Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens had always been the boy who led the other boys in play. He never doubted that this was his role in life and he never relinquished that role as an adult.

But what game would we be pursuing if Dickens and I actually sought out this Mr Drood figure? What purpose would it serve other than to gratify yet another boyish impulse of Charles Dickens’s? And what dangers would be involved? The neighbourhoods that Drood had allegedly mentioned to Dickens as they descended the railway grade to the carnage below were anything but safe areas of London. They were indeed, as Dickens called them— the Great Oven.

I WAS IN great PAIN from the rheumatical gout as I arrived home.

The light from the street gas lamps hurt my eyes. My own footfalls struck my brain like chisel blows. The rumble of a passing waggon made my entire body twitch with pain. I was trembling. A sudden, bitter taste of coffee filled my mouth—not an echo of the coffee I had enjoyed with dessert, but something far more vile. There was a confusion in my mind and a nauseating sickness permeating my body.

Our new home was at Melcombe Place; we had moved from Harley Street a year earlier, partly because of the greater income and literary position that The Woman in White had afforded me. (For my next novel, No Name, I received more than £3,000 for book publication and a guaranteed £4,500 if British or American serialisation was included.)

When I say “our” or “we” I refer to the woman I had been living with for some years, a certain Caroline G— and her then fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, whom we often called Carrie. (There was a rumour that Caroline was my model for The Woman in White —and it is true that I had encountered her running away from a blackguard in the night outside a villa in Regents Park and, running after her, later rescued her from the streets much as was the case with the character in my novel—but I had conceived the idea for The Woman in White long before I met Caroline.)

But Caroline and Harriet were away this week, visiting a cousin in Dover, and—with our two real servants also gone this night (I admit to listing Caroline’s daughter as a “maid-servant” on our annual tax role census at this time)—I had the house to myself. It was true that not too many miles from this home was another house with another woman in it—a certain Martha R—, a former hotel servant in Yarmouth, now visiting London for the first time and with whom I also hoped to live in a comfortable domestic circumstance in the future, but I had no intention of visiting Martha tonight or any time soon. I hurt too much.

The house was dark. I found the jar of laudanum where I kept it in a locked cupboard and drank two glasses, then sat at the servants’ table in the kitchen for several minutes, waiting for the worst of the pain to pass.

The physik soon did its work. I felt renewed, re-energised, and deciding that I would go up to my study on the first floor and write for an hour or two before turning in, I went up the closest stairway.

The back stairway, the servants’ stairway, was very steep and the flickering gaslight at the first-storey landing worked poorly, casting but the smallest circle of doubtful light, leaving the rest of the stairs in deepest darkness.

Something moved in that darkness above me.

“Caroline?” I called, knowing that it would not be she. Nor would it be one of the servants. Our maid-servant’s father had come down with pneumonia and they were in Wales.

“Caroline?” I called again, expecting—and receiving—no answer.

The noise, obvious now as a silk dress rustling, descended the dark stairway from the attic above. I could hear the careful placement of small bare feet in the darkness there.

I fumbled with the light on the wall, but the uncertain jet only flared and faded again, returning to its low flickering.

She stepped into the distant perimeter of ebbing and flowing light then, a mere three steps above me. She looked as she always did—wearing an aged green silk dress with a high bodice. On the dark green silk were tiny gold fleurs-de-lis that descended in constellations to her black-banded waist.

Her hair was drawn up in a bun from a previous era. Her skin was green—the green of very old cheese or of a moderately decomposed corpse. Her eyes were solid pools of black ink that glistened moistly in the lamplight. Her teeth—when her mouth opened as it did now as if to greet me—were long and yellow and curved like tusks.

I had no illusions as to her purpose on the stairs. She wished to grab me and fling me down the long flight of steps. She preferred this back stairway to the wider, brighter, less dangerous front steps. She took two more steps down towards me, her yellow smile widening.

Moving quickly but not in fear or great haste, I flung open the servants’ door to the first-storey landing, stepped through, and closed and locked the door behind me. I heard no breathing through the door—she did not breathe—but there was the faintest of scramblings at the wood, and the porcelain knob turned slightly and then shifted back.

I lighted all the lamps on the first storey. There was no one else here.

Breathing deeply, I undid my pin and collar and went into my study to write.

Three weeks passed and according to my brother, Charley (who, with his wife, Kate, Dickens’s daughter, was staying at Gad’s Hill Place), the author was slowly recovering from his terrible ordeal. He was working every day on Our Mutual Friend, meeting people for dinner, frequently disappearing—almost certainly to call on Ellen Ternan—and even performing readings for select groups. A reading by Charles Dickens was the most exhausting performance I have ever witnessed, and the fact that he was up to it, even if he collapsed afterwards, as Charley reported he frequently did, suggested the reservoirs of energy remaining in the man. It still bothered him to ride in a train but, Dickens being Dickens, he forced himself to travel into town by rail almost daily for precisely that reason. Charley reported that when there was the slightest vibration in the carriage, Dickens’s face would turn grey as flannel and great beads of sweat would pop out on the writer’s forehead and furrowed cheeks and he would fiercely grip the seat ahead of him, but with a sip of brandy he soldiered on, refusing to show any other sign of his inner turmoil. I was sure that the Inimitable had forgotten all about Drood.

But then, in July, the hunt for the phantom began in earnest.

This was the hottest, most feverish time of the hot, feverish summer. The excrement of three million Londoners stank in open sewers, including that greatest of our open sewers (despite this year’s engineering attempt to open an elaborate system of underground sewers)—the Thames. Tens of thousands of Londoners slept on their porches or balconies just waiting for rain. But when the rain fell, it was like a hot shower bath, simply adding a layer of wetness to the heat. July lay over London this summer like a heavy, wet layer of decomposing flesh.

Twenty thousand tons of horse manure per day were gathered from the reeking streets and dumped in what we politely and euphemistically called “dust heaps”—huge piles of feces that rose near the mouth of the Thames like an English Himalaya.

The overcrowded cemeteries around London also stank to high heaven. Grave diggers had to leap up and down on new corpses, often sinking to their hips in rotting flesh, just to force the reluctant new residents down into their shallow graves, these new corpses joining the solid humus of festering and overcrowded layers of rotting bodies below. In July, one knew immediately when one was within six city blocks of a cemetery—the reeking miasma drove people out of surrounding homes and tenements—and there was always a cemetery nearby. The dead were always beneath our feet and in our nostrils.