Monster

by Shane Peacock

  “Bats,” says Godwin.

  “It didn’t sound like wings or like it was in the air; it sounded like something on foot, and it seemed like it knocked something over.”

  “Rats,” says Godwin.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Godwin says nothing for a moment. Then he sighs. “Edgar, you are being daft. Do you think the poor wretch is in there, is that what you think? The Elephant Man himself? You have an extraordinary imagination, though it seems that it is sometimes your enemy. That room has been fitted with a lock since Mr. Merrick’s death seven years ago and is no doubt infested with vermin of one sort or another. No one ever goes in there because it is a sort of sacred place, and the hospital officials have no idea what to do with it since no one wants to inhabit it, so they have just left it. Your uncle, Vincent Brim, is actually responsible for it.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Yes, if you must know, he has a key for it. But even he never uses it. Vincent knew Merrick, as did I, an unfortunate chap but a lovely man and a wonder to behold. I found him absolutely fascinating!” Godwin’s eyes glow again for a moment, but then he remembers himself. “Now enough of all of this, the saw, please. Let us get on with our duty.”

  Edgar wants to speak frankly with the great surgeon. He wants to tell him all about his situation—that he knew a man, a great one-armed man who killed a creature from an ancient story, and that he and his friends destroyed a revenant, a living dead man who lived on the blood of human beings, severed its head in a guillotine on the stage of the Royal Lyceum Theatre just weeks ago. He wants to tell him that something supernatural is now after him and his friends, and he is sure it smashed his adoptive father’s brains out against a wall in his own home. He yearns to tell Godwin that this is why he is alert to any aberration that might be anywhere near him. He wonders if Godwin knows that the very H.G. Wells novel he just mentioned tells a tale that explores the idea of making human beings, in a gruesome way, and Edgar fears that this thing in pursuit of him now is even worse, that it is the most frightening monster the human mind has ever created, perhaps made by the hand of man too! But he also wonders if he should admit to the great surgeon that what is upsetting him even more than sawing this poor little animal’s arms and legs off while it is still alive, is the fact that you, Dr. Godwin, seem very much like a man—perhaps THE man among all men on earth—who might have the skills to make a monster like the very one in question!

  “I…I cannot do this, sir.”

  “Then, my boy, you must put the instrument down. You must take another day or so to steel yourself. I understand. I absolutely understand.” He puts his hand on Edgar’s shoulder and pats it. “Go home, get some rest, and we shall see you in a few days.” His touch is gentle and reassuring.

  —

  Edgar walks along the basement hallway greatly puzzled. Godwin is the most skilled surgeon in London, and yet there are those who hate him and the choices he makes within his profession. He seems such a kind and decent person when you know him—a man of smiles and understanding. Perhaps, thinks Edgar, Dr. Godwin is right about animal vivisection and human dissection, perhaps he only does these things to help humanity. Perhaps he is the only one with the courage to do it.

  But what if Godwin actually went too far, even just once? Maybe there is some living being made by his hand in existence and perhaps it sometimes gets loose—or someone with a key lets it loose—from wherever he keeps it and it is seen by others and ends up in the newspaper articles Shakespeare investigated. Perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson glimpsed it on a London street and this young genius H.G. Wells noticed it too—such men would pick it out. Maybe Godwin deeply regrets what he did and that is why he is so evasive on the subject.

  Perhaps Godwin keeps the creature he made in that room where the Elephant Man once lived?

  12

  On his way out of the hospital, Edgar heads toward his uncle’s door. There is no one in the silent room. He slips into it.

  Edgar surveys everything—the desk, the blackboard, the skeletons, the stacks of papers and the medical texts. Where would the key to the Elephant Man’s room be? He cannot believe he is actually thinking about not only stealing it but then using it to get into that unholy holy place down there. But it seems like the only choice he has. He and his friends need to locate and eliminate this beast before it strikes again.

  He has the terrible feeling that someone is in the room with him, watching what he does. He surveys the space again, every inch of it. The place still appears deserted.

  He stands in front of the desk and notices two key chains on two hooks against the wall, on either side of the blackboard. He steps toward the one on his left.

  “MASTER BRIM!”

  “Yes,” says Edgar before he even turns around, “…Uncle Vincent.”

  Vincent Brim has emerged from a door that Edgar has never noticed before; it looks like part of the wall. His uncle is wearing his white lab coat over another dazzling suit with a gold chain slung across the waistcoat that hides his expanding belly, his glistening black mustache and goatee appearing even more well-manicured than usual. He is glaring at his nephew, though his round glass lenses glint in the light, making his eyes only evident in flashes. For an instant Edgar thinks he can see spots of dark blood on one of his hands, but they are simply flecks cast by a shadow.

  “What are you doing in here?” Dr. Brim marches toward Edgar, then does a sort of semicircle around him and walks behind his desk and sits at his chair, all the time staring at his nephew. He seems a little uncomfortable that the boy is looking down on him. “SIT!” he blares. Edgar does so instantly. “Why would you come into my—”

  “Because I am your relation, Uncle Vincent, family, and I wanted to discuss how things have been going for me in the hospital.”

  “Oh.” Vincent clears his throat. “Please refer to me as Dr. Brim. We have already discussed that. And so…so, how have things been going here? You are privileged to be working with such a man as Dr. Godwin. He has never asked for an assistant before.”

  “He is very kind and most obviously greatly respected.”

  “That he is, unquestionably. Have you been sweeping his room?”

  “Actually, he has allowed me to be by his side while experimenting.”

  “Experimenting! You mean to say that you have been with him during intricate investigations into—”

  “No, sir, not that, but I assisted during human organ removal. And he has invited me to observe while he vivisects a rabbit.”

  “I see. None of that has turned your stomach?”

  “I have had troubles with it.”

  Vincent Brim grins. “I am not surprised. What we do here, my boy, is not for the weak of mind or body. It is a grown-up thing. That is why Dr. Godwin chooses to have me by his side during his most complicated operations.”

  This fact gives Edgar a bit of a start. He wonders about the nature of those “complicated operations.”

  “What do you think, sir, of what he does? The vivisecting and the work on the corpses. You know he has critics.”

  “They are fools. I think it admirable.”

  “How far would he take it?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “There are those who have said he would go so far as to play with human life and attempt to adjust it, perhaps replace the human heart with another’s…or perhaps the brain.”

  “That would be marvelous!”

  Edgar doesn’t like his uncle’s beaming expression. He wonders about Vincent Brim, holder of the key to that room downstairs, who knows where Thorne House is, has been to it several times. He could easily direct a beast right to the door and tell that creature where everyone sleeps. But that seems to Edgar to be a wild thing to consider, another example of his imagination on the loose. Godwin had told him it is sometimes his enemy.

  “I hear, sir, that you are responsible for the Elephant Man’s room.”

  “Where did you hear that?”


  “Dr. Godwin.”

  Vincent hesitates for a moment. “Yes, it is true. I am honored. That freak, half human and half animal, to my mind, was a monument of a specimen.”

  “Could you show me the room one day, perhaps tomorrow?”

  Dr. Brim’s face turns red. He glances toward the key chain to his right then back at Edgar. “What a ridiculous and contemptuous idea! No one goes into that room anymore…not even me!” Edgar notes the pause in that sentence, the sort of hesitation one takes when not telling the truth. “You need to remove your nose from all of these things that are none of your business. Do not question or even think about the experiments the great Dr. Godwin does, boy, merely aid him when he asks! And do NOT ask me to give you some sort of child’s free tour of a place that NO ONE is allowed to see! Do I make that perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good day, Master Brim. It was a pleasure to see you.” He glares at his nephew.

  Edgar gets up and leaves without saying another word. He waits in the back stairwell and ten minutes later, when Vincent goes out, Edgar darts into his room and back out.

  —

  Before Edgar leaves for his midnight rendezvous with his friends, he visits Annabel in her room. He is happy to see her up and dressed, combing out her long blonde hair with a silver brush while she looks at her drawn face in a dressing-table mirror. At least, thinks Edgar, this is some progress. They speak for a while about superficial things and then Edgar brings her around to a more important question.

  “You know that father did more than just invent weapons, don’t you, mother?”

  “I would hope so. He was a bigger man than that. I know he often regretted his role—he said science should be for more than that.”

  “Yes, but do you think he ever did things that…he wasn’t sure were right?”

  She turns and looks at him, a lock of hair in one hand and the brush in the other. “Whatever do you mean, Edgar?”

  “I have come to believe that some scientists wonder if it might be possible to actually make a…a human being.”

  She pauses and then speaks in a clear voice. “The important words you employed in that sentence were some scientists. Though Alfred was intellectually curious, I don’t believe he would ever have considered such a thing.”

  “Yes,” says Edgar, “I believe you are right. I believe that father was more moral than that.”

  “Now, your Uncle Vincent is another case entirely. I could believe in a second that he was up to that sort of thing.”

  —

  When Edgar leaves the house just after eleven o’clock, it is silent. Annabel has gone to bed and the servants are nowhere to be seen. He told Beasley that he was turning in for the night. Now he slips silently through his bedroom door, down the stairs and out the front entrance, closing it behind him as gently as possible. His jaw is set as he walks out of Mayfair and heads toward the West End. He knows what he will say to his friends and what they must do. After this meeting, there will be no turning back.

  There’s a fog over London of the sort usually found on a winter night. The citizens’ demand for better warmth, better everything, keeps adding to this human-enhanced smog.

  Crossing Leicester Square at a quickening pace, Edgar hears a ruckus coming from inside a public house. There are still many people walking about in this central London area, a playground for adults, but most are on their way home, since the theaters and the drinking holes are either closing or have been shut for some time. And yet, here is this noise in this pub—violent noise. Edgar pauses. It is several men’s voices, some aggressive, others terrified.

  “Get out, you beast!”

  He hears a grunt, human but barely, then the sound of a cane whizzing through the air and a cry of pain, another whiz and another cry followed by a dull, sickening sound, like bone striking bone, and then silence. As Edgar stands there, not twenty feet away from the pub’s front door, loud footsteps approach from the inside, then a big boot comes right through the door, smashing its windows and crushing the thick wooden frame. A man appears, huge, wearing a black cloak, a black bowler hat and black suit, twirling a cane in a big hairy fist. He doesn’t see Edgar, who is frozen in place. But then the man seems to sense him and starts to turn. Edgar sees some of the face, wide and grotesque, the lips looking black under the streetlights. Is this it? Edgar thinks of Shakespeare’s claims about Mr. Hyde. He thinks of Annabel’s drawing. The creature looks over his shoulder, just one eye on him. Then it turns and makes off into the night.

  At that instant, Edgar remembers something about Mr. Hyde that had slipped his mind, and which makes it impossible that this thing that is after them could be him. “My mind is too flighty. That was just a man.” But it hardly seemed like one.

  —

  Ten minutes later he is on Drury Lane. He’s early. He doesn’t bother to knock, just opens the door and slips down the stairs into the inner sanctum of the Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen’s Empire.

  When he enters the room, Shakespeare is alone, sitting at the table with papers and quills arranged for all of the expected guests, including the three phantoms, but he isn’t speaking to any of them. He is simply sitting there with a glum expression on his big face, holding his cheeks in his little hands. He starts when he sees Edgar and his usual manic energy seems to overtake him.

  “Master Brim! My colleagues and I were just conversing about our plan of action!” No, you weren’t, thinks Edgar. “We have been awaiting you all with great anticipation!”

  Edgar sometimes wonders about this little fellow. How crazy is he, really? Lear is said to have left some of his writings about monsters here in the society’s rooms, but Shakespeare has never even mentioned their existence. Perhaps the creatures want those documents; perhaps it’s one of the reasons why they are in pursuit and murderous. And why don’t these aberrations come after this little man who believes in their existence? Is it just his insanity?

  “Shakespeare—” begins Edgar.

  “Yes, my knight, my liege, my auburn-haired, pyrotechnically coiffured, perturbation-riddled post-adolescent?” His eyes look wild. “Can I allay any concerns?”

  Edgar finds it hard to imagine that lost mind plotting anything. Before he can respond, there is the sound of three sets of footsteps coming down the stairs and Edgar’s thoughts turn from William Shakespeare. He is happy to see Tiger looking much better. She is dressed in a pair of trousers and seems her old, unafraid and unusual self. He can tell that the pistol is in her pocket now.

  “The cannon is in place at the Lears’ home,” she says to him matter-of-factly.

  “Glad you three retrieved it,” he says. “That makes you safer.”

  “I got it myself, late at night when they were asleep, didn’t want to upset them.”

  Lucy is much more somber tonight, but Jonathan has a spring in his step. He had been carrying Thorne’s rifle at his side, trying to disguise its presence when out of doors. Now, he sets it against a wall and begins to pace.

  “Here is my plan! It differs somewhat from the others. It is not based on our enemy being any particular creature. It is simply a plan of action, which is what we desperately need.”

  “I am not so sure, Jon,” says Lucy.

  “Hear me out. And then do anything other than what I suggest at your peril. We need to all gather at our home in Kentish Town with the doors unlocked and the cannon primed and ready. You need to be with us too, Edgar, so our villain thinks it can kill us all together. We make ourselves enticing, create a situation where this thing feels invited in, and then we tear it apart with Thorne’s great weapon, take its head clean off just like we did with the vampire, but this time with an expanding cannonball!”

  “What if that doesn’t do the trick?” asks Tiger.

  “How could it not?”

  “If the thing we are after is ghostly, invisible,” says Lucy.

  “Annabel Thorne saw it.”

  “She thought she did. She was te
rrified. No one else alive has actually seen it.”

  “When it attacked me, I didn’t see anything,” says Tiger.

  “It isn’t invisible, sis. You read too many books.”

  “What if it is incredibly fast?” asks Lucy. “Or what if a cannonball won’t penetrate it and it just keeps coming?”

  “She’s right,” says Tiger, “we need to know what it is.”

  “It is Mr. Hyde, I tell you!” exclaims Shakespeare. “You are all light of brain!”

  “What is your plan, Tiger?” asks Edgar.

  “A more thoughtful version of Jonathan’s: do some investigating first and then ambush this thing, know what we are trying to kill so we can finish it.”

  “And you, Lucy?”

  It takes her a moment to answer. “I am not certain, not at all,” she finally says. “Perhaps it is best to leave it be, just keep vigilant but do nothing unless it attacks again.”

  “It has attacked enough,” says Jonathan. “We cannot wait anymore. It murdered grandfather and Mr. Thorne, is that not enough? One of us will be next.”

  “He makes a very good point,” says Tiger.

  “Then this is what we will do!” says Edgar loudly, rising to his feet. It isn’t like him to command their attention like this. Both Lucy and Tiger turn to him with looks of anticipation. His face is flushed, a perfect match for his unruly red hair.

  “The valiant Brim has a solution,” sneers Jonathan.

  “I don’t think it is Mr. Hyde,” says Edgar.

  “But—”

  “Be quiet, Shakespeare, and lend me your ears.”

  The little man looks shocked at first, but then puts his hands behind his ears and pushes them toward Edgar Brim.

  “Both Tiger and Annabel said that this creature was a big male, very big. Mr. Hyde was dwarfish. That’s clear in the book. It isn’t him.”

  “But—”

  “I have a theory about what is after us.” He pauses. “I think someone made this creature.”

  There is silence for a moment.