Dan Simmons - Drood

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 can not 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?”