The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Read online

  “You were speaking in your sleep,” said the esteemed professor of sciences in a voice so deep that it seemed to resonate in his head.

  “Y-yes,” said Edgar.

  “Why?”

  “I do not know, sir.”

  “You mentioned the name Grendel this evening as if he were alive in front of you. You are aware of who that is, the evil monster from the epic poem Beowulf?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Why Grendel?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Lear regarded him with a penetrating stare. Edgar wished Annabel Thorne were with him, back in the safety of his bedroom in London.

  “I see,” said Lear finally, “the cat has your tongue, does it? I want to give you something.” He pulled a card from a pocket. Edgar looked down at it.

  THE CRYPTO-ANTHROPOLOGY SOCIETY OF THE QUEEN’S EMPIRE, LONDON, DRURY LANE

  “Keep this with you. There may be a day when it will be of use.” Lear turned toward the door, as if worried that someone was spying on them, then turned back to Edgar.

  “You may be a remarkable boy,” he said, and went out.

  Edgar often felt worthless. So when Lear uttered those words, it was almost shocking. He had said it like it meant something. Edgar wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. So he didn’t speak of it to anyone, not even Tiger.

  Edgar sometimes went to his door at night and looked out into the dim hallway, wondering what he might find if he ventured farther: if he ascended to the black turret or descended below the ground floor. One night, he tiptoed to the top of the staircase, and as he stood there, realized someone was looking up at him in the darkness from the bottom step. It was a round, bloodless face. Usher.

  Edgar stumbled back to his room, found his door ajar, and wondered if he’d left it that way. But no one was inside.

  “We can’t keep doing this!” Edgar whispered, holding the big wooden door of the Great Dining Hall open on a late night just before the Christmas holidays the following year. Tiger had done the dirty work, but Edgar was his partner in crime.

  “We’ll stop, but this is a festive treat!”

  Tiger had been not just inside the Hall, but in the larder room where the food was kept, and dancing in the dark on the headmaster’s table on the dais. His arms, as usual, were filled with goodies.

  “Let’s go up to your room!”

  In the corridor, they encountered the driver, his face, as always, deep in his hood, making no sound when he walked. They had seen him trolling the stone floors before on their late-night missions. For some reason, he never betrayed them. But he seemed unable to speak; the professors communicated with him by sign language. He was a bizarre man, rumored to have been found on the moors many years ago.

  Back in Edgar’s room, the boys gorged themselves on stolen tarts and slices of pie and delicate sweets. The little thief knew the hidden spot in the larder where Griswold and his allies horded the best treats.

  Tiger liked to sit against the wall on the bed with Edgar and chat into the night while stuffing his face. Edgar thought they were a bit old for this—both in their second last year at the school, advancing fast up the forms. But Tiger was in heaven. He had a constant love of danger—in the hallways, on the rugby field and late at night. It was strange for a boy of his breeding to be accomplished at so many criminal arts. Edgar could hardly object, since he loved eating the spoils of their adventures, but one of these days, he was sure his friend would be apprehended, probably expelled, and perhaps bring him down with him.

  “How do you get the larder door unlocked, and then locked again?”

  “You’ll have to learn yourself, Brim. I can’t do everything for you.”

  There was a sudden moaning sound. It came up from the cellar and ran along the halls. Tiger laughed and offered an imitation. But Edgar didn’t smile. He had never become accustomed to these strange, late-night sounds.

  Tiger could be a bit of mystery. He was usually bold, and yet was shy in the changing room during athletics where he chose to disrobe behind the closed door of the water closet. Edgar understood. The smaller boy hadn’t grown the way he and Fardle and the others had. Though his lower body appeared powerful, he didn’t have the muscle in his arms and shoulders that he wished. It bothered him. He was that sort of boy. He often commented on how Edgar had grown.

  “Coming home with me for Christmas this year, Tilley?”

  “Certainly. Just ask Mrs. Thorne.”

  “I already have. I’ve asked her three years in a row now and she’s always said yes and you’ve never come.”

  “I will this year.”

  But Edgar knew he wouldn’t. Tiger was always excited when Edgar brought up the subject in the fall but refused when Mrs. Thorne’s invitation was extended later on. He gave all sorts of reasons, but none were convincing.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Don’t say that to me,” said Tiger abruptly, “not you, of all people.” He climbed out of the bed and walked to the other side of the room and was silent for a while before he spoke again. “I want to tell you about the accident now. I need to get it off my chest.”

  Edgar knew what that meant. Tiger had mentioned the “awful” accident in which his parents had died many times, but had never given any details. Since Edgar lived out any story he read or was told, even drifted into paintings when he stared at them, he wasn’t anxious to hear what promised to be a bloody account. But once they graduated, they might not see each other much, so if his friend was ready to talk about this now, he would listen. Tiger had often followed Edgar down the hallways when his nightmares made him walk in his sleep, quietly returning him to his bed so others wouldn’t know, but Edgar hadn’t told him of the anxiety that was always inside him, or how real the demons in his dreams seemed. He steeled himself for Tiger’s tale.

  Edgar knew that the Tilleys did not have old money, nor were they members of the aristocracy like many other families whose boys attended the College on the Moors. Instead, they were recently wealthy barons of the theater world, suppliers of costumes and scenery to the best performance palaces in London’s West End. “As a child, I was lucky to meet the biggest stars of the stage, including Irving!” Tiger often said. But tonight he didn’t mention any of that. He came to the day of the tragedy instantly. He spoke without sadness, which Edgar found strange. The image of his own father lying motionless in bed still haunted him.

  “We had just visited the college for the first time, the three of us, the whole family. We had met the headmaster and I’d been enrolled … but Mother and Father didn’t make it home.” Tiger put his hand over his heart when he said this, but still didn’t seem upset. In fact, he appeared to be excited.

  “They left Altnabreac Station on the afternoon train. It traveled south on the Far North Line to Inverness and then roared toward Edinburgh at full speed! But … at a valley over a river half an hour out of the city, the unthinkable happened! Up ahead, workers were replacing a track on the viaduct. They were to flag down approaching locomotives some thousand feet before the precipice. But the man charged with that task made a grave mistake. He held the flag only five hundred feet away and the locomotive couldn’t stop. Its brakes screeched and whined, but it plunged into the abyss! Down into the valley the carriages fell, first class, second and third. Many went to their deaths, among them … my parents. It was said limbs and heads were severed and blood was splattered on the walls like paint.”

  Edgar knew that if he listened closely he would be inside that deadly train, so he fixed his mind on a day long ago, reading a happy story with his father.

  “I was fortunate,” Tiger added. “When my parents enrolled me here they left enough money for me to stay in the Highlands for the duration of my education with all my meals and accommodations paid.”

  “I believe you’ve mentioned that.”

  Though Edgar read the Times of London every day, he could not recall ever coming across a report concerning the crash Tiger spoke of. But
it did sound a good deal like another he had read about—at Staplehurst in England some three decades earlier, a much-documented incident in which the author Charles Dickens was nearly killed.

  But why would Tiger lie to him?

  And so Edgar prepared to go home to Thorne House that snowy Christmas wondering about his only friend, again left behind with the dismal dozen. “Have a marvelous holiday, Brim,” said a deep voice as Edgar felt a presence behind him at the front doors. He turned to see Professor Lear. The dark-bearded man dropped his voice. “Sleep well.”

  As fond as Edgar was of his adoptive mother, he always grew bored at Thorne House during school holidays and that Christmas seemed even worse. “Eddie, would you not like to be out of doors?” Annabel asked, as she had many times before. “The pond in the park is frozen over and there are many others your age using it.” She purchased new ice skates for him every year.

  But he never wanted that. He wanted to be with Tiger. And he wanted to climb the stairs at night and find a way into Alfred Thorne’s laboratory. He had sneaked up there a few times when the inventor was away and seen more strange weapons through the keyhole, and once a well-dressed man whose face he recognized from a newspaper had visited the lab: the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Secretary of State for War. “If Tiger were here,” Edgar told himself more than once, “we could break in. He would know how.”

  But two days before Christmas that year, Alfred Thorne unwittingly brought an end to his adopted son’s boredom. And in doing so he changed Edgar’s life.

  Thorne had just entered the drawing room where his wife and young ward were reading in its two most comfortable chairs. She had a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in hand.

  Thorne had only recently allowed her to give Edgar Brim a novel or two. It had galled him to give in, though she argued that Edgar had them at school anyway. As the inventor crossed the room, he saw that the boy had shunned the science books he had left out in favor of a recent H. Rider Haggard adventure story narrating strange and dramatic action in darkest Africa. The boy had even discussed it at dinner the previous evening, speaking of a dashing hero named Quatermain. Thorne hated to admit that it had sounded terribly exciting.

  “I think I shall open this tonight,” said Thorne. He held something in his hand.

  The boy looked up and gasped.

  “I shall break the seal and see what is in it. I have been meaning to do this for years but couldn’t help but think it was nonsense. We shall throw it in the dustbin after I’ve had a quick perusal. Pardon me while I retrieve a hammer from the laboratory to break the lock.”

  Edgar then did something of which he wasn’t proud. And when Thorne returned, Allen Brim’s journal, the object of the inventor’s intended violence, was nowhere to be found.

  “I could have sworn I left it here. Did you see it, Annabel?”

  His wife said she had not, though there seemed a slight smile on her lips.

  “Well,” exclaimed the eccentric man, “I shall see if I left it up in the lab.” Edgar wasn’t sure, but it almost appeared as if there was a very slight smile on his adoptive father’s lips too.

  When Thorne came back empty-handed, Edgar made a shocking announcement.

  “If you don’t mind, mother and Mr. Thorne, I am going to take some air. I feel the need for a turn in the park. Perhaps I shall indeed try out those ice skates.”

  In the park Edgar sat on a cold iron bench, slipped the journal from under his coat and tried to pull it open with his trembling hands. But the lock was secure. Finally, in utter frustration, he stood up and threw it on the frozen ground, jumped into the air and came down as hard as he could on the lock with both feet.

  It sprang open!

  He retrieved it, his breathing quickening, and opened it.

  THE PRIVATE THOUGHTS OF ALLEN BRIM

  With love to Virginia and Edgar

  Edgar fought back tears and began turning the pages. They were full of notes about the fairy tales, sensation novels and horror stories Allen had read, each page headed with the title of a famous fiction. One entry was for Frankenstein, another The Vampyre, and then The Pit and the Pendulum, Beowulf and Beauty and the Beast.

  “The characters seem to be coming to life,” the squire had written on one page.

  As Edgar read on, oblivious to the cold, he realized that in every entry his father dwelt upon the possibility that the monsters and supernatural villains in these novels were real! There were notes about the lives of the writers. Mary Shelley, it seemed, had lived in a haunted house in Switzerland in 1816 during a legendary summer when the sun rarely shone, and one stormy night, she and two poets, her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, made up ghost stories. John Polidori was with them. His tale became The Vampyre. Hers was Frankenstein.

  Mary apparently knew of scientists who believed they could animate dead matter. Allen wondered if one had created a human being, and if she knew about it. Did she see the creature? He quoted a passage Mary had written somewhere, perhaps in her own private journal, and it shook Edgar:

  I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be!

  Edgar flipped through more pages. There were notes about the great American writer named Poe too. The horror master was uniquely sensitive, had “spectral visions” in his dreams and when wide awake. His death had been eerie. “Why can’t they discover what killed him on the Baltimore streets?” Allen had written. “Why was his corpse found in someone else’s clothes?” Then he added: “Did a demon take his life?”

  But of all the spine-tingling thoughts Edgar found in the journal, nothing compared to what he encountered at the end. The final paragraph was in darker ink:

  I am worried that I have done a terrible thing to my beloved little boy. He cannot sleep; he seems frightened of so many things. Did I somehow cause this? I have made him learned and sensitive to his surroundings. He will be a fine boy in those important ways. But have I made him frightened of life? If I have done that, I have done the devil’s work. The Bible says, “Fear not!” and those words and “Love” are our Lord’s greatest. I have not yet had the courage to write the truth in my novels, but if I live long enough (and I have premonitions I may not), I will, at least, instill in Edgar one last and meaningful truth … whatever you do in this world, my son, fight your fears. I am with you.

  DO NOT BE AFRAID

  Edgar Brim could actually hear his father’s voice saying those words as if he were sitting beside him on the cold park bench. It gave him great strength. He stood. As he did, the wind fluttered the pages and his thumb happened to find the last one. Edgar looked down. There were two words there, set off on their own and very small:

  Lear knew.

  9

  New Edgar, New Tiger

  When Edgar Brim returned to the College on the Moors after the Christmas break, he was almost a new boy. Or at least, he was trying to be.

  It was in the very way he moved. Lovecraft noticed it, of course, but so did Griswold and Numb. The lad looked people in the eye, walked with his head up and shoulders back, and spoke to others in a clear voice. It didn’t matter that it was obvious he was forcing himself; it was enough that he was doing it. He was only unnerved near the one-armed professor of science. Lear must refer to someone else, he thought. It must be a coincidence.

  Do not be afraid, he kept reminding himself.

  He appeared in the gymnasium on the first day back ready to develop his muscles and endurance. He wasn’t even sure what he should do with the dumbbells and barbells. He was “greeted” by an astonished Fardle and his minions. Edgar Brim was still the slimmest student his age in the school—the only other who came close was Tiger Tilley. But Edgar ignored Fardle’s needling comments about his weight lifting, stuck to his efforts and made sure he took seconds of everythin
g in the Great Dining Hall. By early February, he began to thicken noticeably. “Excellent,” said Tiger, feeling his mate’s bicep, “you are becoming a man, Master Brim!” The expression on Tilley’s face betrayed admiration. It didn’t hurt that Edgar’s efforts coincided with a major growth spurt. Before long, he reached Fardle’s height.

  But it was at night that Edgar faced his biggest challenge. He kept dreaming of monsters, though now he forced himself to fight them. He wielded an ax at Grendel and confronted the witches and made them back down. He no longer cried out in the night or walked the halls in his sleep, but the nightmares didn’t disappear. And he couldn’t stop wondering about Lear.

  He didn’t shun the more frightening passages in books anymore. Lovecraft was delighted to see him stand up and offer to read the page in Wilkie Collins’s recent novel The Woman in White that detailed the appearance of the ghostly female who haunted that story. Edgar read it with such feeling that he actually scared his classmates. Fardle, for one, fought with a desire to get under his desk.

  On the rugby field, Edgar took the tackles now and often carried the ball. He even caught it once when Fardle threw it at his crotch after a score, then delivered a bullet-like projection right back at the bigger boy’s own groin area. The hard inflated leather ball found its mark and the bully was instantly on the ground, hands upon the precious little engine of the Fardle family’s hopes for the future. The big boy lay there for a while, face as red as the blood he had once or twice drawn from Edgar, Tiger looking on with pride.