Larger Font   Reset Font Size   Smaller Font  

Drood, Page 86

Dan Simmons


  An hour from now, I will have just sent Marian with the note for Frank Beard. I am dying—come if you can.

  Of course he will come. Beard always has come.

  And he will come quickly. His house is only just across the street. But he will not come in time.

  I will be in my big armchair, just as I am now. There will be a pillow behind my head, just as there is now.

  The fire will still be burning behind the grate.

  I will not be able to feel its heat.

  And I apologise for these blobs. The sleeve of my dressing gown truly is too large.

  Sunlight will be coming in the high window, just as it is now, and only a little higher, just as the coal in the fireplace will be burned only a little lower. It will be sometime after 10 AM. And despite the sunlight, the room will be growing darker by the minute.

  I will not be alone.

  You always knew, Reader, that I would not be alone at the end.

  Several figures will be in the room with me and gliding closer as—perhaps—I still strive to write, but my hand will be nerveless, my writing finished forever, and the pen will achieve only vague scratches and blobs.

  Drood will be here of course. His tongue will flick in and out. He will ssso want to ssshare a ssecret with Mr Collinssss.

  Behind and to Drood’s left, I think, I will see Barris, Inspector Field’s son. Field will be there also, behind his son. They both will show cannibals’ teeth. To Drood’s right will stand Dickenson, not the adopted son of Dickens after all. He is and always will be Drood’s creature. And behind these will be more shapes. All will be in black suits and capes. They will look silly here in the fading sunlight.

  I will not be able to clearly make out their faces. The scarab will, at long last, have eaten through my eyes.

  But there will be a huge, indistinct blur of a man near the back. It could be Detective Hatchery. I will just barely be able to make out a terrible concavity beneath the black waistcoat and funeral suit, like some sort of nightmare negative pregnancy.

  But, Reader (I have spied you out—I know you care more about this than about me), Dickens will not be there among them. Dickens is not there.

  But I believe that I will be. I am already.

  Then I will hear dear Beard’s footsteps on the stairs, but suddenly the figures in my bedroom will all begin crowding closer and speaking at once, hissing and slurring and rasping and spitting sounds as they press upon me, all speaking and gibbering at once. I would lift both hands over my ears, if I were able to. I would close what is left of my eyes, if I were able to. For the faces will be terrible. And the din will be intolerable. And it will be very painful in a way I have never known.

  Forty-five minutes remain before all this comes to pass—before I send the note to Frank Beard and the Others arrive before he does—but already it is painful and terrible and intolerable and unintelligible.

  Unintelligible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to acknowledge the help and editing excellence of Reagan Arthur, executive editor at Little, Brown, as well as the truly extraordinary work of senior copyeditor Betsy Uhrig. I’m sure there still will be infelicities and errors in this novel, but in almost all cases, the fault will have been mine. (If stubbornness were a virtue, I’d have one foot in Heaven.)

  Only a partial list of the biographical and other sources related to Charles Dickens and his era which I consulted is possible here, but the author would especially like to acknowledge the following—

  Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, © 1990, pub. by HarperCollins; Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumphs by Edgar Johnson, © 1952, pub. by Simon and Schuster; Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan, © 1988, pub. by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Charles Dickens As I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866–1870) by George Dolby, © 1887, pub. in Popular Edition by T. Fisher Unwin, London; Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley, © 2002, pub. by Penguin Putnam Inc.; The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan, © 2001, pub. by Cambridge University Press; Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, © 1874; The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, © 1870 by Household Words, Oxford University Press Edition © 1956.

  Some other sources for Dickens and his era which the author would like to acknowledge include—

  Dickens and His Family by W. H. Bowen, © 1956; The Life of Charles Dickens as Revealed in His Writing by Percy Fitzgerald, © 1905; The Changing World of Charles Dickens edited by R. Giddings, © 1983; Victorian People and Ideas by Richard D. Altick, © 1973; The World of Charles Dickens (A Pitkin Guide) by Michael St. John Parker, © 2005; Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 by David L. Pike, © 2005; Dickens and Daughter by Gladys Storey, © 1939; Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists by W. C. Phillips, © 1919; London 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen by Francis Sheppard, © 1971; Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist by Andrew Sanders, © 1982; The Speeches of Charles Dickens edited by K. J. Fielding, © 1950; The Actor in Dickens by J. B. van Amerongen, © 1926; Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter, © 1968; Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction by Fred Kaplan, © 1988; The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America by Nigel Cliff, © 2007.

  Internet sources relating to Dickens and his world are too numerous to list in full, but a few that the author especially wishes to acknowledge are—

  “Inspector Charles Frederick Field” at www.ric.edu/rpotter/chasfield.html; “Victorian London—District—Streets—Bluegate Fields” at www.victorianlondon.org/districts/bluegate.html; “Dickens’ London” at www.fidnest.com/~dap.1955/dickens/dickens_ london_map.html; “Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens” at www.classicbookshelf.com/library/charles_dickens/reprinted_pieces/19/html; “Housing and Health (Deaths from cholera in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, and the neighbourhood, 19 August to 30 September, 1854)” at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~city19/viccity/househealth.html; “Beetles as Religious Symbols, Cultural Entomology, Digest 2” at www.insectos.org/ced2beetles_rel_sym.html; “Modern Egyptian Ritual Magick: Ceremony of Blessing and Naming a New Child” at www.idolhands.com/egypt/netra/naming.html.

  For insight into Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, the author wishes to acknowledge the amazing lecture on that novel given at Wellesley College by Vladimir Nabokov (even though Nabokov led the author astray on one central word in a powerful quotation, an error completely missed by the author—who’d just finished rereading Bleak House—but caught by the inimitable copyeditor Betsy Uhrig). That lecture is collected in Lectures on Literature edited by Fredson Bowers, © 1980, pub. by Harcourt, Inc.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the following sources in his research on Wilkie Collins—

  The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke, © 1988, pub. by Sutton Publishing Limited; The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters, Volumes I–IV edited by William Baker, Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, Paul Lewis, © 2005, pub. by Pickering & Chatto; The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters, © 1991, pub. by Martin Secker & Warburg; Wilkie Collins: A Biography by Kenneth Robinson, © 1952, pub. by the MacMillan Company; Some Recollections of Yesterday by Nathaniel Beard, © 1894, pub. in Temple Bar, Vol. CII; Memories of Half a Century by R. C. Lehmann, © 1908, pub. by Smith Elder; The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, first published in Temple Bar © 1874, Hesperus Classics edition pub. by Hesperus Press Limited.

  For those interested in Wilkie Collins, the author recommends one especially helpful Web site—“Wilkie Collins Chronology” at www.-wilkie-collins.info/wilkie_collins_chronology.html.

  Finally, and always, my deepest thanks and dearest love to my first reader, primary proofreader, and ultimate source of inspiration—Karen Simmons.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAN SIMMONS is the award-winning author of several novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Olympos and The Terror. He lives in Colorado.

  Bonus Mat
erial

  The Signal-Man

  by

  Charles Dickens

  “Halloa! Below there!”

  When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

  “Halloa! Below!”

  From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.

  “Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?”

  He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

  I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, “All right!” and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zigzag descending path notched out, which I followed.

  The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recall a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out the path.

  When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right hand, crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at it.

  I resumed my downward way, and stepping out upon the level of the railroad, and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

  Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and lifted his hand.

  This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used; for, besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.

  He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel’s mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked it me.

  That light was part of his charge? Was it not?

  He answered in a low voice,-“Don’t you know it is?”

  The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.

  In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight.

  “You look at me,” I said, forcing a smile, “as if you had a dread of me.”

  “I was doubtful,” he returned, “whether I had seen you before.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed to the red light he had looked at.

  “There?” I said.

  Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), “Yes.”

  “My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it may, I never was there, you may swear.”

  “I think I may,” he rejoined. “Yes; I am sure I may.”

  His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes; that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work- manual labour-he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights, and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here,-if only to know it by sight, and to have formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning it. He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose.

  He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut,-he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another.

  All that I have here condensed he said in a quiet manner, with his grave dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the word, “Sir,” from time to time, and especially when he referred to his youth,-as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. In the discharge of his du
ties, I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was done.

  In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far asunder.

  Said I, when I rose to leave him, “You almost make me think that I have met with a contented man.”

  (I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)

  “I believe I used to be so,” he rejoined, in the low voice in which he had first spoken; “but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled.”

  He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them, however, and I took them up quickly.

  “With what? What is your trouble?”

  “It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very difficult to speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell you.”

  “But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall it be?”

  “I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to- morrow night, sir.”

  “I will come at eleven.”

  He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. “I’ll show my white light, sir,” he said, in his peculiar low voice, “till you have found the way up. When you have found it, don’t call out! And when you are at the top, don’t call out!”

  His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no more than, “Very well.”