by Dan Simmons
“Are you otherwise uninjured, my friend?” I asked, leaning forward into the circle of lamplight.
Dickens waved away the question and returned his attention to the gold watch now in his hands. “My dear Wilkie, I had the most astonishing dream last night.”
“Oh?” I said sympathetically. I assumed I would be hearing his nightmares about the accident at Staplehurst.
“It seemed almost as though I were reading a book that I had written in the future,” he said softly, still turning the watch over and over in his hands. The gold caught the light from the single lamp. “It was a terrible thing… all about a man who mesmerised himself so that he, or his other self created by these mesmeric suggestions, could carry out terrible deeds, unspeakable actions. Selfish, lustful, destructive things that the man—for some reason in the dream I wanted to call him Jasper—would never consciously do. And there was another… creature… involved somehow.”
“Mesmerise himself,” I murmured. “That is not possible, is it? I defer to your longer involvement and training in the art of magnetic influence, my dear Charles.”
“I have no idea. I have never heard of it being done, but that does not necessarily mean it is impossible.” He looked up. “Have you ever been mesmerised, Wilkie?”
“No,” I said with a soft laugh. “Although a few have tried.” I did not feel it necessary to add that Professor John Elliotson, formerly of the University College Hospital and Dickens’s very own mentor and instructor in the art of mesmerism, had himself found it impossible to make me submit to the mesmeric influence. My will was simply too strong.
“Let us try,” said Dickens, dangling the watch by its chain and beginning to swing it in a pendulum motion.
“Charles,” I said, chuckling but not amused, “whatever on earth for? I came to hear the details of your terrible accident, not to play parlour games with a watch and…”
“Humour me, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens said softly. “You know that I have had some success with mesmerising others—I have told you, I believe, of my long and rather successful mesmeric therapy with poor Madame de la Rue on the Continent.”
I could only grunt noncommittally. Dickens had told all of his friends and acquaintances about his long and obsessive series of treatments with “poor” Madame de la Rue. What he did not share with us, but which was common knowledge among his intimates, was that his sessions with the married and obviously insane lady, which occurred at odd times of the night as well as day, had made Dickens’s wife, Catherine, so jealous that—for perhaps the first time in her married life—she had demanded Dickens stop them.
“Please keep your eyes on the watch,” said Dickens as he swung the gold disk back and forth in the dim light.
“This won’t work, my dear Charles.”
“You are getting very drowsy, Wilkie… very drowsy.… It is difficult for you to keep your eyes open. You are as sleepy as if you had just taken several drops of laudanum.”
I almost laughed aloud at this. I had taken several dozen drops of laudanum before coming to Gad’s Hill, as I did every morning. And I was overdue in sipping more from my silver flask.
“You are getting… very… sleepy…” droned Dickens.
For a few seconds I tried to comply, just to humour the Inimitable. It was obvious that he was seeking distraction from the terrors of his recent accident. I focused on the swinging watch. I listened to Dickens’s droning voice. In truth, the heavy warmth of the closed room, the lowered lights, the single gleam of gold swinging back and forth, but mostly the amount of laudanum I had taken that morning, lured me—for the briefest of instants—into the briefest state of fuzzy-headedness.
If I would have allowed myself to, I might have fallen asleep then, if not into the mesmeric trance that Dickens would have so loved to induce in me.
Instead, I shook the fuzziness away before it took hold and said brusquely, “I am sorry, Charles. It simply does not work with me. My will is too strong.”
Dickens sighed and put away the watch. Then he walked over and opened the drapes a bit. The sunlight made both of us blink. “It’s true,” said Dickens. “The wills of real writers are too strong to be subdued by the mesmeric arts.”
I laughed. “Then make your character Jasper—if you ever write this novel based on your dream—something other than a writer.”
Dickens smiled wanly. “So I shall, my dear Wilkie.” He returned to his chair.
“How are Miss Ternan and her mother?” I asked.
Dickens did not hide a frown. Even with me, any discussion of that most personal and secret aspect of his life, however properly circumscribed it was in conversation and however much he needed to speak of her to someone, made him uncomfortable. “Miss Ternan’s mother escaped any real injury other than the shock to the system of someone her age,” rasped Dickens, “but Miss Ternan herself did suffer some rather serious bruises and what her doctor suggests was a slight cervical fracture or dislocation in her lower neck. She finds it very difficult to turn her head without serious pain.”
“I am very sorry to hear that,” I said.
Dickens did not say more about this. He asked softly, “Do you wish to hear the details of the accident and its aftermath, my dear Wilkie?”
“By all means, my dear Charles. By all means.”
“You understand that you shall be the only person to whom I shall reveal all of the details of this event?”
“I will be honoured to hear it,” I said. “And you can trust in my discretion until the grave and beyond.”
Now Dickens did smile—that sudden, sure, mischievous, and somehow boyish show of stained teeth from within the cumulus of beard he’d grown for my play The Frozen Deep eight years earlier and never shaven off. “Your grave or mine, Wilkie?” he asked.
I blinked in a second’s confusion or embarrassment. “Both, I assure you,” I said at last.
Dickens nodded and began rasping out the story of the Staplehurst accident.
DEAR GOD,” I whispered when Dickens was done some forty minutes later. And then again, “Dear God.”
“Exactly,” said the novelist.
“Those poor people,” I said, my voice almost as strained as Dickens’s. “Those poor people.”
“Unimaginable,” repeated Dickens. I had never heard him use this word before, but in this account he must have used it a dozen times. “Did I remember to tell you that the poor man whom we extricated from that truly extraordinary heap of dark ruins—he was jammed in upside down, you see—was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as we searched frantically for his wife? It seems that a few minutes before the crash, this man had changed places with a Frenchman who disliked having the window down. We found the Frenchman dead. The bleeding man’s wife also dead.”
“Dear God,” I said yet again.
Dickens ran his hand over his eyes as if shielding them from the light. When he looked up again there was that intensity in his eyes that I confess I have never seen in another human being. As we shall see in this true tale I share with you, Dear Reader, the will of Charles Dickens was not to be denied.
“What did you think of my description of the figure that called itself Drood?” Dickens’s rasping query was soft but very intense.
“Quite incredible,” I said.
“Does that mean that you do not credit his existence or my description of him, my dear Wilkie?”
“Not at all, not at all,” I said hurriedly. “I am sure his appearance and behaviour were exactly as you described, Charles.… There is no more talented observer of individual human features and foibles either living or interred with all literary honours in Westminster Abbey than you, my friend… but Mr Drood is… incredible.”
“Precisely,” said Dickens. “And it is our duty now, my dear Wilkie—yours and mine—to find him.”
“Find him?” I repeated stupidly. “Why in heaven’s name should we do that?”
“There is a story in Mr Drood that must be unearthed,” whispered Di
ckens. “If you will pardon the grave overtones of that phrase. What was the man—if man he was—doing on the tidal train at this time? Why, when questioned by me, did he say that he was going to Whitechapel and the rookeries of the East End? What was his purpose among the dead and dying?”
I did not understand. “What could his purpose have been, Charles?” I asked. “Other than the same as yours—to help and console the living and to locate the dead?”
Dickens smiled again, but there was no warmth or boyishness in that smile. “There was something sinister afoot there, my dear Wilkie. I am sure of it. Several times, as I described to you, I saw this Drood… if that is the creature’s name… hovering near injured people, and when I later went to attend to those individuals, they were dead.”
“But you described how several of the people to whom you attended, Charles, also died when you returned to help them.”
“Yes,” rasped Dickens in that stranger’s voice, lowering his chin into his collars. “But I did not help them over to the other side.”
I sat back in shock. “Dear God. You’re suggesting that this operacaped, leprous-looking figure actually… murdered… some of the poor victims at Staplehurst?”
“I’m suggesting that some sort of cannibalism went on there, my dear Wilkie.”
“Cannibalism!” For the first time I wondered if the accident had mentally unhinged my famous friend. It was true that during his narration of the accident, I’d held serious doubts about the description and even the actual existence of this “Drood”—the man seemed more a character out of a sensationalist novel than any human reality that could be encountered on the tidal train from Folkestone—but I had ascribed that possibility of hallucination to the same sense of shock and disorientation that had robbed Dickens of his voice. But if Dickens were imagining cannibalism, it was quite possible that the accident had robbed him of his reason as well as his voice.
He was smiling at me again and the intensity of his gaze was precisely the kind that made so many first-time interlocutors believe that Charles Dickens could read their minds. “No, my dear Wilkie, I am not deranged,” he said softly. “Mr Drood was as corporeal as you or I and even stranger—in some indefinable way—than I have described. Had I conceived of him as a character for one of my novels, I would not have described him as I met him in reality—too strange, too threatening, too physically grotesque for fiction, my dear Wilkie. But in reality, as you well know, such phantom figures do exist. One passes them on the street. One finds them during nocturnal walks through Whitechapel or other parts of London. And often their stories are stranger than anything a mere novelist could devise.”
It was my turn to smile. Few had ever heard the Inimitable refer to himself as “a mere novelist” and I was quite sure that he had not done so now. He was speaking of other “mere novelists.” Myself, perhaps. I asked, “So what do you propose we do to find this Mr Drood, Charles? And what do we do with the gentleman once we’ve located him?”
“Do you remember when we investigated that haunted house?” asked the writer.
I did. Several years ago, Dickens—as head of his new magazine, All the Year Round, that had supplanted his former Household Words after a spat with his publishers—had become embroiled in debates with various spiritualists. The 1850s had been a mad time for table rapping, seances, mesmerism—some of which Dickens not only did believe in but in which he was an eager practitioner—and other such fascination with invisible energies. As much as Dickens believed in and relied upon mesmerism, sometimes called animal magnetism, and as superstitious as I knew him to be at heart (he truly believed that Friday was his lucky day, for instance), he had chosen (as editor of his new journal) to pick a quarrel with various spiritualists. When one of his adversaries in the debate, a spiritualist named William Howitt, was giving details of a haunted house in Cheshunt, near London, to prop up his arguments, Dickens immediately decided that we—the editors and managers of All the Year Round—should set up an expedition to investigate the hauntings.
W. H. Wills and I had gone ahead in a brougham, but Dickens and one of our contributors, John Hollingshead, walked the sixteen miles to the village. After some trouble finding the house in question (luckily Dickens had sent along a repast of fresh fish with Wills and me, since he would not trust the local fare), we finally found a villa that was said to be on the property of the so-called haunted house and spent the rest of our afternoon and evening questioning neighbours, nearby tradesmen, and even passers-by, but in the end we decided that Howitt’s “ghosts” consisted of rats and a servant named Frank who enjoyed poaching rabbits in odd hours of the night.
Dickens had been brave enough on that outing, in the daylight and in the company of three other men, but I’d heard that on another ghost expedition, this one at night and investigating a reputedly haunted monument near Gad’s Hill Place, the writer had brought his male servants and a loaded shotgun along. According to the author’s youngest son, called Plorn by the family, his father had been quite nervous and had announced, “. . . if anybody is playing tricks and has got a head, I’ll blow it off.” And they did hear an unearthly wailing, moaning, “terrific noise—human noise—and yet superhuman noise.”
It turned out to be an asthmatic sheep. Dickens restrained himself from blowing its head off. He treated everyone—servants and children all—to rum-and-water when they returned to the house.
“We knew where the haunted house was,” I pointed out to Dickens this June day in his dark study. “How do we find Mr Drood? Where do we look, Charles?”
Suddenly Dickens’s expression and physical stance changed. His face seemed to lengthen and crease and grow even paler. His eyes widened until it seemed he had no eyelids and the whites of those eyes glowed in the lamplight. His posture became that of a crooked old man, or a lurking gravedigger, or a buzzard. His voice, still raspy, became high and reedy and afflicted with a hiss as his long, pale fingers stabbed at the air like a dark magician’s.
“To Limehoussse,” he hissed, acting out the Drood in his former tale. “Whitechapel. Ratcliff Crossss. Gin Alley. Three Foxesss Court. Butcher Row and Commercial Road. The Mint and other rookeriessss.”
I admit that the hair stood on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens was first, as a lad, even before he began to write, such a mimic that his father would take him to public houses to imitate locals they had encountered on their walks. At this moment I began to believe that there was such a creature as Drood.
“When?” I asked.
“Sssoooon,” hissed Dickens, but smiling now, himself again. “We’ve taken such excursions into Babylon before, my dear Wilkie. We have seen the Great Oven at night.”
We had. He had always been fascinated with this underbelly of our city. And “Babylon” and “the Great Oven” were the author’s pet expressions for the worst slums in London. Some of my nocturnal ventures with Dickens into these dark lanes and tenement hovels in earlier years still bothered my dreams.
“I am your man, my dear Dickens,” I said with enthusiasm. “I will report for duty tomorrow night, if that is your pleasure.”
He shook his head. “I have to recover my voice, my dear Wilkie. I am behind schedule on the last numbers of Our Mutual Friend. There are other things to be seen to in the coming days, including the recovery of the Patient. Are you spending the night, sir? Your room is ready, as always.”
“Alas, I cannot,” I said. “I have to get back to the city this afternoon. There are business affairs there that must be attended.” I did not tell Dickens that those “business affairs” consisted primarily of buying more laudanum, a substance which I could not do without, even then in 1865, for so long as a day.
“Very good,” he said, rising. “Could you do me a great favour, my dear Wilkie?”
“Anything in the world, my dear Dickens,” I said. “Command me, my friend.”
Dickens glanced at his watch. “It’s too late for you to catch the next train in from Gravesend, but if Charley gets
the pony cart out, we can get you to Higham in time for the express to Charing Cross Station.”
“I am going to Charing Cross?”
“You are, my dear Wilkie,” he said, clasping me firmly on the shoulder as we came out of the gloom of his study into the brighter light of the entry hall. “I shall tell you why as I accompany you to the station.”
GEORGINA DID NOT COME out of the house with us, but the Inimitable’s oldest son, Charley, had come down to spend a few days with his father and was sent round to hitch up the basket cart. The front yard at Gad’s Hill was as tidy as everything else under the man’s control: Dickens’s favourite flower, scarlet geraniums, planted in precise rows; the two large cedars of Lebanon just beyond the neatly trimmed lawn and now throwing their shadows to the east along the road.
Something about the rows of geraniums we were walking between as we approached Charley and the basket cart bothered me. In fact, they made my heart pound faster and my skin go cold. I became aware that Dickens had been talking to me.
“. . . I took him on the emergency train straight to Charing Cross Hotel immediately after the crash,” he was saying. “I have paid two nurses to be with him so that he is not alone night or day. I would very much appreciate if you could look in on him this evening, my dear Wilkie, to give him my compliments and let him know that as soon as I am able to come into town again—most probably tomorrow—I will look in on him myself. If the nurses tell you that his injuries have worsened in any way, I would take it as a personal favour if you would send a messenger out to Gad’s Hill with the information as soon as possible.”
“Of course, Charles,” I said. I dimly realised that he must have been talking about the young man he had helped extricate from the wreckage at Staplehurst and then had personally put up in the hotel at Charing Cross. A young man named Dickenson. Edmond or Edward Dickenson, I seemed to recall. A rather extraordinary coincidence when one thinks about it.
As we came down the drive and away from the scarlet geraniums, the sense of panic left me as quickly and curiously as it had arrived.