The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim Page 8

  He stepped forward and hugged her. He hadn’t intended to do that.

  For a moment she was stiff in his arms but then went up on her tiptoes and hugged him back, and they remained there embracing for a moment on her front step. He could sense now what he had never really known about his dear friend—she was strong, yes, but a bit vulnerable too. It felt amazing to hold her.

  She was wearing her white cotton school shirt and gray flannel trousers, but not the way they were intended to be worn. The shirt had no tie and was undone a few buttons at the collar and hung loose over the trousers, and her feet were bare. Her shape gave the clothes a look they weren’t intended to have. Her face was a little puffy, her shining black curly hair, now grown longer, was disheveled. But she was marvelous to him.

  She invited him in, made tea, and they sat at the table in her little parlor. By then she had buttoned up her shirt, done up the trousers, put on shoes and fixed her hair a little, but not too much. Her brief joyful expression had been replaced by the tough face she had maintained throughout her years at the college.

  “So you’re not going to America?”

  “I probably will, soon. I can’t secure a good position here.”

  “What sort are you seeking?”

  “That is part of the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I cannot decide if I am a man or a woman. No, that’s not it. I mean, I know what I am.” She smiled and started to slide her hand over to his and then pulled it back. “But I don’t know what I should be in order to get what I want in life.”

  “You should be yourself.”

  She smiled again but then narrowed her eyes. “Why have you come?” she asked. “Not just to see me, I’m sure.”

  “Well, I did come to see you. But there’s something else too.” He took the card from his pocket and put it on the table. She picked it up and looked at it.

  “Lear visited my room one night, years ago, and gave me this.”

  Tiger glanced up at him. The mysterious one-armed professor had the same frightening effect on her as he did on all the students at the College on the Moors.

  Edgar told her about trying to help Lancelot Newman, how their friendship had grown and what had happened a few days ago. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he believed in demons and monsters, and really, he didn’t think he did. But he told her how the little boy had felt about them, and how at the last moment, just after he had spoken of them, a presence had come over the room, as if someone were in there, watching.

  Tiger was listening but also concentrating on the card.

  “I know about these people,” she said, tapping it with a finger.

  “You do?”

  “From a long time ago. I remember when I was on the streets as a child, I used to see these cards, usually on Oxford Street or The Strand; street boys used to hand them out. They all asked the same question when they did. If you answered “yes,” they inquired if you would come with them to a certain address for a little experiment, for which you would be paid. It was sort of sinister, but there were always children who were desperate, and I suppose whoever employed these messengers knew it.”

  “Did you ever go?”

  “No. It wasn’t enough money, just pennies. I had bigger plans. Lear gave this to you?”

  “What was the question they asked?”

  “Let me see.” She thought for a moment. “Oh, yes. They asked if you ever had the sensation, just as you wakened, that something or someone was sitting on your chest and pressing the air from your lungs, trying to kill you. Your arms and legs were paralyzed; you were conscious but couldn’t move. They called it the hag phenomenon.”

  Edgar’s heart started pounding hard.

  “Edgar? Are you all right? You are very white! Do you want to lie down?”

  He had never mentioned the hag to a soul.

  “They asked that very question? They called it that?”

  “What is it? Why does this matter to you?”

  He told her. And he admitted that the old woman was still with him.

  “You should have told me this before.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You just should have. You shouldn’t keep things like that from me. Maybe I could have helped you. Maybe I still can.”

  Though Edgar certainly appreciated her desire to help him, he doubted she could, not with this. The hag represented something that remained alive in him that he needed to kill—he wondered if someday terror might seize him so thoroughly that he might want to end his life. It was good to have his friend near him and reaching out, but he knew that solutions lay elsewhere. It intrigued him beyond description that the “society” noted on the card that Professor Lear had given him was interested in the very thing that had plagued him since infancy. They even had a name for it. Now, that could mean something.

  “Will you come with me?”

  “Where?”

  “To find these people.”

  Half an hour later they were heading north toward Drury Lane. They walked this time, a long way up to the river and then over Waterloo Bridge with stately Somerset House on one side and the golden Parliament Buildings in the distance on the other. They passed ladies in bustled dresses and fancy hats, other women in torn skirts and blouses that barely stayed on them, men in bowler hats and high cravats, or soiled caps with greasy rags around their throats. On the busy streets there were tram cars and omnibuses and even a few motor cars, new in England and the world, daring the speed limit of twelve miles an hour. It was a fine day for London, no fog or rain, as if the great city, often in a dark dream, was momentarily wide awake. But the couple barely noticed either the weather or their surroundings. They were locked in conversation, Edgar telling Tiger in more detail what happened the night Master Newman died, and about the ominous Lear insisting on a visit to the address on the card. She wore a hat, a pleated shirtwaist and modest skirt, but she had that old intense expression on her face, prepared for a fight.

  As they reached The Strand, a wide street just north of the river, Edgar spotted the Gaiety Theatre to his right, its billboards announcing The Circus Girl, one of its popular musical comedies. But just ahead on Wellington Street was the theater. And the tale to be told inside its walls this week was vaguely familiar to Edgar. “FAUST!” read the marquee. “Returning after 7 Years!” He stared at it. Memories of the sounds within the theater’s auditorium came back to him, and so did his father’s strange state that night, the night before he died. A chill ran down Edgar’s spine.

  A moment later, they came to the intersection of Wellington Street and Exeter. Down a short block to their left, two men hurried from the side door of the Lyceum. One was tall and burly with well-groomed red hair and beard, dressed in a nondescript Irish tweed suit and brown tie, a brown felt Homburg hat on his head, his hands in his waistcoat as he anxiously followed a surly fellow in front of him. That man was almost as tall but nearly skeletal, his suit black and immaculate, enclosed in a billowing cape, his top hat towering on his fine head, his black and gray-streaked hair hanging down past his collar. The burly man scurried past and seized the door of a hansom cab, opening it and almost bowing to the other man as he did.

  “Henry Irving!” said Edgar, and he and Tiger froze.

  They were only a few carriage lengths away, the cab pointed straight at them. Irving settled into it looking severe, his face cold and white, his eyes dead like a killer’s. For a fleeting second, it occurred to Edgar that the great Irving’s features bore a distant resemblance to the hooded driver’s at the College on the Moors.

  The other man closed the hansom door and waved as the driver snapped his whip and the horse moved forward, hooves clapping on the cobblestones. Irving didn’t deign to turn back to his helper but stared at the two young people as the cab passed them. The expression in his black eyes seemed to penetrate Edgar’s soul and make it shiver. The devil was staring at him.

  When the great man was gone, they regarded th
e one left behind. The big fellow, too, was watching them, as if he were guarding Irving from all who dared to observe him.

  “Come, Edgar, we must be on our way.”

  They came to Drury Lane. It was a curious street. Narrow and almost closed off from the sky with tall, ancient buildings three to five stories high, it wound its way from its start just north of The Strand to fashionable Oxford Street at its top. In between were many worlds: theaters and shops and offices as well as slums. When you stood at its bottom, it seemed that you could move about in time: back to the bowed shop windows of Dickens, remain in the modern times of steam, or move ahead to the approaching machine world.

  They dodged people on the footpaths, noting the plates on the buildings in search of the Crypto-Anthropology Society. They passed J. Sainsbury’s grocery shop, the back of the huge Drury Lane theater and several boarded-up buildings. Children ran by, a maid in her uniform, a swell in a top hat whistling and a man with a wide basket of muffins balanced on his head, ringing a bell and crying out his wares. The street smelled both enticing and repulsive.

  “Where is it?” said Edgar, frustrated. Why had Lear sent him here? Maybe it was all a ruse. This wasn’t the safest street. Were they about to be set upon?

  But their destination appeared no more than a minute later, a tall old building of an ochre color, made of brick and wood and likely here when knights and their ladies walked up these footpaths. It seemed to loom out over the street, no lights emanating from the low square windows and the upper ones shuttered. The society’s title, so long that it barely fit its plaque, sat below three plates referring to other businesses. There were bells beside each name and Tiger rang the appropriate one. Edgar could have sworn that her hand was shaking just a little.

  Edgar’s imagination began working on him. Lear, he thought, had set this up. What if they went inside and never came out? He readied himself. He wondered how quick and agile Tiger would be in her women’s clothes. Anyone encountering her now wouldn’t believe she could do what he knew she could. Perhaps that was an advantage.

  The inner door opened. They saw a figure through the smoky glass. Then the outer door moved, but didn’t swing wide. Both Tiger and Edgar stepped back.

  “Yes?”

  Before them, or below them, stood a very short man with an enormous head. It seemed to be nearly the size of his entire torso. The door opened a little wider. He was dressed in black billowing pants and a frilly white shirt undone nearly halfway down his chest. He appeared to be ancient, the folds in the skin on his face like those of a hound dog, his bottom lip hanging down too. He was perspiring, his spectacles up on his forehead. The two young people were speechless.

  “Might I, William Shakespeare, chairman of the Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen’s Empire, be of use on this prepossessing day, filled as it is with azure skies?” He glanced up toward the heavens which were, actually, growing cloudy.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Edgar Brim. Was this a joke Professor Lear was playing on him? Edgar wondered to himself. Was Lear capable of humor?

  “In short, what do you want?”

  “To … to meet the Society?”

  “The Society of which you speak is not available to any Tom, Dick or Harriet. It is peopled by gentlemen of the highest standing, and their time is of great value, that is to say, one must have an appointment to meet with them and that appointment must portend of singular moment and significance. Do you understand me?”

  “No,” said Tiger.

  “In short, get out of here.”

  “But I have come a long way,” said Edgar.

  The man chuckled. “I thought as much. This is London, my boy, the greatest city upon the earth, this orb, this stately sphere, and our Society has society of this noble metropolis’s highest standing. I do not care that you have come from—”

  “He experiences the hag phenomenon,” said Tiger.

  Shakespeare stopped speaking and gaped. He pulled his spectacles down over his eyes and stared up at Edgar. “This specimen here?” He looked as if he wanted to lie Edgar down upon an operating table and start carving him with a scalpel.

  “Yes, sir,” said Edgar, making sure his voice didn’t crack.

  “Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well,” said the little man.

  “I—”

  “You must come in!” He opened the door fully, stepped aside, and motioned with an elegant sweep of his hand for his guests to enter and start down the stairs. Once Edgar had passed and taken the lead, Tiger made sure that she brought up the rear, so they were on either side of the strange man as they descended.

  The room below was extraordinary. It was round with a very high ceiling. Nearly every inch of its curving wall, from top to bottom, was crammed with books. Edgar scanned them. It seemed like every last one was a work of fiction. Peeking out between the volumes were more animal heads than one might see in a row of cages at the London Zoo. All sorts of exotic creatures gazed vacantly down upon them—lions, tigers, wildebeests, gazelles and even an elephant. And in among the beasts, as if one of them, hung a mammoth portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, painted at least fifty years earlier. A half dozen leather chairs sat around a wooden table in the center of the room. Each had a stack of papers and books in front of it. There were lit cigars at the settings and smoke filled the space like one of the city’s fogs. But no one was present except this man who called himself Shakespeare.

  “They are conducting discussions of utmost secrecy and importance,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Who are?” asked Tiger.

  But the little man hushed her with a wave of his hand. “GENTLEMEN!” he shrieked and then paused. “Thank you, kind sirs.” He seemed to be internally bubbling with excitement. “I give you …” he said to the empty room, then apparently realized that he had not asked his visitors their names. He turned to them. “Uh, whom am I giving to my esteemed associates?”

  “My name is Edgar Brim.”

  “And I am Miss Tiger Tilley.”

  “Tiger?” asked Shakespeare. “Why, I’ll be a camelopard; I’ll eat my head if I’ve ever heard of such a name for a woman.” He rolled his R’s liberally and caressed each word as if it were a pearl of enormous wisdom cast out toward the swine of the world. He regarded an empty chair. “What is that you say, Mr. Sprinkle? That I may have to consume it, since that is what she said? And, though large, it would be a rather light meal?” He was not pleased. “Thou art a boil, a plague sore!” he shouted.

  But then he turned back to Tiger and Edgar and smiled. “And I give you, my distinguished visitors, three gentlemen of unsurpassed renown in the city of London, indeed in the entire Empire, perhaps the world: Messrs. Sprinkle, Winker and Tightman.” He indicated three empty chairs.

  “Though Mr. Sprinkle Esquire’s standing is not of an elevation more mountainous than his colleagues,” continued the little fellow, “I shall introduce him first.” He paused. “Now, don’t grumble, you two. You rampallian! You fustilarian! I will get to you!” He cleared his throat. “Sprinkle is a magnate in the world of hat feathers and an author of extreme distinction. You may sit down, sir.” Shakespeare turned to the next chair. “Mr. Winker Esquire, whom you see here, is not to be sneezed at either. He has made an enviable fortune in the world of nose bags. His family, indeed, are the nose bag kings. He is also a sportsman of some standing, having shot and killed great piles of animals.” Then Shakespeare turned to another chair. “And, of course, here is the inimitable Mr. Tightman Esquire, a giant in the toilet tissue world and a man now working upon the ultimate refutation of the works of Charles Darwin, following close upon his study of the history of the world in ninety-seven volumes.” He uttered a sigh. “And I, kind sir and lady, am the gentle William Shakespeare, as aforementioned, retired now from the beastly world of daily concerns, a direct descendant of, well, need I say his name?”

  “Shakespeare has no direct descendants,” whispered Tiger.


  “Uh, no, sir,” said Edgar. He glanced around the table. “It is a pleasure to meet every one of you.” He wondered what in the world Lear was up to.

  “Mine too,” added Tiger.

  “Excuse me, guests, but my colleagues are all speaking at once. SILENCE, you long-tongued babbling gossips!” he shrieked and then waited for a good ten seconds. “Now, kind sirs,” he said to the table again, “please listen carefully to what I have to say.” His excitement was coming to the surface. “This gentleman here, this Sir Edgar Broom—”

  “Brim.”

  “Oh yes, Sir Edgar Brim.” He turned to the boy. “Do I have that right now?”

  “Yes, sir, except I have not yet been knighted.”

  “This Brim chap has experienced the HAG PHENOMENON!!!” Shakespeare shouted the last words across the room as if he had been trying to hold them back since he entered. His face had gone beet red. He then waited a few moments as if gauging his audience’s reaction. He seemed to receive the response he wanted, for he began to beam. “Well, sirs, do not just sit there, get him THE drink! Or, a drink, I should say.” He stood there for a while, tapping his foot impatiently. “The potion? Now, why would you call it that, Mr. Sprinkle, just fetch him a beverage, sir. Just a drink, Mr. Winker, if you please? A mere liquid refreshment, Mr. Tightman?” He paused again, “Well, RETRIEVE IT! You lumps of foul deformity! Must I do it myself?”

  Shakespeare turned and stalked toward one of the dark little hallways that led off from the room. But almost immediately he was retreating, backing up.

  “I had forgotten you were here,” he said, sounding a little frightened.

  The person who had unnerved him emerged out of the darkness of the room. He was large and wide shouldered and his head almost touched the low ceiling. His unkempt longish hair and beard were black with gray streaks, his head like a dark lion’s. He had just one arm.