Dan Simmons - Drood

“Wait!” I shouted, the volume of my voice causing the horses to shy. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”

I ran towards the white blur. I believe Dickens would have fired despite my cries if I had not thrown my body between him and his target.

The white blur at the closed end of the darkness revealed itself in the circle of light from my lantern. Edmond Dickenson stood there, his eyes wide but staring blankly, not seeing us, not hearing us. He was in his nightshirt. His feet were bare and pale against the cold black cobbles of the livery stable floor. His hands hung like small white stars at the end of his limp arms.

Dickens came up and began laughing. The loud laughter further alarmed the horses but did not seem to register with Dickenson. “A somnambulist!” cried Dickens. “By God, a somnambulist. The orphan walks abroad at night.”

I held the lantern closer to the young man’s pale face. The flame reflected brightly in the boy’s eyes, but he did not blink or acknowledge my presence. We were indeed in the presence of a sleepwalker.

“You must have seen him in the garden below your window,” I said softly.

Dickens scowled at me so fiercely that I expected him to curse me just as he had cursed his failure of a dog, but his voice was soft when he spoke. “Not at all, my dear Wilkie. I did not see anyone in the garden. I arose from my bed, looked at my windows, and clearly saw Drood’s face there—his foreshortened nose against the glass, his lidless eyes staring at me. Pressed against the window, Wilkie. My high, first-storey window. Not in the garden below.”

I nodded as if in agreement but knew that the Inimitable had to have been dreaming. Perhaps he had taken some laudanum to help him sleep—I knew that Frank Beard the physician had urged the drug on Dickens when the writer had been unable to sleep in the autumn. I could still feel the pulse and ebb of the medicine in my own system, despite the cold that caused my arm holding the lantern to shake as if I were palsied.

“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding towards Dickenson this time.

“What one must do with all serious somnambulists, my dear Wilkie. We shall lead him tenderly back to the house and you shall take him into his room to his bed.”

I looked in the direction of the slightly lighter rectangle that was the open stable door. “And Drood?” I asked.

Dickens shook his head. “Sultan often returns the day after his nighttime hunts with blood on his muzzle. We can only hope that he does so again in the morning.”

I was tempted to ask Dickens what he meant by this. (Inspector Field would value the information.) Had he and his Egyptian mesmerism mentor had a falling-out? Did he wish the phantom dead? Killed by Dickens’s own killer dog? Was he no longer a student of the underground mastermind who—according to the former head of the Scotland Yard Detective Bureau—had sent out his agents to kill more than three hundred men and women?

I said nothing. It was too cold to start a conversation. My gout was returning, sending tendrils of agony through my eyes and into my brain the way it was wont to do before a serious episode.

We took Mr Dickenson by his limp arms and led him slowly out of the stable and across the wide yard to the back door. I realised that I would have to towel off the sleepwalking idiot’s feet before I tucked him beneath his bedcovers.

As we reached the door, I looked back over the dark yard, half-expecting Sultan to come running into the circle of lantern light with a pale arm or albino ankle or dismembered head in his mouth. But nothing moved other than the cold wind.

“And so ends another Christmas Day at Gad’s Hill Place,” I said softly. My glasses fogged slightly as we stepped into the relative warmth of the house. I let go of Mr Dickenson long enough to remove and polish them on my coat sleeve.

When I had tucked the ends of the metal frames behind my ears and could see again, I noted that Dickens’s mouth had turned up in that boyish smile with which he had favoured me so many times in the past fourteen years of our acquaintance.

“God bless us, every one,” he said in a childish falsetto and we both laughed loud enough to wake the entire household.

There was the glowing sphere… no, not quite a sphere, an elongated glowing blue-white oval… and there was the black streak against the dark background.

The streak was on the ceiling and was the result of so many years of smoke rising. The glowing blue-white oval was in front of me, closer, a part of me, an extension of my thoughts.

It was also a moon, a pale satellite in thrall to me. I turned to my left, rolled slightly to my left, and beheld the sun— a sun, orange and white rather than blue and white, flickering out rays into the black cosmos. As the glowing blue-white oval was moon to me, so was I satellite to this burning sun in the darkness of space and time.

Something eclipsed my sun. I felt rather than saw the blue-white oval and long pipe connecting it to me snatched away.

“Here, Hatchery, pluck him out of there. Get him on his feet and support him.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” shrieked an utterly alien and totally familiar voice. “The gen’lmum paid for ’is night and product, all undisturbed-like-to-be. Don’t be presumin’ to…”

“Shut up, Sal,” bellowed another familiar voice. A lost giant’s voice. “One more peep out of you and the inspector here will have you in the blackest hole in Newgate before the sun comes up.”

There were no more peeps. I had been floating above the cloud tops of shifting colours even as I wheeled in space around the spitting, hissing star-sun, my blue-white satellite—now gone—wheeling about me in turn, but now I felt strong hands pulling me down from the cosmic aether to lumpy, muddy, straw-strewn earth.

“Keep him on his feet,” rasped the voice I associated with imperious forefingers. “Lift him when you have to.”

I was floating again, between dark cribs set into dark walls, the hissing sun receding behind me. A thin colossus rose before me.

“Sal, get Yahee out of the way or I’ll snap his smoke-clotted bones clean out of his rotted old flesh and sell them as three’a-penny flutes to the Wild Boys.”

“ ’Ere, ’ere,” I heard again. Shadows merged. One was laid back in his coffin. “That’s a good, Yahee. Rest easy. ’Ib, Your ’Ighness, this ’ere gen’lmum hasn’t paid in full yet. You’re pickin’ my pocket if you ’aul ’im out o’ ’ere.”

“You lie, crone,” said the dominant of the two men’s voices. “You just said he’d paid for the night and drug in full. There was enough in his pipe to keep him addled ’til dawn. But give her another two coins, Detective Hatchery. Anything small.”

Then we were out into the night. I noted on the coldness of the air—it smelt of snow not yet fallen—and I noted the absence of my topcoat and my missing top hat and cane and the small miracle of the fact that my feet did not touch the cobblestones as I floated above them towards a distant, rocking streetlamp. Then I realised that the larger of the two shapes still escorting me was carrying me under his arm as if I were a prize pig won at a country fair.

I was recovering from the pipe fumes sufficiently to protest, but the dark form leading the way—I never doubted for a second that it was my nemesis Inspector Field—said, “Hush, now, Mr Collins, there’s a public house nearby that will open for us despite the hour and we’ll order something for you that will set you right.”

A public house that would be open at this hour? As foggy as my sight might have been (and, I realised, as foggy as the cold air itself was this night), no such place could be open in this terrible hour just before dawn on such a harsh, wintry, early-spring morning.