Drood by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical - General, Historical, London (England), Fiction - Espionage, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Charles, Biographical fiction, General, 1812-1870, 19th century, Dickens, Biographical, Thrillers, American Historical Fiction, Fiction, thriller, History
ISBN: 9780316007030
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2010-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

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

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