Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens turned the bullseye but there was nothing in the cone of light but stone and shadows. The roof of the main passageway was flat stone, not arched brick. It went on for at least fifty yards. Dickens led the way down this corridor, pausing only to shine his beam in some of the niches that opened to the left and right of the passage. They were all loculi, niches holding stacks of massive coffins behind identical rusted-iron grilles. At the end of the passage Dickens passed his beam of light over the wall and even ran his free hand over the stone, pressing here and there as if searching for some spring-lever and secret passage. None opened to us.

“So…” I began. What was I going to say? You see? There’s no Undertown after all. No Mr Drood down here. Are you satisfied? Let us go home, please, Dickens, I need to take my laudanum . I said, “This seems to be all there is.”

“Not at all,” said Dickens. “Did you see that candle on the wall?”

I had not. We walked back to the next-to-last loculus and Dickens aimed the bullseye higher. It was there in a niche, a thick tallow candle burned to a stub.

“Left by the ancient Christians, perhaps?” I said.

“I believe not,” Dickens said drily. “Light it, please, my dear Wilkie. And walk ahead of me back towards the entrance.”

“Why?” I asked, but when he did not answer, I reached for the candle, fumbled matches out of my left pocket—the absurdly heavy pistol still weighed down my jacket on the right—and lit the thing. Dickens nodded, rather brusquely I thought, and I held the stub of candle in front of me as I walked slowly back the way we had come.

“There!” cried Dickens when we had covered about half the distance.

“What?”

“Didn’t you see the candle flame flicker, Wilkie?”

If I had, it hadn’t registered, but I said, “Just a draught from the entrance stairs, no doubt.”

“I think not,” said Dickens. His emphasis on the negative every time I spoke was beginning to annoy me.

Using his lantern, Dickens peered into the loculus on our left and then into the one on our right. “Ahhh!” he said.

Still holding the slightly flickering candle, I peered into the niche but saw nothing to evoke such an ejaculation of surprise and satisfaction.

“On the floor,” said Dickens.

I realised that the red dust there had been trod down into a sort of path that led to the iron grille and the coffins. “Some recent interment?” I said.

“I seriously doubt it,” said Dickens, continuing his string of negative assessments of my contributions. He led the way into the arched vault, handed me the lantern, and shook the iron grille with both gloved hands.

A section of the grille—its joints and edges and hinges invisible from even a few feet away—swung inward towards the stacks of coffins.

Dickens went through without a pause. In a second his lantern seemed to sink into the red dust beneath him. It took me a minute to realise that there were steps back there and that Dickens was descending them.

“Come along, Wilkie,” echoed the writer’s voice.

I hesitated. I had the candle. I had the pistol. I could be back at the base of the steps in thirty seconds and up them and out into the crypt above—under Detective Hatchery’s protection again—thirty seconds after that.

“Wilkie!” The lantern and the author were both out of sight now. I could see the brick ceiling still illuminated above the place where he had disappeared. I looked back towards the dark entrance to the loculus, then at the heavy coffins stacked atop their biers on either side of the path in the red dust, and then back towards the opening again.

“Wilkie, please hurry now. And snuff the candle but do bring it along. This bullseye does not have unlimited fuel.”

I walked through the open grille door and past the coffins and towards the still-not-visible stairs.

The stairway was of unsteady stone, the narrow vault ceiling of brick, and within a few minutes we had come out into another level of corridor and loculi.

“More crypts,” I said.

“Older here,” Dickens whispered. “Notice that this corridor curves, Wilkie. And the ceiling is much lower here. And the entrances to these loculi have been bricked up, which reminds me of a story by the late Mr Poe of whom I was speaking somewhat earlier.”

I did not ask Dickens to share the story. I was about to ask him why he was whispering when he whispered over his shoulder, “Do you see the glow ahead?”

At first I did not because of the bullseye lantern’s glare, but then I did. It was very dim and appeared to originate somewhere around the bend in the stone corridor.

Dickens lowered the shield over most of the bullseye’s lens and gestured for me to follow him. The paving stones on this lower, older level of the catacombs were uneven, and several times I had to use my stick to brace myself from falling. Just around the bend in the corridor, more main passageways branched to the right and left.

“Is this a Roman catacomb?” I whispered.

Dickens shook his top-hatted head, but I felt it was more to quiet me than to answer me. He pointed to the passage on the right from which the glow seemed to be coming.

It was the only loculus not bricked up. A dark and ragged curtain covered most of the arched opening, but not so completely as to hide the glow from within. I touched the pistol in my pocket as Dickens walked brazenly through the rotted gauze.

This loculus was long and narrow and opened into other niches and vaults and loculi. And the corpses here were not in coffins.

The bodies lay along wooden benches that ran from floor to ceiling for the entire length of the narrow passage. They were all corpses of men—and not Englishmen or Christians or Romans from the looks of them. They were skeletal, but not mere skeletons; the tanned skin and stringy flesh and glass marble—looking eyes appeared to have been mummified. Indeed, these might be Egyptian mummies we were walking past, lying there in their rotted robes and tatters, except for the Oriental cast to the mummified features and unblinking eyes. When Dickens paused for a moment, I leaned closer to inspect one of the mummies’ faces.

It blinked.

I let out a cry and leaped back, dropping the candle. Dickens picked it up and came closer, holding the bullseye high to illuminate the shelf and the corpse on it.

“Did you think them dead, Wilkie?” the author whispered.

“Are they not?”

“Did you not see the opium pipes?” he asked softly.

I had not. I did now. These pipes—largely lost to sight where they were clutched against the mummies’ bodies, the bowls and mouthpieces in the mummies’ hands—were much more elaborately carved than the cheap pipes in Sal’s emporium in Shadwell above.

“Did you not smell the opium?” whispered Dickens.

I had not but I did now. It was a softer, sweeter, infinitely more subtle smell than the drug stench in Sal’s. I looked back the way we had come and realised that the dozens of dead men on these rotted shelves in this crypt were all ancient but still-breathing Asiatics lying there with their pipes.

“Come,” said Dickens and led me into a side room from whence came the glow.

There were more shelves and bunks there, some with cushions visible, and a heavier cloud of opium, but in the middle—sitting cross-legged in a Buddha posture atop a backless wooden couch set on a stone bier so that his Oriental eyes were at the same height as ours—was a Chinaman who looked as ancient and mummified as those forms on the shelves behind us and ahead of us. But his gown or robe or whatever it should be called, as well as his headpiece, were made of bright, clean silk, all reds and greens with gold and blue patterns sewn throughout, and his white moustache drooped down ten inches beneath his chin. Behind this figure were two huge men, also Chinamen but much younger, shirtless, standing against the empty stone wall with their hands folded over their crotches. Their muscles gleamed in the light from the two red candles that rose on either side of the thin Buddha-figure.