Drood

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

On Sunday, 9 June, 1867, I returned home later than I had planned. I had told Caroline that morning that I would be at my club working on my book until evening but that I would be home before Dickens arrived for dinner. As you may have guessed, Dear Reader, I actually spent most of the day with Martha R— in her rooms on Bolsover Street, had lost track of the time, and hurried home feeling slightly dishevelled and a bit knackered.

I came into the downstairs parlour to find Charles Dickens again making mesmeric passes over an apparently somnolent Caroline G—.

Dickens was the first to notice me. “Ah, my dear Wilkie,” he cried jovially. “Just in time!”

Caroline opened her eyes and said, “Mr Dickens was mesmerising me.”

“So it appears,” I said coolly.

“Showing me how to apply the procedure to you!” she said. “To help you get to sleep on those nights when… you know.”

“I know that I’ve been sleeping quite well of recent,” I lied.

Dickens smiled. “But if Caroline can use the magnetic influence to help you drift off of an evening,” he said, “you could cut back or eliminate your dependence on laudanum at night.”

“I need hardly use any as it is,” I said.

“Oh, Wilkie, you know that’s not true!” cried Caroline. “Just two nights ago you were…” She broke off when she saw my cold stare. “I shall go talk to Cook,” she said, “and see if dinner is ready.”

Dinner was ready soon and it was a success, not only in taste and quality (a surprise, since our “Cook,” Besse, was also our parlourmaid and one of only three servants we kept, the others being her husband, George, and their daughter, Agnes, who was Carrie’s age) but also in terms of conversation and merriment.

Carrie, who always seemed to delight something in Charles Dickens (even as his own daughters did so less and less frequently those days), was at her blushing, school-girl best—young Harriet, like her mother, was intelligent enough and had already learned the subtle arts of being beguiling with older men without being coquettish—and even Caroline carried her own in our conversations. Dickens himself was relaxed and affable.

I do not know if I’ve described it accurately or sufficiently in this poor memoir, Dear Reader from my posthumous future, but Charles Dickens, while quite possibly a villain and even a murderer, was almost always a most pleasant man to be around. His conversation was easy, agreeable, almost never self-centred, and totally free of any effort or humbug. He held the unique position of being, at least among my circle of famous English friends and acquaintances, never boring and a capable and sympathetic conversationalist.… He never reached after aphorisms or heavy wit… and one aspect of his active listening was that he laughed a lot. And infectiously.

Dickens laughed much this ninth of June in the Year of Our Lord 1867. It seemed at that dinner that he had no concerns and nothing on his mind.

After dinner, we went up to my study for brandy and cigars. I admit to being a bit concerned about going into the study so close to dark—the evenings were long in this time in June, and though the weather had turned and it was cool and pouring rain outside, dim light still came in through the drapes—but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I rarely saw the Other Wilkie this early at night. Nor had I ever seen the Other Wilkie when anyone else was around, even though—and perhaps I should have told you before this, Dear Reader—I have been haunted, in one way or the other, by the sensed and then-visible presence of the Other Wilkie since I was a small boy.

But not this night.

Dickens excused himself to visit the water closet, and I took my brandy and went over to part the drapes and look out into the darkness.

The rain still poured down. I smiled slightly, thinking of Inspector Field and his twenty-three operatives—most of them hired on just for tonight, I’d learned this week, since, surprisingly, Field’s own private investigations agency had only seven men working full-time—out there now somewhere, unseen but also certainly uncomfortable in the rain and unseasonable cold. Carrie and our girl Agnes had got a fire going strong in my study and it felt quite cosy.

It had amused me, only the day before, when I had been required to get Caroline, Carrie, and the three servants all out of the house on various ruses so that Field, Barris, and several of his men could go through our Melcombe Place home from cellar to attic.

Inspector Field had insisted on this and I could do nothing but walk behind him as they inspected all doors and windows—estimating aloud how impossible a jump would be from the nearby roofs to these upstairs windows and deciding upon various vantage points in the neighbourhood from which to watch the alley, back yard, and nearby sidestreets. Finally they had gone through the cellar with a sort of fanatical intensity, even going so far as to move half a ton or so of coal in my coal-cellar. There, where the coal was always piled several feet high near the back wall, they had discovered a hole in the stone wall… a hole not ten inches wide.

The detectives shined their bullseye lanterns down the hole, but the corrugated tunnel so revealed simply curved down out of sight into stone and soil.

“Where does that go?” demanded Inspector Field.

“How could I know?” I said. “I have never seen it before.”

Field then called for Barris and his men, who—unbelievably! — had brought bricks, mortar, and the tools with which they could close up such an innocuous aperture. They did so in less than ten minutes, with Barris himself laying the bricks and applying the trowel. I noticed the easy expertise with which he worked and could imagine the reasons for those massive forearms. However much Mr Reginald Barris might sport an Oxford or Cambridge accent, his background was decidedly that of a lower-class craftsman.

“Are you protecting Dickens and me from rats?” I asked with a smile.

The inspector aimed that corpulent and strangely ominous finger at me. “Mark my words, Mr Collins. Either Mr Dickens will strive to see Drood tomorrow, this important anniversary of their meeting at Staplehurst, or Drood will find a way to see Dickens. Either way, sir, you are in danger if that meeting takes place here.”

I’d laughed and pointed to the tiny hole, now fully and redundantly bricked over. “You expect Drood to somehow slide his way through that?” I showed with my hands how narrow the aperture had been; a child oiled with grease could not have slithered through.

Field did not smile in return. “The thing that you call Drood can enter in through smaller apertures than that, alas, Mr Collins. If once invited, that is.”

“Well, there you have it, Inspector,” I said, still laughing softly. “I have never invited Mr Drood into my home.”

“No, but perhaps Mr Dickens has,” said Inspector Field. Then the men went on to inspect every square inch of the rest of my cellar.

I AM GOING to America,” said Dickens.

We were relaxing with the last of our brandy and cigars, the fire hissing and spitting at our feet and the rain pounding at the windows. Dickens was as quiet and sombre in my study now as he had been jovial and talkative at our dinner table an hour earlier.

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“I am.”

“But…” I began and had to pause. I was about to say, But surely your health will not allow this, but discretion caught me in time. I had heard the serious state of Dickens’s health from several sources, including Frank Beard, my brother, Charley, and Dickens’s daughter Kate (often through Charley), as well as through other mutual friends, but it would only infuriate Dickens if I brought up my awareness of his several serious infirmities: among which were an increasing fatigue that had caused him to collapse between performances during his spring tour of Scotland and England, increasing trouble with his left leg and left kidney, difficulties with digestion, flatulence, and accompanying headaches, and—perhaps most visible to all of us—his rapid ageing.

I said aloud, “But surely your dislike of America and the Americans would preclude you from returning there. You certainly made your disdain clear in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.”

“Pfah,” said Dickens with a wave of his hand. “I visited America twenty-five years ago, my dear Wilkie. Even such a backward place has had to reform in twenty-five years. They certainly have in terms of respect of copyright and payment to English authors for serialised works—as you must know, to your great benefit.”

This last was true. I had made an excellent deal with the Americans for Armadale and had almost completed negotiations for an even better arrangement for The Moonstone, which I had just begun writing.

“Besides,” continued Dickens, “I have many friends there, some of whom are too old or timid to make the Crossing. I should like to see them a final time before they or I die.”

Dickens’s talk of death made me anxious. I sipped the last of my brandy and stared into the fire, again imagining foolish Inspector Field and his small legion of men huddling out there in the rain somewhere. If Dickens was going to do what Field had insisted he might—plead some forgotten meeting somewhere and slip out of my house rather than spend the night—he had better hurry. It was getting late.

“At any rate,” said Dickens, settling deeper into the leather cushions of his wing chair, “I’ve decided to send Dolby over in early August to investigate the lay of the land, as the Americans like to say. He’ll be carrying my two new stories, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ and ‘A Holiday Romance.’ They were commissioned by American publishers, and I believe the latter is appearing there in a children’s magazine called Our Young Folks or something similar.”

“Yes,” I said. “You showed me ‘A Holiday Romance’ at Gad’s Hill a few weekends ago, you might remember… told me that the tales in it were written by children, as was their whimsical conceit. And I believed you.”

“I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted, my dear Wilkie.”

“Neither, of course, Charles,” I said. “A mere statement of fact. As always, when you set out to do a thing with words, it is done in its convincing entirety. But I do remember you telling me that your strength was almost broken twenty-five years ago under the travel and labour of your first American tour. And Forster says to this day that the Americans were unworthy of a man of genius such as yourself. Are you certain, Charles, that you wish to put yourself under such a strain once again?”

Dickens had accepted my invitation to smoke a cigar and now blew smoke towards my ceiling. “It is true that I was younger then, Wilkie, but I was also worn out from writing Master Humphrey’s Clock and—only days before departing—I had undergone a rather serious surgical operation. Also, the speechmaking I was required to carry out once in America would have exhausted an M.P. with nothing else to do. I was also—I admit it—less patient and much more irritable then than I am now in the serenity of my middle life.”

I thought about the so-called serenity of this author’s middle life. Inspector Field had informed me that Ellen Ternan had been ill throughout much of April and May, requiring that Charles Dickens—perhaps our nation’s most public man—disappear for long days on end so that he could be by his ailing mistress’s bedside. Dickens’s habit of secrecy did not extend just to his alleged meetings with the creature named Drood; dissembling had become second nature to the writer. On at least two recent occasions I knew of for certain, Dickens had sent me letters purportedly written from Gad’s Hill Place when, in actuality, he was with Ellen Ternan or staying at his secret home nearby.

“There are other reasons why I must leave the country,” Dickens said softly. “And it has come time to speak to you of them.”

I raised my eyebrows slightly, smoked, and waited. I expected some new fabulation, so Dickens’s actual words were a surprise.

“You remember the personage I have referred to as Drood,” said Dickens.

“Of course,” I said. “How could I forget either your telling of the creature’s purported story or our expedition two summers ago into the tunnels under the city?”

“Indeed,” Dickens said drily. “I think that you do not believe me when I speak of Drood, my dear Wilkie.…” He waved away my hurried objections. “No, now listen a moment, my friend. Please.

“There are many things I have not told you, Wilkie… many things I could not tell you… many things you would not have believed if I had told you. But the existence of Drood is real enough, as you almost discovered in Birmingham.”

Again I opened my mouth, but found I could not speak. What did he mean? I had long since convinced myself that my waking nightmare-vision during Dickens’s reading more than a year earlier in Birmingham had been a laudanum-dream brought on by the terrible confrontation with the thugs in the alley in that same city. The blood I had later found on my shirt collar and cravat had, of course, come from a reopening of the slight wound inflicted when one of the thugs had laid his knife to my neck that very afternoon.

But how could Dickens know about my drug-induced dream? I had told no one, not even Caroline or Martha.

Before I could formulate a question, Dickens was speaking again.

“Instead of wondering about the reality or non-reality of Drood, my dear Wilkie, have you ever wondered about your friend Inspector Field’s true motivations in his obsession with capturing or killing the man?”

I blushed at the “your friend Inspector Field.” I always assumed that Dickens knew little or nothing about my continued contact with the ageing detective—how could he know? — but I was often surprised by what Dickens actually seemed to know or had somehow managed to surmise.

Then again, if Drood were real—which I was not for a second ready to concede—it was possible that Dickens came by his information through that phantom and his agents, much as I was now doing through Inspector Field and his agents.

Not for the first time in the past two years, I felt like a pawn in some terrible chess game being played in the dark of night.

“You’ve told me your thoughts about Inspector Field’s so-called obsession,” I said. “You said that he thought such a coup would result in his pension being reinstated.”

“That hardly seems adequate motive for the inspector’s recent draconian… one might say desperate… measures, does it?” asked Dickens.

I thought about that. Or at least I frowned, squinted, and projected an image of thinking. In truth, I was most aware at that moment of the rheumatical gout gathering in a sphere of spreading pain behind my right eye, creeping around behind my right ear, embedding tendrils of itself deeper into my skull with each passing moment. “No,” I said at last. “I guess it does not.”

“I know Field,” said Dickens. The fire crackled and coal embers collapsed in upon themselves. The study suddenly felt appallingly warm. “I’ve known Field for almost two decades, Wilkie, and his ambition surpasseth all understanding.”

You are speaking of yourself, I thought, but said nothing.

“Inspector Charles Frederick Field wants to be Chief of Detectives again,” said Dickens. “He fully plans on being head of Scotland Yard Detective Bureau.”

I laughed despite my growing pain. “Surely this cannot be the case, Charles. The man is ancient… in his mid-sixties.”

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 discovers 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.

Forgetting that I still held the pistol, I pushed the door shut with a hollow thud and went back to my bedroom. Behind me, just audible through the closed study doors, the talk began again, but not in whispers now.

Did I hear soft laughter before I closed and locked my bedroom door? I shall never be sure.