If I would have allowed myself to, I might have fallen asleep then, if not into the mesmeric trance that Dickens would have so loved to induce in me.

Instead, I shook the fuzziness away before it took hold and said brusquely, “I am sorry, Charles. It simply does not work with me. My will is too strong.”

Dickens sighed and put away the watch. Then he walked over and opened the drapes a bit. The sunlight made both of us blink. “It’s true,” said Dickens. “The wills of real writers are too strong to be subdued by the mesmeric arts.”

I laughed. “Then make your character Jasper—if you ever write this novel based on your dream—something other than a writer.”

Dickens smiled wanly. “So I shall, my dear Wilkie.” He returned to his chair.

“How are Miss Ternan and her mother?” I asked.

Dickens did not hide a frown. Even with me, any discussion of that most personal and secret aspect of his life, however properly circumscribed it was in conversation and however much he needed to speak of her to someone, made him uncomfortable. “Miss Ternan’s mother escaped any real injury other than the shock to the system of someone her age,” rasped Dickens, “but Miss Ternan herself did suffer some rather serious bruises and what her doctor suggests was a slight cervical fracture or dislocation in her lower neck. She finds it very difficult to turn her head without serious pain.”

“I am very sorry to hear that,” I said.

Dickens did not say more about this. He asked softly, “Do you wish to hear the details of the accident and its aftermath, my dear Wilkie?”

“By all means, my dear Charles. By all means.”

“You understand that you shall be the only person to whom I shall reveal all of the details of this event?”

“I will be honoured to hear it,” I said. “And you can trust in my discretion until the grave and beyond.”

Now Dickens did smile—that sudden, sure, mischievous, and somehow boyish show of stained teeth from within the cumulus of beard he’d grown for my play The Frozen Deep eight years earlier and never shaven off. “Your grave or mine, Wilkie?” he asked.

I blinked in a second’s confusion or embarrassment. “Both, I assure you,” I said at last.

Dickens nodded and began rasping out the story of the Staplehurst accident.

DEAR GOD,” I whispered when Dickens was done some forty minutes later. And then again, “Dear God.”

“Exactly,” said the novelist.

“Those poor people,” I said, my voice almost as strained as Dickens’s. “Those poor people.”

“Unimaginable,” repeated Dickens. I had never heard him use this word before, but in this account he must have used it a dozen times. “Did I remember to tell you that the poor man whom we extricated from that truly extraordinary heap of dark ruins—he was jammed in upside down, you see—was bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as we searched frantically for his wife? It seems that a few minutes before the crash, this man had changed places with a Frenchman who disliked having the window down. We found the Frenchman dead. The bleeding man’s wife also dead.”

“Dear God,” I said yet again.

Dickens ran his hand over his eyes as if shielding them from the light. When he looked up again there was that intensity in his eyes that I confess I have never seen in another human being. As we shall see in this true tale I share with you, Dear Reader, the will of Charles Dickens was not to be denied.

“What did you think of my description of the figure that called itself Drood?” Dickens’s rasping query was soft but very intense.

“Quite incredible,” I said.

“Does that mean that you do not credit his existence or my description of him, my dear Wilkie?”

“Not at all, not at all,” I said hurriedly. “I am sure his appearance and behaviour were exactly as you described, Charles.… There is no more talented observer of individual human features and foibles either living or interred with all literary honours in Westminster Abbey than you, my friend… but Mr Drood is… incredible.”

“Precisely,” said Dickens. “And it is our duty now, my dear Wilkie—yours and mine—to find him.”

“Find him?” I repeated stupidly. “Why in heaven’s name should we do that?”

“There is a story in Mr Drood that must be unearthed,” whispered Dickens. “If you will pardon the grave overtones of that phrase. What was the man—if man he was—doing on the tidal train at this time? Why, when questioned by me, did he say that he was going to Whitechapel and the rookeries of the East End? What was his purpose among the dead and dying?”

I did not understand. “What could his purpose have been, Charles?” I asked. “Other than the same as yours—to help and console the living and to locate the dead?”

Dickens smiled again, but there was no warmth or boyishness in that smile. “There was something sinister afoot there, my dear Wilkie. I am sure of it. Several times, as I described to you, I saw this Drood… if that is the creature’s name… hovering near injured people, and when I later went to attend to those individuals, they were dead.”

“But you described how several of the people to whom you attended, Charles, also died when you returned to help them.”

“Yes,” rasped Dickens in that stranger’s voice, lowering his chin into his collars. “But I did not help them over to the other side.”

I sat back in shock. “Dear God. You’re suggesting that this operacaped, leprous-looking figure actually… murdered… some of the poor victims at Staplehurst?”

“I’m suggesting that some sort of cannibalism went on there, my dear Wilkie.”

“Cannibalism!” For the first time I wondered if the accident had mentally unhinged my famous friend. It was true that during his narration of the accident, I’d held serious doubts about the description and even the actual existence of this “Drood”—the man seemed more a character out of a sensationalist novel than any human reality that could be encountered on the tidal train from Folkestone—but I had ascribed that possibility of hallucination to the same sense of shock and disorientation that had robbed Dickens of his voice. But if Dickens were imagining cannibalism, it was quite possible that the accident had robbed him of his reason as well as his voice.

He was smiling at me again and the intensity of his gaze was precisely the kind that made so many first-time interlocutors believe that Charles Dickens could read their minds. “No, my dear Wilkie, I am not deranged,” he said softly. “Mr Drood was as corporeal as you or I and even stranger—in some indefinable way—than I have described. Had I conceived of him as a character for one of my novels, I would not have described him as I met him in reality—too strange, too threatening, too physically grotesque for fiction, my dear Wilkie. But in reality, as you well know, such phantom figures do exist. One passes them on the street. One finds them during nocturnal walks through Whitechapel or other parts of London. And often their stories are stranger than anything a mere novelist could devise.”

It was my turn to smile. Few had ever heard the Inimitable refer to himself as “a mere novelist” and I was quite sure that he had not done so now. He was speaking of other “mere novelists.” Myself, perhaps. I asked, “So what do you propose we do to find this Mr Drood, Charles? And what do we do with the gentleman once we’ve located him?”

“Do you remember when we investigated that haunted house?” asked the writer.

I did. Several years ago, Dickens—as head of his new magazine, All the Year Round, that had supplanted his former Household Words after a spat with his publishers—had become embroiled in debates with various spiritualists. The 1850s had been a mad time for table rapping, seances, mesmerism—some of which Dickens not only did believe in but in which he was an eager practitioner—and other such fascination with invisible energies. As much as Dickens believed in and relied upon mesmerism, sometimes called animal magnetism, and as superstitious as I knew him to be at heart (he truly believed that Friday was his lucky day, for instance), he had chosen (as editor of his new journal) to pick a quarrel with various spiritualists. When one of his adversaries in the debate, a spiritualist named William Howitt, was giving details of a haunted house in Cheshunt, near London, to prop up his arguments, Dickens immediately decided that we—the editors and managers of All the Year Round—should set up an expedition to investigate the hauntings.