Drood

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 thing’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.

He closed the bolt and locked the door, part of my aching brain was trying to tell me. He… it… can affect things in the physical world.

Of course he could. Hadn’t the green-skinned wench with the tusk teeth left livid marks on my neck?

The Other Wilkie waited.

Between moans and the occasional cry of pain, I began—

“FIRST NARRATIVE—all capitals for that—Contributed by MISS CLACK— capitals on the name as well, mind you—colon after the name—niece of the late Sir John Verinder… triple spaces… CHAPTER ONE, in Roman numeral… double space… I am indebted to my dear parents, who are now both dead… no, change that… begin parenthesis, both now in Heaven, end parenthesis… for having had habits of order and regularly instilled into me at a young… no, Miss Clack was never young, make that… at a very early age, full stop, begin new paragraph.”

I moaned and collapsed further back into the sweat-soaked pillow. The other Wilkie, pencil poised, waited patiently.

I HAD MANAGED only two or three nightmare-riddled hours of sleep when there came a pounding on my bedroom door. I fumbled my watch off the nightstand and saw that it was almost eleven AM. The pounding resumed along with Caroline’s stern but concerned voice, “Wilkie, let me in.”

“Come in,” I said.

“I cannot. The door is locked.”

It took me a few minutes to gather the energy to throw back the covers and stagger over to throw the bolt.

“Why on earth was this locked?” asked Caroline as she bustled in and fluttered around me. I went back to bed and drew the bedclothes across my legs.

“I was working,” I said. “Writing.”

“Working?” She saw the small stack of pages still on the wooden chair and picked them up. “These are in pencil,” she said. “When have you ever written in pencil?”

“I can hardly use a pen while lying here on my back.”

“Wilkie…” said Caroline, looking at me strangely over the sheaf of papers “… this is not your hand.” She gave me the pages.

It certainly was not my handwriting. The hastily pencilled words slanted the wrong way (as befitted a left-handed writer, I realised), the letters were formed differently—sharper, more spiked, almost aggressive in the indecorous bluntness—and even the spacing and use of margins were alien to my style. After a moment I said, “You saw that the door was locked. The pain kept me awake most of the night, so I wrote. Neither you nor Carrie nor any of the spineless amanuenses you brought here could take my dictation, so I have no choice but to write it myself. The new numbers will be due in both America and Wills’s office in a week. What choice do I have but to work through the night, using my left hand to write with the pencil when my right hand fails me? It’s a wonder that the hand is legible at all.”

This was the longest speech I had given since I’d been discovered unconscious on our doorstep on 22 January, but Mrs G— did not seem impressed.

“It’s more legible than your usual manuscript,” said Caroline. She looked around. “Where is the pencil you used?”

Absurdly, I blushed. The Other Wilkie must have carried it off with him when he left sometime after dawn. Through the locked door and solid walls. I said, “I must have dropped it. It may have rolled under the bed.”

“Well… I have to say from the few paragraphs I’ve just read,” said Caroline, “that neither this terrible new illness nor your mother’s illness has dulled your writing ability. Just the opposite, from the short bits here. This narrative of Miss Clack is wildly funny. I had thought you were going to make her more pathetic and dour, a mere caricature—but on this first page or two she seems a truly comic character. I look forward to reading the rest soon.”

When she left to direct the girl in the preparation of my breakfast tray, I looked through the surprisingly thick sheaf of pages. The first sentence was precisely as I had dictated it. Nothing else was.

Caroline had been correct in her hasty assessment: this “Miss Clack”—the insufferable old busybody religious pamphleteer—had been sketched in with great energy and dexterity. The paragraphs and descriptive passages, all seen from the old woman’s distorted view of herself, of course, since she was the narrator, moved with a much greater authorial assurance and light comic hand than had the longer, more convoluted and heavy-handed passages I had dictated during the night.

D—n his eyes! The Other Wilkie was writing The Moonstone and there was nothing I could do about it.

And he was the better writer.