“Oh, posh,” said Dickens, waving the weapon away with his white gloves. (You need to remember, Dear Reader, that in our era—I have no idea of the custom in yours—none of our police carried firearms of any sort. Nor did our criminals, for the most part. Hatchery’s talk of “agreements” between the underworld and law enforcement was true in many unspoken ways.)

“I will take it,” I said. “And gladly. I hate rats.”

The pistol was as heavy as it looked and it filled my right jacket pocket. I felt strangely off balance with the massive thing pulling me down on one side. I told myself that I might soon feel far more off balance should I need such a weapon and not have one.

“Do you know how to fire a pistol, sir?” asked Hatchery.

I shrugged. “I assume that the general idea is to aim the end with the opening at one’s target and to pull the trigger,” I said. I was hurting all over now. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jug of laudanum on my locked kitchen’s cupboard shelf.

“Yes, sir,” said Hatchery. His bowler was pulled down so tight that it seemed to be compressing his skull. “That is the general idea. You may have noticed it ’as two barrels, Mr Collins. An upper one and a larger lower one.”

I had not taken notice of this. I tried to pull the absurdly heavy weapon from my pocket, but it snagged on the lining, ripping the cloth of my expensive jacket. Cursing softly, I managed to extricate it and study it in the lamplight.

“Ignore the lower one, sir,” said Hatchery. “It’s made for grapeshot. A form of shotgun. Nasty thing. You won’t be needin’ that, I ’ope, sir, and I have no ammunition for it anyway. My brother, who was in the army until recently, bought the gun from an American chap, although it was made in France… but not to worry, there are good English proof marks on it, sir, from our very own Birmingham Proof ’ouse. The cylinder for the smoothbore barrel is loaded, sir. There are nine shots in the cylinder.”

“Nine?” I said, putting the huge, heavy thing back in my pocket while taking care not to rip the lining any worse than it had been. “Very good.”

“Would you like more bullets, sir? I ’ave a bag of them an’ caps in my pocket. I’d ’ave to show you ’ow to use the ramrod, sir. But it’s fairly simple, as such skills go.”

I almost laughed then, thinking of all the things that might be in Detective Hatchery’s pockets and on his belt. “No, thank you,” I said. “Nine balls should suffice.”

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir,” continued the detective. “Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

I shuddered at that.

“We’ll see you before dawn, Hatchery,” said Dickens, tucking his watch into his waistcoat and leading the way down the very steep steps, the bullseye lantern held low. “Come, Wilkie. We have less than four hours before the sun rises.”

WILKIE, DO YOU know Edgar Allan Poe?”

“No,” I said. We were ten steps down with no end of the steep shaft in sight. The “steps” were more like pyramid blocks, at least three feet from one level down to the next, each step and slab slick with trickles of underground moisture, the shadows thrown by the small lantern ink black and deceptive, and if either of us stumbled here, it would certainly result in broken bones and most probably a broken neck. I half-stepped, half-jumped to the next step down, panting as I tried to keep up with the tiny cone of bobbing light emanating from Dickens’s hand. “A friend of yours, Charles?” I asked. “An expert on crypts and catacombs, perhaps?”

Dickens laughed. The echo was wonderfully awful in the steep stone shaft. I hoped with all my heart that he would not do it again.

“A definitive ‘no’ to your first question, my dear Wilkie,” he said. “Quite possibly a ‘yes’ to the second surmise.”

Dickens had stopped on a level area and now he turned the lantern to illuminate steep walls, a low ceiling ahead, and a corridor stretching off into the dark. Black rectangles on both sides of the corridor suggested open doorways. I jumped down onto the last step to join him. He turned to me and rested both hands and the bullseye on the brass beak of his stick.

“I met Poe in Baltimore during the last weeks of my 1842 tour in America,” he said. “I must say that the fellow forced first his book, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, on me, and then his attention. Freely conversing as if we were equals or old friends, Poe kept us talking—or kept himself talking, I should say—for hours, about literature and his work and my work and again about his work. I never did get around to reading his stories while I was in America, but Catherine did. She was quite enthralled. Evidently this Poe loved to write about crypts, corpses, premature burials, and hearts ripped out of living breasts.”

I kept peering into the darkness beyond the tiny circle of light from the bullseye. Straining so hard—my eyes are not strong—made the shadows everywhere coalesce and shift, like tall forms stirring. My headache grew worse.

“I presume that all this has some relevance, Dickens,” I said sharply.

“Only in the sense that I am receiving the distinct impression that Mr Edgar Allan Poe would be enjoying this outing more than you are at the moment, my dear Wilkie.”

“Well then,” I said a bit sharply, “I wish your friend Poe were here now.”

Dickens laughed again, the echo not so intense this time but even more unnerving as it bounced off unseen walls and niches in the dark. “Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is. I remember reading that Mr Poe died only six or seven years after I met him, quite young and under odd and perhaps unseemly circumstances. From our brief but intense acquaintanceship, this place seems to be exactly the kind of stone barrow his ghost would enjoy haunting.”

“What is this place?” I asked.

As if in answer, Dickens raised the lantern and led the way down the corridor. The doorways I had sensed on both sides were actually open niches. Dickens aimed the bullseye into the first niche on our right as we reached it.

About six feet into this space, an elaborate iron grille rose from the stone floor to stone ceiling; the grille was massive, its cross-members solid, but had openings in the shape of florettes. The blood-red-and-orange iron looked so ancient and rusted that I felt that it would crumble away if I stepped in and struck it with my fist. But I had no intention of stepping into the niche. Behind the iron grille were rows and columns of stacked coffins so solid that I guessed them to be lined with lead. I counted about a dozen in the shifting light and shadows.

“Can you read that plate, Wilkie?”

Dickens was referring to a white stone plaque set high on the iron grille. Another plaque had fallen into the accumulated dirt and heaps of rust on the floor of the niche and a third was lying on its side at the base of the grille.

I adjusted my glasses and squinted. The stone was streaked and stained white by the rising damp and was pockmarked with dark red from the rusted grille beneath and around it. The letters appeared to be—

E. I.

THE CAYA[obscured]OMB

OF

[missing]HE REV[obscured]D

L.L. B [stain obscured]

I read this to Dickens, who had stepped inside for a closer look, and then I said, “Not Roman, then.”

“These catacombs?” said Dickens in his distracted manner as he crouched to try to read the plate that had fallen into the dirt like a tumbled headstone. “No. They were built in the essential Roman manner—deep corridors lined on both sides with burial niches—but original Roman catacombs would be labyrinthine in layout. These were Christian, but very old, Wilkie, very old, and therefore designed, as some of our city is above, on the grid. In this case, it is laid out as a central cross surrounded by these burial niches and smaller passages. You notice the arched brick rather than stone above me here…” He aimed the lantern higher.