“There are reasons for Drood to stay in hiding until the proper time comes,” I say confidently. I have no idea what they might be. I take a long drink of laudanum but make sure that I do not close my eyes for even an instant.

“Well, I wish you luck, my dear Wilkie,” Dickens says with an easy laugh. “But you should know this before you attempt to complete the book according to the outline I never wrote… young Edwin Drood is dead. John Jasper, under the influence of the same opium-laudanum you are drinking at this moment, murdered Edwin on Christmas Eve, just as the reader suspects at this point halfway through the book.”

“That’s absurd,” I say again. “John Jasper is so jealous of his nephew over Rosa Bud that he murders him? But what then… we have half the novel ahead to fill with nothing but… what? John Jasper’s confession?”

“Yes,” says Dickens with a truly evil smile. “That is precisely correct. The remainder of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is indeed—or at least the core of it shall be—the confessions of John Jasper and his alternate consciousness, Jasper Drood.”

I shake my head but the dizziness only grows worse.

“And Jasper is not Drood’s uncle, as we are given to believe,” continues Dickens. “He is Drood’s brother.”

I mean to laugh at this but it emerges as a particularly loud snort. “Brother!”

“Oh, yes. Young Edwin, you must remember, is planning to go to Egypt as a member of a troupe of engineers. He plans to change Egypt forever, perhaps make it his home. But what Edwin does not know, my dear Wilkie, is that his half-brother (not his uncle), Jasper Drood (not John Jasper) was born there… in Egypt. And he learned his dark powers there.”

“Dark powers?” I keep forgetting to aim the pistol but now bring the muzzle up again.

“Mesmerism,” whispers Dickens. “Control of the minds and actions of others. And not merely our English parlour-game level of mesmerism, Wilkie, but the serious sort of mind-control which approaches true mind reading. Precisely the sort of mental contact we have seen in the book between young Neville Landless and his beautiful sister, Helen Lawless. They honed their mind abilities in Ceylon. Jasper Drood learned his in Egypt. When Helen Lawless and Jasper Drood finally meet on the field of mesmeric battle—and they shall—it will be a scene spoken of in awe by readers for centuries.”

Helena Landless, not Lawless, I think, noting Dickens’s confusion of his own characters. Ellen Lawless Ternan. Even in this last unfinished fragment of a failed book, Dickens cannot restrain himself from connecting the most beautiful and mysterious woman in the novel with his own fantasy and obsession. Ellen Ternan.

“Are you listening, my dear Wilkie?” asks Dickens. “You look as if you may be on the verge of dozing.”

“Not at all,” I say. “But even if John Jasper is actually Jasper Drood, the murder victim’s older brother, what interest will that be to the reader who has to suffer through another several hundred pages of mere confession?”

“Never mere confession,” chuckles Dickens. “In this novel, my dear Wilkie, we shall be in the mind and consciousness of a murderer in a way that no reader has ever before experienced in the history of literature. For John Jasper—Jasper Drood—is two men, you see—two complete and tragic personalities, both trapped in the opium-riddled brain of the lay precentor of the Cloisterham…”

He pauses, turns, gestures theatrically to the tower and great structure behind him.

“… of the Rochester Cathedral. And it is within those very crypts…”

He gestures again and my dizzied gaze follows his gesture.

“… those very crypts where John Jasper / Jasper Drood will hide the quick-lime-reduced bones and skull of his beloved nephew and brother, Edwin.”

“This is sh—,” I say dully.

Dickens brays a laugh. “Perhaps,” he says, still laughing under his breath. “But with all the twists and turns ahead, the reader will be… would have been… delighted to learn of the many revelations that lie… would have lain… ahead in this tale. For instance, my dear Wilkie, our John Jasper Drood has committed his murder under the influence of both mesmerism and opium. The latter, the opium in greater and greater quantities, has been the trigger for the former—the mesmeric command to murder his brother.”

“That makes no sense,” I say. “You and I have repeatedly discussed the fact that no mesmerist can successfully command someone to commit murder… to commit any crime… against that person’s conscious moral and ethical convictions.”

“Yes,” says Dickens. He drinks the last of his brandy and slides the flask away in his upper left inside pocket (and I make note of where it is for later). As always when discussing some plot device or other element of his art, Charles Dickens’s voice is a mixture of the veteran professional and the excited boy eager to tell a story. “But you were not listening, my dear Wilkie, when I explained that a sufficiently powerful mesmerist—myself, for instance, but certainly John Jasper Drood or those other, as yet unmet, Egyptian figures beneath the surface of this story—can mesmerise a person like the precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral to live in a fantasy world where he literally knows not what he is doing. And it is the opium and perhaps—say—morphine in great quantities which fuel this ongoing fantasy that can lead him, without his comprehension, to murder and worse.”

I lean forward. The pistol is in my hand but forgotten. “If Jasper kills his nephew… his brother… while under mesmeric control of this shadowy Other,” I whisper, “who is the Other?”

“Ah,” cries Charles Dickens, slapping his knee with delight. “That is the most marvellous and satisfying part of the mystery, my dear Wilkie! Not one reader in a thousand—no, not one reader in ten million—not even one fellow writer amongst the hundreds that I know and esteem—shall, until the full confession of John Jasper Drood is complete, be able to guess that the mesmerist and true murderer in the mystery of Edwin Drood is none other than…”

The bells in the tall tower behind Dickens begin tolling.

I blink at them. Dickens swivels on his headstone to watch, as if the tower is going to do something other than silently and coldly and blindly house the bells tolling his doom.

When the twelve strokes are sounded and the final echoes die out over the low, dark streets of Rochester, Dickens turns back to me and smiles. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Wilkie.”

“You were saying?” I prompt. “The identity of the mesmerist? The real murderer?”

Dickens folds his arms across his chest. “I have told enough of this tale for tonight.” He shakes his head, sighs, and gives the smallest of smiles. “And for this lifetime.”

“Stand,” I say. I feel so dizzy that I almost fall. It is difficult to get a proper grip on the pistol and the unlighted lantern, as if I have forgotten how to do two things at once. “Walk,” I command, although whether to Dickens or to my own legs, I am not certain.

I REALISE LATER how infinitely easy it would have been for Dickens to flee in that brief moment or two as we walked to the rear of the graveyard and then into the rougher grasses at the edge of the marsh where the quick-lime pit waited.

If Dickens began running—if I missed with my first hurried shot—then it would have been child’s play for him to run and crawl and hide amongst the high marsh grasses. It would be difficult to find him there in the daylight and nearly impossible at night, even with the small lantern I was carrying. Even the sound of his running or crawling would be disguised by the rising wind and crash of distant surf.

But he does not run. He leads the way. He seems to be humming a soft tune under his breath. I do not catch the melody.