Dickens had no idea of the effects of laudanum, much less of rich opium.

Let me tell you, Dear Reader of my posthumous future, just what the effect of King Lazaree’s opium was like—

_it was a warmth that began in your belly and veins, a little like a good whiskey, but which, unlike whiskey, never stopped expanding and growing.

_it was an elixir that transformed small, cherubic, usually pleasant, rarely-taken-seriously William Wilkie Collins, he of the absurdly large forehead, poor eyesight, and comically voluminous beard, he who was “always good for a laugh” and usually good to serve as what Americans call a “sidekick”—into the self-confident colossus that he knew in his heart of hearts he always was and always had been.

_it was a transformative agent that eliminated the soul-sickening anxiety that had haunted and weakened me since I was a child, that deepened perception, and which bestowed an insight into people, one’s self, and relationships that illuminated even the most mundane object or situation in a brilliant, golden light that must be something like the vision of a divinity.

This is an inadequate description, I fear, but I hesitate before penning a complete description of the unique and beneficial effects of this ancient Chinaman’s opium. (Too many others, those without my innate resistance to the oft-cited negative aspects of the drug, might rush to try it—not realising that opium of King Lazaree’s quality of essence may never again be found in London or anywhere else.) Suffice it to say that the drug was worth every shilling the ancient Chinaman asked for it—asked for it many hours later, when I was helped from my couch and escorted, by the shadow called Khan, all the way back to the steep staircase above which waited the faithful Hatchery—and it remained worth the thousands upon thousands of pounds I would continue paying for it in the months and years to come.

Thank God for my huge payment from Cornhill’s George Smith in advance of my writing Armadale. I would not say that every cent of that windfall went for opium—I remember spending some £300 for wine and investing at least £1,500 in Funds (and, of course, there were gifts to Caroline and Carrie, as we called her daughter, Harriet, at home, as well as money sent to Martha R—)—but the majority of the astounding £5,000 I received from Smith did end up in the long-nailed yellow hands of the subterranean Mandarin.

Hatchery—huge, hulking, derby-topped—was always waiting for me in the crypt far above, no matter how overdue into the morning (or even afternoon) my return was. Each time he would take back the huge pistol (I always set it next to me in my cot in King Lazaree’s Den, even though I felt safer there than anywhere else in the world) and each time he would escort me out of the crypt, cemetery, and slums back to the world of the sad, shuffling, unseeing mortals who knew nothing of the glories of Lazaree’s premium opium.

I WISHED ALMOST as much as my constantly whining Caroline did that the house on Gloucester Place would open up for us. Our current home at 9 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, had always been comfortable enough for me, but it seemed smaller now between Caroline’s constant complaining and Carrie’s coming into womanhood.

Mostly, though, it was the uninvited inhabitants that made the old place too small.

The woman with the green skin and tusk teeth still haunted the stairways when they were not well lighted, but it was the Other Wilkie who caused me the most consternation.

The Other Wilkie never spoke; he simply watched and waited. No matter how I was dressed when I encountered him, he was always in collar and shirtsleeves and waistcoat, cravat in place. I knew that if I were suddenly to shave off my full beard—which was so much a part of me now that I never really noticed it in the mirror except when trimming it—the Other Wilkie would retain his. If I were to remove my spectacles, he would retain his. He never ventured out of my study and was there only at night, but on those nights I encountered him there, his presence was increasingly irritating.

Sensing someone else in the room with me, I would look up and see the Other Wilkie sitting silently in the yellow-upholstered spiderweb-backed chair in the far corner. Sometimes the chair would be reversed (his doing, I am certain), and he would be sitting spraddle-legged with his shirtsleeved arms on the back, head down and gaze intense, the lamplight glinting off his tiny spectacles. I would go back to work, but when I looked up again, the Other Wilkie would have somehow silently advanced until he was sitting in the curved-back wooden chair I keep near my desk for guests. His small eyes would be fixed intently—hungrily, I thought—upon the manuscript I was working on, and he never blinked.

Eventually I would look up with a start to see and feel the Other Wilkie standing or sitting so close to me that our arms were almost touching. These moments of pure fright and terror were made worse when the Other Wilkie lunged for my pen. He wanted to continue and to finish the work on his own—I had no doubt of that—and I have related to you how violent and ink-spattering these tussles for possession of pen, inkwell, and manuscripts had become before I abandoned the study at night and began to work there only during the day, at times when he would not make an appearance.

But in that autumn of 1866, I could hear the Other Wilkie breathing and occasionally shuffling his feet outside my closed study doors even in daylight. I would tip-toe to those doors—hoping that it might be a servant, or Caroline or Carrie playing a prank on me—and throw open a door, only—and always—to see nothing in the hallway. But—always—I could hear the echo of shoes my own size thudding down the dark servants’ stairway on which also waited the Woman with Green Skin.

I knew then that it would be just a matter of time before the Other Wilkie would appear in the study with me during the daytime. Thus I began carrying my notes and writing material to the Athenaeum Club, where I would find a comfortable leather chair and table near a tall window and work in peace.

The problem was, I had little to work on. For the first time in some years at least, since Charles Dickens had first hired me on the staff to write for Household Words ten years earlier (some five years after I had met him), ideas were not coalescing into plots. I had jotted down notes after my rambling discussion with Dickens about the supernatural-adventure novel I was thinking of calling The Serpent’s Eye, but except for copying out some relevant entries on jewels from India from my club’s library edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the eighth edition, 1855—I had made no progress. I went back to my earlier idea of writing about a former police detective now given to private enquiries—Inspector Field in the form of my detective Sergeant Cuff—but my understandable reluctance to spend more time with Field than I had to, combined with an aversion to the entire insidious idea of a detective’s intrusive investigations, retarded that research as well.

Part of me simply was in no mood to write. I much preferred Thursday nights, with the escorted trip to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery and the hours upon hours of ecstasy and soaring insight that followed. The great frustration was that this godlike insight could never be put down on paper—by anyone, no matter how gifted the wordwright, not even, I was certain during my Thursday-night / Friday-morning flights, by Shakespeare or Keats, should either genius reincarnate in a London opium den without warning. Certainly not by so timid a man and unimaginative a writer as Charles Dickens. Each week I could see in King Lazaree’s dark-eyed look his absolute knowledge of both my growing divinity and growing frustration at not being able to share my new knowledge via the dead bulk of inert letters being set down and pushed around on a white page like so many inky-carapaced and quill-prodded beetles. These clumsy written symbols were merely shorthand, I now understood, for the plaintive sounds that lonely apes make and have been making since the Earth and her sister Moon were young.