Dan Simmons - Drood

I have always been gentle in demeanour and actions. My fiction is—was—sensationalist, but my life is—was—a testimonial to quiet gentleness. Women always sensed this about me, which is why a short, bespectacled, slightly rotund gentleman such as myself was so popular with the ladies. Even our friend Charles Dickens used to joke about my gentleness, as if a lack of aggression were a reason to be made fun of.

During my ride home from Martha’s, I’d realised again that I was incapable of harming a hair on young Agnes’s head, no matter how devastating her inevitable indiscretion would be to my life and career. I had never raised my hand against anyone in anger.

But ah! you say, Dear Reader, what of your plans to shoot Drood and Dickens?

May I remind you that Drood is not a human being as we estimate people as being human. He has murdered scores, if not hundreds, of innocents. He is a creature of and from the Black Lands I dream about every time Frank Beard injects me with morphia.

And Dickens… I have shown you what Dickens has done to me. You may be the jury there, Dear Reader. How many years of arrogance and condescension would you have tolerated from this man… this self-named Inimitable … before you finally raised a hand (or weapon) in righteous anger?

But you must understand that I would never raise a hand to a poor dull child like Agnes.

SHE CAME DOWNSTAIRS dressed in her best cheap outfit and wearing an overcoat that would not keep her warm for ten minutes out of doors in England, less than two minutes in Scotland. She was carrying two cheap valises. And she was weeping.

“Now, now, my dear young friend, none of that,” I said and patted her back. Again she flinched from me. I said, “Would you check to see that the cab is still waiting?”

She looked out through the blinds that covered the lights on either side of the front door. “It is, sir.” She began weeping again. “I don’t know how t-t-to pay the man who d-d-drives the cab. I d-d-don’t know how to find my carriage at the st-station. I don’t know how to d-do anything .” The miserable child was working herself towards hysterics.

“There, there, Agnes. The driver has already been paid. And I have paid him extra to help you find your carriage and your seat. He will make sure you are on the right train, in the correct carriage, and comfortable in your seat before he leaves you. I asked him to watch and make sure you are safe until the coach actually departs. And I have telegraphed members of the fine family you will be serving.… They will meet you at the Edinburgh station.”

“My mum ’n’ dad…” she began again through her tears.

“Will be delighted that you were brave enough to rise to this singular and wonderful opportunity.” I started to open the door and then stopped. “I had forgotten. There is one thing I would like you to help me with before you leave.”

She stared at me with red, wide eyes, but I saw the sense of hope stirring there as well. Perhaps, she was thinking, this was a reprieve.

“This way,” I said and led her back to the kitchen.

At first she did not notice that the boards and nails had been removed from the door to the servants’ stairs, but when she did, she stopped in her tracks.

“I have decided to use this back staircase again, Agnes, and need the candles lit on all the landings going up. But my tired old eyes have trouble seeing in the dim light within.…” I was smiling at her.

She shook her head. Her cheap valises dropped to the floor. Her mouth was open and her expression was—to speak frankly—very close to that of the kind of female idiot they lock away in asylums.

“No… sir,” she said at last. “Dad said that I mustn’t…”

“Oh, there are no rats or mice in there now!” I interrupted with a laugh. “Long gone! Your father knows that I am opening up the stairway. It shan’t take more than a minute to light the candles in their sconces on each landing and then you’re off on your adventure.”

She only shook her head.

I had already lit a candle. Now I put it in her hand and stepped behind her. “Don’t be stubborn, Agnes,” I whispered in her ear. I wondered even at the time if my voice sounded a bit like Drood’s hiss and lisp. “Be a good girl.”

I moved forward and she had to move ahead of me to avoid my touch. She did not try to resist until the door was open and I had herded her into the black rectangle.

She balked then, and turned, her eyes as certain and sad and unbelieving as Dickens’s Irish bloodhound Sultan’s on that last walk he’d taken with us.

“I won’t…” she began.

“Light every candle, Agnes dear, and knock when you want out,” I said and pushed her in and locked the door.

Then I fetched the hammer and lumber and nails from where I had stored them on the counter and began pounding everything back the way it had been, making sure that the nails were driven into the same holes in the door frame so that everything would look undisturbed when George and Besse got home.

She screamed, of course. Very loudly, although the walls at Number 90 Gloucester Place were very thick and so were the doors. Her screams were just barely audible in the kitchen a few feet away and certainly could not be heard, I trusted, from the sidewalk or street outside.

She banged at the other side of the thick oak door, then clawed (from the sounds of it), then stopped about the time I had got the last board nailed into place at the bottom. This would have cut off any tiny bit of light that came from the kitchen under the door and into that dark stairwell.

I set my ear to the wood of the boards and thought I could hear ascending footsteps—slow and hesitant—as she started up the stairs. Part of her must have been certain even then that this was a cruel game on my part and that when she had lit the candles on each landing, I would let her out.

The final screams, when they came, were very loud. But they did not go on for long. They ceased—as I had known they would—suddenly and terribly and in mid-cry.

I went upstairs then and looked in her room. I looked carefully, not worrying about how late it was getting or about the coach driver I was paying to wait outside. When I was certain that the girl had not left a note in either her room or her parents’ room or anyplace else in the house, I made sure that all of her important clothes and belongings had been packed in her two cheap valises.

On her carefully made bed, under the coverlet, there was a shapeless and now eyeless little rag doll. Would she have taken that to her new life in Edinburgh? I decided that she might have and brought it downstairs and crammed it into the larger of her two bags.

There was no sound whatsoever from the sealed-up servants’ staircase.

Taking the hammer and pry bar, I went back down to the cellar. Once there, I put on the long rubber apron that George used when he did messy tasks down there. I also borrowed his heavy work gloves.

It took me only a few minutes to shovel coal clear of the back wall of the half-filled coal cellar. The blocked-up crack in that wall was still visible, but the mortar was loose between the bricks and stone blocks. Using the pry bar, I began to work the bricks loose.

It took longer than I had expected, but again, I did not rush. Eventually the gap that I had always known Drood had come through that ninth of June two years earlier was revealed. I extended a candle through the hole.

The flame flickered to distant and damp currents but did not quite go out. Everything beyond the circle of light was blackness and a long drop into more blackness.

I shoved both of Agnes’s overpacked valises through and listened for the splash or crash of impact, but none came. It was as if there were no bottom to the pit beneath my house.