Dickens appeared to, however. He nodded and said, “My interest is in finding Drood. Not in writing about this place.” He turned to me. “You feel the same, do you not, Mr Collins?”
I was able to grunt and let the King of the Opium Living Dead take that as he wished. I was a novelist. Everything and everyone in my life was material. Certainly this writer whom I stood next to in the candlelight here had already proven that maxim more than had any other writer of our or any other age. How could he speak for me and say that I would never write about such an extraordinary place? How could he speak honestly for himself and say such a thing… this man who had turned his father, mother, sad figure of a wife, former friends, and former lovers into mere grist for his fictional-character wheel?
King Lazaree lowered his head and silken cap ever so slowly. “It would be very unfortunate if some harm were to come to you, Mr Dickens, or you, Mr Collins, while you were our guests here or explorers of Undertown beyond here.”
“We feel precisely the same way!” said Dickens. He sounded almost merry.
“Yet no guarantees for your safety can be made beyond this point,” continued the Chinaman. “You will understand when… if… you proceed.”
“We ask for no guarantees,” said Dickens. “Only for advice on how and where to proceed.”
“You do not fully understand,” said King Lazaree, his voice sounding harsh and Asiatic for the first time. “If something were to happen to one of you gentlemen, the other would not be allowed to return to the world above to write, tell, and testify about it.”
Dickens looked at me again. He turned back to Lazaree. “We understand,” he said.
“Not completely,” said the thin Buddha-figure. “If something were to happen to both of you down here—and if it were to happen to one, as you now understand, it must happen to both—your bodies will be found elsewhere. In the Thames, to be precise. Along with Detective Hatchery’s. The detective already understands this. It is imperative that you also do before you decide to proceed.”
Dickens looked at me again but did not ask a question. To be honest, I would have preferred at that instant that we retire for a moment to discuss the matter and to take a vote. To be completely honest, I would have preferred at that moment that we simply bid the Opium Chinaman King a pleasant evening and have retired altogether—up out of that underground charnel house and back into the fresh night air, even if that fresh air carried the stinking miasma of the overcrowded burial ground that Dickens called St Ghastly Grim’s.
“We understand,” Dickens was saying earnestly to the Chinaman. “We agree to the conditions. But we still wish to go on, down into Undertown, and to find Mr Drood. How do we do that, King Lazaree?”
I was in such shock at Dickens having made this life-and-death decision for me without so much as a consultation or by-your-leave that I heard Lazaree’s response as if from a great, muffled distance.
“Je suis un grand partisan de l’ordre,” the Chinaman was saying or reciting.
“Mais je n’aime pas celui-ci.
Il peint un éternel désordre,
Et, quand il vous consigne ici,
Dieu jamais n’en révoque l’ordre.”
“Very good,” replied Dickens, although, in my shock at Dickens’s speaking for me, at Dickens’s having gambled my life along with his in such cavalier fashion, I had not understood a word of the French.
“And how and where do we find this eternal disorder and order?” continued Dickens.
“Understanding that even eternal disorder has a perfect order such as Wells, find the apse and the altar and descend behind the rude screen,” said King Lazaree.
“Yes,” said Dickens, nodding as if he understood and even glancing at me as if telling me to take notes.
“All that they boast of Styx, of Acheron,” recited Lazaree,
“Cocytus, Phlegethon, our have proved in one:
The filth, stench, noise; save only what was there
Subtly distinguished, was confusèd here.
Their wherry had no sail, too; ours had none;
And in it two more horrid knaves than Charon.
Arses were heard to croak instead of frogs,
And for one Cerberus, the whole coast was dogs.
Furies there wanted not; each scold was ten;
And for the cries of ghosts, women, and men
Laden with plague-sores and their sins were heard,
Lashed by their consciences; to die, afeard.”
I tried to catch Dickens’s eye then, to tell him through sheer glare and intensity that it was time to leave, past time to leave, that our opium-lord host was insane, as were we for coming down here in the first place, but the Inimitable—d— n his eyes! — was nodding again as if all this made sense and saying, “Very good, very good. Is there anything else we need to know to get us to Drood?”
“Only to remember to pay the horrid knaves,” whispered King Lazaree.
“Of course, of course,” said Dickens, sounding absolutely delighted with himself and the Chinaman. “We shall be going, then. Ah… I presume that the corrider we entered through and your… ah… establishment here are, in terms of, well, wells, part of the eternal disordered order?”
Lazaree actually smiled. I saw the gleam of very small, very sharp teeth. They looked to have been filed to points. “Of course,” he said softly. “Consider the former the south aisle of the nave and the latter the Cloister Garth.”
“Thank you very much indeed,” said Dickens. “Come, Wilkie,” he said to me as he led us back out of the opium den of mummies.
“One last thing,” said King Lazaree as we were ready to go out through the doorway into the main hall of the mummies.
Dickens paused and leaned on his stick.
“Watch out for the boys,” said the Chinaman. “Some are cannibals.”
WE HEADED BACK into and down the outer corridor the way we had come. The bullseye lantern seemed dimmer than before.
“Are we leaving?” I asked hopefully.
“Leaving? Of course not. You heard what King Lazaree said. We’re close to the entrance of the actual Undertown. With any luck at all, we shall meet with Drood and be back to take Detective Hatchery out to breakfast before the sun rises over Sain’t Ghastly Grim’s.”
“I heard that obscene Chinaman say that our bodies—and Hatchery’s—would be found floating in the Thames if we continued with this insane quest,” I said. My voice echoed from stone. It was not a completely steady sound.
Dickens laughed softly. I believe I began hating him at that moment.
“Nonsense, Wilkie, nonsense. You understand his point of view. Should something happen to us down here—and we are, after all, men of some public notice, my dear Wilkie—then the ensuing attention on their little sanctuary here would be devastating.”
“So they will dump us in the Thames together,” I muttered. “What was all that French about?”
“You did not understand?” asked Dickens as he led us back towards the first corridor. “I thought you spoke some French.”
“I was distracted,” I said sulkily. I was tempted to add, And I have not been crossing the Channel to the little village of Condette to visit an actress in secret for the past five years, so I have had less opportunity to practise my French, but I restrained myself.