Drood (3 page)

The author also noticed that the man had two fingers missing—or almost missing—on his right hand, the little finger and the ring finger next to it, as well as a missing middle finger on his left hand. What especially caught Dickens’s attention was the fact that the fingers had
not
been cut off at the joint, as is so often the case in an accident to the hand or subsequent surgery, but appeared to have been severed halfway through the bone between the joints. “Like tapers of white wax that had been partially melted,” he told me later.

Dickens was nonplussed as he and this strange black-caped figure slowly worked their way down the steep embankment, both using shrubs and rocks as handholds.

“I am Charles Dickens,” gasped my friend.

“Yesss,” said the pale face, the sibilants sliding out through the tiny teeth. “I know.”

This nonplussed Dickens all the more. “Your name, sir?” he asked as they slid down the embankment of loose stones together.

“Drood,” said the man. At least Dickens thought this is what the man said. The pale figure’s voice was slurred and tinged with what may have been a foreign accent. The word came out sounding most like “Dread.”

“You were on the train going to London?” asked Dickens as they approached the bottom of the steep hill.

“To Limehousse,” hissed the ungainly form in the dark cape. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”

Dickens glanced up sharply at this strange recital, since their train had been going to the station in central London, not to these dark alleys in East London. “Rookeries” was a slang term for the worst of the tenement slums in the city. But now they had reached the bottom of the hill, and without another word, this “Drood” turned away and seemed to glide into the shadows under the railway bridge. In a few seconds the man’s black cape blended with the darkness there.

“You must understand,” Dickens was to whisper to me later, “I never for a second thought that this strange apparition was Death come to claim his own. Nor any other personification of the tragedy that was even then unfolding. This would have been too trite even for far lesser fiction than that which I create. But I do admit, Wilkie,” he said, “that I wondered at the time if Drood might have been an undertaker come from Staplehurst or some other nearby hamlet.”

Alone now, Dickens turned his attention to the carnage.

The train carriages in the riverbed and adjoining swampy banks were no longer recognisable as railway coaches. Except for iron axles and wheels protruding here and there at impossible angles from the water, it was as if a series of wooden bungalows had been flung out of the sky, perhaps dropped from some American cyclone and smashed to bits. And then the bits looked to have been dropped and smashed yet again.

It seemed to Dickens as if no one could have survived such impact, such destruction, but screams of living sufferers—for in truth the injured far outnumbered the dead—began to fill the river valley. These were not, he thought at the time, human sounds. They were somehow infinitely worse than the moans and cries he had heard when touring overcrowded hospitals, such as the East London Children’s Hospital at Ratcliff Cross—which Drood had just mentioned—where the indigent and unclaimed went to die. No, these screams seemed more as if someone had opened a portal to the pit of Hell itself and allowed the damned there to cry out one last time to the mortal world.

Dickens watched a man stagger towards him, arms outstretched as if for a welcoming hug. The top of the man’s skull had been torn off rather the way one would crack an eggshell with a spoon in preparation for breakfast. Dickens could clearly see the grey-and-pink pulp glistening within the concave bowl of splintered skull. The fellow’s face was covered with blood, his eyes white orbs staring out through crimson rivulets.

Dickens could think of nothing to do but offer the man some brandy from his flask. The mouth of the flask came away red from the man’s lips. Dickens helped him lie on the grass and then used the water in his top hat to clean the man’s face. “What is your name, sir?” asked Dickens.

The man said only, “I am gone,” and died, the white eyes continuing to stare up at the sky from their bloody pools.

A shadow passed over them. Dickens whirled, sure—he told me later—that it would be Drood, the apparition’s black cape widening like a raven’s wings. But it was only a cloud passing between the sun and the river valley.

Dickens refilled his top hat from the river and came upon a lady, who also had blood streaming down over her lead-coloured face. She was almost naked, her clothes reduced to a few token strips of bloody cloth dangling like old bandages from her torn flesh. Her left breast was missing. She refused to pause for the writer’s ministrations and did not seem to hear his urgings that she sit down and wait for help. She walked past Dickens in a brisk manner and disappeared into the few trees that grew along the bank.

He helped two stunned guards extricate the crushed body of another woman from a flattened carriage and lay the body gently on the bank. A man was wading downstream, screaming, “My wife! My wife!” Dickens led him to the corpse. The man screamed, threw his arms above his head, and ran wildly into the swampy field near the river, crashing and thrashing about, all the while emitting sounds that Dickens later said “were like the hisses and death grunts of a boar pierced through the lungs by several large calibre bullets.” Then the man fainted, dropping into the marsh more like someone shot through the heart than through the lungs.

Dickens went back towards the carriages and found a woman propped against a tree. Except for a little blood on her face, perhaps from a slight scalp wound, she seemed uninjured.

“I shall bring you some water, madam,” he said.

“That would be very kind of you, sir,” she replied. She smiled and Dickens flinched. She had lost all of her teeth.

He went to the stream and looked back to see a figure he took to be Drood—presumably no one else was foolishly dressed in a heavy opera cape on that warm June day—solicitously bent over the woman. When Dickens returned a few seconds later with his top hat filled with river water, the man in black was gone and the woman was dead but still showing her ragged, bloodied gums in a parody of a final smile.

He went back to the smashed carriages. Amidst the rubble of one coach, a young man moaned feebly. More rescuers were sliding down the slope. Dickens ran to get several strong guards to help extricate the fellow from the broken glass, torn red velvet, heavy iron, and collapsed wooden floor of the compartment. While the guards grunted and lifted the heavy window frames and shattered flooring that had now become a fallen roof, Dickens squeezed the young man’s hand and said, “I shall see you to safety, my son.”

“Thank you,” gasped the injured young gentleman, obviously an occupant of one of the first-class carriages. “You are most kind.”

“What is your name?” asked our novelist as they carried the young man to the bank.

“Dickenson,” said the young fellow.

Charles Dickens made sure that Master Dickenson was carried up to the railway line where more rescuers had arrived, then he turned back to the carnage. He rushed from injured person to injured person, lifting, consoling, assuaging thirst, reassuring, sometimes covering their nakedness with any rag he could find, all while checking other scattered forms to confirm that they were no longer amongst the living.

A few rescuers and fellow passengers seemed as focused as our author, but many—Dickens told me later—could only stand there in shock and stare. The two figures doing the most that terrible afternoon amidst the wreckage and groans were Dickens and the bizarre form who called himself Drood, although the black-caped man seemed always to be just out of earshot, always on the verge of vanishing from sight again, and always appearing to glide rather than walk from wrecked carriage to wrecked carriage.

Dickens came upon a large woman, the peasant cloth and design of her dress showing that she had come from one of the lower-class carriages. She was face-down in the swamp, her arms under her body. He rolled her over to be certain that she was no longer among the living, when suddenly her eyes popped open in her mud-covered face.

“I saved her!” she gasped. “I saved her from
him!
”

It took a moment before Dickens noticed the infant clasped fiercely between the fat woman’s heavy arms, the small white face pressed deep against the woman’s pendulous bosoms. The baby was dead—either drowned in the shallow swamp or asphyxiated by its mother’s weight.

Dickens heard a hissing call, saw Drood’s pale form waving to him from the web of shadows under the broken bridge and walked towards him, but came first to a collapsed, upside-down carriage where a young woman’s bare but shapely arm protruded from what was left of a window. Her fingers moved, seeming to beckon Dickens closer.

Dickens crouched and took the soft fingers in his own two hands. “I am here, my dear,” he said to the darkness inside the small aperture that had been a window only fifteen minutes earlier. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back, as if in gratitude for her deliverance.

Dickens crouched but could see nothing but torn upholstery, dark shapes, and deep shadows within the tiny, triangular cave of wreckage. There was not enough room for him to squeeze in even his shoulders. The top frame of the window was pressing down almost to the marshy ground. He could only just hear the rapid, terrified breathing of the injured woman above the gurgle of the river running by. Without thinking of the possible impropriety of it, he stroked her bare arm as far as he could reach it in the collapsed wreckage. There were very fine reddish hairs along her pale forearm and they glowed coppery in the afternoon light.

“I see the guards and possibly a doctor coming,” Dickens said into the tiny aperture, squeezing her arm and hand all the while. He did not know for sure if the approaching gentleman in the brown suit who carried a leather bag was indeed a doctor, but he fervently hoped so. The four guards, carrying axes and iron pry rods, were jogging ahead, the gentleman in the formal suit puffing to keep up.

“Over here!” Dickens cried to them. He squeezed the woman’s hand. Her pale fingers squeezed back, the first finger closing, opening, and then curling and closing again around his first fingers much as a newborn baby would instinctively but tentatively grasp its father’s hand. She said nothing, but Dickens heard her sigh from the shadows. It seemed almost a contented sound. He held her hand in both of his and prayed that she was not seriously injured.

“Here, for God’s sake, hurry!” cried Dickens. The men gathered around. The heavy, suited man introduced himself—he was a physician by the name of Morris—and Dickens refused to relinquish either his place by the wrecked window or the young lady’s hand as the four guards began levering the window frame and smashed wood and iron upward and to the side, enlarging the tiny space that had somehow been the woman’s shelter and salvation.

“Careful now!” shouted Dickens to the guards. “With great care, by all means! Allow nothing to fall. Careful with the bars there!” Crouching lower to speak into the dark space, Dickens fiercely gripped her hand and whispered, “We almost have you, my dear. Another minute. Be brave!”

There came a last, answering squeeze. Dickens could feel the gratitude in it.

“You’ll have to get back a minute, sir,” said Dr Morris. “Back just a moment while the boys heave and lift here and I lean in to see if she is too injured to move yet or not. Just for a moment, sir. That’s a good gentleman.”

Dickens patted the young lady’s palm, his fingers reluctant to release her, feeling the final, parting pressure from her thin, pale, perfectly manicured fingers in return. His mind pushed away the very real but totally inappropriate sense of there being something physically exciting in such intimate contact with a woman whose acquaintance he had not yet made and whose face he had not yet seen. He said, “You’ll be out of all of this and safe with us in a moment, my dear” and surrendered her hand. Then he crawled backwards on all fours, clearing the way for the workmen and feeling the marsh moistness seeping up through the knees of his trousers.

“Now!” cried the doctor, kneeling where Dickens had been a moment before. “Put your backs into it, boys!”

The four burly guards literally put their backs into it, first lifting with their pry bars and then setting their backs against the ragged wall of collapsed flooring that now became a heavy pyramid of wood. The cone of darkness widened a bit beneath them. Sunlight illuminated the wreckage. They gasped as they strained to hold the debris up and then one of the men gasped again.

“Oh, Christ!” cried someone.

The doctor seemed to leap back as if he had touched an electrified wire. Dickens crawled forward to offer his help and finally saw into the space.

There was no woman, no girl. Only a bare arm severed just below the shoulder lay in the tiny open circle amidst the debris. The knob of bone looked very white in the filtered afternoon light.

Everyone shouted. More men arrived. Instructions were repeated. The guards used their axes and iron bars to pry open the wreckage, carefully at first and then with a terrible, almost wilfully destructive abandon. The rest of the young woman’s body simply was not there. There were no complete bodies anywhere in this pile of wreckage, only mismatched tatters of torn clothing and random bits of flesh and gouged bone. There was not so much as an identifiable scrap of her dress left behind. There was only the pale arm ending in the bloodless and tightly curled and now motionless fingers.

Without another word, Dr Morris turned and walked away, joining other rescuers milling around other victims.

Dickens got to his feet, blinked, licked his lips, and reached for his flask of brandy. It tasted of copper. He realised that it was empty and that he was tasting only the blood left on it from some of the victims to whom he had offered it. He looked around and around for his top hat and then saw that he was wearing it. River water from it had soaked his hair and dripped down his collar.