Field was the second chess player in this terrible game, matched in his ability to provide counterweight to the monster Drood perhaps only by the absent Charles Dickens (whose motives were even less understandable), and I realised that I had begun ascribing impossible, almost mystical, abilities to the old, fat, side-whiskered detective.
I needed someone to save me.
There was no one.
Sobbing, I staggered back to my bed, held on to the post as the moving pain blinded me for a moment, and then managed the few faltering steps to my dressing bureau. The key to the lowest drawer was there in my brush box, beneath the lining, where I kept it hidden.
The gun that Detective Hatchery had given me was still there beneath fresh linen.
I lifted it out—amazed again by its terrible weight—and staggered back to sit on the edge of the bed near the single burning candle. Tugging on my glasses, I realised that I must look as mad as I felt, my hair and beard in wild disarray, my face distorted in an almost constant open-mouthed moan, my eyes wild with pain and terror, and my nightshirt rucked up above pale, shivering shanks.
As best I could, given my total unfamiliarity with firearms, I ascertained that the bullets were still in their cylindered receptacles. I remember thinking, This pain will never end. This scarab will never leave. The Moonstone will never be finished. In weeks, tens of thousands of people will line up to buy the next issue of All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly only to find empty white pages.
The idea of emptiness, of void, appealed to me that night beyond all words to describe it.
I raised the pistol towards my face and inserted the heavy, broad barrel in my mouth. The small bead of what I assumed was a gun sight tapped my front tooth as the barrel slid in.
Someone long ago—it may have been the old actor Macready—had explained to several of us around a happy table that someone serious about blowing his brains out had to fire the bullet upward through the soft palate rather than against the hard outer bone of the skull that too frequently deflected the projectile and left the would-be suicide as a pain-riddled vegetable and object of derision rather than a corpse.
My arms shaking wildly—all of me shaking—I held the anvil-heavy weapon as steady as I could and raised one hand to pull the massive hammer back until it clicked into place. As I was finishing this operation, I realised that if my sweaty thumb had slipped, the gun would already have fired and the bullet would already have ricocheted around through the remaining pulp of my brain.
And the scarab would be dead—or at least would be left to eat and burrow in peace, since I would no longer be feeling this pain.
I began shaking harder, weeping as I shook, but I did not remove the obscene pistol’s barrel from my mouth. The reflex to gag was very strong, and if I had not vomited half a dozen times already that afternoon and evening, I am sure I would have done so then. As it was, my stomach cramped, my throat spasmed, but I kept the barrel in place and angling upward in my mouth, feeling the steel circle touching the soft palate of which Macready had spoken.
I set my thumb on the trigger and began applying pressure. My chattering teeth closed on the long barrel. I realised that I had been holding my breath but could do so no longer and gasped in a final breath.
I could breathe through the pistol barrel.
How many people knew this was possible? I could taste the sour-sweet bite of gun oil—applied long ago by the dead Detective Hatchery, no doubt, but still strong to the tongue—and the cold, vaguely coppery taste of the steel itself. But I could breathe through the pistol even as I bit down on the barrel on all sides, and as I did so, taking long racking breaths, I could hear the whistle of my inhalations and exhalations around the cavitied cylinder and out the echoing chamber near where the hammer was pulled back and cocked.
How many men had ended their lives with this as the last, irrelevant thought passing through their brains so soon to be dead, scattered, cooling, and thoughtless?
The novelist-sensed irony of this was more painful than the scarab-pain and I began laughing. It was a strange, muffled, and oddly obscene sort of laughter, distorted as it was around a pistol barrel. After a moment I pulled the pistol from my mouth—the otherwise dull metal glistening in the candlelight due to the film of my saliva along its length—and, still idly holding the cocked weapon, I lifted the candle and staggered out of my room.
Downstairs, the doors to my new study were closed but not locked. I went in and pulled the broad double doors closed behind me.
The Other Wilkie sat sideways behind my desk, reading a book in the near total darkness. He looked up at me as I came in and adjusted spectacles that reflected my candle, hiding his eyes behind two vertical, flickering columns of yellow flame. I noticed that his beard was slightly shorter and slightly less grey than mine.
“You require my help,” said the Other Wilkie.
Never, not in all the years since my first, vague childhood sense that my Other Self existed, had the Other Wilkie ever spoken to me or uttered any sound. I was surprised at how feminine his voice sounded.
“Yes,” I whispered hoarsely. “I require your help.”
I realised stupidly that the cocked and loaded pistol was still in my right hand. I could raise it now and fire five—six? — bullets into that too-solid-looking flesh sitting presumptuously behind my desk.
When the Other Wilkie dies, will I die? When I die, will the Other Wilkie die? The questions made me giggle, but the giggle came out as a sort of sob.
“Shall we start tonight?” asked the Other Wilkie, laying the book down open on my blotter. He removed his spectacles to wipe them on a kerchief (which he kept in the same jacket pocket in which I kept mine), and I noticed that even without the spectacle-glass in front of them to reflect, his eyes were still two flickering vertical cat’s irises of flame.
“No, not tonight,” I said.
“But soon?” He set the small spectacles back on his face.
“Yes,” I said. “Soon.”
“I will come to you,” said the Other Wilkie.
I had just enough energy left to nod. Still in bare feet, still carrying the cocked pistol, I left my study, closed the heavy doors behind me, padded up the staircase, went into my room, collapsed onto my bed, and fell asleep atop the tumbled bedcovers with the gun still in my hand and my finger still taut on its curved, cold trigger.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
For years I had explained to Caroline that I was not free to marry her because my high-strung mother, who had always suffered from excitability and who was now dying from it (according to Dr Beard), simply would never understand—or agree to—such an arrangement with a formerly married woman who, it would be discovered after marriage, had shared my home for years. I explained that I had to spare the delicate old woman (who, in truth, was not that delicate at all except for her excitability) such a shock. Caroline never fully accepted the argument, but after some years she had ceased to challenge it.
Now Mother was dying.
On Thursday, 30 January—a week and a day after I’d awakened in my bed after the Undertown burnings and Barris’s attack on me—Caroline helped dress me, and Charley all but carried me to a carriage that took us to the railway station. I had sedated the scarab into relative calm by doubling my usual high dosage of laudanum, sometimes drinking straight from a large decanter.
My plan was to continue this high dosage and to do my writing at Mother’s cottage until she died. After that milestone was reached and passed, I would work out a way to deal with Caroline, the scarab in my brain, and my other problems.