Dan Simmons - Drood

“Shall we start tonight?” asked the Other Wilkie, laying the book down open on my blotter. He removed his spectacles to wipe them on a kerchief (which he kept in the same jacket pocket in which I kept mine), and I noticed that even without the spectacle-glass in front of them to reflect, his eyes were still two flickering vertical cat’s irises of flame.

“No, not tonight,” I said.

“But soon?” He set the small spectacles back on his face.

“Yes,” I said. “Soon.”

“I will come to you,” said the Other Wilkie.

I had just enough energy left to nod. Still in bare feet, still carrying the cocked pistol, I left my study, closed the heavy doors behind me, padded up the staircase, went into my room, collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep atop the tumbled bedcovers with the gun still in my hand and my finger still taut on its curved, cold trigger.

For years I had explained to Caroline that I was not free to marry her because my high-strung mother, who had always suffered from excitability and who was now dying from it (according to Dr Beard), simply would never understand—or agree to—such an arrangement with a formerly married woman who, it would be discovered after marriage, had shared my home for years. I explained that I had to spare the delicate old woman (who, in truth, was not that delicate at all except for her excitability) such a shock. Caroline never fully accepted the argument, but after some years she had ceased to challenge it.

Now Mother was dying.

On Thursday, 30 January—a week and a day after I’d awakened in my bed after the Undertown burnings and Barris’s attack on me—Caroline helped dress me, and Charley all but carried me to a carriage that took us to the railway station. I had sedated the scarab into relative calm by doubling my usual high dosage of laudanum, sometimes drinking straight from a large decanter.

My plan was to continue this high dosage and to do my writing at Mother’s cottage until she died. After that milestone was reached and passed, I would work out a way to deal with Caroline, the scarab in my brain, and my other problems.

TRAVELLING BY RAIL to Tunbridge Wells and Southborough, I was so sick and shaky that poor Charley with his aching stomach had to put his arm around me and sit sideways on the outside seat so as to shield me somewhat from public view. I tried to stifle my moans, but I am sure that some were audible to the other passengers over the sounds of the locomotive, rails, and our hurtling passage through the cold air of the countryside. God alone knows what noises the scarab and I might have made if I had not taken the massive doses of laudanum.

I had a sudden, terrible, total insight into what a hell it had been for Charles Dickens in the two and a half years since Staplehurst— especially on his exhausting and demanding reading tours, including the American one he was in the middle of at that moment—as he forced himself almost every day and night to ride the shaking, quaking, freezing or stifling, smoke-filled, rocking, coal-and-sweat-reeking carriages from city to city.

Did Dickens have his own scarab? Does Dickens have a scarab now?

This is all I could think about as the carriage rumbled on. If Dickens had a Drood-implanted scarab but somehow rid himself of it— by the public murder of an innocent man? — then Dickens was my only hope. If Dickens still carried the monster beetle but had learned to live and work and function with it, Dickens was still my best hope.

The carriage rocked and I moaned. Heads turned. I buried my face in the wet-wool scent of Charley’s overcoat for solace and escape, then remembered doing precisely the same thing in the dark cloakroom of the boarding school when I was a boy.

MY LETTER TO THE HARPER BROTHERS in America, I thought, opened with the perfect blend of masculine sadness and professionalism:

“The dangerous illness of my mother has called me to her cottage in the country and I am working at my story as best I can, in intervals of attendance at her bedside.”

I went on—equally professionally—about my revisions and shipping of the twelfth and thirteenth weekly parts of the novel and spent some time first praising and then correcting some of the illustration proofs they had sent me. (My first of a series of epistolary narrators, head-servant Gabriel Betteredge, had been depicted in the artist’s renderings as wearing livery . This would never do, as I explained to the Americans, since the head-servant in a fine house such as the one he served would wear plain black clothes and would look, with his white cravat and grey hair, like an old clergyman.) But I finished with what I considered to be a fine personal flourish—

You may rely on my sparing no effort to study your convenience, after the readiness that you have shown to consider mine. I am very glad to hear that you like the story so far. There are some effects to come, which—unless I am altogether mistaken—have never been tried in fiction before.

I confess that this last sentence sounded a trifle bold, perhaps even a tad presumptuous, but my plan for the mystery of the stolen Moonstone depended upon a long and accurate description of a man walking and acting in the night totally under the influence of opium—performing complicated operations of which he would have absolutely no memory the next morning or any day thereafter until helped, by a more self-aware opium eater, to recover those memories—and I did believe that these scenes and themes were unprecedented in serious English fiction.

As for working during intervals of attendance at my mother’s bedside, I did not feel it relevant or appropriate to explain that those intervals of attendance were very few and far apart, even though I was spending all my time in her cottage. The truth was, Mother could not abide my presence in her bedroom.

Charley had warned me that in the almost two weeks of my absence, Mother had regained the ability to speak, but “speech” certainly is not the accurate descriptor of the screams, moans, inchoate shouts, and animal-like noises she made when anyone—but especially I—was in attendance.

When Charley and I first stood in her presence that Thursday afternoon on the next-to-last day in January, I was shocked to the point of nausea by her appearance. Mother had seemed to lose all her living weight, so the figure in the bed, still distorted, was little more than mottled skin laid over bone and sinew. She reminded me—I could not help the association! — of a dead baby bird I had found in our garden once when I was very young. Like that young bird’s corpse (with its terrible featherless and folded wings), Mother’s dark and blotchy skin was translucent, showing the shape of things meant to be left unseen beneath.

Her irises—just barely discernible between half-lowered lids—still fluttered like trapped sparrows.

But she had indeed regained some vocal powers. When I stood next to her bed that afternoon she writhed, the folded bird wings flapped and vibrated, her twisted wrists fluttered her claw-hands back and forth wildly, and she screamed. It was, as I say, as much growl as scream—a calliope letting off terrible pressure—and the sound made what little hair I had left on the back of my head twist in terror.

As Mother twisted and moaned, I began to twist and moan. It must have been terrible for Charley, who had to grab my arms to hold me upright. (Mrs Wells had hurried away at my arrival and continued to avoid me for the three days I spent at Mother’s. I had no way—and little reason—to explain to her what I had been doing the night she saw me raising Mother’s nightdress to check for beetle entry; one does not explain oneself to servants.)