It seemed the same width, the same lividity, the same shape.
Half-mad with fatigue and terror, I ripped my shirt open, the buttons popping and rolling on the wooden floor out of sight beneath the bed. I had to bend almost double to see the red mark there on my upper belly and was moving the candle quickly back and forth to compare my scarab wound to the mark beneath Mother’s chest.
They were the same.
There was a creak of boards and then a gasp behind me and I wheeled—my shirttails out and buttons open, Mother’s nightgown still pulled up to her collar—to find Mrs Wells staring at me with an expression of absolute wide-eyed horror.
I opened my mouth to explain but found no words. I pulled Mother’s nightgown down, threw the covers over her, set the candle on her bedside table, and turned back to the elderly housekeeper, who shrank away from me.
Suddenly there came a terrible pounding at the door.
“Stay here,” I said to Mrs Wells, but she only shrank back farther from me and bit her knuckles as I hurried past her.
I rushed to the door—in my confusion, I was thinking that Frank Beard had returned with some miraculously revised and hopeful prognosis—but as I reached it, I glanced back towards Mother’s room. Mrs Wells was not visible.
The pounding continued, grew more violent.
I flung the door open.
Four large men, strangers all, dressed almost identically in thick black overcoats and workmen’s caps, stood there in the post-midnight snow. A hearselike carriage waited, its lamps throwing wan light.
“Mr Wilkie Collins?” demanded the closest and largest of the men.
I nodded dumbly.
“It is time,” said the man. “The inspector awaits. By the time we get back to London, all will be in readiness. Come at once.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Undertown was burning.
Inspector Field had said that within twenty-four hours he would turn out a hundred men—ex-detectives, off-duty policemen, others—who would be eager to descend beneath the city to avenge the murdered Detective Hibbert Hatchery.
I had to think that he had understated the case. Even in the fragmentary glimpses I had over these ensuing hours, it was obvious that there were more than a hundred men involved.
There were more than a dozen men in the wide, flat-bottomed scow that Field had ordered me into. A bright lantern hung on a slanted pole rising over and beyond the long tiller at the stern. Near the bow, two men controlled a blinding carbide spotlight of the sort they used outside and within Welsh mines during emergencies such as cave-ins; that spotlight was on a pivot and now stabbed its bright white cone-circle of illumination ahead onto the broad, black waters of the Fleet Street Ditch subterranean river, now onto the arched brick ceiling, now against and across the curving walls and narrow walkways on either side.
Another scow followed us. I had heard that there were two working their way north from the Thames-end of this effluent. Ahead of us and behind us, a dozen small, narrow punts flitted along with our strange fleet, men at the bows and sterns with poles in their hands, men amidships with rifles and shotguns and pistols.
There were rifles and shotguns and pistols in hand here in the lead scow as well. I understood that many of the silent men in their dark workingmen’s clothes were former sharpshooters from the Army or Metropolitan Police. Not being a fancier of things military, I had never seen so many firearms in one place before. I would not have guessed that London had so many private men with arms.
The long river-sewer tunnel was black and foetid, but at the moment it was filled with beams and spheres of light as men in the scows and on the punts added their shifting bullseye lantern shafts to the cyclopean glare of the massive carbide searchlights. Shouts echoed back and forth through the stench. Along with the dozens of men in the various boats, more dozens were striding along the narrow stone or brick walkways on each side of the curving waterway and they also carried lanterns and weapons.
We had not been required to return to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery for our descent into this part of Undertown (and, in truth, Dear Reader, I do not believe I would have been capable of doing so). There were new corridors and stairways—part of a future underground railroad complex, I understood—that connected to the ancient catacombs that had been part of the Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington and we simply had to clatter down well-lighted stairs, through less-lighted tunnels, down more stairs, through a brief but confusing labyrinth of still-reeking catacombs, then down ladders to the new sewers that were to connect the Main Drainage Works at Crossness to the still-incomplete Embankment Works, and then lower again down narrow shafts and ancient tunnels to true Undertown.
I have no idea how they got the scows and punts and searchlights down.
Our advance was anything but silent. Besides the echoing shouts and footfalls and occasional gunshot explosions as someone picked off an aggressive rat—the vermin swam and swarmed in front of our scow and the accompanying punts like a rippling river of brown backs—there were also frequent explosions from ahead of us that were so painfully loud I had to cover my ears.
Small sewer outlets, some no more than three feet across, some much larger—all tributaries to or from our primary Fleet Ditch river channel here—branched off at irregular intervals from both sides of the curving brick vault. Most were covered with corroded and slime-covered grates and grilles. Inspector Field brusquely ordered those grilles blown off with applications of gunpowder that had been brought down and sent along with the advance parties on foot and in punts.
The terrible booms—amplified beyond endurance by the vaulted brick sewer architecture—crashed every few minutes, making me think of some terrible Crimean battlefield with artillery to the left of us, artillery to the right of us, artillery straight ahead of us, and so forth.
It was intolerable, especially to nerve-ends that had been denied sleep for at least three days and nights, muscles and bones which had been drugged and left for dead in the dark, and senses which were even now screaming in pain and protest. I reached into my valise that I had brought along from Tunbridge Wells and drank four more doses of laudanum.
Suddenly the stench became worse. I set my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, but it did little to filter the eye-watering stink.
Inspector Field carried no visible weapon, but he was swathed in a black winter cape-coat, had a wide-brimmed countryman’s hat pulled low, and showed a blood-red scarf wrapped several times around his neck. The red scarf also covered the lower half of his face. Any weapon might have been hidden in a pocket beneath the folds of that cape.
He had not said a single word to me when the four black-coated wraiths and then Reggie Barris delivered me to Undertown and then to the scow, but now Inspector Field—between distant explosions—recited:
“How dare
Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season
When every clerk eats artichokes and peason,
Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat)
’Tempt such a passage? When each privy’s seat
Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat
Urine and plasters?”
Barris and Field’s other underlings stared at him as if he had gone mad, but I laughed. “You and Charles Dickens have something in common, Inspector.”
“Yes?” The old man’s dark, bushy eyebrow arched above the red slash of scarf.
“You both seem to know Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’ by heart,” I said.
“What learnèd man would not?” said Inspector Field.
“Indeed,” I said, feeling the magical laudanum somewhat reviving my all-but-extinguished spirits, “there seems to be an entire genre of sewer writing, sewer poetry.”
“A synecdoche for the filth of the city squatting above us in all its cloacal corruption,” said Inspector Field. The old man was showing me a rough alliterative eloquence that I never would have expected from our earlier encounters and conversations. Or, far more
likely, he was very drunk.
“Would you care to hear some of Swift’s ‘Description of a City Shower’?” he continued. “I trust that you, a writer, Master Wilkie Collins, know that Swift did not mean a rain shower. Or, more appropriate to our reeking Fleet Ditch sewer odyssey, perchance you would care to hear a recitation of Book Two of Pope’s scatological Dunciad?”
“Perhaps another time,” I said.
THE FLEET DITCH widened until it became a true underground river, wide enough for eight or nine of our scows and punts to advance together. The brick roof of the sewer also disappeared as we entered a quarter mile or more of actual cavern—the ragged roof here rising high and unseen above layers of fog or steam or smoke. To the right of the river’s course here a dozen grated sewer pipes, some ten or more feet in diameter, spilled their steaming effluent into the main current, but on the left side there came into sight low, broad shelves of mud and rubble—a sort of riverbank or shore. Rising above these rubbled dikes to a height of a hundred feet or more were ledges, openings, niches, and glimpses of tunnel-intersected crypts, ancient caverns, and deep cellars beneath cellars arrayed high on this cavern’s pockmarked wall like multi-storeyed buildings on the Strand.
As we drifted closer to the rubbled shore, I looked up and saw movement—people in rags peering over low walls, campfires flickering, miserable rags hung out on washlines over the abyss, ladders and crude bridgings connecting the subterranean tenements.
Charles Dickens had always imagined that he had plumbed the depths of London’s slums, learned the pathetic ways of the poorest of the poor in our capital, but here—far beneath the surface—was evidence that there were those poorer than the poorest of the poor in the rotting, typhus-lashed slums above.
I could see families in the hovels and on the high ledges now, what I took to be children dressed in a mere motley of filthy rags, all peering out at us or down at us in alarm, as if we were Vikings raiding some history-forgotten, God-forsaken Saxon settlement. The niches in the high wall, each holding hovels made of canvas and broken brick and mud bricks and old tin, reminded me of illustrations I had seen of abandoned Red Indian cliff dwellings in canyons somewhere in the American West or Southwest. Only these cliff dwellings were anything but abandoned; I estimated that hundreds of people were living in these high holes in the rock here far beneath the city.
More of Inspector Field’s men arrived by foot from unseen caverns or stairways or along sewer-side paths from the south. The scows and punts ran up on the shore with a bone-mulch crunch, and our dark men with torches, lanterns, and rifles spilled out in all directions.
“Burn it all,” said Inspector Field. Barris and other lieutenants turned the old man’s soft command into a series of echoing cries.
The Fleet Ditch cavern echoed with shouts and screams. I could see Field’s men climbing ladders and stone steps, running along the tunnelled terraces, and herding the rag-bundled figures away from the huts and hovels. There was no resistance that I could see. I wondered why anyone would come down here to this cavern beneath the old crypts, then realised that it was cave temperature here—mid-fifties at least—while it was below freezing on the hard-cobbled streets and in the sagging, unheated slums above.
When the first flames shot up from the warren of huts a great gasp went up, echoing through the space like a single breath exhaled by a hundred or two hundred separate forms. The dry rags and driftwood and old mattresses and occasional cast-off sofas burned like tinder, and in two minutes, despite the fact that most of the smoke was carried up and out the various shafts and stairways and corridors in the rock, there was a heavy black cloud under the ceiling of the cavern above us. New flames burned orange through that cloud and a series of explosions from Inspector Field’s men blowing the grilles and grates off the sewer entrances on the opposite side of the river gave the whole scene an impression of a violent summer storm.
Suddenly a bundle of rags came flying from one of the higher terraces, flapped on the way down, and struck the underground river with a hiss before sinking.
I hoped to God it was only a bundle of rags. I hoped to God it was only rags flapping, not arms and legs kicking during the fall.
I went up to Inspector Field where he stood against the bow of the beached scow and I said, “Was it absolutely necessary to burn these people out?”
“Yes.” He had not turned his head from the spectacle. Occasionally he would gesture, and Barris or one of his other favoured subalterns would send men to round up running forms or to set the torch to some hovel that had escaped the first flames.
“Why?” I persisted. “They’re just poor beggars unable to compete even on the street. They do no harm down here.”
Field turned towards me. “Down here,” he said softly, “these miserable excuses for men and women and their offspring are not Her Royal Majesty’s subjects. There are no Englishmen here, Mr Wilkie Collins. This is the kingdom of Drood and these are the minions of Drood. They give him their loyalty and—one way or the other—they offer up to him their service and succour.”
I began laughing then and found it very difficult to stop.
Inspector Field raised a bushy eyebrow. “Did I say something humorous, sir?”
“The Kingdom of Drood,” I managed at last. “The loyal minions of… Drood.” I began laughing again.
Inspector Field turned away from me. Above us, the rag bundles of all sizes were being marched up out of the smoke-filled cliff dwellings and Fleet Ditch cavern to whatever or whoever waited above.
PLEASE BE SO KIND as to go with Mr Barris,” the inspector said to me sometime later.
I was paying little attention to the proceedings. I remember that we had left the half mile or so of cavern and burning cliff dwellings behind and followed the river into a more contained Fleet Ditch tunnel once again. Ahead of us, the brick-arched way diverged into two major channels and on the left a sort of low dam or spillway required hoisting the chosen scow down with various bits of block and tackle; the punts had already gone ahead there. Inspector Field’s scow had taken the right-hand channel, but there was a major sewer outlet ahead and evidently they wanted me to explore it in a punt with Reginald Barris.
“You’ve seen Drood’s temple,” explained the inspector. “We believe that access to it may be through a false wall or hidden channel.”
“I haven’t seen Drood’s temple,” I said wearily.
“You described it, sir. You said that there were steps leading up from the river, high bronze doors, and statues on either side—Egyptian reliquary, human forms with the heads of jackals or birds.”
A chill ran up my spine as this brought back my beetle dream of less than thirty-six hours earlier—could that time span be correct? Could this actually be only the night after my awakening in the dark crypts above here?—but I said, “That was Charles Dickens’s description, Inspector. I’ve never purported to have seen Drood’s mythical temple… nor even Drood, for that matter.”
“You were there yesterday, Mr Wilkie Collins, we both know that,” said Inspector Field. “But we shan’t argue it here. Please go with Detective Barris.”
Before crawling to the punt, I asked, “Is your search down here almost finished, Inspector?”
The old man barked a laugh. “We’ve hardly begun, sir. Another eight hours, at least, until we meet up with my men coming from the Thames.”
I felt dizzy and nauseated again at hearing this. How long had it been since I had truly slept—not lost consciousness due to King Lazaree’s or Drood’s drugs, but slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?
I clumsily climbed down to where Barris and two other men waited in the wobbling punt, and with one of those men poling gondolier-fashion at the front and the other steering with a sweep from the stern, we left the river and moved slowly up a brick side tunnel. I sat on a thwart near the centre of the sixteen-foot craft while Barris stood nearby, using a second pole to balance himself. The moss-covered brick roof was so low here that Barris could
reach up and help push the punt along; I could see the green stain on his expensive tan gloves.
I was half-dozing when the narrow sewer channel opened to a stream twenty feet wide.
“Sir!” said the detective in the bow and aimed his bullseye lantern forward.
Four feral Wild Boys were in water up to their waists, wrestling with something heavy and soggy that looked to have just tumbled out of a smaller pipe high on this larger sewer’s curved wall.
We slid closer and I realised that the “something soggy” was a man’s corpse. The boys had been going through the green thing’s disintegrating jacket and pockets. The four boys froze in our projected lantern light, their eyes reflecting back wide and white and inhuman.
An almost vertiginous sense of déjà vu rolled over me until I realised that I was seeing a scene straight out of the serialised sensationalist tale The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day that both Dickens and I had mentioned—each embarrassed that he had read it—when we had first come down here almost two years ago.
The dead man’s face seemed to be moving, shimmering, as we approached, almost as if the grub-white and decaying features were covered with a very fine, translucent silken cloth. His eyes appeared to be blinking open, then closing; his mouth muscles seemed to be twitching as if he were attempting a smile, perhaps a rueful one at being part of a tableau out of such a poorly written and sensationalist tale.
Then I saw that it was not the facial muscles of the corpse moving. The man’s face, hands, every exposed part, were totally covered with a thin film of constantly shifting maggots.
“Stop!” cried Barris as the Wild Boys dropped their soggy burden back into the thick sludge of the stream and turned to run.
Our man in the bow kept the bullseye’s beam on the scattering pack while his compatriot gave our skiff or punt a powerful shove with his pole sunk deep into the sludge at the bottom of this pipe. Except for the distasteful addition of the maggots, I was enjoying the unreal, sensationalist absurdity of all this.