“That makes no sense,” I say. “You and I have repeatedly discussed the fact that no mesmerist can successfully command someone to commit murder… to commit any crime… against that person’s conscious moral and ethical convictions.”
“Yes,” says Dickens. He drinks the last of his brandy and slides the flask away in his upper left inside pocket (and I make note of where it is for later). As always when discussing some plot device or other element of his art, Charles Dickens’s voice is a mixture of the veteran professional and the excited boy eager to tell a story. “But you were not listening, my dear Wilkie, when I explained that a sufficiently powerful mesmerist—myself, for instance, but certainly John Jasper Drood or those other, as yet unmet, Egyptian figures beneath the surface of this story—can mesmerise a person like the precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral to live in a fantasy world where he literally knows not what he is doing. And it is the opium and perhaps—say—morphine in great quantities which fuel this ongoing fantasy that can lead him, without his comprehension, to murder and worse.”
I lean forward. The pistol is in my hand but forgotten. “If Jasper kills his nephew… his brother… while under mesmeric control of this shadowy Other,” I whisper, “who is the Other?”
“Ah,” cries Charles Dickens, slapping his knee with delight. “That is the most marvellous and satisfying part of the mystery, my dear Wilkie! Not one reader in a thousand—no, not one reader in ten million—not even one fellow writer amongst the hundreds that I know and esteem—shall, until the full confession of John Jasper Drood is complete, be able to guess that the mesmerist and true murderer in the mystery of Edwin Drood is none other than…”
The bells in the tall tower behind Dickens begin tolling.
I blink at them. Dickens swivels on his headstone to watch, as if the tower is going to do something other than silently and coldly and blindly house the bells tolling his doom.
When the twelve strokes are sounded and the final echoes die out over the low, dark streets of Rochester, Dickens turns back to me and smiles. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Wilkie.”
“You were saying?” I prompt. “The identity of the mesmerist? The real murderer?”
Dickens folds his arms across his chest. “I have told enough of this tale for tonight.” He shakes his head, sighs, and gives the smallest of smiles. “And for this lifetime.”
“Stand,” I say. I feel so dizzy that I almost fall. It is difficult to get a proper grip on the pistol and the unlighted lantern, as if I have forgotten how to do two things at once. “Walk,” I command, although whether to Dickens or to my own legs, I am not certain.
I REALISE LATER how infinitely easy it would have been for Dickens to flee in that brief moment or two as we walked to the rear of the graveyard and then into the rougher grasses at the edge of the marsh where the quick-lime pit waited.
If Dickens began running—if I missed with my first hurried shot—then it would have been child’s play for him to run and crawl and hide amongst the high marsh grasses. It would be difficult to find him there in the daylight and nearly impossible at night, even with the small lantern I was carrying. Even the sound of his running or crawling would be disguised by the rising wind and crash of distant surf.
But he does not run. He leads the way. He seems to be humming a soft tune under his breath. I do not catch the melody.
When we stop, he is at the brink of the lime pit but facing me. “You must remember,” he says, “that the metal objects in my pockets will not melt in the lime. My watch, given to me by Ellen… the flask… my pin and…”
“I remember,” I rasp. I suddenly find it very difficult to breathe.
Dickens glances over his shoulder at the lime but remains facing me. “Yes, this is precisely where I would have had Jasper Drood confess that he brought the corpse of Edwin Drood… Jasper is younger than you and I, Wilkie, so even though the opium has reduced his physical abilities by half, carrying the dead boy a few hundred yards was no hardship…”
“Be silent,” I say.
“Do you want me to turn around?” asks Dickens. “To look away? To face the pit?”
“Yes. No. Suit yourself.”
“Then I shall continue looking at you, my dear Wilkie. My former friend and fellow traveller and once-eager collaborator.”
I fire the pistol.
The incredible noise it makes and the unexpected recoil in my hand—I could not in all honesty say that I truly recall the experience of firing it in the servants’ stairway two winters ago—causes me almost to drop the weapon.
“Good God,” says Dickens. He is still standing there. He pats his chest, belly, groin, and upper legs almost comically. “I believe you missed,” he says.
Still he does not run.
There are, I know, three bullets left in the gun.
My entire arm shaking, I take aim this time and fire again.
The tail of Dickens’s jacket leaps up about level with his waist. Again he pats himself. This time he holds up the jacket and in the moonlight I can see his forefinger poking through the hole the bullet made. It must have missed his hip by less than an inch.
“Wilkie,” Dickens says very softly, “perhaps it would be better for both of us if…”
I fire again.
This time the bullet strikes Dickens in the upper chest—there is no mistaking that sound, like a heavy hammer striking cold meat—and he spins around once and falls on his back.
But not into the lime pit. He lies at the edge of the pit.
And he is still alive. I can hear the loud, pained rasping of his breath. It seems to be burbling and gurgling somewhat, as if there is blood in his lungs. I walk closer until I am towering over him on the side away from the quick-lime. I wonder as he looks up if he sees me as a terrible silhouette against the stars.
In my writing, I have had—upon a few occasions—to use that ugly French term coup de grâce—and for some reason I always have trouble remembering how to spell it. But I have no trouble remembering of what it consists—the final shot must be to the brain, to be certain.
And there is only one bullet left in Hatchery’s pistol.
Going to one knee, I set the lantern down and crouch next to the Inimitable, the creator of fools such as the Dedlocks and the Barnacles and the Dombeys and Grewgious, but also of such villains and parasites and dark souls as the Fagins and Artful Dodgers and Squeerses and Casbys and Slymes and Pecksniffs and Scrooges and Vholeses and Smallweeds and Weggs and Fledgebys and Bumbles and Lammles and Hawks and Fangs and Tiggs and…
I set the muzzle of Hatchery’s heavy gun hard against the moaning Charles Dickens’s temple. I realise that I am holding my empty left hand up as a sort of shield to protect my own face from the spatter of skull shards, blood, and brain matter that will erupt in a second or two.
Dickens is mumbling, trying to speak.
“Unintelligible…” I hear him moan. Then, “Wake up… awaken… Wilkie, wake…”
The poor deluded b— d is trying to wake himself from what he must think is a terrible nightmare. Perhaps this is how we are all dragged out of this life, moaning and grimacing and praying to an absent and unfeeling God that we might wake up.
“Awake…” he says, and I pull the trigger.
It is done. The brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers is now spread across the edge of the lime pit in a grey-and-red line of slime that looks oily in the moonlight. Only the shattered bits of skull look white.