Drood (69 page)

Suddenly a bundle of rags came flying from one of the higher terraces, flapped on the way down, and struck the underground river with a hiss before sinking.

I hoped to God it was only a bundle of rags. I hoped to God it was only rags flapping, not arms and legs kicking during the fall.

I went up to Inspector Field where he stood against the bow of the beached scow and I said, “Was it absolutely necessary to burn these people out?”

“Yes.” He had not turned his head from the spectacle. Occasionally he would gesture, and Barris or one of his other favoured subalterns would send men to round up running forms or to set the torch to some hovel that had escaped the first flames.

“Why?” I persisted. “They’re just poor beggars unable to compete even on the street. They do no harm down here.”

Field turned towards me. “Down here,” he said softly, “these miserable excuses for men and women and their offspring are not Her Royal Majesty’s subjects. There are no Englishmen here, Mr Wilkie Collins. This is the kingdom of Drood and these are the minions of Drood. They give him their loyalty and—one way or the other—they offer up to him their service and succour.”

I began laughing then and found it very difficult to stop.

Inspector Field raised a bushy eyebrow. “Did I say something humorous, sir?”

“The Kingdom of Drood,” I managed at last. “The loyal minions of… Drood.” I began laughing again.

Inspector Field turned away from me. Above us, the rag bundles of all sizes were being marched up out of the smoke-filled cliff dwellings and Fleet Ditch cavern to whatever or whoever waited above.

P
LEASE BE SO KIND
as to go with Mr Barris,” the inspector said to me sometime later.

I was paying little attention to the proceedings. I remember that we had left the half mile or so of cavern and burning cliff dwellings behind and followed the river into a more contained Fleet Ditch tunnel once again. Ahead of us, the brick-arched way diverged into two major channels and on the left a sort of low dam or spillway required hoisting the chosen scow down with various bits of block and tackle; the punts had already gone ahead there. Inspector Field’s scow had taken the right-hand channel, but there was a major sewer outlet ahead and evidently they wanted me to explore it in a punt with Reginald Barris.

“You’ve seen Drood’s temple,” explained the inspector. “We believe that access to it may be through a false wall or hidden channel.”

“I haven’t seen Drood’s temple,” I said wearily.

“You described it, sir. You said that there were steps leading up from the river, high bronze doors, and statues on either side—Egyptian reliquary, human forms with the heads of jackals or birds.”

A chill ran up my spine as this brought back my beetle dream of less than thirty-six hours earlier—could that time span be correct? Could this actually be only the night after my awakening in the dark crypts above here?—but I said, “That was
Charles Dickens’s description,
Inspector. I’ve never purported to have seen Drood’s mythical temple… nor even Drood, for that matter.”

“You were there yesterday, Mr Wilkie Collins, we both know that,” said Inspector Field. “But we shan’t argue it here. Please go with Detective Barris.”

Before crawling to the punt, I asked, “Is your search down here almost finished, Inspector?”

The old man barked a laugh. “We’ve hardly begun, sir. Another eight hours, at least, until we meet up with my men coming from the Thames.”

I felt dizzy and nauseated again at hearing this. How long had it been since I had truly slept—not lost consciousness due to King Lazaree’s or Drood’s drugs, but slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?

I clumsily climbed down to where Barris and two other men waited in the wobbling punt, and with one of those men poling gondolier-fashion at the front and the other steering with a sweep from the stern, we left the river and moved slowly up a brick side tunnel. I sat on a thwart near the centre of the sixteen-foot craft while Barris stood nearby, using a second pole to balance himself. The moss-covered brick roof was so low here that Barris could reach up and help push the punt along; I could see the green stain on his expensive tan gloves.

I was half-dozing when the narrow sewer channel opened to a stream twenty feet wide.

“Sir!” said the detective in the bow and aimed his bullseye lantern forward.

Four feral Wild Boys were in water up to their waists, wrestling with something heavy and soggy that looked to have just tumbled out of a smaller pipe high on this larger sewer’s curved wall.

We slid closer and I realised that the “something soggy” was a man’s corpse. The boys had been going through the green thing’s disintegrating jacket and pockets. The four boys froze in our projected lantern light, their eyes reflecting back wide and white and inhuman.

An almost vertiginous sense of déjà vu rolled over me until I realised that I was seeing a scene straight out of the serialised sensationalist tale
The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day
that both Dickens and I had mentioned—each embarrassed that he had read it—when we had first come down here almost two years ago.

The dead man’s face seemed to be moving, shimmering, as we approached, almost as if the grub-white and decaying features were covered with a very fine, translucent silken cloth. His eyes appeared to be blinking open, then closing; his mouth muscles seemed to be twitching as if he were attempting a smile, perhaps a rueful one at being part of a tableau out of such a poorly written and sensationalist tale.

Then I saw that it was not the facial muscles of the corpse moving. The man’s face, hands, every exposed part, were totally covered with a thin film of constantly shifting maggots.

“Stop!” cried Barris as the Wild Boys dropped their soggy burden back into the thick sludge of the stream and turned to run.

Our man in the bow kept the bullseye’s beam on the scattering pack while his compatriot gave our skiff or punt a powerful shove with his pole sunk deep into the sludge at the bottom of this pipe. Except for the distasteful addition of the maggots, I was enjoying the unreal, sensationalist absurdity of all this.

“Stop!” Barris cried again. Suddenly the detective had a small silver revolver in his hand. I had no idea then—nor to this day—why he would want to detain these feral creatures.

Two of the boys had pulled themselves up into a high drain that seemed too small to allow access even to these improbably thin and starving wraiths, but with a burst of wriggling, they disappeared. One almost expected the
pop
of a champagne cork as the second boy’s pale, bare soles wriggled and thrashed out of sight. The third boy crouched low and slithered headfirst into yet another pipe on the opposite side.

The fourth boy reached elbow-deep into the stream he stood in and hurled two handfuls of muck at our approaching boat. The detective with the bullseye ducked and shouted an oath. I heard filth splatter across the thwart where I sat and saw some strike Reginald Barris on the lapels of his heavy wool coat.

I laughed.

Barris fired the pistol twice. The report in the narrow brick tunnel was so loud and startling that I threw my hands over my ears.

The Wild Boy pitched face forward into the water.

The punt floated past the man’s maggot-writhed corpse until we reached the boy. The detective with the pole reached down and turned the boy over, pulled him half into the boat. Filthy, reeking water dripped from the boy’s rags and open mouth into our punt.

He was no older than ten or eleven. One of Barris’s bullets had gone through his throat, severing the jugular. Blood still pumped from that wound, although very weakly. The other bullet had entered his cheek just below the boy’s eye, which remained wide open and staring, as if in reproof. His eyes were blue.

Our man with the pole let the corpse slide back into the black water.

I got to my feet and grabbed Barris by his broad shoulders. “You’ve killed a child!”

“There are no children in Undertown,” was Barris’s cool, unconcerned reply. “Only vermin.”

I remember attacking him then. Only profound exertions by the detective with the pole and by the one in the stern using the tiller as a balancing staff kept the wobbling punt from turning over, adding our four bodies to the stream holding the maggot-ridden man and the murdered boy.

I remember making sounds as I attacked Barris, but not forming words—mere grunts and half-stifled screams, garbled syllables without meaning. I did not attack the detective with my fists, as a man might, but with fingers raking like claws and fingernails clawing for his eyes, the way a madwoman might.

I half-remember Barris holding me off with one hand until it became apparent that I would not desist and was going to knock us all into the black water. I half-remember my screaming becoming more intense and my saliva spattering the young detective’s handsome face and him saying something to the man in the stern behind me and then the silver pistol coming up, its barrel short but heavy and flashing in the bobbing bullseye lantern light.

And then—blessedly—I remember nothing but darkness with no dreams.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
awoke to find myself in my own bed in daylight, in my own nightshirt, in great pain and with Caroline hovering—and frowning—over me. My skull was pounding in a greater agony than I had hitherto experienced and every muscle, sinew, bone, and cell in my body was grinding against its neighbour in an off-key chorus of pain-filled physical despair. I felt as if days or weeks had passed since I had taken any of my medicinal laudanum.

“Who is Martha?” demanded Caroline.

“What?” I could barely speak. My lips were dried and cracked, my tongue swollen.

“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline. Her voice was as flat and unsympathetic as a pistol shot.

Of all the various sorts of panic I had experienced during the past two years, including awakening blind in an underground crypt, none was as terrible as this. I felt like a man sitting fat and secure in his comfortable carriage only to feel it suddenly lurch off a cliff.

“Martha?” I managed to say. “Caroline… my dear… what are you talking about?”

“You’ve been saying… repeating… ‘Martha’ in your sleep for two days and nights,” said Caroline, neither her expression nor her tone softening. “
Who
is Martha?”

“Two days and nights! How long have I been unconscious? How did I get here? Why is this bandage on my head?”

“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline.

“Martha… is Dickens’s character from
David Copperfield,
” I said, touching the thick bandage wrapped around my skull and feigning disinterest in the conversation. “You know… the girl of the streets who walks by the filthy, corrupted Thames. I think I was dreaming about the river.”

Caroline crossed her arms over her chest and blinked.

Never underestimate, Dear Reader, the resourcefulness of a novelist in an untenable situation, even when he is in such a dire condition as I was that day.

“How long have I been sleeping?” I asked again.

“It’s Wednesday afternoon,” Caroline said at last. “We heard knocking at the door on Sunday mid-day and found you unconscious on the stoop. Where had you been, Wilkie? Charley—he and Kate have been here twice; he reports your mother is about the same—said Mrs Wells reported that you left your mother’s without a word of explanation late on Saturday night. Where did you go? Why did your clothes—we had to burn them—stink of smoke and… of something worse? What happened to your head? Frank Beard has been here three times to look at you and was quite worried about the gash on your temple and the possible concussion to your brain. He was afraid you were in a coma. He was afraid that you might never awaken. Where have you
been?
Why in God’s name are you dreaming about a Dickens character named
Martha?
”

“In a minute,” I said, leaning over the side of the bed but deciding that I would not be able to stand, or, if I did manage to stand, be capable of walking. “I shall answer your questions in a minute, but first have the girl bring in a basin. Quickly. I am going to be sick.”

D
EAR READER FROM
my distant future, it seems quite possible—even probable—that in your Far Country a hundred years and more hence, all disease has been conquered, all pain banished, all the mortal afflictions so common to men of my time become no more than a distant hint of an echo of history’s rumour. But in my century, Dear Reader, despite our inevitable
hubris
as we compared ourselves to more primitive cultures, in truth we had little knowledge with which to battle disease or injury and few effective chemists’ potions to utilise in our pathetic attempts to ameliorate mankind’s oldest enemy—pain.

My friend Frank Beard was better than most practitioners of his dubious trade. He did not bleed me. He did not apply leeches to my belly or bring out his arsenal of ugly steel instruments with which to trepan or trephine me (that nineteenth-century surgeon’s habit of casually and obscenely boring a hole in the patient’s aching skull as if coring an apple with a carpenter’s bit-and-brace, popping the circle of white bone out as easy as popping the cork on a bottle of wine, all the while acting as though it were the most normal thing in the world to do). No, Frank Beard visited frequently, fretted and brooded honestly, checked the gash and bruise at my hairline, changed dressings, queried me anxiously about my ongoing and worsening pain, advised rest and a milk diet, gave quiet instructions to Caroline, tut-tutted to me about my laudanum intake but did not order me to stop it, and—in the end—honoured the true spirit of Hippocrates by first doing no harm. Just as with his more famous patient and friend—Charles Dickens—Frank Beard the physician worried about me without being able to help me.

So I remained in agony.

I had regained consciousness—such as it was—in my own bed on 22 January, five days after my final descent to King Lazaree’s den. For the rest of that week I was too ill to get out of bed, even though my need to visit Mother was almost absolute. In all my years of pain from rheumatical gout, I had never experienced anything like this. Beyond the usual aches of muscles and joints and bowels, it was as if some great, throbbing, burning source of pain had embedded itself deep behind my right eye.