Dan Simmons - Drood

Mostly, though, it was the uninvited inhabitants that made the old place too small.

The woman with the green skin and tusk teeth still haunted the stairways when they were not well lighted, but it was the Other Wilkie who caused me the most consternation.

The Other Wilkie never spoke; he simply watched and waited. No matter how I was dressed when I encountered him, he was always in collar and shirtsleeves and waistcoat, cravat in place. I knew that if I were suddenly to shave off my full beard—which was so much a part of me now that I never really noticed it in the mirror except when trimming it—the Other Wilkie would retain his. If I were to remove my spectacles, he would retain his. He never ventured out of my study and was there only at night, but on those nights I encountered him there, his presence was increasingly irritating.

Sensing someone else in the room with me, I would look up and see the Other Wilkie sitting silently in the yellow-upholstered spiderweb-backed chair in the far corner. Sometimes the chair would be reversed (his doing, I am certain), and he would be sitting spraddle-legged with his shirtsleeved arms on the back, head down and gaze intense, the lamplight glinting off his tiny spectacles. I would go back to work, but when I looked up again, the Other Wilkie would have somehow silently advanced until he was sitting in the curved-back wooden chair I keep near my desk for guests. His small eyes would be fixed intently—hungrily, I thought—upon the manuscript I was working on, and he never blinked.

Eventually I would look up with a start to see and feel the Other Wilkie standing or sitting so close to me that our arms were almost touching. These moments of pure fright and terror were made worse when the Other Wilkie lunged for my pen. He wanted to continue and to finish the work on his own—I had no doubt of that—and I have related to you how violent and ink-spattering these tussles for possession of pen, inkwell, and manuscripts had become before I abandoned the study at night and began to work there only during the day, at times when he would not make an appearance.

But in that autumn of 1866, I could hear the Other Wilkie breathing and occasionally shuffling his feet outside my closed study doors even in daylight. I would tip-toe to those doors—hoping that it might be a servant, or Caroline or Carrie playing a prank on me—and throw open a door, only—and always—to see nothing in the hallway. But—always—I could hear the echo of shoes my own size thudding down the dark servants’ stairway on which also waited the Woman with Green Skin.

I knew then that it would be just a matter of time before the Other Wilkie would appear in the study with me during the daytime. Thus I began carrying my notes and writing material to the Athenaeum Club, where I would find a comfortable leather chair and table near a tall window and work in peace.

The problem was, I had little to work on. For the first time in some years at least, since Charles Dickens had first hired me on the staff to write for Household Words ten years earlier (some five years after I had met him), ideas were not coalescing into plots. I had jotted down notes after my rambling discussion with Dickens about the supernatural-adventure novel I was thinking of calling The Serpent’s Eye, but except for copying out some relevant entries on jewels from India from my club’s library edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica —the eighth edition, 1855—I had made no progress. I went back to my earlier idea of writing about a former police detective now given to private enquiries—Inspector Field in the form of my detective Sergeant Cuff—but my understandable reluctance to spend more time with Field than I had to, combined with an aversion to the entire insidious idea of a detective’s intrusive investigations, retarded that research as well.

Part of me simply was in no mood to write. I much preferred Thursday nights, with the escorted trip to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the hours upon hours of ecstasy and soaring insight that followed. The great frustration was that this godlike insight could never be put down on paper—by anyone, no matter how gifted the wordwright, not even, I was certain during my Thursday-night / Friday-morning flights, by Shakespeare or Keats, should either genius reincarnate in a London opium den without warning. Certainly not by so timid a man and unimaginative a writer as Charles Dickens. Each week I could see in King Lazaree’s dark-eyed look his absolute knowledge of both my growing divinity and growing frustration at not being able to share my new knowledge via the dead bulk of inert letters being set down and pushed around on a white page like so many inky-carapaced and quill-prodded beetles. These clumsy written symbols were merely shorthand, I now understood, for the plaintive sounds that lonely apes make and have been making since the Earth and her sister Moon were young.

Everything else whirling around me that late autumn of 1866 seemed too absurd to be of consequence: the ongoing nonsense of Drood or not-Drood; the endless chess game for power between Inspector Field, the Inimitable, and me; the sweet allurings and caterwaulings of the women in my life; my inability to find an entrance into the cave under the paper for my next book; my unspoken and definitely unsettled competition with Charles Dickens…

But all that was to change when, one Friday morning in late November, after a long, sweet night in King Lazaree’s tomb, I returned home with my suit still reeking of opium to find Dickens in the sitting room with Caroline. Her eyes were closed, her head was tilted back, and there was a look of something like uncommonly rare rapture on her face. Dickens was making mesmeric passes around and above her head, pausing only to touch her temples and to whisper to her.

Before I could speak, both heads turned in my direction, Caroline opened her eyes, and Dickens leapt to his feet and cried, “My dear Wilkie! Just the man I came to fetch. We must leave for the railway station this very minute. There is something astounding I have to show you in Rochester and someone there I want you to meet.”

Ineed to murder someone,” said Dickens.

I nodded but said nothing. The train to Rochester had passed Gad’s Hill already.

“I am quite sure I need to murder someone,” said Dickens. “It is the one thing missing from the readings. Every other emotion is included in the greater list of excerpts I have prepared for this upcoming tour. All but… murder.” He leaned on his stick and looked at me. “What do you think, my dear Wilkie? A modified and intensified version of Bill Sikes murdering Nancy perhaps?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not indeed,” chuckled Dickens, patting his jacket. “It is only a human life.”

He was garrulous in part because he had thrice imbibed of brandy during the ride. Each time the carriage shook or jolted, Dickens would either grasp the seat ahead of him with a death-grip or feel in the pocket of his coat for the small flask.

When I had confronted Dickens about the scene I had come upon of him mesmerising Caroline, he’d laughed and explained that my dearest had been upset and telling him of my pain from rheumatical gout, my increasing difficulty in getting to sleep, and what she saw as my growing dependency upon laudanum. Dickens had assured her that magnetic influence would whisk me off to slumber without any of the harmful side-effects of laudanum, and he had been in the process of teaching her the art when I’d entered.

“She was an adept pupil,” he said now as the train rumbled and jolted on towards Rochester, passing the marshes around which Dickens and I had walked more than a few times. “You must allow her to attempt the mesmeric influence tonight. I guarantee it will allow you to sleep without opiate dreams or morning fatigue.”