“Of course not,” said Dickens. He was using his schoolmaster voice. “Have you ever considered, my dear Wilkie, that I might be defending London from the monster’s wrath?”

“Defending?” I repeated. The rheumatical gout had now encircled my head and enveloped both eyes and my cranium with pain.

“You have read my books, my friend. You have heard me speak. You have visited the homes for the poor and for the lost women that I have helped start and have funded. You know my views on social issues.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course, Charles.”

“Then do you have any idea of the anger seething and fomenting there in Undertown?”

“Anger?” I said. “Drood’s anger, you mean?”

“I mean the anger of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of men, women, and children driven into those subterranean vaults, sewers, basements, and slums,” said Dickens, his voice rising to the point that Caroline might have heard it from downstairs. “I mean, my dear Wilkie, the anger of those thousands in London who cannot eke out a daily living even in the worst slums of the surface and who are driven down into the darkness and stench like rats. Like rats, Wilkie.”

“Rats,” I repeated. “What are we speaking of, Charles? Surely you are not saying that this… Drood… represents the tens of thousands of London’s poorest residents. I mean, you yourself said that the man is grotesque… a foreigner.”

Dickens chuckled and tapped the ends of his fingers together in a manic rhythm. “If Drood is an illusion, my dear Wilkie, he is an illusion in the form of upper London’s worst nightmare. He is a darkness in the heart of the soul’s deepest darkness. He is the personified wrath of those who have lost the last meagre rays of hope in our modern city and our modern world.”

I had to shake my head. “You have lost me, Charles.”

“Let me begin again. It is growing late. Why would such a creature as Drood seek me out and select me in the fields of death that were the Staplehurst accident, Wilkie?”

“I wasn’t aware that he had sought you out, Charles.”

Dickens flicked his right hand in a quick gesture of impatience and raised his cigar again. Through the blue smoke he said, “Of course he sought me out. You need to listen, my dear Wilkie. As both novelist and dear friend, it is the one area in which your sensitivities should seek improvement. You are the only person on earth to whom I have revealed the existence of Drood and my relationship to him. You must listen if you are to understand the dire importance of this… drama. This drama that Inspector Field insists on treating as if it were a game and a farce.”

“I am listening,” I said coolly. I did not care for Dickens—a mere author whom I had outsold in numbers of recent books published and a man who had never received an advanced payment from a publisher on the level I had—when he chose to criticise me.

“Why would Drood choose me? Of all the survivors at Staplehurst, why would the awakened-from-his-coffin Drood choose me?”

I thought about this while I covertly massaged my throbbing right temple. “I am not sure, Charles. You were certainly the most famous man on the train that day.” With your mistress and her mother, I silently appended.

Dickens shook his head. “It is not my fame that drew Drood to me and which now holds him in check,” he said softly between long exhalations of blue smoke. “It is my ability.”

“Your ability.”

“As a writer,” Dickens said almost impatiently. “As… you will pardon my immodesty due to the centrality of this point… as perhaps the most important writer in England.”

“I see,” I lied. Then, perhaps, I did finally see. At least a glimmer. “Drood wants you to write something for him.”

Dickens laughed. It was not a cynical or derisive laugh—I might have taken my headache and gone off to bed at that moment if it had been—but rather Dickens’s usual boyish, deep, head-back, sincere laugh.

“I would say, yes,” he said, tapping ashes into the onyx ashtray at his chairside. “He insists that I write something. Nothing less than his biography, my dear Wilkie. Certainly an effort that would require five long volumes, perhaps more.”

“His biography,” I said. If Dickens was weary of my repeating his statements, he was not as weary of it as I was. The evening that had started with a fine meal and laughter had now risen—or descended—into the realm of pure insanity.

“It is the only reason that Drood has not unleashed the full extent of his wrath upon me, upon my family, upon the accursed Inspector Field, upon you, upon all of London,” Dickens said wearily.

“Upon me?” I said.

It was as if Dickens had not heard me. “Almost every week I descend into the Hades that is London Undertown,” he went on. “Every week I take out my notebook and I listen. And I write notes. And I nod. And I ask questions. Anything to draw out the interviews. Anything to postpone the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“The inevitable explosion of this monster’s anger when he discovers that, in truth, I have written not a word of his execrable ‘biography,’ my dear Wilkie. But I have heard much… too much. I have heard of ancient rituals disgusting beyond all abilities of a sane Englishman to comprehend them. I have heard of mesmeric magnetic influence turned to outrageous and unspeakable ends—seduction, rape, sedition, the use of others in revenge, terror, murder. I have heard… too much.”

“You must cease going down into that world,” I said, thinking of King Lazaree’s quiet and pleasurable alcove deep beneath St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.

Dickens laughed again, but more raggedly this time. “If I do not go to him, he comes to me, Wilkie. On my reading tour. At railway stations. In hotels in Scotland and Wales and Birmingham. At Gad’s Hill Place. In the night. It was Drood’s face floating outside my first-storey window that night Dickenson went sleepwalking.”

“And did Drood kill young Dickenson?” I asked, seeing my chance to pounce.

Dickens blinked at me several times before he said slowly, wearily, perhaps guiltily, “I have no idea, Wilkie. The boy asked me to be his guardian for a few weeks, in name only. He had his inheritance paid through my bank and my cheque. Then he… went away. That is all I can tell you.”

“But certainly,” I said, pressing my advantage, “Drood would have liked to have the boy’s money as well as a biography written. Could he have used his evil mesmeric influence to have someone kill the lad and steal his gold to be used in his—Drood’s—service?”

Dickens looked at me so steadily and so coldly that I flinched back in my chair.

“Yes,” said the Inimitable. “With Drood, anything is possible. The monster could have had me kill young Dickenson and bring his money to the Undertown temple and I would not remember it. I would have thought it a dream, a half-memory of some stage drama from long ago.”

My heart pounded and my breathing all but stopped at this confession.

“Or,” continued Dickens, “he could have had you do that deed, my dear Wilkie. Drood knows of you, of course. Drood has plans for you.”

I exhaled, coughed, and tried to slow the pounding of my heart. “Nonsense,” I said. “I have never met the man, if man he is.”

“Are you sure?” asked Dickens. The wicked smile was there again beneath his whiskers.

I thought of Dickens’s earlier, inexplicable mention of my experience in Birmingham. This was the right time to ask him about it—the only time, perhaps—but the pounding of my headache was now as rapid and insistent as the pounding of my heart there in that small, overheated room. Instead, I said, “You say he comes to your home, Charles.”

“Yesss.” Dickens sighed back into his chair. He stubbed out the short remnant of his cigar. “It has worn on me, Wilkie. The secrecy. The constant sense of terror. The dissembling and playacting in his presence. The trips into London and the effect of the descents into Undertown and its horrors. The constant sense of threat to Georgina, Katey, the children… Ellen. It has worn on me.”