Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens paused by what had once been a broad window but which now, with all the glass gone, was merely a ledge and black hole in the blinded side of a black building.

“Hatchery,” he cried, “your lamp.”

The cone of light from the bullseye lantern illuminated three pale, whitish, indistinct lumps on the broken stone sill. For a moment I was sure that three skinned rabbits had been left there. I stepped closer and then stepped quickly back, raising my handkerchief to my nose and mouth.

“Newborns,” said Hatchery. “The one in the middle was stillborn, is my guess. The two others died shortly after birth. Not triplets. Born and died different times from the look of the maggots and rat nibblings and other signs.”

“Dear God,” I said through my handkerchief. Bile rose high in my throat. “But why… leave them here?”

“’Ere’s as good a place as any,” said the detective. “Some of the mothers try to bury ’em. Dress ’em up in what rags they may have. Put little caps on ’em before dropping the wee things into the Thames or burying ’em in the courtyards ’ere. Most don’t bother. They ’ave to get back to work.”

Dickens turned towards me. “Still tempted by the wench who wanted to take you inside for ‘bacca,’ Wilkie?”

I did not answer. I took another step back and concentrated on not vomiting.

“I’ve seen this before, Hatchery,” said Dickens, his voice strangely flat, calm, and conversational. “Not just here in the Great Oven during my walks, but as a young child.”

“Have you indeed, sir?” said the detective.

“Yes, many times. When I was very young, before we moved from Rochester to London, we had a servant girl named Mary Weller who would take me with her, my tiny hand trembling in her large calloused one, to countless lyings-in. So many that I have often wondered if my true profession should not have been that of midwife. More often than not, the babies died, Hatchery. I remember one terrible multiple birth—the mother did not survive either—where there were five dead infants—I believe it was five, as astounding as that sounds, although I was very young, it might have been four—all laid out side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers. You know what I thought of at my tender age of four or five, Hatchery?”

“What, sir?”

“I thought of pigs’ feet the way they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop,” said Charles Dickens. “It’s hard not to think of Thyestes’ feast when encountering such an image.”

“Indeed, sir,” agreed Hatchery. I was sure the detective had no idea of the classical reference to which Dickens was referring. But I did. Again the bile and vomit rose in my throat and threatened to explode.

“Wilkie,” Dickens said sharply. “Your handkerchief, if you please.”

After a pause, I handed it over.

Taking out his own larger, more expensive silk handkerchief, Dickens carefully laid both cloths over the three rotting and partially eaten infant bodies, weighting down the ends with loose bricks from the broken sill.

“Detective Hatchery,” he said, already turning away, his walking cane clicking on stone, “you shall see to the disposition?”

“Before daybreak, sir. You may count on it.”

“I am sure we can,” said Dickens, lowering his head and holding his top hat as we stepped through another aperture into yet an even darker, smaller, more pestilential courtyard. “Come, come, Wilkie. Keep up to the light.”

The open doorway, when we finally reached it, was no more distinguished than the last three dozen shadowy doorways we had passed. Just inside, shielded from view from without, set into its own deep niche, was a small blue lantern. Detective Hatchery grunted and led the way up the narrow black stairs.

The first-storey landing was dark. The next flight of stairs was narrower than the first, though not quite as dark, since there was the dim glow of a single fluttering candle above us on the next landing. The air was so thick here, the heat so intense, and the stench so overpowering that I wondered how the candle managed to continue burning.

Hatchery opened a door without knocking and we all filed in.

We were in the first and largest of several rooms, all visible through open doorways. In this room two Lascars and an old woman sprawled over a sprung bed that seemed heaped with discoloured rags. Some of the rags stirred and I realised that there were more people on the bed. The whole scene was lit by a few burned-down candles and one red-glassed lantern that cast a bloody hue over everything. Eyes peeped furtively at us from beneath rags in the adjoining rooms even as I realised that there were more bodies—Chinese, Occidental, Lascar—sprawled on the floors and in corners. Some tried to crawl away like roaches exposed to a sudden light. The ancient crone on the bed immediately before us, its four posts carved with years of idle knives, its draperies hanging down like rotted funeral cloths, was blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle. The thickness of smoke and harsh, aromatic stink in the room, blended with the sewer-Thames stench wafting in through the close-slatted blinds, caused my gout-hounded stomach to lurch again. I wished then that I had imbibed a second glass of my medicinal laudanum before joining Dickens this evening.

Hatchery prodded the old woman with a wooden police club he had smoothly retrieved from his belt. “’Ere, ’ere, old Sal,” he said harshly. “Wake up and talk to us. These gentlemen have questions for you, and by my oath, you’re going to answer them to my satisfaction.”

“Sal” was a wrinkled ancient, missing teeth, lacking colour in her cheeks and lips, and showing no light of character other than the debauchery visible in her weak, watery eyes. She squinted at Hatchery and then at us. “’Ib,” she said, recognising the giant through her daze, “are you back on the force? Do I need to pay thee?”

“I’m here to ’ave some answers,” said Hatchery, prodding her again on the rags above her sunken chest. “And we’ll ’ave them before we leave.”

“Ask away,” said the woman. “But give me leave first to refill old Yahee’s pipe, that’s a good copper.”

For the first time I noticed what appeared to be an ancient mummy reclining on pillows in the corner of the room behind the large bed.

Old Sal reached to a tumbler in the centre of the room, on a japan tray, that appeared to be half-filled with something like treacle. Lifting some of the thick treacle with a pin, she carried it to the mummy in the corner. As he turned towards the light, I saw that old Yahee was attached to an opium pipe and had been since we had entered. Without fully opening his eyes, he took the bit of treacle in his yellowed, long-nailed fingers, rolled it and rolled it until it was a little ball hardly larger than a pea, and then set it into the bowl of his already smoking pipe. The old mummy’s eyes closed and he turned away from the light, his bare feet tucked under him.

“There’s four pennies more to my own modest coffers,” said Sal as she returned to our small circle of red light near the lantern. “Yahee, you should well know, ’Ib, is more nor eighty years old and been a’smoking the opium through sixty nor more of those years. It’s true ’e don’t sleep, but ’e’s wonderfully ’ealthy and clean. In the morning, after a night o’ smoking, ’e buys his own rice and fish and vegetables, but only after a’scrubbin’ and a’cleanin’ ’is house out and own person off. Sixty years o’ opium, and never a sick day. Ol’ Yahee ’as smoked his way ’ealthy through the last four London Fevers while those arounst ’im were fallin’ like flies, and…”

“Enough,” commanded Hatchery, silencing the crone. “The gentleman’s going to ask you a few questions now, Sal… and if you value this rat hole you call a ’ome and business and don’t want to see it shut down around your poxy ears, then by God you had better answer quick and honest.”