Dan Simmons - Drood

Charles Dickens had always imagined that he had plumbed the depths of London’s slums, learned the pathetic ways of the poorest of the poor in our capital, but here—far beneath the surface—was evidence that there were those poorer than the poorest of the poor in the rotting, typhus-lashed slums above.

I could see families in the hovels and on the high ledges now, what I took to be children dressed in a mere motley of filthy rags, all peering out at us or down at us in alarm, as if we were Vikings raiding some history-forgotten, God-forsaken Saxon settlement. The niches in the high wall, each holding hovels made of canvas and broken brick and mud bricks and old tin, reminded me of illustrations I had seen of abandoned Red Indian cliff dwellings in canyons somewhere in the American West or Southwest. Only these cliff dwellings were anything but abandoned; I estimated that hundreds of people were living in these high holes in the rock here far beneath the city.

More of Inspector Field’s men arrived by foot from unseen caverns or stairways or along sewer-side paths from the south. The scows and punts ran up on the shore with a bone-mulch crunch, and our dark men with torches, lanterns, and rifles spilled out in all directions.

“Burn it all,” said Inspector Field. Barris and other lieutenants turned the old man’s soft command into a series of echoing cries.

The Fleet Ditch cavern echoed with shouts and screams. I could see Field’s men climbing ladders and stone steps, running along the tunnelled terraces, and herding the rag-bundled figures away from the huts and hovels. There was no resistance that I could see. I wondered why anyone would come down here to this cavern beneath the old crypts, then realised that it was cave temperature here—mid-fifties at least—while it was below freezing on the hard-cobbled streets and in the sagging, unheated slums above.

When the first flames shot up from the warren of huts a great gasp went up, echoing through the space like a single breath exhaled by a hundred or two hundred separate forms. The dry rags and driftwood and old mattresses and occasional cast-off sofas burned like tinder, and in two minutes, despite the fact that most of the smoke was carried up and out the various shafts and stairways and corridors in the rock, there was a heavy black cloud under the ceiling of the cavern above us. New flames burned orange through that cloud and a series of explosions from Inspector Field’s men blowing the grilles and grates off the sewer entrances on the opposite side of the river gave the whole scene an impression of a violent summer storm.

Suddenly a bundle of rags came flying from one of the higher terraces, flapped on the way down, and struck the underground river with a hiss before sinking.

I hoped to God it was only a bundle of rags. I hoped to God it was only rags flapping, not arms and legs kicking during the fall.

I went up to Inspector Field where he stood against the bow of the beached scow and I said, “Was it absolutely necessary to burn these people out?”

“Yes.” He had not turned his head from the spectacle. Occasionally he would gesture, and Barris or one of his other favoured subalterns would send men to round up running forms or to set the torch to some hovel that had escaped the first flames.

“Why?” I persisted. “They’re just poor beggars unable to compete even on the street. They do no harm down here.”

Field turned towards me. “Down here,” he said softly, “these miserable excuses for men and women and their offspring are not Her Royal Majesty’s subjects. There are no Englishmen here, Mr Wilkie Collins. This is the kingdom of Drood and these are the minions of Drood. They give him their loyalty and—one way or the other—they offer up to him their service and succour.”

I began laughing then and found it very difficult to stop.

Inspector Field raised a bushy eyebrow. “Did I say something humorous, sir?”

“The Kingdom of Drood,” I managed at last. “The loyal minions of… Drood.” I began laughing again.

Inspector Field turned away from me. Above us, the rag bundles of all sizes were being marched up out of the smoke-filled cliff dwellings and Fleet Ditch cavern to whatever or whoever waited above.

PLEASE BE SO KIND as to go with Mr Barris,” the inspector said to me sometime later.

I was paying little attention to the proceedings. I remember that we had left the half mile or so of cavern and burning cliff dwellings behind and followed the river into a more contained Fleet Ditch tunnel once again. Ahead of us, the brick-arched way diverged into two major channels and on the left a sort of low dam or spillway required hoisting the chosen scow down with various bits of block and tackle; the punts had already gone ahead there. Inspector Field’s scow had taken the right-hand channel, but there was a major sewer outlet ahead and evidently they wanted me to explore it in a punt with Reginald Barris.

“You’ve seen Drood’s temple,” explained the inspector. “We believe that access to it may be through a false wall or hidden channel.”

“I haven’t seen Drood’s temple,” I said wearily.

“You described it, sir. You said that there were steps leading up from the river, high bronze doors, and statues on either side—Egyptian reliquary, human forms with the heads of jackals or birds.”

A chill ran up my spine as this brought back my beetle dream of less than thirty-six hours earlier—could that time span be correct? Could this actually be only the night after my awakening in the dark crypts above here? — but I said, “That was Charles Dickens’s description, Inspector. I’ve never purported to have seen Drood’s mythical temple… nor even Drood, for that matter.”

“You were there yesterday, Mr Wilkie Collins, we both know that,” said Inspector Field. “But we shan’t argue it here. Please go with Detective Barris.”

Before crawling to the punt, I asked, “Is your search down here almost finished, Inspector?”

The old man barked a laugh. “We’ve hardly begun, sir. Another eight hours, at least, until we meet up with my men coming from the Thames.”

I felt dizzy and nauseated again at hearing this. How long had it been since I had truly slept—not lost consciousness due to King Lazaree’s or Drood’s drugs, but slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?

I clumsily climbed down to where Barris and two other men waited in the wobbling punt, and with one of those men poling gondolier-fashion at the front and the other steering with a sweep from the stern, we left the river and moved slowly up a brick side tunnel. I sat on a thwart near the centre of the sixteen-foot craft while Barris stood nearby, using a second pole to balance himself. The moss-covered brick roof was so low here that Barris could reach up and help push the punt along; I could see the green stain on his expensive tan gloves.

I was half-dozing when the narrow sewer channel opened to a stream twenty feet wide.

“Sir!” said the detective in the bow and aimed his bullseye lantern forward.

Four feral Wild Boys were in water up to their waists, wrestling with something heavy and soggy that looked to have just tumbled out of a smaller pipe high on this larger sewer’s curved wall.

We slid closer and I realised that the “something soggy” was a man’s corpse. The boys had been going through the green thing’s disintegrating jacket and pockets. The four boys froze in our projected lantern light, their eyes reflecting back wide and white and inhuman.

An almost vertiginous sense of déjà vu rolled over me until I realised that I was seeing a scene straight out of the serialised sensationalist tale The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day that both Dickens and I had mentioned—each embarrassed that he had read it—when we had first come down here almost two years ago.