Dan Simmons - Drood

I should mention here that the scarab obviously could not read things through my eyes; each night that Frank Beard injected me with morphia, I continued to dream of the Neteru Gods of the Black Land and all their attendant and requisite ceremonies, but I never once became the scribe Drood had commanded me to become; I never once wrote about those dark and heathen gods.

The beetle in my brain seemed assuaged when I was writing, obviously fooled into thinking that I was recording my dreams of these ancient rituals. And all that time I was actually writing about curious old servant Gabriel Betteredge (and his obsession with Robinson Crusoe, a book I also venerated) and plucky (if stupidly headstrong) Rachel Verinder and heroic (if strangely duped) Franklin Blake and the misshapen and doomed-to-drown-in-quicksand servant Rosanna Spearman and the meddling, pious pamphleteer Miss Clack (whose hilarious malice was the Other Wilkie’s contribution) and, of course, the clever (but never central to the solution of the mystery) Sergeant Cuff. The parasite within me thought all this frenzied scribbling through my illness was the obedient work of a scribe.

Stupid scarab.

The early numbers of my serialised novel were being met with continued and rising enthusiasm. Wills reported more and more people flocking to the magazine’s offices on Wellington Street on the day each new issue was released. All the talk was of the Moonstone itself, the precious diamond, and who might have stolen it and how. No one knew, of course, the full extent of my ingenuity in providing that ending, but even before writing those chapters, I had full confidence that no one would guess the amazing revelation. Between this and the triumph of my play, I would have much to impress Charles Dickens with when he returned.

If he lived long enough to return.

More and more, Wills and I were receiving, through a variety of sources (but especially through candid notes from George Dolby to Dickens’s daughters, as relayed to me by Charley), news that Dickens’s health was failing alarmingly. Influenza caught during his almost daily travels through the American provinces required him to stay in bed until the afternoon and not eat anything until three o’clock or later. All of us were amazed to read that Dickens—who always insisted on staying in hotels during his tours and never at private homes—had been so ill in Boston that he had been forced to stay with his friends the Fieldses rather than at the Parker House as planned.

Besides the worsening influenza and catarrh, exhaustion and a return of swelling in his left foot seemed close to doing Dickens in. We were hearing that Dolby had to help “the Chief” onto the stage for each reading, although as soon as he was beyond the curtain, Dickens would stride to his reading stand with a perfect imitation of his old alertness and spryness. And during the intermission and after the reading, Dolby and others would have to catch the totally exhausted author to keep him from fainting. Mrs Fields wrote Dickens’s daughter Mamie that during his last reading in Boston on 8 April, Dickens had boasted of a return of his old powers but still had not been able to change his clothes after the readings, but simply lay on the sofa for thirty minutes “in a state of the greatest exhaustion” even before allowing himself to be helped back to his room.

And—I took notice of this—Dolby had written in an almost offhand manner that because of the Inimitable’s inability to sleep, he had begun again to take laudanum—although only a few drops per glass of wine—each night.

Was there an insatiable scarab in America that also needed sedating?

At any rate, Dickens’s daughters and son Charles were worried about their father, even though the Inimitable’s own letters home were filled with optimism and bragging about crowds and adoration from his eager public at each American city in which he read. But as March and April passed and I slowly, slowly showed improvement and began to overcome some of the pain and debilitation (although setbacks would send me to bed again for days on end), I began to believe either that Charles Dickens would never return from America or that he would return a broken, dying man.

IT WAS DIFFICULT communicating with Martha R— during my illness. I did manage to send one message to her via my servant George early in my crisis and during Mother’s deathwatch, under the guise of enquiring about rental properties on Bolsover Street, but that was far too risky to continue.

Three times in February I did tell Caroline and Carrie that I was going to Tunbridge Wells with Charley to see Mother and turned back at the station, telling Charley I was simply not well enough to go on and would take a hansom cab home. Two of those three times I spent the night (or nights) with Martha—although I was too ill to enjoy the time properly—but that stratagem was also too risky, since Charles might, at any time, mention to Caroline or in Caroline’s presence the occasions I was not able to travel all the way to Mother’s.

Martha could have written me during this interval (using a false return address on the envelopes), but she preferred not to write letters. In point of fact, my Martha was close to being illiterate at this time, although later I would tutor her to the point she could read simple books and write basic letters.

Once I was ambulatory again by late March, I did work out ways to see her, explaining to Caroline and even to my doctor that I had to take solitary carriage rides (I was not up to pretending that I was walking for hours) to help me ruminate on my novel, or claiming that I must spend time at my club in its wonderful library, seeking out more books for my research. But these visits to “Mrs Dawkins” at Bolsover Street gave us, at most, a few stolen hours, and satisfied neither Martha nor me.

But Martha R—’s compassion for me during this most difficult time was sincere and palpable, in contrast to Caroline’s grudging and often suspicious care.

MAAT GIVES MEANING to the world. Maat bestows order upon the chaos of creation in the First Times and maintains order and balance throughout all time. Maat controls the movement of the stars, oversees the rising and setting of the sun, governs the flooding and flow of the Nile, and lays her cosmic body and soul beneath all laws of nature.

Maat is the goddess of justice and truth.

When I die, my heart will be torn from my body and carried to the Judgement Hall of the Tuat, where it will be weighed against Maat’s feather. If my heart is mostly free from the terrible weight of sin—sin against the Gods of the Black Land, sin against my duties as outlined by Drood and enforced by the sacred scarab—I will be allowed to travel on and perhaps join the company of the gods themselves. If my sinful heart outweighs Maat’s feather, my soul will be devoured and destroyed by the demon-beasts of the Black Land.

Maat gave meaning to the world and still gives meaning to the world. My Day of Judgement in the Hall of the Tuat is coming, as is yours, Dear Reader. As is yours.

MORNINGS WERE VERY BAD for me. Now that I had quit dictating The Moonstone to the treacherous scribe of the Other Wilkie through the lowest-ebb hours of the night, I often awoke from my laudanum or laudanum-and-morphine dreams between two and three AM and simply had to moan and writhe my way through to the spring dawn.

I usually was able to get myself down to my large study on the ground floor by early afternoon, where I would write until four PM, when Caroline or Carrie or both would take me outside, at least to the garden, to get some air. As I wrote to one friend who wanted to come visit me that April—“If you are to come, it should be before four o’clock, because I am carried out to be aired at 4.”