I glanced at Dickens. There was something both thrilled and mischievous in the author’s eye. I may have mentioned earlier that Charles Dickens was not the man one wants to stand next to at a funeral service—the boy in the man could not resist a smile at the least appropriate time, a meaningful glance, a wink. Sometimes I thought that Charles Dickens would laugh at anything, sacred or profane. I was afraid that he would start laughing now. I say I was afraid that he would start laughing, not just because of the embarrassment of the situation, but because I had the most uncanny certainty at that moment that the entire opium den around us, all the poor wretches buried in rags and secreted in corners and hidden under blankets and draped on pillows, in all three filthy, dark rooms there, were listening with all of the attention that their drug-addled minds could command.

I was afraid that if Dickens started laughing, these creatures—Old Sal first among them, fully changed into a huge cat—would leap upon us and rend us limb from limb. Even huge Hatchery, I was sure in that instant of my fear, could not save us if it came to that.

Instead of laughing, Dickens handed the crone three gold sovereigns, setting the coins gently in her filthy yellow palm and closing her curled and twisted fingers around them. He said softly, “Where can we find Drood now, my good woman?”

“In the Undertown,” she whispered, clutching the coins with both hands. “Down in the deepest parts of Undertown. Down where the Chinee named King Lazaree provides Drood and t’others the purest pure opium in the world. Down in Undertown with the other dead things.”

Dickens gestured and we followed him out of the smoke-filled room and onto the narrow, dark landing.

“Detective Hatchery,” said the writer, “have you heard of this subterranean Chinese opium dealer named King Lazaree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know of this Undertown that Sal talks about with such trepidation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it within walking distance?”

“The entrance is, yes, sir.”

“Will you take us there?”

“To the entrance, yes, sir.”

“Will you go with us into this… Undertown… and continue being Virgil to our questing Dantes?”

“Are you asking if I’ll take you down into Undertown, Mr Dickens?”

“That I am, Inspector,” Dickens said almost gleefully. “That I am. For twice the rate we agreed upon, of course, since this is twice the adventure.”

“No, sir, I won’t.”

I could see Dickens blinking in amazement. He raised his stick and tapped the giant gently on the chest with the brass bird’s beak. “Come, come now, Detective Hatchery. All joking aside. For three times our agreed-upon sum, will you show Mr Collins and me to this and into this tantalising Undertown? Lead us to Lazaree and Drood?”

“No, sir, I won’t,” Hatchery said. His voice sounded ragged, as if the opium smoke had affected it. “I won’t go into Undertown under any circumstances. That’s my final word on that, sir. And I would beg you, if you value your souls and sanity, not to go down there yourselves.”

Dickens nodded as if considering this advice. “But you will show us the… what did you call it?… the entrance to Undertown.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His low words came out like someone tearing thick paper. “I will show you… regretfully.”

“That’s good enough, Detective,” said Dickens, taking the lead down the dark stairway. “That’s fair and more than good enough. It is past midnight, but the night is young. Wilkie and I will press on—and down—by ourselves.”

The huge detective lumbered down the steps behind Dickens. It took me a minute to follow. The dense opium smoke in the closed room must have affected my nerves or muscles below the waist, because my legs felt heavy, leaden, unresponsive. In quite literal terms, I could not force my legs and feet to take the first step on the stairs.

Then, tingling and hurting all over as a limb does after falling asleep unbeknownst to its owner, I was able to take that first clumsy step down. I had to rely on my walking stick to keep my balance.

“Are you coming, Wilkie?” came Dickens’s accursedly excited voice up the black stairwell.

“Yes!” I called down, adding a silent God d— n your eyes. “I’m coming, Dickens.”

Imust pause in my narrative here for a moment, Dear Reader, to explain how and why I had chosen to follow Charles Dickens into absurd and dangerous situations before this. There was the time, for instance, when I followed him up Mount Vesuvius. And the more serious incident in Cumberland, where he almost got me killed on Carrick Fell.

Vesuvius was just one of the minor adventures of the 1853 trip around Europe which Dickens and I shared with Augustus Egg. Strictly speaking, there were only two bachelors in that three-man travelling party, and both were younger than the Inimitable, but Dickens certainly acted as carefree and boyish as any young bachelor with the majority of his life and career ahead of him as we gambolled about Europe that autumn and winter. Visiting most of Dickens’s old haunts on the Continent, we eventually headed for Lausanne, where the author’s eccentric old friend Reverend Chauncey Hare Town-shend lectured us on ghosts, jewelry, and—one of Dickens’s favourite topics—mesmerism, and then we were off to Chamonix and climbing the Mer de Glace, where we looked down into glacial crevasses a thousand feet deep. In Naples, which I had hoped would be a respite from all the adventure, Dickens immediately insisted that we climb Vesuvius.

He was disappointed, deeply disappointed I would say, that there was no fire belching and blazing from the volcano. Evidently a major eruption in 1850 had taken some of the energy out of the mountain; there was much smoke while we were there, but no flames. To say that Dickens was crestfallen would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Dickens quickly put a climbing party together, including the archaeologist and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, and we promptly threw ourselves at the smoking mountain.

Eight years before our climb, on the night of 21 January, 1845, Dickens had found all the Vesuvian fire and sulphur that someone as indifferent to danger as he might ask for.

It was the Inimitable’s first trip to Naples and the volcano was very active indeed. With his wife, Catherine, and sister-in-law Georgina in tow, Dickens set off with six saddle horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and—because the weather was harsh and the volcano very treacherous then—no fewer than twenty-two guides. They began their ascent around four PM with the women being carried in litters while Dickens and the guides led the way. The walking stick that the author used that evening was taller and thicker than the bird-beaked cane he was clacking against cobblestones this night in the slums of Shadwell. I am sure that his pace that first time on Vesuvius was no slower than it was tonight on such flat ground at sea level. Charles Dickens’s response to an intimidating slope—as I have witnessed to my chagrin and fatigue many times—was to double his already too-quick pace.

Near the top of the cinder cone that is Vesuvius’s summit, no one would go on save for Dickens and a single guide. The mountain was in eruption. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the sky above them and sulphur, cinders, and smoke belched from every crevice in the snowfields and rockfields. The author’s friend Roche, who had climbed to within a few hundred feet of the crater but who could not go farther towards the fiery maelstrom, screamed that Dickens and his guide would be killed if they ventured closer.

Dickens insisted on climbing right to the brink of this crater, on the windy and most dangerous side—the fumes alone have been known to kill people miles below this level—and looking, as he wrote his friends later, “down into the crater itself… into the flaming bowels of the mountain.… It was the finest sight conceivable, more terrible than Niagara.…” The American waterfalls had been his previous exemplar of transcendence and awe in Nature on this world. Equal, he wrote “… as fire and water are.”