Monster Page 3

  She falls into step beside them, drawing a glare from the undertaker up on the box in front of them, who now leads a motley little procession with two women in it.

  “Good day,” says Tiger, her voice weak, which isn’t like her either. Edgar expects her to say more, but she immediately grows silent, her expression grim.

  They move through a black wrought-iron gate set in the cemetery’s brick wall, along a gravel path and keep walking at their solemn pace for another half mile, past the cedar trees and flowers and undergrowth that line the avenues. Shadows loom over them. It is difficult to believe that a place can be this eerie in the middle of the day. Edgar thinks of Dracula, that horrifying novel by Bram Stoker that he intends to burn in the Thornes’ fireplace at the first opportunity—it was here in this very cemetery, he is almost certain from the description in the book, where Dracula’s woman-turned-vampire was staked in her crypt by her husband while three other men looked on. They had cut off her head and stuffed the mouth with garlic. Edgar remembers their own revenant, the one that had pursued them, its head severing from its body when the guillotine came down—he remembers putting that head, big and skull-like, between that creature’s feet to keep it from rising again.

  They stop at a deep grave positioned tightly between two others in a row with many stone markers, several tall and ornate. Edgar fingers the big bullets in his pocket as the clergyman speaks softly and quickly, as if to get things over with. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

  The coffin is lowered and Lucy stares down at the ground. Jonathan, his face set like he is sitting for a funereal photograph, puts his arm around her. Edgar and Tiger step closer to each other. When the brief ceremony is done, Lucy goes to her knees and reaches down into the grave, almost falling into it. She drops the red rose onto the coffin.

  “Good-bye,” she says.

  The gravedigger takes off his jacket and begins to throw the dirt into the hole, the spitting rain coming harder now. He has a black mustache like the tip of a thick finger and stubble on his cheeks. There is something about him, beyond his occupation here, that Edgar doesn’t like. He is a big brute, but it isn’t that. He seems to work in a calculated way, as if he were sizing up something about the grave, remembering it.

  Moments later, Jonathan guides Lucy away and Edgar walks behind them, sticking close to Tiger. He can see now that there is a bruise on the side of her forehead stretching almost to her temple. It is red and angry and meant to be hidden under her bonnet. Something isn’t right about her eyes.

  3

  “What is wrong?” Edgar asks Tiger as they leave the cemetery. “Tell me the truth.” The four friends are alone now. The undertaker, his apprentice, the clergyman and that gravedigger had abandoned them the minute the grave was covered.

  Tiger staggers and Edgar catches her in his arms. He helps her to a wooden bench nearby and sets her down. He sits beside her, his hand on her shoulder, and then turns her face gently toward him, while the other two stand over them.

  “I’m…I’m fine.”

  “You are not fine,” says Lucy. “Oh, Tiger, what’s happened?”

  “I’ve taken a blow to the head. It aches. I didn’t want to bother you, not now.” She lowers her face into her hands. Edgar knows that if Tiger says her head aches, it must be absolutely pounding. He gently unties her bonnet and takes it from her head and sees the wound fully now. Lucy gasps. Though Tiger isn’t cut, the contusion appears dreadful. It is swollen and looks like a piece of hard flesh surgically attached to her head. It’s the size of a fist.

  “I…I must have blacked out, that’s why I’m so behind. I went last night to a draper’s and bought this dress. I had it laid out to wear this morning. When I woke I knew I was late, very late. I put it on and came straight away.”

  “What happened last night?” asks Edgar. His dear friend has always been an early riser and never oversleeps, no matter what.

  “Something came into my house.”

  “Something?” asks Jonathan. He sits beside her on her other side, making the bench creak, rests his broad shoulders against the back, and takes her hand. She doesn’t pull it away.

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I just recall lying in my bed, my clothes still on, listening. I had the cannon next to me, primed. I was trying to stay awake. Then something entered and was on me like lightning. It must have struck me. I don’t remember anything else. My room was dark. I couldn’t see its face, its body, anything, but I think…it was very large. I have the vague sense that it put its hands around my throat too.”

  “This is good,” says Edgar.

  “Good!” shouts Lucy. She looks as though she wants to hit him. He has never seen her angry at him before.

  “Because it didn’t kill her.”

  “It could have, instantly,” says Jon. “The question is, why didn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Edgar after a while, “but in the meantime, take these.” He pulls the bullets from his suit coat, a fistful of them, and hands them to his big friend. “They’re for the rifle.”

  Jon looks relieved. “I’ll take off its head if it comes near us again,” he says. “I won’t miss this time!” In two months, he will be at Sandhurst Military College. He looks ready to leave now.

  They walk Tiger back to the Lear home and she leans on Jonathan’s arm most of the way, her head at times on his shoulder. Edgar knows how much that must bother her—she never likes to show any weakness.

  When they arrive the Lears’ front door is ajar. They halt on the footpath.

  “Oh God,” says Lucy, staring at the entrance. Her hands are shaking as she puts them up to her mouth.

  “We can’t go in,” adds her brother. “We are unarmed. It would have us at its mercy in an enclosed space.”

  “Is there a back way?” asks Edgar.

  “Only through our neighbor’s house, from their yard,” says Jonathan. “All the buildings are attached here.”

  “They aren’t at home during the day,” says Lucy, “and we keep a key.”

  “All right,” says Edgar. “Let’s go through the neighbor’s house and out their back door. Jon, you and I will climb their wall into your yard and enter through the rear of your home. Lucy, you stay with Tiger, and if all is well, we will let you in through your front entrance. We are going to try to make it to the rifle.”

  “It’s in my room,” says Jonathan, “under the bed. I’ll get it.”

  “We have bullets now!”

  “I’ll come with you,” says Tiger, her voice barely audible, trying to stand on her own.

  “You will stay with me.” Lucy takes her from Jonathan.

  They move through the neighbor’s house silently and the boys are soon over the short wall without a sound. Jon opens the Lears’ back door as quietly as he can, though it squeaks a little. They move through the scullery and into the back hall. They hear a sort of groan and a shuffling. Whatever is near is waiting for them.

  “It’s in the parlor,” whispers Jonathan. “My bedroom’s just ahead. I’ll get the rifle. Wait here.”

  Edgar nods. But Jon seems to be gone for a long time, so Edgar takes a couple of quiet steps forward and peers into the parlor. There is something in there all right. Edgar can hear it breathing. And he can see it, or at least a tiny part of it—its feet. It appears to be sitting in one of the chairs!

  The feet seem awfully small and they are encased in slippers, bright gold ones that turn up at the ends as if they are the footwear of a little genie from The Arabian Nights. Edgar takes a step forward and turns into the parlor.

  “You!” he exclaims.

  William Shakespeare starts so violently that he appears to elevate straight off the parlor chair toward the ceiling. He comes down and hits the cushion with his little rear end and vaults straight up again. This time he lands in a heap on the floor, staring up at Edgar Brim.

  “Oh MY LORD! My LORD and all his disciples! You have given me a start, my boy! You have shaken me to th
e very foundations of my magnificent and munificent soul! Could you not simply enter the front door and bid me hello?”

  “Could you not wait for us on the doorstep like a normal human being? And how did you get—”

  Jonathan turns the corner, the rifle pointed straight at little Shakespeare’s big head.

  “OH!!” he screams. “Put down that blunderbuss, you rapscallion, you clod of wayward marl!”

  Jon lowers the gun.

  “Am I too late for the funeral?”

  —

  They get Tiger into the house, give her tea and put her in Lucy’s bedroom with a cold compress over the wound and the lights out. Then they huddle in the parlor.

  “What’s next?” asks Jonathan.

  “I think—” begins Edgar.

  “Well!” says Shakespeare. “The first thing we must do is establish the identity of the creature that is in injurious pursuit of us.”

  “Us?” asks Jonathan.

  “And I just so happen to have brought a book along with me, a novel of some repute, and it seems to me that it is from this particular tome that our monster has come, given its beastly attacks, its blunt ways.” He draws a book out from the yellow waistcoat he wears beneath his purple suit coat, a curious outfit even for him to have worn to a funeral. “Now!” he exclaims. “I believe our monster is—”

  “We must continue to stay out of all of this,” says Edgar, “despite what happened to Tiger. Think about it: it’s likely that attack was a second warning, and though horrific that’s all it was, there was no attempt to kill. The best we can hope for is that there won’t be anything more to this from here on. We are armed now, so let’s keep to ourselves and make it seem absolutely clear by our actions that we have no interest in pursuing this…creature in any way.”

  “But, but—” sputters Shakespeare.

  “That sounds cowardly after what happened to Tiger,” says Jonathan. “This thing seems to be active right now, right here in London, so it may be killing others.”

  “Yes! An excellent point, young Lear!”

  “Or maybe it isn’t doing anyone any fatal harm,” says Lucy. “Maybe it just wants to be let alone.”

  “I’m for fighting it now,” says Jon. “We need to pursue it aggressively. We know where it was last night, so perhaps we can pick up a trail.”

  “No,” say Lucy and Edgar together. They glance at each other a little sheepishly. “It seems to me,” continues Lucy, “that there are three of us deciding on this, Jon. It’s two to one.”

  “Two to two, my dear,” says Shakespeare. “For I, leader de facto and de justo and de realistico of the Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen’s Empire, shall take up my suffrage and cast my vote in glorious favor of—”

  “We are only counting the people who would actually be willing to fight,” says Lucy.

  “But Messrs. Sprinkle, Winker and Tightman would also be—”

  “And those whose actual existence can be verified.”

  Shakespeare goes quiet.

  “Tiger would side with me,” says Jonathan.

  “I’m not so sure,” says Edgar.

  “How do you know what she feels?”

  “I have known her since we were children, how about you?”

  “She and I are more alike, Brim.”

  “Jon,” says Lucy, “there may be a time to fight, and it may come very soon, but for now, I think we need to be cautious. Why invite more violence?”

  Jonathan doesn’t answer for a moment. “All right,” he finally says, “but sometimes safety comes from fighting, not from sitting back and being afraid. I won’t wait for long.”

  “I’m not afraid,” mutters Edgar.

  Jon sneers at him.

  “We all are,” says Lucy, “or we are fools.”

  Edgar motions for Shakespeare to put his book away, which he does with a long face. Then he turns to Lucy. “Tiger should stay with you two for a while. See if you can convince her to do that. Perhaps you can bring the cannon up here, then you will be more than sufficiently armed, and you can take turns sleeping.”

  “Did you steal another weapon from the laboratory, Edgar?” asks Lucy.

  “No.”

  “Then what will you—”

  “Remember, I have the sword. And I also have Alfred Thorne.”

  —

  Edgar doesn’t sleep well again that night. He doesn’t dare go up into the laboratory, not two nights in a row. Instead, he lies awake listening, trying to resist dozing off. There is a deep fear within him that feels like his old terrors, like a disease that he cannot rationalize away with the argument that this thing that murdered Lear and attacked Tiger is only interested in warning them.

  When he finally does drift off, a nightmare comes. The hag slips through the door and comes for him. She climbs on top of him and the pressure on his lungs is unbearable. When he awakens she is still there! All his limbs are paralyzed and he remains unable to breathe. He closes his eyes and tries to calm himself, repeating internally that this isn’t reality, the hag is not real, but it’s no use. The old woman’s toothless mouth is inches from his; he can smell her breath, like the odor that comes from the sewers, and he can feel her red eyes glaring. He gets up and walks blindly around the room, but she clings to him, wrapping her bony legs around his torso, climbing up onto his shoulders, her thighs still pressed to his chest, piling her weight onto him to drive him to the floor. He falls to his knees and the shock of hitting the hard wood surface seems to wake him fully, and when he opens his eyes again she is gone. All that is left is the pounding of his heart and the sweat on his face, the sweat all over him.

  She was so real!

  —

  It is dead quiet in the dining room when he enters for breakfast. Both his adoptive parents are waiting for him and neither has touched their toast or tea. Annabel is dipping her knife in the jam and drawing doodles on her napkin, remarkable images of her son’s face. Edgar greets them and sits.

  “You screamed in the night,” says Alfred Thorne.

  “I did?”

  “Is there anything wrong, dear?”

  “There is simply nothing that can be wrong enough for a grown man to scream in his bed.”

  “He is not a grown man, Alfred.”

  “He shall be soon.”

  “Edgar,” says Annabel, ignoring her husband. “Your father and I have discussed your future and have come to a—”

  “A conclusion.”

  “A compromise.”

  That sounds better to Edgar. He looks at his adoptive mother with anticipation.

  But it is Alfred’s big voice that re-enters the fray. “Here is the state of things,” he says with some force, “and I would appreciate your full attention.” Edgar looks back at him. “Mrs. Thorne and—”

  “Your mother.”

  “Mrs. Thorne and I have decided that you are to enter upon a scientific career.”

  “But not a severe one, instead one with promise and creativity and—”

  “A scientific career!”

  “But not in a laboratory, in a dusty, old, boring situation like your father’s.”

  The inventor’s face has gone red. Annabel looks a little concerned, as if she may have gone too far.

  “You, Brim, shall become a doctor,” mutters Thorne.

  “Oh, it will be ever so interesting and challenging and you shall be doing good in the world.”

  Edgar doesn’t know what to say. He is wondering how he might get out of this.

  “I see,” he finally says.

  “Your father wants to send you to the University of Edinburgh this autumn, but I have asked him to kindly allow you to stay with us for another year or two in London. You are still so young.” She pauses and looks as though she is anticipating an explosion of disagreement from her spouse, but when Alfred speaks he seems calm, though his teeth are held tightly together.

  “We have agreed to have you apprentice, as it were, with a physician in London, a resp
ected surgeon, for ONE year before you proceed to Scotland to enter the esteemed medical school there and work industriously to receive your degree. Then you will return and take up your practice here.”

  “You will be close to us!”

  “At the London Hospital, one of our finest, and the best part is that the surgeon is your own uncle, Vincent Brim. He has agreed to take you under his wing for this year. You are a fortunate child.”

  “Imagine that, a child,” says Annabel, “and just moments ago he was a man.”

  The silence in the room hangs there for several seconds.

  “You are fortunate, Brim.”

  But Edgar doesn’t feel that way. This is not what he wanted in life, and right now, he has so many other things with which to grapple. He doesn’t want to be pushed toward a vocation right away.

  “You shall start tomorrow!” exclaims Thorne.

  “Tomorrow?”

  Annabel gets up and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Well, you know, Edgar, you must make a start of it sometime. You need to get used to all those horrid things that doctors must do. All that blood and sawing of bones and—”

  “That is enough, Mrs. Thorne. We do not need to discuss this any further. I shall wake you at five in the morning, Brim, and you will be on your way. You can walk to the hospital. It is not terribly far and brisk constitutionals in the morning are good for young fellows. Simply report to the Receiving Room or Accident Department, whatever they call it, at the main entrance, and ask for your uncle. Mrs. Thorne will have Beasley lay out the appropriate clothing.”

  —

  Edgar spends the day feeling anxious, about his friends in Kentish Town, about something entering Thorne House and attacking, and this new worry: what will he encounter tomorrow at the hospital? He has always hated Vincent Brim. His uncle had disliked his father, thought him flighty and irresponsible, and had always been jealous that (the older) Allen Brim had inherited Raven House and then let it fall into such disrepair, especially while pursuing his “childish” interest in literature. When Vincent was given the old mansion upon Allen’s death, he had drawn up a statement for nine-year-old Edgar to sign renouncing all claims on it and then immediately sold the place and purchased a luxurious home for himself and his loathsome, social-climbing wife Carmilla, in Kensington. Edgar remembers the few times he had seen her, got up in elaborate dresses, her face pancaked and white; and the single time he had been in their house, told in no uncertain terms to “NOT touch anything!” Edgar had been repelled by the very sight of Uncle Vincent too, short and thick, ridiculously clean, always inspecting his fingernails and pushing back the cuticles, with wide black eyebrows and a charcoal mustache and goatee—all dyed from their original red—with gleaming circular glasses and a way of holding his nose in an upward direction when he spoke to you. There was something else about him too, difficult for Edgar to put his finger on. Uncle Vincent always seemed to be scheming, to have secrets, as if he were plotting something and that something had to do with you. Sometimes Vincent Brim looked at Edgar as if he were examining him, planning his dissection.