Monster

by Shane Peacock

  “Of course it has,” says his adoptive father in his stern voice, staring at him.

  “Sir, I did not see you there.”

  “Evidently, or you would not be uttering such drivel.”

  Edgar walks up the stairs and edges past Alfred Thorne without looking at him, though he knows his adoptive father’s eyes are on him. “Excuse me, sir,” he says, “and mother, but I am exhausted and should retire to my room for a while.” He must stop searching the house while being observed. Nothing would come here anyway, he tells himself—the thing that attacked Lear couldn’t know where he lives, at least, not yet.

  —

  Edgar has a bad night, listening for an intruder, and thinking about Tiger alone in her home and Lucy and Jonathan in theirs. He feels a coward for not staying with them, for not insisting that they all keep together. Sleep is not an attractive option. He knows if he drifts off his nightmares will come and the hag will be on him when he wakes. So, as he did on the first night he came to this house as an orphaned little boy, he lies awake for hours and then gets quietly to his feet, goes out the door and sneaks up the creaking steps to the laboratory at the top of the house.

  This time, he knows how to get in. He has been watching Tiger, who grew up on the streets and knows how to break into any building, and could get herself inside the rooms where the sweets were kept in their student days at the College on the Moors. A simple piece of wire can do the trick and he often carries one of hers now. The door has a complicated lock, designed by Thorne himself, but in minutes, Edgar has it open.

  He is inside with the entrance closed behind him in a flash. There is something about this place that is electric to him. The big ceiling window that stretches nearly the length of the room is partially exposed tonight. The long blind is not fully drawn shut and the stars are twinkling in the clear black sky above, casting soft light onto the floor and on the tables, on Thorne’s big desk and the books that line the wall—those unexpected works of fiction.

  Edgar steps carefully, intent on getting what he needs quickly and then leaving. He wonders if he dare steal another weapon.

  “Find the rifle bullets and get out,” he whispers to himself.

  And there in the center of the room is the table he is seeking. And there on it, as if left for him, is a scattering of the big bullets. He sweeps them into the pocket of his dressing gown and turns back to the door, his pulse racing.

  He hears something, as if someone were in the room with him. Then he sees a shadow on the wall, glimpses it peripherally to the side and nearly behind him.

  A figure is coming forward, tall and thin. It emerges out of the darkness and approaches the squares of light on the floor. Edgar thinks he sees something behind it: a body, a big human one lying on a table.

  “Stop right there!” A hand seizes his elbow in a steely grip.

  “Good evening, Edgar,” says Alfred Thorne. “I see you have returned to my laboratory.”

  “Re-returned?” sputters Edgar.

  “I believe you have been here before. Do you know, by the way, that someone, or perhaps a pair of someones, stole two valuable items from my arsenal, just within these past two weeks?”

  “No…no, sir, I did not know that. I am sorry to hear it.”

  “Well, never mind, I have informed the police and they shall be found out before long.” He releases the boy and takes a step back.

  “And so they should be.” Edgar can’t help glancing at the scar on Thorne’s cheek.

  “You have grown industrious, Edgar.”

  “Should that not be admired?”

  “If it is for good. One might argue that breaking into laboratories through locked doors is not quite an altruistic thing.”

  “Good is hard to define these days, sir.”

  “Perhaps in any day, Edgar, though I would put it to you that something which advances human knowledge cannot be anything but admirable. And that is what I am attempting to do daily in this room.”

  Edgar glances toward the thing lying on the table behind his adoptive father. He thinks he can see a head turned on its side and is unsure if it is attached to the trunk. “Said like a true man of science, sir.”

  “There is nothing more important than science, my boy, nothing! Look out on the streets these days at these new motor vehicles. They will change our world and improve everything about life on earth: there is a kind of goodness in them.” He advances toward Edgar, causing the lad to back up. Edgar stumbles and nearly falls into the bookshelf with those rows of sensation novels.

  “Be careful, Edgar.”

  “Might I go, sir?”

  Alfred Thorne pauses. “Why, yes, of course.” Edgar turns to leave. “But do not come back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Unless you are invited and I am prepared for you.”

  Edgar wishes he had a clearer view of what is on that table at the back of the lab, but Thorne seems to be standing so as to block his view. And with those bullets in his pocket, the theft of which he is almost sure Alfred did not see, Edgar is anxious to get away. He opens the door and begins to close it behind him, but it won’t shut. When he looks back, he sees Thorne is holding it.

  “You know, Edgar, you are not entirely unwelcome in this place now. Science is also a calling, an admirable one, in fact, the greatest of vocations.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you must choose your calling soon.” Thorne turns in the direction of that thing on the table for an instant.

  “I…I am considering literature.”

  Thorne’s face had been white and porcelain in the dim light but a sort of rose color quickly invades it. He grimaces, as if to keep himself from shouting, and turns on Edgar.

  “I was not finished!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That prospective hobby of yours, which you just mentioned, will not be your calling.”

  Edgar says nothing.

  “You may choose from among the sciences. I have friends and I shall consult them and find you a position soon.”

  Edgar turns his back on him and slips out the door.

  —

  In the morning, there is no message from his friends—no telegram, nothing. But he tells himself that makes sense—anything arriving at Thorne House, even if addressed to him, would first be read by Alfred or Annabel, since he is still their ward. His friends must have considered that. But he wonders. Images of his comrades’ gruesomely murdered bodies flash through his mind and he desperately tries to banish them.

  He fidgets during breakfast under the glittering chandelier in the dining room, anxious to get away. Annabel pushes scones and jams and tea at her beloved adopted son and carries the conversation, asking Edgar questions about his final school year and what his plans are for the future. He, of course, says nothing of the terrible things that transpired at the College on the Moors during his last days there, and is careful to seem uncommitted about his prospects. Alfred says almost nothing, though he watches Edgar closely whenever he answers.

  “You still don’t look well, my son,” adds Annabel.

  “He is fine.”

  “I believe he has a tongue to answer for himself, Mr. Thorne.”

  “I am fine, mother.”

  “So, dark circles under your eyes indicate health, do they? You seem sad, morose. Is anything wrong?”

  Edgar gets abruptly to his feet.

  “No, nothing at all. But…mother, sir, might I be excused? I have an appointment late this forenoon.”

  “An appointment?” asks Thorne.

  “I am meeting three acquaintances from school.”

  “How wonderful!” cries Annabel. “I shall have Beasley set out the appropriate clothes. Something with some color in it?”

  “Uh, no, mother, dark would be better, and somewhat formal.”

  “Dark?”

  “We, uh, we shall be attending a…lecture…by an esteemed gentleman.”

  “And who would that be?” asks Thorne.

&n
bsp; “Uh…Professor T.H. Huxley.”

  Thorne smiles, a decidedly unusual thing for him. “Why, that’s lovely, Brim! He is an excellent man. A scientist, biologist, Darwin’s bulldog they call him…” But then Thorne frowns. “Did he not die, just last year or the year before?”

  “I…” stammers Edgar, “I may have the wrong name. It is my friends who are hosting me. Perhaps it is Mr. Huxley’s brother? Or son?”

  Alfred’s frown doesn’t leave him.

  “Well, I think that is marvelous,” says Annabel, “whoever is speaking. Science is a wonderful vocation, you know, Edgar, but perhaps there are others for you to consider as well. After all, science can be a little dull. All that proving and proving—do we need proof for everything? Love, for example, can you hold that in your hand?”

  Alfred Thorne drops his utensils with a bang onto the white tablecloth.

  “Did I say something wrong, my dear?”

  “Mrs. Thorne, we clearly have not yet had our chat about Edgar’s future.”

  “His future is up to him, Mr. Thorne.”

  “That is unacceptable, you well know that.”

  Edgar backs toward the door, hoping they won’t notice. Their eyes are locked on each other’s, Annabel wearing a bright and daring dress that shows her stockings nearly to the calf and her husband without a spot of color on his person. But as Edgar reaches behind his back and feels for the doorknob, Annabel suddenly raises her voice.

  “Beasley!”

  The door opens from the other side and the butler’s quick entry nearly knocks Edgar down. Beasley is a small man with a pronounced ridge for a brow.

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “Please lay out Master Brim’s black suit coat and trousers for him, dark necktie, dress shoes, thank you.”

  She is still glaring at her husband.

  —

  Within an hour Edgar is on the street, almost running north from elegant Mayfair, the fistful of bullets for Jonathan and Lucy’s rifle in the pocket of his dark suit coat. He has to get them to his friends. That is, if they are alive to receive them. Spooked by Alfred’s presence in the laboratory last night, Edgar hadn’t made an attempt to return there to steal a weapon, so other than employing Lear’s big sword-like knife, which he has hidden under his bed, he will be defenseless should anything come after him when (and if) he returns home to Thorne House.

  As he scurries along, he keeps looking back, knowing that he is leaving Annabel vulnerable too. He isn’t worried about Thorne. The inventor seems well equipped, both in spirit and in resources, to fend off anything, to arm himself with some extraordinary weapon with gruesome capability in an instant and destroy anything that might threaten him. But the inventor is always up there in that laboratory—even in the middle of the night, it seems—seldom at Annabel’s side. Should something come after her, it would take her life with ease.

  Edgar knows he must try to get back to her as soon as he can and somehow defend her, perhaps even tell her everything, so she is at least prepared. But he can’t be everywhere at once. First, he must help his friends.

  He boards an omnibus on Regent Street, advertisements for soap and ladies’ items and Sainsbury’s grocer splashed on its exterior. He goes up the spiral stairs to the roof and in minutes is moving past big Regent’s Park, folks strolling about on its green inner-city acres without a care in the world.

  If all has gone well, his friends will be at the Lears’ house in Kentish Town, their first time together since they left the hotel with the professor’s body in a coach, Edgar and Tiger standing silent on the footpath, Lucy and Jonathan both solemn in the hansom cab behind their grandfather. They had agreed the funeral would be today. The corpse would have spent yesterday and this morning in the Lear home and a coroner would have been there to inspect it by now. But what if that official, likely stern and humorless, didn’t believe the story of the fall in the bathtub? Edgar tries to imagine the quiet house last night, the sound of a clock ticking, or perhaps no sound at all, as his friends waited out the darkness, their dead grandfather for company, terrified of a monstrous intruder, worried about facing the grim coroner in the morning, and then the funeral. He imagines them sleeping in the same room for safety, taking turns with Thorne’s unloaded rifle pointed at their door as if its very appearance would be a sufficient deterrent, with their backs against the wall, hoping this new creature will let them live just one more day.

  Did it? he asks himself.

  And what of Tiger, he thinks, absolutely alone in her little home in Brixton, going without sleep, the cannon primed and ready. He wonders if she is alive too.

  I let her go home alone.

  The omnibus deposits him in the slightly upscale northern end of the Lears’ working-class neighborhood, just south of the much more elegant Highgate with Hampstead to the west. Professor Lear couldn’t afford a house in either of those areas, well known as home to great writers and artists, to the great of all sorts. It is as if the terrain acknowledges this, for here, near the foot of Highgate Hill, the land rises up to Hampstead Heath and Highgate Cemetery and the houses of the wealthy. Mary Shelley’s immortal husband often visited other poets up there, and just recently the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson lived in its environs, he whose mind conjured up the monster in the terrifying Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “Where did that creature come from?” asks Edgar out loud. “Did the author actually see the demon Hyde walking those leafy streets after midnight?”

  But the street Edgar is on now is much more humble than those. Many of the houses are attached to one another, built of sturdy brick, mostly just two stories high and tightly stationed near the footpath. Edgar is so anxious about what he will soon find that he starts to run toward the Lear home, remembering the number—66 Progress Street. He spots a black coach outside, two black horses hitched and ready, a man in a tall black top hat and black clothes up on the box with reins in hand. The undertaker.

  Either the coroner has been to the house and swallowed the story about Lear’s phantom fall in the bathtub and the professor’s coffin lies in the coach ready for its trip to the cemetery…or this black conveyance is there for someone else, for two others, perhaps even three.

  Edgar reaches the front entrance out of breath and doesn’t bother to knock. He pulls open the door and enters, nearly colliding with Lucy. She is emerging from the little front parlor into the vestibule carrying a single red rose, dressed in black from head to foot, her pale face and copper-colored hair in great contrast to her black bonnet. Jonathan appears behind her, dressed in dark clothing too.

  “You are alive!” Edgar nearly shouts.

  Lucy brings a finger up to her thin lips. There are three other men behind Jonathan: a clergyman and two who look working class, all in black. Edgar wonders if they are undertaker’s mutes hired to accompany the funeral procession.

  Lucy takes his arm and leads him back through the doorway toward the street. Behind them, Jonathan speaks under his breath.

  “No intruder, no creature, came here. We had grandfather washed and prepared. The coroner believed us, though he asked many questions. The five quid I paid him may have helped.”

  They walk out into the late morning, clouds gathering above, their hard shoes clacking on the stones. It smells of onions and wet clothes on the foot pavement. Perhaps the poor vegetable mongers have been past with their wares.

  “I have chosen to walk with the procession,” says Lucy. “I know it is unusual.”

  “Who are the other two?”

  “That’s the gravedigger and the undertaker’s boy—they will walk with us too. We couldn’t afford much and we had to keep this quiet. Grandfather had few friends anyway, most were from the college. Though we’ve invited no one, I’ve had a gravesite dug in Highgate Cemetery. I wanted him to lie up there. He deserves it.” She begins to cry and Edgar finds a handkerchief for her in his trouser pocket. Annabel always thinks of everything.

  “Where is Tiger?”
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  The other two say nothing and Edgar’s heart sinks. He stands still behind the hearse, paralyzed, and feels a drop of rain hit his shoulder and another strikes the top of his head. He wants to run south, back down into London, across the Thames and into Brixton, to Tiger’s house. He needs to see her answer the door.

  “She must simply be late,” says Jonathan. But he looks as if he doesn’t believe it. He appears to be holding back tears. Edgar has never seen such an expression on his face.

  If Tiger could crawl she would be here, thinks Edgar. He imagines her dead, her throat crushed like Lear’s, torn apart by whatever attacked the old man in the hotel, some wretch, “worse” than the first. When the hearse moves forward he follows woodenly.

  “It’s my fault,” he whispers.

  They walk solemnly out of Progress Street and then pass the southern end of lush Hampstead Heath. Edgar wishes he could take Lucy by one hand and Tiger by the other and walk under the beautiful trees along the paths on that big, beautiful green heaven, London below them at their feet. But instead, they turn up Highgate Road and begin the climb toward the cemetery, Edgar’s mind boiling.

  “I have to leave,” he whispers to Lucy. “I have to go to Tiger. She might be wounded. She may need me.” Lucy glances at the hearse in front of them, and then back at Edgar and nods. They are now passing the cemetery’s brick wall with its gated entrances, the grounds on the other side verdant like an English jungle. Edgar touches Lucy gently on the shoulder and steps away from the procession, but as he does, he sees someone coming up the road toward them: a girl dressed in black from her bonnet to her long dress and shoes, limping. Her short black hair curls out from under the hat and her black eyes stare in his direction.

  “Tiger!” he says out loud.

  He realizes she isn’t actually limping. She is in high-heeled boots, which isn’t her fashion, and it gives her a labored gait. She is rushing, hobbling toward them. Jonathan has stopped as well and begins to hold out his arms to her, but then drops them and simply smiles.