Dan Simmons - Drood

Yet Katey must not have vocally opposed Ellen’s visits or the former actress would not have kept returning to Gad’s Hill.

With these thoughts still in mind, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING me violently and whispering my name.

I rolled over groggily. The room was dark except for a strange light that seemed to be coming from the floor at the side of the bed. A fire? There was a dark form looming over me, shaking me.

“Get up, Wilkie.”

I focused on that shape.

Charles Dickens in a nightshirt with a woollen coat thrown over his shoulders, carrying a two-barrelled shotgun in one hand and a crumpled shroud in the other.

The time has come, I thought.

“Get up, Wilkie,” he whispered again. “Quickly. Just put your shoes on. I brought your coat.”

The shape dropped the shroud on my legs and I realised it was my overcoat. “What…”

“Sshhh. You’ll wake the others. Get up. Quickly. Before he gets away. We have no time to waste. Just the coat and shoes. That’s a good man.…”

We went down the back stairs, Dickens with his gun and lantern ahead of me, both of us trying to make as little noise as possible.

Sultan, the ferocious Irish bloodhound, was tied up in the back hall, muzzled and leashed but straining to get out the door.

“What is this?” I whispered to Dickens. “What’s wrong?”

The Inimitable’s wisps of hair atop his head and long whiskers were curled this way and that in the tangle of sleep, some standing straight up, all of which would have been very amusing under different circumstances. But not tonight. There was something like real fear in Charles Dickens’s eyes—something I don’t believe I had ever seen before.

“It was Drood,” he whispered. “I could not sleep. I kept thinking of something I should have noted for Wills. So I rose from my bed, intending to go down to the study to make a note, and I saw it, Wilkie.…”

“Saw what, man?”

“Drood’s face. That pale, tortured face. Floating at the window. Pressed against the cold panes.”

“Of your study?” I said.

“No,” said Dickens, his eyes as wild as a runaway horse’s, “at the windows of my bedroom.”

“But, Dickens,” I whispered back, “that is impossible. Your bedroom is up on the first floor, with the guest rooms. Drood would have to be standing on an eight- or ten-foot ladder to peer into those windows.”

“I saw him, Wilkie,” rasped Dickens.

He flung the door open and with the lantern and leash in one hand and his two-barrelled gun in the other, was pulled out into the night after his straining dog.

IT WAS VERY COLD and very dark in Dickens’s back yard. There was no moon, no stars, no light from the house. The cold wind cut through my loosely donned coat in a second and I shivered under my fluttering nightshirt. My legs and ankles were bare between the coat and my shoes, and the night air was so frigid against my flesh there that I felt as if the frozen grass were slashing at me with tiny razors.

Sultan snarled and surged. Dickens let the dog lead us as if we were outraged villagers on the trail of a murderer in a second-rate sensationalist novel.

And perhaps we were.

We hurried around the side of the house in the dark and stood in the garden beneath Dickens’s bedroom windows. Sultan pulled and snarled and tugged to continue, but Dickens paused long enough to unshutter the small lantern and focus its beam on the frozen soil in the flower bed. There were no incriminating footprints and no signs that a ladder had been set there. We both glanced up towards his dark bedroom window. A few stars appeared between rapidly moving clouds and were then erased.

If Drood had stared into that window without a tall ladder beneath him, he must have been floating ten feet off the ground.

Sultan growled and tugged and we followed.

We returned to the back of the house and paused in the small field where Dickens had burned all of his letters in 1860. The cold wind moved bare branches with skeletal clicks. I whispered to Dickens, “How could it be Drood? How could he be here? Why would he be here?”

“He followed me from London one morning,” Dickens whispered back, slowly turning in a full circle, the long double-barrelled weapon in the crook of his right arm. “I am sure of it. I have seen a shadowy figure on the other side of the road, by the chalet, many nights now. The dogs bark. When I emerge, the form is gone.”

More likely to be the agents of Inspector Field, I thought and was tempted to say aloud. Instead, I said again, “ Why would Drood come out here to stare in your window on Christmas Day night?”

“Shhhh,” said Dickens, waving me into silence and clamping his free hand around Sultan’s jaws to silence the bloodhound’s growling.

For a second I thought that a sleigh was approaching, even though there was not a hint of snow on the ground, but then I realised that the faint jingling of bells was coming from the dark stables. The pony Newman Noggs’s Norwegian bells were hanging on the wall there.

“Come,” said Dickens and hurried towards the barn.

The stable doors were open—a blacker rectangle in the near-black night.

“Did you…” I started to whisper.

“They are always closed,” Dickens hissed back. “I checked them at sunset tonight.” He handed me the suddenly silent dog’s leash, set the lantern down, and lifted the shotgun.

From inside the stables there came a final faint jingle of bells then sudden silence, as if a hand were muffling the harness.

“Unclip Sultan’s muzzle and then release his leash,” Dickens whispered very softly, still aiming his weapon at the open doors.

“He’ll tear whoever it is apart,” I whispered back.

“Unclip the muzzle and release him,” hissed Dickens.

I went to one knee, heart pounding, shivering in the cold, and fumbled with the clasps on the muzzle. I was half-certain that the straining, wild-eyed Irish bloodhound—he weighed almost as much as I—would rip me limb from limb the second I removed the muzzle.

He did not. Sultan ceased growling and straining as I dropped the muzzle to the ground and fumbled off the clip of the leash.

“Go!” Dickens said aloud to the dog.

Sultan went, exploding into a run as if he were made of metal springs rather than mere muscles. But he did not run into the darkness of the barn. Instead, the bloodhound veered to the left, leaped a hedge in a single bound, and disappeared out into the fields, heading towards the forest and distant sea.

“D— n that dog,” said Dickens. I realised how few times I had heard the Inimitable curse. “Come, Wilkie,” he said peremptorily, as if I were a second hound he had kept in reserve.

Handing me the shielded lantern, Dickens ran towards the open door of the stable. I hurried to keep up, almost slipping on the frozen grass even as Dickens reached the doorway and entered without waiting for light.

I came into the gloom feeling rather than seeing Dickens’s presence a few feet to my left, knowing—perhaps clairvoyantly—that he stood there with his shotgun raised and aimed towards the long avenue within the barn, even as I sensed rather than saw the stir and breath of the horses and ponies standing here.

“Light!” cried Dickens.

I fumbled open the shutter on the lantern.

A vague blur in the stalls where the horses—all awake but silent—shifted uneasily, a glimpse of their breath like fog in the cold air, and then a blur of white motion at the far end of the dark space, beyond where the bells and harness and tack hung.

Dickens lifted the weapon higher and I could see his eyes white in the lantern light as he prepared to pull both triggers.