The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Page 11

  “I know why he died,” said Lear. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “And a few days ago,” said Lucy, “that dear little boy died too, the one who believed in monsters! That was when grandfather told us everything.”

  “It is warning me. Will it come for my grandchildren next?!”

  The door opened and Jonathan re-entered the room. “Fat chance of that!” he said and headed toward the window again. “Are we done with this and had our tears? Told our sad little stories?” Tiger noticed his strong strides.

  “Not yet,” said Lucy, wiping her face. “Sit, Jon-Jon, and keep your mouth shut.”

  “Those deaths may be just coincidences,” said Edgar.

  “You know as well as I do, Brim,” said Lear, “that there have been reports from boys at the college of something on the moors at night, a human-like being out on the wasteland.” He paused. “Those stories began just after I killed that creature.”

  “But they’re nonsense, children’s fears. We imagined all that.” Edgar tried to look like he believed it.

  “Or perhaps you didn’t. Will you help us?”

  “We have an idea of how to kill that sucker,” snapped Jonathan.

  “Yes,” said Lear and there was a strange gleam in his eye. Edgar wondered if the professor, like Shakespeare, was going mad. “We plan to concentrate on the head.”

  “But we need a weapon of extraordinary power,” added Jonathan. “Blades are only useful in close. A cannon would be best, or at least something with its capability.”

  “Tonight,” said Lear, “I will finish a deal to procure the most lethal guns possible, and if we find this thing and use them correctly, pray they are enough. We have no choice. We must kill or be killed. I will not wait for it to do more evil.”

  You, thought Edgar, you three have no choice, not me.

  “But there is another reason we have to act,” said Jonathan, leaving the window and approaching Brim. He walked right up to him, apparently holding back a rage. “You see, there is a certain boy in his last year at the College on the Moors who dreams of monsters to the point where he worries they are real, says it out loud in the night. He told someone else too, doing it while this thing may have been on the moors, watching and listening! He was in the room just before our enemy appears to have taken the life of that poor child. He made the child state his belief out loud! This boy is suspicious of what happened. And he has spoken to others of his suspicions.”

  “Me,” said Edgar, terrified.

  “Give the man a prize!”

  “Oh, don’t be beastly, Jon!” said Lucy. “He is frightened.”

  “We are all frightened, my earnest little Lu. We all know the consequences if this thing exists and has made up its mind to act.”

  “This is incredible,” said Edgar quietly, shaking his head.

  Lear walked slowly toward him. He held his one hand down to Lucy and helped her to her feet. “Perhaps it has noticed my interest in you, Brim, though I tried to be discreet. Perhaps it thinks I am, finally, about to reveal what I know. Perhaps there are other reasons.”

  “What about Shakespeare?”

  Lear smiled. “It doesn’t care about him. Shakespeare is barking mad, or so it seems. He only speaks to his invisible friends and me. It cares about me because of what I did in the past and what I can do now, and it may care about my grandchildren if it discovers that I told them what I suspect. But it may now have a deep and abiding interest in someone else. It likely knows of the young man who did all the things that Jonathan just said. It has probably been aware of him since he came to the Moors with his nightmares. It knows that young man is from a new generation, from outside my family, young and vigorous, growing in mind and body, anxious to kill his fears.”

  Edgar shuffled in his chair.

  “My dear Master Brim, I am not really asking you to help me. I am imploring you to take refuge among us and save yourself. You have no choice. You are the next accident. If this monster is about to act, then I believe it will be coming after you!”

  “But I don’t—”

  “You may be the key to destroying it. We may need you to draw him to us.”

  Tiger moved to Edgar’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. “If he goes,” she said, “if he’s in danger, I’m coming too.”

  “Couldn’t do it without you,” said Jonathan, smiling for the first time in a while.

  They all turned to Edgar. His heart was thudding. He sat there thinking about his childhood, about everything he had been through. It seemed to him that it had all led up to now. He had to fight what he feared or be killed. He had found a mission.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Jonathan clapped him on the back. Lucy leaped to her feet and hugged him, almost ripping him from Tiger’s hands. But he gently pushed her back.

  “And I will do something else. You said you need extraordinary weapons to destroy this thing.”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan.

  “I know where to find some.”

  15

  Armed

  Edgar needed Tiger for this job. Not that she was going to stay behind anyway. The instant he suggested that he might lay his hands upon weapons with monstrous capabilities, she insisted that she accompany him. In fact, she told him that she would pin him down and make him let her go. He didn’t think she could pin him anymore, though he thought that activity might be fun.

  They arrived in Mayfair that night both excited and nervous, Tiger wearing her trousers and a man’s shirt, Edgar carrying a bag with two blankets and a small lantern inside. It was one o’clock in the morning. Tall Thorne House was the only five-story building on the block. Edgar pointed out the top floor, which contained the laboratory. It sat up there as if lowered from above and attached to the rest of the house, its windows with wrought iron bars and a flat area on the roof for Thorne’s outdoor experiments.

  All the lights were out.

  They checked up and down the street, slid up the few stone steps, and Tiger produced a tool from somewhere in her trousers. It had a handle like a screwdriver but was narrower at the other end and slightly hooked.

  She had the wide black entrance open within seconds, then put her finger to her lips and nudged the door gently, testing it for sound as it swung open a few inches. It didn’t offer any noise at all.

  “The rich make it so much easier,” she smiled.

  Inside, all they could hear was the dull and distant ticking of Thorne’s grandfather clock. It was strange for Edgar to be in the house at this time of the year and stranger still to be sneaking about in what was supposed to be his home. He wished he could slip up the stairs to the second floor and wake Annabel and draw her into the hall for the same warm welcome he always received, wrapped in her arms. But he couldn’t do that to her. If she knew what he was attempting, she’d be deceiving her husband. He was about to steal from the man who was supposed to be his father.

  The servants were all asleep too. Up the stairs the two intruders went.

  “Nice place, rich boy,” whispered Tiger.

  It was funny. The Thornes did have money, most of it acquired from the sale of armaments that Alfred had made to the military, but they weren’t the sort to show off their wealth and they (or at least, Alfred) didn’t lavish it on their “son.” He was to be brought up with “an appreciation for money.” In other words, he was given almost none. Edgar wondered what Alfred’s plan was for him once he graduated. The mysterious man had said nothing about it.

  On the next floor, they passed Edgar’s bedroom. He nodded toward it and pointed to himself.

  “I want to see it,” said Tiger quietly and moved in its direction. He grabbed her by the hand to stop her but she pulled away. When he entered the room, she was lying on his bed, giving him a come-hither look. He rolled his eyes and sat beside her. She instantly jumped to her feet and headed past him up the stairs. Edgar had warned her that those last flights, wooden, creaky and creepy, especially nea
r the top, would be a problem.

  The steps winced the instant they put their feet upon them. The two friends paused and listened. There was no response in the house. They tried several more steps, but those groaned too. With every noise, they paused, and with every pause, they listened.

  There was only a landing and the entrance to the laboratory up there, a door at the top of the stairs like a portal into the heavens, or maybe hell. When they reached the last step, they heard a creak that wasn’t of their own making, sounding like it came from inside the laboratory!

  They stood stock still for a long time. Their eyes were locked on the door with its ominous sign: NO ENTRY!

  Finally, Edgar nodded at Tiger. She took out her lock tool again.

  But she couldn’t make it work. Edgar stood beside her for a full five minutes holding the bag with the blankets and lantern, watching Tiger grow more and more frustrated.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she muttered. “He must have invented a new kind of lock.” But at last, she sprang it. The door was thick and turning the big, tightly fastened steel knob was almost a feat of strength. Edgar accomplished it with a pounding heart. He was finally about to enter Alfred Thorne’s laboratory!

  He took his time pushing the door open, nudging it just an inch at a time, making sure it made no noise. It didn’t, as if designed to perfection: it was jammed tightly into the frame to make the laboratory soundproof.

  When he was younger, he would have shoved Tiger in first, but now he stepped inside without waiting, into the forbidden realm.

  They let the door close gently and stood still for a moment. Edgar lit his small lantern, keeping his hand over it so the glow remained dim. Bobbies often patrolled the Mayfair streets. He didn’t want one inquiring about a suspicious light on the fifth floor of Thorne House.

  They could see only a small area at a time and had to move slowly, carefully illuminating their path so they wouldn’t trip or knock anything over. It was a surprisingly large room, much larger than seemed possible when viewed from outside or through the keyhole. There before Edgar were the things he had glimpsed when he spied on this room: countertops like operating tables littered with test tubes, vices, saws, scalpels and chemicals. It smelled acrid and burnt. There were strange weapons on some surfaces, others on racks—crossbows, pistols, cannons, rifles—unlike any they had ever seen, some equipped with cogs and containers filled with liquids. There were targets everywhere, a few with holes in them, others nearly blown apart. An imposing wooden desk with a black lamp sat at one end of the room. And all around, evident as Edgar shone his lantern on the walls, were books, some he’d glimpsed before. Few dealt with science. He saw names on the spines that thrilled him: Beowulf, Dickens, Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and volumes by the American, Poe. Really, what good would those books be for Thorne’s research?

  Edgar shone his light toward the ceiling and his mouth fell open. There was a window about the size of several shop fronts up there. He hadn’t been able to see it from the keyhole. Then he realized that the horizontal blind that was drawn partially over it extended the full length of the room. Alfred Thorne’s entire ceiling was made of glass, crisscrossed with black iron bars. Imagine, thought Edgar, being here on a starlit night, your imagination soaring with the twinkling black heavens above you.

  “Eddie!” hissed Tiger. He had lost his concentration. She hadn’t. She was standing in the center of the room where two tables had been pulled together, away from the others, and on them were two extraordinary weapons.

  “Bring your light. I think it says something here.”

  Edgar tiptoed forward and turned the lantern on the weapons. Up close, they were amazing. Edgar wasn’t a violent young man, but something inside him made him want to pick them up and use them on something, anything.

  “I want to fire them,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Tiger.

  They had hit a gold mine.

  The first instrument was a rifle. It was so unusual that it appeared to have come from the pages of a supernatural story, one set far in the future. It was a sort of revolver rifle, with a round cylinder and chambers where the butt met the main part of the gun and a sleek barrel that was slim near the trigger but grew slightly wider toward the muzzle. It was black from one end to the other. There was a bag of six bullets with it and a sheet of paper beside them with handwriting on it, as if put there for them to read.

  NOT FOR MILITARY USE.

  Rapid-fire revolving rifle with six new-fashioned expanding bullets that explode on contact with their target. Sighted. Can kill anything within a fifty-foot range.

  Edgar reached out and ran his hand along the shaft. But the other weapon was even better. Its barrel was several times the width of the first’s and a little longer. It was like a miniature cannon, complete with small wheels. It was telescopic, with the barrel receding in size in sections from the muzzle, and a cylinder with six chambers, near the pull-cord that fired it. A translucent container was attached below the cylinder, with two liquids evident inside, one green, the other black. The weapon was shiny red, as befit its devilish capabilities. There were big round bullets as big as fists sitting in the chambers.

  NOT FOR MILITARY USE.

  Short-range, rapid-fire cannon with new-fashioned projecting mechanism. When cord is pulled, chemicals mix and explode in massive concussion, firing five-inch diameter cannonballs with extraordinary force and accuracy. Bullets expand on contact. Next bullet then moves into firing position. Can smash a foot-wide hole in a concrete wall. Can be folded smaller and moved on wheels.

  Could this thing destroy a monster? Edgar gave a low whistle. At that moment, as if in answer, they heard another creak, like a single footstep. It seemed to come from inside the room. They stood still for a long time. Then Edgar broke the silence.

  “We have to leave now. We’re taking these two.”

  In seconds, they had both weapons and their ammunition down from the tables and wrapped up in the blankets and shoved partly into the bag, and were tiptoeing toward the door. But Tiger turned back. She had spotted another rifle bullet on the table. “For good luck,” she said, and swept it into her pocket. They were down the stairs in a flash, the steps groaning as they went. They flew along the marble stairs, through the vestibule and then out the main door, which Tiger had left open just a crack. She closed it behind them and they ran up the street, heading north toward the Langham. Edgar was so excited he couldn’t speak. He had done it! He had not only been in the laboratory but had seen the guns and actually stolen two. He, Edgar Brim, was growing reckless. At this moment, he didn’t care about the consequences.

  When the two thieves got to the Langham, they could barely contain their excitement. They showed off the weapons and Jonathan, who was grinning, eagerly took each one in hand and aimed them at objects in the room. Lucy thought that ridiculous; she didn’t want to touch them. But the others took time to understand how to use them, and then Lear made sure they were wrapped tightly in the blankets and placed, with their bullets, into their big traveling bags. He packed a long knife too.

  A few hours later they were at the Euston Railway Station to take the five o’clock morning train north to Edinburgh, change up there at Inverness and then on to the moors. Tiger, who was not allowed in the college, would be on a later train and join them that night. They couldn’t risk someone from the college seeing her with them. There was an abandoned farmhouse a fifteen-minute walk from the school where she told them she’d stay. Lear had telegraphed Griswold and Usher, saying that he was not only bringing Brim with him, but also his grandchildren, to help him during the last week of school. Lucy’s presence in the all boys’ institution was going to be a challenge.

  They scurried through the station, the stars still twinkling in the black sky above the bowed glass ceiling. As they passed the W.H. Smith bookstand, Edgar noticed a tall man in a black bowler hat and cape standing next to it with his back to them, his nose a beak peeki
ng out. When they neared, the man knocked a book from the stand. Edgar picked it up. He looked at the cover, yellow with a blood-red title, and then up at the sign in front of him: The Most Frightening Novel in England! It was like a challenge, dropped into his hands at precisely the right moment. He had to take it on. He paid the shilling and caught up to the others. The tall man had vanished.

  Edgar read the story sporadically as they moved north, enjoying the first few pages, written in the form of a young English solicitor’s journal about a trip into the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. Then it became more and more frightening. Edgar was the hero, in a carriage on a winding road leading to a dark castle. He had to stop reading several times.

  The four of them were in a compartment facing each other. That way, they could speak quietly and without fear of eavesdroppers. But mostly there was silence. It was only as they neared Scotland that they really talked. Edgar began by asking Lear more questions.

  “What if it isn’t up there anymore? What if it has gone somewhere else? We aren’t even sure what we are after.”

  “You raise excellent concerns,” said Lear. “But we have the beginnings of a plan.”

  They hadn’t given Edgar many details, which worried him.

  “The key will be the little boy,” said Lucy, finally.

  “First, we try to prove that it killed him, so we will know it was there last week,” added Jonathan, “and perhaps how it operates.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Edgar.

  No one answered him.

  “How do we prove it killed Newman?” he repeated.

  It was Jonathan who finally spoke. Edgar couldn’t believe what he said.

  II

  First Pursuit

  As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

  Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808)