Dan Simmons - Drood

In my writing, I have had—upon a few occasions—to use that ugly French term coup de grâce —and for some reason I always have trouble remembering how to spell it. But I have no trouble remembering of what it consists—the final shot must be to the brain, to be certain.

And there is only one bullet left in Hatchery’s pistol.

Going to one knee, I set the lantern down and crouch next to the Inimitable, the creator of fools such as the Dedlocks and the Barnacles and the Dombeys and Grewgious, but also of such villains and parasites and dark souls as the Fagins and Artful Dodgers and Squeerses and Casbys and Slymes and Pecksniffs and Scrooges and Vholeses and Smallweeds and Weggs and Fledgebys and Bumbles and Lammles and Hawks and Fangs and Tiggs and…

I set the muzzle of Hatchery’s heavy gun hard against the moaning Charles Dickens’s temple. I realise that I am holding my empty left hand up as a sort of shield to protect my own face from the spatter of skull shards, blood, and brain matter that will erupt in a second or two.

Dickens is mumbling, trying to speak.

“Unintelligible…” I hear him moan. Then, “Wake up… awaken… Wilkie, wake…”

The poor deluded b— d is trying to wake himself from what he must think is a terrible nightmare. Perhaps this is how we are all dragged out of this life, moaning and grimacing and praying to an absent and unfeeling God that we might wake up.

“Awake…” he says, and I pull the trigger.

It is done. The brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers is now spread across the edge of the lime pit in a grey-and-red line of slime that looks oily in the moonlight. Only the shattered bits of skull look white.

Even with his helpful warning, I almost forget to take his gold and other metal possessions before rolling the corpse into the pit.

I hate touching him and try to touch only fabric, which is possible in getting the watch, the flask, the coins in his pocket, and the pin, but for the rings and studs, I am forced to make contact with his cooling flesh.

I light the shielded bullseye lantern for this final operation and notice—with some small satisfaction—that my hand is steady as I strike the match and set it to the wick. I’ve brought a rolled-up burlap bag in my outside jacket pocket and now set all the metal objects in it, making sure not to drop anything into the high grass here near the pit.

Finally I am finished and set the sack away in my bulging pocket next to the pistol. I will have to remind myself to stop at the nearby river and throw all those things—pistol and sack—into the deep water there.

Dickens lies sprawled in the impossibly unselfconscious attitude known only to the dead. Standing with my booted foot on his bloodied chest, I consider saying some words but decide not to. There are times when words are superfluous, even to a writer.

It takes more effort than I have imagined, but after several strong shoves with my boot and a final kick, Dickens rolls once and slides into the quick-lime. Left to its own devices, the body would have half-floated and remained visible until daylight arrives, but I fetch the long iron pole that I have set away in the weeds for this night and push and poke and lean my weight into it—it feels rather like pressing a rod down into a large bag of soft suet—until the body goes under the surface and stays under the surface.

Then, holding the lamp close just long enough to check that I have no blood or other incriminating material on my person, I douse the light and walk back to the road to summon the waiting sailor-driver and coach. I whistle a soft tune as I walk through the glowing headstones. Perhaps, I think, it is the same tune that Dickens whistled under his breath just a few minutes earlier.

AWAKEN! WILKIE… wake up! Awake.”

I moaned, rolled, thrust my forearm over my forehead, but managed to open one eye. My head pounded with a laudanum-morphia headache that sang of overdose. Thin moonlight painted random stripes across furniture in my bedroom. And across a face mere inches from mine.

The Other Wilkie was sitting on the edge of my bed. He had never come so close before… never.

He spoke.

His voice this time was not my voice, nor even an altered imitation of my voice. It was the voice of an old, querulous woman, the voice of one of the Weird Sisters in the opening scene of Macbeth.

He or she touched my bare arm and it was not the touch of a living being.

“Wilkie…” he/she breathed at me, the bearded face almost touching mine. His breath—my breath—stank of carrion. “Kill him. Wake up. Listen to me. Finish your book… before June ninth. Finish Man and Wife quickly, next week. And on the day you finish it, kill him.”

In response to my letter replying to his “Perhaps you may be glad to see me by and by. Who knows?” overture, Dickens invited me down to Gad’s Hill Place on the fifth of June, a Sunday. I sent word that I would be there by three PM, after the Inimitable’s usual Sunday writing time, but actually took an earlier train and walked the last mile or so.

The beauty of the June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing. A few white puffy clouds moved like aerial sheep above the green and rolling hills inland, but towards the water there was only more blue, more sunshine. The air was so clear that one could see the towers of London from twenty miles away. The farmlands beyond my carriage window and on either side of the dusty road as I walked the last mile or so were busy with playful little calves, running colts, and the occasional cluster of rural human children intent upon whatever games such a species pursues in early-summer fields and forests. It was almost enough to make a confirmed city-dweller such as myself want to buy a farm—but a jolt of laudanum followed by some brandy from a second, smaller flask cured that idiot’s passing impulse.

No one greeted me at the drive of Gad’s Hill Place this day, not even the pair of sentry dogs—sired by that assassinated Grendel-of-dogs, Sultan, I was sure—that Dickens usually kept chained there by the entrance pillars.

The red geraniums (still Dickens’s favourite flower, the annuals faithfully planted by the author’s gardeners every spring and left, at his command, as late into the autumn as possible) were everywhere—along the drive, in the sunny section near the bow windows outside Dickens’s office in the main house, paralleling the hedges, out along the road—and, as always and for reasons I did not yet understand, I recoiled from their serried ejaculations of red blotches with a sense of real horror.

Guessing that Dickens might be in his chalet on such a perfect day, I went down through the cool tunnel—although there was almost no traffic on the highway above it—and emerged near the outside stairway that led up to the first-storey office.

“Halloa the bridge!” I called up.

“Halloa the approaching sloop,” came down Dickens’s strong voice.

“Permission to come aboard?”

“What is the name of your ship, sirrah? And where are you from and where are you bound?”

“My poor barque is called the Mary Jane, ” I called back up the staircase, putting on my best attempt at an American accent. “Set sail from Saint Looee and bound for Calcutta, by way of Samoa and Liverpool.”