Edgar falls back into the chair. “There…there was one in my bed too! I didn’t think it was real!”
“This isn’t good,” says Shakespeare, “not a good thing at all!”
“Such brilliant analysis,” says Jonathan.
The little fellow smiles. “Thank you, Master Lear. You see, I just put together three intriguing facts that—”
“What is after us now?” asks Lucy, her trembling hand reaching out for Edgar’s. “I cannot go through this again. I cannot.”
“I told you all it would be worse! And now, it has come!”
“Hold your tongue, little man,” says Jonathan.
“It isn’t his fault, Jon,” says Lucy. “He is just telling us the truth, like he’s done all along. I have to escape from all of this and you three must come with me! We must flee and get as far away as we can, to the continent, maybe to America.”
“The devil is everywhere,” says Shakespeare in a dramatic voice. “You will not be able to elude him, no matter where you go.” He stares off into the distance as if he were seeing something horrific. Edgar has never seen the little man look so distraught.
“I told you to be quiet!” Jonathan is pacing now.
“What happened to the snakes? Are they still loose in your homes?” asks Edgar, rising and stepping toward the hallway and peering down it. “The butler did a thorough search at Thorne House but found nothing. What were they like?”
Lucy speaks in a monotone. “It was gigantic and green, like a monstrous worm in my bed. I screamed when I saw it and ran from my room, and Jonathan met me outside my door. He went in with his cricket bat, but could not find any sign of it, though the window was slightly ajar. It has not come back. At least, we don’t think it has.”
Edgar is wondering about the window in his own room. He will have to examine it when he returns.
“Anacondas, squeezers, lethal,” mutters Shakespeare.
“How do three gigantic snakes suddenly appear in our homes on the same night?” asks Tiger. “Is there an army of monsters against us this time?”
“Satan,” says Shakespeare. “He can take any form, be in many places at once!”
Edgar tries not to react. He returns to his chair and sits down, holding himself rigid.
“There goes my vacation,” says Jon. His smile is forced.
Tiger scratches her chin. “How do we fight this?”
“We don’t,” says Lucy. “We must pack our things tonight and get across the channel…to France.”
“The home of the devil,” says Shakespeare.
“We can’t run, sis. We have the cannon and the rifle, and we have our brains and our resourcefulness. Grandfather killed Grendel; we eliminated the vampire and a Frankenstein creature! We can do it again. We have a responsibility to protect others too. We know about the creatures, what they have done in the past, about our loved ones whom they killed! I will employ the weapons myself!”
“To shoot at what? Three giant snakes in three different places at once? An evil, a force as powerful as God?” says Lucy.
“I don’t think that’s quite—”
“You could…negotiate,” says Shakespeare.
“Ah, yes, a deal with the devil,” snaps Jon.
“It has been done before. In the Faust story for example, and in many other tales,” says the little man.
Edgar remembers the great actor Henry Irving portraying the devil so convincingly in the Faust play at the Lyceum Theatre, he and his friends and Professor Lear watching as if entranced from the seats…the night the vampire creature first appeared to him, right on that stage. He remembers murdering it just a few days later.
“Exactly. Stories!” shouts Jon.
“And what did the devil want in Faust?” asks Edgar in a monotone. He knows the answer.
“I believe it was a soul, Master Broom.”
“Ah, yes,” says Jon, “a small price to pay.” He strides to the fireplace and seizes Alfred Thorne’s remarkable rifle from the mantel, the one with the expanding bullets, the one that took off three-quarters of the vampire’s neck. He snaps the chamber open and sees that it is loaded. He smiles. “Let’s stop talking nonsense. I am not running away. If it can incarnate itself as something, then that something must be made of flesh and blood, a visible living being of a sort, and that means we can kill it. An anaconda, big as it is, would not react well to one of these bullets exploding its head into a million pieces.” His face is flushed. “Let it come, I say!”
He points the gun at the door, then down the hall. Edgar, however, can see the fear in his eyes, doubt behind all the bluster, doubt that is creating the bluster.
Edgar lowers his head into his hands. “I’m not sure what to do. I do not think fleeing is the answer either. It wasn’t the other times we were pursued. They keep coming. We simply have to figure out how to defeat it.”
“Or them,” says Shakespeare. “As Miss Lear pointed out, there were three of them in your beds!” His foot is tapping wildly, as if someone else were controlling it.
“Three or six hundred and sixty-six, we’ll be ready!” says Jon.
Edgar lifts his head. “I’m going to stay here tonight and maybe tomorrow, maybe all week. I think it is best we are together with the cannon and the rifle. Tiger and Lucy should share a bed, and Jon and I another.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” says Jonathan.
“Every precaution, everyone alert, every weapon primed.”
“I have seen him,” says the little man under his breath.
“What did you say?” asks Edgar.
“We’ve all seen him,” mutters Tiger. “One way or another.”
“It will not work!” screeches Shakespeare. “OH! We are all doomed!”
“We?” says Jon. “You haven’t been a target yet.”
That is true, thinks Edgar, very true.
* * *
—
Edgar leaves for the hospital the next day with some trepidation. He wishes he could remain with his friends all day. He sends a note to Annabel, telling her that he has decided to stay at the Lears’ home for a few days and that Beasley should send some clothing to the Kentish Town address for him.
When Edgar reaches the second-to-top floor, he sees that the blinds on the nerve specialist’s door are down once more and the lights dim again too. He rushes past it without pausing.
When Edgar is shown into Sir Andrew’s room, the chairman is too wrapped up in the invisible woman he is squiring about the floor in a waltz to notice his assistant. He is singing too, just as Annabel did, though he is butchering his song, an operatic piece sung at an ear-injuring level. His happiness makes Edgar feel as though they are living in different realities. The chairman is positively floating on air, a man unquestionably in love. It is such a contrast to the evil that Edgar feels is closing in on him and his friends.
Edgar stands quietly inside the office door until Sir Andrew comes to the end of his dance. “Ah! My boy!” he finally says. “Sit down.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Sir Andrew takes the chair behind his desk and Edgar the one in front of it.
“How is your mother? You know, I am not quite myself when I am with her. I feel a sort of intoxication, almost. It is very strange. I know I should have told you that I asked her to walk out with me, alone. I am sorry for that, not like me to do that, normally, but she seemed so accepting of it when I asked. How is she, indeed?”
Edgar wonders how he could have doubted Sir Andrew Lawrence. “She is well, sir.” He pauses. He thinks of the fact that there is not a single man left in his life to whom he can talk. “I have something of pressing importance to share with you.”
“Well, no beating around the bush, I see. If it is a bad thing, then let us hear it. I think I could bear anything right now, even about your mother, though I shan
’t believe it if it is too unsavory.”
“It is bad, yes, but it’s about me. It is something that I must tell you. I desperately need to tell you…because I believe I can trust you.” Edgar’s hands are shaking and Lawrence notices.
“This sounds serious indeed. You have my full attention. Whatever I can do for you, I shall.”
Edgar pauses again. “Do you recall that I said something about monsters the other day?”
“Yes, yes. You and I share a vivid imagination. We enter the stories we read, the plays we see, and the paintings we regard. Though I do have the sense such experiences are more intense for you. So…monsters? You have encountered them in the sensation novels that are about these days. That is nothing to be ashamed of, even if it upsets you greatly. It is not unmanly. It shows you have feelings and that you care. It might actually be a good—”
“They are real.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I should not say that. They are not all real. I don’t mean that…but some of them are.”
“I don’t follow you. What is real?” Lawrence’s light tone is diminishing.
“There are aberrations in the world, sir.”
“Aberrations?”
“There are monsters; there are creatures alive on this earth like one might find in our imaginations, in their darkest corners. Some have appeared in famous stories.”
“Whatever do you mean? Are you referring to the beasts in fairy tales? Surely you—”
“I mean like Dracula.”
“Dracula?” Lawrence sits back. “Isn’t that the repulsive character which that fellow Stoker, the manager at the Lyceum Theatre, Irving’s man, put in that trash of a novel he wrote this year. There is a lascivious tone in it, lascivious indeed! Look here, I do not recommend that you read such things. I saw a review of it in the—”
“The monster in it was real.”
“Surely you can’t mean—”
“But we killed it.”
Edgar’s voice has dropped low, and though Lawrence barely hears him, he hears enough.
“Edgar…”
“I don’t mean to suggest that Mr. Stoker found a Count Dracula living in a castle in eastern Europe. Nor do I mean that he knows of a revenant that sucks blood from women’s necks, taking their essence from them in their bedrooms while their husbands are absent. And I am not suggesting that he knows of women who have been infected by such a beast and thus had to be staked through the heart by men with iron—”
“Edgar!”
“That is not what I am saying.”
“Then what, in God’s name, are you saying?” Sir Andrew is sitting bolt upright now.
“Mr. Stoker accidentally stumbled upon an aberration, one he didn’t know was a monster, and it found its way into that novel.”
“And…you killed it?” Lawrence pushes his chair back from the desk.
“Not just me. Me and three friends and a professor who destroyed Grendel.”
“Grendel? From the story…Beowulf?”
Edgar is not listening. He speaks as if in a trance. “A professor, a dear man, and a brave one, with just one arm…who is dead now…his throat crushed by another aberration…”
“Edgar, get a hold of yourself.”
“Frankenstein!”
Lawrence gets up from his chair, walks around his desk and puts a hand on Edgar’s shoulder. “Listen to me. You are suffering from delusions, a phobia of some sort, some neurasthenia, or nerve problem. I…I know about those things. I told you we have someone here now who can help with such difficulties. There, now, I won’t judge you.”
“Frankenstein’s creature…we murdered it too.”
“That is not something you—”
“We had to, sir. We had to!” Edgar is shouting now. “It was coming after us! I killed it with a harpoon gun from a whaling ship. It had gone north to the Arctic…like in the novel. Mary Shelley had seen it, though she was not aware she had. She put that thing into her novel and did not know that it really existed. Can you imagine that?”
“No, Edgar, no I cannot. You are in a real place here, right now. Look around this room, an office, my office, in the London Hospital in London, England. You are not in a novel, a play or a painting. You are here with me.”
“Dr. Godwin…he was Frankenstein’s creature!”
Lawrence’s eyes widen. “All right, Edgar, you really need to come with me.”
Edgar leaps to his feet. “I can prove it to you! Godwin was trying to make another creature just like himself. He was trying to eliminate us because we knew. That is what he was doing in that laboratory at the top of the Midland Grand Hotel! The reason he wasn’t found was because he escaped; his face burned off, yellow and scarred, stitched up, a marvelous brain placed in his skull. We chased him, though! We tracked him and destroyed him! They believe they cannot live if people know about them! There may be more of them. Who knows? Someone told us that if we killed one, another would come after us. I see a hag, sir, an old woman. She sat on my chest as I woke in the mornings when I was a child, but now she comes all the time…the hag phenomenon, sleep paralysis…no, it isn’t that…it is real! It talks to me now! My father read horror stories when I was a child; he did not know that I heard them. They came down through the heat pipes! They electrified my brain!…Find out where Godwin came from, sir. You will see. Because he came from nowhere and was not born of a woman. Find out where he was before he took up residence here, what hospital recommended him, and where he was before that! We dropped the dead vampire into the basement of the Lyceum, buried him in a grave along with his severed head—we cut it off in a guillotine—yes, put his head in there with him! Go there, sir, dig up the earth in the basement of the Lyceum Theatre! You will see!”
“Edgar, I am going to take you by the hand and lead you to another room now, a special room one floor down. I have mentioned it before.” Lawrence’s hand is shaking as he takes a hold of Edgar. “I will inform your dear mother of your situation.” His voice sounds choked.
Edgar pushes him away. “Shakespeare says that the next one that comes after the likes of us is always worse!”
“Shakespeare?”
“Do you know what is after us now?”
“Edgar, I—”
“DO YOU KNOW?”
“No.”
“There were SNAKES in our beds! SNAKES!”
“Edgar—”
“The devil! SATAN himself!”
Lawrence stares at him. Edgar Brim is quivering from head to foot.
“You must…God, SOMEONE must help us!”
Edgar runs from the room.
“Stop him!” cries Lawrence as he rushes to the door of his office and sees Edgar racing down the hallway. Two burly men who drive delivery carriages for the hospital have just appeared at the far end. They seize Edgar before he can get away.
“Take him to Dr. Berenice,” says Lawrence sadly, and then watches as the two men guide Edgar, struggling in their arms, out a door and down the stairs to the floor below. Realizing how powerful they are, he stops resisting.
That room with the blinds drawn down.
Edgar wonders if these men are working for him, for the devil. Perhaps Lawrence has a similar allegiance. They have me now! he thinks.
One of the men knocks on the alienist’s door and the same woman’s voice that Edgar heard the day before calls out for them to enter. They lead Edgar inside. All the lights are on in the room now, all the blinds on the tall windows pulled up, giving the sparse interior a stark brightness. It is almost cold in here, remarkable in the middle of another stifling hot day. The woman is sitting behind a desk near a sofa and when she notices the distraught expression on the face of the young person ushered in, she motions for the men to put him on a bed across the room. There are straps on it and they tie him down. She is past her mid
dle years, wearing a plain brown dress without a bustle, that fits her unusually snugly, as if to accentuate her shape. Her stomach is flat, her arms muscular. She stares at Edgar with wide eyes and intrigue, almost as if she recognizes him. He wonders for an instant too, if he knows her. There is a scent in the air around her, the mild aroma of a strange perfume. It too is vaguely familiar.
“Dr. Berenice?” says Andrew Lawrence, who is now standing at her door looking nearly as distraught as his young friend. “Please do not tie him to the bed. He is simply upset and I would like you just to speak with him. May I have a moment?”
“Of course, sir,” she says, nodding to the men to untie Edgar. Then she steps out into the hall and closes the door. Lawrence is a big man but Berenice is nearly his height. Edgar can hear them speaking in low tones for a good five minutes. “This is him?” she seems to ask at first—Edgar is not sure—their other words are muffled.
The burly men stand over the bed, looking down at the patient as if he were an animal. As the door opens, they begin to make their way out. Edgar glances toward the door and is shocked to see the doctor just leaving Sir Andrew Lawrence’s embrace; her hand going up and affectionately caressing his cheek as she steps away from him and re-enters the room. Edgar blinks. I cannot have seen that, he tells himself. The door was only open for an instant and there was barely a glimpse of them. I made it up in my distress.
The men depart and Berenice closes the door behind her without even glancing at them. She walks over to the bed, striding like an athlete, her feet making no sound on the floor as if she were not wearing shoes, or were gliding on air. She pauses for an instant above Edgar and then sits beside him, her wide hip under her thin garment touching his. He is trying not to struggle and lies there as limp as he can. She brings her face up close to his, examining him. She is quivering, her skin perspiring. He is surprised at how old she is—an aging visage on a fit and voluptuous body that she seems to make no bones about displaying. Her long hair is raven black, though it does not appear dyed.
“My name is Hilda Berenice,” she says in a quiet tone. Her eyes are black too. There is some sort of slight accent in her voice. Edgar wonders if it is German. She is attempting a smile but it appears as though mirth of any sort does not come naturally to her. She fidgets, first holding her hands together, then setting one on the bed near Edgar, then sliding it along so it touches him, then pulling it back. “So, Master Edgar Brim,” she finally says, “how are you feeling, now that we have you lying down and unrestrained?”
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