“We poled down the broad stream of sewage for some hundred yards or more. I glanced back, but I do not believe you ever looked my way before our gondola-scull went around a bend and we were lost to each other’s view, you and I. The small lanterns dangling from iron rods near the bow and stern did little to illuminate the rushing waterway. My primary impression was of lantern light reflected from the moist and dripping arch of bricks above us.
“I dare say I do not have to remind you, Wilkie, of the terrible stench of that first tributary. I was not sure that I could tolerate it for long without becoming physically sick. But luckily, after a few hundred yards of that reeking Styx, the masked form at our tiller turned us into a side tunnel so narrow that I was sure it was nothing more than a sewer pipe. Both Mercury and Venus had to bow low—I did as well—as they moved us along by pressing their gloved palms to the bricks of the low ceiling and encroaching sides. Then the way opened into a wider stream—and I say ‘stream’ advisedly, Wilkie, since this was less a sewer than a bricked and contained underground river, as wide as any aboveground tributary to the Thames. Did you know that some rivers have been partially or completely covered over in London… the Fleet, for instance? Of course you did. But one never thinks of their subterranean sections.
“My androgynous escorts piloted our little craft downstream for a long while and here—I must warn you, my dear Wilkie—the narrative becomes fantastical.
“Our first escort that night, Detective Hatchery, had called this subterranean world ‘Undertown,’ as had the Chinese opium apparition King Lazaree, but now I saw that this connected labyrinth of cellars, sub-cellars, sewers, caverns, side caverns, buried ditches, abandoned mines from some age before our city existed, forgotten catacombs, and partially constructed tunnels was quite literally a city beneath the city, a sort of terrible London beneath London. A true Undertown.
“We rode the slow current for some time, and as my eyes adapted to the darkness along the sides of this wider stream, I realised that I was seeing people. People, my dear Wilkie. Not merely more of the Wild Boys, who were like the feral dogs or real wolves that once circled the outskirts of some medieval village, but actual people. Families. Children. Cooking fires. Crude hovels and stretched canvases and mattresses and even some stoves and discarded, sagging furniture set in amongst the niches in the brick walls and in the side caverns and on wide, muddy banks along this part of the tunnel.
“Here and there blue flames rose from the mud and ooze itself, rather like the flames which flicker on a Christmas pudding, Wilkie, and some of these wretched human forms huddled near these gaseous eruptions for light and warmth.
“And then, just as I thought Venus and Mercury were going to keep poling us down these dark, watery avenues forever, the way widened, and we came to an actual landing… broad stone steps carved into the rock wall of the tunnel with bright torches blazing on either side. Mercury tied us up. Venus helped me step out of the bobbing boat. Both of them stayed aboard the boat, motionless and silent, as I climbed those steps towards a brass door.
“There were large Egyptian statues carved from the stone on both sides of this staircase, Wilkie, and more carvings above the door, the kinds of ancient forms one sees in the British Museum and perhaps feels uncomfortable about being amongst on a winter’s evening shortly before closing time. There were black bronze bodies of men with jackal heads or the heads of birds. There were forms holding staffs, sceptres, and curved crooks. The stone lintel above the broad doorway was carved with the sorts of picture-writing—hieroglyphics, they are called—one sees in illustrations of obelisks in books about Napoleon’s adventures along the Nile. It was like a child’s version of writing featuring carved wavy lines and birds and eyeballs… many bird-shapes.
“Two large, silent, but living and breathing black men—the word ‘Nubians’ came to mind as I passed them—stood just outside these massive doors and opened them for me as I approached. They were dressed in black robes that left their huge arms and chests bare and they carried strange hooked staffs that looked to be made of iron.
“Based on the imposing entrance stairs from the subterranean river, making a guess based on the statuary and bas-reliefs outside, and judging from the men at the door, I expected that I was entering a temple, but although the echoing, lantern-lit interior did have something of the hushed air of a heathen temple about it, in truth it was more library than temple. Shelves in the first room I passed through and along the walls of rooms I glanced into held scrolls, tablets, and many much more mundane books. I glimpsed scholarly and reference titles such as one might find in any fine library. The rooms were sparsely furnished with a few tables illuminated by torches or hanging braziers and the occasional low, backless couch of the sort historians tell us were present in some patrician’s home in ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt. I could see various figures moving, sitting, or standing in these rooms, and most looked to be Lascar or Magyar or Hindoo or Chinese. But there were no ancient opium sleepers—no beds or bunks or opium pipes nor sign nor smell of the wretched drug. I noticed that most of the men in the various rooms, for whatever reason, had shaved their heads.
“Drood was waiting for me in the second room, Wilkie. He sat at a small table near a hissing lantern. Various books and scrolls covered the table, but I noticed that he was drinking tea from Wedgwood china. He was dressed in a tan robe that made him look quite different than my impression of him as a poorly tailored undertaker at Staplehurst—much more dignified—but his deformities were even more apparent in the lantern light: his scarred head almost devoid of hair, the missing eyelids, a nose that looked to have been mostly amputated in some terrible surgery, the slight harelip, and ears that were little more than stubs. He rose and offered his hand as I approached.
“ ‘Welcome, Mr Dickensss,’ he said with that hint of lisp and slide of sibilants which I have so unsuccesfully tried to reproduce for you. ‘I knew you would come,’ he said as he arranged the tea set.
“ ‘How did you know that I would come, Mr Drood?’ I asked, accepting his handshake and forcing myself not to flinch at the touch of his cold, white flesh.
“He smiled, Wilkie, and I was reminded that his teeth were small, oddly spaced, and very sharp, while his pink tongue seemed extraordinarily quick and busy behind them. ‘You are a man of great curiosity, Mr Dickensss,’ Drood said to me. ‘I know thiss from your many wonderful booksss and storiess. All of which I have admired very much indeed.’
“ ‘Thank you, sir, you are very kind’ was my reply. You can imagine the sense of oddness, my dear Wilkie, sitting in this underground Undertown temple-library with this odd man who already, since the Staplehurst terror, had become a fixture of my dreams, hearing him praise my books rather as if I had just completed a reading in Manchester.
“Before I could think of anything else to say, Drood poured tea into the lovely cup set before me and said, ‘I am sure that you have questionsss for me.’
“ ‘I do, indeed, Mr Drood,” I said to him. ‘And I hope you will not consider them impertinent or overly personal. There is in me, I confess, a great curiosity as to your background, how you came to be here in this… place, why you were on the tidal train from Folkestone that terrible day at Staplehurst… everything.’
“ ‘Then I shall tell you everything, Mr Dickensss,’ said my strange interlocutor.
“I spent the next half hour or so drinking tea and listening to his story, my dear Wilkie. Would you care to hear a summary of Drood’s biography now, or shall we save it for another day?”