Demon Read online

  Also by Shane Peacock

  Eye of the Crow

  Death in the Air

  Vanishing Girl

  The Secret Fiend

  The Dragon Turn

  Becoming Holmes

  The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim

  The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim: Monster

  Penguin Teen, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  Text copyright © 2019 by Shane Peacock

  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.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

  ISBN 9780735262720

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946080

  Ebook ISBN 9781770497061

  Acquired by Tara Walker

  Edited by Lara Hinchberger

  Cover images: (skull) NaDo_Krasivo / Shutterstock Images;

  (snakes) Zhivova / Shutterstock Images; (horns) © ccoimages / Dreamstime.com;

  (leaves) Pepin Press—Graphic Ornaments

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Jennifer Lum and Rachel Cooper

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Shane Peacock

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Howl

  2. Home

  3. In the Flesh

  4. Rich Man

  5. Mad Man

  6. The Devil and Andrew Lawrence

  7. Visitations

  8. The Alienist

  9. Visions

  10. What They Found in Whitechapel and When They Returned Home

  11. Devastation

  12. Navigator of the Mind

  13. Last Ally

  14. A Different Sort of Visit

  15. What Shakespeare Knew

  16. First Disappearance

  17. Alone

  18. Dead Man

  19. The Devil’s Friend

  20. Lawrence Lodge

  21. The Electricity of Fear

  22. Friends and Enemies

  23. Revelations

  24. To Thomas Street

  25. The Thing in the Box

  26. Fear

  27. The Hag

  Acknowledgments

  To Johanna,

  who heard the stories coming up from down below.

  I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.

  Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

  If we could learn not to be afraid, we could live forever.

  Don DeLillo, White Noise

  Far away from home, from comfort and sanity, up in the arctic mountains of Spitsbergen Island, the sound vibrates in the frigid air, comes racing toward the sea and enters Edgar’s soul. It is a cry of anguish and it terrifies him. He stands on the little ship amidst the human blood and severed limbs and smashed skulls that the great whale has left in its wake, unable to move. Lucy and Jonathan are on the shore just an arrow shot away, motionless too. Tiger lies beneath them on the hard ground, awfully still.

  “That sounds like the devil,” whispers the wounded captain, still on all fours.

  “Bring her,” Edgar calls to Jonathan as he motions toward Tiger, a tear rolling down his cheek.

  Though his friend is a young man with arms like a strongman, he cannot do it. Instead, he drops to his knees and buries his head in his hands. Lucy bends down and, summoning a strength beyond her physical powers, lifts her fallen companion and then staggers toward the boat with her, Tiger’s limbs limp and extending toward the rocks. Edgar gets to them in an instant, reaches over the railing, and takes his dearest friend from Lucy, shocked to feel how light she is. He stares down at her twice-broken nose and pale face, framed by short, raven-black hair. She is still so beautiful, even in death. Tiger. The indefatigable, the unconquerable, the inimitable Tiger, laid low by the monster they had pursued to this godforsaken place. The tilted boat is jammed against the high, rocky shore. Lucy clambers up and onto it as Edgar walks with Tiger in his arms across the deck, holding her close. He puts his forehead to hers and then sets her down, away from the blood. He presses his finger to the jugular vein on her neck and tries to tell himself that he feels a very slight pulse.

  The cry echoes across Spitsbergen again and the captain cowers.

  “Do you have binoculars?” asks Edgar in a monotone.

  The captain points to them, their straps somehow still holding fast to a hook on a mast, but their lenses smashed. Edgar takes the binoculars in both hands and points them upward into the mountains. The cry comes one more time. Edgar stares through the broken glass, seeing a thousand images, but he focuses on one: a distant figure, only slightly less white than the snow. It is holding its face toward the sky as if it has just let out a howl. Below it lies the broken body of another polar bear, the one the monster had killed with his bare hands less than an hour before. Did the horrific cry come from this looming animal, or from something else?

  The bear gazes down again at the corpse and sniffs. Then it crouches and looks around, as if prepared for an attack.

  “We need to get moving.”

  As Edgar says this, the whaling ship shudders and rights itself, pushing off from the rocks on its own and bobbing out into the water.

  “Satan is taking us,” cries the captain. “He sent the giant whale to destroy us and now he is taking us!”

  Jonathan is still on the shoreline and looks as though he wants to stay there.

  “Come!” shouts Edgar, and Jon gets slowly to his feet and leaps for the boat. He barely makes it, gripping the edge above the gunwales and pulling himself up and over the railing. He flops onto the deck like a hooked fish.

  “Captain,” says Lucy, “we need you to gather yourself, so we can ready the ship and sail south.”

  “We must clean this up,” says Edgar, glancing around at the carnage on deck. “And we need to build a bed for Tiger.”

  “What for?” mutters the captain. “She’s dead.”

  “HOLD YOUR TONGUE!” shouts Jonathan. He rises and moves toward the old sailor, but Lucy steps between them and wraps her arms around her brother.

  * * *

  —

  Edgar and Lucy take charge of the boat, encouraging the captain to sail and Jonathan to put his mind and body into building a crude bed and finding dry blankets for Tiger. He does his job like a dead man, lifting his love into the bed and setting her down gently, feeling her neck for a pulse too—but he cannot find one. He puts his ear down to her chest and then his nose to her lips to see if there is any breath there. He looks as though he is not sure of what he hears or feels.

  Edgar wonders where Tiger’s mind is: in a peaceful place like he
aven where all her cares and pain are gone? He knows he cannot let his thoughts dwell on her, his great ally who defended him when he was small, whose bravery was unsurpassable…because she has departed from him forever. He cannot believe that he is even functioning, but Lucy’s courage pushes him to get necessary things done. As the boat floats out of the bay, through the fjord and into the Arctic Ocean, they shove the dead bodies of the sailors overboard, looking away from the severed parts so the sight of them does not turn their stomachs. Then they swab the deck.

  They are a good distance south and nearly finished their gruesome task when the sun begins to dip toward the horizon. Edgar is so spent that he stops to lean on his mop and gazes at Lucy, who is down on her hands and knees scrubbing, not pausing for an instant. Her copper-colored hair, somehow still shining, is spread over the back of her thick winter coat, her long nose points toward her work. He tries not to stare, but he cannot stop himself. She is the smallest of the four of them, but there is something inside her that he knows he doesn’t have, that none of them has. She looks up for some reason, as if she has the power to know when someone is watching her, and smiles at him.

  “Somehow, you and I are still moving,” he says quietly.

  Lucy looks around. Jonathan has collapsed on the boards next to Tiger, his hand still on hers; the captain slouches near the wheel.

  “We do what we have to do,” says Lucy.

  She has no idea how he feels inside, what he has to conquer even to speak, and he cannot tell her. A nearly seventeen-year-old boy cannot tell a girl, especially one as interesting as her, how desperately fearful he is, how fear has plagued him all his life. She knows of his nightmares and his electrifying visions of the hag, the old woman who began haunting him in his bed when he was a child, pressing down on his chest so he could barely breathe. But Lucy doesn’t know how often the old crone still comes; that it attacks him frequently by day even now; that it was on this very boat, as real as it had ever been, just before he slew the monster Godwin with a brutal iron harpoon. Somehow, he has not collapsed like Jonathan, who is so physically powerful and speaks so bravely. Edgar stands before Lucy, hiding his fear like an actor, his brave face a lie, his flaming red hair billowing in the mild arctic air.

  “You look…nice…just now,” she says, and bows her head back to her work.

  “Lucy.”

  “Yes?” Her face comes up quickly, her blue eyes intense.

  “Remember what Mr. Shakespeare said to us. He said something worse, even worse than Godwin, would come after us if we killed another creature.”

  She nods.

  “Has it?” he asks.

  Lucy doesn’t say anything right away. He thinks of the creature they murdered on the stage of the Royal Lyceum Theatre just a month ago, the revenant some would have called a vampire, and remembers severing its head with the company’s guillotine prop. He hears that harpoon sucking into the huge chest of the Frankenstein creation that was masquerading as Dr. Godwin and sees it staggering toward him onto the boat and its eyes looking up at him as it sank beneath the cold arctic water.

  “Will it, Lucy?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  They hear a faint moan behind them. Lucy and Edgar turn.

  Tiger’s eyes are open.

  A few days of sailing south takes them to the Orkney Islands. Tiger has sat up once or twice and is beginning to say a few words. They stay well away from the islands and no one dares to recall anything about the events that recently transpired there, when Godwin, revealed as a yellow-faced, black-lipped monster, made of human body parts by some devil long ago, heavily muscled and without a soul, took them on the beginning of the terrifying hunt that ended in its death. Thinking of it means pondering what might pursue them next and they cannot bear that. There have been no other cries in the air, nothing but silence on the flat, gray seas, which gives them a small measure of comfort.

  Edgar, however, cannot resist scanning the horizon behind them with the binoculars at regular intervals. He sees shadows and shapes out there in the distance—things that could be nothing…or something following.

  They make for the northern coast of Scotland, where the captain will drop them and head for his native Norway. As they float into the little harbor at Thurso, Edgar stands on the deck next to Lucy and hears her say, “We both know what the next one will be.” He turns to her.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she says, looking at him with some concern.

  He turns back and stares straight ahead.

  * * *

  —

  It is dark when they get into town. They walk glumly through the narrow streets past grim stone buildings until they find an inn. Tiger, who is plagued with a blinding headache and can barely walk, is being all but carried by Jonathan. It saddens Edgar to see his friend unable to summon her usual fierce independence. At the inn’s door, Jonathan hands Tiger off to Lucy’s care, and they separate for the night, the girls to one room and the boys to another across the hall.

  “Don’t worry, Edgar,” says Jonathan when they are in their beds and the lights are out, “I am myself again and I am not afraid of anything when I’m right. I will not leave the group until I am sure you are all safe. I will not even start my course at military college if I sense we are in the slightest danger. Think about it, though—we have killed the two freaks that came after us! Shakespeare knows nothing. He is a lunatic, my friend. In fact, if anything pursues us, we can use the little fellow as ammunition—he would fit nicely into our cannon. But why would we believe anything he says?”

  “Because he has been right, twice,” Edgar wants to respond. Instead, he simply turns over and tries to sleep. Their door, which does not latch properly, keeps creaking slightly open and then closing in little slams.

  * * *

  —

  The hag comes for Edgar in the night. He sees the door open wide and then shut behind her as he lies in bed, unable to move, paralyzed as he always is when she appears. She grins at him in the darkness, her face somehow dimly lit. A rancid smell infests the room. Edgar turns his eyes toward Jonathan. But he is fast asleep, snoring lightly. Edgar cannot believe his friend has not heard the old crone.

  She is not real, he tells himself. Face her. He hears his father’s words. Do not be afraid.

  But she is coming closer and he still cannot move.

  She slides onto his bed and gets astride him, driving her bony knees into his ribs and her elbows into his chest as she lowers her wrinkled face to his. Her teeth are yellow, her breath putrid, but he cannot turn his head. He wants to vomit, but no part of his body can move, not even his stomach muscles to force food up his throat. He cannot breathe either—his chest is collapsing onto his heart and lungs. The fear is taking control of him again. She has never seemed so real.

  “I am the devil,” says a voice, though the hag’s thin, white lips do not move. The sound seems to be coming from the door, which appears to be staying slightly ajar now.

  Then the hag vanishes and Edgar leaps from the bed, screaming. Jonathan springs up, bare-chested, standing on his straw mattress.

  “WHAT?” he shouts. “WHAT IS IT?”

  Edgar is in the middle of the room in his underclothing, feet wide apart, looking frantically around him.

  “I…I…”

  “WHAT?” asks Jon a second time.

  Their door opens wide and Lucy enters, her coat pulled over her underthings. She turns on the electric light.

  “Edgar?”

  He sees her standing in the very spot where the hag had entered, but she is the opposite of the freak. She is heaven while it was hell. He gasps and says nothing. Jonathan steps down from the bed.

  “What was it? I’ll pursue it!” he cries.

  “No! It…it was nothing,” says Edgar.

  “Nothing?” asks Jon.

&
nbsp; Lucy puts a finger to her lips to silence him as Edgar staggers past them toward the door.

  “It was just a dream,” she says, “just a dream.”

  Edgar stands there looking into the empty hallway. “Yes,” he says. “A dream.”

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, he lets Jonathan go out first so he can examine the floor near his bed. He can see his own light footprints on the dusty stone surface, but it seems to him that there are more disturbances there—smaller ones, more like a woman’s. Then, in the hall, he thinks he sees too many large ones, but they must be his own and Jonathan’s.

  “Perhaps,” he says to himself, “Lucy came in later to check on me.” He wonders, though, if that really could have happened.

  They speak quietly at breakfast and do not say a word of the nightmare, not wanting to excite Tiger, who is able to eat a little. Edgar examines the woman who serves them, wondering if she could have entered their room for some reason in the night.

  * * *

  —

  On the train ride south toward London, all the way to Inverness Station and down past Edinburgh, they speak of other things, anticipating their return home, pretending that everything is well and repeating how wonderful it was to have saved themselves from the aberration when it seemed it had them at its mercy. Jonathan acts particularly jolly.

  Lucy asks Edgar about his plans for the future, the interest he once expressed in being a writer, his fascination with frightening stories. He answers her in short sentences and tries to engage her about her own ambitions, about which she is evasive. Inside, Edgar is bursting with anxiety and it is making him intensely conscious of everything, even words as they come out of his mouth. It is as if he were watching himself and his friends and they are all in a story that he knows will come to a desperate end. Dread. It dominates his feelings. He dreads everything, every possibility, and can barely keep his face from crumbling. Any movement, however slight, makes him jump, even passengers strolling by their seats. Something is in the train, near them, watching! It seems a certainty. If his three allies notice the distress in his eyes, they say nothing about it. After a while, Jonathan gets up to stretch his legs and walks away down the aisle. Tiger has fallen asleep.