Monster

by Shane Peacock

  She is fixing a hat with a flower on it and smoothing down her dress, a navy blue one with only a small bustle. She believes the larger ones make women look like simple objects of desire for men. Edgar had blushed when she had told him that right in front of Alfred. She stops fussing with her outfit and gives him an exasperated look.

  “Just fine? Is that all you have to say about your big day? What was it really like? Do tell. Was Dr. Brim mean to you, was there blood and the sawing of bones, was it too horrible? All that scientific stuff conducted by stiff scientific men. Your father is really not like that all the time, you know, Edgar. He is truly a lovely man, underneath, very tender with me.”

  Edgar clears his throat. “I shall be working with a Dr. Godwin, not my uncle.”

  “Godwin? I know that name. Oh, yes, some say he is the greatest surgeon in England, in the world. That’s wonderful, Edgar. But he is a vivisectionist too, is he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I do not much like that. Mr. Bernard Shaw of our Society has protested it, as has that young novelist, that fascinating man who writes those scientific romances that are all the rage, The Invisible Man thing and that one about the time traveler…”

  “H.G. Wells,” says Edgar. “Dr. Godwin actually seems like a nice man. He was very nice to me. I shall describe him at length later, but I don’t want to keep you. How have things been here, really?”

  “Edgar, you have asked me that about a thousand times since yesterday. Why do you keep inquiring?”

  “No reason.”

  “All is well. Well, well, well, well, well. There, is that good enough for you?”

  It is time to tell her, thinks Edgar. He has to explain. She and Thorne need to be prepared. “You see…I…it’s just that…have you noticed anything unusual—”

  “Edgar, I am going to scream. These sorts of questions are all that come out of your mouth these days. There is NOTHING unusual around here…other than your deliciously unusual father. He is a man, you know, who both upsets and fascinates me. He bores and intrigues me.”

  Edgar doesn’t want to hear more about that, so he embraces her and bids her farewell.

  “Oh,” she says as she picks her umbrella from a hook on the wall, “your father wants to see you later, up in the laboratory.”

  “Are you sure you have that correct, in the laboratory?”

  “I know, rather strange, that. Beasley will set out your dinner at eight o’clock, and then you are to proceed to the lab for a meeting at nine o’clock, a manly meeting I am sure! And it will take place just as darkness falls!” She says the last few words in a mock-scary voice. “Alfred is such a nut! I like to pinch his derriere, you know, when he gets too serious.”

  Edgar blushes. Annabel Thorne leaves him with a kiss on the cheek.

  —

  Edgar eats alone in the dining room. He hears strange noises, but that is a regular thing in Thorne House. Their home seems to feel every gust of wind, every drop of rain, as if it were a human being groaning and shivering.

  At the appointed hour he climbs those creaking stairs and comes to a halt in front of the laboratory door. There seems to be dead silence throughout the house now. No Entry reads the old sign directly in front of Edgar’s face. He can’t believe Thorne is actually inviting him in. A sudden loud sound explodes the quiet—a gong, going off nine times. It’s the grandfather clock on the ground floor. When it finishes, Edgar knocks, and hears his adoptive father’s voice ushering him in.

  Alfred is standing halfway across the room, appearing unsure if he wants to approach his son or stay put. It is almost alarming to see the scientist looking uncertain. Without a word, he motions for the boy to follow him to his big desk. When they get there, Alfred makes as if he will go around it to sit in his chair, but then stops and leans clumsily against the bookcase. Edgar sees an entire row of novels near Alfred’s head. He has never been able to figure out why his adoptive father, professed hater of fiction, has such books in his laboratory.

  There is an awkward silence. Edgar realizes that none of the weapons he has twice seen in this room are there anymore. The tables are cleared off. But that other table, the one at the back in the shadows, still seems to hold a body. Edgar thinks he can smell it. He tries not to glance its way but does, and Alfred appears to notice.

  “My boy, I called you here this evening in order to tell you something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Edgar,” he begins again. He never addresses his adopted son by his Christian name. “Edgar, I…”

  Edgar can’t help looking back toward the body, and it appears to move. Surely it was just the shadows playing tricks on his mind.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You and I…we seldom talk.” Thorne pushes himself up from the bookcase and walks toward Edgar at a measured pace. “I hope your day went well.”

  “It did. I will be working with Dr. Godwin.”

  A cloud comes over Thorne’s face. “Godwin?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see.” He pauses then speaks quickly as if anxious to get the words out. “I am thinking of giving up the invention of weapons. I am not sure if such activity is a fit thing for me to do and I am not certain it is a good example to you.” He stops. “In fact, I am not sure about scientific…”

  “Pardon me, sir. What did you say?”

  “Nothing, nothing, my boy, I merely wanted to tell you what I have just said and ask you about your day, and it seems you do not have much to contribute!” His voice is growing harsher, back to the tone Edgar recognizes. “Be on your way.” He takes a few steps backward and leans against the bookcase again, knocking a volume onto the floor. He picks it up. Edgar can see Charles Dickens’s name on the spine. He takes a deep breath.

  “Why, sir, do you have novels on your shelves? I thought you disliked them.”

  Thorne takes a moment to respond and when he does his voice is softer again. “I find some of these books quite…curious. The Jekyll and Hyde story, for example, contains some interesting ideas.” He straightens up and puts his shoulders back. “They are all nonsense, of course, simply fantasies, but one needs to know about them, I suppose. You must be on your way! It is getting late.” He points in the direction of the door.

  But Edgar is emboldened by his adoptive father’s apparent moment of weakness—so he stares over at the body on the table, although he can’t quite bring himself to ask what it is.

  “It is getting late,” repeats Thorne, more emphatically.

  Edgar has had enough. He needs to know. He strides toward the body.

  “Brim!” shouts Thorne and follows him.

  The body is indeed moving. The shoulders below the severed neck are quivering! Edgar can feel a slight breeze and notices a small fan, powered by electricity it seems, blowing on the corpse. But it isn’t a corpse. Edgar can see now that it is merely a model, made of some sort of plaster, with organs and blood vessels drawn onto the surface or glued to it, some sticking out, and a fake head removed from the trunk, fake neck bones and arteries evident.

  “What is this?” asks Edgar.

  “A human model made of plaster of paris, if you must know. I add and take away parts as I experiment. It is drying. Some of the loose bits flutter a little in the wind.”

  “What are your experiments about?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular. I have ideas sometimes that…”

  “What ideas?”

  Thorne doesn’t say anything for a moment, as if lost in thought. Then he finds his voice again. “My ideas are none of your business. Scientists do not need to explain themselves, especially to children. You were about to leave.”

  Edgar makes for the door quickly. When he gets there, he turns and sees that Thorne has followed him. They both reach for the knob at the same time and for an instant their hands touch. They both pull back.

  “You know, Brim,” says Thorne, “you are, legally, my son. And I wish you all the best in…in this new occupation. I have fo
llowed you and your life with more interest than you might think.” He stiffens again. “Good evening, Brim!”

  —

  Edgar falls asleep too quickly that night.

  In his dream, he is on a beach in the sunshine walking with Lucy and Tiger on either side of him, holding his hands, both of them smiling at him. But then there is a huge crack of thunder and bolts of lightning, and the girls let go of his hands, and he looks down the beach to the old woman running toward him from a distance. She is alive. He is sure of it. She will never let him go.

  Edgar comes awake with the next thunderclap and realizes that the cannonading sound in his dream is real…and inside the house!

  6

  Edgar sits bolt upright in the bed. Someone has kicked in the front door with a sound like a gunshot, a blast from one of Thorne’s incredible weapons. And now it is as if a charging elephant was thundering up the stairs! Edgar hears the thing reach the first landing, outside Alfred and Annabel’s bedroom; he hears their door open and Annabel crying out for help. She must be down there alone! He leaps from bed but then can’t move, paralyzed with fear.

  Now he hears a scream.

  “Mother!”

  She shrieks again, the way an animal does when brutally attacked, then there is silence, and then footsteps thudding on the stairs, but this time coming downward.

  They are like the tread of a deer next to the others, which are now booming upward again, something bumping and banging on the steps behind.

  “Annabel! My LOVE!” Alfred Thorne shouts.

  Edgar begins to shake and drops to his knees and crawls back to the bed and scrambles under it. He lifts the floorboard he long ago loosened and reaches for the second-most important thing he hides beneath it. Lear’s sword! He takes the big blade into his hands.

  The footfalls approach each other on the landing outside Edgar’s room, the louder steps arriving first. There’s the sound of something—Annabel!—thrown to the floor and rolling up against his bedroom door. Edgar rushes forward and reaches the door but cannot turn the knob. His heart is in his mouth.

  The descending steps arrive. “Unhand her, you fiend!” cries Alfred Thorne. And there are several quick steps and a huge crash, the sound of a big body striking the floor. The whole house shakes and Edgar hears a sort of inhuman roar, then several thuds, the dull splat of fists hitting flesh and bones, of a skull being crushed against hard boards, a few groans, a strangled gasp, and then silence.

  Edgar presses his face to the door. Something walks across the floor and then it is breathing loudly just inches from his nose. It sounds huge and stinks of refuse. It roars again, like a lion after a kill. Edgar knows this bellow is for him. It has found him—its prime target.

  But then there is the shout of other voices, the loudest Beasley’s, and many footsteps running up the stairs. Edgar hears the thing hiss and begin to flee. There is an explosion of glass as if something has been thrown through the window at the end of the hall, the thunk of a body landing on the hard footpath two flights down, and then footsteps pounding away into the night.

  Edgar puts his shoulder to the door and drives himself into it. It takes a good shove to open it even partway. The voices are nearing. He feels the weight move from the door, like the body that was lying there is trying to get to its feet. But it falls again a stride away. Edgar tosses the sword back under the bed and pushes through the doorway. The landing is dark, lit only by approaching lanterns coming up the stairs, but he can make out something at his feet.

  She isn’t moving. He drops to his knees and takes her into his arms but when he does, he can feel her breath on his cheek and then the sensation of her stirring.

  “Alfred?” she asks. “Alfred, I love you.”

  “It’s Edgar.”

  “Where is he? Where is Alfred?”

  The butler is now standing across the landing near a wall where a deformed body is lying still. Female servants are crying, their hands over their eyes and mouths. There is blood on the wall and a pool forming on the boards at their feet.

  Annabel turns her head toward the light. “Alfred?” she asks.

  “You shouldn’t look over here, ma’am,” says Beasley, moving his lantern away so that it glows upward toward his face, making his protruding brow ghoulish in the dark. “Mr. Thorne, ma’am…is dead.”

  Annabel’s scream rockets through the house.

  7

  Annabel couldn’t say what it was. She was confined to her bed, speaking very little, only telling the police, and Edgar, that the intruder had seized her by throat and struck her the moment she left her room to investigate. She had seen the face for a second, but its features had vanished from her memory. She had gone semiconscious soon after the blow, aware only briefly of a man—she was certain it was a man, a large one—pulling her by the hair and an arm up the stairs. The next thing she knew she was awakening in Edgar’s embrace.

  “Alfred saved my life,” she sobbed to her son the next day. “He gave his life for me!”

  It seemed that it was true.

  Thorne’s skull had been crushed by a tremendous blow, a series of blows that the police described as being delivered by something “almost inhuman.” It had trampled him and crushed his larynx to make sure of its work. The coroner at first believed that many of the injuries were caused by some sort of blunt instrument, but the shape and size of that weapon was more consistent with a fist. The police were searching every inch of London for the villain.

  Edgar knew what it was, not exactly what it was, but he knew that a monster, the monster, had come to Thorne House to kill or at least wound him, to keep him off its trail. Edgar also knew that he had, in essence, been the cause of Alfred Thorne’s death. He had, for all intents and purposes, murdered him.

  —

  “That is nonsense, my boy!” cried Godwin two days after that, when Edgar finally returned to work at the hospital. Then the good doctor actually took the boy into his arms and embraced him. It was a stiff hug, like something that made sense to do rather than one that was offered based on emotions and true sympathy. It seemed, though, that the intentions were admirable.

  But Edgar, of course, hadn’t told the surgeon the whole story. He had merely said that he felt the murder was his fault because he had not been able to come to the rescue.

  Upon being told that his new apprentice would not be returning to the hospital on his second day of employment and the cause of his absence, Godwin had immediately swung into action, making all the arrangements for Thorne’s funeral, encouraging Edgar to stay home with Annabel and comfort her.

  Edgar sent a telegram to Kentish Town, telling the others what had happened. He tried to make it unemotional.

  Thorne killed by intruder. Please be careful. I will see you when I can.

  But he imagined the terror his message would invoke.

  “My boy, you must get back in the saddle, as it were,” said Godwin. “It is the best thing for it. You shall merely do some odd jobs today, but tomorrow, we shall experiment. I delayed the arrival of the new corpse when you could not come. It shall be here in the morning.” It seemed a strange thing to ask a bereaved person to do.

  —

  Though Edgar is desperate to know if Tiger and the Lears are safe, he feels duty-bound to stay near his widowed mother. He spends that evening sitting in a chair in Annabel and Alfred’s room while she dozes off and on, every now and then saying a few words. The laudanum is helping her cope.

  “That face!” she cries out twice.

  “Describe it,” says Edgar quietly the second time. “Do you remember it now?”

  “No,” she says sleepily. “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was horrible, a beast. I don’t want to say. I can’t…I don’t remember.”

  —

  When Edgar returns to his room it is almost midnight. But he can’t sleep. He knows the hag will come for him tonight.

  He decides to go up to the lab. Alfred had rushed from it on
the night the intruder had killed him, leaving the door wide open, and the key had been found in his pocket. Edgar had gone upstairs after Annabel had been put to bed, closed the door and locked it as a sign of respect. But he cannot resist the desire to finally explore it without interruption. Perhaps Thorne has hidden the weapons somewhere.

  When Edgar enters the lab, he realizes that Thorne had left the huge blind up above fully drawn, so the stars are twinkling down upon him, the full moon making the room’s contents clear before he even turns on a light. The tables are still bare, so Edgar searches in the closets and behind desks, desperate to find something he can use now that he is the last line of defense at Thorne House.

  He eventually locates what he is looking for but their appearance makes his heart sink. There are many of them, a dozen or more—rifles and small cannons and handguns and even a deadly looking crossbow with a cartridge of arrows, as if designed to fire multiple times without pause. But each and every weapon has been smashed to bits. Alfred had destroyed them and with them went Edgar’s chance of defending himself and Annabel. All he has now is Lear’s big knife.

  Edgar slumps down in the chair at the desk. It is large and comfortable. He stares up at the stars for a while, imagining Alfred doing the same, wondering what his thoughts were on that last night, just hours after they’d had their abbreviated talk. Alfred had been trying to tell him something, but he hadn’t been able to do it.

  Edgar opens the upper right-hand drawer of the desk. There’s a stack of heavy paper folders inside. He pulls them all out. Each has a different title. WEAPONS. IDEAS. MY WORK. MY LIFE. The last one intrigues him. But then he notices another, at the bottom.

  EDGAR BRIM, it says.

  8

  Edgar looks at the first page.

  Notes about my SON, it begins.

  He is touched by this, and it surprises him. It begins with simple facts: Edgar’s birth date and the names of his real parents, Allen and Virginia. Then there is a day-by-day account, page after page, of everything Edgar did from the time he arrived at the Thornes’, from funny things he said, to big words he employed, to his acts of kindness. Alfred dwells on what he calls the boy’s “anxiety,” his nightmares and his sleepwalking, and wishes he could do something about them. He worries about Edgar when he is away at school, even follows him north one time on the train. He curses the bullies who tormented him. He wishes he wasn’t so stern in his manner and that he could talk with his son about the novels he is studying at school, novels that he himself is intrigued by. He speaks of his awareness that Allen Brim was fascinated with the idea that the monsters and evil creatures in novels might in some way be real. He wonders if Edgar thinks that too and worries that the boy’s nightmares might be a result of that concern. He writes of being in the laboratory the night Edgar and Tiger stole the weapons, of watching them doing it from a hiding place in a closet! He had wanted to go with them, help them, and hates the stiff scientific coldness within him that keeps him from ever extending a hand, offering any sort of closeness, knowing what his son was up to, being by his side when it mattered.