Drood: A Novel by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: , Historical - General, London (England), Biographical, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Charles, Biographical fiction, Fiction, 1812-1870, Suspense, Thriller, Dickens, Fiction - Espionage, Thrillers, American Historical Fiction, General, 19th century, History
ISBN: 9780316040686
Publisher: New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2009.
Published: 2010-08-21T03:48:12.305000+00:00

* * *

CAROLINE WAS WAITING in my bed, sleeping, but I woke her and sent her downstairs to her own room. This was no night for her to be up on the first floor where Dickens and I slept.

I got into my night gown and drank down three tall glasses of laudanum. The usually competent medicine did little to allay either my pain or my anxiety this June night. After lying in bed in the dark for an undetermined period, feeling my heart pound in my chest like the pendulum of some thudding but silent clock, I rose and went to the window.

The rain had stopped, but a summer fog had risen and was now creeping through the hedges and shrubs in the small park across the way. The moon had not worked free of the low overcast, but the clouds hurrying above the rooftops were limned with an almost liquid grey-white light. Puddles threw back a multitude of yellowed reflections from the corner streetlamp. There was no one out this night, not even the boy who had replaced Gooseberry. I tried to imagine where Field and his many operatives had positioned themselves. In that empty house near the corner? In the darkness of the alley to the east?

A real clock—the one in our downstairs hallway—slowly struck twelve.

I went back to bed, closed my eyes, and tried to slow my mind.

From somewhere far below, borne up by the medium of the hollow walls and occasional grates, there came a subtle rustling. A scuttling. A door opening? No, I thought not. A window, then? No. A cellar-dark slow shifting of bricks, perhaps, or some slow but minded movement amidst heaps of black coal. But definitely a scuttling.

I sat up in bed and clutched my bedclothes to my chest.

My accursed novelist’s imagination, perhaps aided by the laudanum, offered up clear visions of a rat the size of a small dog pressing its way through the renewed hole in the coal cellar wall. But this oversized rat had a human face. The face of Drood.

A door creaked. Floor boards moaned ever so softly.

Dickens sneaking out into the night, as Inspector Field had so confidently predicted?

I slipped out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to one knee, opening the lowest drawer of my dresser with exaggerated care so as not to make a sound. The huge pistol given to me by Detective Hatchery was there where I had left it under my folded summer linens. It felt absurdly heavy and bulky in my hand as I tip-toed to my door and opened it with a wince-producing protest of hinges.

The hallway was empty, but now I could hear voices. Whispering voices. Men’s voices, I thought but could not be certain.

Glad that I had left my stockings on, I moved out into the hall and stood at the head of the dark staircase. Other than the pendulum thud and inner ticking of the hallway clock downstairs, there was no noise coming up from the ground floor.

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