I think that Dickens told the story backwards. I think he was stealing cherries out of the boy’s brown bag. And the father never knew. Nor did the world.

Or perhaps this has been my secret story. Or perhaps Dickens had been stealing the cherries from me as I rode on his shoulders.

An hour from now, I will have just sent Marian with the note for Frank Beard. I am dying—come if you can.

Of course he will come. Beard always has come.

And he will come quickly. His house is only just across the street. But he will not come in time.

I will be in my big armchair, just as I am now. There will be a pillow behind my head, just as there is now.

The fire will still be burning behind the grate.

I will not be able to feel its heat.

And I apologise for these blobs. The sleeve of my dressing gown truly is too large.

Sunlight will be coming in the high window, just as it is now, and only a little higher, just as the coal in the fireplace will be burned only a little lower. It will be sometime after 10 AM. And despite the sunlight, the room will be growing darker by the minute.

I will not be alone.

You always knew, Reader, that I would not be alone at the end.

Several figures will be in the room with me and gliding closer as—perhaps—I still strive to write, but my hand will be nerveless, my writing finished forever, and the pen will achieve only vague scratches and blobs.

Drood will be here of course. His tongue will flick in and out. He will ssso want to ssshare a ssecret with Mr Collinssss.

Behind and to Drood’s left, I think, I will see Barris, Inspector Field’s son. Field will be there also, behind his son. They both will show cannibals’ teeth. To Drood’s right will stand Dickenson, not the adopted son of Dickens after all. He is and always will be Drood’s creature. And behind these will be more shapes. All will be in black suits and capes. They will look silly here in the fading sunlight.

I will not be able to clearly make out their faces. The scarab will, at long last, have eaten through my eyes.

But there will be a huge, indistinct blur of a man near the back. It could be Detective Hatchery. I will just barely be able to make out a terrible concavity beneath the black waistcoat and funeral suit, like some sort of nightmare negative pregnancy.

But, Reader (I have spied you out—I know you care more about this than about me), Dickens will not be there among them. Dickens is not there.

But I believe that I will be. I am already.

Then I will hear dear Beard’s footsteps on the stairs, but suddenly the figures in my bedroom will all begin crowding closer and speaking at once, hissing and slurring and rasping and spitting sounds as they press upon me, all speaking and gibbering at once. I would lift both hands over my ears, if I were able to. I would close what is left of my eyes, if I were able to. For the faces will be terrible. And the din will be intolerable. And it will be very painful in a way I have never known.

Forty-five minutes remain before all this comes to pass—before I send the note to Frank Beard and the Others arrive before he does—but already it is painful and terrible and intolerable and unintelligible.

Unintelligible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the help and editing excellence of Reagan Arthur, executive editor at Little, Brown, as well as the truly extraordinary work of senior copyeditor Betsy Uhrig. I’m sure there still will be infelicities and errors in this novel, but in almost all cases, the fault will have been mine. (If stubbornness were a virtue, I’d have one foot in Heaven.)

Only a partial list of the biographical and other sources related to Charles Dickens and his era which I consulted is possible here, but the author would especially like to acknowledge the following—

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, © 1990, pub. by HarperCollins; Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumphs by Edgar Johnson, © 1952, pub. by Simon and Schuster; Dickens: A Biography by Fred Kaplan, © 1988, pub. by The Johns Hopkins University Press; Charles Dickens As I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866–1870) by George Dolby, © 1887, pub. in Popular Edition by T. Fisher Unwin, London; Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley, © 2002, pub. by Penguin Putnam Inc.; The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan, © 2001, pub. by Cambridge University Press; Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, © 1874; The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, © 1870 by Household Words, Oxford University Press Edition © 1956.

Some other sources for Dickens and his era which the author would like to acknowledge include—

Dickens and His Family by W. H. Bowen, © 1956; The Life of Charles Dickens as Revealed in His Writing by Percy Fitzgerald, © 1905; The Changing World of Charles Dickens edited by R. Giddings, © 1983; Victorian People and Ideas by Richard D. Altick, © 1973; The World of Charles Dickens (A Pitkin Guide) by Michael St. John Parker, © 2005; Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 by David L. Pike, © 2005; Dickens and Daughter by Gladys Storey, © 1939; Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists by W. C. Phillips, © 1919; London 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen by Francis Sheppard, © 1971; Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist by Andrew Sanders, © 1982; The Speeches of Charles Dickens edited by K. J. Fielding, © 1950; The Actor in Dickens by J. B. van Amerongen, © 1926; Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter, © 1968; Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction by Fred Kaplan, © 1988; The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America by Nigel Cliff, © 2007.

Internet sources relating to Dickens and his world are too numerous to list in full, but a few that the author especially wishes to acknowledge are—

“Inspector Charles Frederick Field” at www.ric.edu/rpotter/chasfield.html;  “Victorian London—District—Streets—Bluegate Fields” at www.victorianlondon.org/districts/bluegate.html; “Dickens’ London” at www.fidnest.com/~dap.1955/dickens/dickens_london_map.html;  “Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens” at www.classicbookshelf.com/library/charles_dickens/reprinted_pieces/19/html; “Housing and Health (Deaths from cholera in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, and the neighbourhood, 19 August to 30 September, 1854)” at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~city19/viccity/househealth.html;  “Beetles as Religious Symbols, Cultural Entomology, Digest 2” at www.insectos.org/ced2beetles_rel_sym.html; “Modern Egyptian Ritual Magick: Ceremony of Blessing and Naming a New Child” at www.idolhands.com/egypt/netra/naming.html.

For insight into Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, the author wishes to acknowledge the amazing lecture on that novel given at Wellesley College by Vladimir Nabokov (even though Nabokov led the author astray on one central word in a powerful quotation, an error completely missed by the author—who’d just finished rereading Bleak House—but caught by the inimitable copyeditor Betsy Uhrig). That lecture is collected in Lectures on Literature edited by Fredson Bowers, © 1980, pub. by Harcourt, Inc.

The author wishes to acknowledge the following sources in his research on Wilkie Collins—

The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William Clarke, © 1988, pub. by Sutton Publishing Limited; The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters, Volumes I–IV edited by William Baker, Andrew Gasson, Graham Law, Paul Lewis, © 2005, pub. by Pickering & Chatto; The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters, © 1991, pub. by Martin Secker & Warburg; Wilkie Collins: A Biography by Kenneth Robinson, © 1952, pub. by the MacMillan Company; Some Recollections of Yesterday by Nathaniel Beard, © 1894, pub. in Temple Bar, Vol. CII; Memories of Half a Century by R. C. Lehmann, © 1908, pub. by Smith Elder; The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, first published in Temple Bar © 1874, Hesperus Classics edition pub. by Hesperus Press Limited.