Dan Simmons - Drood

“I’m not crossing that,” I said.

“You have to,” said Barris. He seized me under the arm and lifted me onto the sill and then shoved me out onto the board. With his other hand, he aimed the lantern to illuminate the impossibly narrow wooden plank. The wind threatened to topple me off before I took a single step.

“Go!” he ordered and shoved me out over the fatal drop. The beam disappeared for a moment and I realised that Barris was half-crouching on the plank and securing the canvas on nails behind us.

Holding my arms straight to either side, my heart racing, I set one foot in front of the other and shuffled forward like some circus clown preceding the real acrobats. Lightning flashed somewhere nearby and the following roll of thunder struck me like a giant open palm. The rising wind flipped my cape over my face when I was halfway across the impossible plank bridge.

Then somehow I found myself at the opposite window, but the canvas here was as taut as a drum’s skin—I couldn’t get in. I crouched fearfully and clung to the half-inch of wood frame around the opening, feeling the plank beneath us spring up and down and begin to slide—and slip off the sill—as Barris came up behind me.

His broad arm reached over my shoulder (if I had moved a muscle then, we would have both fallen to our deaths), his free hand fumbled with some opening in the canvas, and then the pitching lantern beam showed an opening. I threw myself forward into this second, larger attic.

Here waited Geb, the green-coloured god of Earth; Nut, with his crown of blue sky and golden stars; and Sekhmet, the god of destruction, his lion’s jaws open wide in a roar. Holy Ra was nearby with his falcon’s head, Hathor with the cow horns, Isis with a throne on her head, Amun crowned with feathers… they were all there.

I realised that my legs were so weak I could no longer stand. I sat on the path of fresh planks that ran down the centre of this larger attic. A new window, round, at least twelve feet in diameter, had been set into what I guessed was the Thames-facing southern rooftop, the circle of glass and wood placed directly above a wooden altar. The window was well constructed with thick, quality leaded glass not yet warped by gravity and there were metal circles within circles set into the glass much as I had always imagined some exotic gun sight on a naval ship.

“That points at the Dog Star, Sirius,” said Barris, who had secured the canvas and turned off his lantern. The nearly constant lightning display was enough to illuminate this large attic space now empty except for us, the Gods of the Black Lands, and the black-linen-draped altar. “I don’t know why Sirius is so important to their rituals—I dare say you may, Mr Collins—but one finds such a window aligned properly with that star in all their London attic nests.”

“Nests?” My voice sounded as stunned as I felt. The scarab was so excited that it was tunnelling ragged circles through the riddled grey matter that passed for my brain in those days. The pain was excruciating. My eyeballs felt as if they were slowly filling with blood.

“Drood’s followers have attic nests like this all over London,” said Barris. “Dozens of them. And some of them connect half a dozen or more attics.”

“So London has an Overtown as well as an Undertown,” I said.

Barris ignored that. “This nest has been abandoned for some weeks,” he said. “But they’ll be back.”

“Why have you brought me here? What do you want?”

Barris lit his lantern again and shined the bullseye beam on part of the wall and steep ceiling. I saw birds, eyeballs, wavy lines, more birds… what my clark friend at the British Museum called “hieroglyphics.”

“Can you read this?” asked Barris.

I started to answer and then realised, to my deep shock, that I could read the picture-words and phrases. “And Djewhty came forth! Djewhty, whose words became Ma’at…”

It was part of a ritual for naming and blessing a newborn child. And the words had been carved into the rotting wood of the ceiling, not painted on, just above a statue of Ma’at—the goddess of Justice—who stood there with a feather in her hair.

I said, “Of course I cannot read this gibberish. I am no museum docent. What are you asking?”

To this day, I believe this lie saved my life that night.

Barris expelled a breath and seemed to relax. “I thought not, but there are so many who have become slaves and servants of Drood.…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you remember the last night we saw each other, Mr Collins?”

“How could I forget? You murdered an innocent child. When I turned to remonstrate, you brutally clubbed me on the head—you might have killed me! I was unconscious for days. For all I know, you were trying to kill me.”

Barris was shaking his dirty, bearded head. His expression, what I could see of it through the grime and wild hair, seemed sad. “That was no innocent child, Mr Collins. That Wild Boy was an agent of Drood. He was no longer human. If he had escaped to tell of our presence there, Drood’s hordes would have fallen on us there in that sewer within minutes.”

“That’s absurd,” I said coldly.

I could see Barris smile so broadly that the image remained in my retina during the intervals between lightning crashes. “Is it, Mr Collins? Is it indeed? You do not know, then—for which I am particularly grateful—about the brain-beetles.”

Suddenly my mouth was very dry. I forced myself not to wince as there came a stab of pincer-pain from behind my right eye. Fortunately, a solid wall of thunder ended conversation and gave me a moment to recover. “The what?” I managed to ask.

“Brain-beetles is what Inspector Field and I called them,” said Barris. “Drood inserts these Egyptian insects—actually, English ones trained to his heathen Egyptian ways—into the bodies and brains of his slaves and converts. Or he makes them think he’s done so. It’s all actually a result of his mesmerising them, of course. They obey him for years in a sort of post-mesmeric trance, and he reinforces that control at every opportunity. The brain-beetles are the mesmerising symbol of that control to the victim.”

“That’s pure poppycock,” I said loudly between thunder crashes. “I happen to have researched mesmerism and the magnetic arts most extensively. It is impossible to control someone at a distance and over a long period of time as you suggest—much less enslave them to such a delusion as this… brain-beetle.”

“Is it?” asked Barris. I could see in the flickering light that the blackguard was still smiling, but it was a terrible and ironic smile now. “You were not there, Mr Collins, to see the horror that occurred in Undertown an hour after I clubbed you down—for which I do apologise, sir, most sincerely, but I thought you were one of them at the moment, a beetle-controlled agent of Drood.”

“What horror occurred after you clubbed me into insensibility, Detective Barris?”

“It isn’t ‘detective’ for me any longer, Mr Collins. That title and occupation are lost forever to me. And what happened, sir, some few hours after you were carried up and out of Undertown, was an ambush and slaughter, sir.”

“You exaggerate,” I said.

“Is nine good men dead an exaggeration, sir? We were hunting for Drood’s lair, Drood’s Temple, and, of course, Drood… but all the time he was drawing us deeper and deeper into his trap.”

“That is absurd,” I said. “You must have had two hundred men there that night.”

“One hundred and thirty-nine, Mr Collins. Almost all of them policemen away from duty at the time or former policemen, and almost all of them men who had known Hibbert Hatchery and who had come down with us to catch his killer. There were fewer than twenty of us who knew just what a monster Drood actually is—no normal killer, not a human being at all—and five of those men died at Drood’s killer-slaves’ hands that night. Those scores of thugs and Thuggees who were controlled by those magnetic-influence brain-beetles that you say don’t exist. And the inspector was murdered the next day.”