Dan Simmons - Drood

Somewhere out there, I was certain, however invisible to a layman’s eye, one or more of Inspector Field’s agents still stood watch. He would never abandon me now, not after what I had seen and learned of his operations.

For days I had begged Caroline for the newspaper and asked her for copies of the Times which I had missed while in my coma. But those newspapers had been thrown away and the few recent ones I was able to peruse made no mention of a former policeman’s eviscerated body being found in a slum cemetery. There was no account of fires breaking out in areas near the Thames or in the Fleet Ditch sewer system, and Caroline only looked at me oddly when I asked if she had heard of such fires.

I queried Frank Beard when he came and my brother, Charles, in his turn, but neither had noticed mention of any detective’s murder nor of any subterranean fires. Both Beard and Charley assumed that my queries were the result of nightmares I had been having—it was certainly true that my few scattered hours of sleep gained during this entire period were ruled by terrible nightmares—and I made no effort to disabuse them of that theory.

Obviously Inspector Field has used his influence to keep the police and news-papers quiet about Sergeant Hatchery’s terrible murder… but why?

Perhaps Field—and his hundred or more men who had come to the punitive expedition beneath the city—simply had kept the fact of the murder from the police.

But, again… why?

I had neither strength of body nor adequate mental concentration that Monday night as I clung to the drapes and looked out at the cold, foggy London January midnight to answer my own questions, but I looked for Inspector Field’s inevitable eavesdropping detectives as if peering into darkness in search of a Saviour.

Why? How can Inspector Field help me stop this pain?

The scarab moved an inch or two at the base of my brain and I screamed twice, muffling the second scream in a wad of velvet drapery stuffed into my mouth.

Field was the second chess player in this terrible game, matched in his ability to provide counterweight to the monster Drood perhaps only by the absent Charles Dickens (whose motives were even less understandable), and I realised that I had begun ascribing impossible, almost mystical, abilities to the old, fat, side-whiskered detective.

I needed someone to save me.

There was no one.

Sobbing, I staggered back to my bed, held on to the post as the moving pain blinded me for a moment, and then managed the few faltering steps to my dressing bureau. The key to the lowest drawer was there in my brush box, beneath the lining, where I kept it hidden.

The gun that Detective Hatchery had given me was still there beneath fresh linen.

I lifted it out—amazed again by its terrible weight—and staggered back to sit on the edge of the bed near the single burning candle. Tugging on my glasses, I realised that I must look as mad as I felt, my hair and beard in wild disarray, my face distorted in an almost constant open-mouthed moan, my eyes wild with pain and terror, and my nightshirt rucked up above pale, shivering shanks.

As best I could, given my total unfamiliarity with firearms, I ascertained that the bullets were still in their cylindered receptacles. I remember thinking, This pain will never end. This scarab will never leave. The Moonstone will never be finished. In weeks, tens of thousands of people will line up to buy the next issue of All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly only to find empty white pages.

The idea of emptiness, of void, appealed to me that night beyond all words to describe it.

I raised the pistol towards my face and inserted the heavy, broad barrel in my mouth. The small bead of what I assumed was a gun sight tapped my front tooth as the barrel slid in.

Someone long ago—it may have been the old actor Macready—had explained to several of us around a happy table that someone serious about blowing his brains out had to fire the bullet upward through the soft palate rather than against the hard outer bone of the skull that too frequently deflected the projectile and left the would-be suicide as a pain-riddled vegetable and object of derision rather than a corpse.

My arms shaking wildly—all of me shaking—I held the anvil-heavy weapon as steady as I could and raised one hand to pull the massive hammer back until it clicked into place. As I was finishing this operation, I realised that if my sweaty thumb had slipped, the gun would already have fired and the bullet would already have ricocheted around through the remaining pulp of my brain.

And the scarab would be dead—or at least would be left to eat and burrow in peace, since I would no longer be feeling this pain.

I began shaking harder, weeping as I shook, but I did not remove the obscene pistol’s barrel from my mouth. The reflex to gag was very strong, and if I had not vomited half a dozen times already that afternoon and evening, I am sure I would have done so then. As it was, my stomach cramped, my throat spasmed, but I kept the barrel in place and angling upward in my mouth, feeling the steel circle touching the soft palate of which Macready had spoken.

I set my thumb on the trigger and began applying pressure. My chattering teeth closed on the long barrel. I realised that I had been holding my breath but could do so no longer and gasped in a final breath.

I could breathe through the pistol barrel.

How many people knew this was possible? I could taste the sour-sweet bite of gun oil—applied long ago by the dead Detective Hatchery, no doubt, but still strong to the tongue—and the cold, vaguely coppery taste of the steel itself. But I could breathe through the pistol even as I bit down on the barrel on all sides, and as I did so, taking long racking breaths, I could hear the whistle of my inhalations and exhalations around the cavitied cylinder and out the echoing chamber near where the hammer was pulled back and cocked.

How many men had ended their lives with this as the last, irrelevant thought passing through their brains so soon to be dead, scattered, cooling, and thoughtless?

The novelist-sensed irony of this was more painful than the scarab-pain and I began laughing. It was a strange, muffled, and oddly obscene sort of laughter, distorted as it was around a pistol barrel. After a moment I pulled the pistol from my mouth—the otherwise dull metal glistening in the candlelight due to the film of my saliva along its length—and, still idly holding the cocked weapon, I lifted the candle and staggered out of my room.

Downstairs, the doors to my new study were closed but not locked. I went in and pulled the broad double doors closed behind me.

The Other Wilkie sat sideways behind my desk, reading a book in the near total darkness. He looked up at me as I came in and adjusted spectacles that reflected my candle, hiding his eyes behind two vertical, flickering columns of yellow flame. I noticed that his beard was slightly shorter and slightly less grey than mine.

“You require my help,” said the Other Wilkie.

Never, not in all the years since my first, vague childhood sense that my Other Self existed, had the Other Wilkie ever spoken to me or uttered any sound. I was surprised at how feminine his voice sounded.

“Yes,” I whispered hoarsely. “I require your help.”

I realised stupidly that the cocked and loaded pistol was still in my right hand. I could raise it now and fire five—six? — bullets into that too-solid-looking flesh sitting presumptuously behind my desk.

When the Other Wilkie dies, will I die? When I die, will the Other Wilkie die? The questions made me giggle, but the giggle came out as a sort of sob.