Dan Simmons - Drood

“From these garish lights,” he concluded, stepping slightly closer to the gaslights and to his silent (except for the soft weeping) audience, “I now vanish forevermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”

He limped from the stage then, but the relentless roars of applause brought him back one last time.

His cheeks wet with tears, Charles Dickens kissed his hand, waved, and then limped off the stage for the final time.

Walking back to Number 90 Gloucester Place through light showers that March night, a new unopened letter from Caroline Clow—more carefully detailed abuses, I was sure—in my pocket, I drank heavily from my silver flask.

Dickens’s public—that mob of public which I had seen and heard roar that very night—would, whenever that d— ned beloved writer of theirs finally chose to die, insist on having him buried in Westminster Abbey next to the great poets. I was now certain of that. They would get him there if they had to carry his corpse on their rough-wooled shoulders and dig the grave themselves.

I resolved to take a day off from my writing the next day—a Wednesday—and go to Rochester and visit the cathedral and seek out Mr Dradles and there make my final arrangements for Charles Dickens’s true demise and interment.

Ere is the block,” whispered Dradles, patting the face of a stone in the wall that looked like all the others in the gloom. “And ’ere the tool to ’andle ’er with.” In the weak lantern light, I saw him reach deep into his layers of flannel and moleskin and filthy canvas and bring out a pry bar as long as my forearm. “And ’ere on top, you see, the notch I chiselled in, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins, sir. Easy as the front door key to your very own ’ouse, you see.”

I could not really see the niche at the top of the block where it met the mortar, but the flat end of the pry bar found it. Dradles grunted rum fumes at me as he leaned all his weight on the upper part of the bar. The stone screamed.

I write “screamed,” Dear Reader, rather than “screeched” or “scraped” or “made a loud sound” because the noise this stone block made sliding back several inches out of its ancient place in the wall of the crypt was precisely that of a woman screaming.

I helped Dradles remove the surprisingly heavy block and set it on the dark, dank stones of the curving crypt stairs. The lantern showed a rectangular hole which I was sure was far too small for my purposes. When Dradles dropped the iron bar on the floor behind me, I confess I jumped several inches.

“Go on, lean ’n’ peer in, make your acquaintance wi’ the old ’uns there,” cackled the stonemason. He took another drink from his ever-present jug as I held the lantern to the aperture and attempted to peer inside.

From what I could see, it still looked too small for my purposes. Less than a foot of space separated this outer wall from the first inner wall of an old crypt, and although I could see that this narrow gap dropped a foot or two below the level of the outer walkway and floor where we crouched, much of this cavity stretching away on both sides of the hole we’d made was half-filled with broken stones, ancient bottles, and other rubbish.

I heard Dradles chuckle to my left. He must have seen my appalled expression in the lamplight.

“Y’er thinkin’ it’s too narrow, ain’t you, Mr Billy Wilkie Collins? But it ain’t. It’s perfect. Shove aside ’ere.”

I held the lantern as Dradles squat-walked forward. He patted his bulging pockets and suddenly there was an animal’s long leg bone in his right hand.

“Where did that come from?” I whispered.

“One of yer bigger test dogs in the lime pit, ’course. It’s me who does the rakin’ out there, now, in’t it? Now watch and learn.”

Dradles pushed the long canine femur or whatever it was sideways through the small aperture and tossed it in with a flick of his fingers. I heard it clatter on the rubbish below and several feet to one side.

“You could get a kennel ’o dogs’ skeletons in ’ere,” he said too loudly. “But it ain’t dogs we’re thinkin’ of to join the old ’uns with their crooks ’ere, is it?”

I said nothing.

Dradles patted at his layers of filthy, dusty garments again and suddenly he was holding a human skull missing only its jawbone.

“Who is… who was that?” I whispered. I hated it that my voice sounded like it was trembling in this narrow but echoing space.

“Oh, aye, names are important for the dead ’uns, though not for them, but for us quick ’uns, eh?” laughed Dradles. “Let us call ’im Yorick.”

Once again, the old man must have seen my expression in the lantern light, for he laughed loudly—the echo of that drunken bark coming back from groined vaults on the level above us and from the walls of the curved and descending staircase-corridor we were in and from unimagined rooms and tunnels and pits in the absolute darkness far below.

“Mr Billy Wilkie Collins mustn’t think that masons of stone don’t know and can’t recite the Bard,” whispered the old man. “’Ere, let us see the last of Poor Yorick.” And with that he fitted the skull carefully through the tight space, held it in one hand, and flicked it to the left and out of sight into the narrow cavity. The noise it made upon hitting the stone and bottles and rubbish below was memorable.

“Skulls is always the ’ardest part,” Dradles said happily. “Spines, e’en wi’ all the vertebrae intact, you can twist in like a petrified snake an’ it don’t matter if some o’ the parts chip off. Where the skull can go though, there can go the whole man. Or ten whole men. Or a ’undred. Seen enough, Mr Billy Wilkie?”

“Yes.”

“Be a good lad, then, and ’elp me lift this stone back in place. When you’re done wi’ your business down ’ere, you let old Dradles know and I’ll touch up the grout ’ere so no one can ever tell that this wall ain’t have been untouched since Noah’s day.”

Outside in the chilly March wind, I gave the old stonemason £300 in various-size bills. As I counted them out, Dradles’s long, dry tongue kept flicking out like a Galapagos lizard’s, licking his own dusty-stubbled cheeks and upper lip in startling pink-and-grey stabs.

“And there will be another hundred pounds each year,” I whispered. “As long as you live.”

He squinted at me. His voice, when he spoke, was much, much too loud. “Mr Billy Wilkie Collins ain’t thinkin’ that old Dradles’s silence ’as to be bought, now, does he? Dradles can be as silent as the next good man. Or the next bad ’un, for that matter. If one who’s done what you plan to do goes to thinkin’ about payin’ for silence, ’e might go to thinkin’ about doin’ more of what he done to make sure o’ that silence. That’d be a mistake, Mr Billy Wilkie. It surely would. I’ve told me apprentice all about this ’ere business and sworn ’im to keep silence on pain of death by Dradles’s wrath, but ’e knows, sir. ’E knows. An’ ’e would let others know if something untowards-like were to ’appen to his good, stalwart old Dradles.”

I thought a moment about his apprentice—an idiot deaf-mute, if I remembered correctly. But I said, “Nonsense. Think of it as an annuity. And annual payment in exchange for service and your investment in our common…”

“Dradles knows what an annuity is, sure as he knows ol’ Yorick we left back there was a man of infinite jest, young ’Oratio. Just let Dradles know when you wants the stone, which looks perfectly fine and old now, grouted and mortared up for all of ’ternity.” And with that he turned on his worn heel and walked away, touching his finger to what could have been a brim of what might have been a hat, without looking back.