Dan Simmons - Drood

“Only for a short time,” I said again, patting her hand. “I will deal with this detective and then we will make our plans anew. In fact, this very suite of rooms shall continue being let in the name of Mrs Dawson, in the certainty of your returning soon. Would you like that?”

“I should like that very much, Mr… Dawson. Can you spend the night tonight? This last night for a while?”

“Not tonight, my dearest. The gout is heavy on me tonight. I need to get home to take my medicine.”

“Oh, I wish you would leave a bottle of your medicine here, my love, so that it could alleviate your pain while I alleviate your other tensions and anxieties!” She squeezed my hand hard enough to send pain up my aching arm. There were tears in her eyes now, and I knew that they were for me and not due to her exile. Martha R— had a sympathetic soul.

“The eleven fifteen train,” I said, setting bills and coins totalling six pounds on the top of the dresser as I rose and pulled on my coat. “Make sure that you leave nothing behind here, my dearest. Travel safely and I shall be in contact with you soon.”

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Harriet was asleep in her room, but Caroline was still awake when I arrived home at 9 Melcombe Place.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “We had veal and I kept some for you.”

“No, only some wine, perhaps,” I said. “I’ve had the worst time with the gout today.” I went to the kitchen, unlocked my private cupboard with the key from my waistcoat, drank down three glasses of laudanum, and returned to Caroline in the dining room, where she had filled two glasses with a good Madeira. The taste of Martha’s wretched wine was still on my mouth and I sought to banish it.

“How was your day with Dickens?” she asked. “I did not expect you to stay so late.”

“You know how insistent he can be when he invites one to dinner,” I said. “He will not take no as an answer.”

“I do not really know that, actually,” said Caroline. “All of my meals with Mr Dickens have been with you and either at our home or in a private room at a restaurant. He has never insisted to me that I stay late at his table.”

I did not dispute the fact. I could feel the laudanum beginning to work on the pulsating pain of my terrible headache. The medicine gave me the odd feeling of bobbing up and down, as if the dining room table and chair were a small boat caught in the wake of a larger ship.

“Did you have a pleasant day of conversation with him?” pressed Caroline. She was wearing a red silk dressing gown a bit too flamboyant to be of the highest taste. The embroidered gold flowers on it seemed to throb and pulse in my vision.

I said, “I believe that Dickens threatened to kill me this afternoon if I did not follow his commands. To put me down like a disobedient dog.”

“Wilkie!” Her horror was real and her face went white in the low lamplight.

I forced a laugh. “Never mind, my dearest. Nothing of the sort actually happened, of course. Just another example of Wilkie Collins’s penchant for hyperbole. We had a delightful walk and chat this afternoon and more enjoyable conversation over the long dinner and brandy and cigars afterwards. John Forster and his new bride were there.”

“Oh, that bore.”

“Yes.” I removed my glasses and rubbed my temples. “I should go to bed.”

“Poor darling,” said Caroline. “Would it help to have your muscles rubbed?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe it would.”

I do not know where Caroline G— learned the art of muscular massage. I have never asked. As is true of so much of her life before I met her ten years earlier, that remains a mystery.

But the pleasure and relaxation her hands gave me were no mystery.

Some half an hour later in my bedroom, when she was finished, she whispered, “Shall I stay tonight, my darling?”

“Not tonight, my love. The gout is still very much with me—as pleasure ebbs, the pain flows back in, as you know—and I have serious work to do early tomorrow.”

Caroline nodded, kissed me on the cheek, took the candle lamp on the dresser, and went downstairs.

I considered writing then, working through the night as I had so often done on The Woman in White and earlier books, but a subtle noise from the first-floor landing beyond my bedroom door convinced me to stay where I was. The woman with green skin and tusk-teeth was growing more bold. For months after we moved here she had contained her prowlings to the steep and dark servants’ stairway, but now I frequently heard her bare feet on the rug and wood of the landing after midnight.

Or the noise could have come from my study. That would be worse, to go in there in the dark and see him writing in my place in the moonlight.

I stayed in my bedroom and crossed to the window, quietly parting the drapes.

Near the lamp post on the corner loitered a boy in rags. He was sitting with his back against a dustbin, possibly sleeping. Or possibly looking up towards my window. His eyes were in shadow.

I closed the drapes and went back to bed. Sometimes the laudanum keeps me awake all night; at other times, it carries me away to powerful dreams.

I was drifting off to sleep, banishing Charles Dickens and his phantom Drood from my thoughts, when my nostrils were filled with a cloying, almost sickening scent—rotting meat, perhaps—and images of scarlet geraniums, bundles and heaps and funeral-thick towers of scarlet geraniums, pulsed behind my eyelids like spurtings of blood.

“My God,” I said aloud, sitting up in the dark, filled with a certainty so absolute as to be a form of clairvoyance. “Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”

After making notes of my conversation with Dickens the next morning, I breakfasted late and alone at my club. I needed time to think.

Dickens had pressed me several times the preceding day on whether I believed him, but the truth is, I did not. At least not fully. I was not certain that he ever met with anyone named Drood down there in the sewers and labyrinths under London. I had seen the rowboat-gondola and its two odd men, Venus and Mercury, Dickens had called them, so that was something certain to begin with.

Or had I seen them? I remembered the boat arriving and Dickens boarding and disappearing around the bend with the masked figure poling near the bow and the other masked figure steering with the stern sweep… or did I? I had been exhausted and frightened and yet also sleepy. I had taken extra doses of my medicine before joining Dickens that night and then drunk more wine than I usually did at dinner. The entire experience of that evening, even before we went down through a crypt to find the Chinese Lazaree opium lord, all seemed dreamlike and unreal.

But what about Dickens’s biographical tale of Mr Drood?

What about it? Charles Dickens’s imagination could furnish a thousand such tales with only seconds of notice. In fact, the story of Drood’s childhood, English father, murdered Mohammadan mother… it all sounded contrived to a level far below Charles Dickens’s creative powers.

But, oddly enough, it was the part of the story concerning Drood’s abilities with mesmerism and Magnetic Influence that made me want to believe the bulk of the Inimitable’s tale. It also explained why Dickens, terrified now of riding in trains and even carriages, would come into London from Gad’s Hill at least once a week.

He was a student… or perhaps “acolyte” was a better word… of the Master Mesmerist named Drood.

AS I HAD KNOWN even before he had tried (and failed) to mesmerise me shortly after Staplehurst, Dickens’s fascination with mesmerism went back almost thirty years, to the time when the writer was known everywhere primarily by his early nom de plume of “Boz.” All of England was interested in mesmerism at that time: the phenomenon had been imported from France, where a “magnetic boy” seemed to be able to tell time on people’s watches and read cards in a mesmeric trance even while his head and eyes were heavily bandaged. I did not know Dickens then, of course, but he had described more than once how he had attended as many demonstrations of mesmerism as he could find in London. But it was the professor Dickens had mentioned, a certain John Elliotson from University College Hospital, who most impressed the young Boz.