They stopped at Old Opium Sal’s den, as I knew they would. Here I could have found my way around blindfolded, but because of the bright flashes of lightning—the artillery barrage had grown louder, but still there came not a hint of refreshing rain—I waited until they had gone to the upper regions of the rotting building before I slipped up to the first-storey landing and edged around into the deeper darkness there. Because of open doors and raised voices, I could hear snatches of Dickens’s and the policeman’s explanations and the tourists’ conversation as they toured the opium den.
There was just enough smell of burnt opium in the air to make my body and scarab-inhabited brain ache for the drug. To take the edge off the longing, I drank deeply from my flask.
“The Puffer Princess…” I heard Dickens’s voice drift down in the thick air between thunder rumblings. It was not until months later that I understood this reference.
“Her pipe appears to be made from an old penny ink-bottle…” I heard Fields say.
Between all the understandable snippets, I could hear Opium Sal’s familiar but unintelligible cackles, croaks, whines, and entreaties. The policeman shouted her into silence several times, but the cackles would rise in volume again and drift down to me as surely as the scent of opium smoke. I could tell from my hiding place on the floor below them (as well as from memory) that this opium was lesser stuff and none of the excellent variety burned in beautiful pipes down in King Lazaree’s crypt-den. I sipped again from my flask.
Dickens and the policeman led the way down the sagging, rotted steps, and I had to shuffle back several paces into the deeper darkness of that empty first-storey landing.
Where were they going next? I wondered. Could he possibly take them all the way to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the crypt-entrance to the upper reaches of Undertown?
No, I realised, Dickens would never do that. But this was the anniversary date on which he always met Drood. How was he to do this with Fields and the others in tow, much less with the policeman present?
The loud group had disappeared around the corner of the building and I’d taken a few steps to go down the stairway myself when suddenly a thick, powerful arm came around my throat and a hot breath whispered in my ear, “Don’t move.”
I did move—spastically, since I was filled with terror, but quickly—and fumbled Hatchery’s pistol out of my pocket with my free hand even as the strong forearm was cutting off my air.
The bearded man swept the pistol out of my hand and deposited it in the pocket of his seaweed-rags jacket as easily as one would take a toy away from a small child.
A powerful hand shoved me up against the wall, and the filthy and bearded man struck a match. “It is I, Mr Collins,” he rasped.
For a moment I could identify neither the voice nor the face, but then I saw the intensity of gaze as well as the filth and unkempt beard.
“Barris,” I gasped. His hand still held me pinned to the splintered wall.
“Yes, sir,” said the man whom I had last seen as he was clubbing me with a pistol after shooting a boy dead in an Undertown sewer river. “Come this way…”
“I cannot…”
“Come this way,” ordered former detective Reginald Barris. He grabbed my cape sleeve and tugged me roughly along behind him. “Dickens has already met with Drood. There’s nothing new for you to see tonight.”
“Impossible…” I began as I stumbled along in his grip.
“Not impossible. The monster met with Dickens in his rooms at the Saint James Hotel just before dawn this morning. You were still home sleeping. Come along now and watch your step in this dark hall. I’m going to show you something quite remarkable.”
BARRIS PULLED ME DOWN an absolutely black hallway—not even the lightning flashes penetrated—then onto a side terrace to the building, one that I had never noticed when I was a regular patron upstairs at Opium Sal’s. Here, fifteen feet above an alley not four feet wide, two planks had been laid in a gap in the rotted railing to cross to the next tenement’s sagging terrace.
“I can’t…” I began.
Barris shoved me onto the planks, and I tiptoed across the narrow, sagging bridge-way.
On this dark terrace, which wrapped around the old structure, we edged carefully (for there were gaps in the rotted floor) around to the river side. The stench was much stronger there, but the lightning flashes illuminated our way as Barris led me into another corridor and then up three full flights of stairs. None of the closed-off rooms here showed even a hint of light from under the doors. It was as if the entire building—in a stretch of slum where every foetid basement and former cowshed was crowded with poor families or entire legions of opium addicts—had been abandoned.
The stairs were as narrow and as steep as a thick-planked ladder, and by the time we got to the top level, the fourth storey five tall flights above the ground, I was panting and wheezing. The outside balcony-terrace there had fallen completely away, but through the raw opening to my right I could see the river, countless shingled roofs, and chimney pots all flickering into existence when the cannonade lightning flashed, then dropping immediately into darkness during the short intervals between flashes.
“This way,” barked Barris. He forced open a warped and screeching door, then lit a match.
The room appeared to have been abandoned for years. Rats scurried along the baseboards and disappeared either into the adjoining room or into the rotting walls. The single window had been boarded over and not the slightest gleam of light entered there even when thunder roared and flashes of lightning slashed through the doorway behind us. There were no furnishings left behind, only something that looked like a broken ladder thrown into a far corner.
“Help me with this,” ordered the former detective.
Together we carried the heavy lattice of thick boards to the centre of the room and Barris—who, despite his rag-clothing and filth and beard and wild, uncombed hair indicating a starving man, was still amazingly strong—forced the top of this ladder up against the cracked and sagging ceiling.
Prodded by the top of the ladder, a hidden panel in that ceiling flew upward and open, revealing a rectangle of blackness.
Barris propped the ladder against the inner lip of this opening and said, “Go up first.”
“I will not,” I said.
He lit another match and I could see white teeth flash in the center of that dark beard. Anyone who saw those healthy teeth would know that Reginald Barris with his Cambridge accent was no true resident of these New Court in Bluegate Fields sad streets. “Very well then,” he said softly. “I shall go up first and light another match there. I have a small police bullseye in my pocket—next to your pistol. When you come up, I shall light that lantern. Trust me, sir, it is perfectly safe up there. But it shall not be safe for you if you try to flee back down those stairs and I have to descend to catch up with you.”
“Still the ruffian, I see,” I said contemptuously.
Barris laughed easily. “Oh, yes,” he said. “More than you could imagine, Mr Collins.”
He scrambled up the ladder and I could see the glow of a match flare in the darkness above. For a second I considered throwing down the ladder and then running for the hall and stairway. But I could feel Barris’s terrible grip firm on the top of the ladder and I remembered the strength with which he had propelled me across that plank bridge and then up the stairs.
Awkwardly—for I had continued to put on weight through the preceding year—I made my way up the ladder and then onto my knees in the musty-smelling dark above and then, shaking off the detective’s helping hands, to my feet. He lit the lantern.
Immediately in front of me loomed the ebony jackal-face of the god Anubis. I wheeled. Less than six feet away, a seven-foot-tall statue of Osiris stared down at me. The god was properly dressed in white with his tall white hat and carried his requisite crook and flail.
“This way,” said Barris.
We made our way down the centre of what had onc
e been a long attic. There were more tall statues set under the eaves on either side. To my left was Horus with the head of a hawk; to my right was Seth with his animal head and long, curved snout. We walked between ibis-headed Thoth and Bastet with her cat’s face and ears. I could see where the sagging floor here had been reinforced by recent carpentry. Even the ceilings in the niches where the gods resided had been altered, built up like dormers so that the statues of the gods could stand upright.
“They’re plaster of paris,” said Barris, his lantern beam flashing back and forth as he led me farther down the length of the attic. “Even with the rebuilt floors here, stone effigies would crash through.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. “What is all this?”
At the end of the attic there was a square door where Barris pulled aside a piece of canvas that kept the weather and pigeons out. The frame around this relatively new doorway was made of fresh wood. Lightning illuminated the opening and the thick night air flowed in and around us like some foul syrup. From the sill of this door, a single plank—not more than ten inches wide—ran a dozen feet or more to a dark opening on the opposite side of an alley fifty or sixty feet below. The wind had come up ahead of the approaching storm, and the door canvas flapped with the sound of a raptor’s heavy wing.
“I’m not crossing that,” I said.
“You have to,” said Barris. He seized me under the arm and lifted me onto the sill and then shoved me out onto the board. With his other hand, he aimed the lantern to illuminate the impossibly narrow wooden plank. The wind threatened to topple me off before I took a single step.
“Go!” he ordered and shoved me out over the fatal drop. The beam disappeared for a moment and I realised that Barris was half-crouching on the plank and securing the canvas on nails behind us.
Holding my arms straight to either side, my heart racing, I set one foot in front of the other and shuffled forward like some circus clown preceding the real acrobats. Lightning flashed somewhere nearby and the following roll of thunder struck me like a giant open palm. The rising wind flipped my cape over my face when I was halfway across the impossible plank bridge.
Then somehow I found myself at the opposite window, but the canvas here was as taut as a drum’s skin—I couldn’t get in. I crouched fearfully and clung to the half-inch of wood frame around the opening, feeling the plank beneath us spring up and down and begin to slide—and slip off the sill—as Barris came up behind me.
His broad arm reached over my shoulder (if I had moved a muscle then, we would have both fallen to our deaths), his free hand fumbled with some opening in the canvas, and then the pitching lantern beam showed an opening. I threw myself forward into this second, larger attic.
Here waited Geb, the green-coloured god of Earth; Nut, with his crown of blue sky and golden stars; and Sekhmet, the god of destruction, his lion’s jaws open wide in a roar. Holy Ra was nearby with his falcon’s head, Hathor with the cow horns, Isis with a throne on her head, Amun crowned with feathers… they were all there.
I realised that my legs were so weak I could no longer stand. I sat on the path of fresh planks that ran down the centre of this larger attic. A new window, round, at least twelve feet in diameter, had been set into what I guessed was the Thames-facing southern rooftop, the circle of glass and wood placed directly above a wooden altar. The window was well constructed with thick, quality leaded glass not yet warped by gravity and there were metal circles within circles set into the glass much as I had always imagined some exotic gun sight on a naval ship.
“That points at the Dog Star, Sirius,” said Barris, who had secured the canvas and turned off his lantern. The nearly constant lightning display was enough to illuminate this large attic space now empty except for us, the Gods of the Black Lands, and the black-linen-draped altar. “I don’t know why Sirius is so important to their rituals—I dare say you may, Mr Collins—but one finds such a window aligned properly with that star in all their London attic nests.”
“Nests?” My voice sounded as stunned as I felt. The scarab was so excited that it was tunnelling ragged circles through the riddled grey matter that passed for my brain in those days. The pain was excruciating. My eyeballs felt as if they were slowly filling with blood.
“Drood’s followers have attic nests like this all over London,” said Barris. “Dozens of them. And some of them connect half a dozen or more attics.”
“So London has an Overtown as well as an Undertown,” I said.
Barris ignored that. “This nest has been abandoned for some weeks,” he said. “But they’ll be back.”
“Why have you brought me here? What do you want?”
Barris lit his lantern again and shined the bullseye beam on part of the wall and steep ceiling. I saw birds, eyeballs, wavy lines, more birds… what my clark friend at the British Museum called “hieroglyphics.”
“Can you read this?” asked Barris.
I started to answer and then realised, to my deep shock, that I could read the picture-words and phrases. “And Djewhty came forth! Djewhty, whose words became Ma’at…”
It was part of a ritual for naming and blessing a newborn child. And the words had been carved into the rotting wood of the ceiling, not painted on, just above a statue of Ma’at—the goddess of Justice—who stood there with a feather in her hair.
I said, “Of course I cannot read this gibberish. I am no museum docent. What are you asking?”
To this day, I believe this lie saved my life that night.
Barris expelled a breath and seemed to relax. “I thought not, but there are so many who have become slaves and servants of Drood.…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you remember the last night we saw each other, Mr Collins?”
“How could I forget? You murdered an innocent child. When I turned to remonstrate, you brutally clubbed me on the head—you might have killed me! I was unconscious for days. For all I know, you were trying to kill me.”
Barris was shaking his dirty, bearded head. His expression, what I could see of it through the grime and wild hair, seemed sad. “That was no innocent child, Mr Collins. That Wild Boy was an agent of Drood. He was no longer human. If he had escaped to tell of our presence there, Drood’s hordes would have fallen on us there in that sewer within minutes.”
“That’s absurd,” I said coldly.
I could see Barris smile so broadly that the image remained in my retina during the intervals between lightning crashes. “Is it, Mr Collins? Is it indeed? You do not know, then—for which I am particularly grateful—about the brain-beetles.”
Suddenly my mouth was very dry. I forced myself not to wince as there came a stab of pincer-pain from behind my right eye. Fortunately, a solid wall of thunder ended conversation and gave me a moment to recover. “The what?” I managed to ask.
“Brain-beetles is what Inspector Field and I called them,” said Barris. “Drood inserts these Egyptian insects—actually, English ones trained to his heathen Egyptian ways—into the bodies and brains of his slaves and converts. Or he makes them think he’s done so. It’s all actually a result of his mesmerising them, of course. They obey him for years in a sort of post-mesmeric trance, and he reinforces that control at every opportunity. The brain-beetles are the mesmerising symbol of that control to the victim.”
“That’s pure poppycock,” I said loudly between thunder crashes. “I happen to have researched mesmerism and the magnetic arts most extensively. It is impossible to control someone at a distance and over a long period of time as you suggest—much less enslave them to such a delusion as this… brain-beetle.”
“Is it?” asked Barris. I could see in the flickering light that the blackguard was still smiling, but it was a terrible and ironic smile now. “You were not there, Mr Collins, to see the horror that occurred in Undertown an hour after I clubbed you down—for which I do apologise, sir, most sincerely, but I thought you were one of them at the moment, a beetle-controlled agent of Dro
od.”
“What horror occurred after you clubbed me into insensibility, Detective Barris?”
“It isn’t ‘detective’ for me any longer, Mr Collins. That title and occupation are lost forever to me. And what happened, sir, some few hours after you were carried up and out of Undertown, was an ambush and slaughter, sir.”
“You exaggerate,” I said.
“Is nine good men dead an exaggeration, sir? We were hunting for Drood’s lair, Drood’s Temple, and, of course, Drood… but all the time he was drawing us deeper and deeper into his trap.”
“That is absurd,” I said. “You must have had two hundred men there that night.”
“One hundred and thirty-nine, Mr Collins. Almost all of them policemen away from duty at the time or former policemen, and almost all of them men who had known Hibbert Hatchery and who had come down with us to catch his killer. There were fewer than twenty of us who knew just what a monster Drood actually is—no normal killer, not a human being at all—and five of those men died at Drood’s killer-slaves’ hands that night. Those scores of thugs and Thuggees who were controlled by those magnetic-influence brain-beetles that you say don’t exist. And the inspector was murdered the next day.”
My jaw sagged at this statement. “Murdered? Murdered? Don’t lie to me, Barris. I won’t have it. I know better than this. The Times of London—I have spoken to the reporters who did the obituary, sir—reported that Inspector Field died a natural death. He died in his sleep.”
“Oh? And were these reporters there that morning after he died to see the terror imprinted on the poor old man’s dead face, Mr Collins? I was there. I was the first person Inspector Field’s wife sent for when she found him dead. His open mouth and bulging eyes were not the expression of a man who died peacefully in his sleep from heart problems, Mr Collins. His eyes were filled with blood.”
I said, “I understand that a stroke of the brain can cause just such symptoms.”