Dan Simmons - Drood

George was always a little slow, but he had rarely looked as completely half-witted as he did while wrestling with this question. “It sounds like one great ’un, sir,” he said at last. “Not rats so much, sir, as… a single bloody great rat, beggin’ your pardon, misses.”

“This is absurd,” I said. “Everyone get out. I will dress and be down in a minute and find and kill this ‘single bloody great rat’ of yours. And then perhaps you’ll all be so kind as to let a sick man get his rest.”

I CHOSE TO enter the stairway on the kitchen level so she could not get below me.

I was certain that I knew what had been making the noise. In truth, I wondered why I’d not seen the woman with green skin and tusks for teeth before this during the eight months we had been in the new house. The Other Wilkie had come along from Melcombe Place easily enough.

But why can the others now hear her?

In all the years the woman with the green skin had occupied my previous servants’ staircases in the dark, no one but I had ever heard or seen her. I was certain of that.

Are the Gods of the Black Lands making her more real the way they have the Other Wilkie?

I set that disturbing thought aside and lifted the candle from the table. I’d ordered the others not to come into the kitchen with me and to stay away from all of the doorways to the servants’ stairway on each storey of the tall house.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had drawn blood on my throat before this, long before Drood, the scarab, and the Gods of the Black Land had entered my life. I had no doubt that she could kill me now if I allowed her the proximity and opportunity. I had no intention of allowing her either.

Opening the door slightly, I removed Detective Hatchery’s heavy pistol from my jacket pocket.

With the door closed behind me, the servants’ staircase was almost absolutely dark. There were no windows along this side of the house, and the few candles in the wall sconces had not been lighted. The staircase was unusually—and disturbingly—steep and narrow, rising straight for three storeys before pausing on a short landing and continuing two storeys in the opposite direction to the attic.

I listened for a moment before starting up the stairs. Nothing. Candle in my left hand, pistol in my right, and stairway so narrow that my elbows on each arm brushed the walls, I moved quietly up the steps.

Halfway between the ground floor and first floor, I paused to light the first wall candle.

There was no candle there, although one of our parlourmaid’s daughter’s jobs was to replace them regularly. Leaning closer, I could see scratches and gouges on the firmly fixed old sconce, as if something had ripped the half-burned candle there out with claws. Or with teeth.

I paused to listen again. The softest of scuttling sounds came from somewhere above me.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had never made a loud sound before, I realised. She had always glided up and down stairs, towards or away from me, as if her bare feet barely touched the steps.

But that had been in my other houses. This servants’ stairway may have had more resonance for such malign spirits.

How had Shernwold died? She had fallen down these very steps and broken her neck, but why had she been in the servants’ staircase?

Investigating the sounds of rats?

And why had she fallen?

The candles missing from their sconces as if eaten?

I continued up to the first storey, paused in front of that doorway a moment—the doors were old and thick, and no sound came through, but there was a reassuring sliver of light at the bottom—and then I went on up the stairs.

The second candle was also missing from its sconce.

Something scuttled and scraped most audibly from not too far above me now.

“Hallo?” I called softly. I confess to feeling some sense of real power as I extended the pistol. If the woman with green skin had been corporeal enough to leave scratches on my neck—and she had—then she was corporeal enough to feel the effects of one of these bullets. Or several of them.

How many bullets were in the cylinder?

Nine, I remembered from that day Detective Hatchery had pressed the pistol into my hand, telling me as I went down to King Lazaree’s den that I should have something to defend myself from the rats. I even remembered what he had said about the calibre.…

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir. Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

I stifled the giggle that rose in my throat now.

At the second-storey door, the staircase behind and beneath me, only dimly illuminated by my flickering candle, seemed so steep as to be vertical. It—and perhaps lack of breakfast and the after-effects of my three glasses of morning laudanum—gave me a sense of vertigo.

Something sounding far too much like claws on plaster or wood scrabbled above me.

“Show yourself!” I cried into the darkness. I confess that this was mere bravado, a hope that George, Caroline, Besse, and the girl, Agnes, might hear me. But they were, presumably, two storeys below me now. And the doors were very thick.

I began climbing even more slowly, the pistol directly in front of me and swinging from side to side like an absurdly heavy weather vane in variable winds.

The scrabbling was not only louder now, but it seemed to have a direction. I could not tell if it came from the third-storey landing, where the staircase turned back in the opposite direction, or from somewhere between me and that landing. I made a mental note to have at least one window set into the thick brick-and-masonry outer wall there at the landing if no place else.

I took three more steps.

I cannot tell you, Dear Reader, from where the apparition of my woman with green skin and yellow tusk-teeth had originally come from, only that she had been with me since my early childhood. I remember her entering our nursery when Charles was sleeping. I remember seeing her in the attic of my father’s house when I had been so imprudent as to explore that dark and cobwebbed space when I was nine or ten years of age.

They say that familiarity breeds freedom from fear, but that is not quite the case. The green-skinned wench—her face was not of any living woman I had ever known, although I sometimes thought that she reminded me a bit of the first governess Charley and I had ever had—gave me the shudders every time I encountered her, but I knew from experience that I could fight her off when she lunged at me.

But no one else has ever heard her before. She’s never made a sound before.

I took another three steps towards the third-storey landing and stopped.

The scraping and scurrying were much louder now. The sound seemed very close above me, although now the pale circumference of candlelight extended almost to the landing itself. But it was very loud and—I understood George’s fear now—very ratlike indeed. Scrabble-scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble scrabble scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble.

“I have a surprise for you,” I said, cocking the massive pistol one-handedly with some difficulty. I remembered Hatchery saying that the large bottom barrel was a sort of shotgun. I wished now that he’d given me shells for it.

Two more steps up and I could see the landing. It was empty.

The scrabbling came again. It seemed to be above and even behind me.

I raised the candle over my head and peered straight up.

The scrabbling had turned to wild screaming and I stood there, frozen, listening to the screaming for a full minute or more before realising that it was coming from me.