Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

As serious as Dickens’s physical ailments were and as dire the predictions from his phalanx of doctors, he became a small boy again when good friends came from America to visit.

James and Annie Fields had been his friends since the time of the Inimitable’s first triumphant American reading tour in 1842. James once mentioned to me that even before he and Dickens were socially introduced, he had joined a group of literary enthusiasts who had followed the “strangely dressed Englishman” around Boston during those heady days of Dickens’s first trip there. The depths of Dickens’s affection for these two was partially shown by the fact that when, during his second American tour, he finally was forced to break his usually steadfast rule of never staying in private homes, it was the Fieldses’ lovely home in Boston that became his refuge.

With them on this visit to England came the Charles Eliot Nortons and Dickens’s old friend James Russell Lowell’s daughter Mabel. Also in the entourage was Dr Fordyce Barker and Sol Eytinge, who had illustrated the lovely “Diamond Back” American edition of Dickens’s work.

Great adventures were planned for the period when this group visited Gad’s Hill Place (with the bachelorly overflow staying in the best rooms of the Falstaff Inn across the road), but the Fieldses’ first stop was London, and Dickens promptly took rooms at the St James Hotel in Piccadilly—the same hostelry where I had spent so much money on harbouring and feeding Fechter the previous January—just so that he could be close to the hotel on Hanover Square where the Fieldses were staying.

I had disguised myself in a broad-brimmed hat and dark summer cape-coat and followed them all from the hotels and then later from Gad’s Hill Place. I had purchased a sailor’s spyglass and hired my own cab (its driver and horse as nondescript as my disguise-clothing). All those days of detective work and the act of being in disguise and following someone invariably reminded me of poor, dead Inspector Field.

During the first days of their stay in London, the Fieldses & Co. were more or less launched into the pages of Dickens’s novels; after brisk hikes alongside the Thames (as if to prove that he was as young and healthy as ever), the Inimitable showed them the rooms in Furnival Inn where he had started work on The Pickwick Papers, showed them the room at the Temple where Pip had lived in Great Expectations, and acted out Magwitch stumbling on the very darkened staircase where the scene had been set.

Travelling along behind them in the cab or on foot, I could see Dickens pointing out this old house or that narrow alley where his various characters had lived or died and I remembered a similar tour with him more than a decade earlier when I had been his friend.

I was not invited on their expedition during the day and night of 9 June, the Anniversary—although Dolby was invited to join Fields and Eytinge on the nighttime part of the adventure—but I was there waiting near the Fieldses’ hotel when their carriages set out. Their first out-of-town stop that warm Wednesday afternoon was Cooling Churchyard.

This, of course, is the rural churchyard with its lozenge-shaped graves that Dickens had described so well in the opening of Great Expectations (a disappointment of a book, if one were to ask me). And as I watched through my trusty spyglass from some hundred yards away, I was amazed to see Dickens re-creating the same macabre churchyard-pantomime dinner with which he had entertained Ellen Ternan and her mother and me so long ago in the churchyard at Rochester Cathedral.

There was the same type of flat gravestone selected and used as a dinner table; the same transformation of Charles Dickens, Writer, into Charlie Dickens, Waiter; the same use of a wall as a bar for the gentlemen’s drinks; the same use of crystal and white linen and perfectly roasted squab lifted from hampers in the back of their carriages and delivered by the writer-waiter with the towel over one arm.

Even the nearby marshes and smell of the salt sea were the same, although this stretch of coastal marsh was more desolate and isolated than the Rochester graveyard.

Why was Dickens doing this again with his American friends? Even through the slightly shaky circle of the spyglass, I could tell that James Fields was a bit put off by this forced merrymaking in the midst of a boneyard. The ladies looked actively shocked and ate very little.

Only Eytinge, the illustrator, could be seen to be laughing and joining in the graveyard-theatre gaiety with Dickens, and that is most likely because he had enjoyed three glasses of wine even before the squab was served.

Was this some statement that Dickens, the mortal man, was making in the face of the imminent paralysis or death predicted by Beard and his other doctors?

Or was the scarab in his brain finally driving Dickens mad?

THAT NIGHT, the ladies and most of the other guests were left behind as Dickens took James Fields, a still-inebriated Sol Eytinge, and a very sober George Dolby into the Great Oven of London. (But he did not leave me behind, despite the lack of any invitation—when they left their cab, I followed stealthily on foot.) They paused briefly at a police station on Ratcliffe Highway to pick up a detective policeman who would be their bodyguard for the night’s explorations. I needed no such bodyguard: Detective Hatchery’s pistol was in the oversized pocket of my dark summer cape-coat.

What must have been so exotic, even terrifying, to Boston-born Fields was now, after more than two years of regularly traversing these streets with Hatchery, familiar almost to the point of comfort for me.

Almost.

Thunderstorms were brewing, lightning rippled all around the pitched, leaning roofs above the narrow lanes, thunder rumbled like constant cannon-fire around a besieged city, but it refused to rain. It only grew hotter and darker. Nerves were on edge everywhere in London, but down here in this suppurating pit of the hopeless poor, this nightmare-market of husbandless women, parentless children, Chinese and Lascar and Hindoo thugs and German and American sailor-murderers on the run from their ships, there was a madness in the air almost as visible as the electrical blue flames that played around the tilted weather vanes and leaped between the iron support cables that ran down like rusted mooring lines from buildings that had long since forgotten how to stand upright on their own.

The tour that Dickens and his police detective were giving the two Americans and Dolby was essentially the same as the ones that Inspector Field and Hatchery had shown the Inimitable and me so long ago: the poorest slums of Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, and New Court off Bluegate Fields; penny lodging houses outside of which drunken mothers insensibly held filthy infants (I watched from a dark distance as Dickens seized one of these children out of its drunken mother’s arms and bore the babe into the lodging house himself); lock-ups filled with thugs and lost children; basement tenements where scores and hundreds of London’s huddled outcasts slept in filth and straw within the constant miasmic stench from the river. The tidal mud this hot night seemed to be made up completely of horse dung, cattle guts, chickens’ viscera, the carcasses of dead dogs, cats, and the occasional hog or horse, and acres upon acres of human excrement. The streets were filled with idle men carrying knives and even more dangerous idle women carrying disease.

Charles Dickens’s beloved Babylon. His very own Great Oven.

In one of his lesser novels (I believe it was the plotting disaster he titled Little Dorrit), Dickens had compared the homeless children who skittered and scattered beneath the arches of Covent Garden to rats and warned that someday these rats, always gnawing at the foundations of the city and society that chose to ignore them, might “bring down the English Empire.” His outrage was real, as was his compassion. This night of 9 June, as I watched through my little telescope from half-a-block distant, I saw Dickens take up a scabbed and filthy child who looked to be dressed in strips of rags. It appeared that James Fields and Dolby were dabbing their eyes while Eytinge watched with a drunken illustrator’s disinterested gaze.

Because it was summer—or as hot as summer—the doors of tenements were open, the windows thrown up, and clusters and mobs of men and women were out in filthy courtyards and no less filthy streets. Even though it was the middle of the work week, most of the men (and not a few of the women) were drunk. Several times these groups would lurch towards Dickens’s party only to back away when the police detective with them flashed his bright bullseye lantern at the thugs and showed his club and uniform.

For the first time, I began to be nervous about my own safety. Although my cheap cape and broad-brimmed hat hid my features and allowed me to mix with most of these mobs, some men took note of me and followed along, calling drunkenly for me to stand them to a drink. I hurried on behind the Dickens party. While they tended to keep to the centre of the street where it was lightest, I crept along in the darkest shadows under porches, tattered awnings, and the leaning buildings themselves.

For a while, I was certain that I was being followed.

There was a small bearded man in rags—it looked as if he had been dressed in filthy strips of seaweed—who lurched along behind me, turning when I turned to follow Dickens’s group, pausing when I paused.

For a wild moment I was sure that it was the Other Wilkie following me and that he had escaped the confines of the house once and for all.

But while this figure (never seen distinctly) was as short as I (and the Other Wilkie), I realised that he was more burly and barrel-chested under those rags than stout in a Wilkie-ish way.

When we entered New Court proper in darkened Bluegate Fields, I no longer saw him following and put it down to coincidence and my nerves. I took several long sips from my flask, reassured myself by touching the pistol in my coat pocket, and hurried to get a bit closer to the strutting policeman, Dickens, Dolby, Fields, and Eytinge.

They stopped at Old Opium Sal’s den, as I knew they would. Here I could have found my way around blindfolded, but because of the bright flashes of lightning—the artillery barrage had grown louder, but still there came not a hint of refreshing rain—I waited until they had gone to the upper regions of the rotting building before I slipped up to the first-storey landing and edged around into the deeper darkness there. Because of open doors and raised voices, I could hear snatches of Dickens’s and the policeman’s explanations and the tourists’ conversation as they toured the opium den.

There was just enough smell of burnt opium in the air to make my body and scarab-inhabited brain ache for the drug. To take the edge off the longing, I drank deeply from my flask.

“The Puffer Princess…” I heard Dickens’s voice drift down in the thick air between thunder rumblings. It was not until months later that I understood this reference.

“Her pipe appears to be made from an old penny ink-bottle…” I heard Fields say.

Between all the understandable snippets, I could hear Opium Sal’s familiar but unintelligible cackles, croaks, whines, and entreaties. The policeman shouted her into silence several times, but the cackles would rise in volume again and drift down to me as surely as the scent of opium smoke. I could tell from my hiding place on the floor below them (as well as from memory) that this opium was lesser stuff and none of the excellent variety burned in beautiful pipes down in King Lazaree’s crypt-den. I sipped again from my flask.

Dickens and the policeman led the way down the sagging, rotted steps, and I had to shuffle back several paces into the deeper darkness of that empty first-storey landing.

Where were they going next? I wondered. Could he possibly take them all the way to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the crypt-entrance to the upper reaches of Undertown?

No, I realised, Dickens would never do that. But this was the anniversary date on which he always met Drood. How was he to do this with Fields and the others in tow, much less with the policeman present?

The loud group had disappeared around the corner of the building and I’d taken a few steps to go down the stairway myself when suddenly a thick, powerful arm came around my throat and a hot breath whispered in my ear, “Don’t move.”

I did move—spastically, since I was filled with terror, but quickly—and fumbled Hatchery’s pistol out of my pocket with my free hand even as the strong forearm was cutting off my air.

The bearded man swept the pistol out of my hand and deposited it in the pocket of his seaweed-rags jacket as easily as one would take a toy away from a small child.

A powerful hand shoved me up against the wall, and the filthy and bearded man struck a match. “It is I, Mr Collins,” he rasped.

For a moment I could identify neither the voice nor the face, but then I saw the intensity of gaze as well as the filth and unkempt beard.

“Barris,” I gasped. His hand still held me pinned to the splintered wall.

“Yes, sir,” said the man whom I had last seen as he was clubbing me with a pistol after shooting a boy dead in an Undertown sewer river. “Come this way…”

“I cannot…”

“Come this way,” ordered former detective Reginald Barris. He grabbed my cape sleeve and tugged me roughly along behind him. “Dickens has already met with Drood. There’s nothing new for you to see tonight.”

“Impossible…” I began as I stumbled along in his grip.

“Not impossible. The monster met with Dickens in his rooms at the Saint James Hotel just before dawn this morning. You were still home sleeping. Come along now and watch your step in this dark hall. I’m going to show you something quite remarkable.”

BARRIS PULLED ME DOWN an absolutely black hallway—not even the lightning flashes penetrated—then onto a side terrace to the building, one that I had never noticed when I was a regular patron upstairs at Opium Sal’s. Here, fifteen feet above an alley not four feet wide, two planks had been laid in a gap in the rotted railing to cross to the next tenement’s sagging terrace.

“I can’t…” I began.

Barris shoved me onto the planks, and I tiptoed across the narrow, sagging bridge-way.

On this dark terrace, which wrapped around the old structure, we edged carefully (for there were gaps in the rotted floor) around to the river side. The stench was much stronger there, but the lightning flashes illuminated our way as Barris led me into another corridor and then up three full flights of stairs. None of the closed-off rooms here showed even a hint of light from under the doors. It was as if the entire building—in a stretch of slum where every foetid basement and former cowshed was crowded with poor families or entire legions of opium addicts—had been abandoned.

The stairs were as narrow and as steep as a thick-planked ladder, and by the time we got to the top level, the fourth storey five tall flights above the ground, I was panting and wheezing. The outside balcony-terrace there had fallen completely away, but through the raw opening to my right I could see the river, countless shingled roofs, and chimney pots all flickering into existence when the cannonade lightning flashed, then dropping immediately into darkness during the short intervals between flashes.

“This way,” barked Barris. He forced open a warped and screeching door, then lit a match.

The room appeared to have been abandoned for years. Rats scurried along the baseboards and disappeared either into the adjoining room or into the rotting walls. The single window had been boarded over and not the slightest gleam of light entered there even when thunder roared and flashes of lightning slashed through the doorway behind us. There were no furnishings left behind, only something that looked like a broken ladder thrown into a far corner.

“Help me with this,” ordered the former detective.

Together we carried the heavy lattice of thick boards to the centre of the room and Barris—who, despite his rag-clothing and filth and beard and wild, uncombed hair indicating a starving man, was still amazingly strong—forced the top of this ladder up against the cracked and sagging ceiling.

Prodded by the top of the ladder, a hidden panel in that ceiling flew upward and open, revealing a rectangle of blackness.

Barris propped the ladder against the inner lip of this opening and said, “Go up first.”

“I will not,” I said.

He lit another match and I could see white teeth flash in the center of that dark beard. Anyone who saw those healthy teeth would know that Reginald Barris with his Cambridge accent was no true resident of these New Court in Bluegate Fields sad streets. “Very well then,” he said softly. “I shall go up first and light another match there. I have a small police bullseye in my pocket—next to your pistol. When you come up, I shall light that lantern. Trust me, sir, it is perfectly safe up there. But it shall not be safe for you if you try to flee back down those stairs and I have to descend to catch up with you.”

“Still the ruffian, I see,” I said contemptuously.

Barris laughed easily. “Oh, yes,” he said. “More than you could imagine, Mr Collins.”

He scrambled up the ladder and I could see the glow of a match flare in the darkness above. For a second I considered throwing down the ladder and then running for the hall and stairway. But I could feel Barris’s terrible grip firm on the top of the ladder and I remembered the strength with which he had propelled me across that plank bridge and then up the stairs.

Awkwardly—for I had continued to put on weight through the preceding year—I made my way up the ladder and then onto my knees in the musty-smelling dark above and then, shaking off the detective’s helping hands, to my feet. He lit the lantern.

Immediately in front of me loomed the ebony jackal-face of the god Anubis. I wheeled. Less than six feet away, a seven-foot-tall statue of Osiris stared down at me. The god was properly dressed in white with his tall white hat and carried his requisite crook and flail.

“This way,” said Barris.

We made our way down the centre of what had once been a long attic. There were more tall statues set under the eaves on either side. To my left was Horus with the head of a hawk; to my right was Seth with his animal head and long, curved snout. We walked between ibis-headed Thoth and Bastet with her cat’s face and ears. I could see where the sagging floor here had been reinforced by recent carpentry. Even the ceilings in the niches where the gods resided had been altered, built up like dormers so that the statues of the gods could stand upright.

“They’re plaster of paris,” said Barris, his lantern beam flashing back and forth as he led me farther down the length of the attic. “Even with the rebuilt floors here, stone effigies would crash through.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. “What is all this?”

At the end of the attic there was a square door where Barris pulled aside a piece of canvas that kept the weather and pigeons out. The frame around this relatively new doorway was made of fresh wood. Lightning illuminated the opening and the thick night air flowed in and around us like some foul syrup. From the sill of this door, a single plank—not more than ten inches wide—ran a dozen feet or more to a dark opening on the opposite side of an alley fifty or sixty feet below. The wind had come up ahead of the approaching storm, and the door canvas flapped with the sound of a raptor’s heavy wing.

“I’m not crossing that,” I said.

“You have to,” said Barris. He seized me under the arm and lifted me onto the sill and then shoved me out onto the board. With his other hand, he aimed the lantern to illuminate the impossibly narrow wooden plank. The wind threatened to topple me off before I took a single step.

“Go!” he ordered and shoved me out over the fatal drop. The beam disappeared for a moment and I realised that Barris was half-crouching on the plank and securing the canvas on nails behind us.

Holding my arms straight to either side, my heart racing, I set one foot in front of the other and shuffled forward like some circus clown preceding the real acrobats. Lightning flashed somewhere nearby and the following roll of thunder struck me like a giant open palm. The rising wind flipped my cape over my face when I was halfway across the impossible plank bridge.

Then somehow I found myself at the opposite window, but the canvas here was as taut as a drum’s skin—I couldn’t get in. I crouched fearfully and clung to the half-inch of wood frame around the opening, feeling the plank beneath us spring up and down and begin to slide—and slip off the sill—as Barris came up behind me.

His broad arm reached over my shoulder (if I had moved a muscle then, we would have both fallen to our deaths), his free hand fumbled with some opening in the canvas, and then the pitching lantern beam showed an opening. I threw myself forward into this second, larger attic.

Here waited Geb, the green-coloured god of Earth; Nut, with his crown of blue sky and golden stars; and Sekhmet, the god of destruction, his lion’s jaws open wide in a roar. Holy Ra was nearby with his falcon’s head, Hathor with the cow horns, Isis with a throne on her head, Amun crowned with feathers… they were all there.

I realised that my legs were so weak I could no longer stand. I sat on the path of fresh planks that ran down the centre of this larger attic. A new window, round, at least twelve feet in diameter, had been set into what I guessed was the Thames-facing southern rooftop, the circle of glass and wood placed directly above a wooden altar. The window was well constructed with thick, quality leaded glass not yet warped by gravity and there were metal circles within circles set into the glass much as I had always imagined some exotic gun sight on a naval ship.

“That points at the Dog Star, Sirius,” said Barris, who had secured the canvas and turned off his lantern. The nearly constant lightning display was enough to illuminate this large attic space now empty except for us, the Gods of the Black Lands, and the black-linen-draped altar. “I don’t know why Sirius is so important to their rituals—I dare say you may, Mr Collins—but one finds such a window aligned properly with that star in all their London attic nests.”

“Nests?” My voice sounded as stunned as I felt. The scarab was so excited that it was tunnelling ragged circles through the riddled grey matter that passed for my brain in those days. The pain was excruciating. My eyeballs felt as if they were slowly filling with blood.

“Drood’s followers have attic nests like this all over London,” said Barris. “Dozens of them. And some of them connect half a dozen or more attics.”

“So London has an Overtown as well as an Undertown,” I said.

Barris ignored that. “This nest has been abandoned for some weeks,” he said. “But they’ll be back.”

“Why have you brought me here? What do you want?”

Barris lit his lantern again and shined the bullseye beam on part of the wall and steep ceiling. I saw birds, eyeballs, wavy lines, more birds… what my clark friend at the British Museum called “hieroglyphics.”

“Can you read this?” asked Barris.

I started to answer and then realised, to my deep shock, that I could read the picture-words and phrases. “And Djewhty came forth! Djewhty, whose words became Ma’at…”

It was part of a ritual for naming and blessing a newborn child. And the words had been carved into the rotting wood of the ceiling, not painted on, just above a statue of Ma’at—the goddess of Justice—who stood there with a feather in her hair.

I said, “Of course I cannot read this gibberish. I am no museum docent. What are you asking?”

To this day, I believe this lie saved my life that night.

Barris expelled a breath and seemed to relax. “I thought not, but there are so many who have become slaves and servants of Drood.…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you remember the last night we saw each other, Mr Collins?”

“How could I forget? You murdered an innocent child. When I turned to remonstrate, you brutally clubbed me on the head—you might have killed me! I was unconscious for days. For all I know, you were trying to kill me.”

Barris was shaking his dirty, bearded head. His expression, what I could see of it through the grime and wild hair, seemed sad. “That was no innocent child, Mr Collins. That Wild Boy was an agent of Drood. He was no longer human. If he had escaped to tell of our presence there, Drood’s hordes would have fallen on us there in that sewer within minutes.”

“That’s absurd,” I said coldly.

I could see Barris smile so broadly that the image remained in my retina during the intervals between lightning crashes. “Is it, Mr Collins? Is it indeed? You do not know, then—for which I am particularly grateful—about the brain-beetles.”

Suddenly my mouth was very dry. I forced myself not to wince as there came a stab of pincer-pain from behind my right eye. Fortunately, a solid wall of thunder ended conversation and gave me a moment to recover. “The what?” I managed to ask.

“Brain-beetles is what Inspector Field and I called them,” said Barris. “Drood inserts these Egyptian insects—actually, English ones trained to his heathen Egyptian ways—into the bodies and brains of his slaves and converts. Or he makes them think he’s done so. It’s all actually a result of his mesmerising them, of course. They obey him for years in a sort of post-mesmeric trance, and he reinforces that control at every opportunity. The brain-beetles are the mesmerising symbol of that control to the victim.”

“That’s pure poppycock,” I said loudly between thunder crashes. “I happen to have researched mesmerism and the magnetic arts most extensively. It is impossible to control someone at a distance and over a long period of time as you suggest—much less enslave them to such a delusion as this… brain-beetle.”

“Is it?” asked Barris. I could see in the flickering light that the blackguard was still smiling, but it was a terrible and ironic smile now. “You were not there, Mr Collins, to see the horror that occurred in Undertown an hour after I clubbed you down—for which I do apologise, sir, most sincerely, but I thought you were one of them at the moment, a beetle-controlled agent of Drood.”

“What horror occurred after you clubbed me into insensibility, Detective Barris?”

“It isn’t ‘detective’ for me any longer, Mr Collins. That title and occupation are lost forever to me. And what happened, sir, some few hours after you were carried up and out of Undertown, was an ambush and slaughter, sir.”

“You exaggerate,” I said.

“Is nine good men dead an exaggeration, sir? We were hunting for Drood’s lair, Drood’s Temple, and, of course, Drood… but all the time he was drawing us deeper and deeper into his trap.”

“That is absurd,” I said. “You must have had two hundred men there that night.”

“One hundred and thirty-nine, Mr Collins. Almost all of them policemen away from duty at the time or former policemen, and almost all of them men who had known Hibbert Hatchery and who had come down with us to catch his killer. There were fewer than twenty of us who knew just what a monster Drood actually is—no normal killer, not a human being at all—and five of those men died at Drood’s killer-slaves’ hands that night. Those scores of thugs and Thuggees who were controlled by those magnetic-influence brain-beetles that you say don’t exist. And the inspector was murdered the next day.”

My jaw sagged at this statement. “Murdered? Murdered? Don’t lie to me, Barris. I won’t have it. I know better than this. The Times of London—I have spoken to the reporters who did the obituary, sir—reported that Inspector Field died a natural death. He died in his sleep.”

“Oh? And were these reporters there that morning after he died to see the terror imprinted on the poor old man’s dead face, Mr Collins? I was there. I was the first person Inspector Field’s wife sent for when she found him dead. His open mouth and bulging eyes were not the expression of a man who died peacefully in his sleep from heart problems, Mr Collins. His eyes were filled with blood.”

I said, “I understand that a stroke of the brain can cause just such symptoms.”

The lightning flashed and there was no lag between the flash and thunder now. The storm was upon us. “And does a stroke of the brain leave a silken rope knotted twice, Mr Collins?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the calling card of the Hindoo Thuggee who smothered poor Charles Frederick Field in his sleep, sir. Or in this case, three or four Thuggees. One to hold the pillow over my employer and friend’s straining face and at least two—I would guess three, since Field was a powerful man despite his age—to hold him down as the noose was tightened. He died hard, Mr Collins. Very hard.”

I could think of nothing to say.

“And the inspector had seven full-time operatives, including me, working for his agency,” continued Barris. “These men—myself included—were some of the finest and most professional ex-policemen in all of England. Five have died under mysterious circumstances since January. The other has left his family and fled to Australia, the little good that will do him. Drood has agents in every port on Earth. I have survived only by going to ground here in Drood’s own foul turf—and I have still had to kill three of his assassins who’ve come at me in the past six months. When I sleep at all, I sleep with one eye open, I assure you, sir.”

As if remembering something, Barris reached into his pocket and handed Hatchery’s pistol back to me.

Scarab-pain flared behind my throbbing right eye and the thought occurred to me that I could shoot Barris this moment and his corpse would lie here undiscovered for weeks or months until Drood’s followers returned to this place. Would that earn me some sympathy with them?

Blinking with pain to the point of vertigo, I put the idiot weapon away in my cape-coat pocket.

“Why did you bring me here?” I rasped.

“To see, first of all, whether you had become… one of them,” said Barris. “My estimate is that you have not.”

“You did not have to drag me up to these filthy heathen attics to discover that,” I shouted over the thunder.

“Actually, I did,” said Reginald Barris. “But more importantly, I wanted to give you a warning.”

“I need no more warnings,” I said dismissively.

“This one is not for you, sir,” said Barris. For half a moment there was silence—the first long lack of thunder since we had left Opium Sal’s tenement—and the silence was somehow more terrifying than the preceding storm noises.

“It is for Charles Dickens,” continued Barris.

I had to laugh. “You said that Dickens met with Drood this morning before dawn. If he’s one of Drood’s… what did you call them?… beetle-slaves already, what could he have to fear?”

“I believe he is not a slave, Mr Collins. I believe that your friend has made some sort of Faustian deal with Drood—of what particular nature, I cannot guess.”

I remembered Dickens once telling me that he had promised to write Drood’s biography, but this was too silly even to consider, much less mention.

“At any rate,” continued Barris, who suddenly looked exhausted under his scrim of dirt, “I learned from one of the assassins that Drood sent after me that Dickens will die in eighteen seventy.”

“I thought you killed all the assassins Drood sent after you,” I said.

“I did, Mr Collins. Indeed I did. But I urged two of them to talk to me before they shuffled off their mortal coils.”

The thought of this made my skin grow clammy. I said, “Eighteen seventy is a year away.”

“Actually just a little over six months away, sir. The assassin did not tell me when in the year they would move against Mr Dickens.”

At that instant and as if on theatrical cue, the storm struck with full ferocity. We both flinched as rain suddenly pounded the old shingles just above us with incredible force. Barris’s relit lantern beam danced wildly over the walls as he leaped back and then caught his balance. I saw a blur of the carved hieroglyphics and somehow my scarab or mind translated—“… give soundness to our limbs, O Isis, and be the charm which shall ensure our justification in the Judgement soon to come.”

I WAS DRENCHED by the time I got home. Carrie met me in the foyer, and I noticed that she was still fully dressed, not in her robe, at such a late hour and that she looked concerned.

“What is it, my dear girl?”

“There is a man here to see you. He arrived before nine PM and has insisted on waiting all this time. If George and Besse had not been home, I never would have let him in—his countenance is fearful—and he did not have a card. But he said it was urgent.…”

Drood, I thought. I was too tired even to feel fear. “There is nothing to be alarmed about, Carrie,” I said softly. “Probably some tradesman after a bill we forgot to pay. Where did you put him?”

“He asked if he could wait in your study. I said yes.”

D— n, I thought. The last place I wanted Drood was in my study. But I patted her cheek and said, “You go on up to bed now, that’s a good girl.”

“May I hang up your coat for you?”

“No, I want to leave it on for a while,” I said, not explaining to Carrie why I would want to keep on the thoroughly soaked-through cheap cape-coat.

“Won’t you be wanting any dinner? I had cook make your favourite French beef before she went home.…”

“I’ll find it and warm it myself, Carrie. Now you go on up for the night. I’ll call George if I need anything.”

I waited until her footsteps had faded up the main stairway and then went down the hall and through the parlour and opened the doors to my study.

Mr Edmond Dickenson, Esquire, was sitting not in the leather guest’s chair but behind my desk. He was insolently smoking one of my cigars and his feet were up on an opened lower drawer.

I went in and closed the doors tightly behind me.