Demon

by Shane Peacock

  When her brother is out of earshot, Lucy reaches out and puts a gentle hand on Edgar’s knee. “I know what you saw in the night,” she whispers. That is all she says, but she continues to look at him with kindness. It calms him a little.

  “A voice said it was the devil.”

  “But it wasn’t. It wasn’t even real.”

  “It IS real!”

  “Edgar—”

  “I…I don’t mean it was flesh and blood—though it may have been—but you…I can’t explain to you, to anyone, how real it is to me. I feel cowardly for saying this, Lucy, but I am terribly afraid. I am afraid of what is behind me and in front of me, of the very air we breathe. I cannot stop my heart from pounding.”

  He is disappointed in himself—he had thought he had changed so much, but now he seems back at the beginning: a frightened boy wounded by perpetual nightmares, a child easily bullied.

  “You don’t appear that way. You simply look like my friend Edgar, as sturdy as you were up there on the island when you slew the monster.” She takes his hand and squeezes it.

  He relaxes a little again. The whirlwind in his mind begins to slow.

  “I am still worried that little Shakespeare was right, Lucy. Something worse will indeed come for us, and soon.” He leans forward and speaks softly, “Maybe it’s here.”

  She glances down the aisle, then out the window and then back at him. “We faced the others, did we not?”

  * * *

  —

  They sleep through the night on the train, Lucy leaning against Edgar and Tiger against Jon. They get to the station and walk out onto Euston Road under a boiling July sun. London is bustling around them, arteries jammed with people and horses and carriages and a few sputtering motorcars, everything loud and smelly as always. All that noise, all the bustle, is helpful to Edgar. He is home and feels anonymous and hidden in the crowds.

  “It’s as hot as hell,” they overhear a man say to another, “never seen it like this.”

  The four friends pause before they cross the street.

  “Tiger, come with me,” says Edgar, taking off his sweat-soaked black jacket and extending a hand. “You can stay at Thorne House. Annabel will be happy to have you; she is lonely these days, now that my adoptive father is gone. We can offer you a quiet home and the best of care.”

  “No,” she says. She is walking on her own now and traces of her old spirit are coming back.

  “Of course,” says Jonathan and smiles, “she would like to stay with us. I shall—”

  “I am going home. I will be fine.”

  “No,” say the other three together.

  “That just makes me want to be on my own even more!” Her words snap in the thick city air, just as they used to.

  The others say nothing for a moment and then they all burst out laughing. It is like another tonic to Edgar, and before he knows it, he has let her go. She walks away, heading straight south to the river and Brixton, her head held stiffly, as if it still hurts. She has not complained of any pain for a while, but they all know that means nothing—Tiger never complains.

  Edgar takes his leave of the other two, lingering a bit with Lucy’s hand in his before separating: his friends turn north toward Kentish Town and the old Lear home, and he proceeds southwest to Mayfair to be with Annabel Thorne, the only mother he has ever known.

  Annabel greets him in the vestibule on the gleaming black-and-white marble floor with both arms outstretched to envelop him. He has the sense that she was already nearby, as if looking out the windows, in constant wait should he appear. She is still dressed in her widow’s weeds, black from head to foot, though she has somehow managed to find a dress that shows her ankles to good effect. She has magically made it cool in Thorne House too.

  “My dear boy!” she veritably screams and grips him in a vice-like hold that he doubts even a monster could loosen. Then she pushes him back and looks him in the eye.

  “Why did you not return home when news of that awful hotel fire was in the papers? It was a full two weeks ago. Your uncle burned to death! Dr. Godwin gone missing, presumed dead! Surely all that news reached you. You were only in Scotland, so you said. It is not the backwaters…well, actually it is, but did no one tell you?”

  “Yes, Mother, I knew something of it, but not details and—”

  “What, in the first place, pray tell, was this urgent hospital business to which you had to attend? And why did it keep you away even when such horrors were happening to your superiors down here? Did you take a side trip to Australasia or the blooming Arctic Ocean? I was without word after the first day you were gone!”

  He has gotten better at lying but it is always difficult to deceive Annabel Thorne.

  “I—I…”

  “Actually, you seem like your old self again.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That is not a compliment! Your old self! A sad, bag-eyed and morose little thing, instead of the later model, the one that loves his mother, tries to be happy and helpful, and gets on with life. Surely, the passing of your uncle and the vivisecting Dr. Godwin cannot be so devastating to you, can it? You did not like Vincent Brim at all. I know it! No great loss concerning Godwin either, I say. I did not care a farthing for him! It is not their deaths that have turned you this way. Have you been thinking?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Thinking!”

  “I don’t understand what—”

  “I have been reading a great deal while you were away, and there are new people about who study the brain, the feelings and the nervous disposition in an entirely different way these days. There is a young man in Austria by the name of Freud who is at the forefront of all of this, and he has written a wonderful study or two about it. Nervous disorders! Phobias! Neurasthenia! We are becoming a world full of contemplators and worriers and anxious sorts, depressing people always thinking and thinking and thinking…about ourselves! It causes all sorts of unneeded stress to your nervous system. You must DO, Edgar, DO! Stop all this inwardness.” She pauses for a moment. “Then, of course, you might simply be in love. Are you, Edgar? Is it a Scottish lass? Do tell!”

  “Mother, I am merely fatigued, and yes, a little saddened by the terrible human cost of that fire. I will go to my room and have a good night’s sleep and return a new man.”

  * * *

  —

  But in the night, his enemy comes again.

  He is struggling to sleep when he hears her moving up the stairs, a light tread but her hobbled gait recognizable, the pace of a witch from a dark fairy tale, like the ones that his father used to read aloud, the ones that seeped into his infant brain. One is not supposed to truly hear the things that are happening in a story, but Edgar Brim could. It was as if someone, something, perhaps the author, perhaps God, was providing the sounds.

  The footsteps draw nearer and then the door opens and he looks down toward the end of the bed and past it, paralyzed, and sees her hideous face in the entrance. She has never looked like this! The image before him is not a ghost, not ethereal and fictional, not translucent and amorphous, but real, three-dimensional and breathing and moving on two solid feet whose treads are audible. The old woman closes the door behind her and regards him. Then she starts across the floor toward him.

  “I will do evil to you,” she hisses, “and to your friends.” This time there is no doubt that the words are coming from her. Her face looks made-up, rouged with red, black around the eyelids, white powder in the folds of her skin, her hair dark and long. She comes at him in a sort of glide. He tries to scream but when he opens his mouth, he cannot make a sound. That is the way it has always been, ever since he was a child.

  Now she is standing over him, grinning. Then she seizes the covers and sweeps them back, leaving him cold in his nightgown beneath her. She has never done this before. She swoops down upon him and he can fe
el her this time, the weight of her torso on him, her body stronger and more powerful than before, her woman’s chest on his, her lips close to his mouth, her breath like a strange perfume that makes his head swim. He wants to die. Panic attacks him and his heart pounds so hard that he fears it will burst.

  “I will do evil to you,” she repeats, “and to your friends!” The word evil stretches out until it seems to envelop the entire sentence—the e long and hard, the rest like a smooth blanket on which it sits.

  Then the hag suddenly rises. This time, she does it differently: she does not float away, instead she walks backward, feels for the knob, opens the door and goes out. He hears her footsteps descending the stairs, the front door opening and closing. Then there is silence.

  When sound returns, it is Edgar’s own breathing he hears, fast and hard. He moves his toes, then his knees, his thighs, his stomach, his fingers, his hands, his mouth. He pulls the covers back up over himself. Then he lies there for hours, unable to sleep. He thinks and thinks. He convinces himself that the old woman cannot be in any way real. This is simply the “hag phenomenon,” a psychic reality that descends on some people at night or at dawn, descends on their brains and their imaginations, not a real person upon their sleeping forms. It is in his power to send it away. Annabel is right. He must DO. Whatever it is, he must DO. Go back to work, train for another profession, leave the monsters behind and change his life, stop imagining a devil is nearing.

  * * *

  —

  Then Edgar encounters Beasley.

  The butler knocks on his door at dawn. It is an unusual thing for him to do. Beasley is well aware that Edgar never wants to be roused in the mornings or have his clothes prepared or his breakfast brought to him or anything of that sort. He hates all those kinds of services. Yet, there is Beasley, at his room.

  “Sir, might I have a word?” he asks when Edgar opens the door.

  “Of course, Beasley.” The boy smiles at him. He is already dressed for the day.

  “I heard something in the night, sir, so I came down the stairs. It seemed like footsteps, each carefully set like those of a thief in the night. When I came to this floor, I had the sense that this intruder had been at your door. Indeed, your entrance was slightly ajar. I followed the sounds down the staircase, as quiet as a mouse, mind you, and saw someone go out the front door.”

  “Someone?” Edgar’s voice is barely audible.

  “An old woman, sir.”

  Shaking, Edgar slips past the butler and begins to make his way downstairs, seized by an overpowering need to flee, to run from the nightmare that seems to be alive in his life again. He is anxious not to encounter Annabel, to leave the house before she has the chance to question him again and see his even more unsettled appearance.

  “It is likely nothing about which to concern yourself,” he hears Beasley say behind him. “Just an old woman, not a threat to anyone, a wandering street person. But I shall ensure that all the doors are locked in the future.”

  Edgar finds his own quick breakfast of toast and tea in the kitchen at the back, but Beasley intercepts him again as he attempts to slip out the front door. The butler is bearing a card on a gleaming silver tray. It is on the personal stationery of someone whose name he does not recognize, and it requests Edgar’s appearance at the London Hospital, where he had worked alongside the monster Dr. Godwin until a few weeks ago. It is as if someone is magically giving him a reason to be somewhere else, to elude Annabel. His presence is required there in exactly an hour and a half, a perfect length of time to walk through the city to the East End, to calm himself, surrounded by reality, not the dreams swirling in his mind. He tells Beasley to send messages to his friends in Kentish Town and Brixton, asking them to meet him at the hospital in the afternoon—he wants to be sure that they are all right, especially Tiger.

  He makes his way through the loud London day as if he were inside a bubble, still anxious about what happened in the night. He tries with his very being to take things in, to concentrate on the real world around him—the sights, the sounds, the smells. He cannot, however, seem to think of anything but the hag. She keeps going round and round in his head. He looks over his shoulder, into the shop windows, down the alleys that he passes.

  Eventually, it occurs to him that speaking to someone would be the best way to get out of his bubble and get away from his fears, and even though the matron at the hospital’s front desk is as formidable as usual, she is most definitely real. He walks right up to her.

  “Master Brim,” she snaps, “you are to proceed all the way to the top floor to the chairman’s office, where your presence is expected.” She looks angry about it.

  He wonders why in the world he would be wanted up there where the wealthy and influential people who run the hospital often meet with the powerful man who makes the final decisions. Edgar knows it only as a mysterious place located behind double wooden doors at the end of the upper floor’s main hall, an inner sanctum.

  The hospital’s ceiling fans are little relief against the heat. His shirt soaked through with sweat, Edgar climbs staircase after staircase, gets to the top nearly out of breath, and sees his destination way down the hall. As he approaches, he observes that the doors are wide open and a crowd of doctors and other hospital employees have gathered inside its ample space. Three or four well-dressed gentlemen are settling themselves at a long gleaming table under a huge stained-glass window with an image of Christ looking down upon them. No one seems to notice Edgar as he slips into a chair at one end.

  One of the well-dressed gentlemen, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow wearing a monocle, a long black coat, checked waistcoat and gray trousers, rises to his feet. Edgar is surprised to see that his handsome face is tanned, unlike the pasty white visages of his colleagues. “I will be brief,” he begins. “As chairman of your hospital board, I have gathered you here today to inform you that we are moving forward on the assumption that our esteemed colleague, the brilliant Dr. Godwin, has met the same regrettable fate as his friend and collaborator, Dr. Vincent Brim. Though the latter’s remains were found in the fire that ravaged the Midland Grand Hotel, there was no sign of the former, but his simultaneous disappearance has led the police to conclude that he met his maker in the same inferno. It is a sensible conclusion. Though none of us knew of Godwin’s laboratory on the top floor of the hotel, neither were any of us surprised to learn that his dedication to his science, one might even say his art, kept him at his research even when away from this hospital, and also that his dear friend, Brim, would be with him. Medicine has its dangers even to those who are not patients. The fire, it seems, originated in the lab. Some sort of combustion occurred while these two valiant men were at work…with the tragic result that they are no longer with us. May God bless them.”

  There is a murmur of similar blessings from the men at the table. Edgar remains silent, his mind cast back to those terrifying moments in that laboratory. He sees himself and his friends captured and tied to tables so the monster Godwin could experiment upon them, make a hybrid human being out of them, just as Godwin himself had once been made by the brilliant mind and expert hands of another. Edgar thinks of his uncle setting fire to everything, his incineration, and their narrow escape.

  “We shall encourage applications for the chief operating surgeon’s role here and shall hire another doctor to take the admirable Vincent Brim’s place. We shall continue to pursue experimental surgery at the London Hospital and thus will remain at the forefront of advances in our great science. I know it is difficult to go on under these circumstances, but we are meant to be leaders of men, conveyors of succor and aid to the ill, and as such, we shall lift up our chins and proceed. Thank you, gentlemen.”

  There is an instant of silence and then the grinding of wooden chairs pushing back from the table on the polished wooden floor and a general exodus, which Edgar joins. The chairman, however, calls out amidst the noise.


  “Master Brim!”

  Edgar turns and regards the man and gestures to himself with a finger.

  “Yes, you, Brim, come forward.”

  The other board members are departing while deep in conversation. In moments, Edgar and the distinguished gentleman wearing the monocle are the only people left in the room.

  “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Edgar turns to go, but the chairman seems interested in detaining him.

  “My name is Andrew Lawrence, perhaps you have heard of me?”

  Edgar recognizes his name from the message that Beasley had given him this morning. He turns back to Lawrence.

  “No, sir…not before today.”

  Lawrence laughs. “Not a financial man, are you, Brim? I like that.” He has a deep voice that in formal speech is elegant and has a slight Irish lilt, but now, in private conversation, betrays a much broader accent. He seems an ordinary man, yet extraordinary at the same time. Edgar imagines him as a father, reading a story to his son in his slightly foreign, down-to-earth baritone and making it sound wonderful. Lawrence takes the monocle from his eye, leans down and speaks softly into Edgar’s ear. “They say I am the richest living thing in London, but the Rothschilds and Queen Victoria might beg to differ. They also say that such success is a remarkable thing for a man of my race.”