Drood (64 page)
Drood is passing a lighted candle over my chest and face in circular motions. Hot wax dribbles onto my bare flesh, but the pain of that is nothing compared to the pain of the scarab moving within me. It is climbing again.
“I fly up asss a bird and alight asss a beetle,” chants Drood, deliberately dripping more hot wax across my chest and throat. “I fly up assss a bird and alight asss a beetle on the empty throne which isss on your bark, O Ra!”
The huge insect has filled my throat with its impossible, chitinous hardness and burrowed into my soft palate as easily as it would have burrowed into sand. I can feel it now filling the sinuses behind my nose, behind my eyes. Its barbed legs flail at the backs of my eyeballs as it forces itself higher. I can hear the huge pincers scraping bone as it burrows through the soft matter opening into my skull.
The pain is terrible—indescribable, unsupportable—but I can breathe!
Still unable to focus on anything beyond Drood—the jackal’s-head and great-bird’s-head statues mere blurs, the dark-robed figures melded together as blurs—I realise that I am looking out through a film of the blood I have wept.
I feel the huge stag beetle burrow into the soft surface of my brain—deeper, deeper. If this continues another second, I know I shall go mad.
The scarab stops moving near the centre of my brain. It begins to feed.
“You may shut your eyessss,” says Drood.
I squeeze them shut, feeling the tears of blood and terror streaking my wax-spotted cheeks.
“You are our scribe now,” says Drood. “You alwaysss will be. You will work when bidden. You will come when summoned. You belong to usss, Misster Wilkie Collinsss.”
I can
hear
the scarab’s pincers and jaws clicking and moving as it eats. I can visualise the insect rolling my half-digested brain matter into a grey and bloody ball and pushing it ahead of itself.
But it does not move forward again. Not yet. It has made a nest for itself in the lower-central base of my brain. When the scarab’s six legs twitch, it tickles and I again have to fight the absolute need to vomit.
“All praise to the lord of truth,” says Drood.
“Whose shrine is hidden,”
chants the chorus.
“From whose eyesss mankind issues,” says Drood.
“And from whose mouth the gods came into being,”
chants the choir.
“We send forth this scribe now to do the bidding of the beloved Child and the Hidden Light,” calls Drood.
“Behind him shines Ra, whose names the gods do not know,”
chants the crowd.
I try to open my eyes but cannot. Nor can I hear or feel.
The only sound or sensation in my universe now is the ticking and scrabbling as the scarab twists, turns, burrows slightly deeper, and eats again.
I
awoke from my opium nightmare to find that I had gone blind.
It was absolute darkness. King Lazaree always had diffused lights in each room of his den, light from the main room always filtered through the red curtain, and the coal stove near the entrance to my niche of the opium den always gave off a warm orange glow. Now there was only absolute darkness. I raised my hands to my eyes to make sure they were open and my fingertips touched the surface of my eyeballs. Wincing away, I could not see my fingers.
I cried out in the darkness and—unlike my dream—I could hear my screams very well indeed. They echoed off stone. I cried for help. I cried for King Lazaree and his assistant. No one answered.
Only slowly did I realise that I was not lying on my high cushioned bunk as I always did at King Lazaree’s. I was lying on a cold floor of stone or hard-packed dirt. And I was naked.
Just as in my dream. Or just as in my real abduction by Drood.
I was shivering violently. It was the cold that had awakened me. But I could move, and within a minute I was on all fours and feeling around in my blindness, trying to touch the edge of one of the wooden bunks, or even the stove or the edge of the doorway.
My fingers met rough stone and wood instead. I ran my hands over the shape, wondering if it was the wall and then the corner to one of the stacked bunks. It was not. The stone and wood were ancient—they
smelled
ancient—and the stone had partially fallen through in places. I could touch cold wood within. Everything smelled of age and corruption.
I am in one of the
loculi—
one of the countless burial chambers in the multi-levelled catacombs. These are the stone or cement sarcophagi with the wood coffins within. And inside those wood coffins are lead liners. I am down with the dead.
They had moved me.
Of course they moved me. They carried me down through the circular apse, through the rood screen, into Undertown proper. They carried me down the river to Drood’s Temple. I may be miles from King Lazaree’s den, a mile deep under the city. Without a lantern I shall never find my way to the surface.
I screamed again then and began flailing along the line of stacked coffins and biers, rising to my feet only to drop to all fours again and flail again with my out-thrust hands, seeking the bullseye lantern that I always brought down to King Lazaree’s and always used to find my way back to the upper level and out.
There was no lantern.
Finally I quit flailing and simply crouched there in the dark, more panicked beast than man.
There were a dozen levels to these catacombs before one found a tunnel leading to a sewer or the underground river. There were hundreds of burial
loculi
running off these countless straight and curved corridors on these dozen levels. The stairs from the highest level of burial chambers, the corridor just below St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery where Sergeant Hatchery presumably waited for me even now—
How long have I been down here!?
—was just ten yards to the left along the curving corridor from King Lazaree’s den, then up those stairs, ducking one’s head through the broken rear wall of a
loculus,
past the last stack of coffins, right then once in that last corridor, and up the ten steps to the crypt and—presumably, possibly—daylight. I had made that walk back a hundred times after my night of opium.
I reached for my waistcoat as if to pull my watch from its pocket and check the time. There was no watch, no waistcoat. No clothing at all.
I realised that I was freezing—my teeth were chattering violently, the sound echoing back from unseen stone walls. I was shivering so hard that my elbows and forearms were beating a tattoo on the not-quite-hollow stone sarcophagus that I had fallen against.
I had lost any sense of direction in my blind stumbling about; even if I were in the niche that once held King Lazaree’s den, I no longer knew the way forward or back in it.
Still shaking wildly, my arms stretched straight out ahead of me and my fingers stiff and splayed, I began stumbling along the line of biers, sarcophagi, and coffins.
Even with my arms out ahead of me, I managed to run into something with my head that knocked me back on my arse. I felt blood running from the wound in my temple and immediately sent my fingers searching my forehead, uselessly holding my hands in front of my eyes as if I could suddenly see. I could not. I touched again. The cut was shallow; the bleeding was slight.
Rising carefully to my feet again, I waved my arms until I found the obstruction that had almost knocked me out.
Cold metal, so rusted that the empty-space triangles of the open grid were almost closed in.
The iron grille!!
Each
loculus
along the catacomb corridors had been enclosed within an ancient iron grille. If I had found the grille, I had found the corridor—or
a
corridor—there were scores on different levels down here, most of which I had never seen or explored.
What if the grille is closed and locked?
I would never get to the corridor. Someone would find my skeleton in amongst the sarcophagi and coffins in twenty or fifty or a hundred years and merely think that I was another of what the crypt man at Rochester Cathedral, Dradles, had called “the old ’uns.”
Panicked again, I pounded my palms and forearms and knees along the metal grille, feeling the rusted edges scrape skin away, but finally there was—an emptiness. An opening! At the very least, a fissure caused by a vertical segment of the grille rusting away.
It was only ten inches or so wide, and irregular, but I squeezed through, sharp edges of the grille scraping at my ribs and backside and shrunken genitals.
Then I was in a corridor. I was sure of it!
Unless you’ve passed through a grille
behind
the coffins, in which case you’re more lost than before on some unfathomable deep level of an endless labyrinth.
I dropped to all fours and felt the stone under my palms and knees. No, this was one of the main corridors. All I had to do was follow it to one of the nearly hidden stairways to a higher level, then up the final steps to the crypt where Hatchery was waiting for me.
Which way?? How could I find the stairs in the absolute darkness? Which way??
I crawled to my left, found the grille I had just squeezed through, and rose carefully, not even sure how high the corridor ceiling might be down here. When I had followed Dickens to the river that night two years ago, some of the corridors had been ten feet high—others had been mere tunnels where one had to crouch to avoid bashing one’s brains out. It had all been so simple with a lantern.
Which way???
I turned my face but could sense no movement of air. If I had a candle, perhaps I could sense the draft.…
If I had a God-d—— ned candle, I could easily find my way out without sniffing for drafts!!
I screamed at myself.
I realised that I had screamed it aloud. Echoes died away in both directions. Dear God, any more of this and I would surely lose my mind.
I decided that I would follow my old instincts and walk just as if I were leaving King Lazaree’s den. My body remembered that return walk I had made so many times, even if my brain—without vision to help—kept insisting that it did not.
Using my left hand as my guide, I began walking along the corridor. I came to other grates, other openings, although none of them had the tattered curtain that separated Lazaree’s den from the corridor. At each opening that was not protected by a grille, I got down on my knees and felt for stairs or another corridor, but there were only collapsed grilles, more coffins, or empty niches in the walls.
I moved on, panting, shivering, my teeth still chattering audibly. My conscious mind told me that I would not freeze to death down here—did not caves stay at some constant temperature, in the fifties? It did not matter. My torn, gouged, shivering body was freezing.
Was the corridor curving slightly to the left? The way to Lazaree’s den had curved slightly to the right as one approached it from the hidden stairs down from the first level of catacombs. If I was on that level and to the right of the stairs, the walls here would have to be curving slightly to my left.
I had no idea. It was impossible to tell. But I knew without doubt that I had gone at least twice as far as it took to walk from the entrance to the second and lower level to the curtained alcove that was King Lazaree’s den.
I continued forward anyway. Twice there were cold draughts from my right. The touch of the colder air on my flesh caused my skin to ripple with revulsion—as if something dead and eyeless were caressing me with long, grub-white, boneless fingers.
I shivered and moved on.
There had been two corridors to the left—my right now—as Dickens and I had first found King Lazaree’s den. I had walked past them without a glance or turn of my lantern so many times since.
Down
one of them had been the corridor leading past even more
loculi
to the circular room with the altar and rood screen and hidden stairs down to the deeper levels of Undertown.
Where Drood waited.
But I could already
be
on one of those lower levels.
Twice I had to stop to vomit. My stomach was already empty—I seemed to remember getting sick in the first
loculus,
where I had wakened—but still the retching bent me double and made me lean against cold stone until the spasms passed.
I passed another ungrilled opening—nothing but rubble within the niche—and staggered on another twenty paces or so before crashing into a solid wall.
The corridor ended. The wall was solid; behind me, the corridor stretched backward the way I had come.
I screamed then. And kept screaming. The echoes were all behind me.
They had bricked up the corridor they had left me in. Closed it so that no one would even find my bones.
I clawed at the wall, feeling ancient mortar, stones, and bricks fall away, feeling my fingernails tear off and the ends of my flailing fingers rip and shred.
It was no use. Behind the bricks were more bricks. Behind those bricks was heavier stone.
I dropped, gasping and retching, to my knees, then began crawling back the way I had come.
The last opening was on my right now—the rubble-tumbled niche—but this time I crawled into it, lacerating my already-lacerated knees and palms on the jumble of stones.
They were not just stones. They were steps set into cold, loose dirt.
I scrambled up them, heedless of any obstacle that might be waiting to strike me in the face.
I crashed into a wall, almost fell back down the unseen stairs, but grasped at the edge of an opening. There
was
an opening. I could almost
see
the jagged masonry on either side.
I tumbled through and scraped my right cheek and temple against rough stone. Another bier. Getting to my feet, I realised there were more coffins stacked on the carved stone or shaped cement. I was in another
loculus.
Teeth chattering, I looked to my left and seemed to sense a lightening in my vision in that direction.
I crashed into another metal grate, smeared unseen blood on it from my torn fingers as I flailed until I found the opening to it, and staggered out into an emptiness that must have been another corridor.
