Drood (15 page)

W
E WALKED FOR
about twenty minutes through even darker and more reeking slums. At times there were signs of crowded human habitation in the sagging tenements, whispers and catcalls rising out of the thick darkness on both sides of the narrow lanes, and at other times the only sound was that of our boots and Dickens’s cane tapping on the cobblestones of those few lanes that had cobblestones. I was reminded that night of a passage in Dickens’s most recent—and still uncompleted—book,
Our Mutual Friend,
one of the first numbers to be serialised in the past year, in which our author has two young men riding in a carriage down to the Thames to identify a body found drowned and dragged out of the river by a father and daughter who do that daily for a living—

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower, and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river.

In truth, like the dissolute young characters in the coach in Dickens’s tale, I had been paying little attention to the direction we were going; I merely followed the large shadow of Detective Hatchery and the lithe shadow of Dickens. I was later to regret my inattention.

Suddenly the constant background stench changed its flavour and grew in intensity. “Pfah!” I cried to my shadowy companions ahead. “Are we nearing the river again?”

“Worse, sir,” said Hatchery over his wide shoulder. “It’s burial grounds, sir.”

I looked around. For some time I had been under the general but contradictory impression that we were approaching either Church Street or the London Hospital area, but this dark avenue had opened instead on our right onto a sort of field encircled by walls and an iron fence and a gate. I saw no church nearby, so this was no churchyard cemetery, but rather a municipal cemetery of the kind that had become so common in the past fifteen years.

You see, Dear Reader, in our time, the almost-three-million of us in London lived and walked above the corpses of at least that many of our common dead, and almost certainly more. As London grew and devoured its surrounding suburbs and villages, those graveyards were also subsumed, and it was to them that the hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies of our beloved dead were consigned. St Martin-in-the-Fields churchyard, for instance, was only about two hundred feet square, but by 1840, some twenty-five years before this eventful night, it was estimated to contain the remains of between
60,000
and
70,000
of our London departed. There are many more there now.

In the 1850s, about the time of the Great Stink and the worst of the terrible cholera epidemics, it was becoming apparent to all of us that these overcrowded churchyards were creating a health risk to those unlucky enough to live nearby. Every burial place in the city was—and remains—overcrowded to the point of overflow. Thousands of bodies were buried in shallow pits beneath chapels and schools and workplaces and in empty lots and even behind and beneath private homes. So the Burial Act of 1852—a piece of legislation which Dickens had spoken for—demanded that the General Board of Health establish some cemeteries open to all the dead regardless of their religion.

Perhaps you also know, Dear Reader, that until recently in my lifetime, all those to be buried in England had to receive Christian burial in parish churchyards. There were few exceptions. It was as late as 1832 that an act of Parliament put an end to the common practice of my fellow Englishmen burying suicides in public highways with a stake driven through the dead sinner’s heart. The Act—a paragon of modern thought and philanthropy—allowed the corpses of suicides to be buried in churchyards with Christians, but only if the dead one was interred between the hours of nine PM and midnight, and always then without the rites of the Church. And I should mention that the compulsory dissection of murderers’ corpses was also abolished in 1832—that enlightened year!—and even murderers may be found in Christian cemeteries in this liberal era.

Many—I should say
most
—of those graves remain unmarked. But not necessarily undiscovered. Those men digging new graves each day or night here in London invariably sink their spades into rotting flesh—layers of it, I am told—and then into unnamed skeletons beneath. Some churchyards hire men to check the grounds each morning for chunks of decaying parishioners that have risen to the surface—especially after heavy rains—in too-eager anticipation of the Final Trumpet Call. I have seen these workers carrying arms and hands and other, less distinguishable parts, in wheelbarrows while in the pursuit of their rounds, rather like a diligent gardener on an estate will carry off fallen limbs and branches after a storm.

These new interment areas were called “burial grounds” as distinct from parish “churchyards” and they had been very popular. The first burial grounds were commercial ventures (and as was still the custom in so many places on the Continent, if the family fell behind on payment on their loved ones’ graves, the bodies were dug up and tossed aside, the beautiful headstones used to pave retaining walls or walkways, and the earth sold to a more reliable customer), but since the 1850s Acts enforcing the closure of many overflowing London churchyards, most of our new cemeteries were of the municipal variety, with separate seating, as it were, for religious Conformists (complete with chapels and consecrated ground) and a different area for Dissenters. One wonders if they were uncomfortable spending Eternity within a cricket pitch’s distance of one another.

The burial ground we were approaching now in the dark looked to have been an ancient churchyard at some point—until the church was abandoned as the neighbourhoods here got too dangerous for decent people, then its structure burned down in order to raise more tenements so that landlords could squeeze more money out of immigrants with nowhere else to light—but the churchyard itself had remained and been used… and used… and used… perhaps taken over by Dissenters a century or two ago, then converted to a bury-for-profit graveyard some time in the last twenty years.

As we approached the sweating walls and black iron fence of the place, I wondered who would pay even a penny to be buried here. There had once been large trees within the churchyard, but these were only calcified skeletons now, dead for generations, with their amputated arms rising towards the black buildings leaning over the site on every side. The stench from within this walled and fenced space was so terrible that I reached for my handkerchief before remembering that Dickens had taken it earlier in the night to drape across the dead babies. I half expected to see an actual green cloud of miasma hanging over this place and—in truth—there was a sick glow to the mist that had arrived to serve as harbinger for the next warm-blanket of rain.

Dickens reached the high, closed, black iron gate first and tried to open it, but it was locked with a massive padlock.

Thank God,
I thought.

But Detective Hatchery reached under his coat and brought a heavy ring of keys from his impossibly burdened belt. He had Dickens hold the bullseye lantern while he fumbled through the clanking keys before finding the one he wanted. It fit in the lock. The huge gate, all black arches and scallops, opened slowly with such a creaking that it seemed as if it had been decades since anyone had paid to open it to rid themselves of a loved one’s corpse.

We walked between the dark headstones and sagging sepulchres, passing under the dead trees and down uneven paving stones on narrow lanes between ancient vaults. I could tell by the spring in his step and the clack of his cane that Dickens was enjoying every second of this. I was concentrating on not retching from the stink and not stepping, in the darkness, on anything soft and yielding.

“I know this place,” Dickens said suddenly. His voice in the darkness was loud enough to make me leap a small distance into the air. “I have seen it in daylight. I have written about it in
The Uncommercial Traveller
. But I was not within its gates before tonight. I called it the ‘City of the Absent’ and this particular place ‘Saint Ghastly Grim’s.’ ”

“Aye, sir,” said Hatchery. “It once were exactly that.”

“I did not see the skulls and crossbones decorating the iron spikes on the gate,” said Dickens, his voice still far too loud for the circumstances.

“They are still there, Mr Dickens,” attested Hatchery. “I did not feel it politick to shine my light up on ’em. ’Ere we are, sirs. Our entrance to Undertown.”

We had stopped before a narrow, sealed crypt.

“Is this a joke?” I asked. My voice may have sounded a bit brittle to my companions. I was overdue for an application of my medicinal laudanum; the gout was causing many parts of my body to hurt and I could feel a terrible headache tightening like a metal band around my temples.

“No, Mr Collins, no joke, sir,” said Hatchery. He was fumbling at his key ring again and now he set yet another massive key into an ancient lock on the metal door of the crypt. The tall door groaned inward when he leaned his weight against it. The detective shone the light inside and waited for Dickens or me to enter.

“This is absurd,” I said. “There can be no Undertown or underground anything here. Our boots have been squelching in the reeking muck of the Thames for hours. The water table here must be shallower than these graves around us.”

“That does not prove to be the case, sir,” whispered Hatchery.

“This part of the East End lies over rock, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens. “Ten feet down and it is solid rock. Certainly you know the geology of your city! That is why they chose to build them here.”

“Build what?” I asked, attempting, without total success, to keep the asperity I felt out of my voice.

“The catacombs,” said Dickens. “The ancient underground spaces of a monastery crypt. The Roman
loculi
before that, even deeper here, almost certainly beneath the Christian catacombs.”

I did not choose to ask what
“loculi”
meant. I had the sense that I would learn its dark etymology soon enough.

Dickens entered the crypt, then did the detective, then I. The cone of light from the bullseye moved over and around the tiny interior. The pedestal bier in the centre of the small mausoleum, just long enough to hold a coffin or sarcophagus or shrouded body, was empty. There were no obvious niches or other places for bodies.

“It’s empty,” I said. “Someone’s pilfered the corpse.”

Hatchery laughed softly. “Bless me, sir. There was never a corpse ’ere. This partic’lar house o’ the dead is—’as always been—just an entrance to the
land
o’ the dead. If you’ll move aside, Mr Collins.”

I stepped back against the sweating stone wall at the rear of the crypt as the detective bent low, set his shoulder to the cracked marble bier, and shoved. The sound of stone scraping across solid stone was extremely unpleasant.

“I noticed the arcs gouged into the old pavers as we came in,” Dickens commented to the still-labouring detective. “As clear a clue as the grooves the post of a sagging gate makes in the mud.”

“Aye, sir,” panted Hatchery, still shoving. “But usually leaves and dirt an’ such in ’ere hide that, even in direct lantern light. You’re very observant, Mr Dickens.”

“Yes,” said Dickens.

I was sure that the screech and moans of the slowly shifting bier were loud enough to bring mobs of curious ruffians into the graveyard. Then I remembered that Hatchery had locked the cemetery gate behind us. We were locked in. And since the door of the crypt itself had taken much of Hatchery’s considerable bulk and strength to open—he had shouldered it shut after we entered—we might as well have been locked into this tomb as well. As steep stone stairs became visible in the black wedge beneath the floor now growing wider as the bier was moved, the sense of
that
weight being set back in place, essentially entombing us below the stone beneath the locked tomb within the locked cemetery, I felt cold shivers running down my back despite the thick heat of the night.

Finally Hatchery stopped pushing and stood upright. The triangular wedge of the dark opening was not large, little more than two feet wide, but when Dickens shone the bullseye down into it, I could see very steep stone steps descending.

Dickens’s face was lighted from below by the lantern as he looked at the detective and said, “You’re sure you will not come down with us, Hatchery?”

“No, sir, thank you, sir,” said the big man. “I have agreed not to.”

“
Agreed
not to?” Dickens’s tone was one of mild curiosity.

“Aye, sir. An old arrangement that many of us former and current constables and inspectors ’ave with those in Undertown. We don’t go down to complicate their lives, sir; they don’t come up to complicate ours.”

“Rather like the arrangement most of the living attempt to make with the dead,” Dickens said softly, his gaze returning to the dark hole and steep steps.

“Exactly, sir,” said the detective. “I knew you would understand.”

“Well, we should be going down,” said Dickens. “Will you be able to find your way home without a lantern, Detective? We’ll obviously need this one below.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Hatchery. “I ’ave another one on my belt should I need it. But I won’t be going ’ome yet. I’ll wait here until dawn. If you’re not back by then, I’ll go straight to Leman Street Station and report two gentlemen missing.”

“That’s very kind of you, Detective Hatchery,” said Dickens. He smiled. “But as you said, the constables and inspectors won’t go below to look for us.”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir,” said the detective, shrugging. “What with you both being famous authors an’ fine gentlemen, perhaps they’d see fit to make an exception in this case. I just ’ope we don’t have to find out, sir.”

Dickens laughed at this. “Come along, Wilkie.”

“Mr Dickens,” said Hatchery, reaching under his coat and coming out with a huge pistol of the revolver variety. “Perhaps you should take this with you, sir. Even if just for the rats.”