Drood by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online

smiling at me again and the intensity of his gaze was precisely the kind that made so many first-time interlocutors believe that Charles Dickens could read their minds. “No, my dear Wilkie, I am
not
deranged,” he said softly. “Mr Drood was as corporeal as you or I and even stranger—in some indefinable way—than I have described. Had I conceived of him as a character for one of my novels, I would not have described him as I met him in reality—too strange, too threatening, too physically grotesque for fiction, my dear Wilkie. But in reality, as you well know, such phantom figures
do
exist. One passes them on the street. One finds them during nocturnal walks through Whitechapel or other parts of London. And often their stories are stranger than anything a mere novelist could devise.”
    It was my turn to smile. Few had ever heard the Inimitable refer to himself as “a mere novelist” and I was quite sure that he had not done so now. He was speaking of
other
“mere novelists.” Myself, perhaps. I asked, “So what do you propose we do to find this Mr Drood, Charles? And what do we do with the gentleman once we’ve located him?”
    “Do you remember when we investigated that haunted house?” asked the writer.
    I did. Several years ago, Dickens—as head of his new magazine,
All the Year Round,
that had supplanted his former
Household Words
after a spat with his publishers—had become embroiled in debates with various spiritualists. The 1850s had been a mad time for table rapping, seances, mesmerism—some of which Dickens not only
did
believe in but in which he was an eager practitioner—and other such fascination with invisible energies. As much as Dickens believed in and relied upon mesmerism, sometimes called animal magnetism, and as superstitious as I knew him to be at heart (he truly believed that Friday was his lucky day, for instance), he had chosen (as editor of his new journal) to pick a quarrel with various spiritualists. When one of his adversaries in the debate, a spiritualist named William Howitt, was giving details of a haunted house in Cheshunt, near London, to prop up his arguments, Dickens immediately decided that we—the editors and managers of
All the Year Round
—should set up an expedition to investigate the hauntings.
    W. H. Wills and I had gone ahead in a brougham, but Dickens and one of our contributors, John Hollingshead, walked the sixteen miles to the village. After some trouble finding the house in question (luckily Dickens had sent along a repast of fresh fish with Wills and me, since he would not trust the local fare), we finally found a villa that was said to be on the property of the so-called haunted house and spent the rest of our afternoon and evening questioning neighbours, nearby tradesmen, and even passers-by, but in the end we decided that Howitt’s “ghosts” consisted of rats and a servant named Frank who enjoyed poaching rabbits in odd hours of the night.
    Dickens had been brave enough on that outing, in the daylight and in the company of three other men, but I’d heard that on another ghost expedition, this one at night and investigating a reputedly haunted monument near Gad’s Hill Place, the writer had brought his male servants and a loaded shotgun along. According to the author’s youngest son, called Plorn by the family, his father had been quite nervous and had announced, “. . . if anybody is playing tricks and has got a head, I’ll blow it off.” And they
did
hear an unearthly wailing, moaning, “terrific noise—human noise—and yet superhuman noise.”
    It turned out to be an asthmatic sheep. Dickens restrained himself from blowing its head off. He treated everyone—servants and children all—to rum-and-water when they returned to the house.
    “We knew where the haunted house was,” I pointed out to Dickens this June day in his dark study. “How do we find Mr Drood? Where do we look, Charles?”
    Suddenly Dickens’s expression and physical