Dan Simmons - Drood

“This part of the East End lies over rock, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Ten feet down and it is solid rock. Certainly you know the geology of your city! That is why they chose to build them here.”

“Build what?” I asked, attempting, without total success, to keep the asperity I felt out of my voice.

“The catacombs,” said Dickens. “The ancient underground spaces of a monastery crypt. The Roman loculi before that, even deeper here, almost certainly beneath the Christian catacombs.”

I did not choose to ask what “loculi” meant. I had the sense that I would learn its dark etymology soon enough.

Dickens entered the crypt, then did the detective, then I. The cone of light from the bullseye moved over and around the tiny interior. The pedestal bier in the centre of the small mausoleum, just long enough to hold a coffin or sarcophagus or shrouded body, was empty. There were no obvious niches or other places for bodies.

“It’s empty,” I said. “Someone’s pilfered the corpse.”

Hatchery laughed softly. “Bless me, sir. There was never a corpse ’ere. This partic’lar house o’ the dead is—’as always been—just an entrance to the land o’ the dead. If you’ll move aside, Mr Collins.”

I stepped back against the sweating stone wall at the rear of the crypt as the detective bent low, set his shoulder to the cracked marble bier, and shoved. The sound of stone scraping across solid stone was extremely unpleasant.

“I noticed the arcs gouged into the old pavers as we came in,” Dickens commented to the still-labouring detective. “As clear a clue as the grooves the post of a sagging gate makes in the mud.”

“Aye, sir,” panted Hatchery, still shoving. “But usually leaves and dirt an’ such in ’ere hide that, even in direct lantern light. You’re very observant, Mr Dickens.”

“Yes,” said Dickens.

I was sure that the screech and moans of the slowly shifting bier were loud enough to bring mobs of curious ruffians into the graveyard. Then I remembered that Hatchery had locked the cemetery gate behind us. We were locked in. And since the door of the crypt itself had taken much of Hatchery’s considerable bulk and strength to open—he had shouldered it shut after we entered—we might as well have been locked into this tomb as well. As steep stone stairs became visible in the black wedge beneath the floor now growing wider as the bier was moved, the sense of that weight being set back in place, essentially entombing us below the stone beneath the locked tomb within the locked cemetery, I felt cold shivers running down my back despite the thick heat of the night.

Finally Hatchery stopped pushing and stood upright. The triangular wedge of the dark opening was not large, little more than two feet wide, but when Dickens shone the bullseye down into it, I could see very steep stone steps descending.

Dickens’s face was lighted from below by the lantern as he looked at the detective and said, “You’re sure you will not come down with us, Hatchery?”

“No, sir, thank you, sir,” said the big man. “I have agreed not to.”

“ Agreed not to?” Dickens’s tone was one of mild curiosity.

“Aye, sir. An old arrangement that many of us former and current constables and inspectors ’ave with those in Undertown. We don’t go down to complicate their lives, sir; they don’t come up to complicate ours.”

“Rather like the arrangement most of the living attempt to make with the dead,” Dickens said softly, his gaze returning to the dark hole and steep steps.

“Exactly, sir,” said the detective. “I knew you would understand.”

“Well, we should be going down,” said Dickens. “Will you be able to find your way home without a lantern, Detective? We’ll obviously need this one below.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Hatchery. “I ’ave another one on my belt should I need it. But I won’t be going ’ome yet. I’ll wait here until dawn. If you’re not back by then, I’ll go straight to Leman Street Station and report two gentlemen missing.”

“That’s very kind of you, Detective Hatchery,” said Dickens. He smiled. “But as you said, the constables and inspectors won’t go below to look for us.”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” said the detective, shrugging. “What with you both being famous authors an’ fine gentlemen, perhaps they’d see fit to make an exception in this case. I just ’ope we don’t have to find out, sir.”

Dickens laughed at this. “Come along, Wilkie.”

“Mr Dickens,” said Hatchery, reaching under his coat and coming out with a huge pistol of the revolver variety. “Perhaps you should take this with you, sir. Even if just for the rats.”

“Oh, posh,” said Dickens, waving the weapon away with his white gloves. (You need to remember, Dear Reader, that in our era—I have no idea of the custom in yours—none of our police carried firearms of any sort. Nor did our criminals, for the most part. Hatchery’s talk of “agreements” between the underworld and law enforcement was true in many unspoken ways.)

“I will take it,” I said. “And gladly. I hate rats.”

The pistol was as heavy as it looked and it filled my right jacket pocket. I felt strangely off balance with the massive thing pulling me down on one side. I told myself that I might soon feel far more off balance should I need such a weapon and not have one.

“Do you know how to fire a pistol, sir?” asked Hatchery.

I shrugged. “I assume that the general idea is to aim the end with the opening at one’s target and to pull the trigger,” I said. I was hurting all over now. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jug of laudanum on my locked kitchen’s cupboard shelf.

“Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His bowler was pulled down so tight that it seemed to be compressing his skull. “That is the general idea. You may have noticed it ’as two barrels, Mr Collins. An upper one and a larger lower one.”

I had not taken notice of this. I tried to pull the absurdly heavy weapon from my pocket, but it snagged on the lining, ripping the cloth of my expensive jacket. Cursing softly, I managed to extricate it and study it in the lamplight.

“Ignore the lower one, sir,” said Hatchery. “It’s made for grapeshot. A form of shotgun. Nasty thing. You won’t be needin’ that, I ’ope, sir, and I have no ammunition for it anyway. My brother, who was in the army until recently, bought the gun from an American chap, although it was made in France… but not to worry, there are good English proof marks on it, sir, from our very own Birmingham Proof ’ouse. The cylinder for the smoothbore barrel is loaded, sir. There are nine shots in the cylinder.”

“Nine?” I said, putting the huge, heavy thing back in my pocket while taking care not to rip the lining any worse than it had been. “Very good.”

“Would you like more bullets, sir? I ’ave a bag of them an’ caps in my pocket. I’d ’ave to show you ’ow to use the ramrod, sir. But it’s fairly simple, as such skills go.”

I almost laughed then, thinking of all the things that might be in Detective Hatchery’s pockets and on his belt. “No, thank you,” I said. “Nine balls should suffice.”

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir,” continued the detective. “Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

I shuddered at that.

“We’ll see you before dawn, Hatchery,” said Dickens, tucking his watch into his waistcoat and leading the way down the very steep steps, the bullseye lantern held low. “Come, Wilkie. We have less than four hours before the sun rises.”

WILKIE, DO YOU know Edgar Allan Poe?”