Dan Simmons - Drood

Dickens laughed again, but I remained uncharmed and unmoved. Inside the now-lighted cathedral, a choir was singing, “Tell me shep-herds, te-e-ell me.…”

“You know, Wilkie,” said Dickens, still in good humour despite the late hour and growing chill as a breeze came up around us, stirring the brittle leaves across the flat headstone we had dined on only hours earlier, “I believe I know the name of that choirmaster.”

“Yes?” I said, allowing my tone to convey my total lack of interest in this fact.

“Yes. I do believe his name is Jasper. Jacob Jasper, I believe. No, John Jasper. That is it. Jack to his beloved and loving nephew.”

It was not like Dickens to babble on like this, at least not with such banal content. “You don’t say?” I said, using the tone I used with Caroline when she prattled at me while I was reading a newspaper.

“I do say,” said Dickens. “And do you know Mr Jasper’s secret, my dear Wilkie?”

“How could I?” I said with some small asperity. “I did not even know of the choirmaster’s existence until a second ago.”

“Indeed,” said Dickens, rubbing his hands together. “Mr John Jasper’s secret is that he is an opium addict.”

The skin on my face prickled and I found myself standing very straight. I do not believe I breathed for half a minute or so.

“The worst kind of opium addict,” continued the Inimitable. “No laudanum or tincture of opium for Mr John Jasper, the way a civilised white man uses the drug for medicinal purposes. Oh, no! Mr John Jasper takes himself to the worst parts of London, then to the worst slums in those worst parts, and seeks out the worst—that is, to him, the best —opium den.”

“Does he?” I managed. I could feel the rising damp stealing up through my bones to my brain and tongue.

“And our choirmaster Jasper is also a murderer,” said Dickens. “A cold-blooded, calculating murderer, who, even in his opium dreams, plans to take the life of someone who loves and trusts him.”

“Dickens,” I said at last, “what in the blazes are you talking about?”

He clapped me on the back as we began walking across the graveyard towards the road where his carriage had just returned. “A fiction, of course,” he said with a laugh. “That ghost of a glimmer of a shade of an idea—a character, a hint of a story. You know how such things happen, my dear Wilkie.”

I managed to swallow. “Of course. Is that what this afternoon and evening have been about then, my dear Dickens? Preparation for one of your books? Something for All the Year Round, perhaps?”

“Not preparation for my book!” cried Dickens. “For your book, my dear Wilkie! For your Serpent’s Tooth .”

“ The Eye of the Serpent, ” I corrected. “Or perhaps, The Serpent’s Eye. ”

Dickens waved away the difference. It was becoming difficult to see him in the growing darkness. The lamps on the carriage were lit.

“No matter,” he said. “The idea is the tale, my friend. You have your wonderful Sergeant Cuff. But even the best detective requires a mystery to solve if he is to be of any use or interest to your readers. That is what I hoped would come of our luncheon and Dradles outing today.”

“A mystery?” I said stupidly. “What mystery was there today?”

Dickens opened his hands and arms to take in the dark cathedral, the darker graveyard, and the many tombs and headstones. “Imagine a villain so devilish and clever, my dear Wilkie, that he murders someone simply to have had the experience of murder. Not murder a family member, as was the way of it in the Road Case in which you and I were both so interested—no, but to murder a stranger, or near-stranger. A murder with no motive whatsoever.”

“Why on earth would any human being do that?” I asked. Dickens was making no sense to me whatsoever.

“I just explained,” he said with perhaps some small exasperation. “ To have the experience of having murdered someone. Imagine what a boon that would be to an author such as yourself—or to me. To any writer of imaginative prose, much less the sensationalist imaginative prose for which you are known, my dear Wilkie.”

“Are you talking about preparation for reading a Murder in your upcoming tour?” I asked.

“Good heavens, no. I have my poor Nancy waiting to be done in by that ultimate villain, Bill Sikes, someday. Not now. Already I have jotted down improvements on the method and description of that bloody massacre. I am talking about your tale, my friend.”

“But my tale is about a diamond that brings bad luck to the family that…”

“Oh, bother the diamond!” cried Dickens. “That was just an early draft of an idea. The Koh-i-noor diamond was a disappointment to everyone who went out of their way to see it at the Great Exhibition. Its color was a sickly, urine yellow—no real diamond to the English eye. Toss away your worthless gem, Wilkie, and follow the path of this new tale!”

“What tale?”

Dickens sighed. He ticked off the elements on the fingers of his gloved hand. “Element the first—the idea of someone murdering a near-stranger simply for the experience of having murdered. Element the second—the perfect way to dispose of a body. Your Sergeant Cuff will have a devil of a time figuring that out!”

“What are we speaking of?” I said. “I encountered no sure-fire way of disposing of a body in our bizarre luncheon or more-bizarre tour with the drunken Dradles.”

“But of course you did!” cried Dickens. “First there is the quick-lime. Certainly you have not forgotten that Pit!”

“My eyes and nose have not.”

“Nor should they, my dear Wilkie! Imagine your readers in terror as they come to understand that your murderer—your casual, random murderer, like Iago, moved by a motiveless malignancy—has dissolved the body of some poor chap in a pit of quick-lime. Everything down to the last few bones and pearl buttons and perhaps a watch. Or a skull.”

“There would still be those remaining last bones. And the watch and skull,” I said sullenly. “And the pit would be right there in the open for Sergeant Cuff and the police to discover.”

“Not for a minute!” cried Dickens. “Did you not understand the gift I gave you in Dradles? Your villain shall enlist—knowingly or unknowingly shall be up to your novelistic judgement, of course—just such a character as Dradles to help him inter the poor, pitiful remnants of his murder victim in just such a tomb or vault as we saw, or heard, rather, this evening. The last bits of the murdered man—or woman, if you truly want a sensational novel, my friend—shall be interred alongside the old ’uns, and that will be an end to him—until your clever Sergeant Cuff works it all out through a series of clues that only Wilkie Collins could provide.”

We stood there for a moment in a silence broken only by the shifting of the two carriage horses and the more furtive shifting of the cold servant on the driver’s box. Finally I said, “All very wonderful… very Dickens-like, I am sure… but I believe I prefer my original idea of a fabled gem sacred to the Hindoos or other heathens, bringing bad luck to some illustrious English family.”

Dickens sighed. “Oh, very well. Have it the way you insist. Look a gift horse in the withers, if you must.” But I heard him say much more softly, “Even though the gem and the Hindoos were my idea, which I have now seen to be too weak to bear the tale.”

More loudly, he said, “May I drop you at the station?”

Dickens’s uncharacteristic omission of an invitation to Gad’s Hill for supper told me what I already knew—that he would be dining with Ellen Ternan and that he had no intention of returning to Gad’s Hill Place that night.