Demon Read online

  “I will kill anyone or anything that I have to,” repeats Lawrence. “Dr. Berenice has taught me how important it is to know who my enemies are, and how to identify them.”

  “I can hear someone,” whispers Allen Brim. “Someone is walking through the house.”

  Edgar listens carefully and thinks he hears footsteps too, far off in the building, perhaps one floor beneath them, perhaps lower, but he is not sure. He thinks of Poe’s magnificent sensation story The Fall of the House of Usher and of the woman in it who had been given up for dead and put in a coffin in the basement of a building not unlike the one they are in right now…only to appear, very much alive, right before the eyes of the narrator. The footsteps are coming upward, just as hers had.

  “One of us needs to venture out and search the building,” says Lucy. “I’ll do it, if necessary.”

  “No,” says Lawrence, “I’ll go, just give me a minute or two to brace myself.”

  Edgar motions to the other two to move back from the door and down the hallway. When they are far enough away, he gathers them together.

  “If someone is moving about in the house, we have to find him or her. We have to do it before Lawrence sees us too. We have to do it now.”

  “That is an excellent idea, my son.”

  “No,” says Shakespeare. “All the servants seem to be gone. They have somehow vanished! We know where the lovely Lucy, the wealthy Mr. Lawrence and your apparently dearest mother are at this moment, Edgar. So, that leaves only a couple of possibilities as to the identity of this intruder.”

  “Satan,” says Allen Brim.

  “Or Tiger,” says Edgar.

  “Yes, indeed,” cries Shakespeare, “and neither she nor the devil are opponents we want to face, especially if the valiant Tilley has that blunderbuss weapon or that infernal cannon!”

  “We could take whatever is lurking by surprise,” says Edgar.

  “YOU, you could take it by surprise. I will have nothing to do with this! For it will mean certain death!”

  “You are as brave as a lion.”

  “I am a survivor!” says Shakespeare.

  “You must kill whatever you find,” says Allen. “Tiger Tilley is no friend of yours. Kill her and cut off her head with that sword. Bury her in a deep grave with her severed head between her feet, just like you did with the vampire creature.”

  Edgar wonders if he ever told his father what they did to the revenant’s corpse. If he did not, then how could he know all that? He regards Allen Brim for an instant and wonders again if he too is his enemy. He glances at William Shakespeare. I am alone in this. I always have been, he thinks.

  “You two stay here and I will search the house,” says Edgar out loud. “If I do not come back in a short while, then flee. There is no use in all of us perishing.”

  His father takes him into his arms and hugs him but offers no resistance to the idea of his confronting their enemy alone. Shakespeare stands there watching with a puzzled expression on his face.

  Edgar leaves them at that intersection in the hallway and heads out into the house with his sword held in front of him, stepping quietly and stealthily, every one of his acute senses alert. The moonlight filters dimly through a window or two. When he gets to the top of the staircase, he stops for a long time and listens. For a while, all he can hear is his own breathing. Then he hears that sound again, those quiet footsteps, a single floor down.

  He descends the stairs.

  When he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he stands still and again listens for a long while. There it is once more, but now he can distinguish some subtleties in the sound. It is indeed as if someone is walking and he or she is doing so carefully, so it is difficult to tell if the intruder is large or small, but there is another element to the sound, a steady little noise like what you might hear if someone were rolling something behind as he or she walked.

  It cannot be Morley, says Edgar, inside his head, for he is dead. But if Morley is Satan, he reminds himself, then how can Satan be dead? He thinks again of The Fall of the House of Usher and the dead woman who came up from the basement. A terrible thought occurs to him. Is that apparition moving about in this building? He hears a caw, a deep guttural one, not from a crow, but a raven…then he remembers that big black bird they saw in the window as they approached this House of Usher. “Once upon a midnight dreary,” he hears a voice inside his head say, “while I pondered, weak and weary”…the first lines of Poe’s great poem, The Raven. “I am living in reality,” he says to himself in as steady a voice as he can muster, “and my friends are near, not my enemies. I am not in a poem or a story and I am not hearing Poe’s ‘ominous bird of yore’ speak to me from a windowsill.” Then the black bird offers another utterance, three quick caws like the syllables of a word…Nevermore!

  “This is madness,” Edgar whispers. “Shake your head and send all the fiction out!” The Raven spoke of death, its finality, its terror. The Raven spoke of fear! He hears Dr. Berenice telling him not to avoid the devil but accept him. He hears her telling him to be suspicious of his friends. “Did she really say that?” he asks himself. He can smell her perfume.

  The footsteps begin again, and the rolling sound. They are getting closer!

  Edgar moves behind the staircase, crouches down and waits.

  A spectral figure emerges out of the darkness with a long weapon in hand and trailing a larger one behind.

  It is Tiger Tilley.

  She does not see him and walks past. Edgar rises. He can see the smooth white stretch of her slim but muscular neck, so vulnerable there with her face turned away. He will take off her head indeed! He will bury her on the grounds here, her skull resting between her feet. He raises the sword to strike.

  At the last minute, Edgar hesitates, and Tiger Tilley turns so quickly that he cannot react. She raises Alfred Thorne’s incredible rifle, equipped with its remarkable expanding bullet, squeezes the trigger and hits a target a few inches from Edgar’s hand, exploding the sword into a thousand pieces, the shards rocketing through this floor of the house like so many bits of a supernatural bomb. The sound is earsplitting.

  Both Edgar and Tiger stand there speechless in the wake of the explosion. It slowly recedes. Then she smiles.

  “You thought you might get the drop on me, Edgar Brim? Me? No one gets the drop on Tiger Tilley.” Her grin makes her appear possessed.

  “What are you going to do?” he asks.

  “To you?”

  “Yes. And after that.”

  “Well, what were you going to do to ME?”

  “Are you in league with him?”

  She raises the rifle and points it at his head. Edgar Brim has a strange sensation. His heart is pounding, but he isn’t just frightened by his imminent death, it is who is going to be the cause of it. His dearest friend. This is not like any story he has ever read. It is the worst nightmare imaginable, to be slaughtered by the one you trusted, the one you loved, and whom you thought loved you. He imagines the bullet coming at him, entering his skull, exploding his brain. He wonders what it will feel like after that.

  “Do what you will,” he says.

  At that instant, they hear someone descending the stairs directly above them. This clever person is already halfway down, no more than fifteen feet away. He or she has approached with great stealth.

  “Move a muscle and I will shoot you, Miss Tilley,” says a voice.

  Tiger remains motionless, her rifle still pointed at Edgar who looks up and sees Andrew Lawrence approaching on the stairs in a crouch, his old-fashioned shotgun in hand, its barrel pointed directly at Tiger’s head.

  “I know you are quick, as quick as lightning, but my finger is on the trigger. Dare you test me? Like you, I have lived a difficult life and been on the streets, so make an intelligent decision about your situation. You of all people should know the correct response.
”

  Tiger drops the rifle to the floor.

  “Wise choice.”

  “Why are you doing this?” asks Edgar.

  Lawrence swings the gun around to him. “She is not to be trusted. And neither are you.” The handle of the sword is still in Edgar’s hand. “What were you doing here in the darkness?” asks Lawrence. “Were you trying to kill your friend? What sense does that make? You are mad, Edgar Brim.”

  “And you?” says Tiger. “What sense are you making? Are we your enemies? Are you in league with him?”

  Edgar looks at her. “I just asked YOU that.”

  As the two former friends stare at each other, there is a dull thud and Lawrence tumbles down the stairs, as limp as a rag. Annabel Thorne comes into view directly behind Lawrence, with an iron candlestick in her hand.

  “Silly fool,” she says.

  “Mother!” cries Edgar.

  “Silly fool!” she shouts at him.

  “Mrs. Thorne?” says Tiger.

  “Another idiot,” says Annabel, pointing at her. “I assume you are the famous Tiger Tilley, though not so admirable right now!” She descends the stairs and turns at the bottom to confront Edgar. She looks down at the sword handle in his hand. “What were you doing? Considering killing your friend?”

  “Considering?” snaps Tiger. “That is an understatement.”

  Annabel strides over to her and slaps her in the face. “Hold your tongue! I know perfectly well what YOU intended with that horrible rifle Alfred invented!”

  “Nice to meet you too,” says Tiger.

  Edgar smirks.

  Annabel turns, takes a few steps back and slaps him across the face too.

  “What the devil is going on here!” she shouts.

  “I—,” begins Edgar.

  “Oh, be quiet, Edgar! I was not really asking you. You have nothing to say at this moment.”

  “I—,” says Tiger.

  “And neither do you!” She looks down at Andrew Lawrence. “Or you!” He groans, still unconscious. She keeps looking down at him. “Did you actually think I would consider a relationship with you so soon after Alfred’s death?”

  “Mother—”

  “Hold your tongue, Edgar, or I shall cut it off!” Her face is red and Edgar clams up. “I took the liberty of insinuating myself into your life, my boy, after you returned from Scotland with that look of desperation in your eyes again. All the anxiety that you had as a child, which I thought I had helped you, in my own little way, shake off somewhat, appeared to have returned. I knew something was going on, something that has been a part of your life for some time now, which you have kept from me. I knew you would never tell me, since you are so good at keeping things inside. I befriended this fellow lying at my feet here, suspicious as I was of him and his intentions, and got closer to you and your troubles through him. As your mother, as one who knows your very soul, I could tell he was the sort of fellow in whom you would confide. I could see he was working on you, right off the bat. He has told me a great deal about what he now knows of your life and situation, things I knew I could get out of him if I arranged the right set of circumstances and approached him cleverly.”

  “But he told me he kept my secrets from you!”

  “That tongue is still in danger of being removed, young man! I am speaking!” She glances down at Lawrence again. “He is a man who is not without troubles himself. He had a very difficult time as a child, even more difficult and desperate than I think he has told me. In reaction to that, he has spent his whole life being manly and careful, paying little attention to his feelings and concentrating on his own wealth. He is good fellow inside, I think, but he was susceptible to the charms of Dr. Berenice, who seems to have influenced him somehow and perhaps you as well, my son. What in the world did she tell you? You know that I know something of these alienists, these mind navigators, and the power they might have over someone if they wanted. That is why I have been reading that young Professor Freud fellow. Do you know that uncontrolled fear induces paranoia? I understand that you told Dr. Berenice that you were being pursued by the devil?”

  “He is,” says little William Shakespeare, who has come to the top of the stairs. “We all are!” Allen Brim appears behind him.

  “I trust that this is the strange little man who takes the great bard’s name, who keeps telling you that monsters are in pursuit of you? Mr. Lawrence has filled me in on that too.”

  “The monsters are pursuing us!” cries Shakespeare, “and each one is worse!”

  Lucy now appears at the top of the stairs. “I heard a horrible bang!” she exclaims. She stares down at the scene below her.

  “There is a good deal of truth to what the little man is saying, Mrs. Thorne,” says Tiger. “There are indeed aberrations about on the earth, monsters if you want to call them that, some glimpsed in distant versions of themselves in story books. Circumstances have drawn us into battle with a few of them. That is true.”

  “Even if that WERE the case, it does not mean the devil himself is after you now!” cries Annabel.

  “We cannot say that for certain,” says Edgar. “Ask my father.”

  “Pardon me?” asks Annabel. “Do not speak of Alfred Thorne in the present tense. That is cruel, Edgar. He is gone.”

  “No, Mother, my real father. Ask him yourself!”

  “Ask him?”

  “He is right here. He will tell you how it all began.”

  “Where?”

  “Where…what?”

  “Where is your father?” asks Annabel, her voice sounding shaky.

  “Why, he is at the top of the stairs, glaring at you.”

  Annabel looks up the stairs, then back at her adopted son. “Edgar…if you ever again so much as mention the fact that your father is alive and talking to you, I will get a switch and give you a thrashing, even if you are thirty years older than you are now! DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  “Yes…Mother.”

  Allen Brim slowly fades from the top of the stairs, and Edgar feels as though he is awakening from a long sleep. When he looks at his mother, her face seems clearer, sharper to his senses.

  “This Freud fellow talks about something he calls delusions and he also discusses a phenomenon he terms suggestion and, of course, hypnosis. Someone is playing with your mind. It may be Dr. Berenice or Mr. Lawrence or…”

  “The devil!” shouts Shakespeare.

  Annabel takes a step toward him and he scurries up the stairs to the top and gets behind Lucy.

  “Mother!” cries Edgar, stopping her in her tracks. “You may be correct about many things. It does seem that I may have allowed myself to spiral inward…somewhat…perhaps to be taken in by delusions…of a sort.” He wonders about Dr. Berenice’s perfume, its strange odor, how it lingered on his clothes. He thinks of her holding her warm hand tightly to the side of his head, her talk of the black magic skills that Morley had taught her, her suggestion that he encounter his dead father and consort with the devil in his head. “Perhaps I have been guided by expert hands that mean me and others harm, people who have discovered things about us and found the right circumstances to manipulate us, and thus may have pitted us against each other, but there is something in all of this, someone, who is not playing at tricks and who is no delusion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lawrence rouses and gets to a seating position. He rubs his temple. “Oh, my head,” he moans.

  “There is a man named—”

  “MORLEY!” cries Shakespeare.

  “And he is real.”

  “He is DEAD and he is LIVING!” adds the little man.

  “Explain yourself, my boy.”

  “Alex Morley. He believes he is Satan.”

  “HE IS!”

  “That is preposterous!” Annabel cries.

  “We did not believe there c
ould be a revenant on earth, a vampire, or a Grendel, or a human being made by the hand of man.”

  Annabel’s eyes widen. “Is…is that what the last one was?”

  “Yes,” says Lucy quietly at the top of the stairs. “It is certain.”

  “Morley turned on a light with his mind,” whispers Shakespeare, “and moved an inkwell across my table!”

  “He put our friend Jonathan to death by taking the form of the hag from my nightmares and then using her to enter his brain or his heart or his bloodstream, employing some strange power, a sort of electricity of fear,” says Edgar. “He turned off the light inside our dear friend!” Beside him, Tiger cannot stop herself from gasping. “Only one force could inject that sort of terror into someone.”

  “And now he is dead…but he is still here!” sobs Shakespeare. “He is the devil, I tell you, HE IS SATAN HIMSELF! He is in all the great stories, all the great books! He is the greatest villain of all time, the greatest monster! Morley recognized himself! I told him about the aberrations and he recognized himself! It lit up a realization inside him! He is Satan, I tell you, and now he knows it!”

  “Nonsense,” says Annabel, but she says it so softly they can barely hear her.

  “He killed himself in a bloody mess…several days ago,” says Edgar. “We know that for a fact. We also know that he has spoken to people in person, written to them, since he died.”

  “Someone is here,” says Lucy suddenly.

  “What do you mean?” asks Tiger, picking up the rifle again.

  Lucy Lear has hearing like no one else in the group. Tiger knows that if she senses something, it is no delusion.

  “Downstairs.”

  Lawrence staggers to his feet. “I feel as though apologies are in order. First, to this lovely lady, Mrs. Thorne. I fear I have been a cad. I know not why. I thought I was long past that. Please accept my sincere regrets. I have also harbored ill feelings toward others in this company and—”

  “Oh, close your mouth!” says Annabel.

  “Yes, my lady,” he says, glowing at her. She looks back at him and Edgar thinks he detects a slight smile on her face. Then they all hear the sound and her smile instantly vanishes.