There was a stairway, huge stone steps rising up and curving out of sight.

I knew this stairway.

Weeping, crying out for Detective Hatchery’s help, slipping, falling, rising, and clawing upward again, I went up the steps and squeezed through the familiar wedge of opening.

The light in the crypt, I would realise later, was only the dimmest of January predawn glows—certainly not enough to read by—but it blinded me with its brightness.

Staggering to the stone bier that overhung the secret entrance to Undertown—an entrance I swore then and there that I would never use again—I had to sag against the empty bier or collapse.

“Hatchery! For God’s sake, help! Hatchery!”

My own voice startled me so badly that I almost urinated without volition. I did look down then, at my naked white body. I found that I was staring at my belly, just below the sternum.

There was a red wound or scrape there.

Where the scarab entered.

I shook my head to rid myself of the opium nightmare’s image. I had scrapes and gouges all over my body. My feet and knees and fingers were by far the worse. My head ached abominably.

From the huge beetle moving… burrowing.

“Stop it!” I screamed aloud.

Why was Hatchery not here? Why had he abandoned me this one time I needed him most?

You may have been down there for days, Wilkie Collins.

I heard Missster Wilkie Collinssss echoing in my aching skull.

I laughed then. It did not matter. They had tried to kill me—whoever “they” were—certainly King Lazaree and his heathen, foreign-bastard friends and fellow opium addicts—but they had failed.

I was free. I was out. I was alive.

Looking up, I was startled to see that someone had decorated the interior high spaces of the small crypt with some sort of glistening garlands. The gleaming grey strips had not been there when Hatchery and I had entered hours—days? weeks? — ago, I was certain of that. Christmas was more than two weeks past. And why decorate an empty crypt in the first place?

It did not matter. Nothing mattered—not even my aching, shivering body, raging headache, terrible thirst, and surging hunger—except to get out of this place forever.

Avoiding the cold black hole-in-the-floor entrance to Undertown, I stepped around the bier—quickly, since my writer’s imagination then gave me the vision of a long grey arm with long white boneless fingers suddenly sliding out of that hole like a snake and pulling me, screaming, back down into the darkness—but then I had to stop immediately.

I had no choice.

My way was blocked by the body on the floor of the crypt.

It was Detective Sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, his white face distorted into a huge, silent scream, his all-white eyes staring sightlessly towards the garland-festooned bas-relief carvings and tiny gargoyles set along the corners of the small crypt’s ceiling. Scattered on the stone floor around his body were the remains of his three AM lunch, a small flask, his bowler hat, and the copy of Thackeray’s novel. Rising from his gaping belly were the stretched and glistening grey garlands that were not garlands at all.

Unable even to scream, I leaped the body, ducked the taut grey strands, and ran naked into the predawn burial ground of St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Two hours later and I was back in another opium den. Waiting.

I was lucky to be alive. After all, I had been running, naked and screaming, through the worst slums of Bluegate Fields behind the docks, not even aware of which way I was running. Only the odd hour (even the thugs were inside and asleep at dawn on a cold, snowy January dawn) and the fact that even thugs might have been afraid of a screaming crazy man with bloody hands explained how the first person I encountered in my panicked flight was a police constable walking his patrol through the tenements.

The policeman himself had been frightened by my aspect and manner. He had removed a small weighted cosh from his belt, and I am sure that if I had babbled at him another minute without saying words that made sense, he would have clubbed me unconscious and dragged me by the hair to the nearest station.

As it was, he said, “What did you just say? Did you say—‘Hatchery’s body’? As in Hibbert Hatchery?”

“Former sergeant Hibbert Hatchery, now private detective Hibbert Hatchery, yes, Constable. They removed his insides and draped them around the crypt—oh, Christ! oh, God! — and he was working for me, privately, not for Inspector Field, for whom he worked privately publicly.”

The policeman shook me. “What’s that about Inspector Field? Do you know Inspector Field?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” I said and laughed. And wept.

“Who are you?” demanded the heavily moustachioed police officer. Snow had coated his dark helmet-cap white.

“William Wilkie Collins,” I said through chattering teeth. “Wilkie Collins to millions of my readers. Wilkie to my friends and almost everyone else.” I giggled again.

“Never heard of you,” said the constable.

“I am a personal friend of and collaborator with Mr Charles Dickens,” I said. My jaw had been quivering so violently that I could only barely get out the word “collaborator.”

The policeman allowed me to stand there naked in the snow and wind while he slapped his open palm with his heavy cosh and regarded me with a furrowed brow beneath the brim of his cap.

“All right, come along, then,” he’d said, taking me by my pale, scratched upper arm and leading me deeper into the tenements.

“A coat,” I said through chattering teeth. “A blanket. Anything.”

“Soon enough,” said the policeman. “Soon enough. Hurry on, now. Keep up.”

I imagined the police station to which he was leading me as being dominated by a large stove so hot that it was glowing red. My upper arm shook in the policeman’s grasp. I was weeping again.

But he did not lead me to a police station. I half-recognised the rotting stairway and darkened hallway up which he led and pushed me. Then we were inside and I recognised the wizened woman who was swooping around me, her beak of a nose extruding from her rotting black hood of a shawl.

“Sal,” said the policeman, “put this… gentleman… somewhere warm and get him some clothes. The fewer lice the better, although it don’t really matter that much. Make sure he don’t leave. Use your Malay to make sure he don’t leave.”

Opium Sal had nodded and danced around me, prodding my naked flanks and aching belly with her long-nailed finger. “I seen ’ere this ’un before, Constable Joe. ’E used to be a cust’mer an’ smoked ’is pipe right hup on that cot, ’e did. The Inspector Field tuk ’im away one night. Before that I first seen ’im with ol’ Hib Hatchery and some gemmun they tol’ me was tip-toff important. All ’igh ’n mighty this ’un was then; ’e was, scowlin’ and looking down ’is plump l’il nose at me through them spectacles what he ha’n’t got on now.”

“Who was this someone important?” demanded the policeman.

“Dickens, the Pickwick man, was who,” cried Sal triumphantly, as if it had taken all her resources to dredge the name up from the depths of her opium confusion.

“Watch him,” growled the policeman. “Get him some clothes even if you have to send the idiot out to find some. Keep the Malay on watch so he don’t go nowhere. And put him near that puny stove you keep one lump o’ coal burning in so he don’t die on us before I get back. You hear me, Sal?”

The old crone had grunted and then cackled. “I never seen a man wi’ such a shrivelled li’l John Thomas an’ company, ’ave you, Joe?”

“Do what I say,” said the policeman and left with a blast of cold air roiling in over us like the breath of Death.