“Stop!” Barris cried again. Suddenly the detective had a small silver revolver in his hand. I had no idea then—nor to this day—why he would want to detain these feral creatures.
Two of the boys had pulled themselves up into a high drain that seemed too small to allow access even to these improbably thin and starving wraiths, but with a burst of wriggling, they disappeared. One almost expected the pop of a champagne cork as the second boy’s pale, bare soles wriggled and thrashed out of sight. The third boy crouched low and slithered headfirst into yet another pipe on the opposite side.
The fourth boy reached elbow-deep into the stream he stood in and hurled two handfuls of muck at our approaching boat. The detective with the bullseye ducked and shouted an oath. I heard filth splatter across the thwart where I sat and saw some strike Reginald Barris on the lapels of his heavy wool coat.
I laughed.
Barris fired the pistol twice. The report in the narrow brick tunnel was so loud and startling that I threw my hands over my ears.
The Wild Boy pitched face forward into the water.
The punt floated past the man’s maggot-writhed corpse until we reached the boy. The detective with the pole reached down and turned the boy over, pulled him half into the boat. Filthy, reeking water dripped from the boy’s rags and open mouth into our punt.
He was no older than ten or eleven. One of Barris’s bullets had gone through his throat, severing the jugular. Blood still pumped from that wound, although very weakly. The other bullet had entered his cheek just below the boy’s eye, which remained wide open and staring, as if in reproof. His eyes were blue.
Our man with the pole let the corpse slide back into the black water.
I got to my feet and grabbed Barris by his broad shoulders. “You’ve killed a child!”
“There are no children in Undertown,” was Barris’s cool, unconcerned reply. “Only vermin.”
I remember attacking him then. Only profound exertions by the detective with the pole and by the one in the stern using the tiller as a balancing staff kept the wobbling punt from turning over, adding our four bodies to the stream holding the maggot-ridden man and the murdered boy.
I remember making sounds as I attacked Barris, but not forming words—mere grunts and half-stifled screams, garbled syllables without meaning. I did not attack the detective with my fists, as a man might, but with fingers raking like claws and fingernails clawing for his eyes, the way a madwoman might.
I half-remember Barris holding me off with one hand until it became apparent that I would not desist and was going to knock us all into the black water. I half-remember my screaming becoming more intense and my saliva spattering the young detective’s handsome face and him saying something to the man in the stern behind me and then the silver pistol coming up, its barrel short but heavy and flashing in the bobbing bullseye lantern light.
And then—blessedly—I remember nothing but darkness with no dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Iawoke to find myself in my own bed in daylight, in my own nightshirt, in great pain and with Caroline hovering—and frowning—over me. My skull was pounding in a greater agony than I had hitherto experienced and every muscle, sinew, bone, and cell in my body was grinding against its neighbour in an off-key chorus of pain-filled physical despair. I felt as if days or weeks had passed since I had taken any of my medicinal laudanum.
“Who is Martha?” demanded Caroline.
“What?” I could barely speak. My lips were dried and cracked, my tongue swollen.
“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline. Her voice was as flat and unsympathetic as a pistol shot.
Of all the various sorts of panic I had experienced during the past two years, including awakening blind in an underground crypt, none was as terrible as this. I felt like a man sitting fat and secure in his comfortable carriage only to feel it suddenly lurch off a cliff.
“Martha?” I managed to say. “Caroline… my dear… what are you talking about?”
“You’ve been saying… repeating… ‘Martha’ in your sleep for two days and nights,” said Caroline, neither her expression nor her tone softening. “Who is Martha?”
“Two days and nights! How long have I been unconscious? How did I get here? Why is this bandage on my head?”
“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline.
“Martha… is Dickens’s character from David Copperfield,” I said, touching the thick bandage wrapped around my skull and feigning disinterest in the conversation. “You know… the girl of the streets who walks by the filthy, corrupted Thames. I think I was dreaming about the river.”
Caroline crossed her arms over her chest and blinked.
Never underestimate, Dear Reader, the resourcefulness of a novelist in an untenable situation, even when he is in such a dire condition as I was that day.
“How long have I been sleeping?” I asked again.
“It’s Wednesday afternoon,” Caroline said at last. “We heard knocking at the door on Sunday mid-day and found you unconscious on the stoop. Where had you been, Wilkie? Charley—he and Kate have been here twice; he reports your mother is about the same—said Mrs Wells reported that you left your mother’s without a word of explanation late on Saturday night. Where did you go? Why did your clothes—we had to burn them—stink of smoke and… of something worse? What happened to your head? Frank Beard has been here three times to look at you and was quite worried about the gash on your temple and the possible concussion to your brain. He was afraid you were in a coma. He was afraid that you might never awaken. Where have you been? Why in God’s name are you dreaming about a Dickens character named Martha?”
“In a minute,” I said, leaning over the side of the bed but deciding that I would not be able to stand, or, if I did manage to stand, be capable of walking. “I shall answer your questions in a minute, but first have the girl bring in a basin. Quickly. I am going to be sick.”
DEAR READER FROM my distant future, it seems quite possible—even probable—that in your Far Country a hundred years and more hence, all disease has been conquered, all pain banished, all the mortal afflictions so common to men of my time become no more than a distant hint of an echo of history’s rumour. But in my century, Dear Reader, despite our inevitable hubris as we compared ourselves to more primitive cultures, in truth we had little knowledge with which to battle disease or injury and few effective chemists’ potions to utilise in our pathetic attempts to ameliorate mankind’s oldest enemy—pain.
My friend Frank Beard was better than most practitioners of his dubious trade. He did not bleed me. He did not apply leeches to my belly or bring out his arsenal of ugly steel instruments with which to trepan or trephine me (that nineteenth-century surgeon’s habit of casually and obscenely boring a hole in the patient’s aching skull as if coring an apple with a carpenter’s bit-and-brace, popping the circle of white bone out as easy as popping the cork on a bottle of wine, all the while acting as though it were the most normal thing in the world to do). No, Frank Beard visited frequently, fretted and brooded honestly, checked the gash and bruise at my hairline, changed dressings, queried me anxiously about my ongoing and worsening pain, advised rest and a milk diet, gave quiet instructions to Caroline, tut-tutted to me about my laudanum intake but did not order me to stop it, and—in the end—honoured the true spirit of Hippocrates by first doing no harm. Just as with his more famous patient and friend—Charles Dickens—Frank Beard the physician worried about me without being able to help me.
So I remained in agony.
I had regained consciousness—such as it was—in my own bed on 22 January, five days after my final descent to King Lazaree’s den. For the rest of that week I was too ill to get out of bed, even though my need to visit Mother was almost absolute. In all my years of pain from rheumatical gout, I had never experienced anything like this. Beyond the usual aches of muscles and joints and bowels, it was as if some great, throbbing, burning source of pain had embedded itself deep behind my rig
ht eye.
Or as if some huge insect had burrowed into my brain.
It was during this time that I remembered something odd that Dickens had said to me years earlier.
We had been discussing modern surgery in general terms, and Dickens mentioned in passing “a certain simple medical procedure I had undergone years ago, not long before my trip to America…”
Dickens did not elaborate, but I knew through Katey Dickens and others what that surgery—hardly a “simple procedure”—had been. Dickens, while then working on Barnaby Rudge, had begun experiencing ever more severe rectal pains. (How these would have compared to my present excruciating headache, I cannot say.) The doctors diagnosed a “fistula”—literally a gap in the rectal wall through which tissue was being forced.
Dickens had no choice but to undergo immediate surgery and chose Dr Frederick Salmon—the author thirteen years before of A Practical Essay on the Structure of the Rectum—to perform it. The procedure consisted of the rectum being widened by a blade, then opened up by a series of clamps, then held even wider apart by some vicious surgical appliance, while the intruding tissue was slowly and carefully cut away and then the loose ends pressed back out of the rectal cavity, and finally the rectal wall sewn together.
And Dickens had undergone this with no morphia, no opium, nor any sort of what some are now calling “anaesthetic.” Katey reported (all this learned from her mother, of course) that her father had remained cheerful during the surgery and was active shortly afterwards. Within days he was writing Barnaby Rudge again, but, one must add, while lying on a sofa with extra cushions available. And his huge and exhausting First American Tour was looming.
But I digress from my point.
Dickens’s comments about this “certain simple medical procedure” were about our fortunately fallible human memory in regards to pain.
“It’s often struck me, my dear Wilkie,” he said that day as we were riding somewhere through Kent in a brougham, “that in a real sense, we have no true memory of pain. Oh, yes—we can recall we had it and remember quite vividly how terrible it was and how we wish never to experience it again—but we cannot truly recall it, can we? We remember the state, but not the true particulars the way one might remember… say… a fine meal. I suspect that this is the reason that women agree to go through the agonies of childbirth more than once—they have simply forgotten the specifics of their earlier agonies. And that, my dear Wilkie, is my point.”
“What is?” I had asked. “Childbirth?”
“Not at all,” Dickens said. “Rather, the contrast between pain and luxury. Pain we remember in a general (yet terrible) way but cannot really recall; luxury we recall in every detail. Ask yourself if this is not true! Once one has tasted the finest of wines, smoked the best cigars, dined in the most wonderful restaurants… even ridden in such luxury as this brougham in which we ride today… much less gained an acquaintance of a truly beautiful woman, all lesser experiences in each category continue to pale for years, decades… a lifetime! Pain we cannot truly recall; luxury—in all its Sybaritic details—we can never forget.”
Well, perhaps. But I assure you, Dear Reader, that the terrible pain I was suffering in January, February, March, and April of 1868 was of a nature and horrible specificity that I shall never forget.
IF A FARMER IS ILL, others till the fields in his place. If a soldier falls ill, he reports to the infirmary and is replaced on the field of battle. If a tradesman falls ill, others—perhaps his wife—must perform daily duties in his shop. If a queen falls ill, millions pray for her and voices and footsteps are muffled in her bedroom wing of the palace. But in all these cases, the work of the farm, army, shop, or nation goes on.
If a writer falls terribly ill, everything stops. If he dies, his “business” ends forever. In this sense, a popular writer’s career is most like that of a famous actor—but even the most famous actor has an understudy. A writer does not. No one can replace him. His distinctive voice is everything. This is especially true for a popular writer whose work is already in the process of being serialised in a major national magazine. The Moonstone had begun its serial run both in our English All the Year Round and the Americans’ Harper’s Weekly in January. Although I had several numbers written in advance of this initial publication, those were already being set in type; new instalments would be needed almost immediately. They existed only in rough note and outline form and were yet to be written.
This pressure brought on a terror on top of my terror, a pain of pressure on top of the pressure of pain crawling and digging its way through my screaming brain and body.
In that first week of my new misery, unable to sit up and hold a pen, racked in unspeakable pain and confined to bed, I attempted dictating the next chapter to Caroline and then to her daughter, Carrie. Neither could tolerate the screams and moans of agony that, unbidden, interrupted and punctuated my attempts at dictation. Both would rush to my side in an attempt to soothe me rather than sit and wait for dictation to resume.
By the weekend, Caroline had hired a male amanuensis to sit in a nearby chair and take my dictation. But this secretary, obviously of a sensitive nature, could also not bear my moans, expostulations, and involuntary writhings. He quit after the first hour. The second male amanuensis on Monday seemed to have little care or empathy for my pain, but he also seemed incapable of pulling the dictated sentences and punctuations out of the background of my cries and moans. He was fired after the second hour.
That Monday night, with the household asleep but the agony from hard-pincered scuttlings in my brain and then down along my spine keeping me from being able to sleep—or just to lie still—even after half a dozen self-ministrations of laudanum, I got out of bed and staggered to the window, pulling back the funereally heavy drapes and raising the blinds to look out at the slushy darkness towards Portman Square.
Somewhere out there, I was certain, however invisible to a layman’s eye, one or more of Inspector Field’s agents still stood watch. He would never abandon me now, not after what I had seen and learned of his operations.
For days I had begged Caroline for the newspaper and asked her for copies of the Times which I had missed while in my coma. But those newspapers had been thrown away and the few recent ones I was able to peruse made no mention of a former policeman’s eviscerated body being found in a slum cemetery. There was no account of fires breaking out in areas near the Thames or in the Fleet Ditch sewer system, and Caroline only looked at me oddly when I asked if she had heard of such fires.
I queried Frank Beard when he came and my brother, Charles, in his turn, but neither had noticed mention of any detective’s murder nor of any subterranean fires. Both Beard and Charley assumed that my queries were the result of nightmares I had been having—it was certainly true that my few scattered hours of sleep gained during this entire period were ruled by terrible nightmares—and I made no effort to disabuse them of that theory.
Obviously Inspector Field has used his influence to keep the police and news-papers quiet about Sergeant Hatchery’s terrible murder… but why?
Perhaps Field—and his hundred or more men who had come to the punitive expedition beneath the city—simply had kept the fact of the murder from the police.
But, again… why?
I had neither strength of body nor adequate mental concentration that Monday night as I clung to the drapes and looked out at the cold, foggy London January midnight to answer my own questions, but I looked for Inspector Field’s inevitable eavesdropping detectives as if peering into darkness in search of a Saviour.
Why? How can Inspector Field help me stop this pain?
The scarab moved an inch or two at the base of my brain and I screamed twice, muffling the second scream in a wad of velvet drapery stuffed into my mouth.
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 unders
tandable), 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.