The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Read online

  “I’ll destroy it myself!” he shouts, heading for the door.

  “Edgar?” asks Lucy. “Don’t!”

  “He’s fine,” spits Tiger.

  Lear lifts his head and smiles. “What do you have in mind, my young friend?”

  “My bare hands!” Edgar cries out.

  Now, even Tiger is alarmed. Her friend’s face has become very red. “Eddie,” she says, “calm and calculated.”

  Jonathan seizes him by the arm. “Brim,” he says, and there is admiration in his voice, “we must do this together.”

  “But we need to go now, out this door and down those stairs with the weapons, no more waiting.”

  “So what exactly are you suggesting we do, my hero?” asks Jonathan.

  But Lear intervenes. “We will not be rash. Something doesn’t make sense to me about Driver being our target. He doesn’t seem to have the wits to do what has been done here over the years.”

  “But he is the last one!” cries Edgar. “It can’t be anyone else!”

  “Or our enemy is just making us think that. Driver wasn’t here when Erasmus died.”

  “So you believe, sir,” says Jonathan. “Perhaps he was living down in the cellar and then showed himself later, dressed up as the driver. When did he first appear here? He was found on the moors, wasn’t he?”

  “Alone and starving. I believe it was the year after Scrivener—” This fact, suddenly apparent to Lear, stops him in his tracks.

  “Died!” says Lucy.

  “It IS him,” says Tiger.

  Lear stands in front of them at the door, still barring them from a reckless departure. “But I keep thinking this dumb and deaf creature cannot be it.”

  “He is acting,” says Edgar.

  “Or he is someone’s weapon,” says Lucy.

  “We will go out cautiously,” insists Lear, “with all our guns loaded. Tiger, Lucy and I will stand guard, while Jonathan and Edgar go upstairs and see if Griswold’s body is still there. If it is, bring it to us. We will then move downstairs and open the front doors. Jonathan, you will stay there and train the cannon on Driver, but keep it out of his sight. The rest of us will carry the corpse out onto the lawn for him to see. We shall observe his reaction. It may tell us something. Two of us will approach him face-to-face: Edgar with the rifle and Tiger with the pistol. I have my big blade. If he does not attack us, we will ask him to bury the body. We shall see what he does with his back to us, working. If he still hasn’t come at us, we will indicate to him that we want to go to the train. We will stay alert, weapons ready, Driver in front of us on the cart, the cannon stowed but available.”

  His young colleagues are staring intently at him, Edgar with a hand on the doorknob.

  “We will see what transpires.”

  Bram Stoker walks out of the Royal Lyceum’s entrance and stops beneath the cream-colored stone pillars. He sees the bonnets and top hats passing by, no one even glancing his way, colors moving about in London’s brown and yellow world. He hears the rattle of the harnesses, a sound some say will soon be gone, the cries of hawkers, the usual din of the London streets. Amidst it, a voice comes to him: the one Irving imitates in his dressing room, eastern European. Stoker realizes for the very first time that he has heard it somewhere else!

  It was at Cruden Bay in northern Scotland on the coast of the North Sea, more than a year ago, the second time he went up there to write. He took the room in the Kilmarnock Arms he’d had before, looking out over the village and the water. He wrote well there. He could see Slains Castle again, just a ten-minute walk away, a perfect home for monsters. That vision of the undead man kept unfolding for him, looking like the master: elegant, brilliant and deadly. Irving as a villain brought to life, intent on sucking blood to stay undead, cornering a young hero in a castle in the Carpathians, as evil as Vlad the Impaler, with elements of him too. Stoker remembers how he tried to frighten the hell out of his readers, incite the horror that lurks in all of us, tell dark truths and deal in human fears, explore the unsaid things, emotions we all hide—how women arouse men, and men excite women, and some men … other men. His face grew red at the memory. Then that voice came back to him. He had heard it as he sat at his desk in his room at Cruden Bay, booming while it asked for directions in the lobby downstairs.

  “I have had a nautical accident,” it said. “My conveyance was wrecked.” A deep, foreign voice!

  The night before, a ship had gone aground on the rocks nearby in a storm—Stoker had written through the gale, energized. He had heard there was just a crew aboard, no passengers, and that one or two had been swept into the waves.

  “I like to holiday on the moors,” the voice had said, “but I usually dock at Inverness. Is there transportation that can take me there so I may board a train north to Altnabreac?”

  Afterward, Stoker had peeked out his window and saw this man from behind. He was dressed in black, remarkably tall. Stoker had watched him make his way down the village road in the rain. He had seen his face in profile. The nose had been like Irving’s.

  Stoker shakes his head. “What nonsense, what imaginings.”

  They lug Griswold’s body down the stairs, while Lucy stands at the window watching Driver carrying the students’ little carts from the wagon into the stable. The headmaster’s corpse is so heavy even Jonathan can’t lift it, a dead weight. It thuds on each step as they pull it along. They have the weapons at hand. Lucy watches Driver emerge out onto the grounds one last time and then joins her friends. At the big front doors, they ready the cannon. Jonathan is behind it and has it sighted. Edgar has the rifle loaded and ready, Tiger the pistol. Lucy puts her ear to the entrance.

  “I can’t hear anything close.”

  “All right,” says Lear to Edgar, “open the doors.”

  27

  The Novel

  Driver is standing beside the black horse near the stable. Only his prominent nose is visible inside the dirty red cloak, but it is certain that he is watching them.

  Edgar and Tiger take Griswold’s hands and drag him forward. Lear and Lucy follow a few paces back from them. She’s as alert as a meerkat. They drop the corpse halfway across the lawn.

  “Uh!” says the headmaster when his back strikes the ground. They all start and stand back. But it is just air being released from the dead body’s lungs.

  “I’ll take the lead,” insists Edgar. He has the rifle. Tiger pulls the pistol from a pocket.

  Edgar walks directly toward the demon, his gun cocked but not pointed at its target, not yet. Tiger is just behind and ready to strike, hiding the pistol.

  The creature doesn’t move. He just watches. They trudge forward. They’re within ten feet and he still hasn’t budged. Now they can see his eyes deep in the hood, almost violet colored in that scarred face.

  “I can’t believe he’s capable of so many well-executed murders,” whispers Lear.

  “I can,” says Tiger.

  Edgar says nothing. He holds up his hand so they all halt, and then he looks back toward the corpse, lying on the ground halfway between them and the college. He can see the glint of the cannon in the slightly open doorway, Jonathan ready to fire.

  “We want you to bury him,” says Lucy.

  Driver doesn’t move.

  “You have to show him,” says Edgar.

  “That’s what he wants you to think,” adds Tiger.

  But Lucy shows him, miming carrying the body and digging a hole. Driver turns and walks into his stable. William Wilson neighs and seems to eye them.

  “What’s he doing?” asks Tiger.

  “I don’t know,” says Lear. “Ready your guns.” They point them at the two big swinging doors. After a while, Driver comes out. Tilley cocks her pistol. Driver looks at her and then Edgar, registering no reaction. He is carrying a rough wooden coffin, a spade shovel on top of it.

  “He keeps coffins in there?” asks Tiger.

  They all step back and let him walk past, towering over them. His hands ar
en’t usually visible, often gloved or covered by the sleeves of his dirty cloak. But they’re apparent now, huge mitts with fingers the size of the iron spokes on a locomotive’s wheel. Edgar hears wheezing in his throat as he passes. They keep the guns trained on him. But the monster never turns, and when he reaches the body, drops the coffin and picks up the giant headmaster as if he were a small sack of potatoes and throws him over his shoulders. Edgar and Tiger had barely been able to drag him partway across the grounds!

  Driver bends down with Griswold still over his shoulders and picks up the coffin and the spade. He trudges toward the graveyard, casting a look over his shoulder at them. The expression makes the back of Edgar’s neck tingle.

  “We need to leave,” says Lucy, “now!”

  “It won’t matter if we run,” says Edgar. “If this is him then he will either kill us or we will kill him.” Lear motions for Jonathan to come out of the college. He emerges with the cannon and moves it forward on its wheels.

  They all follow Driver around the college to the graveyard in the back grounds, keeping their distance. Then they watch him dig the grave. He grunts as he works, but he never removes his hood; in fact, he grabs it once or twice when it begins to fall back off his head. Twenty minutes later he has a deep hole dug. He creaks open the coffin, picks up the body and throws it in with a thud.

  “He doesn’t like the old man,” says Lear.

  It only takes Driver a short while to lower the coffin and pile the dirt back into the grave. He doesn’t bother replacing the sod, and when he’s finished, the spot is marked by black muck. The driver turns and stares at them.

  “What is he doing?” asks Edgar.

  “Waiting,” says Lear.

  “For what?” asks Tiger.

  “An instruction.”

  Lear points to himself and his friends, then to William Wilson and the carriage, and then out over the moors in the direction of Altnabreac Station. The train for London will arrive in about an hour. There are always two on Fridays, about five hours apart.

  They step back again and let the creature pass. Edgar thinks he sees sadness in his eyes and wonders what is going on.

  A short while later they have their bags on the ground next to the carriage. Driver loads them on to the racks beneath it. He motions for them to get in, but Lear insists that he board first. The hooded man does as he is told, mounts the driver’s box and takes the reins in his hands, his back to them. They get in. Jonathan has folded up the cannon: they can’t have it ready to fire. He wants the rifle, but Edgar keeps it. Jon will have to use his hands if a confrontation comes. Lear and Lucy sit on the rear bench and the other three at the front, directly behind Driver, Edgar in the middle, rifle pointed straight at the back of the creature’s head. Tiger’s pistol is pointed at his heart. Driver doesn’t seem to care. Edgar isn’t sure if that should calm or terrify him.

  They move out, the black horse ambling forward, the wheels turning slowly. The black wooden benches creak and the black harness jingles in a slow and steady rhythm as they move.

  The sun is going down, bright in their eyes, blinding them when they face it. Perhaps this is part of the creature’s plan. Were he to turn and lunge, they couldn’t see him.

  Edgar shifts in his seat and knocks his book out of his pocket. It falls onto Lucy’s lap. She picks it up and sees the title.

  “Dracula.”

  “What is this about?”

  “It’s, uh …” Edgar is trying to talk to her and keep his eye on Driver. “It’s a sensation novel, very frightening.”

  She reads the author’s name. “Bram Stoker.”

  Lear turns around. “Bram Stoker?” But then he shifts back, keeping his eyes ahead.

  “I’ll read some,” she says. “Make us brave.” She pulls out the bookmark and begins in a quivering voice as they move across the desolate land under the setting sun.

  Edgar wants to keep his mind here on the moors in this carriage, on Driver. But his surroundings fade and he finds himself drawn seductively into the novel by the sweet sound of Lucy’s voice. The hero, the professor and their friends are searching for Count Dracula, the old man who imprisoned him in his castle and killed his wife’s young friend and is now infecting her, secretly sucking on her, mingling his blood with hers. She is growing ever paler and having evil thoughts, dreams of dying! They must find the elusive count. They discover coffins inside his home near the docks just east of London and fill them with garlic and crosses, and pursue his ship over the English Channel back to eastern Europe. He lies in his coffin during the day, undead. They are equipped with stakes and knives and a huge sword.

  Driver stops the carriage. The station is still a hundred yards away. Edgar shoves the gun into the back of the thing’s head, his finger pressing the trigger. Jonathan stands up, fists balled, Tiger with the pistol in the creature’s back now too. Driver gently turns around to regard them, appearing perplexed. He gets down and points to a little bridge over a stream. Two rotten boards have fallen through. He motions for them to get out. They descend slowly, Edgar keeping Lucy behind him.

  Driver indicates that they cannot go any farther. He motions for them to get their bags out of the carriage.

  “No one move!” cries Lear. “We can’t put our backs to him!”

  The creature still looks perplexed. He motions again.

  Lear’s face grows red with anger. Perhaps he is thinking of his wife, his son, or of Scrivener and little Newman. “Keep the weapons on him!” He advances toward a startled Driver and seizes him. The creature does nothing. Lear grabs the hood and pulls it back. They gasp.

  His face is horribly scarred. The wounds run across his visage and shaved head, as if various features have been sewed onto him. An ear appears torn. He looks at the ground. He seems ashamed.

  Edgar thinks of the room in the cellar.

  “What are you?” asks Lear. “Who did this to you?” He seizes him again, shakes him, and grabs the front of his cloak and rips it off, tearing the loosely tied knots down the chest. Underneath, Driver is wearing old trousers and his chest is bare. Lucy screams. Four words are carved into his skin. They are still red, only just beginning to heal.

  COME

  AND

  GET ME

  They all stand still under the dimming sky. They hear the locomotive approaching in the distance, steaming along from the north, heading toward London. The freakish man, shirtless and shivering, drops his head. Jonathan steps forward and gently takes Driver’s face in his hands, gripping him on either side of the jaw and by opening his own mouth gets him to open his. Inside, he can see a severed tongue, long since cut out.

  “Oh, God,” says Lear, dropping the cloak to the ground.

  “The demon did this,” says Edgar. “It was here.” He looks around the moors. “But it’s gone.”

  “We’ve been searching in the wrong place.” Lear lowers his head. “It knew we would come to the college. It drew us.”

  “But why didn’t it just kill us there?” asks Edgar.

  “Because it didn’t make sense,” says Lear. “I’ve been a fool!” He cocks an ear toward the sound of the approaching train. “It saw how many of us were here. If five people died in a week at the College on the Moors, attention would be brought here and a cause for the deaths would be sought.”

  “So,” says Tiger, “where is it?”

  Edgar picks up Driver’s cloak and searches the pockets. He pulls out a piece of paper. I drove you to the college is written in an old-fashioned hand.

  Five mouths drop open. They all think back. The monster had been under the cloak in the place of Driver the day they arrived, right with them in the carriage!

  “It must look something like him,” says Tiger, staring at Driver.

  Edgar thinks of the room in the cellar with Scrivener’s skeleton, its operating table, its pieces of human flesh—the blood, the fingernail and part of a nose. “It was operating on Driver.”

  “Remaking him!” says Lucy.
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  “To look enough like him so he could walk about in the college under that hood,” says Lear, “watching, listening, entering the rooms and doing as he pleased!”

  Edgar thinks he is going to vomit. He brings the cloak up toward his face to cover his mouth but when he does he notices a label inside. Royal Lyceum Theatre, London it reads. “It’s a costume,” he says. He looks closer. Abraham Stoker, manager. An image of Sir Henry Irving in the street flashes through Edgar’s brain, and of the man who was there with him.

  “Bram Stoker,” says Lucy. She glances at the novel now lying on the ground at their feet. Edgar is staring at it too.

  “Our enemy,” says Lear, “drew us up here where it last struck to get us to kill someone at the college in its place and think the job done!”

  It was genius, thinks Edgar. It was the monster sitting there under the cloak in the balcony, pointing at the giant headmaster, nodding his head! It has all been orchestrated. But the creature’s first plan had failed, so now it was calling them south to finish them, even telling them where to find it.

  COME

  AND

  GET ME.

  ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE, LONDON.

  It was daring them.

  “It can kill us down there,” says Lear, “one after the other, amidst the great metropolis where our deaths won’t be suspicious.”

  Edgar remembers buying the novel in Euston Railway Station. As they run for the train, the whole scene is suddenly clear in his mind and it sends a shiver down his spine.

  III

  Last Pursuit

  There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1891)

  28

  The Creature in the Book

  “What did he look like?” asks Lear, leaning forward in his seat on the Far North Line’s southbound train for Edinburgh and London. He is still sweating and puffing from the run over the moors to catch the train. But the excitement in his eyes has little to do with that.