Dan Simmons - Drood

I shook my head and sighed. “And this is what you wanted to apologise to me about, Charles? Lying to me about Drood? Staging such a farce with the crypts and gondola? Not telling me about how—you believe—Detective Hatchery died?” I thought of the many times I had seen Drood, talked to Inspector Field about Drood, listened to Detective Barris talk about Drood, seen Edmond Dickenson after his conversion to Drood, and seen Drood’s minions in Undertown and his temples in Overtown. I had seen a note from Drood and seen Drood himself sitting and talking with Dickens in my own house. Dickens’s simple lie on this beautiful Sunday was not going to make me believe that I was mad.

“No,” he said, “that is not what I want to chiefly apologise for, although it is a subsidiary element of my larger apology. Wilkie, do you remember that first day you came to my home and office after the Staplehurst accident?”

“Of course. You told me all about your initial encounter with Drood.”

“Before that. When you first came into the room. Do you remember what I was doing and what we talked about?”

I had to work to recall this, but eventually I said, “You were fiddling with your watch and we talked for a moment about mesmerism.”

“I mesmerised you then, my dear Wilkie.”

“No, Charles, you did not. Can you not recall that you said you would like to and began to swing your watch, but that I simply waved it all away? You yourself agreed that my will was too strong to submit to magnetic control of any sort. And then you put away the watch and told me about the Staplehurst accident.”

“Yes, I said that your will was too strong to be mesermised, Wilkie, but that was after ten minutes of having you in a mesmeric trance.”

I laughed aloud at this. What game is he playing here? I adjusted my hat brim to keep the bright sun out of my eyes. “Charles, now you are lying… but to what purpose?”

“It was a sort of experiment, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He was literally hanging his head in a way that reminded me of Sultan. If I’d had his shotgun right then, I would have dealt with Dickens precisely the way that Dickens had dealt with Sultan.

“Even then,” continued Dickens, “even then, I had some vague notions of writing a novel in which a man carries out certain… actions… while under an incredibly extended period of mesmeric post-trance suggestion. I confess that I was especially interested in how such a suggestion of belief would affect a creative artist. That is, someone with a well-honed professional imagination to begin with and—I confess even more—such a creative person, a writer, who was, even then, using large quantities of opium, since opium was to be a leit motif in the mystery tale I had in mind.”

Here I not only laughed but I slapped my leg. “Very good! Oh, very good, Charles! And you’re telling me that you simply commanded me—via your mesmeric control—to believe in the Drood tale that you then told me when you awoke me from the trance?”

“I did not command such belief,” Dickens said morosely. “I merely suggested it.”

I patted both knees with both hands. “Oh, very good. And now you will tell me that you made up the entire idea of our friend Drood from whole cloth, using that incredible Charles Dickens imagination and love of the macabre!”

“Not at all,” said Dickens. He looked towards the west and I could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. “I had dreamt of Drood the night before—dreamt of the creature moving amongst the dead and dying at Staplehurst, just as I described to you, my dear Wilkie, mixing and interweaving the fantasy of Drood with the horror of the real experience.”

I could not keep from smiling broadly. I removed my spectacles, mopped my brow with a paisley handkerchief, and shook my head in admiration of the audacity of what he was telling me and of the game he was playing. “So now you say that you dreamt Drood into existence.”

“No,” said Dickens. “I had first heard the legend of Drood from Inspector Charles Frederick Field more than a decade before Staplehurst. Why I interwove the old inspector’s obsessive fantasy into my nightmare about what happened at Staplehurst, I shall never know.”

“ Field’s fantasy?” I cried. “Now it is Inspector Field who invented Drood!”

“Before you and I first met, my dear Wilkie. You remember that I did a series of essays on crime and the city that were published by my old magazine Household Words as far back as eighteen fifty-two. I was actually introduced to Inspector Field by other actors who had known Field when he had been an amateur actor at the old Catherine Street Theatre more than a decade earlier. But it was indeed Police Detective Charles Frederick Field, during our long walks through the night streets of the Great Oven back in the early eighteen fifties, who told me about the spectre in his mind whom he called Drood.”

“Spectre,” I repeated. “You are telling me that Inspector Field was insane.”

“Not at first, I believe,” said Dickens. “I later spoke to many of his colleagues and superiors in the Detective Bureau about this—as well as with the man who succeeded Field as Chief of Detectives when the inspector actually did break down.”

“Broke down because of Drood,” I said sarcastically. “Because of Field’s fantasy about an Egyptian occultist killer named Drood.”

“Yes. At first it was not a fantasy. There were a series of incredible murders about the time that Charles Frederick Field was becoming Chief of Detectives—all were unsolved. Some seemed to relate to cases that Inspector Field had been unable to solve in earlier years. Some of the Lascars and Malays and Chinamen and Hindoos that the police dragged in at the time tried to blame a spectral figure called Drood—the details were always hazy, but consistent at least on the basics that this monster was Egyptian, was a serial-murderer, could control other people by the powers of his mind and by the rituals of his ancient cult, and that he lived in some vast temple underground—or, according to some of the opium-eating villains, in a temple beneath the Thames itself.”

“Shall we walk back?” I said.

“Not yet, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He set his trembling hand upon my forearm for a moment but pulled it away when he saw my glare. “Do you see, though,” he went on, “how this became first an obsession with Field, then a fantasy? According to the many policemen and detectives I later spoke to, including Hatchery, it was when Lord Lucan was murdered so foully while under Charles Frederick Field’s personal protection, and the identity of the murderer never discovered that… what is funny, Wilkie?”

I simply could not stop laughing. This story, this plot, was so wonderfully baroque yet somehow so tidily logical. It was so, so… Dickensian.

“It was his fantasy about this make-believe master criminal, Drood, that eventually cost Field his job and then his pension,” said Dickens. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field simply could not believe that the terrible crimes which he saw and had reported to him every day of his working life could be so random… so meaningless. In his increasingly confused mind, there had to be a single master criminal behind all the terror and misery he saw and experienced. A single villain. A master criminal nemesis worthy of him, of the great Inspector Charles Frederick Field. And a nemesis who was not really human, but who—when caught (by Inspector Charles Frederick Field, of course)—would bring an end to the literally endless series of brutalities that he was spending his life observing.”

“So you are saying,” I said, “that the respected former Chief of Detectives whom we both knew, Charles Frederick Field, was insane by the end.”