Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens and the policeman led the way down the sagging, rotted steps, and I had to shuffle back several paces into the deeper darkness of that empty first-storey landing.

Where were they going next? I wondered. Could he possibly take them all the way to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the crypt-entrance to the upper reaches of Undertown?

No, I realised, Dickens would never do that. But this was the anniversary date on which he always met Drood. How was he to do this with Fields and the others in tow, much less with the policeman present?

The loud group had disappeared around the corner of the building and I’d taken a few steps to go down the stairway myself when suddenly a thick, powerful arm came around my throat and a hot breath whispered in my ear, “Don’t move.”

I did move—spastically, since I was filled with terror, but quickly—and fumbled Hatchery’s pistol out of my pocket with my free hand even as the strong forearm was cutting off my air.

The bearded man swept the pistol out of my hand and deposited it in the pocket of his seaweed-rags jacket as easily as one would take a toy away from a small child.

A powerful hand shoved me up against the wall, and the filthy and bearded man struck a match. “It is I, Mr Collins,” he rasped.

For a moment I could identify neither the voice nor the face, but then I saw the intensity of gaze as well as the filth and unkempt beard.

“Barris,” I gasped. His hand still held me pinned to the splintered wall.

“Yes, sir,” said the man whom I had last seen as he was clubbing me with a pistol after shooting a boy dead in an Undertown sewer river. “Come this way…”

“I cannot…”

“Come this way,” ordered former detective Reginald Barris. He grabbed my cape sleeve and tugged me roughly along behind him. “Dickens has already met with Drood. There’s nothing new for you to see tonight.”

“Impossible…” I began as I stumbled along in his grip.

“Not impossible. The monster met with Dickens in his rooms at the Saint James Hotel just before dawn this morning. You were still home sleeping. Come along now and watch your step in this dark hall. I’m going to show you something quite remarkable.”

BARRIS PULLED ME DOWN an absolutely black hallway—not even the lightning flashes penetrated—then onto a side terrace to the building, one that I had never noticed when I was a regular patron upstairs at Opium Sal’s. Here, fifteen feet above an alley not four feet wide, two planks had been laid in a gap in the rotted railing to cross to the next tenement’s sagging terrace.

“I can’t…” I began.

Barris shoved me onto the planks, and I tiptoed across the narrow, sagging bridge-way.

On this dark terrace, which wrapped around the old structure, we edged carefully (for there were gaps in the rotted floor) around to the river side. The stench was much stronger there, but the lightning flashes illuminated our way as Barris led me into another corridor and then up three full flights of stairs. None of the closed-off rooms here showed even a hint of light from under the doors. It was as if the entire building—in a stretch of slum where every foetid basement and former cowshed was crowded with poor families or entire legions of opium addicts—had been abandoned.

The stairs were as narrow and as steep as a thick-planked ladder, and by the time we got to the top level, the fourth storey five tall flights above the ground, I was panting and wheezing. The outside balcony-terrace there had fallen completely away, but through the raw opening to my right I could see the river, countless shingled roofs, and chimney pots all flickering into existence when the cannonade lightning flashed, then dropping immediately into darkness during the short intervals between flashes.

“This way,” barked Barris. He forced open a warped and screeching door, then lit a match.

The room appeared to have been abandoned for years. Rats scurried along the baseboards and disappeared either into the adjoining room or into the rotting walls. The single window had been boarded over and not the slightest gleam of light entered there even when thunder roared and flashes of lightning slashed through the doorway behind us. There were no furnishings left behind, only something that looked like a broken ladder thrown into a far corner.

“Help me with this,” ordered the former detective.

Together we carried the heavy lattice of thick boards to the centre of the room and Barris—who, despite his rag-clothing and filth and beard and wild, uncombed hair indicating a starving man, was still amazingly strong—forced the top of this ladder up against the cracked and sagging ceiling.

Prodded by the top of the ladder, a hidden panel in that ceiling flew upward and open, revealing a rectangle of blackness.

Barris propped the ladder against the inner lip of this opening and said, “Go up first.”

“I will not,” I said.

He lit another match and I could see white teeth flash in the center of that dark beard. Anyone who saw those healthy teeth would know that Reginald Barris with his Cambridge accent was no true resident of these New Court in Bluegate Fields sad streets. “Very well then,” he said softly. “I shall go up first and light another match there. I have a small police bullseye in my pocket—next to your pistol. When you come up, I shall light that lantern. Trust me, sir, it is perfectly safe up there. But it shall not be safe for you if you try to flee back down those stairs and I have to descend to catch up with you.”

“Still the ruffian, I see,” I said contemptuously.

Barris laughed easily. “Oh, yes,” he said. “More than you could imagine, Mr Collins.”

He scrambled up the ladder and I could see the glow of a match flare in the darkness above. For a second I considered throwing down the ladder and then running for the hall and stairway. But I could feel Barris’s terrible grip firm on the top of the ladder and I remembered the strength with which he had propelled me across that plank bridge and then up the stairs.

Awkwardly—for I had continued to put on weight through the preceding year—I made my way up the ladder and then onto my knees in the musty-smelling dark above and then, shaking off the detective’s helping hands, to my feet. He lit the lantern.

Immediately in front of me loomed the ebony jackal-face of the god Anubis. I wheeled. Less than six feet away, a seven-foot-tall statue of Osiris stared down at me. The god was properly dressed in white with his tall white hat and carried his requisite crook and flail.

“This way,” said Barris.

We made our way down the centre of what had once been a long attic. There were more tall statues set under the eaves on either side. To my left was Horus with the head of a hawk; to my right was Seth with his animal head and long, curved snout. We walked between ibis-headed Thoth and Bastet with her cat’s face and ears. I could see where the sagging floor here had been reinforced by recent carpentry. Even the ceilings in the niches where the gods resided had been altered, built up like dormers so that the statues of the gods could stand upright.

“They’re plaster of paris,” said Barris, his lantern beam flashing back and forth as he led me farther down the length of the attic. “Even with the rebuilt floors here, stone effigies would crash through.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. “What is all this?”

At the end of the attic there was a square door where Barris pulled aside a piece of canvas that kept the weather and pigeons out. The frame around this relatively new doorway was made of fresh wood. Lightning illuminated the opening and the thick night air flowed in and around us like some foul syrup. From the sill of this door, a single plank—not more than ten inches wide—ran a dozen feet or more to a dark opening on the opposite side of an alley fifty or sixty feet below. The wind had come up ahead of the approaching storm, and the door canvas flapped with the sound of a raptor’s heavy wing.