The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Page 2

  The story came down through that heat pipe and found its way to Edgar Brim as he lay in his bed half-asleep. It electrified his brain.

  The next day they took their carriage, a little hansom drawn by an old horse, down to London. They shared the threadbare blanket. The child snuggled up to his father, and Allen allowed it. He wasn’t one for making a man out of a boy before his time.

  “You seem tired, my son. Did you not sleep?”

  “I slept well, father.”

  “What shall we do about those circles under your eyes?”

  “Hereditary,” said the little voice.

  Allen Brim smiled, not just because of Edgar’s extraordinary vocabulary, but because the observation was accurate. Allen’s own eyes were not exactly sparkling advertisements for a good night’s sleep.

  “Edgar, you may not have much in life, but you will be smart and caring, you will speak well and be well read. There is no question about it.” The boy must learn to grapple with fear too, thought Allen. The day would come, Squire Brim vowed, when he would introduce his son to the dark literature.

  They moved along gravel roads through the countryside, south toward the great city. Edgar loved to watch the locomotive trains whistle past at unearthly speeds, and the one that thundered by today was faster than any before, its head hissing steam and its tail like a gigantic snake’s. Edgar wondered what it would be like to ride in one. There seemed to be many things to learn in life, many secrets. It made him think of something mysterious the squire often did.

  “What do you write in your journal, father?” he said suddenly.

  Allen was taken aback. He kept the journal locked.

  “Oh, nothing, my good fellow.”

  “Nothing, sir? It can’t be nothing, for there are words in it. I have seen you putting them there.”

  When Squire Brim wasn’t writing novels, he liked to record his thoughts. And one subject dominated his journal’s pages. His interest in it began with an idea a wise man had offered him long ago.

  “I have a theory about stories,” the gentleman had whispered, almost as if his words should not be spread about, “especially in sensation novels and horror tales with demons and dark characters.” He surveyed the room from behind his desk and lowered his voice even more. And what he proceeded to say had stayed with Allen Brim to this day. He could remember every word.

  “Father?”

  Allen had been gazing off into the distance. Now he turned back to his son and smiled.

  “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say I write exactly nothing in my journal, Edgar, but it is nothing with which to concern yourself.”

  These trips into London were monthly journeys. Little Edgar found the city disturbing—horses and carriages, rattling omnibuses, pungent smells and absolute rivers of people moving at top speed. Squire Brim’s destination, however, was a quiet place—the world’s greatest library at the British Museum where, he told his son, he researched the backgrounds for his novels. But he always dropped Edgar at a tall, narrow home in wealthy Mayfair beforehand. Allen Brim would walk his young son up to the entrance and before he even had time to grasp the bronze knocker, the door would be flung open and a smiling woman would pull Edgar into her arms.

  Mrs. Annabel Thorne had been Virginia Brim’s dearest friend and had loved her from the moment they met, through the days before the Brims’ fortunes had slid, right up until Virginia’s death. Allen’s unusual American wife—the daughter of actors, of all things, from Baltimore, Maryland—had been shunned by London society, but Annabel would have none of it. “Such spirit!” she told others, who often soured when she said so. Now the childless Mrs. Thorne loved Virginia’s son with the same devotion.

  These were the only times Edgar ever felt the embrace of a woman. Perhaps his mother had clasped him to her the day he was born, the day she had died, he didn’t know. Mrs. Thorne’s hugs always made him feel warm inside, and he loved to sit with her at tea in front of the drawing room’s big fireplace, tasting raspberry scones and sweets, the sorts of things he never had at home.

  But there was a mystery in that house, a deep, dark one. Mr. Thorne never appeared. He inhabited a space upstairs at the top of the house, all the way up on the fifth floor, and never came down when the boy was about, and Annabel said nothing of him. Edgar wondered what he was doing up there.

  Allen reappeared late that night, lit up from his researches and the play he had attended. Edgar questioned him closely as they walked down the white stone steps of Thorne House past the black wrought iron fence toward their old carriage.

  “What was it like?”

  “What, my boy, the British Museum Library or the theater?”

  “The former first, father, then the latter.”

  Allen hesitated. Though he said he sought information for his books at the library, he rarely did. He often searched for something else, something he dared not tell Edgar. But he hated to lie to his son.

  “Well,” he said, “the library is an enormous, round, dim room, as quiet as a cathedral, with walls of books that ring it from floor to ceiling and sliding ladders that allow you to reach them. You hear only the muffled sounds of people moving dusty chronicles and other echoes as you sit at your wooden desk with your little lamp. It is marvelous!”

  Edgar could see it as his father spoke. He imagined the books he would find there. Not one like the story his father read last night, which was inhabited by a monster and had given him a terrible nightmare, but calmer tales like others he was now being allowed to hear, with colorful characters and happy endings. They took him to intriguing worlds.

  “You are forbidden to make any noise. You must imagine the things you are reading.”

  Edgar loved that. He hoped there would always be places like this magical library. Would they still be there when he grew up?

  “I am a transgressor, though.”

  “A what, father?”

  “Well, I sometimes make a little noise.”

  For some reason, they both laughed at that.

  “I find particular things in books that make me say, ‘Ah!’ Today I did so and it brought a rebuke from a gentleman nearby.”

  Allen laughed again, but Edgar didn’t.

  “What things, father?”

  This appeared to make the elder Brim uncomfortable. The carriage was a good distance down the street, and they walked a few more strides along the footpath before he answered.

  “Oh, nothing, really.”

  “If I were in that library with you,” said Edgar, “and I heard you say, ‘Ah!’ I would whisper something to you.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “What, exactly, are you reading, father?” whispered Edgar.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Brim. He realized he had said it again. “I am sorry, my boy.” He wondered how much he should tell his son. “It was an obscure account of a day in the life of an author named Mary Shelley. In the book, she saw something frightening in the woods in Switzerland near a renowned scientist’s laboratory.”

  “Something frightening?”

  “Yes, but it was a long while past, my lad, and Mrs. Shelley has been dead for some time. Her work is most certainly not for children. You won’t even know of her.”

  But of course Edgar did know. His heart started to pound when he heard the name that had traveled down the pipe to his ears the previous night.

  They reached the carriage. Allen noticed the anxiety on the boy’s face as he reached down to lift him into his seat. “Perhaps we should speak of something else. You asked about the theater?”

  “Yes, father, might I attend the play next time?”

  “Come now, Edgar, it wouldn’t be right. The theater is not for individuals of your age.”

  “When can I come?”

  Allen got into the carriage. “Perhaps in a few years.”

  “Then tell me the story of the play you saw tonight.”

  “I traveled east on Piccadilly after I dropped you here, my boy,” he said, as
he stared out into the fog that had settled over Mayfair, “then down Bow Street into the West End, past the Royal Opera House. Bow became Wellington Street and the Royal Lyceum Theatre appeared, its pillars rising on the pale exterior, gaslights illuminating the entrance so it became some sort of palace, a palace of the imagination. The roadway was teeming with gleaming carriages. There were shimmering dresses and famous faces.”

  “Was that the theater you attended?”

  “No, my boy.” He had seen a silly musical at the Gaiety and could barely recall the story.

  “Then why are you telling me this?”

  “I like to imagine the plays that happen at the Lyceum.”

  “So, why do you not see them?”

  “I am not sure I am up to it. The man who performs on that stage has a talent given to him as much by the devil as God.” He paused. “There was a giant drawing of him on a banner above the main doors.”

  Allen remembered the face as if he were seeing it coming toward them out of the London fog, the skin painted with dark makeup, looming there like a monster.

  4

  A Fatal Mistake

  Edgar woke on a dark morning five years later with the old woman sitting on his chest again, pressing the life out of him. She came for him at dawn now, not just a horrid face growing on his mother’s body, but the full hag. She dug her knees into his rib cage, her filthy hands gripped him and her wrinkled face was inches from his. He couldn’t breathe and felt like he was dying, but he struggled against her and, slowly, she began to fade.

  He sat up, trembling.

  “I mustn’t tell father,” he said out loud. “He will worry. A nine-year-old boy is far too old for such things. And besides, who would believe it?”

  During the night he had heard his father’s voice again, reading one of those frightening stories, the tale echoing through his room. Nightmares always came later, and then the hag. She seemed so real.

  “I shan’t tell him that I can hear him. He will stop and he enjoys it. The old woman won’t kill me.” But he wasn’t sure.

  He pulled on his clothes and walked out into the hallway. He could hear Allen’s familiar whistle in the kitchen far away and moved toward it with a smile, ready for whatever the squire had found for them to eat. It wouldn’t be much but they would have it together. It was earlier than Edgar usually rose, so his father would be surprised to see him. He paused as he neared the bare sitting room: two chairs were next to the squire’s desk in there, where they often sat while working on Edgar’s studies. Much of it was reading. They read everything in their big library, except the books on the top shelf. There wasn’t enough money for formal schooling. “Not yet,” his father said almost every day. “But sometime … soon.”

  Edgar noticed something on the desk that usually wasn’t there. The journal. And the lock was undone! His father obviously intended to come back to it.

  “What if I opened it and looked inside, just the first page?”

  He walked into the sitting room, treading quietly, feeling guilty. His father’s whistling had stopped, but he was two rooms away. The squire wouldn’t suspect that his son was awake yet.

  Just the first page.

  Edgar moved to the desk and stood over the journal for a while. He reached for it.

  But as he did, he heard the creak of a bad floorboard. He turned and saw his father just outside the room.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  But Edgar’s hand was on the journal.

  Allen’s face grew pale. “I have told you that its contents are not for you to view, my boy.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “And you disobeyed me.”

  “I …”

  There was a hard hickory cane in the room, the one the boy’s grandfather had used for disciplining his father long ago. It leaned against the doorframe gathering cobwebs. Squire Brim didn’t believe in its use. His eyes went to it now. So did Edgar’s and his heart rate accelerated.

  But then Allen smiled at him. He moved to the desk and pressed the lock closed. “I shall share it with you when you are older … soon.”

  They traveled to London the next day to the British Museum Library. The Thornes were away on a trip to Germany, so Edgar had to wait in the cold stone atrium, his thin bottom on a hard marble bench, two pleasant children’s novels in hand. When his father finally emerged from the Reading Room, his face was tense.

  “Is there something the matter, father?” asked Edgar.

  “Not a thing, my boy,” he smiled. But his words were forced.

  After they left, Edgar learned the reason for his father’s nerves. Allen didn’t pass by the Royal Lyceum this time. He took the boy in.

  “I am preparing to write a different sort of story,” he told his son as they rushed through the theater’s towering front doors. “I feel I must. It is a frightening tale with a sort of devil in it and it explores human fear. I need to prepare myself, and there is no better way than to see the production that is at the Lyceum now.”

  They were almost late. Inside, Edgar stared wide-eyed at the red lobby with its giant golden chandelier. The room was beginning to clear. Edgar, of course, couldn’t go all the way into the auditorium. He was to wait, again, in the lobby on a bench, a softer one this time, plush and comfortable. His father spoke to a coat-check girl, handing her a coin to keep an eye on his son, and then said a few reassuring words to Edgar before he turned to go. As he did, someone came through the entrance, well behind the crowd. The man neared them, tall and thin, dressed in a long black coat and a black bowler hat that was pulled down over his forehead, his big, aquiline nose sticking out like a parrot’s beak. Edgar noticed how the man stopped when he saw his father, and then looked back and forth, examining both of them. Something about him made Edgar shiver.

  But Allen didn’t notice. He strode across the thick carpet toward the inner doors, dressed in the worn-out evening clothes he had put on in the water closet at the museum, the tall man not far behind him. The theater’s burly, red-haired manager was standing in the doorway eyeing the lagging patrons. Allen swept by him and entered the auditorium. Instantly, he was in another world. It belonged to the man whose image had loomed above the theater five years ago, the one and only Henry Irving.

  Allen’s knees were quaking as an immaculately dressed usher walked him up to his seat at the very back of the last section of the upper balcony, nearly two thousand packed seats below him. He had never seen Irving in the flesh before but he, of course, knew all about the great actor. One had to be living under a rock on the Scottish moors not to be aware of exactly what he looked like, things he had said and the roles he had played. It was said that his face, when seen in person, was like porcelain; his eyes like burning coals; his black hair, long and parted down the center and graying a little now, like the feathers of a strange tall bird. Tonight, he would play Satan in the flesh.

  London had never seen a production like this. It was huge and lush, and it mesmerized everyone who saw it. Its special effects were astonishing and Irving was spellbinding. Even his leading lady, the great and gorgeous Ellen Terry, rumored to be his lover offstage, seemed unimportant beside him upon the boards. It was difficult to put a finger on just what Irving did to people. He pronounced words in strange ways, dragged his leg as he performed, didn’t simply stand facing the audience and declaim like other actors. He became his characters. No one could take their eyes from him.

  There was always music during an Irving production, all the way through. The orchestra was playing the overture now, the strings rising in crescendos, building the excitement. A buzz ran through the audience, growing with the music.

  And then the curtain rose.

  For a while people held their breath, waiting for him to appear. Soon, a creature materialized out of a mist, red from head to foot. It slithered as it moved. Then it rose up and began to dominate scene after scene, forcing the hero to sign a pact in blood, giving him everything he craved, summ
oning witches. Allen was glad that Edgar was safe in the lobby, for the great artist took him places he would not want his child to go. He believed in evil that night. He believed he should live only for himself, that wealth and power were all that were important, that women were playthings for his pleasure, that powerful spirits existed that could help him fight God. He believed in the devil.

  The play seemed to go by in a moment.

  Afterward, Allen staggered out of the auditorium in a stupor, his face pale. His chest hurt. He had been so entranced during the action that he had felt as though he had been dragged down from the balcony to the stage and thrown upon the boards before Irving, where he watched him in the lurid stage lights, that made-up face lit up, those black eyes penetrating his, all the goodness inside him sucked away.

  As he struggled toward Edgar in the lobby, he saw the manager again. Another patron whispered his name: Bram Stoker. The stolid Irishman looked dazed and glassy-eyed. Irving, thought Allen, had infected Stoker too. How could he still be that way after so many performances?

  The truth is unbearable, Allen told himself, I dare not write it. He took his son’s arm. The boy was stunned and silent, having sat there in wonder for hours as strange sounds came from inside the auditorium’s doors, as though a demon were on the loose. Allen led Edgar out under the street lamps and they moved in silence through the remnants of the crowd. The squire felt absolutely exhausted and could barely walk. He got into his carriage like a dead man. The boy was staring at him, peering right into him. Allen knew something then that terrified him. Edgar could see and feel his agony.

  As they drove home through the countryside, the squire tried to tell happy stories. All he could manage were old tales from the boy’s earlier years. But he was careful even with them. He took the big bad wolf out of the Three Little Pigs, the witch from Hansel and Gretel and the three ugly sisters from Cinderella. He made Edgar laugh once or twice. But the stories were flat. It took so much effort to sanitize them. And Allen remained tired, very tired. When they arrived home, he was barely able to make it to his bedroom.