Drood (66 page)

Detective Barris barked a laugh at this, but Inspector Field silenced him with a glance.

There was another tall man wearing a topcoat and carrying a shotgun standing guard at the entrance to Ghastly Grim’s. He touched his cap as we approached. I pulled back as we came to the gate, but Inspector Field propelled me forward as if I were a child.

The snow had covered the headstones and statues and outlined the flat roofs and ledges on the crypts. The dead tree that brooded over the last crypt rose against the cloudy sky like a spill of black ink rimned with white chalk.

Three more men waited inside the crypt, their breath hovering over them like trapped souls in the cold. I looked away but not before seeing that they had covered Hatchery’s eviscerated body with some sort of canvas tarpaulin. The grey, glistening garlands were gone, but I noticed a second, smaller tarpaulin in the corner covering something other than Hatchery’s corpse. Even in the cold air, the small space smelled like an abattoir.

Most of the men who had accompanied us through the streets peered in at the crypt door and waited just outside. The crypt was small and seemed absurdly crowded now with six of us in it, since everyone avoided standing too near to Hatchery’s covered corpse.

I realised with a start that one of the three men waiting in the crypt was not a policeman or detective but was a giant Malay, his black hair hanging long, dirty, and lank down his neck, his arms behind his back and his wrists cruelly cuffed by iron manacles. For a confused second I thought him to be the Malay we had just left behind at Opium Sal’s, but I saw this man was older and his cheeks were unscarred. He stared at me without curiosity or passion, his eyes dulled in the way I had seen in condemned men before or after their hangings.

Inspector Field moved me towards the narrow entrance in the floor, but I pulled back with all of my will and energy. “I cannot go down there,” I gasped. “I
shall
not.”

“You shall,” said Inspector Field and shoved me forward.

One of the detectives guarding the tall Malay handed a bullseye lantern to the inspector; another was given to Barris. With the younger detective leading and Inspector Field holding me tight by the arm as he shoved me ahead of him, the three of us descended the narrow stairway. Only one other man—a detective who was a stranger to me and who carried a heavy shotgun—went down with us.

I
CONFESS, DEAR
Reader, that many elements of the next half-hour or so are lost to me still. My terror, fatigue, and pain were such that my state of consciousness was rather like that which we experience when hovering near the threshold of sleep—now aware of our surroundings, now dropping off to dreams, now jerked back to reality by some sound, sensation, or other stimulus.

The stimulus I remember most was Inspector Field’s insistent, incessant iron-grip on my arm pulling and pushing me this way and that in the lantern-lit darkness of the pit.

In the lantern light, the short descent and walk to King Lazaree’s den was as familiar as a recurring dream, holding nothing of the nightmare of my panicked flight in the darkness.

“Is this the opium den?” asked Inspector Field.

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. Yes. I don’t know.”

Instead of the red curtain hanging, there was a rusted grate just as on all the other
loculi.
The bullseye lanterns showed piles of coffins within rather than rows of three-tiered bunks and the bier with the ever-present Buddha figure of King Lazaree.

“This grate isn’t set in the wall like the others,” grunted Barris, grasping the rusty iron and shoving it in. It clanged like the bell of doom as it hit the stone floor. We entered the narrow space.

“No dust from the ceiling here,” said Barris, moving the beam of his bullseye back and forth. “It’s been swept clear.”

The fourth man in our party remained in the corridor with his shotgun.

“Yes, this is King Lazaree’s den,” I said as the lanterns illuminated more of the familiar corridor and alcove. But nothing remained, not even marks on the stone where the heavy bunks and small iron stove had rested. The bier in the centre where King Lazaree had sat in his bright robes now held only an ancient and empty stone sarcophagus. My private alcove at the back was just another niche filled with more stacked coffins.

“But you did not wake in the dark here,” said Inspector Field.

“No. Farther down the corridor, I think.”

“We’ll look there,” said the inspector and waved Barris out ahead of him. The man with the shotgun lifted his own lantern and followed us.

I was thinking about Dickens. Where was he in his American tour now? The last letter I had received from him, written from New York just before the New Year, reported him sick with what he called “low action of the heart” and so unhappy where he was that he was staying in bed each day until three PM and only with great difficulty rousing himself for the inevitable evening performances.

Did Dickens have a scarab in him? Did it crawl from his brain to his heart and sink its huge pincers in when he did anything that would release him from Drood?

I knew from the original itinerary and from telegrams to Wills at the magazine office that in this January, Dickens was to have read in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Brooklyn—and that each hall was selling out to the tune of six- to eight-thousand tickets—but where was he now amidst that list of odd-sounding cities?

I knew Dickens well enough to know that he would have recovered from his illness and moral swoon and be capering around between readings, amusing children and onlookers on his trains connecting the cities, putting every ounce of energy and fibre of his being into the afternoon and nightly readings, but I also knew that he would be miserable at the same time, counting down the days until his ship sailed for England and home in April.

Would he live that long? Would the scarab
allow
him to live if it detected his betrayal?

“Is this the place where you woke?” demanded Inspector Field.

He had to shake me to bring me back from my revery. I looked into a
loculus
identical to most of the others except that in the dust in this narrow niche there were footprints—of small, bare, naked, vulnerable feet—in the thick dust. There was also blood on the ragged grate where I had blindly squeezed through the break. I touched the clothing above the fresh wounds on my ribs and hips.

“Yes,” I said dully. “I think so.”

“It’s a wonder you made it out of here in the dark,” said Barris.

I had nothing to say to that. I was shaking as with the ague and wanted to leave this pit more than anything else in the world. But Inspector Field was not finished with me.

We walked back towards the entrance, light from the three bullseye lanterns dancing on the walls and
loculi
entrances in such a way as to make me feel faint. It was as if reality and fiction, life and death, light and its absolute absence, were whirling in a frenzied
danse macabre
.

“Is this the corridor leading to the rood screen and lower levels?” asked Inspector Field.

“Yes,” I said, not having any idea at that moment of what he was talking about.

We followed the narrow corridor past black
loculi
to the circular subterranean room underneath the former Cathedral of St Ghastly Grim’s apse. This was where Dickens had found the narrow stairway down to the real Undertown.

“I’m not going down there,” I said, pulling myself free from Inspector Field’s supporting grasp and almost falling. “I can
not
go down there.”

“You do not have to,” said Inspector Field, and the words made me almost weep.
“Today,”
he added. To the man with the shotgun, he said, “Bring the Malay down.”

I stood there dully, outside of time, feeling movement deep in my head as the scarab stirred. I tried not to be sick again, but the air down there stank of rank soil and decay and the grave. When the detective with the shotgun returned, he had another detective with him—this man in a tan overcoat and carrying a rifle—and between them was the handcuffed Malay. The Oriental stared at me when he entered the subterranean apse; his narrow black eyes on either side of that flat blade of a nose were almost as dull with pain or despair as mine but more accusatory. He never looked at Field or Barris, only at me, as if I were his persecutor.

Inspector Field nodded, the two men with guns led the captive through the tattered rood screen and down the narrow passage, and Barris and the inspector brought me back into the corridor and then up into the light.

“I don’t understand,” I managed to gasp as we came out of the crypt into the freezing January air. The snow had stopped but the air was thick with winter fog. “Have you informed the police? Why are all these private detectives here? Certainly you must have informed the police. Where are the police?”

Inspector Field led me to the street where a black closed carriage waited. It reminded me of a hearse. The horses’ exhalations added more fog to the air. “The police will be informed soon enough,” he said. His tone seemed soft, but beneath that softness I could sense a fury and resolve as powerful as his grip on my arm. “These men knew Hibbert Hatchery. Many worked with him. Some loved him.”

Barris and the inspector pushed me up into the carriage. Barris went around to get in the other side. Inspector Field, his hand still on my arm, stood in the open door. “Drood expects us to rush down into Undertown today—a dozen of us perhaps, or twenty. He wants us to. But by tomorrow there will be a hundred private men here, all who knew Hatchery or who hate Drood. Tomorrow we will go down. Tomorrow we will find Drood and smoke him out of his hole.”

He shut the door with a muffled slam. “Be available tomorrow, Mr Collins. You will be needed.”

“I cannot…” I began but then saw the two men with guns emerge from the crypt. The Malay was no longer with them. I stared in horror at the right sleeve of the taller man. His expensive tan coat was crimson from the cuff upward, as if blood had wicked up the wool halfway to the elbow.

“The Malay…” I managed. “He must have been the one in police custody. The one the Metropolitan Detectives Bureau turned over to you for interrogation.”

Inspector Field said nothing.

“Where is he?” I whispered.

“We sent the Malay down as a message,” said Inspector Field.

“As a messenger, you mean.”

“We sent the Malay down as a
message,
” repeated Inspector Field tonelessly. He rapped on the side of the carriage and Barris and I rolled away through the narrow streets of Bluegate Fields.

B
ARRIS DROPPED ME
off outside my home at 90 Gloucester Place without a word. Before I entered my own door, I stood shivering in the fog and watched the dark carriage roll out of sight around the corner. Another dark carriage came past, its side lamps lit. It also turned right at the corner. I could not hear if they both stopped—the fog and snow muffled even hoofbeats and axle rumbles—but my guess was that they had. Barris would be appointing lookouts, giving instructions. Inspector Field’s men would be watching the front and back of the house, I felt sure, although not in the high numbers of the previous 9 June.

Somewhere out there in the fog were my new Gooseberries. But all I had to do to outsmart them was go down into my own coal cellar, knock down a few bricks, and crawl through the narrow hole into the upper levels of Undertown. The city would then be mine to travel in… or at least under.

I giggled at the thought but stopped when the hysterical giggle turned to nausea. The scarab shifted in my skull.

W
HEN I STEPPED
into the foyer of my home, I opened my mouth to scream in horror.

Detective Hatchery’s intestines were strewn from cornice to chandelier, from chandelier to stairway, from stairway to candle sconces. They hung there just as in the crypt, grey and wet and glistening.

I did not scream. And after a moment in which I shook like a child, I realised that the “intestines” were simply garlands, grey and silver silk and ribboned garlands, left over from some inane party we had thrown at the old house ages ago.

The house smelled of cooking—pot roast and other beefs simmering, some sort of rich bouillabaisse getting started—and the urge to vomit rose in me again.

Caroline swept out of the dining room.

“Wilkie! Where on
earth
have you been? Do you think you can just disappear every night and not… Good Lord—where did you get those
atrocious
rags? Where are your real clothes? What is that
smell?
”

I ignored her and bellowed for our parlourmaid. When she rushed in, face flushed from the kitchen steams, I said brusquely, “Draw a hot bath for me—immediately.
Very
hot. Hurry on, now.”

“Wilkie,” huffed Caroline, “are you going to answer my questions and explain?”

“
You
explain,” I growled, waving at the draped ribbons everywhere. “What is all this trash? What’s going on?”

Caroline blinked as if slapped. “What is going
on?
In a few hours is your
very important
pre-theatre dinner party. Everyone is coming. We have to dine early, of course, as you specified, since we all must leave for the theatre by…” She paused and lowered her voice so the servants would not hear. What emerged was a steam kettle hiss. “Are you
drunk,
Wilkie? Are you addled by your laudanum?”

“Shut up,” I said.

This time her head snapped back and colour rose to her cheeks as if she
had
been slapped.

“Call it off,” I said. “Send the boy… send messengers… tell everyone the party is off.”

She laughed almost hysterically. “That is
quite
impossible, as you well know. The cook has begun dinner. People have arranged transportation. The table is already set with the complimentary theatre tickets at each place. It would be quite impossible to…”

“Call it off,” I said and brushed past her to go upstairs and take five glasses of laudanum, give the wretched clothes to our servant Agnes to burn, and bathe.