The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Read online

  Lear is breathing heavily by the time he reaches the great man’s room. There is no answer to his knock. For an instant Lear wonders if Emeritus has expired. The old man’s one hundredth birthday was toasted the previous year, though he had been too frail to come downstairs. In fact, no student currently at the college can be certain to have ever seen him, and most professors, Lear included, haven’t spoken to him in years. Lear gently pushes open the door.

  And there the old headmaster is—sitting at his desk with his back to the door, staring out over the moors, mumbling to himself, still wearing his robes. Lear needs him to be sane, not perfectly sane, not bright with awareness and suspicion, but somewhere in that unguarded state that very elderly people reach, almost as if they were between sleeping and life, in their own sort of dream.

  “Headmaster Emeritus?”

  The old man keeps staring out the window, muttering.

  Lear walks around so he can be seen. His presence doesn’t startle the ancient man in the least.

  “Yes, my child, have you come to be whipped?” Emeritus speaks in explosive bursts in a thin, hoarse pitch.

  This man had been the king of whippings. He made Griswold look like an amateur. Though his body is withered and shrunken today, his face fallen as if it is beginning to melt, his hands, resting on his lap, are as big and powerful as ever. He is said to have left scars on some students that will last lifetimes.

  “Sir, it is Professor Hamish Lear.”

  “Oh. Oh, Lear. Yes, I recall you, young man. Are you settling in nicely?”

  “Sir, I have been here for forty years now.”

  “I see.”

  “I have a few questions for you.”

  “Questions!” The old man tries to get up, but he can’t and falls back into the chair. “Questions about discipline? Do you have a problem I must straighten out? Send me the boy!”

  “No, sir, there is no boy involved.”

  “No boy! But how can this be?”

  “I want to ask you a few questions about the history of the College on the Moors.”

  “Yes, well, I was the headmaster there, my boy.”

  “Smooth sailing?”

  “For the most part, yes, thank you for inquiring.”

  “No problems? Nothing suspicious happened during your tenure that you still think about?”

  “Well, there was the case of the murdered boy.”

  Lear feels the blood drain from his face. He is glad that the old man can’t see well. He doesn’t want to talk about this and there is no reason to now. The boy Emeritus has just spoken of was precious to Lear, though he hasn’t mentioned him (or what happened) to his grandchildren and certainly not to Edgar Brim.

  “He wasn’t murdered. There was nothing suspicious about it.”

  “Well, killed, at least. Erasmus Scrivener was his name, a lovely boy, had a deformed foot, if I recall correctly. I never had the pleasure of whipping him, not once. He didn’t need it.” The old man is sad for an instant, but goes on. “He was a genius in literature. A man named Lear, who taught him, told me that.”

  “That would be me.”

  “You! No, no, can’t be; he is a young man.”

  “Scrivener committed suicide, sir, nothing more.”

  “Ah, yes, that was what they said. The prints of his boots led to the lake.”

  Scrivener had been Lear’s prize student in the days when he taught literature. He had often secretly veered from the curriculum and taught modern works to his classes. He remembers even instructing them on the writings of Poe. They loved those stories—the tale about the man who pulled his wife’s teeth while she died, another about a boy who killed an old man because he didn’t like one of his eyes, and of course, the poem about the ghastly raven.

  “You are Lear, for certain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Has your arm healed? That was one nasty business. A wolf, was it not? Wolves are rarely seen here.”

  “Yes … a wolf, sir.”

  “The boy died while you were on sabbatical getting well, did he not?”

  Scrivener had indeed died when Lear was away. It had pained him even more than the loss of his limb. He had done nothing about it, and there had been something to do. He had been afraid.

  “It was suicide, sir, the police were sure.”

  Though there are few lakes on this part of the moors, the one in question, Loch Blue, is about a mile to the north. It seemed obvious that the boy had walked out there alone and perished in the freezing waters. A few prints were clear the next day, leading up to the edge; no remains were ever found. He had been a happy boy from a loving family and with excellent prospects; he had no reason to despair. Lear still sees Scrivener sometimes these days, in his nightmares.

  He needs to change the direction of the conversation, get directly to the point he has come to investigate. The old man is nodding off.

  “Sir, were you to want to hide somewhere in the college, where would you do it? Are there any old, secret places that no one else knows about?”

  “Hide? Why would I do that, young fellow? That sounds like an impertinent question. Are you an impertinent boy? Are you here to be whipped?”

  “Could you hide anywhere in the walls?”

  “No, my boy, they are solid throughout the building, no exceptions. But there is another place, one that is a different story indeed, one with potential! Were I that Brontë woman who wrote those dreadful novels—”

  “There were three Brontës, sir.”

  “The one who wrote that modern nonsense for moral reprobates about that lunatic woman, insane as a rabid dog, kept in that hidden apartment in that dreadful gothic mansion—”

  “Jane Eyre?”

  “That’s the one! If I had a lunatic, whom I wanted to hide, I’d—” He pauses. “Not that I do, young man.”

  “I am sure you don’t, Headmaster.”

  “I do not, you scoundrel, you can be sure of it! I am hiding no lunatic woman on these grounds! Do I make myself clear?” He made a motion to get up again, but fell back.

  “Headmaster, I am—”

  “Do you doubt me, young man? I HAVE NO LUNATIC WOMAN HIDDEN AWAY!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you here for a whipping?”

  “Where would you hide her?”

  “Why, in the cellar, you fool.”

  The cellar. It’s really only Usher who ever goes there, braving it to fetch bottles from its wine racks. The moans that seem to come from it at night are just the winds blowing low across the moors. If something were there, would Usher not see it?

  “There’s a hidden room down there,” says Emeritus. Lear has never heard this. He leans forward. “A catacomb! Come even closer, Griswold, for I can only tell you this. It is an old secret passed down from the previous headmasters. I thought I wouldn’t tell you. There is no need for you to know. It would just scare the boys. But since you are here—” He notices the moors through the window and completely nods off, snoring like he has a bass trumpet in his mouth.

  “Sir!”

  He comes awake with a start.

  “Are you here to be whipped? Take down your trousers, underclothing and all!”

  “The room in the cellar, sir?”

  “Oh, no one knows about that, boy. Why would I tell you! You are impertinent. Down with your trousers!”

  “You would hide your lunatic woman where, sir?”

  “If I had a lunatic woman! I am not saying that I have! Are you accusing me?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. Tell me about the room or I shall expose you.”

  The old man pauses and examines him. “I do not have such a woman, but if I did I would put her at the far eastern end of the cellar where they built an ice room when the college was constructed in the 1590s. A fine school for boys, mind you!”

  “They made an ice room? Because it was cool down there?” Lear thinks this strange because the college has an ice room deep in the ground just outside the gates.

&nb
sp; “But it wasn’t cool, lad, no.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “It was as hot as hell, sir, as the devil’s own home, so they filled in the doorway to it! And that is why no one knows it is there! You can see it if you search, though no one would dare to do that these days even if they knew it existed. It is filled in with modern cement and stones. Though I hear there are holes.”

  A room in the cellar, thinks Lear. He has what he needs.

  21

  The Cellar

  They are moving quietly and quickly in the utter blackness of the ground floor of the college toward the cellar staircase, unlit lanterns in hand. They have Thorne’s smaller gun, the rifle, and Jonathan has his pistol. Tiger is with them. She has taken up residence out on the moors and made it through the day, hiding the little cannon in a lonely shrub, too stubborn to take the train back to London. Jonathan had volunteered to go out there with some food and tell her their plan for investigating the cellar that evening. As the stroke of one o’clock on the school’s big clock echoed throughout the building, they creaked open the front door for Tiger and closed it in the reverberation.

  The professor leads the way in the darkness and Brim takes Lucy’s hand. Tiger and Jonathan keep to themselves. The cellar door is at the back of the entrance hall, past the grand staircase and the doors to an office where Usher rules his porter’s counter. Once you go by the stairs, two hallways run off on either side. It is there, close to the doors, so as to intercept anyone who might be trying to get in or out of the building, that the professors, every one of the dismal dozen, have their quarters.

  Their snores are sawing back and forth, as if they are competing.

  “I give you the Nose Orchestra of the College on the Moors,” whispers Jonathan.

  “Ssshh!”

  Most of Lear’s aging colleagues probably sleep so soundly that he and his young friends could fire their cannon down one of these hallways and none of them would awake. But Lear isn’t sure. One loud sound could end everything.

  The professors may or may not be listening as the five intruders move toward the rear of the main room, but someone else is most certainly aware of their presence. Henry Usher sits in his alcove with the lights out.

  “It’s here,” says Tiger in the dark.

  They are at the top of the cellar stairs. Lear gives the order.

  “Lights.”

  Edgar, Jonathan and Lucy light the lanterns they carry. The bolt is large and thunders when Tiger pulls it back.

  “Proceed,” says Lear.

  “Yes!” exclaims Jonathan under his breath. “Let the bad boy make his entrance!”

  Lucy’s grip on Edgar’s hand tightens and it fills him with courage. He hopes she knows that.

  They close the door behind them.

  What would happen, thinks Edgar, if someone were to come along and lock it from the other side? The terrifying sensation of being confined reminds him not only of the little boy alive in his coffin but of Poe’s story about premature burial, where the narrator calls out in the darkness of his grave, awaiting starvation and decomposition.

  “Come on,” he whispers, “let’s get this done.”

  Tiger smiles at him.

  The stairs go on forever. There are cracks in every step, causing the intruders to walk carefully, worried that the whole thing might collapse. When they reach the bottom, the scene before them is daunting. The massive cellar is dark and damp, and they hear water dripping into unseen pools. The strange howling that is heard distantly up above is louder here, moaning through this huge space. Shadows lurk on the only wall they can see: beside them on the staircase. The other walls are out there somewhere in the black distance. Edgar wonders if anyone could hear them scream down here. They are deep in the bowels of the moors.

  They gaze around with open mouths. The monster could be near them now. Edgar begins to try to picture it, a faceless foe attacking them from behind and ripping them apart, eating them alive. Just my imagination, he tells himself.

  “All right,” says Lear, “Emeritus says the room is at the eastern end of the cellar.” He points straight ahead. “That would be this way.”

  “Where is the wine cellar?” asks Tiger.

  “Need a drink?” says Jonathan.

  She ignores him. “It must be close to the staircase.” They would all like to see some sort of guidepost. The wine cellar should be near. It is unbelievable that even Usher would come down here if he had to walk too far in this ghastly darkness.

  Seconds later, they find the racks and wooden barrels, cobwebbed and mostly undisturbed in a little area built into the wall no more than twenty steps from the bottom of the stairs.

  But then Lucy screams and kicks at something on her boot. She folds herself into Edgar, shaking. He can’t believe how good this feels, so good that, to his surprise, he doesn’t cry out. He just lowers the lantern. As he does, he catches Tiger’s face in the light, looking their way, on the verge of a scream too, and then frowning. It surprises Edgar. He sometimes thinks Lucy has the right approach: she doesn’t pretend she isn’t afraid. Something is scurrying below, several things. They squeak.

  “It’s all right, Lucy. It’s only rats,” says Edgar.

  “I hear they’re tasty, sis,” says Jonathan, though in the lantern light, Edgar can see that he is a little paler than usual too.

  “Keep your eyes wide,” says Lear. “Watch below you and in front. We can’t afford another sound like that. Who knows how noises travel from here. Maybe it goes right up into the bedrooms. We may have warned whatever lurks down here too.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Lucy.

  “Not at all,” says her grandfather. “These clowns would have screamed too. At least your voice doesn’t carry as far. Females are stealthier too. I’ve told you before: I would rather have women with me in a pinch.”

  “Thanks again, sir,” says Jonathan.

  They move forward for another few minutes. It is difficult to believe that the cellar can be this large. It is as if they walk the full length of the college and then on past it and over the athletics field and out into the moors.

  Cobwebs catch on their faces. Lucy doesn’t make another sound, even when a rat runs up her leg. Edgar can swear that he hears Tiger and even Jonathan let out little noises of alarm, though they both stifle them quickly. He would be happy to be told at any minute that there is no secret room down here and they must turn around. But they can’t.

  They move on in silence. Edgar thinks again of the novel he is reading, and of the imprisoned hero in the grim castle, descending into its cellar too, seeking to escape his frightening captor. Earlier in its pages, Edgar had seen the terrifying old man through his window at night, crawling down the sheer drop of the side of the building, face downward with his cape billowing, glued to the wall like a spider! And there were witches in another room, strangely beautiful, with wet, red mouths, ready to fall upon him. When Edgar got to the castle’s cellar, he found it was filled with vaults, and in them, coffins. He opened the biggest one and saw the old man inside, his eyes wide open.

  They reach the eastern wall. But when they shine their lanterns on it, the surface is uniform everywhere. There is no sign of another room, sealed up or otherwise. They turn right and walk along the wall together, casting their lights up and down its rocks and crevices.

  “We should try going the other way,” says Tiger after a while.

  “No,” says Lucy. “I smell something. It smells different here.”

  Edgar isn’t sure she is right. It still seems like the same damp, rat-infested atmosphere that has been invading their nostrils since the moment they entered the cellar. But he has read that women have a better sense of smell than men. Annabel Thorne can scent everything he has done: the professor’s cigar smoke on his clothes when he comes home from college or even an extra sweet he has stolen from the kitchen. It is maddening. “You know, my son,” she once told him with a smile, “young ladies will be able to smell others’ perf
ume on you in a few years, so you had better be a loyal young fellow!”

  They keep moving forward. Edgar begins to sense a different odor too. Tiger sniffs the air and nods at Lucy. “I think you’re right.”

  Moments later they detect changes in the wall. It is discolored as if the rocks have been plastered in the last few decades rather than three centuries ago like everywhere else.

  Lucy holds her lantern high.

  “Up there!” she says.

  There’s a hole in the wall nearly eight feet up. It’s not very large, less than two feet in diameter.

  Edgar thinks he hears a sound behind them. “Quiet,” says Lear and they all hold their breath for a moment and listen, but there is silence. “Let me examine the hole,” whispers Lear. He takes Edgar’s lantern and gazes up at the wall for a while. “Too small,” he finally says.

  “I can bust it up,” says Jonathan, “make it bigger.”

  “Yes,” says Tiger, “we could do that.”

  “How?” asks Lucy. “With what?”

  Edgar looks down at Thorne’s weapon. “Good point. Even this gun can’t do it, not to this rock. All we’d likely do is alert someone.”

  “We need a big blunt tool,” says Jonathan.

  “And other than you, we don’t have one,” says Lucy.

  “One of us simply has to squeeze through it,” says Edgar. He can smell an acrid stench coming from it now.

  He has grown too large for this job, Jon is out of the question, and Lear could barely get through the opening if it were five times the size and just a few feet off the ground. There are only two candidates, Tiger and Lucy.

  “I’ll go,” says Tiger.

  “If anyone tries, it should be Lucy,” says Lear decisively. Tiger’s face falls.