Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens had become the bully-thug Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist and was lost in the bloody act of murdering Nancy.

She tried to escape, crying out for mercy. No mercy, bellowed Bill Sikes. She cried out for God to help her. God did not answer, but Bill Sikes did, shouting and cursing and striking her down with his heavy club.

She tried to rise, holding her arm and hand up to ward off the blow. Dickens/Sikes struck again, and again, breaking her delicate fingers, smashing the bones of her upraised forearm, then bringing the full weight of the club down on her bloodied head. And again. And again.

Charley Dickens and Charley Collins could see the blood and brain tissue flying. They could see the pool of blood growing beneath the now prone dying woman as Bill Sikes continued clubbing her. They could see the blood spattering Sikes’s screaming, distorted face. The very paws and legs of Sikes’s dog were bloody!

And still he kept clubbing her, even after she was dead.

Still crouched over the imaginary woman’s corpse, the invisible club still held in two hands and poised above the battered and bloody form in the grass, Charles Dickens looked up at his son and my brother. His face was twisted and contorted in triumph. His eyes were wide, wild, and in no way sane. My brother, Charley, later said that he was sure he could see pure, murderous evil in the eyes of that twisted, gloating countenance.

The Inimitable had, at long last, found his Murder for his next round of public readings.

IT WAS AT ABOUT THIS TIME that I became certain that I had to kill Charles Dickens.

He would pretend to murder his imaginary Nancy on stage, in front of thousands. I would murder him in real life. We would see which ritual murder was more effective in driving the Drood-scarab out of a man’s brain.

To prepare the way, I wrote him a letter of apology, even though I had nothing to apologise for and Dickens had everything for which to beg forgiveness. It made no difference.

90 Gloucester Place Saturday, 18 July, 1868

My Dear Charles:

I write to offer my sincere and total apologies for the contretemps I provoked last month at our favourite place of dining, Vérey’s. My failure to consider that you were overtired from your many travels and exertions undoubtedly provoked the illusion of disagreement between us, and my not-unusual clumsiness in expression led to unfortunate consequences for which I again apologise and humbly ask your forgiveness. (Any accidental attempt on my part to compare my poor current literary efforts to your incomparable Bleak House were presumptuous and in error. No one shall ever confuse this humble protégé with Cher Maître. )

It is somewhat more difficult for me to entertain at home since Mrs Caroline G— left my home and service, but I still hope that you will be my guest at No. 90 Gloucester Place before too much more of the year passes. Also, as I am sure you have noticed despite your business with All the Year Round in our poor friend Wills’s absence, our wonderful success, No Thoroughfare, has finally closed at the Adelphi Theatre. I confess to have begun making rough notes about another play—I believe I shall call it Black and White, since it may be about a French nobleman who, for one reason or another, finds himself on the auction in Jamaica, being sold as a slave. Our dear mutual friend Fechter suggested the general idea some months ago—I plan to speak to him about it in detail in October or November—and Fechter would love to play the lead. In preparing this work I would be most grateful if I could avail myself of your advice and criticism so that I might avoid the more egregious errors so plentiful in my contributions to No Thoroughfare. In any case, I would consider it an honour if you and your entire family would be my guests at premiere night at the Adelphi should this modest effort ever succeed in being staged.

With final and abject apologies and most sincere wishes for a mending of this unforeseen and unwanted breach in the constant history of our cordial relationships, I remain…

Affectionately and Loyally Yours,

W. C. Collins

I looked this note over for some time, making small changes here and there, always in the direction of the contrite and servile. I had no fear whatsoever that this missive would someday come to light after Dickens’s sudden and mysterious death and cause curiosity in the biographer who read it. Dickens was still in the habit of annually burning every letter he received. (He would have burned every letter he sent as well, if he could have, but most of us who corresponded with the famous man did not share his pyromaniacal tendencies when it came to communications.)

Then I had George send it off by post and I went out to buy a bottle of good brandy and a puppy.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON I carried the brandy, a copy of this week’s All the Year Round , and the unnamed puppy with me as I took the train to Rochester and hired a carriage to take me to the cathedral.

I left the puppy in the carriage but took the brandy and paper as I walked through the graveyard to the back of the high, hulking cathedral. Rochester had always been a coastal city of narrow streets and redbrick buildings, which made this colossus of an ancient grey stone cathedral seem all the more impressive and oppressive.

This was the very landscape of Charles Dickens’s childhood. It was the presence of this very cathedral that had caused him to say to me years ago that Rochester reflected, for him, “universal gravity, mystery, decay, and silence.”

There was silence enough this hot, humid July day. And I could smell the stench of decay from the nearby tidal flats. Even with what Dickens had once called “the splash and flop of the tide” geographically nearby, there was no splashing audible this day, precious little flop, and absolutely no breeze. The full weight of the sun lay on the baking old headstones and browning grass like an incongruous gold blanket.

Even the shade of the cathedral tower gave little relief. I leaned back and stared up at that grey tower and remembered Dickens’s comment about how it had affected him when he was a tiny boy—“… what a brief little practical joke I seemed to be, my dear Wilkie, in comparison with its solidity, stature, strength, and length of life.”

Well, Dear Reader, if I had my way—and I fully intended to—the cathedral might go on for centuries or millennia more, but the length of life for that little-boy-turned-old-man-writer was all but at its end.

At the far end of the graveyard, beyond the headstones, with only the slightest path leading to it, I found the quick-lime pit still open, still full, and as foul as ever. My eyes watered as I walked back through the graveyard, passing by the very stones and wall and flat headstone-table where Dickens, Ellen Ternan, Ellen’s mother, and I had shared that macabre luncheon so long ago.

I followed the soft TIP-TAP-TIP-TAP around the cathedral, past the rectory, and into a courtyard on the far side. Between the stone wall and a low hovel of stones and thatch, Mr Dradles and an idiot-looking young assistant were working on a headstone taller than either of them. Only the name and the dates—GILES BRENDLE GYMBY, 1789–1866—had been chiselled out of the marble.

When Mr Dradles turned to me, I saw that his face, under a layer of stone dust rivuleted with tracks of his perspiration, was red to the point of bursting. He mopped his forehead as I came closer.

“You probably do not remember me, Mr Dradles,” I began. “But I came here some time ago in the company of…”

“Dradles remembers ’ee, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, named after a Sirred house painter or some’at,” rasped the red-faced figure. “You was here with Mr Charles D., of all them books an’ such, who was interested in the ol’ ’uns in their dark beds.”