Dan Simmons - Drood

“I’d not heard this,” I confessed. My thought had been to write about a ruby or sapphire sacred to an ancient Egyptian cult, but Dickens’s true tale of the Koh-i-noor made my hands twitch in anticipation of taking notes.

We were interrupted then by an urgent pounding on the door to Dickens’s study.

It was Georgina, in tears and almost beside herself with agitation. When Dickens calmed her, she explained that the Irish bloodhound—Sultan—had attacked yet another innocent victim, this time a little girl who was the sister of one of the servants.

Dickens sent her out to soothe the victim. Then he sighed, opened a cupboard door, and removed the two-barrelled shotgun I had last seen ten months earlier on Christmas night. He then went to his desk and pulled several large shells from a lower-right-hand drawer. Outside, the rain had ceased pelting the window glass, but I could see dark, fast clouds moving low above black branches that were quickly losing their leaves.

“I’m afraid that I have shown too much tolerance with this dog,” he said softly. “Sultan has a good heart—and he is totally loyal to me—but his aggressive spirit was forged in the fires of hell. He refuses to learn. I can tolerate anything—in dog or man—save for the refusal or inability to learn.”

“No more warnings?” I asked, rising to follow him away from the fire and out of the room.

“No more warnings, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “This hound’s inevitable death sentence was pronounced by a power much higher than ours when Sultan was only a pup at his mother’s teat. Now there remains only the execution of that sentence.”

THE EXECUTION PARTY was, fittingly, all male: besides Sultan, Dickens, and myself, the fourteen-year-old Plorn had been summoned from his room. My brother, Charles, and his wife, Katey, had just arrived for the weekend, and Charley was invited along but declined. A weather-faced old blacksmith from across the road had been reshoeing two horses in Dickens’s stable and joined the procession. (It turned out that the blacksmith was an old friend of the condemned—he had enjoyed the killer’s antics from the time Sultan was a puppy—and the old man was honking into his handkerchief even before the execution party set out.)

Finally there were Dickens’s oldest son, Charley, just up for the day, and two male servants, one the husband of the female servant whose sister had been attacked. One servant trundled the empty wheelbarrow that would bear Sultan’s carcass back from the killing grounds and the other gingerly carried a burlap bag that would be the condemned’s shroud in a few minutes. The women of the household and other servants watched from the windows as we walked out through the backyard, past the stables, and into the field where Dickens had burned his correspondence six years earlier.

At first Sultan bounded around with enthusiasm and excitement, unbridled by the new muzzle he was wearing. He obviously thought that he was on a hunting expedition. Something was going to die! Sultan leaped around from one trudging, high-booted, waxed-cotton-coated man to the next, his paws sending out ripples in the puddles and kicking up mud. But when the humans would not meet his gaze, the dog stood at the end of his leash—held by Charley Dickens—and cast an observing eye on the open shotgun under his master’s arm and upon the empty wheelbarrow that had never been a part of any other grouse-hunting trek.

As the group stopped a hundred yards or so from the stable, Sultan’s gaze became meditative, even gloomy, and he fixed the gun bearer—his lord and master—with a questioning look that soon became an imploring one.

Charley slipped the leash and stepped back. We had all stepped back behind Dickens, who continued standing there and returning Sultan’s gaze. The big Irish bloodhound cocked his head to add a question mark to the end of his unspoken query. Dickens set the two shells in place and clicked the heavy gun shut. Sultan cocked his head farther to the left, his gaze never leaving his master’s eyes.

“John,” Dickens said softly to the blacksmith, who stood at the far left of our crescent of execution-witnesses, “I want him turned. Would you please peg a stone behind him?”

John the blacksmith grunted, blew his nose a final time, tucked away the kerchief in the coat pocket of his rain jacket, leaned over, lifted the kind of flat stone one would choose to skip across a pond, and tossed it just behind Sultan’s tail.

The dog’s head turned. Before Sultan could look back at him, Dickens had smoothly raised the shotgun and fired both barrels. Even though we were all expecting it, the double explosion seemed especially loud in the damp, cold, thick air. Sultan’s ribcage exploded in a blur of red-shredded hair and striated flesh and shattered bone. I am certain that his heart was pulverised so quickly that no message from nerve-endings had time to reach the animal’s brain. He did not whimper or cry out as the impact knocked him several feet across the wet grass in the opposite direction from us, and I was all but certain that Sultan was dead before he hit the ground.

The servants had the heavy carcass in the bag and then in the wheelbarrow in an instant. They trundled the corpse back towards the house as the rest of us gathered around Dickens, who broke the smoking gun, removed the spent shells, and set the empty cartridges carefully in his overcoat pocket.

He looked up at me as he did this and our gazes seemed to lock much as his and Sultan’s had only a moment earlier. I fully expected the Inimitable to say to me, perhaps in Latin, “And thus death to those who betray me”— but he remained silent.

A second later, young Plorn, seemingly excited by the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air—the very boy whom Dickens had recently described to me as “wanting application and continuity of purpose” due to some “impracticable torpor in his natural character”—cried out, “That was smashing, Father! Absolutely smashing!”

Dickens did not reply. None of the men said a word as we walked slowly back to the warm house. The rain and wind came up again before we reached the back door.

Once inside, I started to head up to my room to change into dry clothes and take an additional brace of laudanum, but Dickens called out to me and I stopped on the stairs.

“Be of good cheer, Wilkie. Even so will I comfort dear Percy Fitzgerald, who gave me the doomed dog in the first place. Two of Sultan’s children are rolling in the straw of the barn even as we speak. Blood inheritance being the iron master that it is, one of those two will almost assuredly inherit Sultan’s ferocity. He will also almost certainly inherit the gun.”

I could think of nothing to say to this, so I nodded and went upstairs for my anodyne.

KING LAZAREE, THE Chinaman King of the Opium Living Dead, seemed to have been expecting me when I had first returned to his kingdom almost two months before Sultan’s execution, in late August of that summer of 1866.

“Welcome, Mr Collins,” the ancient Chinee had whispered when I parted the curtains to his hidden realm in the loculus beneath the catacombs beneath the cemetery. “Your bed and pipe are ready for you.”

Detective Hatchery had led me safely to the cemetery late that August night, had unlocked gates and crypt doors and moved the heavy bier again, and had once again loaned me his absurdly heavy pistol. Handing me a bullseye lantern, he promised to stay in the crypt until I returned. I confess here that it was more difficult going down through the tombs and hidden passage to the lower level this second time than it had been when I followed Dickens.

King Lazaree’s robe and headpiece were of different colours this visit, but the silk was as clean, bright, and perfectly pressed as the time I’d first come here with Dickens.