Dan Simmons - Drood

I shook my head as if awakening from a dream and went backstage.

Dickens was sprawled on a couch and appeared to be too exhausted to rise or move. Dolby bustled in and out, supervising a waiter who was setting out a glass of iced champagne and a plate with a dozen oysters. Dickens stirred himself to sip the champagne and suck down the oysters.

“It’s the only thing the Chief can eat in the evening,” Dolby whispered to me.

Hearing the whisper, Dickens looked up and said, “My dear Wilkie… how splendid of you to pop in during the interval. Did you enjoy the first part of the evening’s fare?”

“I did,” I said. “It was… extraordinary… as always.”

“I believe I told you that we shall be replacing the ‘Doctor Marigold’ parts should I accept more such engagements in the autumn or winter,” said Dickens.

“But the audience loved it,” I said.

Dickens shrugged. “Not as much as they love Dombey or Scrooge or Nickleby, which I shall read in a few minutes.”

I was sure that the programme had listed the Trial from The Pickwick Papers as the thirty-minute reading scheduled for after the interval—Dickens always preferred to end the evenings with sentiment and laughter—but I was not about to correct him.

The ten minutes were almost up. Dickens rose with some effort, cast his heat-wilted scarlet geranium into the trash, and set a new one in his buttonhole.

“I shall see you after the reading,” I said and went back out to join the eager multitudes.

AS THE APPLAUSE DIED, Dickens took up his book and pretended to read aloud, “Nicholas Nickleby at Mr Squeers’s School… Chapter the First.” So it was to be Nickleby.

None of the exhaustion I had glimpsed backstage was evident now. Dickens seemed even more energetic and animated than he had been during the first ninety minutes. The power of his reading once again reached out like a magnetic current to fix and align the audience’s attention as if their eyes and minds were so many needles on a compass. Once again, the Inimitable’s gaze seemed to settle on each and every one of us.

Despite that powerful magnetic attraction, my mind began to wander. I began to think of other things—the publication of my novel Armadale in two volumes would be a fact within the week—and it occurred to me that I had to settle on a plot and theme for my next book. Perhaps something shorter and even more sensationalist, although with a simpler plot than the labyrinthine Armadale …

Suddenly I snapped back to attention.

Everything had changed in the huge hall. The light seemed thicker, slower, darker, almost gelatinous.

It was silent. Not the attention-silence of more than two thousand people that had existed an instant earlier—with coughs being stifled, laughter punctuating the silence, the stirrings of so many after more than two hours of listening—but now it was an absolute silence. It was as if twenty-one hundred people had suddenly died. There was not the slightest hint of breathing or movement. I realised that I could not hear or feel my own breathing, nor sense my own heartbeat. The Birmingham hall had turned into a giant crypt and was just that silent.

At the same moment, I realised that up through the darkness rose hundreds of slender, white, barely perceptible cords, their ends tied to the middle finger on the right hand of every member of the audience. The air was so dark that I could not make out the point at which these twenty-one hundred cords converged above us, but I knew that they must be connected to a massive bell up there. We were, all of us, in the Dead House. The cords—silken ropes, I realised—were tied to us in case one of us might still be alive. The bell, whose tone and toll, I knew instinctively, would be too terrible to hear, was there to alert—someone, something—if any one of us stirred.

Knowing that I and that I alone was still alive out of these twenty-one hundred dead, I tried not to stir, and focused all of my attention on not tugging at the cord tied to the middle finger of my right hand.

Looking up, I realised that it was no longer Charles Dickens whose face and hands and fingers glowed in the thick, slow light of the gas lamps in the darkness on the stage.

Drood looked out at us.

I recognised at once the pale white skin, the brittle tufts of hair over the ravaged ears, the lidless eyes, the nose that was little more than two nictitating membranes above a hole in the skull, the long, twitching fingers, and the pale, constantly turning pupils.

My hands shook. A hundred feet above the heads of all the corpses in the audience, the bell vibrated audibly.

Drood’s head snapped around. His pale eyes locked with mine.

I began shaking all over. The bell rumbled, then rang. No other corpse there breathed or stirred.

Drood came out from behind Dickens’s reading table and then out from the rectangle of turgid light. He leaped down from the stage and began gliding up the aisle. My arms and legs shook now as if agued, but I could move no other part of my body—not even my head.

I could smell Drood as he approached. He smelled like the Thames near Tiger Bay where Opium Sal’s opium den rotted away in the general effluvium when the tide was out and the sewage high.

There was something in Drood’s hand. By the time he was twenty paces from me up the steep aisle, I could see that it was a knife, but unlike any knife I had ever held or used or seen. The blade was a dark steel crescent on which hieroglyphs were visible. The handle was mostly hidden behind the Egyptian’s pale and bony knuckles; the thin handle of the razor-crescent disappeared between Drood’s fingers so the curved blade, at least eight inches across in its thinly gleaming arc of edge, extended from his fist like a lady’s fan.

Run! I ordered myself. Escape! Scream!

I could not move a muscle.

Drood paused above me, at the farthest limit of my peripheral vision, and when he opened his mouth, a miasma of Thames-mud stench enveloped me. I could see his pale pink tongue dancing behind those tiny teeth.

“You ssseee,” he hissed at me, his right arm and the blade pulling back for the decapitation’s swing, “how easssssy it issss?”

He swung the blade in a flat, vicious arc. The razor-sharp edge of the crescent-blade sliced through my beard and cut through my cravat, collar, skin, throat, trachea, gullet, and spinal cord as if they were made of butter.

The audience began applauding wildly. The gelatin-thick air had lightened to normal. The silken cords were gone.

Dickens turned to leave the stage without acknowledging the applause, but George Dolby was standing at the edge of the curtain. A moment later, with applause still echoing, Dickens stepped back into the glow of the gaslights.

“My dear friends,” he said after his raised hands had silenced the huge hall, “it appears as if there has been an error. Actually, it appears that I have made an error. Our programme had called for the Trial from Pickwick to be read after the interval, but I mistakenly carried Nickleby out to the podium and went on to read it. You were most gracious in your acceptance of that error and more than generous in your applause. The hour is late—I see by my watch that it is just ten, the precise time scheduled for the conclusion of our evening together—but the Trial was promised and if the majority of you would like, and you can show by your hands or applause if you would so like, to hear the Trial read, I shall happily add it to the unscheduled reading you have just enjoyed.”

The audience did like. They applauded and cheered and shouted encouragement. No one left.

“Call Sam Weller!” bellowed Dickens in his judicial voice, and the crowd roared louder in its applause and cheers. As each classic character appeared—Mrs Gamp, Miss Squeers, Boots—the audience roared even louder. I put my hand to my temple and found my brow cold and covered with perspiration. As Dickens read on, I staggered out.