Dan Simmons - Drood

“You knew I would be back?” I asked as I followed the ancient figure to the farthest, darkest reaches of the long burial loculus.

King Lazaree only smiled and beckoned me farther into the burrow. The silent forms on the three-tiered wooden beds set against the cavern walls appeared to be the same Oriental mummies that we had glimpsed during that first visit. But each mummy held an ornate opium pipe, and the smoky exhalations which filled the narrow, lamp-lit passage were the only indication that they were breathing.

All the other beds were occupied, but this three-level wooden bunk at the back of the room, separated by its own dark red curtain, was empty.

“You shall be our honoured guest,” Lazaree said softly in his oddly lilted Cambridge accent. “And as such, you shall have your privacy. Khan?” He gestured, and another figure in a dark robe handed me a long pipe with a beautiful glass-and-ceramic bowl at the end.

“The pipe has never been used,” said King Lazaree. “It is for you and your use alone. This bed also is for your use and your use alone. No one else shall ever lie in it. And the drug you will experience tonight is of the quality reserved for kings, pharaohs, emperors, and those holy men wishing to become gods.”

I tried to speak, found my mouth too dry, licked my lips, and tried again. “How much…” I began.

King Lazaree silenced me with a touch of his long yellowed fingers and longer yellow nails. “Gentlemen do not discuss price, Mr Collins. First, experience this night—then you can tell me if such quality and uniqueness is worth the coin these other gentlemen…” He moved those long, curving fingernails in a sweep that included the rows of silent cots. “… have decided to pay for it. If not, there will be, of course, no charge.”

King Lazaree glided into the dark and the robed figure named Khan helped me up into my bunk, set a notched wooden block under my head—it was strangely comfortable—and lit the pipe for me. Then Khan was gone and I lay on my side, inhaling the fragrant smoke and allowing my anxieties and worries to flow out of me.

Do you wish, Dear Reader, to know the effects of this ultimate opium? Perhaps in your day everyone avails himself of this amazing drug. But even so, I doubt if the efficacy of your opium could equal or come close to the perfection of King Lazaree’s secret recipe.

If it is the effect of mere opium that piques your curiosity, I can quote to you here from the first paragraph of the last book ever written by Charles Dickens—a book he would not live long enough to finish:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

There you have it. An opium addict struggling to consciousness in a run-down tumbled opium den at dawn. Ten thousand scimitars flashing in the sunlight. Thrice ten thousand dancing girls. White elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours. What poetry! What insight!

What rubbish.

Charles Dickens had not the slightest idea of the power or effect of opium. He once bragged to me that during his second reading tour—still in our future that summer and autumn of 1866—when he was racked by pain and unable to sleep, he granted himself the “Morpheus of laudanum.” But when I enquired further—of Dolby rather than of the Inimitable, since I wanted the truth—I found that the wings of Morpheus to which he had abandoned himself consisted of two tiny drops of opium in a very large glass of port. By this time, I was drinking several port-glasses full of pure laudanum with not even a chaser of wine.

Dickens had no idea of the effects of laudanum, much less of rich opium.

Let me tell you, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, just what the effect of King Lazaree’s opium was like—

_it was a warmth that began in your belly and veins, a little like a good whiskey, but which, unlike whiskey, never stopped expanding and growing.

_it was an elixir that transformed small, cherubic, usually pleasant, rarely-taken-seriously William Wilkie Collins, he of the absurdly large forehead, poor eyesight, and comically voluminous beard, he who was “always good for a laugh” and usually good to serve as what Americans call a “sidekick”—into the self-confident colossus that he knew in his heart of hearts he always was and always had been.

_it was a transformative agent that eliminated the soul-sickening anxiety that had haunted and weakened me since I was a child, that deepened perception, and which bestowed an insight into people, one’s self, and relationships that illuminated even the most mundane object or situation in a brilliant, golden light that must be something like the vision of a divinity.

This is an inadequate description, I fear, but I hesitate before penning a complete description of the unique and beneficial effects of this ancient Chinaman’s opium. (Too many others, those without my innate resistance to the oft-cited negative aspects of the drug, might rush to try it—not realising that opium of King Lazaree’s quality of essence may never again be found in London or anywhere else.) Suffice it to say that the drug was worth every shilling the ancient Chinaman asked for it—asked for it many hours later, when I was helped from my couch and escorted, by the shadow called Khan, all the way back to the steep staircase above which waited the faithful Hatchery—and it remained worth the thousands upon thousands of pounds I would continue paying for it in the months and years to come.

Thank God for my huge payment from Cornhill ’s George Smith in advance of my writing Armadale. I would not say that every cent of that windfall went for opium—I remember spending some £300 for wine and investing at least £1,500 in Funds (and, of course, there were gifts to Caroline and Carrie, as we called her daughter, Harriet, at home, as well as money sent to Martha R—)—but the majority of the astounding £5,000 I received from Smith did end up in the long-nailed yellow hands of the subterranean Mandarin.

Hatchery—huge, hulking, derby-topped—was always waiting for me in the crypt far above, no matter how overdue into the morning (or even afternoon) my return was. Each time he would take back the huge pistol (I always set it next to me in my cot in King Lazaree’s Den, even though I felt safer there than anywhere else in the world) and each time he would escort me out of the crypt, cemetery, and slums back to the world of the sad, shuffling, unseeing mortals who knew nothing of the glories of Lazaree’s premium opium.

I WISHED ALMOST as much as my constantly whining Caroline did that the house on Gloucester Place would open up for us. Our current home at 9 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, had always been comfortable enough for me, but it seemed smaller now between Caroline’s constant complaining and Carrie’s coming into womanhood.