Which way?? How could I find the stairs in the absolute darkness? Which way??
I crawled to my left, found the grille I had just squeezed through, and rose carefully, not even sure how high the corridor ceiling might be down here. When I had followed Dickens to the river that night two years ago, some of the corridors had been ten feet high—others had been mere tunnels where one had to crouch to avoid bashing one’s brains out. It had all been so simple with a lantern.
Which way???
I turned my face but could sense no movement of air. If I had a candle, perhaps I could sense the draft.…
If I had a God-d— ned candle, I could easily find my way out without sniffing for drafts!! I screamed at myself.
I realised that I had screamed it aloud. Echoes died away in both directions. Dear God, any more of this and I would surely lose my mind.
I decided that I would follow my old instincts and walk just as if I were leaving King Lazaree’s den. My body remembered that return walk I had made so many times, even if my brain—without vision to help—kept insisting that it did not.
Using my left hand as my guide, I began walking along the corridor. I came to other grates, other openings, although none of them had the tattered curtain that separated Lazaree’s den from the corridor. At each opening that was not protected by a grille, I got down on my knees and felt for stairs or another corridor, but there were only collapsed grilles, more coffins, or empty niches in the walls.
I moved on, panting, shivering, my teeth still chattering audibly. My conscious mind told me that I would not freeze to death down here—did not caves stay at some constant temperature, in the fifties? It did not matter. My torn, gouged, shivering body was freezing.
Was the corridor curving slightly to the left? The way to Lazaree’s den had curved slightly to the right as one approached it from the hidden stairs down from the first level of catacombs. If I was on that level and to the right of the stairs, the walls here would have to be curving slightly to my left.
I had no idea. It was impossible to tell. But I knew without doubt that I had gone at least twice as far as it took to walk from the entrance to the second and lower level to the curtained alcove that was King Lazaree’s den.
I continued forward anyway. Twice there were cold draughts from my right. The touch of the colder air on my flesh caused my skin to ripple with revulsion—as if something dead and eyeless were caressing me with long, grub-white, boneless fingers.
I shivered and moved on.
There had been two corridors to the left—my right now—as Dickens and I had first found King Lazaree’s den. I had walked past them without a glance or turn of my lantern so many times since. Down one of them had been the corridor leading past even more loculi to the circular room with the altar and rood screen and hidden stairs down to the deeper levels of Undertown.
Where Drood waited.
But I could already be on one of those lower levels.
Twice I had to stop to vomit. My stomach was already empty—I seemed to remember getting sick in the first loculus, where I had wakened—but still the retching bent me double and made me lean against cold stone until the spasms passed.
I passed another ungrilled opening—nothing but rubble within the niche—and staggered on another twenty paces or so before crashing into a solid wall.
The corridor ended. The wall was solid; behind me, the corridor stretched backward the way I had come.
I screamed then. And kept screaming. The echoes were all behind me.
They had bricked up the corridor they had left me in. Closed it so that no one would even find my bones.
I clawed at the wall, feeling ancient mortar, stones, and bricks fall away, feeling my fingernails tear off and the ends of my flailing fingers rip and shred.
It was no use. Behind the bricks were more bricks. Behind those bricks was heavier stone.
I dropped, gasping and retching, to my knees, then began crawling back the way I had come.
The last opening was on my right now—the rubble-tumbled niche—but this time I crawled into it, lacerating my already-lacerated knees and palms on the jumble of stones.
They were not just stones. They were steps set into cold, loose dirt.
I scrambled up them, heedless of any obstacle that might be waiting to strike me in the face.
I crashed into a wall, almost fell back down the unseen stairs, but grasped at the edge of an opening. There was an opening. I could almost see the jagged masonry on either side.
I tumbled through and scraped my right cheek and temple against rough stone. Another bier. Getting to my feet, I realised there were more coffins stacked on the carved stone or shaped cement. I was in another loculus. Teeth chattering, I looked to my left and seemed to sense a lightening in my vision in that direction.
I crashed into another metal grate, smeared unseen blood on it from my torn fingers as I flailed until I found the opening to it, and staggered out into an emptiness that must have been another corridor.
There was definitely light—a thin, grey ghost of a glow—to my right, not twenty yards away.
My bare feet slapping on the stone or brick floor of this wider corridor, I fairly ran towards the light.
Yes. I could suddenly see my hands and arms in front of me. My fingers were crimson.
There was a stairway, huge stone steps rising up and curving out of sight.
I knew this stairway.
Weeping, crying out for Detective Hatchery’s help, slipping, falling, rising, and clawing upward again, I went up the steps and squeezed through the familiar wedge of opening.
The light in the crypt, I would realise later, was only the dimmest of January predawn glows—certainly not enough to read by—but it blinded me with its brightness.
Staggering to the stone bier that overhung the secret entrance to Undertown—an entrance I swore then and there that I would never use again—I had to sag against the empty bier or collapse.
“Hatchery! For God’s sake, help! Hatchery!”
My own voice startled me so badly that I almost urinated without volition. I did look down then, at my naked white body. I found that I was staring at my belly, just below the sternum.
There was a red wound or scrape there.
Where the scarab entered.
I shook my head to rid myself of the opium nightmare’s image. I had scrapes and gouges all over my body. My feet and knees and fingers were by far the worse. My head ached abominably.
From the huge beetle moving… burrowing.
“Stop it!” I screamed aloud.
Why was Hatchery not here? Why had he abandoned me this one time I needed him most?
You may have been down there for days, Wilkie Collins.
I heard Missster Wilkie Collinssss echoing in my aching skull.
I laughed then. It did not matter. They had tried to kill me—whoever “they” were—certainly King Lazaree and his heathen, foreign-bastard friends and fellow opium addicts—but they had failed.
I was free. I was out. I was alive.
Looking up, I was startled to see that someone had decorated the interior high spaces of the small crypt with some sort of glistening garlands. The gleaming grey strips had not been there when Hatchery and I had entered hours—days? weeks? — ago, I was certain of that. Christmas was more than two weeks past. And why decorate an empty crypt in the first place?
It did not matter. Nothing mattered—not even my aching, shivering body, raging headache, terrible thirst, and surging hunger—except to get out of this place forever.