Dan Simmons - Drood

Of course he could. Hadn’t the green-skinned wench with the tusk teeth left livid marks on my neck?

The Other Wilkie waited.

Between moans and the occasional cry of pain, I began—

“ FIRST NARRATIVE —all capitals for that— Contributed by MISS CLACK— capitals on the name as well, mind you—colon after the name— niece of the late Sir John Verinder … triple spaces… CHAPTER ONE, in Roman numeral… double space… I am indebted to my dear parents, who are now both dead … no, change that… begin parenthesis, both now in Heaven, end parenthesis… for having had habits of order and regularly instilled into me at a young … no, Miss Clack was never young, make that… at a very early age, full stop, begin new paragraph.”

I moaned and collapsed further back into the sweat-soaked pillow. The other Wilkie, pencil poised, waited patiently.

I HAD MANAGED only two or three nightmare-riddled hours of sleep when there came a pounding on my bedroom door. I fumbled my watch off the nightstand and saw that it was almost eleven AM. The pounding resumed along with Caroline’s stern but concerned voice, “Wilkie, let me in.”

“Come in,” I said.

“I cannot. The door is locked.”

It took me a few minutes to gather the energy to throw back the covers and stagger over to throw the bolt.

“Why on earth was this locked?” asked Caroline as she bustled in and fluttered around me. I went back to bed and drew the bedclothes across my legs.

“I was working,” I said. “Writing.”

“Working?” She saw the small stack of pages still on the wooden chair and picked them up. “These are in pencil,” she said. “When have you ever written in pencil?”

“I can hardly use a pen while lying here on my back.”

“Wilkie…” said Caroline, looking at me strangely over the sheaf of papers “… this is not your hand.” She gave me the pages.

It certainly was not my handwriting. The hastily pencilled words slanted the wrong way (as befitted a left-handed writer, I realised), the letters were formed differently—sharper, more spiked, almost aggressive in the indecorous bluntness—and even the spacing and use of margins were alien to my style. After a moment I said, “You saw that the door was locked. The pain kept me awake most of the night, so I wrote. Neither you nor Carrie nor any of the spineless amanuenses you brought here could take my dictation, so I have no choice but to write it myself. The new numbers will be due in both America and Wills’s office in a week . What choice do I have but to work through the night, using my left hand to write with the pencil when my right hand fails me? It’s a wonder that the hand is legible at all.”

This was the longest speech I had given since I’d been discovered unconscious on our doorstep on 22 January, but Mrs G— did not seem impressed.

“It’s more legible than your usual manuscript,” said Caroline. She looked around. “Where is the pencil you used?”

Absurdly, I blushed. The Other Wilkie must have carried it off with him when he left sometime after dawn. Through the locked door and solid walls. I said, “I must have dropped it. It may have rolled under the bed.”

“Well… I have to say from the few paragraphs I’ve just read,” said Caroline, “that neither this terrible new illness nor your mother’s illness has dulled your writing ability. Just the opposite, from the short bits here. This narrative of Miss Clack is wildly funny. I had thought you were going to make her more pathetic and dour, a mere caricature—but on this first page or two she seems a truly comic character. I look forward to reading the rest soon.”

When she left to direct the girl in the preparation of my breakfast tray, I looked through the surprisingly thick sheaf of pages. The first sentence was precisely as I had dictated it. Nothing else was.

Caroline had been correct in her hasty assessment: this “Miss Clack”—the insufferable old busybody religious pamphleteer—had been sketched in with great energy and dexterity. The paragraphs and descriptive passages, all seen from the old woman’s distorted view of herself, of course, since she was the narrator, moved with a much greater authorial assurance and light comic hand than had the longer, more convoluted and heavy-handed passages I had dictated during the night.

D—n his eyes! The Other Wilkie was writing The Moonstone and there was nothing I could do about it.

And he was the better writer.

Mother died on the nineteenth of March.

I was not there when she died. Since I was not able to attend the funeral, I asked my friend Holman Hunt, with whom I’d gone to the theatre just the week before to see my No Thoroughfare again, to go in my place, writing— “I am sure it will be a comfort to him…” by which I meant my brother, Charles, “… to see the face of a dear old friend whom my mother loved, and whom we love.”

In truth, Dear Reader, I have no idea if Mother loved Holman Hunt or if he had any serious affection for her, but he had taken dinner with her a few times in my presence, so I saw no reason that he could not fill that missing presence at Harriet Collins’s funeral.

You may think me cold or unfeeling for not going to my own mother’s funeral, when my illness may have— would have—allowed me to, but you would not think this if you had known my heart and mind at this time. It was all too terribly logical. If I went to Mother’s cottage with Charley to view the body, what reaction would her scarab and mine have to the other’s proximity? The thought of that beetle lurching and digging and scrabbling in Mother’s dead body was too much for me to bear.

And—before the funeral, when the casket was still in the parlour of her cottage and open so that friends could pay their respects—what would happen to me if I saw (especially if I were the only one who could see) those scarab pincers and that beetle head and carapace slowly creeping out from between Mother’s dead white lips? Or what if it exited some other way—through her ear, or eye, or throat?

My sanity could not have borne it.

And for the funeral itself, as her coffin was lowered into the frozen hole next to our father’s grave, I would have been the only one leaning forward and waiting, and listening, and waiting and listening more, even after the first clods of dirt struck the lid of the casket.

Who knew better than I that there were tunnels everywhere under London and terrible things moving in those tunnels? Who knew what awful impulses and manners and means of Droodish control the burrowing scarab, now almost certainly grown as large as Mother’s brain had been after the chitinous creature had consumed all the dying and dead brain matter, was subject to?

So I stayed home, in bed, suffering.

BY LATE FEBRUARY I had begun writing again, composing The Moonstone at my desk in my study when I was able, writing while propped up in bed more often than not. When I was working alone in my study or bedroom, the Other Wilkie often joined me, staring silently at me in an almost reproachful way. It had crossed my mind that he might have been planning to replace me (in writing this book and the next, in receiving plaudits for it, in Caroline’s bed, in society at large) should I die. Who would ever know? Had I not recently planned to replace Charles Dickens in much the same way?

I realised that the suddenly revealed illness (and even more sudden death) of one of my characters—the much-loved and much-respected Lady Verinder, never a central character but always a reassuring and noble offstage presence—almost certainly came from the deeper parts of my creative mind and were a way of honouring Mother’s death.