When we stop, he is at the brink of the lime pit but facing me. “You must remember,” he says, “that the metal objects in my pockets will not melt in the lime. My watch, given to me by Ellen… the flask… my pin and…”

“I remember,” I rasp. I suddenly find it very difficult to breathe.

Dickens glances over his shoulder at the lime but remains facing me. “Yes, this is precisely where I would have had Jasper Drood confess that he brought the corpse of Edwin Drood… Jasper is younger than you and I, Wilkie, so even though the opium has reduced his physical abilities by half, carrying the dead boy a few hundred yards was no hardship…”

“Be silent,” I say.

“Do you want me to turn around?” asks Dickens. “To look away? To face the pit?”

“Yes. No. Suit yourself.”

“Then I shall continue looking at you, my dear Wilkie. My former friend and fellow traveller and once-eager collaborator.”

I fire the pistol.

The incredible noise it makes and the unexpected recoil in my hand—I could not in all honesty say that I truly recall the experience of firing it in the servants’ stairway two winters ago—causes me almost to drop the weapon.

“Good God,” says Dickens. He is still standing there. He pats his chest, belly, groin, and upper legs almost comically. “I believe you missed,” he says.

Still he does not run.

There are, I know, three bullets left in the gun.

My entire arm shaking, I take aim this time and fire again.

The tail of Dickens’s jacket leaps up about level with his waist. Again he pats himself. This time he holds up the jacket and in the moonlight I can see his forefinger poking through the hole the bullet made. It must have missed his hip by less than an inch.

“Wilkie,” Dickens says very softly, “perhaps it would be better for both of us if…”

I fire again.

This time the bullet strikes Dickens in the upper chest—there is no mistaking that sound, like a heavy hammer striking cold meat—and he spins around once and falls on his back.

But not into the lime pit. He lies at the edge of the pit.

And he is still alive. I can hear the loud, pained rasping of his breath. It seems to be burbling and gurgling somewhat, as if there is blood in his lungs. I walk closer until I am towering over him on the side away from the quick-lime. I wonder as he looks up if he sees me as a terrible silhouette against the stars.

In my writing, I have had—upon a few occasions—to use that ugly French term coup de grâce—and for some reason I always have trouble remembering how to spell it. But I have no trouble remembering of what it consists—the final shot must be to the brain, to be certain.

And there is only one bullet left in Hatchery’s pistol.

Going to one knee, I set the lantern down and crouch next to the Inimitable, the creator of fools such as the Dedlocks and the Barnacles and the Dombeys and Grewgious, but also of such villains and parasites and dark souls as the Fagins and Artful Dodgers and Squeerses and Casbys and Slymes and Pecksniffs and Scrooges and Vholeses and Smallweeds and Weggs and Fledgebys and Bumbles and Lammles and Hawks and Fangs and Tiggs and…

I set the muzzle of Hatchery’s heavy gun hard against the moaning Charles Dickens’s temple. I realise that I am holding my empty left hand up as a sort of shield to protect my own face from the spatter of skull shards, blood, and brain matter that will erupt in a second or two.

Dickens is mumbling, trying to speak.

“Unintelligible…” I hear him moan. Then, “Wake up… awaken… Wilkie, wake…”

The poor deluded b— d is trying to wake himself from what he must think is a terrible nightmare. Perhaps this is how we are all dragged out of this life, moaning and grimacing and praying to an absent and unfeeling God that we might wake up.

“Awake…” he says, and I pull the trigger.

It is done. The brain that conceived of and brought to life David Copperfield and Pip and Esther Summerson and Uriah Heep and Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit and Bob Cratchit and Sam Weller and Pickwick and a hundred other living beings that live on in the minds of millions of readers is now spread across the edge of the lime pit in a grey-and-red line of slime that looks oily in the moonlight. Only the shattered bits of skull look white.

Even with his helpful warning, I almost forget to take his gold and other metal possessions before rolling the corpse into the pit.

I hate touching him and try to touch only fabric, which is possible in getting the watch, the flask, the coins in his pocket, and the pin, but for the rings and studs, I am forced to make contact with his cooling flesh.

I light the shielded bullseye lantern for this final operation and notice—with some small satisfaction—that my hand is steady as I strike the match and set it to the wick. I’ve brought a rolled-up burlap bag in my outside jacket pocket and now set all the metal objects in it, making sure not to drop anything into the high grass here near the pit.

Finally I am finished and set the sack away in my bulging pocket next to the pistol. I will have to remind myself to stop at the nearby river and throw all those things—pistol and sack—into the deep water there.

Dickens lies sprawled in the impossibly unselfconscious attitude known only to the dead. Standing with my booted foot on his bloodied chest, I consider saying some words but decide not to. There are times when words are superfluous, even to a writer.

It takes more effort than I have imagined, but after several strong shoves with my boot and a final kick, Dickens rolls once and slides into the quick-lime. Left to its own devices, the body would have half-floated and remained visible until daylight arrives, but I fetch the long iron pole that I have set away in the weeds for this night and push and poke and lean my weight into it—it feels rather like pressing a rod down into a large bag of soft suet—until the body goes under the surface and stays under the surface.

Then, holding the lamp close just long enough to check that I have no blood or other incriminating material on my person, I douse the light and walk back to the road to summon the waiting sailor-driver and coach. I whistle a soft tune as I walk through the glowing headstones. Perhaps, I think, it is the same tune that Dickens whistled under his breath just a few minutes earlier.

AWAKEN! WILKIE… wake up! Awake.”

I moaned, rolled, thrust my forearm over my forehead, but managed to open one eye. My head pounded with a laudanum-morphia headache that sang of overdose. Thin moonlight painted random stripes across furniture in my bedroom. And across a face mere inches from mine.

The Other Wilkie was sitting on the edge of my bed. He had never come so close before… never.

He spoke.

His voice this time was not my voice, nor even an altered imitation of my voice. It was the voice of an old, querulous woman, the voice of one of the Weird Sisters in the opening scene of Macbeth.

He or she touched my bare arm and it was not the touch of a living being.

“Wilkie…” he/she breathed at me, the bearded face almost touching mine. His breath—my breath—stank of carrion. “Kill him. Wake up. Listen to me. Finish your book… before June ninth. Finish Man and Wife quickly, next week. And on the day you finish it, kill him.”