The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Read online

  Also by Shane Peacock

  Eye of the Crow

  Death in the Air

  Vanishing Girl

  The Secret Fiend

  The Dragon Turn

  Becoming Holmes

  Text copyright © 2016 by Shane Peacock

  Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Peacock, Shane, author

  The undead / Shane Peacock.

  (The dark missions of Edgar Brim)

  ISBN 978-1-77049-698-9 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-77049-700-9 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8581.E234U54 2016 jC813′.54 C2015-903997-5

  C2015-903998-3

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Tundra Books of Northern New York, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947652

  Edited by Tara Walker and Lara Hinchberger

  Cover images: (boy) CP Photo Art/Getty Images; (x-ray) Yuji Susaki/Getty Images; (fog) © Deviney/​Dreamstime.​com; (hole) © Carlos Caetano/​Dreamstime.​com

  Designed by Jennifer Lum

  www.​penguin​randomhouse.​ca

  v3.1

  To the admirable Hadley Jane,

  who has faced her fears

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: Preparation

  1: After the Demon

  2: Villains in his Bedroom

  3: Fear and Truth

  4: A Fatal Mistake

  5: Alfred Thorne

  6: Sent Away

  7: Dear Friend

  8: The Journal

  9: New Edgar, New Tiger

  10: Two Deaths

  11: Mission

  12: The Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen’s Empire

  13: Lear’s Secret

  14: You Have No Choice

  15: Armed

  II: First Pursuit

  16: Grave Concerns

  17: A Grim Decision

  18: An Offer

  19: Bait

  20: Hiding Place

  21: The Cellar

  22: The Secret Room

  23: Back in the Graveyard

  24: Graduation

  25: Meanwhile

  26: His Father’s Son

  27: The Novel

  III: Last Pursuit

  28: The Creature in the Book

  29: Stoker’s Art

  30: The Night Before

  31: The Devil’s Set

  32: Walpurgis Night

  33: After the Master

  34: In the Demon’s Nest

  35: The Real One

  36: Confrontation

  37: Buried Alive

  38: Another?

  39: Not the End

  Acknowledgments

  I

  Preparation

  I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  “Darkness,” George Gordon, known as Lord Byron (summer 1816)

  1

  After the Demon

  Edgar Brim can’t breathe. An old woman is upon him. She digs her knees into his chest, her talon hands grip his throat and her vile breath assaults him. Only his brain is alive and it is on fire. He wants to scream but can’t. He opens his mouth but no sound comes out.

  “Edgar?”

  It’s Lucy’s voice, distant.

  “Master Brim?”

  Jonathan is there too, in that realm between sleep and life.

  The hag usually comes as Edgar rouses. But today is different. He isn’t in his bed. He is a passenger on a locomotive heading north, a bleak landscape whizzing along on either side of the rails.

  Is the world out there reality? Or is this thing on his chest?

  This time the old crone may kill him. He is sure that one day she will. He tries to tell himself that she doesn’t exist, but he knows better. The hag is as authentic as the moors around them.

  Edgar imagines how he appears to his friends: his electric expression of fear, wild eyes like a horse’s being led to slaughter. He must seem a lunatic, paralyzed on his seat.

  Professor Lear barks something out like a gunshot and the old woman begins to fade. She loosens her grip and vanishes as she always has. So far. Edgar sits up.

  “Yes?” His voice sounds weak and he hates that.

  “Is everything all right?” asks Lucy.

  Sounds are coming to him now in a rush: rhythmic chugging, voices and the blast of the train’s whistle. He feels cold. Lucy is looking at him with sympathy, Jonathan with concern and the professor with interest.

  “It was the hag,” says Lear, matter-of-factly, turning back to his paper.

  “I am fine,” says Edgar.

  “We shall tend to her someday,” adds Lear, without lifting his eyes, “once we fry a bigger fish.” His left hand, his only hand, turns another page.

  Their mission comes back to Edgar with a jolt. He glances down at the bags by his seat and thinks of the guns inside, his master’s weapons. The book he has been reading is still held tightly in his hand, its cover yellow and title blood red, purchased new in London, hot off the press. The Most Frightening Novel in England! the advertisement at the W.H. Smith bookstand in Euston Railway Station had said.

  He smiles faintly at Lucy. He finds consolation in her face.

  “Be there in minutes,” says Lear in his deep voice.

  When the train grinds to a halt at lonely Altnabreac Station, Lucy and Jonathan bounce to their feet: she dressed in a modest brown cotton dress that reaches the floor, her bonnet brown too on her copper-colored hair; he buttoned tightly into a tan corduroy country suit, a cloth hunting cap on his head. Lear is in black from head to foot, as always, his starched white collar barely visible, sliced in two by his black cravat. He stands over Edgar, his massive left hand held out.

  “Brim,” he says. “It is time.”

  There had been a day when Edgar feared Professor Lear. But today he fears what they are after even more.

  A rough carriage, the transportation for the schoolboys of the College on the Moors, is waiting with the powerful dray horse named William Wilson hitched to it. Up above, the sky is the color of the gruel that Edgar imagines Oliver Twist was served in his workhouse long ago. It always seems that way in this part of the Highlands. Edgar gazes across the barren land, spotting bits of heather here and there, like diamonds in a bog. Where is the demon they seek? Is it out here somewhere, perhaps in the hills killing animals and eating them raw, waiting for this very group to come to it?

  The silent driver, whose real name Edgar has never heard, who never speaks a word and apparently cannot speak, snaps the whip in his huge gloved hands and William Wilson begins to amble forward. The driver is hooded but you sometimes see his pronounced scars. His visible features have a patchwork appearance, as if each one belongs to someone else. He is extremely tall and glimpses of his complexion are like pale flashes of the moon.

  “We are walking into its trap,” says Lear. “But that is what we desire.”

  They continue in silence. The big wheels turn slowly. The black horse’s
hooves clap along on the gravel. Lear is deep in contemplation while Jonathan scans the horizon, the knuckles on one hand bone-colored where he grips the seat, the slight bulge in his coat betraying his pistol. Lucy’s face is tight and drawn.

  Edgar still clutches the book in his hand. He had begun reading it soon after they left London but couldn’t take much at once. He had lived it fully each time he turned to it, transported by the author’s words to a forest in the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe where a dark castle loomed and the hero was being warned not to go. Edgar had been that young man when he read. Just a few pages back, he was dropped on a treacherous turn in a road and a freakish, white-faced man offered to deliver him to the castle. The moon was full. Wolves were howling. Edgar had closed the book at that point. The dim light on the moors makes the lurid yellow cover glow, and the scarlet-lettered title, nearly a match for Brim’s flame-colored hair, almost vanishes into it.

  One can see the college from a long way off, black in this gray and brown world and set upon an elevation against a flat horizon. From a distance, it appears to be a ruin, but as one nears the road that leads to its iron gates, its grandeur is revealed. Its three-and-a-half stories of granite stretch out in long wings and face south toward civilization; its gothic windows, crisscrossed with black lines, are set deep in the stone and seem like eyes. A single black turret towers above.

  Lear’s leather satchel is beside him on the carriage bench. Edgar sees a shape protruding in its skin, sharp, as if it wants to slice through. The old man has brought his knife too, as big as a sword.

  The mute driver takes them around the curving driveway that winds through the only grass in sight and stops at the wooden doors, like portals for giants.

  They open.

  Lear has sent word ahead about his two grandchildren. They are expected and are to be employed as his academic assistants, helping him clean up during the last week of school. But that, of course, is not why they are really here, nor has Edgar come back for his graduation.

  They are here to kill.

  2

  Villains in his Bedroom

  Sixteen years earlier, little Edgar looked up from his cradle to see a man with dark circles under his eyes approach him in the dimness of the nursery. The man bore a dripping candle in one hand and a fairy tale in the other. He wielded the book like a weapon.

  “Ah, the boy and the giant!” said his father, his face becoming clear to the infant.

  From somewhere behind Allen Brim, Edgar heard sounds he couldn’t identify—sighs and creaks and whispers—sneaking through their barely furnished mansion like the scurrying of ghosts.

  Allen began to read and, like magic, the child entered the story. The first part was beautiful—Edgar was a few years older and ascending a fantastic plant into heaven. Everything was green and wonderful, and a shining palace appeared in the distance. But once he went through its doors, there came the thudding of footsteps: the footfalls of a monster. Inside his little mind, the child began to run. He looked behind him as he fled and saw the giant’s feet coming around a corner and after him, crushing the stone floor beneath. Terror rose like a volcano inside him.

  Fee-fi-fo-fum,

  I smell the blood of an Englishman,

  Be he live, or be he dead,

  I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

  The giant reached out and snatched him! He could feel the meaty hands closing around his ribs, squeezing the life from him. The monstrous teeth were thick and blunt and they didn’t just slice the boy, they crushed him, tearing him in half and swallowing him in big bleeding bits. Edgar’s scream exploded into his father’s face and erupted into Raven House, shaking the very walls, it seemed.

  The kindly man snapped the book shut and stepped back.

  How could this be? he thought. The baby was too small to follow the story. How could it affect him so? Had it been read with too much feeling?

  “You … you, young sir, must stop that blubbering,” said Allen, employing his happy face. The lad began to settle and stared up at his father, who now leaned down to kiss him on his large forehead. Squire Brim’s hair was the same color as his son’s, their eyes dark blue like a stormy English sky.

  “Look, I have ceased reading that tale, my boy,” said Allen, holding out his empty hands in their fingerless gloves to his tiny charge. “I shan’t do it again.”

  There hadn’t been a fire all day in Raven House, and not a single servant lived or worked anywhere in its many rooms. The squire had so neglected his businesses that he was unable to pay the help, and one after the other, they had left. The Brims came from a long line of industrious country squires and Allen was destroying what they had built. He was a good man, a very good man, but he was a dreamer.

  “Shall I offer you something from my own work, my boy?” he asked. He reached for another book, opened it and began to read.

  Edgar cried even louder than before.

  “A critic!” said Allen. “Well, I do not blame you,” he sighed, pulling his woolen greatcoat around his shoulders and his sleeping cap over his ears. He tucked the blanket about his son and they shivered together. “I do not blame you at all.”

  Squire Brim’s latest novel, the one he had just threatened to inflict upon the little one, had sold exactly sixty-six copies. Pleasant Endings was an uplifting tale throughout, and tearfully boring. “Should you have troubles sleeping,” one reviewer had written, “keep this novel on your bed table and it will solve your problems with admirable alacrity. Simply open it and begin to read. I can assure you that you shall be fast asleep before the first chapter reaches its sunny conclusion.”

  But wee Edgar Brim disagreed. It was as if the story demanded that he must be happy just moments after the life had been scared out of him. He remained wide awake in the old wooden cradle after his father left the room, listening to the footsteps thumping up the stairs and then striking heavily on the bedroom floor above. Edgar had often been up there, carried tenderly in large arms across that big room, and shown the many volumes in the looming bookcase, his eyes drawn to the ones with the brighter covers that were kept way up on the top shelf. His father would sometimes gently set him down on the big bed and simply glow at him.

  But now Edgar lay alone as the moonlight streamed in upon him through the bare windows, listening in fear for the sound he knew would come next. And there it was: through the heat pipe that ran between the master bedroom and his room, he heard his father crying, soft, heart-wrenching sobs that filled the air in the nursery.

  And in that air, as if on cue, someone began materializing near the ceiling. She floated down toward him, seemingly growing out of the very pain that his father was sending through that pipe. The infant was no longer afraid: she was lovely and smiling at him, like an angel come to soothe him. Edgar reached out his little arms to her, but his hands went right through her. Virginia Brim wasn’t really there, for she had died giving birth to him.

  Then her face became grotesque and her hands reached for his throat.

  3

  Fear and Truth

  A few years later, in the bleakest part of winter, Allen Brim ascended Raven House’s creaking wooden stairs with a smile emerging on his lips. His breath puffed in clouds in front of him and he wrapped his arms close to his frayed coat. Young Edgar was such a sensitive child. Even at age four, it took him forever to settle in his bed. Every night when Allen tiptoed up to his own room, the boy was still fussing. But this evening he seemed to have drifted off!

  “It is time,” said the squire out loud.

  He trembled with excitement. He had been waiting for this for a long time. He wouldn’t even think about the empty bed with its two pillows arranged there, just as they always had been when his wife was alive. He would walk past it to the ceiling-high bookcase that ran along every wall. He needed to stand on boxes to reach the top shelf. Books were the only thing he spent his traces of money on these days; that, and a yearly trip to the theater. There was little left for anyth
ing else.

  Squire Brim was planning to let himself go. Tonight, he would read out loud from one of the stories up there in those lurid covers, exclaiming and gesticulating, wrapped up in its essence. That was the only way to come to grips with a literary work of art. At night in this grim house, these dark tales would arise. He hadn’t been able to do this for four years, but tonight, with the boy finally appearing to be deeply asleep, he could unleash them. He knew the words would resonate in the stillness of the room while the blackness glowered through the windows! He tried not to run to the shelves. He wished he had the courage to write such vivid tales, such dark truths.

  But which would he choose? He climbed onto his two wooden boxes and moved his shaking fingers along the spines. How about the Russian folktale that told the feats of history’s most fearsome witch, Baba Yaga? He imagined that story scaring the life out of him! Or what about John Polidori’s The Vampyre? Was there ever such a villain as the beast in those pages? Tomorrow, he would go to the village bookshop and purchase The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the new novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, just published last week. It was said to be terrifying, the monster so authentic he seemed right next to you. If all went well, Allen could perform it next!

  He searched farther along the top shelf. And there it was: the only story for this night. He took it into his hands and descended to the floor. Dare he? He gave it one last thought and reassured himself. His little boy was far away in dreamland, and the floor between them was thick. “Frankenstein,” said Allen in a cold clear voice, “by Mary Shelley.” He opened the novel:

  With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.… His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.