Drood forces the ladle end of the long iron rod into my open, gaping mouth. There is something round and soft and covered with hair in the sharp bowl at the end. Drood tips the rod and the haired mass falls to the back of my throat.

“Qebhsennuf!” cries Drood.

“Qebhsennuf!” shouts the invisible chorus.

I cannot breathe. My throat is completely blocked by the furry glob filling it. I am dying.

I feel the beetle stop in my lower abdomen. The sharp legs scrabble against my intestines, rip at the outer walls of my stomach, climb higher under my ribs, towards my heart.

I will myself to vomit the hairy mass out of my throat but cannot do even that. My eyes have bulged until I am sure that they will explode out of my head. I think—This is the way that famous novelist Wilkie Collins dies. No one will ever know. Then all thought abandons me as my vision begins to narrow down black tunnels as the last breath in my lungs is trapped and useless.

I feel the scarab’s legs flailing at my right lung. I feel the scarab’s pincers dragging across the outside surface of my heart. I feel the scarab crawling up my throat, feel my neck bulging as it rises higher.

The insect seizes the hairy mass in my throat and drags it down deeper with it, back into my gullet and upper belly.

I can breathe! I cough, gasp, gasp more, try to retch, remember how to breathe.

Drood is passing a lighted candle over my chest and face in circular motions. Hot wax dribbles onto my bare flesh, but the pain of that is nothing compared to the pain of the scarab moving within me. It is climbing again.

“I fly up asss a bird and alight asss a beetle,” chants Drood, deliberately dripping more hot wax across my chest and throat. “I fly up assss a bird and alight asss a beetle on the empty throne which isss on your bark, O Ra!”

The huge insect has filled my throat with its impossible, chitinous hardness and burrowed into my soft palate as easily as it would have burrowed into sand. I can feel it now filling the sinuses behind my nose, behind my eyes. Its barbed legs flail at the backs of my eyeballs as it forces itself higher. I can hear the huge pincers scraping bone as it burrows through the soft matter opening into my skull.

The pain is terrible—indescribable, unsupportable—but I can breathe!

Still unable to focus on anything beyond Drood—the jackal’s-head and great-bird’s-head statues mere blurs, the dark-robed figures melded together as blurs—I realise that I am looking out through a film of the blood I have wept.

I feel the huge stag beetle burrow into the soft surface of my brain—deeper, deeper. If this continues another second, I know I shall go mad.

The scarab stops moving near the centre of my brain. It begins to feed.

“You may shut your eyessss,” says Drood.

I squeeze them shut, feeling the tears of blood and terror streaking my wax-spotted cheeks.

“You are our scribe now,” says Drood. “You alwaysss will be. You will work when bidden. You will come when summoned. You belong to usss, Misster Wilkie Collinsss.”

I can hear the scarab’s pincers and jaws clicking and moving as it eats. I can visualise the insect rolling my half-digested brain matter into a grey and bloody ball and pushing it ahead of itself.

But it does not move forward again. Not yet. It has made a nest for itself in the lower-central base of my brain. When the scarab’s six legs twitch, it tickles and I again have to fight the absolute need to vomit.

“All praise to the lord of truth,” says Drood.

“Whose shrine is hidden,” chants the chorus.

“From whose eyesss mankind issues,” says Drood.

“And from whose mouth the gods came into being,” chants the choir.

“We send forth this scribe now to do the bidding of the beloved Child and the Hidden Light,” calls Drood.

“Behind him shines Ra, whose names the gods do not know,” chants the crowd.

I try to open my eyes but cannot. Nor can I hear or feel.

The only sound or sensation in my universe now is the ticking and scrabbling as the scarab twists, turns, burrows slightly deeper, and eats again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Iawoke from my opium nightmare to find that I had gone blind.

It was absolute darkness. King Lazaree always had diffused lights in each room of his den, light from the main room always filtered through the red curtain, and the coal stove near the entrance to my niche of the opium den always gave off a warm orange glow. Now there was only absolute darkness. I raised my hands to my eyes to make sure they were open and my fingertips touched the surface of my eyeballs. Wincing away, I could not see my fingers.

I cried out in the darkness and—unlike my dream—I could hear my screams very well indeed. They echoed off stone. I cried for help. I cried for King Lazaree and his assistant. No one answered.

Only slowly did I realise that I was not lying on my high cushioned bunk as I always did at King Lazaree’s. I was lying on a cold floor of stone or hard-packed dirt. And I was naked.

Just as in my dream. Or just as in my real abduction by Drood.

I was shivering violently. It was the cold that had awakened me. But I could move, and within a minute I was on all fours and feeling around in my blindness, trying to touch the edge of one of the wooden bunks, or even the stove or the edge of the doorway.

My fingers met rough stone and wood instead. I ran my hands over the shape, wondering if it was the wall and then the corner to one of the stacked bunks. It was not. The stone and wood were ancient—they smelled ancient—and the stone had partially fallen through in places. I could touch cold wood within. Everything smelled of age and corruption.

I am in one of the loculi—one of the countless burial chambers in the multi-levelled catacombs. These are the stone or cement sarcophagi with the wood coffins within. And inside those wood coffins are lead liners. I am down with the dead.

They had moved me.

Of course they moved me. They carried me down through the circular apse, through the rood screen, into Undertown proper. They carried me down the river to Drood’s Temple. I may be miles from King Lazaree’s den, a mile deep under the city. Without a lantern I shall never find my way to the surface.

I screamed again then and began flailing along the line of stacked coffins and biers, rising to my feet only to drop to all fours again and flail again with my out-thrust hands, seeking the bullseye lantern that I always brought down to King Lazaree’s and always used to find my way back to the upper level and out.

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.