“Of course,” I murmured. I thought of Inspector Field and the others out in the rain. Waiting.

“So you see, I must go to America,” whispered Dickens. “Drood will not follow me there. He cannot follow me there.”

“Why not?”

Dickens sat bolt upright and stared at me with wide eyes and, for the first time in our long association, I saw pure terror on my friend’s countenance. “He cannot!” he cried.

“No, of course not,” I said hurriedly.

“But while I am gone,” whispered Dickens, “you will be in great danger, my friend.”

“Danger? Me? Why on earth should I be in danger, Charles? I have nothing to do with Drood or this dreadful game you and Field are playing with him.”

Dickens shook his head but for a moment did not bother to speak or even look at me. Finally he said, “You shall be in great danger, Wilkie. Drood has already passed the black wings of his control over you at least once—almost certainly more than once. He knows where you live. He knows your weaknesses. And—most terribly for you—he knows that you are a writer and that you are now widely read both here in England and in America.”

“What does that have to do with anything…” I began. When I stopped in mid-sentence, Dickens nodded again.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I am his biographer of choice, but he knows he can find another should I die… or should he discover the extent of my desperate game and decide to dispose of me. I shall not depart for America until November at the earliest—I have much to do and much convincing of Drood that I go to the United States only to prepare the way for the publication of his biography—and you and I shall talk again many times and of many things before I sail, Wilkie, but promise me now that you will be very careful.”

“I promise,” I said. I knew at that moment that my friend Charles Dickens had gone mad.

We spoke of other things, but I ached abominably and Dickens was obviously exhausted. It was not even eleven PM when we said our goodnights and Dickens went off to his guest room and I to my bedroom.

I let the girl douse all the lamps in the house.

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.

The whispers rose again. They came from just down the hall.

Could Caroline—angry at me for sending her away—have come up to talk to Dickens? Or Carrie, who had always considered Charles Dickens her favourite visitor to our house?

No, the whispers were not coming from Dickens’s guest room. I saw a vertical slice of soft light coming through the partially opened study door and moved carefully down the hall, the heavy pistol pointing towards the floor.

There was a single lighted candle in there. By pressing my face against the door, I could make out the three chairs and three figures sitting near the cold fireplace. Dickens in a red Moroccan robe was sitting in the wing chair he had occupied earlier. He leaned forward above the only candle, his expression lost to shadows, but his hands busy working the air as he whispered urgently. Listening from the desk chair was the Other Wilkie. His beard was slightly shorter than mine, as if he had trimmed it recently, and he wore my spare set of spectacles. The two circles of glass reflected the candle and made his eyes look demonic.

In the tall chair I had occupied an hour earlier, the back of the chair now towards me, I could make out only a black arm, long pale fingers, and a hint of bare scalp rising above the dark leather. I knew who it was, of course, even before the form leaned forward into the candlelight to hiss-whisper some response to Dickens.

Drood was in my house. I remembered the image of the rat in the coal cellar, then saw instead a curling tendril of smoke or fog creeping between the bricks down there, coalescing into this simulacrum of a man.

I felt very dizzy. I leaned back against the doorjamb to steady myself, realising as I did so that I could open the door, stride in, kill Drood with two shots, and then turn the pistol on the Other Wilkie. And then, perhaps… upon Dickens himself.

No… I could shoot Drood, but could I kill him? And as for shooting the Other Wilkie, would that not be tantamount to shooting myself? Would the Metropolitan Police come at Caroline’s hysterical behest in the grey light of morning to find three dead bodies on the floor of Wilkie Collins’s study, one of them being the cold corpse of Wilkie Collins?

I leaned forward to hear what they were saying, but the whispering stopped. First Dickens raised his head to look at me. Then the Other Wilkie, his round face bunched up like a rabbit’s above his beard and below that endless forehead, turned his pale face to stare at me. Then Drood turned… slowly, terribly. His lidless eyes gleamed as red as embers from Hell.

Forgetting that I still held the pistol, I pushed the door shut with a hollow thud and went back to my bedroom. Behind me, just audible through the closed study doors, the talk began again, but not in whispers now.

Did I hear soft laughter before I closed and locked my bedroom door? I shall never be sure.