Dan Simmons - Drood

“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.