Drood Read Online Free

itself and allowed the damned there to cry out one last time to the mortal world.
    Dickens watched a man stagger towards him, arms outstretched as if for a welcoming hug. The top of the man’s skull had been torn off rather the way one would crack an eggshell with a spoon in preparation for breakfast. Dickens could clearly see the grey-and-pink pulp glistening within the concave bowl of splintered skull. The fellow’s face was covered with blood, his eyes white orbs staring out through crimson rivulets.
    Dickens could think of nothing to do but offer the man some brandy from his flask. The mouth of the flask came away red from the man’s lips. Dickens helped him lie on the grass and then used the water in his top hat to clean the man’s face. “What is your name, sir?” asked Dickens.
    The man said only, “I am gone,” and died, the white eyes continuing to stare up at the sky from their bloody pools.
    A shadow passed over them. Dickens whirled, sure—he told me later—that it would be Drood, the apparition’s black cape widening like a raven’s wings. But it was only a cloud passing between the sun and the river valley.
    Dickens refilled his top hat from the river and came upon a lady, who also had blood streaming down over her lead-coloured face. She was almost naked, her clothes reduced to a few token strips of bloody cloth dangling like old bandages from her torn flesh. Her left breast was missing. She refused to pause for the writer’s ministrations and did not seem to hear his urgings that she sit down and wait for help. She walked past Dickens in a brisk manner and disappeared into the few trees that grew along the bank.
    He helped two stunned guards extricate the crushed body of another woman from a flattened carriage and lay the body gently on the bank. A man was wading downstream, screaming, “My wife! My wife!” Dickens led him to the corpse. The man screamed, threw his arms above his head, and ran wildly into the swampy field near the river, crashing and thrashing about, all the while emitting sounds that Dickens later said “were like the hisses and death grunts of a boar pierced through the lungs by several large calibre bullets.” Then the man fainted, dropping into the marsh more like someone shot through the heart than through the lungs.
    Dickens went back towards the carriages and found a woman propped against a tree. Except for a little blood on her face, perhaps from a slight scalp wound, she seemed uninjured.
    “I shall bring you some water, madam,” he said.
    “That would be very kind of you, sir,” she replied. She smiled and Dickens flinched. She had lost all of her teeth.
    He went to the stream and looked back to see a figure he took to be Drood—presumably no one else was foolishly dressed in a heavy opera cape on that warm June day—solicitously bent over the woman. When Dickens returned a few seconds later with his top hat filled with river water, the man in black was gone and the woman was dead but still showing her ragged, bloodied gums in a parody of a final smile.
    He went back to the smashed carriages. Amidst the rubble of one coach, a young man moaned feebly. More rescuers were sliding down the slope. Dickens ran to get several strong guards to help extricate the fellow from the broken glass, torn red velvet, heavy iron, and collapsed wooden floor of the compartment. While the guards grunted and lifted the heavy window frames and shattered flooring that had now become a fallen roof, Dickens squeezed the young man’s hand and said, “I shall see you to safety, my son.”
    “Thank you,” gasped the injured young gentleman, obviously an occupant of one of the first-class carriages. “You are most kind.”
    “What is your name?” asked our novelist as they carried the young man to the bank.
    “Dickenson,” said the young fellow.
    Charles Dickens made sure that Master Dickenson was carried up to the railway line where more rescuers had arrived, then he turned back to