The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim

by Shane Peacock

  “No,” Edgar says again to the hag, and she begins to fade. She tries to cling to him, but the weight has been removed. Up above, the monster has his hands on Lucy’s bared shoulders, his mouth moving toward her chest.

  A hole in the heart! thinks Edgar. This thing will puncture her and suck blood straight from the source! The best blood, the purest. Why would it bother with a neck? That’s just a story.

  At that moment, Edgar becomes fully aware of his powers. Though everyone else is helpless, he is different. Edgar Brim can be in an imagined world and also be aware of it. He knows he is being hypnotized. So he can step out of it! He has always had the ability to understand stories, enter them and watch and mine them as he reads or listens. He is aware of both stories being played out on the stage. The demon doesn’t know that. It cannot entrance Edgar like it does the others.

  Edgar rises to his feet. He scrambles over the seats to the aisle.

  Up above, the tall man spots him out of the corner of his eye and pulls back from Lucy’s chest, utter surprise on his face.

  Edgar seizes the edge of the stage and leaps onto it. He turns for an instant and looks back at the crowd. Every face stares at a now-frozen Irving!

  Edgar turns to the demon. It takes a step away, almost frightened. But then it leans down and again picks up Lucy and Jonathan. They droop over his long spidery limbs.

  “Let them be,” says Edgar. His voice is strong but quiet. “Or—”

  “Or what?” says the man. It is a deep, foreign voice. He is late in his middle years with dark eyes and brows, a shaved head with a long nose like an eagle’s. He is dressed in black, his white shirt almost startling amidst his long dark coat.

  “I will shout,” says Edgar and motions to the audience, “and all this will end.” He scans the crowd. “They will awaken!” He hopes this is true.

  The revenant pauses. “So we have a standoff, Master Brim. I believe, however, I have the advantage upon you.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Should you shout and break the spell, I shall kill one of your lovely friends here instantaneously. Examine them, so delectable! You can watch.” He smiles and Edgar can see the long teeth inside his red mouth. They aren’t fangs, but they are big and long and powerful, perhaps grown sturdy over the centuries, beyond human teeth. He sees that one has been sharpened to a point. Edgar imagines this beast penetrating Lucy’s or Jonathan’s chest, driving down right through the breastbone, cracking it, the blood sucked from the heart.

  “I used to take from the jugular vein but I was still weak afterward. I needed purer sustenance. I learned to bore into the heart, crush through the protective bone for the best wine! I’m sure I was seen sucking on necks! It gave rise to such silly, romantic twaddle!”

  Edgar isn’t sure what to do. But he must do something. He considers attacking his opponent. But a better idea comes to him.

  “I shall let you go,” he says, “if you let them be.”

  The revenant ponders this for a moment. “No one can know,” he finally says, stepping back. His eyes glisten. “And I shall come for you again, very soon.”

  “And I for you.”

  “Please do.”

  “Let them be.”

  “I shall set them down and walk up the aisle within inches of hundreds of people. Should you shout at any moment, I will kill someone, perhaps more than one.”

  He keeps his red eyes fixed on Edgar as he sets Lucy and Jon onto the boards. Then he leaps down into the aisle and turns to observe his enemy. He walks slowly backward, his face toward the stage, his long fingers caressing one spectator after another. And then, in the blink of an eye, he is out the door.

  Edgar feels like he should weep. But he doesn’t and neither does he shout. If he cries out, how will he explain all this, standing here alone on the stage with the Lears at his feet, their clothes disheveled and undone? He looks around in this frozen work of art. Irving stands just a few feet away. Edgar walks toward him. He brings his face up within inches of his. He looks into the black eyes. Are they truly evil? What, really, is his role in this darkness? Edgar turns toward Lucy and Jonathan, spread out below him on the floor. They had been at the monster’s mercy and he had saved them.

  He advances and stands over Lucy. Her beautiful copper hair hangs down over the top of her opened dress, her red mouth open, her eyes still caught in a look of desire. She is truly magnificent. He kneels down between the two siblings. He is remembering what Mephistopheles says to Faust about women: that they were there for his pleasure.

  He reaches for Lucy, quickly re-fastens her dress, fixes her hair back into place and does up the buttons on Jonathan’s shirt. He drags the bigger boy to the edge of the stage, gets down, then hoists him up on his shoulders with a grunt and somehow gets him to his seat. He does the same with Lucy, carrying her in his arms. Then, he returns to his own place.

  He shouts.

  There is a different sort of silence in the theater as the spell is broken. The actors, including Irving, come out of their freeze but are still. But then the great stage veteran declaims his next line and the play resumes.

  Lucy and Jonathan are staring up at Sir Henry, alive and intrigued. She finds a hair out of place and absentmindedly puts it back. She notices Edgar looking at her and smiles at him. He smiles back. Did he dream what just happened?

  He feels a couple of marks on his throat, just slight ones, already fading.

  At the play’s end, they head up the aisle and retrieve their coats from the cloakroom.

  “Nothing remarkable in the production,” says Lear. “We must sneak back in once the crowd disperses. We know the innards of the theater well now.”

  “No,” says Edgar firmly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The boy has never spoken like this to the professor.

  “Our plans have changed.”

  Outside, Edgar explains. He sees faces grow white, even Lear’s. He takes Lucy’s hand as he speaks and feels her tremble. Tiger looks angry. Only Jonathan is unaffected. He offers a smirk and shakes his head in disbelief.

  Edgar is thinking of two other things as he speaks. The first is that the crosses on their chests did nothing. The second is what the demon said to him when they were locked in their duel upon the stage.

  “I shall come for you again,” it had said, “very soon.”

  33

  After the Master

  “The creature isn’t here now,” says Edgar as they all stand in a circle outside the theater. “He has fled the building.”

  Lucy, who had pulled her coat about herself as Edgar spoke, now feels Tiger’s arm go around her too. They stand close.

  “Eddie,” says Jonathan, “you can’t expect us to believe this. These things you dreamed this phantom did to me? Not possible.”

  “Jon,” says Lucy, “he saw—”

  “I suppose it didn’t say where it went?” asks Jonathan. “Perhaps out for a spot of tea?”

  “I don’t know,” replies Edgar. “I saw what I saw. You can believe as you wish.”

  “It is said that hypnotism is a power these creatures possess,” says Lear.

  “Where? In the handbook for vampires?”

  “Why would Brim make this up?”

  “I didn’t say that. He fell asleep. He was dreaming. He’s good at that.”

  “We cannot take the chance that he wasn’t.”

  “I think we should proceed as if it was real,” adds Lucy. Tiger says nothing.

  “Sis, I believe you are biased. We should re-enter and search inside, trap this thing.” He puts his hand on the pistol in his coat. “I’m ready!”

  “That would be useless,” says Edgar matter-of-factly. “It has gone. We need to seek it somewhere else.”

  “Perhaps in your fantasies?”

  “If this is happening,” asks Lear, as much to himself as the others, “then what, exactly, is Irving’s role?” He addresses Edgar. “Is he making you see this man? Is he the monster?” />
  “I can’t say for sure.”

  “What of Stoker?”

  Even Jonathan is grim at that.

  “We need to see Irving in person again, examine him closer this time, speak to him and draw him out.”

  Edgar realizes that when Sir Henry was frozen and within inches of his face, he had been so intrigued by his eyes that he hadn’t bothered to examine the rest of him. He should have looked closely at his throat and unbuttoned his costume and searched his chest. He worries that Jonathan is right—perhaps he dreamed everything. Standing outside in the cool London night now, it all seems a fantasy.

  “We must speak to Stoker more forthrightly too,” says Lear. “Corner him. Make him answer!” He turns to Jonathan. “For now, let us believe what Brim is telling us and move forward. If we are wrong, we will know soon enough!”

  Moments later they are at the back door on Burleigh Street. Another little crowd has gathered. They wait for a long while. A drizzle begins to fall. The sounds of the city—the harnesses, drunken shouts, distant conversations—lessen as the night lengthens.

  Then the door opens with a bang. Hawkins pushes the crowd back. Out comes Irving, appearing more exhausted this time, his eyes dead under his top hat, his walking stick hanging limply from his side, Stoker behind him and concerned, his arms reaching out but not touching him, as if trying to guide him toward the hansom cab that is now rolling up. Edgar steps directly in front of Irving, checking his neck, ready with a question.

  “Are you—”

  “Stand back!” cries Stoker. “You should know better! Step away!”

  There are no puncture marks or healing wounds anywhere that Edgar can see, but he is aghast at how drained the face is. Then again, Irving is nearly sixty years old and at the end of another exhausting, soul-stirring turn. Edgar again wishes he could see his bare chest.

  Alarmed by the boy, Irving steps quickly up into the carriage and it is sent away before another word is said. Stoker turns back to them, eyes on fire.

  “What can you possibly be thinking?”

  Lear moves close to him. “We believe that the fiend in your novel may be real. And it may have something to do with Mr. Irving.”

  Several of the other hangers-on hear what he says and turn back from watching the carriage slip into the night. They step away from the business manager of the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the one-armed man who is confronting him.

  “I shall call the police,” says Stoker. “You are mad.”

  “I do not mean that you saw a demon exactly like that or even that it exists in that form. But you saw or heard something. Some force caused you to write Dracula, something deep and meaningful, more than you have told us, something somehow real!”

  The onlookers start to walk away. Hawkins stands near his boss, unsure what to do.

  Stoker steps back from them. He thinks of the second voice he has so often heard in Irving’s dressing room. He thinks of the cruel deeds of Vlad the Impaler, of Irving’s fascination with the long-dead tyrant, of what he learned when he researched his life, imagining human beings impaled right through their bodies from their trunks up through their throats. He thinks of the man with the foreign voice in Scotland that seemed to match the one in Irving’s room, walking away in the rain in the direction of the Highlands and its desolate moors. He thinks of Irving in the morgues of Paris, on ship decks in storms on the Atlantic, and of the power Irving has over people, the way he connects to evil. Stoker wonders about a vampire, not a fantasy, not something fended off with garlic and crosses and feared only between the pages of a sensation novel. What if one were real?

  “Did you,” asks Edgar, “model your demon after Irving?”

  Hawkins walks away and re-enters the theater. Only Stoker remains near the five friends, though a young woman, who was here the previous night, is listening carefully a carriage length away.

  “Did you?” repeats Lear.

  “That is nonsense,” says Stoker, swallowing. He walks toward the door and then is gone.

  “We must pursue Irving,” says Edgar.

  “But we have no idea where he has gone,” says Lucy.

  “I do,” says a voice behind them. The young woman steps forward. “I come ’ere every night to see ’im walk by, though I’ve only seen ’im once upon the stage. Can’t afford more.” Her eyes glow. “I’ve followed ’im, sirs, and I know where ’e lives. Takes Miss Terry with ’im some evenings.” She smiles. “I ’ave sat outside ’is place all night, many times, until the bobbies ’ave moved me on.”

  Tiger walks up to her. “Tell us where he lives,” she demands. Jonathan advances too.

  But the woman barely hears. Perhaps forty years younger than the legendary master of the Lyceum stage, her mind is soaring and in his thrall. “You are right about ’im! Powers, ’e ’as!” Her eyes are huge now. “I love ’im. But ’e’s a demon!”

  They hail two hansom cabs and tell the drivers the address the woman gave them: 17 Stratton Street off Piccadilly. It takes them less than fifteen minutes to get there. They head west down The Strand through the south end of Trafalgar Square and then along the north side of Green Park, its wrought iron fence between them and Buckingham Palace, lit wonderfully in the distance. They tell the cabbies to stop on the corner. Number seventeen is a cricket bowl away, up this short, canyon-like road of four- and five- story buildings, most made of stone or brick and set tightly together like walls.

  “Let’s go right in, surprise him,” says Edgar.

  “That would be best, weapons out,” says Jonathan.

  They had decided not to take the time to return to the hotel, so they don’t have Thorne’s guns, but they have the pistol, the kitchen knives, and Lear has his sword-like blade. They have their crucifixes and strings of garlic in the pockets of their out-of-door coats. They have a measure of deadly force.

  “We may find only Irving,” says Lear, “not the creature.”

  “Perhaps one and the same,” says Tiger.

  Edgar is looking out into the night. “We may have to kill both.”

  Jonathan turns to his grandfather. “Your blade goes through his heart.”

  “We shall knock and I’ll send up my card,” says Lear. “We want to speak with him first. Our journey will either end here or come very close.” His voice falters a little on the last word. “Be prepared for anything, all of you.”

  They walk up the street and find number seventeen, a five-story red brick building at the end with little iron balconies, extensive flats on each floor. The young woman had said that Irving’s was at the top. They can see a light up there and a shadow pacing back and forth.

  There is no footman at the main door. It creaks when they open it. They begin walking up the stairs.

  34

  In the Demon’s Nest

  Lear puts a finger to his lips and they ascend the stairs as slowly and quietly as possible. But the girls are in evening dresses and coats and have to hold them up as they walk, setting the narrow heels of their boots carefully on each step. Tiger’s face is filled with frustration; Lucy is patient. The stairs are wooden and the five intruders go rigid with each creak, even as they pass the first few stories. Once they get to the fourth, they slow even more, hearing footsteps pacing on the floor above, and as they light upon the first step going to the fifth, they hear voices and halt. The dominant voice is not Irving’s. It is deeper, foreign. Edgar cups his hands over his mouth and whispers to the others. “It’s the demon I saw on the stage!” Fear flickers across Jonathan’s eyes, as if for the first time he is facing the possibility that the scene in the theater was not a dream.

  Edgar thinks of his father. He pulls his knife from his coat and advances up the stairs.

  “Edgar!” cries Tiger as loudly as she dares. But he doesn’t stop and she follows. Just as she did against the coward Fardle long ago, she will defend him tonight to the death.

  The others have no choice but to go with them. Up on the top floor there is only one door. They sn
eak down the polished wooden boards of the hallway toward it. When they arrive, Edgar motions to Tiger. She pulls a wire from the underclothing inside her dress. In less than a minute, she has sprung the lock.

  As the door swings slowly inward, they can hear the deep voice much clearer. In fact, that voice is now all they hear. It is moving about, its owner pacing. They get inside and gently close the entrance, crouching down in the vestibule. The voice is coming through a partially open door, emotionless.

  “I cannot die. I am undead. You are related. You are a genius. You can be irresistible. You can be evil for your art. Listen to me. Listen to me.”

  Lucy puts her jewelry into her coat pocket, slips the coat off and drops it onto the floor, then unlaces her high-heeled boots and removes them. The others watch in silence. They know what she is doing. She is the stealthiest of them all. Edgar wants to stop her but understands he shouldn’t. “You see,” mouths Lear to the others, “a woman!”

  But then Lucy does something that startles them even more. She takes off the cross. Jonathan reaches out to pull her back, but she is gone.

  Lucy crawls on her hands and knees into the drawing room. She catches a glimpse of the pacing man, but doesn’t pause because she’s exposed between a chair and a sofa. She darts behind the bigger piece of furniture.

  “I must sleep. I must sleep,” says the man. “It will be light before I know it.”

  Lucy peeks around the end of the sofa. The man is walking directly toward her. It’s Henry Irving. And he sees her! She scurries away, back toward her friends, knocking a lamp over as she flees. Edgar reaches out and catches it, but it still smacks into his hands.