Dan Simmons - Drood

Except for the fact that I now wished him dead.

When our laughter died, Dickens said, “I have been thinking more about your Moonstone, Wilkie.”

My entire body tensed. But I managed a wan smile.

Dickens held both his hands out and up, palms towards me. “No, no, my dear friend. I mean in totally admiring and professionally respectful ways.”

I held the smile in place.

“You may not have been aware of it, my dear Wilkie, but it is possible that with that sensationalist novel you may have created an entirely new genre of fiction.”

“Of course I am aware of it,” I said stiffly. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Dickens did not seem to have heard me. “The idea of an entire novel revolving around a single mystery, with an interesting and three-dimensional detective character—perhaps a private enquiry detective rather than a formal police detective—in a central position, and with all character development and nuance of daily verisimilitude flowing from the side-effects and after-effects of whatever crime was the mainspring for the novel’s central tale… why, it is revolutionary!”

I nodded humbly.

“I have decided to take a whack at it myself,” said Dickens, using one of the more execrable American expressions he had picked up on his last tour there.

At that moment I hated the man without reservation. “Do you have a title for this theoretical work yet?” I heard myself ask in a normal-enough voice.

Dickens smiled. “I was thinking of something straightforward, my dear Wilkie… something like The Mystery of Edmond Dickenson .”

I confess that I started in my chair. “Have you heard from young Edmond, then?”

“Not at all. But your questions about him last year made me think that the idea of a young man simply disappearing, with no clue as to his whereabouts or reasons for leaving, might lead to some interesting complications if murder were involved.”

I felt my heart pounding and wished that I could take a steadying drink of the laudanum from my flask in my jacket’s chest pocket. “And do you think that young Edmond Dickenson was murdered?” I asked.

I remembered Dickenson with his shaved head and sharp teeth and fanatic’s eyes, wearing a hooded robe and chanting at the ceremony in which Drood had loosed the scarab into my vitals. At the very memory of it, the scarab stirred and shifted in the back of my brain.

“Not a bit of it!” laughed Dickens. “I had every reason to believe young Edmond when he said that he was taking his money and travelling, perhaps relocating in Australia. And I certainly would change the character’s name and the title. It was merely to give an idea of the overall story.”

“Interesting,” I lied.

“And mesmerism,” said Dickens, steepling his fingers as he sat back and smiled at me.

“What about it, Charles?”

“I know you are interested in it, Wilkie. Your interest in it is almost as old as mine, although you have never practised it as I have. And you introduced it, subtly, into The Moonstone, although more as a metaphor than reality, but you failed to use it properly.”

“How so?”

“The solution to your so-called mystery,” said Dickens in that maddening, schoolmaster’s tone he used with me so frequently. “You have Mr Franklin Blake stealing the diamond in his opium-dream sleep but not knowing that he has stolen it.…”

“As I said before,” I said coolly, “this is most feasible and totally possible. I have researched it myself and…”

Dickens waved that away. “But, my dear Wilkie, the discerning reader—perhaps all readers—must ask, Why did Franklin Blake steal his beloved’s diamond?”

“And the answer is obvious, Charles. Because he was afraid that someone might steal it and therefore, under the dream-influence of opium he did not know he had ingested, he walked in his sleep and… stole it.” I heard the lameness in my own voice.

Dickens smiled. “Precisely. It strains credulity and endangers verisimilitude. But if you had one of your characters mesmerise Franklin Blake and order him to steal the diamond, and add to that the mischievous use of opium in his wine (although I would have had both the mesermism and the opium a deliberate part of the plot, a conspiracy rather than mere accident)… well, everything falls into place, doesn’t it, my dear Wilkie?”

I sat thinking about this for a moment. It was far too late to make changes. The last number of the serialised novel had already appeared in both All the Year Round and in the Harper brothers’ magazine in America and the complimentary leather-bound three-decker copies of the Tinsley edition were already completed and ready to be sent by messenger to Dickens and others.

I said, “But I still maintain that it violates the rules of mesmerism, Charles. You and I both know that Professor Elliotson and others taught that someone cannot do under the influence of the magnetic powers anything he or she would not do—in moral terms—when fully conscious.”

Dickens nodded. “Indeed, but Elliotson has shown— I have shown —that under the magnetic influence, the subject may alter his or her behaviour for extended periods of time because he or she has been told that something is true that is not.”

I did not understand this and said so.

“A woman might never carry her baby outside at night,” continued Dickens, “but if you were to mesmerise her and tell her that the house was on fire—or would be on fire, say, at nine PM—she would, either while in the mesmeric trance or much later under the influence of suggestion, seize up her baby and rush outside even when no flames were visible. In this way, your Hindoos in The Moonstone might have mesmerised Franklin Blake when he came upon them on the estate’s grounds, and your meddling doctor… Mr Sweets?”

“Mr Candy,” I supplied.

“Mr Candy then would have secretly administered the laudanum to poor Franklin Blake as part of a larger plot, not out of sheer random malice that should have seen him put in jail.”

“You’re saying that dear old Mr Candy was also under the mesmeric influence of the Hindoos?” I said. Suddenly I could see all these connections bringing together disparate and separate strands that I had left disparate and separate in my novel.

“That would have been elegant,” said Dickens, still smiling. “Or perhaps the vile drug addict, Ezra Jennings, was in on the plot to steal the Koh-i-noor.”

“The Moonstone,” I corrected absently. “But my Ezra Jennings is a sort of hero. He is the one who explains the mystery and then re-creates it for Franklin Blake in Blake’s aunt’s house in Yorkshire.…”

“A re-creation of events that is very handy to resolving your tale,” Dickens said quietly, “but which may strain the reader’s credulity more than any other element.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the conditions of the original night, the night the diamond was stolen, could not be re-created, my dear Wilkie. One essential element has been changed, and that would preclude all chance of the sleepwalking and theft occurring again.”

“What element is that?” I asked.

“In the so-called experiment, Mr Franklin Blake knows that he was drugged; he knows that Jennings believes he stole the diamond; he knows the sequence of events that took place and should take place again. That in itself would absolutely eliminate any chance that the same amount of opium…”

“I had Jennings use more in the wine than Mr Candy originally used,” I interrupted.

“Irrelevant,” said Dickens with another infuriatingly dismissive wave of his fingers. “The point is that the re-creation of events itself is impossible. And your Mr Ezra Jennings—probable sodomite, addicted opium eater… his adoration of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater comes close to being nauseating—is a poor hero-substitute for Franklin Blake. As it stands, Blake comes across as a sort of idiot. But if you had used the Hindoos properly to introduce mesmerism as part of the theft, included the administration of opium as a means to that conspiracy rather than as pure accident…”