Avoiding the cold black hole-in-the-floor entrance to Undertown, I stepped around the bier—quickly, since my writer’s imagination then gave me the vision of a long grey arm with long white boneless fingers suddenly sliding out of that hole like a snake and pulling me, screaming, back down into the darkness—but then I had to stop immediately.
I had no choice.
My way was blocked by the body on the floor of the crypt.
It was Detective Sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, his white face distorted into a huge, silent scream, his all-white eyes staring sightlessly towards the garland-festooned bas-relief carvings and tiny gargoyles set along the corners of the small crypt’s ceiling. Scattered on the stone floor around his body were the remains of his three AM lunch, a small flask, his bowler hat, and the copy of Thackeray’s novel. Rising from his gaping belly were the stretched and glistening grey garlands that were not garlands at all.
Unable even to scream, I leaped the body, ducked the taut grey strands, and ran naked into the predawn burial ground of St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two hours later and I was back in another opium den. Waiting.
I was lucky to be alive. After all, I had been running, naked and screaming, through the worst slums of Bluegate Fields behind the docks, not even aware of which way I was running. Only the odd hour (even the thugs were inside and asleep at dawn on a cold, snowy January dawn) and the fact that even thugs might have been afraid of a screaming crazy man with bloody hands explained how the first person I encountered in my panicked flight was a police constable walking his patrol through the tenements.
The policeman himself had been frightened by my aspect and manner. He had removed a small weighted cosh from his belt, and I am sure that if I had babbled at him another minute without saying words that made sense, he would have clubbed me unconscious and dragged me by the hair to the nearest station.
As it was, he said, “What did you just say? Did you say—‘Hatchery’s body’? As in Hibbert Hatchery?”
“Former sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, now private detective Hibbert Hatchery, yes, Constable. They removed his insides and draped them around the crypt—oh, Christ! oh, God! — and he was working for me, privately, not for Inspector Field, for whom he worked privately publicly.”
The policeman shook me. “What’s that about Inspector Field? Do you know Inspector Field?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” I said and laughed. And wept.
“Who are you?” demanded the heavily moustachioed police officer. Snow had coated his dark helmet-cap white.
“William Wilkie Collins,” I said through chattering teeth. “Wilkie Collins to millions of my readers. Wilkie to my friends and almost everyone else.” I giggled again.
“Never heard of you,” said the constable.
“I am a personal friend of and collaborator with Mr Charles Dickens,” I said. My jaw had been quivering so violently that I could only barely get out the word “collaborator.”
The policeman allowed me to stand there naked in the snow and wind while he slapped his open palm with his heavy cosh and regarded me with a furrowed brow beneath the brim of his cap.
“All right, come along, then,” he’d said, taking me by my pale, scratched upper arm and leading me deeper into the tenements.
“A coat,” I said through chattering teeth. “A blanket. Anything.”
“Soon enough,” said the policeman. “Soon enough. Hurry on, now. Keep up.”
I imagined the police station to which he was leading me as being dominated by a large stove so hot that it was glowing red. My upper arm shook in the policeman’s grasp. I was weeping again.
But he did not lead me to a police station. I half-recognised the rotting stairway and darkened hallway up which he led and pushed me. Then we were inside and I recognised the wizened woman who was swooping around me, her beak of a nose extruding from her rotting black hood of a shawl.
“Sal,” said the policeman, “put this… gentleman… somewhere warm and get him some clothes. The fewer lice the better, although it don’t really matter that much. Make sure he don’t leave. Use your Malay to make sure he don’t leave.”
Opium Sal had nodded and danced around me, prodding my naked flanks and aching belly with her long-nailed finger. “I seen ’ere this ’un before, Constable Joe. ’E used to be a cust’mer an’ smoked ’is pipe right hup on that cot, ’e did. The Inspector Field tuk ’im away one night. Before that I first seen ’im with ol’ Hib Hatchery and some gemmun they tol’ me was tip-toff important. All ’igh ’n mighty this ’un was then; ’e was, scowlin’ and looking down ’is plump l’il nose at me through them spectacles what he ha’n’t got on now.”
“Who was this someone important?” demanded the policeman.
“Dickens, the Pickwick man, was who,” cried Sal triumphantly, as if it had taken all her resources to dredge the name up from the depths of her opium confusion.
“Watch him,” growled the policeman. “Get him some clothes even if you have to send the idiot out to find some. Keep the Malay on watch so he don’t go nowhere. And put him near that puny stove you keep one lump o’ coal burning in so he don’t die on us before I get back. You hear me, Sal?”
The old crone had grunted and then cackled. “I never seen a man wi’ such a shrivelled li’l John Thomas an’ company, ’ave you, Joe?”
“Do what I say,” said the policeman and left with a blast of cold air roiling in over us like the breath of Death.
DO THOSE FIT ye, darlin’?” asked Opium Sal as I sat in an otherwise empty room at the back of her opium parlour. A huge Malay with ritual scars on his cheeks sat guard just outside the door. The window here was shuttered and nailed tight. The stench of the Thames came up through it with the freezing draught even on this January day.
“No,” I said. The shirt was too small, too dirty, and stank. The heavy workingman’s trousers and jacket smelled just as bad and itched much more. I was sure that I could feel small things moving in both. There were no underlinens, nor socks. The ancient, worn boots she had brought me were half again too large for my feet.
“Well, ye should be thankful for what’s given ye,” cackled the crazy woman. “Ye would’na had them weren’t it for the fac’ that Ol’ Yahee died ’ere sudden-like two nights ago and no one’s come to fetch away ’is things.”
I sat there as the cold light of Saturday morning slipped through the shutters with the stink and…
Wait. Was it Saturday morning, the morning after I had descended into King Lazaree’s world, or was it days later? It felt as if days, or weeks, had passed. I thought of calling out to Old Opium Sally, but realised that odds were great that the old crone would not know. I could have asked the scar-faced Malay outside my door, but he had shown no sign of understanding English or being able to speak.
I laughed softly, then stifled a sob. It didn’t matter what day it was.
My head hurt so terribly that I feared I might faint from the pain. I could feel the locus of the pain deep, far behind my eyes, not at all like a mere rheumatical gout headache that I had once found so fierce.
The stag beetle scarab is excavating a wider hole for itself. Rolling a glistening grey globe ahead of it as it moves down its entrance tunnel towards…
I sat on the edge of a filthy cot and lowered my head to my knees, trying to hold in the nausea. I knew I had nothing more to vomit up, and the dry retching had turned my guts to bands of cramped pain.
The grey, glistening garlands rising to the ceiling.