Dickens looked at me so steadily and so coldly that I flinched back in my chair.
“Yes,” said the Inimitable. “With Drood, anything is possible. The monster could have had me kill young Dickenson and bring his money to the Undertown temple and I would not remember it. I would have thought it a dream, a half-memory of some stage drama from long ago.”
My heart pounded and my breathing all but stopped at this confession.
“Or,” continued Dickens, “he could have had you do that deed, my dear Wilkie. Drood knows of you, of course. Drood has plans for you.”
I exhaled, coughed, and tried to slow the pounding of my heart. “Nonsense,” I said. “I have never met the man, if man he is.”
“Are you sure?” asked Dickens. The wicked smile was there again beneath his whiskers.
I thought of Dickens’s earlier, inexplicable mention of my experience in Birmingham. This was the right time to ask him about it—the only time, perhaps—but the pounding of my headache was now as rapid and insistent as the pounding of my heart there in that small, overheated room. Instead, I said, “You say he comes to your home, Charles.”
“Yesss.” Dickens sighed back into his chair. He stubbed out the short remnant of his cigar. “It has worn on me, Wilkie. The secrecy. The constant sense of terror. The dissembling and playacting in his presence. The trips into London and the effect of the descents into Undertown and its horrors. The constant sense of threat to Georgina, Katey, the children… Ellen. It has worn on me.”
“Of course,” I murmured. I thought of Inspector Field and the others out in the rain. Waiting.
“So you see, I must go to America,” whispered Dickens. “Drood will not follow me there. He cannot follow me there.”
“Why not?”
Dickens sat bolt upright and stared at me with wide eyes and, for the first time in our long association, I saw pure terror on my friend’s countenance. “He cannot!” he cried.
“No, of course not,” I said hurriedly.
“But while I am gone,” whispered Dickens, “you will be in great danger, my friend.”
“Danger? Me? Why on earth should I be in danger, Charles? I have nothing to do with Drood or this dreadful game you and Field are playing with him.”
Dickens shook his head but for a moment did not bother to speak or even look at me. Finally he said, “You shall be in great danger, Wilkie. Drood has already passed the black wings of his control over you at least once—almost certainly more than once. He knows where you live. He knows your weaknesses. And—most terribly for you—he knows that you are a writer and that you are now widely read both here in England and in America.”
“What does that have to do with anything…” I began. When I stopped in mid-sentence, Dickens nodded again.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I am his biographer of choice, but he knows he can find another should I die… or should he discover the extent of my desperate game and decide to dispose of me. I shall not depart for America until November at the earliest—I have much to do and much convincing of Drood that I go to the United States only to prepare the way for the publication of his biography—and you and I shall talk again many times and of many things before I sail, Wilkie, but promise me now that you will be very careful.”
“I promise,” I said. I knew at that moment that my friend Charles Dickens had gone mad.
We spoke of other things, but I ached abominably and Dickens was obviously exhausted. It was not even eleven PM when we said our goodnights and Dickens went off to his guest room and I to my bedroom.
I let the girl douse all the lamps in the house.
CAROLINE WAS WAITING in my bed, sleeping, but I woke her and sent her downstairs to her own room. This was no night for her to be up on the first floor where Dickens and I slept.
I got into my night gown and drank down three tall glasses of laudanum. The usually competent medicine did little to allay either my pain or my anxiety this June night. After lying in bed in the dark for an undetermined period, feeling my heart pound in my chest like the pendulum of some thudding but silent clock, I rose and went to the window.
The rain had stopped, but a summer fog had risen and was now creeping through the hedges and shrubs in the small park across the way. The moon had not worked free of the low overcast, but the clouds hurrying above the rooftops were limned with an almost liquid grey-white light. Puddles threw back a multitude of yellowed reflections from the corner streetlamp. There was no one out this night, not even the boy who had replaced Gooseberry. I tried to imagine where Field and his many operatives had positioned themselves. In that empty house near the corner? In the darkness of the alley to the east?
A real clock—the one in our downstairs hallway—slowly struck twelve.
I went back to bed, closed my eyes, and tried to slow my mind.
From somewhere far below, borne up by the medium of the hollow walls and occasional grates, there came a subtle rustling. A scuttling. A door opening? No, I thought not. A window, then? No. A cellar-dark slow shifting of bricks, perhaps, or some slow but minded movement amidst heaps of black coal. But definitely a scuttling.
I sat up in bed and clutched my bedclothes to my chest.
My accursed novelist’s imagination, perhaps aided by the laudanum, offered up clear visions of a rat the size of a small dog pressing its way through the renewed hole in the coal cellar wall. But this oversized rat had a human face. The face of Drood.
A door creaked. Floor boards moaned ever so softly.
Dickens sneaking out into the night, as Inspector Field had so confidently predicted?
I slipped out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to one knee, opening the lowest drawer of my dresser with exaggerated care so as not to make a sound. The huge pistol given to me by Detective Hatchery was there where I had left it under my folded summer linens. It felt absurdly heavy and bulky in my hand as I tip-toed to my door and opened it with a wince-producing protest of hinges.
The hallway was empty, but now I could hear voices. Whispering voices. Men’s voices, I thought but could not be certain.
Glad that I had left my stockings on, I moved out into the hall and stood at the head of the dark staircase. Other than the pendulum thud and inner ticking of the hallway clock downstairs, there was no noise coming up from the ground floor.
The whispers rose again. They came from just down the hall.
Could Caroline—angry at me for sending her away—have come up to talk to Dickens? Or Carrie, who had always considered Charles Dickens her favourite visitor to our house?
No, the whispers were not coming from Dickens’s guest room. I saw a vertical slice of soft light coming through the partially opened study door and moved carefully down the hall, the heavy pistol pointing towards the floor.
There was a single lighted candle in there. By pressing my face against the door, I could make out the three chairs and three figures sitting near the cold fireplace. Dickens in a red Moroccan robe was sitting in the wing chair he had occupied earlier. He leaned forward above the only candle, his expression lost to shadows, but his hands busy working the air as he whispered urgently. Listening from the desk chair was the Other Wilkie. His beard was slightly shorter than mine, as if he had trimmed it recently, and he wore my spare set of spectacles. The two circles of glass reflected the candle and made his eyes look demonic.
In the tall chair I had occupied an hour earlier, the back of the chair now towards me, I could make out only a black arm, long pale fingers, and a hint of bare scalp rising above the dark leather. I knew who it was, of course, even before the form leaned forward into the candlelight to hiss-whisper some response to Dickens.