. If my brother ever wondered why Mrs Wells and I took pains never to be alone together in a room for a single moment, he never asked. On Friday, Frank Beard came—announced again that there was no hope—and injected her with morphia so that she could sleep. Before he left that night, he injected me with morphia as well. Those may have been the only few hours of silence in which poor, hurting Charley found a few hours’ sleep while Mrs Wells watched over Mother.

  I TRIED TO work while I was at Mother’s. I had brought my japanned tin box of notes and research materials and sat as long as I could at Mother’s tiny desk near the front windows, but my pen hand seemed to have no power in it. I would have to shift the pen to my left hand just to dip the nib in ink. And even then no words would flow. For three days I stared at a manuscript page unblemished by fiction save for three or four lame lines which I eventually scratched out.

  After three such days, we all surrendered the pretence that my presence there was needed. Mother could not abide my proximity; every time I entered the room she would get worse, raving and writhing, and my pain would increase until I swooned or retreated.

  Charley packed my things and brought me back to London on the afternoon express. He had wired ahead and arranged for Frank Beard and my servant George to meet us at the station—it took the three of them to lift me into the rented carriage. Once carried through my own front door and upstairs to my room, I did not fail to see the look that Caroline G—— gave me: there was alarm in that look, and perhaps affection, but there was also embarrassment and disdain, perhaps even disdain bordering on disgust.

  Beard gave me an extra-large injection of morphia that evening and I fell into a deep sleep.

  Awake in peace!

  You yourself beautifully awaken in peace!

  Heru of Edfu wakes himself to life!

  The gods themselves raise to worship your spirit,

  You who are the venerable winged disc that rises in the sky!

  For you are the one, the ball of the sun that pierces the sky,

  That now floods the land rapidly in the east,

  Then sinks as the setting sun each day, passing the night in Inuet.

  Heru of Edfu

  Who wakes himself in peace,

  The great master god of the sky,

  The one whose plumage is multi-coloured,

  Rising on the horizon,

  The great winged disc that protects the sanctuaries!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  Ihy, who wakes himself in peace,

  The Great, son of Hwt-Hwr,

  Made noble by the Golden One of the Neteru!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  Awake in peace!

  Ihy, son of Hwt-Hrw, awake in peace!

  The beautiful lotus of the Golden One!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  Awake in peace Harsiesis, son of Osiris,

  The inheritor without reproach originating from the Powerful One,

  Produced by Ounennefer, the Victorious!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  Awake in peace Osiris!

  The Great God who takes his place in Iunet,

  The elder son of Geb!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  Awake in peace the Neteru and the Neteretu that are in Tarer,

  The Ennead around His Majesty!

  You yourself awake in peace!

  I AWOKE IN darkness and pain and confusion.

  Never before had I dreamt only in words—in chants of words—and in a language I could not understand but which my mind—or scarab—somehow had been able to translate. The reek of incense and oily smoke from the braziers lingered in my nostrils. The echo of long-dead voices in stone barrows rang in my ears. Burned into my vision, as though a retinal red circle from staring into the sun for too long, were the faces and bodies of the Neteru, the Gods of the Black Lands: Nuit, Lady of the Stars; Ast, or Isis, Queen of Heaven; Asar, or Osiris, God of our Fathers; Nebt-Het, or Nepthys, Goddess of the Death Which Is Not Eternal; Suti, or Set, the Adversary; Heru, or Horus, Lord of Things to Come; Anpu, or Anubis, Guide to the Dead; Djewhty, or Thoth, Keeper of the Book of Life.

  Filled with the pain of the scarab’s stirrings, I cried out in the darkness.

  No one came—it was sometime in the earliest morning hours, the door to the bedroom was closed, and Caroline and her daughter were downstairs behind their own closed doors—but as the echoes of my scream faded in my aching skull, I realised that there was someone or something else in the bedroom with me. I could hear its breathing. I could sense its presence, not as that slight, subliminal sensing of human warmth by which we sometimes become aware of the presence of other people near us in the dark, but by a perception of the th
ing’s coldness. It was as if something were pulling the last warmth from the air.

  I fumbled on the dresser, found matches, lighted the candle.

  The Other Wilkie was sitting there on the small, hard chair just beyond the foot of my bed. He was wearing a black frock-like coat that I had cast away some years earlier and had a small writing board on his lap with some blank paper on it. There was a pencil in his left hand. The nails on his hand were bitten down closer than mine usually were.

  “What do you want?” I whispered.

  “I’m waiting for you to begin dictating,” said the Other Wilkie.

  I noted again that his voice was not as deep or as resonant as my own. But then… does one ever really hear the tone and timbre of one’s own voice?

  “Dictating what?” I managed to ask.

  The Other Wilkie waited. After a hundred of my heartbeats he said, “Do you wish to dictate the content of your dreams or the next part of The Moonstone?”

  I hesitated. This must be some sort of trap. If I did not offer to begin dictating the details and ceremonies of the Gods of the Black Lands, would the scarab begin tunnelling its way out through my skull or face? Would the last thing I ever saw or felt be the huge pincers cutting their way out of my cheek or eye?

  “The Moonstone,” I said. “But I will write it myself.”

  I was too weak to rise. A half-minute of struggling only got me propped awkwardly higher on my pillows. But the scarab did not assassinate me. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it did not understand English.

  “We should lock the door,” I whispered. “I’ll do it.” But again I did not have the strength to rise.

  The Other Wilkie got up, shot the bolt home, and resumed his seat, his pencil poised. I saw that he wrote with his left hand. I was right-handed.