Drood

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Two hours later and I was back in another opium den. Waiting.

I was lucky to be alive. After all, I had been running, naked and screaming, through the worst slums of Bluegate Fields behind the docks, not even aware of which way I was running. Only the odd hour (even the thugs were inside and asleep at dawn on a cold, snowy January dawn) and the fact that even thugs might have been afraid of a screaming crazy man with bloody hands explained how the first person I encountered in my panicked flight was a police constable walking his patrol through the tenements.

The policeman himself had been frightened by my aspect and manner. He had removed a small weighted cosh from his belt, and I am sure that if I had babbled at him another minute without saying words that made sense, he would have clubbed me unconscious and dragged me by the hair to the nearest station.

As it was, he said, “What did you just say? Did you say—‘Hatchery’s body’? As in Hibbert Hatchery?”

“Former sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, now private detective Hibbert Hatchery, yes, Constable. They removed his insides and draped them around the crypt—oh, Christ! oh, God! — and he was working for me, privately, not for Inspector Field, for whom he worked privately publicly.”

The policeman shook me. “What’s that about Inspector Field? Do you know Inspector Field?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” I said and laughed. And wept.

“Who are you?” demanded the heavily moustachioed police officer. Snow had coated his dark helmet-cap white.

“William Wilkie Collins,” I said through chattering teeth. “Wilkie Collins to millions of my readers. Wilkie to my friends and almost everyone else.” I giggled again.

“Never heard of you,” said the constable.

“I am a personal friend of and collaborator with Mr Charles Dickens,” I said. My jaw had been quivering so violently that I could only barely get out the word “collaborator.”

The policeman allowed me to stand there naked in the snow and wind while he slapped his open palm with his heavy cosh and regarded me with a furrowed brow beneath the brim of his cap.

“All right, come along, then,” he’d said, taking me by my pale, scratched upper arm and leading me deeper into the tenements.

“A coat,” I said through chattering teeth. “A blanket. Anything.”

“Soon enough,” said the policeman. “Soon enough. Hurry on, now. Keep up.”

I imagined the police station to which he was leading me as being dominated by a large stove so hot that it was glowing red. My upper arm shook in the policeman’s grasp. I was weeping again.

But he did not lead me to a police station. I half-recognised the rotting stairway and darkened hallway up which he led and pushed me. Then we were inside and I recognised the wizened woman who was swooping around me, her beak of a nose extruding from her rotting black hood of a shawl.

“Sal,” said the policeman, “put this… gentleman… somewhere warm and get him some clothes. The fewer lice the better, although it don’t really matter that much. Make sure he don’t leave. Use your Malay to make sure he don’t leave.”

Opium Sal had nodded and danced around me, prodding my naked flanks and aching belly with her long-nailed finger. “I seen ’ere this ’un before, Constable Joe. ’E used to be a cust’mer an’ smoked ’is pipe right hup on that cot, ’e did. The Inspector Field tuk ’im away one night. Before that I first seen ’im with ol’ Hib Hatchery and some gemmun they tol’ me was tip-toff important. All ’igh ’n mighty this ’un was then; ’e was, scowlin’ and looking down ’is plump l’il nose at me through them spectacles what he ha’n’t got on now.”

“Who was this someone important?” demanded the policeman.

“Dickens, the Pickwick man, was who,” cried Sal triumphantly, as if it had taken all her resources to dredge the name up from the depths of her opium confusion.

“Watch him,” growled the policeman. “Get him some clothes even if you have to send the idiot out to find some. Keep the Malay on watch so he don’t go nowhere. And put him near that puny stove you keep one lump o’ coal burning in so he don’t die on us before I get back. You hear me, Sal?”

The old crone had grunted and then cackled. “I never seen a man wi’ such a shrivelled li’l John Thomas an’ company, ’ave you, Joe?”

“Do what I say,” said the policeman and left with a blast of cold air roiling in over us like the breath of Death.

DO THOSE FIT ye, darlin’?” asked Opium Sal as I sat in an otherwise empty room at the back of her opium parlour. A huge Malay with ritual scars on his cheeks sat guard just outside the door. The window here was shuttered and nailed tight. The stench of the Thames came up through it with the freezing draught even on this January day.

“No,” I said. The shirt was too small, too dirty, and stank. The heavy workingman’s trousers and jacket smelled just as bad and itched much more. I was sure that I could feel small things moving in both. There were no underlinens, nor socks. The ancient, worn boots she had brought me were half again too large for my feet.

“Well, ye should be thankful for what’s given ye,” cackled the crazy woman. “Ye would’na had them weren’t it for the fac’ that Ol’ Yahee died ’ere sudden-like two nights ago and no one’s come to fetch away ’is things.”

I sat there as the cold light of Saturday morning slipped through the shutters with the stink and…

Wait. Was it Saturday morning, the morning after I had descended into King Lazaree’s world, or was it days later? It felt as if days, or weeks, had passed. I thought of calling out to Old Opium Sally, but realised that odds were great that the old crone would not know. I could have asked the scar-faced Malay outside my door, but he had shown no sign of understanding English or being able to speak.

I laughed softly, then stifled a sob. It didn’t matter what day it was.

My head hurt so terribly that I feared I might faint from the pain. I could feel the locus of the pain deep, far behind my eyes, not at all like a mere rheumatical gout headache that I had once found so fierce.

The stag beetle scarab is excavating a wider hole for itself. Rolling a glistening grey globe ahead of it as it moves down its entrance tunnel towards…

I sat on the edge of a filthy cot and lowered my head to my knees, trying to hold in the nausea. I knew I had nothing more to vomit up, and the dry retching had turned my guts to bands of cramped pain.

The grey, glistening garlands rising to the ceiling.

I shook away the image, but the motion made my headache worse and brought on the nausea again. The air reeked of opium smoke—cheap, rotten, diluted, and polluted opium. I could not believe that for weeks I had come here for Opium Sal’s terrible product—sleeping the sleep of the drugged in these same filthy cots, all crawling with lice and vermin. What had I been thinking?

What had I been thinking last night—or however many nights ago it was—when I had descended beneath the crypt to join the Chinese mummies in that other opium den?

It had been Inspector Field who came with Hatchery to take me out of here so many months ago. It had been Inspector Field who suggested I go to King Lazaree’s den under Hatchery’s protection. Could it have been a plot all along? Could Field have murdered Hatchery—perhaps out of anger that the huge detective was working for me on the side?

I shook my aching head again. None of that made any sense at all.

Deep inside my skull, I could feel something move with six sharp legs and stag beetle pincers. I could not help it—I screamed in terror as much as in pain.

Inspector Charles Frederick Field and Detective Reginald Barris burst in.

“Hatchery’s dead,” I said through teeth that were chattering again.

“I know,” barked Inspector Field. He seized me by the upper arm in the same knowing grip that the other policeman had used that morning. “Come along. We’re going back there now.”

“Nothing can make me go back!”

I was wrong. Inspector Field’s powerful hand found a nerve in my arm that I did not know I had. I cried out in pain, rose, and stumbled along between Barris and the heavier, older man as I clattered—half-pushed, half-supported—down the stairs into a group of other men waiting in the street.

Altogether, counting the inspector and Barris, there were seven of the quiet, tough men, and although none were dressed in police uniform, I knew immediately that all had been policemen for the better part of their lives. Three of the men carried shotguns of some sort. One openly held a huge cavalry pistol at his side. Having never had any interest in things or people military, I was shocked at the sight of all this weaponry on a London city street.

But it was not really London, of course. It was Bluegate Fields. As we left New Court and passed a litany of dingy streets I had seen in all seasons for at least two years now—George Street, Rosemary Lane, Cable Street, Knock Fergus, Black Lane, New Road, and Royal Mint Street included—I noticed that the rag-wrapped bundles of misery in the courts and tenement doors, both male and female, shrank back into shadows or disappeared into darker doorways as we passed. They also recognised the seven deadly-serious men with firearms as policemen when they saw the grim knot stride past their awful hollows.

“What happened?” demanded Inspector Field. His iron grip was still hard on my quaking arm. I had brought a blanket with me to act as a sort of shawl over the filthy workman’s jacket, but the wool was cheap and the cold wind cut through it at once. It was snowing again.

“What happened?” prompted Field again, shaking me slightly. “Tell me everything.”

At that second I made one of the most fateful decisions of my life.

“I remember nothing,” I said.

“You’re lying,” snapped Inspector Field and shook me again. All pretext of his workingman detective status showing deference to my gentleman status was now gone. I might as well have been one of the Smithfield or Limehouse felons whom he had handled with such a similar iron grip over the decades.

“I remember nothing at all,” I lied again. “Nothing after taking my pipe last night in King Lazaree’s den at about midnight, as always. Then awakening in the dark some hours ago and finding my way out. And discovering… poor Hatchery.”

“You’re lying,” the inspector said again.

“They drugged me,” I said tonelessly as we entered the last of the alleys before reaching the cemetery. “Lazaree or someone put some drug in my opium pipe.”

Detective Barris barked a laugh at this, but Inspector Field silenced him with a glance.

There was another tall man wearing a topcoat and carrying a shotgun standing guard at the entrance to Ghastly Grim’s. He touched his cap as we approached. I pulled back as we came to the gate, but Inspector Field propelled me forward as if I were a child.

The snow had covered the headstones and statues and outlined the flat roofs and ledges on the crypts. The dead tree that brooded over the last crypt rose against the cloudy sky like a spill of black ink rimned with white chalk.

Three more men waited inside the crypt, their breath hovering over them like trapped souls in the cold. I looked away but not before seeing that they had covered Hatchery’s eviscerated body with some sort of canvas tarpaulin. The grey, glistening garlands were gone, but I noticed a second, smaller tarpaulin in the corner covering something other than Hatchery’s corpse. Even in the cold air, the small space smelled like an abattoir.

Most of the men who had accompanied us through the streets peered in at the crypt door and waited just outside. The crypt was small and seemed absurdly crowded now with six of us in it, since everyone avoided standing too near to Hatchery’s covered corpse.

I realised with a start that one of the three men waiting in the crypt was not a policeman or detective but was a giant Malay, his black hair hanging long, dirty, and lank down his neck, his arms behind his back and his wrists cruelly cuffed by iron manacles. For a confused second I thought him to be the Malay we had just left behind at Opium Sal’s, but I saw this man was older and his cheeks were unscarred. He stared at me without curiosity or passion, his eyes dulled in the way I had seen in condemned men before or after their hangings.

Inspector Field moved me towards the narrow entrance in the floor, but I pulled back with all of my will and energy. “I cannot go down there,” I gasped. “I shall not.”

“You shall,” said Inspector Field and shoved me forward.

One of the detectives guarding the tall Malay handed a bullseye lantern to the inspector; another was given to Barris. With the younger detective leading and Inspector Field holding me tight by the arm as he shoved me ahead of him, the three of us descended the narrow stairway. Only one other man—a detective who was a stranger to me and who carried a heavy shotgun—went down with us.

I CONFESS, DEAR Reader, that many elements of the next half-hour or so are lost to me still. My terror, fatigue, and pain were such that my state of consciousness was rather like that which we experience when hovering near the threshold of sleep—now aware of our surroundings, now dropping off to dreams, now jerked back to reality by some sound, sensation, or other stimulus.

The stimulus I remember most was Inspector Field’s insistent, incessant iron-grip on my arm pulling and pushing me this way and that in the lantern-lit darkness of the pit.

In the lantern light, the short descent and walk to King Lazaree’s den was as familiar as a recurring dream, holding nothing of the nightmare of my panicked flight in the darkness.

“Is this the opium den?” asked Inspector Field.

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. Yes. I don’t know.”

Instead of the red curtain hanging, there was a rusted grate just as on all the other loculi. The bullseye lanterns showed piles of coffins within rather than rows of three-tiered bunks and the bier with the ever-present Buddha figure of King Lazaree.

“This grate isn’t set in the wall like the others,” grunted Barris, grasping the rusty iron and shoving it in. It clanged like the bell of doom as it hit the stone floor. We entered the narrow space.

“No dust from the ceiling here,” said Barris, moving the beam of his bullseye back and forth. “It’s been swept clear.”

The fourth man in our party remained in the corridor with his shotgun.

“Yes, this is King Lazaree’s den,” I said as the lanterns illuminated more of the familiar corridor and alcove. But nothing remained, not even marks on the stone where the heavy bunks and small iron stove had rested. The bier in the centre where King Lazaree had sat in his bright robes now held only an ancient and empty stone sarcophagus. My private alcove at the back was just another niche filled with more stacked coffins.

“But you did not wake in the dark here,” said Inspector Field.

“No. Farther down the corridor, I think.”

“We’ll look there,” said the inspector and waved Barris out ahead of him. The man with the shotgun lifted his own lantern and followed us.

I was thinking about Dickens. Where was he in his American tour now? The last letter I had received from him, written from New York just before the New Year, reported him sick with what he called “low action of the heart” and so unhappy where he was that he was staying in bed each day until three PM and only with great difficulty rousing himself for the inevitable evening performances.

Did Dickens have a scarab in him? Did it crawl from his brain to his heart and sink its huge pincers in when he did anything that would release him from Drood?

I knew from the original itinerary and from telegrams to Wills at the magazine office that in this January, Dickens was to have read in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Brooklyn—and that each hall was selling out to the tune of six- to eight-thousand tickets—but where was he now amidst that list of odd-sounding cities?

I knew Dickens well enough to know that he would have recovered from his illness and moral swoon and be capering around between readings, amusing children and onlookers on his trains connecting the cities, putting every ounce of energy and fibre of his being into the afternoon and nightly readings, but I also knew that he would be miserable at the same time, counting down the days until his ship sailed for England and home in April.

Would he live that long? Would the scarab allow him to live if it detected his betrayal?

“Is this the place where you woke?” demanded Inspector Field.

He had to shake me to bring me back from my revery. I looked into a loculus identical to most of the others except that in the dust in this narrow niche there were footprints—of small, bare, naked, vulnerable feet—in the thick dust. There was also blood on the ragged grate where I had blindly squeezed through the break. I touched the clothing above the fresh wounds on my ribs and hips.

“Yes,” I said dully. “I think so.”

“It’s a wonder you made it out of here in the dark,” said Barris.

I had nothing to say to that. I was shaking as with the ague and wanted to leave this pit more than anything else in the world. But Inspector Field was not finished with me.

We walked back towards the entrance, light from the three bullseye lanterns dancing on the walls and loculi entrances in such a way as to make me feel faint. It was as if reality and fiction, life and death, light and its absolute absence, were whirling in a frenzied danse macabre.

“Is this the corridor leading to the rood screen and lower levels?” asked Inspector Field.

“Yes,” I said, not having any idea at that moment of what he was talking about.

We followed the narrow corridor past black loculi to the circular subterranean room underneath the former Cathedral of St Ghastly Grim’s apse. This was where Dickens had found the narrow stairway down to the real Undertown.

“I’m not going down there,” I said, pulling myself free from Inspector Field’s supporting grasp and almost falling. “I cannot go down there.”

“You do not have to,” said Inspector Field, and the words made me almost weep. “Today,” he added. To the man with the shotgun, he said, “Bring the Malay down.”

I stood there dully, outside of time, feeling movement deep in my head as the scarab stirred. I tried not to be sick again, but the air down there stank of rank soil and decay and the grave. When the detective with the shotgun returned, he had another detective with him—this man in a tan overcoat and carrying a rifle—and between them was the handcuffed Malay. The Oriental stared at me when he entered the subterranean apse; his narrow black eyes on either side of that flat blade of a nose were almost as dull with pain or despair as mine but more accusatory. He never looked at Field or Barris, only at me, as if I were his persecutor.

Inspector Field nodded, the two men with guns led the captive through the tattered rood screen and down the narrow passage, and Barris and the inspector brought me back into the corridor and then up into the light.

“I don’t understand,” I managed to gasp as we came out of the crypt into the freezing January air. The snow had stopped but the air was thick with winter fog. “Have you informed the police? Why are all these private detectives here? Certainly you must have informed the police. Where are the police?”

Inspector Field led me to the street where a black closed carriage waited. It reminded me of a hearse. The horses’ exhalations added more fog to the air. “The police will be informed soon enough,” he said. His tone seemed soft, but beneath that softness I could sense a fury and resolve as powerful as his grip on my arm. “These men knew Hibbert Hatchery. Many worked with him. Some loved him.”

Barris and the inspector pushed me up into the carriage. Barris went around to get in the other side. Inspector Field, his hand still on my arm, stood in the open door. “Drood expects us to rush down into Undertown today—a dozen of us perhaps, or twenty. He wants us to. But by tomorrow there will be a hundred private men here, all who knew Hatchery or who hate Drood. Tomorrow we will go down. Tomorrow we will find Drood and smoke him out of his hole.”

He shut the door with a muffled slam. “Be available tomorrow, Mr Collins. You will be needed.”

“I cannot…” I began but then saw the two men with guns emerge from the crypt. The Malay was no longer with them. I stared in horror at the right sleeve of the taller man. His expensive tan coat was crimson from the cuff upward, as if blood had wicked up the wool halfway to the elbow.

“The Malay…” I managed. “He must have been the one in police custody. The one the Metropolitan Detectives Bureau turned over to you for interrogation.”

Inspector Field said nothing.

“Where is he?” I whispered.

“We sent the Malay down as a message,” said Inspector Field.

“As a messenger, you mean.”

“We sent the Malay down as a message,” repeated Inspector Field tonelessly. He rapped on the side of the carriage and Barris and I rolled away through the narrow streets of Bluegate Fields.

BARRIS DROPPED ME off outside my home at 90 Gloucester Place without a word. Before I entered my own door, I stood shivering in the fog and watched the dark carriage roll out of sight around the corner. Another dark carriage came past, its side lamps lit. It also turned right at the corner. I could not hear if they both stopped—the fog and snow muffled even hoofbeats and axle rumbles—but my guess was that they had. Barris would be appointing lookouts, giving instructions. Inspector Field’s men would be watching the front and back of the house, I felt sure, although not in the high numbers of the previous 9 June.

Somewhere out there in the fog were my new Gooseberries. But all I had to do to outsmart them was go down into my own coal cellar, knock down a few bricks, and crawl through the narrow hole into the upper levels of Undertown. The city would then be mine to travel in… or at least under.

I giggled at the thought but stopped when the hysterical giggle turned to nausea. The scarab shifted in my skull.

WHEN I STEPPED into the foyer of my home, I opened my mouth to scream in horror.

Detective Hatchery’s intestines were strewn from cornice to chandelier, from chandelier to stairway, from stairway to candle sconces. They hung there just as in the crypt, grey and wet and glistening.

I did not scream. And after a moment in which I shook like a child, I realised that the “intestines” were simply garlands, grey and silver silk and ribboned garlands, left over from some inane party we had thrown at the old house ages ago.

The house smelled of cooking—pot roast and other beefs simmering, some sort of rich bouillabaisse getting started—and the urge to vomit rose in me again.

Caroline swept out of the dining room.

“Wilkie! Where on earth have you been? Do you think you can just disappear every night and not… Good Lord—where did you get those atrocious rags? Where are your real clothes? What is that smell?”

I ignored her and bellowed for our parlourmaid. When she rushed in, face flushed from the kitchen steams, I said brusquely, “Draw a hot bath for me—immediately. Very hot. Hurry on, now.”

“Wilkie,” huffed Caroline, “are you going to answer my questions and explain?”

“You explain,” I growled, waving at the draped ribbons everywhere. “What is all this trash? What’s going on?”

Caroline blinked as if slapped. “What is going on? In a few hours is your very important pre-theatre dinner party. Everyone is coming. We have to dine early, of course, as you specified, since we all must leave for the theatre by…” She paused and lowered her voice so the servants would not hear. What emerged was a steam kettle hiss. “Are you drunk, Wilkie? Are you addled by your laudanum?”

“Shut up,” I said.

This time her head snapped back and colour rose to her cheeks as if she had been slapped.

“Call it off,” I said. “Send the boy… send messengers… tell everyone the party is off.”

She laughed almost hysterically. “That is quite impossible, as you well know. The cook has begun dinner. People have arranged transportation. The table is already set with the complimentary theatre tickets at each place. It would be quite impossible to…”

“Call it off,” I said and brushed past her to go upstairs and take five glasses of laudanum, give the wretched clothes to our servant Agnes to burn, and bathe.

I SHOULD HAVE slept in the steaming water had it not been for the crawling in my skull.

The pressure from the scarab was so great that three times I leapt from the bath to stand in front of the looking glass. Adjusting the candles for maximum light, I opened my mouth wider than I thought possible—my jaw muscles actually groaned in protest—and the third time I did it I was sure that I saw light gleam on a black carapace as the huge insect scuttled back out of sight, away from the light.

I turned and vomited into the basin, but there was nothing left in my stomach to bring up, and the beetle was back in my skull by then. I got back into the bath, but each time I approached sleep I relived the inside of the crypt, the grey gleaming, the abattoir stink of the place, and over that I smelled incense and heard the chanting and saw the huge black bug burrowing into my belly as if flesh were sand.…

There came a rap on the door.

“Go away!”

“There is a telegram come for you,” said Caroline through the door. “The boy said it was important.”

Cursing, I rose dripping from the bath—which was growing cold at any rate—pulled on my robe, and opened the door long enough to grab the flimsy from Mrs G—’s thin white fingers.

I assumed the note was from Fechter or someone else at the theatre—they had the profligate habit of sending telegrams as if a simple messenger-borne note might not suffice. Or perhaps it was from Dickens. In a flash of revelation, I imagined him confessing to his own scarab and acknowledging that he somehow knew that I had gained mine.

I had to read the actual six words and signature four times over before the meaning sank into my exhausted, inhabited brain.

MOTHER IS DYING. COME AT ONCE. CHARLEY