“There in his home city, within the walls of his fortress of a compound guarded by his clan’s well-armed circle of guards, fellow priests, and loyal Alexandrian assassins, Uncle Amun took Jasper in as one of his own without ever revealing the boy’s identity to anyone. The morning after young Jasper John Forsyte awoke in his strange new surroundings, Uncle Amun took him out to a pen and told him to choose a goat. Young Drood took his time the way only a four-year-old boy can, Wilkie, and finally chose the largest and silkiest white goat, one with the Devil’s own vertically slitted eyes. Uncle Amun nodded and smiled, told the boy to take the goat from the pen, and led the bleating animal and the boy to a private courtyard deep within the sprawling compound. There Uncle Amun, no longer smiling, pulled a long, curved dagger from his belt, handed it to the boy, and said, ‘This goat is all that there remains of the boy once known as Jasper John Forsyte, son of the English infidel John Forsyte and the shamed woman called Amisi. Jasper John Forsyte dies here, now, this morning, and none of these names shall ever be mentioned again—not by you, upon pain of your death, not by anyone else, upon pain of death.’
“And then Uncle Amun put his powerful hand over little Jasper John’s hand on the hilt of the dagger and quickly slashed the goat’s throat. The still-thrashing animal bled to death in seconds. Droplets of blood spattered the four-year-old’s white trousers and shirt.
“ ‘From this moment forward, your name is Drood,’ said Uncle Amun.
“Drood was not Amun’s family name, Wilkie. It was not even a common Egyptian name. Its meaning was, in fact, lost in the mists of time and secret religious rites.
“In the years that followed, Uncle Amun introduced the boy to the secret world Amun and some of his acolytes inhabited. Mohammadans by day—little Drood learned to recite the Koran and say his prayers five times a day as any worthy believer in Islam must do—Amun and the other Alexandrians in Amun’s secret circle followed the Old Ways, the ancient religious ways and rites, at night. Drood followed his uncle and these other priests into Pyramids by torchlight, and into hidden rooms deep beneath other such sacred sites as the Sphinx. Before he reached his adolescent years, young Drood had travelled with his uncle and other secret priests to Cairo, to the isle called Philae and to ancient ruins of necropoli far up the Nile, including a valley where the long-dead Egyptian kings—pharaohs, I am sure you remember they were called, Wilkie—lay buried in elaborate tombs carved into cliffsides and hidden beneath the stone of the valley floors.
“In these hidden places the ancient Egyptian religion and its thousands of years of arcane knowledge flourished. There the boy Drood was initiated into the mysteries of that religion and taught the same secret rituals that Moses had mastered.
“Uncle Amun’s speciality turned out to be in sacred healing sciences. He was—and Drood was trained to be—a high priest in the Temples of Sleep dedicated to Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. This so-called healing sleep, my dear Wilkie, went back in Egyptian lore and practise for more than ten thousand years. The priests who had the power to induce such healing sleep also gained power and control over their patients. Today, of course, we call this practise by its scientific name of mesmerism and know its magical effects as the induction of magnetic sleep.
“You are aware that I have an ability of my own—some say a rare talent—in this art, Wilkie. I have told you of my training with Professor John Elliotson at the University College Hospital in London, of my own private investigations into the power, and of my own use of Magnetic power to help poor, phantom-afflicted Madame de la Rue—at her husband’s insistence—over a period of many months in Italy and Switzerland some years ago. I would have completely cured her, I am certain of this, if Catherine had not intervened because of her insane and baseless jealousy.
“Drood told me that he sensed my control of such Magnetic mesmeric power the moment he saw me on the hillside above the accident carnage at Staplehurst. Drood said that he recognised the gods-given ability in me instantly, the same way Uncle Amun had recognised the latent abilities in him when he was a boy of four so many decades earlier.
“But I digress.
“For the rest of his boyhood and young manhood in Egypt, Drood pursued mastery of his powers through the rituals and knowledge of the ancients. Did you know, for instance, my dear Wilkie, that no less an historian than Herodotus tells us that the great king Rameses, Pharaoh of all Egypt, once became so seriously ill that there was no hope for him and he, in Herodotus’ words but also the words of Drood’s uncle and teachers, ‘descended into the mansion of death’? But Rameses then returned to the light, cured. This pharaoh’s return has been celebrated for thousands of years, and continues to be celebrated in Islam-dominated Egypt today. And Wilkie, do you know the mechanism for Rameses’ miraculous return from the dark mansion of death?”
Here Dickens paused for dramatic effect until I was finally forced to ask, “What was it?”
“That magical power was mesmeric magnetism,” he said. “Rameses had been mesmerised, according to ritual and method, at the Temple of Seag, was allowed to die as a man, but was brought back—cured of his fatal disease—as something more than a man.
“Tacitus tells us of the celebrated Temple of Sleep in Alexandria. This is where young Drood did most of his midnight studies and where he emerged as a practitioner of this ancient art of Magnetic Influence.
“That night in his temple-library in Undertown, Drood explained to me—actually showed me the parchments and books—that Plutarch reported that both the prophetic and curative sleep induced in the temples of Isis and Osiris utilised a mesmeric incense called Kyphi, which is used even today—Drood let me smell it from a vial, Wilkie—as well as the music of the lyre to bring on such mesmeric sleep. The Pythagoreans also used this Kyphi incense and the lyre in their secret cave and temple ceremonies, since they believed as the ancient Egyptians did that such Magnetic Influence, properly directed, can free the soul from its body and create a full rapport with the spiritual world.
“Don’t look at me that way, my dear Wilkie. You know I am no believer in mere ghosts and spirit-rappings. How many have I exposed in my talks and essays? But I am an expert in Magnetic Influence, and I hope to become a greater expert in the science very soon.
“According to Herodotus and Clemens Alexandrinus, this prayer and mesmeric control of a dying man have been used for ten thousand years at all important Egyptian funerals—
“ ‘Deign, ye gods, who give life to men, to give a favourable judgement of the soul of the deceased, that it may pass to the eternal gods.’
“But you see that some souls they do not release, Wilkie. Some souls they hold under their Magnetic Influence and bring back. Such it was with the Pharaoh Rameses. Such it was with the man you and I know as Drood.”
DICKENS STOPPED WALKING and I stopped next to him. We were less than half a mile from Gad’s Hill now, although we had been walking at something less than Dickens’s usual frenzied pace. I confess that I had been half-mesmerised by the sound and tone and drone of Charles Dickens’s voice for the past twenty minutes or so and had noticed almost nothing of our surroundings.
“Have you found this boring, Wilkie?” he asked, his dark eyes sharp and challenging.
“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “It’s fascinating. And fantastic. It’s not everyone who is permitted to, or every day that one is allowed to, hear an Arabian Nights tale from Charles Dickens.”
“Fantastic,” repeated Dickens, smiling thinly. “Do you find it too fantastic to be true?”