Dan Simmons - Drood

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Drood: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens — at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world — hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research… or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in
, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival),
explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work:
. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original,
is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.

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“As mad as a hatter,” said Dickens. “For many years. His idée fixe had become an obsession, the obsession a fantasy, the fantasy a nightmare from which he could not awaken.”

“It’s all very neat, Charles,” I said softly. This was such nonsense that it had not even caused my pulse to speed up. “But you forget the others who have seen Drood.”

“Which others?” Dickens asked softly. “Besides those thugs from decades ago and your mesmeric hallucinations, my dear Wilkie, I can think of no other instances of persons who ever believed in the Drood phantom—with the possible exception of Field’s son.”

“His son?”

“He had a boy out of wedlock by a young West Indies woman he had been seeing for some years. She lived not far from Opium Sal’s den that you and I got to know so well—you better than I, I believe. The inspector’s wife never learned of the woman (who died, I learned, shortly after childbirth, probably from an opium overdose) nor of the boy, but Field did right by the lad, paying to have him raised by a good family far from the docks, then sending him to fine public schools, and finally to Cambridge, or so I hear.”

“What was the boy’s name?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly very dry. I wished that I had brought water rather than laudanum in my flask.

“Reginald, I believe,” said Dickens. “I did enquire about him in the past year, but the young man seems to have disappeared after his father died. Perhaps he went to Australia.”

“And how do you think Inspector Charles Frederick Field died, Charles?”

“A heart attack, my dear Wilkie. Just as the papers reported. We have discussed that.”

I slid down from the stone and stood on legs that were tingling from lack of circulation. Not caring if Dickens watched, I drank deeply from my flask. “I need to get back,” I said thickly.

“Surely you will stay for dinner. Your brother and Katey are down for the weekend. Percy Fitzgerald and his wife are coming by and…”

“No,” I interrupted. “I have to get back to town. I need to work. I need to finish Man and Wife .”

Dickens had to use his cane to get to his feet. I could tell that his left foot and leg were putting him through agony, although he refused to show it. He took his watch and chain from his waistcoat.

“Let me mesmerise you, Wilkie. Now. At this moment.”

I took a step away from him. My laugh sounded frightened even to my own ears. “You have to be joking.”

“I have never been more serious, my dear friend. I had no idea when I mesmerised you in June of eighteen sixty-five that the post-trance suggestions would—or could—go on for so long. I underestimated both the power of opium and the power of a novelist’s imagination.”

“I do not wish to be mesmerised,” I said.

“I should have done it years ago,” said Dickens. His voice was also thick, as if he were close to weeping. “If you remember, my dear Wilkie, I tried to mesmerise you again on more than one occasion—so that I could cancel the mesmeric suggestions and have you wake from this endlessly constructed dream you’re in. I even tried to teach Caroline how to mesmerise you, giving her the single command code word I had implanted in your unconsciousness. Upon hearing that key word when you are in a mesmeric trance, you will awaken at long last from this extended dream.”

“And what is the command… the code word?” I asked.

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” said Dickens. “I chose a distinctive word you would not hear every day. But for it to work, you must be in mesmeric sleep.”

“ ‘Unintelligible,’ ” I repeated. “A word you said you used on the day of the Staplehurst accident.”

“I did use it then,” said Dickens. “It was my response to the horror.”

“I believe it is you who is mad, Charles,” I said.

He shook his head. He was weeping. The Inimitable, weeping in a grassy field in the sunlight. “I do not expect you to forgive me, Wilkie, but for God’s sake—for your own sake—let me put you under magnetic influence now and release you from this accidental curse I put upon you. Before it is too late!”

He took a step towards me, both arms raised, the watch in his right hand glinting goldly in the sunlight, and I took two steps backwards. I could only guess what his real game was, and all those guesses were dark indeed. Inspector Field had once said that this was all a chess game between himself and Drood. I had once seen it as a three-way game with Dickens. Now I had taken the inspector’s place as a player in this very real game of life or death.

“You really want to mesmerise me, Charles?” I said in a friendly and reasonable voice.

“I must, my dear Wilkie. It is the only way I can begin to make amends to you for what is the cruelest joke I have ever—however inadvertently—played on anyone. Just stand there and relax and I shall…”

“Not now,” I said, taking another step back but holding both palms out towards him in a calm, placating manner. “I am too disturbed and agitated to be a successful subject now anyway. But Wednesday night…”

“Wednesday night?” said Dickens. He suddenly seemed confused, battered, like a prizefighter who has gone rounds beyond his stamina but who is still standing out of sheer reflex, yet unable to protect himself from further blows. I watched him hop, using the cane, unable to put any weight on his obviously swollen and throbbing left foot and leg. “What is Wednesday night, Wilkie?”

“The secret outing you agreed to accompany me on,” I said softly. I stepped closer, took the watch from his hand—the metal was very hot—and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket for him. “You agreed to go with me on a short adventure during which I promised that we would solve at least two mysteries together. Remember the time we went to investigate that haunted house in Cheshunt?”

“Cheshunt,” repeated Dickens. “You and Wills went ahead in a brougham. John Hollingshead and I walked to the village.”

“Sixteen miles, if I remember correctly,” I said, patting his shoulder. “It was long ago.” Dickens was suddenly and irrevocably an old man.

“But we found no ghosts, Wilkie.”

“No, but we had a wonderful time, did we not? Great fun! And so we shall on this coming Wednesday night, the eighth of June. But you must tell no one that you are going with me.”

We had started walking back, Dickens hobbling painfully, but suddenly he stopped and looked at me. “I shall go on this… expedition… if you promise me, my dear Wilkie… if you promise me now, and give your word of honour… that you shall let me mesmerise you first thing that night. Mesmerise you and release you from this cruel delusion I foisted upon you through my sheer arrogance and lack of common sense.”

“I promise, Charles,” I said. And when he continued to stare, “Our first item of business shall be you mesmerising me and me helping you in that endeavour. You can say your magic word… ‘Unintelligible’… to your heart’s content and we shall see what happens. You have my word of honour.”

He grunted and we continued the slow hobble back towards Gad’s Hill Place. I had left the Swiss chalet in the company of a middle-aged man filled with guilt, creative energy, and enthusiasm for life. I was returning in the company of a dying cripple.

“Wilkie,” he muttered as we approached the shade of the trees. “Did I ever tell you about the cherries?”

“Cherries? No, Charles, I don’t believe you did.” I was listening to a confused old man gather wool, but I wanted to keep him moving, keep him hobbling forward. “Tell me about the cherries.”

“When I was a difficult London youth long ago… it must have been after the awful Blacking Factory… yes, definitely after the Blacking Factory.” He feebly touched my arm. “Remind me to tell you about the Blacking Factory someday, my dear Wilkie. I have never told anyone in my life the truth about the Blacking Factory in my childhood, although it was the most horrible thing that…” He seemed to drift off.

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