“But I digress.
“For the rest of his boyhood and young manhood in Egypt, Drood pursued mastery of his powers through the rituals and knowledge of the ancients. Did you know, for instance, my dear Wilkie, that no less an historian than Herodotus tells us that the great king Rameses, Pharaoh of all Egypt, once became so seriously ill that there was no hope for him and he, in Herodotus’ words but also the words of Drood’s uncle and teachers, ‘descended into the mansion of death’? But Rameses then returned to the light, cured. This pharaoh’s return has been celebrated for thousands of years, and continues to be celebrated in Islam-dominated Egypt today. And Wilkie, do you know the mechanism for Rameses’ miraculous return from the dark mansion of death?”
Here Dickens paused for dramatic effect until I was finally forced to ask, “What was it?”
“That magical power was mesmeric magnetism,” he said. “Rameses had been mesmerised, according to ritual and method, at the Temple of Seag, was allowed to die as a man, but was brought back—cured of his fatal disease—as something more than a man.
“Tacitus tells us of the celebrated Temple of Sleep in Alexandria. This is where young Drood did most of his midnight studies and where he emerged as a practitioner of this ancient art of Magnetic Influence.
“That night in his temple-library in Undertown, Drood explained to me—actually showed me the parchments and books—that Plutarch reported that both the prophetic and curative sleep induced in the temples of Isis and Osiris utilised a mesmeric incense called Kyphi, which is used even today—Drood let me smell it from a vial, Wilkie—as well as the music of the lyre to bring on such mesmeric sleep. The Pythagoreans also used this Kyphi incense and the lyre in their secret cave and temple ceremonies, since they believed as the ancient Egyptians did that such Magnetic Influence, properly directed, can free the soul from its body and create a full rapport with the spiritual world.
“Don’t look at me that way, my dear Wilkie. You know I am no believer in mere ghosts and spirit-rappings. How many have I exposed in my talks and essays? But I am an expert in Magnetic Influence, and I hope to become a greater expert in the science very soon.
“According to Herodotus and Clemens Alexandrinus, this prayer and mesmeric control of a dying man have been used for ten thousand years at all important Egyptian funerals—
“ ‘Deign, ye gods, who give life to men, to give a favourable judgement of the soul of the deceased, that it may pass to the eternal gods.’
“But you see that some souls they do not release, Wilkie. Some souls they hold under their Magnetic Influence and bring back. Such it was with the Pharaoh Rameses. Such it was with the man you and I know as Drood.”
DICKENS STOPPED WALKING and I stopped next to him. We were less than half a mile from Gad’s Hill now, although we had been walking at something less than Dickens’s usual frenzied pace. I confess that I had been half-mesmerised by the sound and tone and drone of Charles Dickens’s voice for the past twenty minutes or so and had noticed almost nothing of our surroundings.
“Have you found this boring, Wilkie?” he asked, his dark eyes sharp and challenging.
“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “It’s fascinating. And fantastic. It’s not everyone who is permitted to, or every day that one is allowed to, hear an Arabian Nights tale from Charles Dickens.”
“Fantastic,” repeated Dickens, smiling thinly. “Do you find it too fantastic to be true?”
“Charles, are you asking me whether I think Drood was telling you the truth with this story or whether you are telling me the truth?”
“Either,” said Dickens. “Both.” His intense gaze never left my face.
“I have no idea whether this Drood spoke a word of truth,” I said. “But I trust that you are telling me the truth in your narration of what he said.”
I was lying, Dear Reader. The story was too absurd either for me to accept it or to believe that Dickens had accepted it. I remembered that Dickens had once told me that 1001 Arabian Nights had been his favourite book when he was a child. I wondered now if the accident at Staplehurst had released some childhood strain in his character.
Dickens nodded as if I had answered the schoolmaster correctly. “I don’t need to remind you, my dear old friend, that all of this information is told in confidence.”
“Of course not.”
He smiled almost boyishly. “Even if our Inspector Field friend threatens to tell the world about the Landlady and the Butler?”
I waved that away. “You did not tell the heart of Drood’s story,” I said.
“I did not?”
“No,” I said flatly. “You did not. Why was he there at Staplehurst? Where had he come from? What was he doing with the injured and dying?… I believe that you once said it looked as if the Drood creature were stealing the souls of the dying there. And what on earth is he doing in a cave beneath the catacombs beyond a river in a tunnel?”
“Rather than continue the narration…” said Dickens even as he began walking again, “… since we are rather close to home, I shall just answer your questions, my dear Wilkie. But first of all, Hatchery was correct in his detective work and assumptions about Drood’s presence at Staplehurst. The man was in a coffin in the baggage car.”
“Good God!” I said. “Why?”
“For precisely the reasons we surmised, Wilkie. Drood has enemies in London and England who attempt to locate and harm him. Our Inspector Field is one of those enemies. Nor is Drood either a citizen of our nation or a welcome foreign visitor. In fact, in the eyes and files of all official sources, he has been dead for more than twenty years. So he was returning in a coffin from a trip to France… a trip in which he met others of his religion and expertise in the Magnetic Arts.”
“Extraordinary,” I said. “But what about his odd behaviour at the accident site, lurking and leaning over victims who were dead when you visited them next? ‘Stealing souls,’ you said.”
Dickens smiled and beheaded a weed, swinging his blackthorn stick like a broadsword. “It shows how mistaken even the trained and intelligent observer can be when deprived of all context, my dear Wilkie. Drood was not stealing the souls of those poor dying wretches. On the contrary, he was mesmerising them to ease the pain of their passage and saying the words of the ancient Egyptian funeral ceremony to help them on their journey, using some of the very words I quoted to you a few minutes ago. Rather as if he were a Catholic giving the Last Rites to the dying. Only with mesmeric Sleep Temple rites, he was certain he really was sending their souls on to their judgement by whatever gods they worshipped.”
“Extraordinary,” I said again.
“And as for his history here in England and the reasons for his presence in Undertown,” continued Dickens, “Drood’s arrival in England and his altercation with a sailor, knife and all, are almost exactly as old Opium Sal related it. Except in reverse. Drood was sent to England more than twenty years ago to look up two cousins of his from Egypt—twins, a young man and young woman who had mastered another ancient Egyptian skill, the ability to read each other’s minds—and Drood arrived with thousands of pounds in English cash and more wealth in the form of gold in his luggage.