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 co
rridor 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.
There was definitely light—a thin, grey ghost of a glow—to my right, not twenty yards away.
My bare feet slapping on the stone or brick floor of this wider corridor, I fairly ran towards the light.
Yes. I could suddenly see my hands and arms in front of me. My fingers were crimson.
There was a stairway, huge stone steps rising up and curving out of sight.
I knew this stairway.
Weeping, crying out for Detective Hatchery’s help, slipping, falling, rising, and clawing upward again, I went up the steps and squeezed through the familiar wedge of opening.
The light in the crypt, I would realise later, was only the dimmest of January predawn glows—certainly not enough to read by—but it blinded me with its brightness.
Staggering to the stone bier that overhung the secret entrance to Undertown—an entrance I swore then and there that I would never use again—I had to sag against the empty bier or collapse.
“Hatchery! For God’s sake, help! Hatchery!”
My own voice startled me so badly that I almost urinated without volition. I did look down then, at my naked white body. I found that I was staring at my belly, just below the sternum.
There was a red wound or scrape there.
Where the scarab entered.
I shook my head to rid myself of the opium nightmare’s image. I had scrapes and gouges all over my body. My feet and knees and fingers were by far the worse. My head ached abominably.
From the huge beetle moving… burrowing.
“Stop it!” I screamed aloud.
Why was Hatchery not here? Why had he abandoned me this one time I needed him most?
You may have been down there for days, Wilkie Collins.
I heard Missster Wilkie Collinssss echoing in my aching skull.
I laughed then. It did not matter. They had tried to kill me—whoever “they” were—certainly King Lazaree and his heathen, foreign-bastard friends and fellow opium addicts—but they had failed.
I was free. I was out. I was alive.
Looking up, I was startled to see that someone had decorated the interior high spaces of the small crypt with some sort of glistening garlands. The gleaming grey strips had not been there when Hatchery and I had entered hours—days? weeks?—ago, I was certain of that. Christmas was more than two weeks past. And why decorate an empty crypt in the first place?
It did not matter. Nothing mattered—not even my aching, shivering body, raging headache, terrible thirst, and surging hunger—except to get out of this place forever.
Avoiding the cold black hole-in-the-floor entrance to Undertown, I stepped around the bier—quickly, since my writer’s imagination then gave me the vision of a long grey arm with long white boneless fingers suddenly sliding out of that hole like a snake and pulling me, screaming, back down into the darkness—but then I had to stop immediately.
I had no choice.
My way was blocked by the body on the floor of the crypt.
It was Detective Sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, his white face distorted into a huge, silent scream, his all-white eyes staring sightlessly towards the garland-festooned bas-relief carvings and tiny gargoyles set along the corners of the small crypt’s ceiling. Scattered on the stone floor around his body were the remains of his three AM lunch, a small flask, his bowler hat, and the copy of Thackeray’s novel. Rising from his gaping belly were the stretched and glistening grey garlands that were not garlands at all.
Unable even to scream, I leaped the body, ducked the taut grey strands, and ran naked into the predawn burial ground of St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two hours later and I was back in another opium den. Waiting.
I was lucky to be alive. After all, I had been running, naked and screaming, through the worst slums of Bluegate Fields behind the docks, not even aware of which way I was running. Only the odd hour (even the thugs were inside and asleep at dawn on a cold, snowy January dawn) and the fact that even thugs might have been afraid of a screaming crazy man with bloody hands explained how the first person I encountered in my panicked flight was a police constable walking his patrol through the tenements.
The policeman himself had been frightened by my aspect and manner. He had removed a small weighted cosh from his belt, and I am sure that if I had babbled at him another minute without saying words that made sense, he would have clubbed me unconscious and dragged me by the hair to the nearest station.
As it was, he said, “What did you just say? Did you say—‘Hatchery’s body’? As in Hibbert Hatchery?”
“Former sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, now private detective Hibbert Hatchery, yes, Constable. They removed his insides and draped them around the crypt—oh, Christ! oh, God!—and he was working for me, privately, not for Inspector Field, for whom he worked privately publicly.”
The policeman shook me. “What’s that about Inspector Field? Do you know Inspector Field?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” I said and laughed. And wept.
“Who are you?” demanded the heavily moustachioed police officer. Snow had coated his dark helmet-cap white.
“William Wilkie Collins,” I said through chattering teeth. “Wilkie Collins to millions of my readers. Wilkie to my friends and almost everyone else.” I giggled again.
“Never heard of you,” said the constable.
“I am a personal friend of and collaborator with Mr Charles Dickens,” I said. My jaw had been quivering so violently that I could only barely get out the word “collaborator.”
The policeman allowed me to stand there naked in the snow and wind while he slapped his open palm with his heavy cosh and regarded me with a furrowed brow beneath the b
rim of his cap.
“All right, come along, then,” he’d said, taking me by my pale, scratched upper arm and leading me deeper into the tenements.
“A coat,” I said through chattering teeth. “A blanket. Anything.”
“Soon enough,” said the policeman. “Soon enough. Hurry on, now. Keep up.”
I imagined the police station to which he was leading me as being dominated by a large stove so hot that it was glowing red. My upper arm shook in the policeman’s grasp. I was weeping again.
But he did not lead me to a police station. I half-recognised the rotting stairway and darkened hallway up which he led and pushed me. Then we were inside and I recognised the wizened woman who was swooping around me, her beak of a nose extruding from her rotting black hood of a shawl.
“Sal,” said the policeman, “put this… gentleman… somewhere warm and get him some clothes. The fewer lice the better, although it don’t really matter that much. Make sure he don’t leave. Use your Malay to make sure he don’t leave.”
Opium Sal had nodded and danced around me, prodding my naked flanks and aching belly with her long-nailed finger. “I seen ’ere this ’un before, Constable Joe. ’E used to be a cust’mer an’ smoked ’is pipe right hup on that cot, ’e did. The Inspector Field tuk ’im away one night. Before that I first seen ’im with ol’ Hib Hatchery and some gemmun they tol’ me was tip-toff important. All ’igh ’n mighty this ’un was then; ’e was, scowlin’ and looking down ’is plump l’il nose at me through them spectacles what he ha’n’t got on now.”
“Who was this someone important?” demanded the policeman.
“Dickens, the Pickwick man, was who,” cried Sal triumphantly, as if it had taken all her resources to dredge the name up from the depths of her opium confusion.
“Watch him,” growled the policeman. “Get him some clothes even if you have to send the idiot out to find some. Keep the Malay on watch so he don’t go nowhere. And put him near that puny stove you keep one lump o’ coal burning in so he don’t die on us before I get back. You hear me, Sal?”