Dan Simmons - Drood

My jaw sagged at this statement. “Murdered? Murdered? Don’t lie to me, Barris. I won’t have it. I know better than this. The Times of London—I have spoken to the reporters who did the obituary, sir—reported that Inspector Field died a natural death. He died in his sleep.”

“Oh? And were these reporters there that morning after he died to see the terror imprinted on the poor old man’s dead face, Mr Collins? I was there. I was the first person Inspector Field’s wife sent for when she found him dead. His open mouth and bulging eyes were not the expression of a man who died peacefully in his sleep from heart problems, Mr Collins. His eyes were filled with blood.”

I said, “I understand that a stroke of the brain can cause just such symptoms.”

The lightning flashed and there was no lag between the flash and thunder now. The storm was upon us. “And does a stroke of the brain leave a silken rope knotted twice, Mr Collins?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the calling card of the Hindoo Thuggee who smothered poor Charles Frederick Field in his sleep, sir. Or in this case, three or four Thuggees. One to hold the pillow over my employer and friend’s straining face and at least two—I would guess three, since Field was a powerful man despite his age—to hold him down as the noose was tightened. He died hard, Mr Collins. Very hard.”

I could think of nothing to say.

“And the inspector had seven full-time operatives, including me, working for his agency,” continued Barris. “These men—myself included—were some of the finest and most professional ex-policemen in all of England. Five have died under mysterious circumstances since January. The other has left his family and fled to Australia, the little good that will do him. Drood has agents in every port on Earth. I have survived only by going to ground here in Drood’s own foul turf—and I have still had to kill three of his assassins who’ve come at me in the past six months. When I sleep at all, I sleep with one eye open, I assure you, sir.”

As if remembering something, Barris reached into his pocket and handed Hatchery’s pistol back to me.

Scarab-pain flared behind my throbbing right eye and the thought occurred to me that I could shoot Barris this moment and his corpse would lie here undiscovered for weeks or months until Drood’s followers returned to this place. Would that earn me some sympathy with them?

Blinking with pain to the point of vertigo, I put the idiot weapon away in my cape-coat pocket.

“Why did you bring me here?” I rasped.

“To see, first of all, whether you had become… one of them,” said Barris. “My estimate is that you have not.”

“You did not have to drag me up to these filthy heathen attics to discover that,” I shouted over the thunder.

“Actually, I did,” said Reginald Barris. “But more importantly, I wanted to give you a warning.”

“I need no more warnings,” I said dismissively.

“This one is not for you, sir,” said Barris. For half a moment there was silence—the first long lack of thunder since we had left Opium Sal’s tenement—and the silence was somehow more terrifying than the preceding storm noises.

“It is for Charles Dickens,” continued Barris.

I had to laugh. “You said that Dickens met with Drood this morning before dawn. If he’s one of Drood’s… what did you call them?… beetle-slaves already, what could he have to fear?”

“I believe he is not a slave, Mr Collins. I believe that your friend has made some sort of Faustian deal with Drood—of what particular nature, I cannot guess.”

I remembered Dickens once telling me that he had promised to write Drood’s biography, but this was too silly even to consider, much less mention.

“At any rate,” continued Barris, who suddenly looked exhausted under his scrim of dirt, “I learned from one of the assassins that Drood sent after me that Dickens will die in eighteen seventy.”

“I thought you killed all the assassins Drood sent after you,” I said.

“I did, Mr Collins. Indeed I did. But I urged two of them to talk to me before they shuffled off their mortal coils.”

The thought of this made my skin grow clammy. I said, “Eighteen seventy is a year away.”

“Actually just a little over six months away, sir. The assassin did not tell me when in the year they would move against Mr Dickens.”

At that instant and as if on theatrical cue, the storm struck with full ferocity. We both flinched as rain suddenly pounded the old shingles just above us with incredible force. Barris’s relit lantern beam danced wildly over the walls as he leaped back and then caught his balance. I saw a blur of the carved hieroglyphics and somehow my scarab or mind translated— “… give soundness to our limbs, O Isis, and be the charm which shall ensure our justification in the Judgement soon to come.”

I WAS DRENCHED by the time I got home. Carrie met me in the foyer, and I noticed that she was still fully dressed, not in her robe, at such a late hour and that she looked concerned.

“What is it, my dear girl?”

“There is a man here to see you. He arrived before nine PM and has insisted on waiting all this time. If George and Besse had not been home, I never would have let him in—his countenance is fearful—and he did not have a card. But he said it was urgent.…”

Drood, I thought. I was too tired even to feel fear. “There is nothing to be alarmed about, Carrie,” I said softly. “Probably some tradesman after a bill we forgot to pay. Where did you put him?”

“He asked if he could wait in your study. I said yes.”

D— n, I thought. The last place I wanted Drood was in my study. But I patted her cheek and said, “You go on up to bed now, that’s a good girl.”

“May I hang up your coat for you?”

“No, I want to leave it on for a while,” I said, not explaining to Carrie why I would want to keep on the thoroughly soaked-through cheap cape-coat.

“Won’t you be wanting any dinner? I had cook make your favourite French beef before she went home.…”

“I’ll find it and warm it myself, Carrie. Now you go on up for the night. I’ll call George if I need anything.”

I waited until her footsteps had faded up the main stairway and then went down the hall and through the parlour and opened the doors to my study.

Mr Edmond Dickenson, Esquire, was sitting not in the leather guest’s chair but behind my desk. He was insolently smoking one of my cigars and his feet were up on an opened lower drawer.

I went in and closed the doors tightly behind me.

In early October, Dickens invited me to spend a few days at Gad’s Hill during the Fieldses’ last visit there before they returned to Boston. It had been some time since I had been invited to spend the night at Dickens’s home. In truth, after Dickens’s show of support at my March premiere of Black and White, intercourse between us had been somewhat rare and decidedly formal (especially in comparison to our intimacy of earlier years). While we continued to sign our letters “affectionately yours,” there seemed to be little affection left on either side.

As I travelled to Gad’s Hill, I stared out the railway carriage window and wondered both about the real reasons for the Inimitable’s invitation and also what I might tell him that would surprise him. I rather enjoyed surprising Dickens.

I could have described my Overtown excursion four months earlier on 9 June while he and Fields and Dolby and Eytinge went slum-hopping under the protection of their policeman, but that would have been too much of a revelation. (And I had no excuse for following them through the first part of that night.)