The dog’s head turned. Before Sultan could look back at him, Dickens had smoothly raised the shotgun and fired both barrels. Even though we were all expecting it, the double explosion seemed especially loud in the damp, cold, thick air. Sultan’s ribcage exploded in a blur of red-shredded hair and striated flesh and shattered bone. I am certain that his heart was pulverised so quickly that no message from nerve-endings had time to reach the animal’s brain. He did not whimper or cry out as the impact knocked him several feet across the wet grass in the opposite direction from us, and I was all but certain that Sultan was dead before he hit the ground.

The servants had the heavy carcass in the bag and then in the wheelbarrow in an instant. They trundled the corpse back towards the house as the rest of us gathered around Dickens, who broke the smoking gun, removed the spent shells, and set the empty cartridges carefully in his overcoat pocket.

He looked up at me as he did this and our gazes seemed to lock much as his and Sultan’s had only a moment earlier. I fully expected the Inimitable to say to me, perhaps in Latin, “And thus death to those who betray me”— but he remained silent.

A second later, young Plorn, seemingly excited by the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air—the very boy whom Dickens had recently described to me as “wanting application and continuity of purpose” due to some “impracticable torpor in his natural character”—cried out, “That was smashing, Father! Absolutely smashing!”

Dickens did not reply. None of the men said a word as we walked slowly back to the warm house. The rain and wind came up again before we reached the back door.

Once inside, I started to head up to my room to change into dry clothes and take an additional brace of laudanum, but Dickens called out to me and I stopped on the stairs.

“Be of good cheer, Wilkie. Even so will I comfort dear Percy Fitzgerald, who gave me the doomed dog in the first place. Two of Sultan’s children are rolling in the straw of the barn even as we speak. Blood inheritance being the iron master that it is, one of those two will almost assuredly inherit Sultan’s ferocity. He will also almost certainly inherit the gun.”

I could think of nothing to say to this, so I nodded and went upstairs for my anodyne.

KING LAZAREE, THE Chinaman King of the Opium Living Dead, seemed to have been expecting me when I had first returned to his kingdom almost two months before Sultan’s execution, in late August of that summer of 1866.

“Welcome, Mr Collins,” the ancient Chinee had whispered when I parted the curtains to his hidden realm in the loculus beneath the catacombs beneath the cemetery. “Your bed and pipe are ready for you.”

Detective Hatchery had led me safely to the cemetery late that August night, had unlocked gates and crypt doors and moved the heavy bier again, and had once again loaned me his absurdly heavy pistol. Handing me a bullseye lantern, he promised to stay in the crypt until I returned. I confess here that it was more difficult going down through the tombs and hidden passage to the lower level this second time than it had been when I followed Dickens.

King Lazaree’s robe and headpiece were of different colours this visit, but the silk was as clean, bright, and perfectly pressed as the time I’d first come here with Dickens.

“You knew I would be back?” I asked as I followed the ancient figure to the farthest, darkest reaches of the long burial loculus.

King Lazaree only smiled and beckoned me farther into the burrow. The silent forms on the three-tiered wooden beds set against the cavern walls appeared to be the same Oriental mummies that we had glimpsed during that first visit. But each mummy held an ornate opium pipe, and the smoky exhalations which filled the narrow, lamp-lit passage were the only indication that they were breathing.

All the other beds were occupied, but this three-level wooden bunk at the back of the room, separated by its own dark red curtain, was empty.

“You shall be our honoured guest,” Lazaree said softly in his oddly lilted Cambridge accent. “And as such, you shall have your privacy. Khan?” He gestured, and another figure in a dark robe handed me a long pipe with a beautiful glass-and-ceramic bowl at the end.

“The pipe has never been used,” said King Lazaree. “It is for you and your use alone. This bed also is for your use and your use alone. No one else shall ever lie in it. And the drug you will experience tonight is of the quality reserved for kings, pharaohs, emperors, and those holy men wishing to become gods.”

I tried to speak, found my mouth too dry, licked my lips, and tried again. “How much…” I began.

King Lazaree silenced me with a touch of his long yellowed fingers and longer yellow nails. “Gentlemen do not discuss price, Mr Collins. First, experience this night—then you can tell me if such quality and uniqueness is worth the coin these other gentlemen…” He moved those long, curving fingernails in a sweep that included the rows of silent cots. “… have decided to pay for it. If not, there will be, of course, no charge.”

King Lazaree glided into the dark and the robed figure named Khan helped me up into my bunk, set a notched wooden block under my head—it was strangely comfortable—and lit the pipe for me. Then Khan was gone and I lay on my side, inhaling the fragrant smoke and allowing my anxieties and worries to flow out of me.

Do you wish, Dear Reader, to know the effects of this ultimate opium? Perhaps in your day everyone avails himself of this amazing drug. But even so, I doubt if the efficacy of your opium could equal or come close to the perfection of King Lazaree’s secret recipe.

If it is the effect of mere opium that piques your curiosity, I can quote to you here from the first paragraph of the last book ever written by Charles Dickens—a book he would not live long enough to finish:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

There you have it. An opium addict struggling to consciousness in a run-down tumbled opium den at dawn. Ten thousand scimitars flashing in the sunlight. Thrice ten thousand dancing girls. White elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours. What poetry! What insight!

What rubbish.

Charles Dickens had not the slightest idea of the power or effect of opium. He once bragged to me that during his second reading tour—still in our future that summer and autumn of 1866—when he was racked by pain and unable to sleep, he granted himself the “Morpheus of laudanum.” But when I enquired further—of Dolby rather than of the Inimitable, since I wanted the truth—I found that the wings of Morpheus to which he had abandoned himself consisted of two tiny drops of opium in a very large glass of port. By this time, I was drinking several port-glasses full of pure laudanum with not even a chaser of wine.