Dan Simmons - Drood

Many dead bodies lay uncollected in the poorest streets of this Great Oven, decomposing next to the rotting garbage that also was never picked up. Not just trickles and rivulets but actual rivers of raw sewage flowed down these streets past and through the garbage and dead bodies, sometimes finding a sewer opening but more often simply accumulating in puddles and ponds that mottled the cobblestones. This brown water flowed into basements, accumulated in cellars, contaminated wells, and always ended up—sooner or later—in the Thames.

Shops and industry shovelled out tons of hides, flesh, boiled bones, horse meat, catgut, cow hooves and heads and guts, and other organic detritus every day. It all went to the Thames or was stacked up in giant piles along the banks of the Thames, waiting to go into the water. Shops and homes along the river sealed their windows and soaked their blinds with chloride, and the city officials dumped ton after ton of lime into the Thames. Pedestrians walked with perfume-soaked handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses. It did not help. Even carriage horses—many of which would soon die from the heat and add to the problem—vomited from the smell.

The air this steaming July night was almost green with the heated effusions of three million human beings’ excrement and the effluvia of the urban and industrial slaughter that was the hallmark of our era. Dear Reader, perhaps it is worse in your day, but I confess I do not see how.

Dickens had sent a note for me to meet him at eight PM at the Blue Posts tavern on Cork Street, where he would host me to a meal. The note also told me to wear serious boots for a “late-night excursion related to our friend Mr D.”

Even though I had been feeling indisposed earlier in the day—the gout often is aggravated by such heat—I arrived on time at the Blue Posts. Dickens threw his arms around me in the entrance to the tavern and cried out, “My dear Wilkie, I am so happy to see you! I have been terribly busy at Gad’s Hill these past weeks and have missed your company!” The meal itself was extensive, slow, and excellent, as were the ale and wine we enjoyed with it. The conversation was mostly from Dickens, of course, but was as animated and higgledy-piggledy as most conversations with the Inimitable. He said that he hoped to finish Our Mutual Friend by early September and that he had every confidence that the last numbers would boost sales of our All the Year Round.

After dinner we took a cab to a police station house in Leman Street.

“Do you remember Police Inspector Charles Frederick Field?” Dickens asked as our cab rumbled towards the police station.

“Of course,” I said. “Field was in the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. You spent time with him when you were obtaining background material for Household Words years ago, and he escorted us that time we toured the… ah… less appealing areas of Whitechapel.” I did not mention that I’d always felt sure that Dickens had used Inspector Field as his template for “Inspector Bucket” in Bleak House. The overly assured voice, the sense of easy dominance over obvious criminals and brigands and women of the street who had crossed our path that long night in Whitechapel, not to mention the big man’s ability to take one’s elbow in an iron grip one could not escape and which would then move one in directions one had not planned on going… all of Inspector Bucket’s rough skills had described the real Inspector Field to a “T,” as they say.

I said, “Inspector Field was our protective angel during our descent into Hades.”

“Precisely, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens as we exited the cab in front of the Leman Street police station. “And while Inspector Field has gone on to retirement and new endeavours, it is my sincerest pleasure to introduce you to our new protective angel.”

The man waiting for us there under the gas lamp outside the police station seemed more wall than man. Despite the heat, he wore a full coat—rather like the loose, long sort that Australian or American cowboys are so often shown wearing in illustrations for penny-dreadful novels—and his massive head was topped with a bowler hat set firmly on a mop of tight, curly hair. The man’s body was absurdly wide and stolidly square—a sort of granite pedestal to the square block of stone that was his head and face. His eyes were small, his nose a blunt rectangle seemingly carved out of the same stone as his face, and his mouth appeared to be little more than a thin sculpted line. His neck was as wide as the brim of his bowler. His hands were at least thrice the size of mine.

Charles Dickens stood five foot nine inches tall. I was several inches shorter than Dickens. This square hulk of a man in the grey cowboy duster looked to be at least eight inches taller than Dickens.

“Wilkie, please meet former sergeant Hibbert Aloysius Hatchery,” said Dickens, grinning through his beard. “Detective Hatchery, I am pleased to introduce my most valued associate and talented fellow writer and fellow seeker of Mr Drood this night, Mr Wilkie Collins, Esquire.”

“Pleasure, sir, indeed,” said the wall looming above us. “You may call me Hib if it pleases you, Mr Collins.”

“Hib,” I repeated stupidly. Luckily, the giant had merely tipped his bowler hat in greeting. The thought of that huge hand enveloping my own and crushing all the bones of my hand made me feel weak about the knees.

“My father, a wise man but not a learned one, if you follow my meaning, sir,” said Detective Hatchery, “was sure that the name Hibbert was in the Bible. But, alas, it weren’t. Not even as a resting place for the Hebrews in the wilderness.”

“Detective Hatchery was a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Force for several years but is currently on… ah… leave and is privately employed as an investigative detective,” said Dickens. “He may decide to rejoin Scotland Yard’s Detective Bureau in a year or so, but it appears that being privately employed pays more.”

“A privately employed detective,” I muttered. The idea had wonderful possibilities. I filed it away at that moment and the result—as perhaps you know, Dear Reader from my future, if I might be so immodest—would later become my novel The Moonstone. I said, “Are you on holiday, Detective Hatchery? Some form of police sabbatical?”

“In a way as you might say, sir,” rumbled the giant. “I was asked to take a year off because of irregularities in my treatment of a blackguard felonious sort in the pursuance of my duties, sir. The press made a row. My captain thought it might be better for the Bureau and myself if I went into private practice, a leave of absence as you might say, for a few months.”

“Irregularities,” I said.

Dickens patted me on the back. “Detective Hatchery, in arresting the aforementioned blackguard—a presumptuous daytime burglar who specialised in preying upon elderly ladies right here in Whitechapel— accidentally snapped the worthless thief’s neck. Strangely, the thief lived, but now has to be carried around in a basket by his family. No loss to the community and all a proper part of the job, as Inspector Field and others in the profession have assured me, but some of the oversensitive Punch group, not to mention the lesser newspapers, decided to make a fuss. So it is our great fortune that Detective Hatchery is free to escort us into the Great Oven tonight!”

Hatchery removed a bullseye lantern from beneath his coat. The lantern seemed like a pocket watch in his huge hand. “I shall follow you, gentlemen, but will endeavour to remain silent and invisible unless called upon or needed.”

IT HAD RAINED while Dickens and I were dining, but it only served to make the hot night air around us thicker. The Inimitable led the way, setting his usual absurd walking pace—never less than four miles per hour, which he could maintain hour after hour, I knew from painful experience—and once again I struggled to keep up. Detective Hatchery flowed along ten paces behind us like a silent wall of solidified fog.