“You may shut your eyessss,” says Drood.
I squeeze them shut, feeling the tears of blood and terror streaking my wax-spotted cheeks.
“You are our scribe now,” says Drood. “You alwaysss will be. You will work when bidden. You will come when summoned. You belong to usss, Misster Wilkie Collinsss.”
I can hear the scarab’s pincers and jaws clicking and moving as it eats. I can visualise the insect rolling my half-digested brain matter into a grey and bloody ball and pushing it ahead of itself.
But it does not move forward again. Not yet. It has made a nest for itself in the lower-central base of my brain. When the scarab’s six legs twitch, it tickles and I again have to fight the absolute need to vomit.
“All praise to the lord of truth,” says Drood.
“Whose shrine is hidden,” chants the chorus.
“From whose eyesss mankind issues,” says Drood.
“And from whose mouth the gods came into being,” chants the choir.
“We send forth this scribe now to do the bidding of the beloved Child and the Hidden Light,” calls Drood.
“Behind him shines Ra, whose names the gods do not know,” chants the crowd.
I try to open my eyes but cannot. Nor can I hear or feel.
The only sound or sensation in my universe now is the ticking and scrabbling as the scarab twists, turns, burrows slightly deeper, and eats again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Iawoke from my opium nightmare to find that I had gone blind.
It was absolute darkness. King Lazaree always had diffused lights in each room of his den, light from the main room always filtered through the red curtain, and the coal stove near the entrance to my niche of the opium den always gave off a warm orange glow. Now there was only absolute darkness. I raised my hands to my eyes to make sure they were open and my fingertips touched the surface of my eyeballs. Wincing away, I could not see my fingers.
I cried out in the darkness and—unlike my dream—I could hear my screams very well indeed. They echoed off stone. I cried for help. I cried for King Lazaree and his assistant. No one answered.
Only slowly did I realise that I was not lying on my high cushioned bunk as I always did at King Lazaree’s. I was lying on a cold floor of stone or hard-packed dirt. And I was naked.
Just as in my dream. Or just as in my real abduction by Drood.
I was shivering violently. It was the cold that had awakened me. But I could move, and within a minute I was on all fours and feeling around in my blindness, trying to touch the edge of one of the wooden bunks, or even the stove or the edge of the doorway.
My fingers met rough stone and wood instead. I ran my hands over the shape, wondering if it was the wall and then the corner to one of the stacked bunks. It was not. The stone and wood were ancient—they smelled ancient—and the stone had partially fallen through in places. I could touch cold wood within. Everything smelled of age and corruption.
I am in one of the loculi—one of the countless burial chambers in the multi-levelled catacombs. These are the stone or cement sarcophagi with the wood coffins within. And inside those wood coffins are lead liners. I am down with the dead.
They had moved me.
Of course they moved me. They carried me down through the circular apse, through the rood screen, into Undertown proper. They carried me down the river to Drood’s Temple. I may be miles from King Lazaree’s den, a mile deep under the city. Without a lantern I shall never find my way to the surface.
I screamed again then and began flailing along the line of stacked coffins and biers, rising to my feet only to drop to all fours again and flail again with my out-thrust hands, seeking the bullseye lantern that I always brought down to King Lazaree’s and always used to find my way back to the upper level and out.
There was no lantern.
Finally I quit flailing and simply crouched there in the dark, more panicked beast than man.
There were a dozen levels to these catacombs before one found a tunnel leading to a sewer or the underground river. There were hundreds of burial loculi running off these countless straight and curved corridors on these dozen levels. The stairs from the highest level of burial chambers, the corridor just below St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery where Sergeant Hatchery presumably waited for me even now—How long have I been down here!? — was just ten yards to the left along the curving corridor from King Lazaree’s den, then up those stairs, ducking one’s head through the broken rear wall of a loculus, past the last stack of coffins, right then once in that last corridor, and up the ten steps to the crypt and—presumably, possibly—daylight. I had made that walk back a hundred times after my night of opium.
I reached for my waistcoat as if to pull my watch from its pocket and check the time. There was no watch, no waistcoat. No clothing at all.
I realised that I was freezing—my teeth were chattering violently, the sound echoing back from unseen stone walls. I was shivering so hard that my elbows and forearms were beating a tattoo on the not-quite-hollow stone sarcophagus that I had fallen against.
I had lost any sense of direction in my blind stumbling about; even if I were in the niche that once held King Lazaree’s den, I no longer knew the way forward or back in it.
Still shaking wildly, my arms stretched straight out ahead of me and my fingers stiff and splayed, I began stumbling along the line of biers, sarcophagi, and coffins.
Even with my arms out ahead of me, I managed to run into something with my head that knocked me back on my arse. I felt blood running from the wound in my temple and immediately sent my fingers searching my forehead, uselessly holding my hands in front of my eyes as if I could suddenly see. I could not. I touched again. The cut was shallow; the bleeding was slight.
Rising carefully to my feet again, I waved my arms until I found the obstruction that had almost knocked me out.
Cold metal, so rusted that the empty-space triangles of the open grid were almost closed in.
The iron grille!! Each loculus along the catacomb corridors had been enclosed within an ancient iron grille. If I had found the grille, I had found the corridor—or a corridor—there were scores on different levels down here, most of which I had never seen or explored.
What if the grille is closed and locked? I would never get to the corridor. Someone would find my skeleton in amongst the sarcophagi and coffins in twenty or fifty or a hundred years and merely think that I was another of what the crypt man at Rochester Cathedral, Dradles, had called “the old ’uns.”
Panicked again, I pounded my palms and forearms and knees along the metal grille, feeling the rusted edges scrape skin away, but finally there was—an emptiness. An opening! At the very least, a fissure caused by a vertical segment of the grille rusting away.
It was only ten inches or so wide, and irregular, but I squeezed through, sharp edges of the grille scraping at my ribs and backside and shrunken genitals.
Then I was in a corridor. I was sure of it!
Unless you’ve passed through a grille behind the coffins, in which case you’re more lost than before on some unfathomable deep level of an endless labyrinth.
I dropped to all fours and felt the stone under my palms and knees. No, this was one of the main corridors. All I had to do was follow it to one of the nearly hidden stairways to a higher level, then up the final steps to the crypt where Hatchery was waiting for me.