Monster

by Shane Peacock

  At the door, Godwin offers a handshake. But he seems to see the strain still in his assistant’s eyes and briefly embraces him again. It is just as awkward as their first hug and equally unexpected, but also, Edgar thinks, a remarkably kind thing to do.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Not at all, my boy. I know that was difficult, but you came through with flying colors. Keep bearing in mind that what I learn from this poor gentleman will help many others. Even the skin will be well used. I do not know if you are aware of this, but I have some repute as a skin surgeon as well, or what some folks these days are calling ‘plastic’ surgery. I actually replaced much of one man’s face not long ago. If you could have looked into his eyes and seen the joy when he was able to show his visage to the world for the first time, it would fill your heart with joy and with admiration for the world of scientific medicine. I am sure my work will lead to great advances in the future. Some day we may be able to make entirely new men and women out of ourselves, if needed!”

  —

  It had been agreed that Edgar would walk home from the hospital every day too. Thorne had insisted that it was good for him. The first day, it had been getting dark during his journey and the trip had been rather harrowing, through the tough streets of the East End, then into the semi-deserted Old City and on into the West End and home. But today, he is walking in bright sunshine. He tries to convince himself that there is some sun on the horizon in his life too, despite what he had to do today and may have to experience in the future and despite the fear of attack that hangs over him and his loved ones. Perhaps the worst is behind him. But he isn’t convinced. The monster has struck at them three times. It obviously knew where they were. Really, why wouldn’t it come again? But isn’t it after him more than the others, as Lear once said? That isn’t a helpful thought. He wonders if he should tell Dr. Godwin about all of this and seek that brilliant and kind man’s advice and help. He also again wonders if he should go north to Kentish Town to see Tiger and Lucy and Jonathan. But he knows his place remains at home with Annabel. He will see them the minute he has a chance.

  —

  “How is she?” he asks Beasley as soon as he is in the door. The butler takes his hat and coat.

  “She is rallying somewhat, though she has slept a good deal today. She is a brave soul, sir, and has asked that she be given no more laudanum. She also asked if you would go in to her the moment you arrived.”

  He finds her propped up in bed under the quilts again with an array of pillows behind her head, fingering in one hand the cross on a necklace that Alfred gave her and holding her Bible in the other, though she isn’t reading it. Her face brightens slightly when she sees Edgar.

  “Come sit with me,” she says weakly.

  “Are you finding any consolation there?” asks Edgar, nodding at the good book.

  “Oh, you know me, my child, I’m not the world’s biggest believer. You also know that I hate all these new ideas about the whole thing being true, every word of it, every single line of our Bible. That is impossible. No one has ever truly believed that. I think it is a story, a marvelous one really, with a deep goodness and truth within it. So, I’ve been reading it a little, just the New Testament, for I abhor all the horror in the Old, all the murder and mayhem and monsters. And it has helped me to be not absolutely hopeless. I still believe in happiness and kindness and that human beings are capable of such things…even with what happened to Alfred.” She sobs and then gathers herself. “People say there can’t be a God when bad things happen, but I know that is childish, actually quite stupid, and I’m trying not to think that way.”

  “I know my father was a good man despite his rough exterior,” says Edgar.

  “Thank you for saying that, my son, and for calling him by that name.” She smiles. “He didn’t care for religion at all, couldn’t believe in anything that was simply spiritual. He couldn’t entirely detach himself from that need for proof about everything. Proof, proof, proof, such is the quest of a man of science. But he never needed proof of our love. He just knew it existed. Formless as it was, and is, it was more powerful than any of his science. I think he knew that in the end.” She looks terribly sad again and glances away, but then she turns back to Edgar. “How was your day?”

  He wonders what he should say. “It was fine.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “Well, it was a little difficult. We did some work in the laboratory.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Another time.”

  He wonders if he should ask his next question, and then decides he must.

  “Do you feel up to thinking further about what our intruder looked like? It would be very helpful to the police. They, and I, and I’m sure you, would dearly like to see this beast brought to justice.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Whoever he is, he has to live with what he did, one way or the other. Hanging him or whatever might be done to him won’t really be justice. It will just be another evil.”

  “But—”

  “But, yes, I am up to thinking about what he looked like, in truth, I have been thinking about it a great deal. The parts in the good book that I read gave me some courage. I have actually drawn a picture of the intruder’s face. Beasley brought me some colored chalk.”

  Annabel Thorne is a good amateur artist and portraiture is a particular talent of hers. She often entertained Edgar when he was younger with funny images of animals or characters from stories, making sure there wasn’t a single monster among them.

  “It’s on the bedside table.”

  When Edgar looks at the drawing his heart begins to pound. Annabel had indeed worked color in. The skin on the face before him is so sallow that it is almost yellow and it seems tight on the bone, stretched over a big, square visage that makes it look like the muscles and arteries beneath it are on the surface. The black eyes are set deep in gray, dun-colored sockets and pearl-white teeth gleam in a horrid expression inside a shriveled mouth held in a tight line by black lips.

  “My mind must be playing tricks on me,” says Annabel. “He can’t have looked like that. I have drawn a monster.”

  10

  Annabel insists that Edgar not take the drawing to the police. She thinks her picture is just too ridiculous and worries that it might be considered the work of a “hysterical” woman, a word she says men like to use when describing her sex. But Edgar fears that her drawing is accurate and asks if he can have it.

  “You may,” she says, “as long as you keep it to yourself.”

  Now that Edgar is the man of the house and Annabel is incapacitated, he can do as he likes at Thorne House. As soon as he leaves her bedroom, he asks Beasley to have a footman take messages to two addresses as fast as possible: one to Kentish Town and the other to Drury Lane. And while he waits for responses he returns to Thorne’s laboratory.

  He pulls the big blinds back, revealing the early evening sky, and walks around the room, finally seating himself at the table with the plaster corpse. He takes out Annabel’s drawing. It gives him the shivers. This is what is after him and his friends. This is what came here and murdered Alfred Thorne. He can’t look at it for very long, so he lifts his head and stares into the fake eyes on the fake head of the fake corpse.

  “Alfred was looking for your soul,” he says quietly to it.

  He notices something about the plaster body that he hadn’t observed before. The different parts look like they’ve been made separately and then attached. Edgar sees now that the markings on the plaster’s surface are especially detailed near each joint, indicating how the bones and the arteries might functionally connect. There is a stack of medical texts on the table and, strangely, among them is a novel—Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The presence of this story next to the corpse and severed body parts, even though they aren’t real, shakes him a little. He remembers his father reciting from that book, its horrible scenes coming down through the heat pipe in Raven House and into his br
ain. No story ever frightened him as much as it.

  He recalls that Vincent Brim had this novel on his desk as well. There was another one too. Edgar goes to Alfred’s bookshelf and finds it, the title written in a black Gothic slash on the spine: The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells. It has a contemporary cover, sandy with red lettering. There’s an island drawn on it, sitting there in a yellow sea, looking black and spooky. Edgar knows all about this author. He is relatively young, once a science teacher people say, who writes stories that are combinations of science and fiction. They are fantastic stories, full of amazing ideas and frightening too. Wells is considered by many to be the most modern and imaginative man in the empire—his The War of the Worlds, a story about Martians invading earth, is the talk of London and everywhere else at this very moment, running every month in Pearson’s Magazine. Like so many other readers, Edgar can hardly wait to devour each installment to discover what is going to happen next. But this book in his hand, this Island of Doctor Moreau, is the one Wells novel Edgar has never been able to face. Too many reviewers have called it gruesome and repulsive, disgusting in a way that no novel has ever been. He remembers that the review in the Times of London insisted it should be kept away from young people. But now, sitting in Thorne’s laboratory next to the body parts on the table, rattled by the fact that both his uncle and Alfred Thorne had this very same tale at hand, and worried about what he will or won’t hear from his friends and little William Shakespeare, he picks it up. At first, he hesitates to open it, a wave of fear passing through his stomach like the butterflies he so often used to feel. Edgar Brim cannot read a book or look at a painting or see a play without feeling as though he were part of it, inside its very textures, on its stage, between its pages. And the great sensation novels are the worst: they take him to worlds that terrify him to his soul. But his father had told him to face those fears. Do not be afraid. It is the best advice there is.

  He turns to chapter one and begins to read. He enters the story. It starts with a shipwreck, like many other adventure tales, and Edgar becomes a man left alone on a small boat on a vast ocean. He can smell the salt water and feel the waves wafting him up and down, and a sense of hopelessness as he stares at the endless horizon. But when he is rescued by a strange ship and crew, everything gets worse. The story descends into scenes of horror. Edgar is taken to an exotic island where a scientist, a vivisectionist named Dr. Moreau, lives and works. And what he is doing there is evil beyond description.

  Lightning flashes through the dark sky above the lab and Edgar starts, then there’s thunder, and rain begins to pelt out of the black heavens. The corpse seems to glow in the flicker of the lightning. Edgar walks to Thorne’s desk, turns on his lamp and returns to the novel.

  His character grows more and more terrified. “I was convinced now, absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being.” But Moreau is doing much more than that. He is making human-like beings…out of animals. And he is doing so in a building called the House of Pain. From his room next door, Edgar hears the animals cry out in the night as Moreau works upon them.

  There is another bang, but this time it comes from five floors down. Edgar leaps to his feet, dropping The Island of Doctor Moreau on the desk.

  In a second he is running out the door, his heart thudding and his mind in a whirl. The creature has come back! He must save Annabel! He must save himself too, for it has surely come to finish him, to prevent him from ever speaking a word about its existence. It was scaring the others, but does it mean him lethal harm? Moreau’s evil face is in Edgar’s mind as he races down the first flight and then the second on a winding descent into Thorne House. He stops at Annabel’s door. All is quiet, and there is no sign of forced entry, or indeed any evidence that anything out of the ordinary is happening at all. He cracks open the door to hear her softly breathing.

  Then a dark figure is rushing up the stairs at him, drenched in rain, clutching something in its hand. It’s a towering thing and Beasley is on its tail.

  The figure comes to a halt. It is the large boy who was sent out with the messages a few hours earlier.

  “Forgive me, sir,” pants the butler. “It appears we have startled you.”

  Edgar catches his breath and tries to look calm.

  “Not at all.”

  “You said you wanted the replies the minute they arrived. Griffin waited at each address for a response, as you said, and then rushed in out of this thunderstorm and I sent him right up to you. I’m afraid he slammed the door a little when he entered. Once I sent him up, I realized he might not present the best figure. Perhaps I should have brought the replies myself?”

  “Not to worry,” says Edgar, taking the wet papers from the soaked boy, who smiles sheepishly. “You may both go.”

  They head down the stairs, Beasley chiding Griffin, who is dripping all over the steps.

  Edgar waits until they have disappeared and then opens the first letter.

  We are well. Received your note saying we must meet immediately. I fear what you will say, since you are in such haste. I agree that it is wise, as you suggest, for us to gather at the Crypto-Anthropology Society at midnight. All my best, Lucy.

  He takes up the second.

  Have read mysterious missives from both yourself and Miss Lear and shall be delighted to convene an ad hoc meeting of the esteemed Society at midnight, shall alert the wondrous Messrs. Sprinkle, Winker and Tightman. It sounds like some excitement is afoot!

  It was signed, with great flourish: Cordially yours, William Shakespeare, Esquire.

  —

  When Edgar leaves Thorne House a few hours later, the rain is still coming down hard, as if God isn’t pleased about something. Edgar doesn’t want to use the family carriage or a cab, doesn’t want to leave any trail of where he is going, so he walks, umbrella in hand, a poor refuge from the deluge. He keeps his head down most of the way and doesn’t look at the strange people he passes, some of whom come out of the dark to call out with pleas or shouts or taunts—they are like characters in scientific romances who live in fantastic storms.

  Big Ben strikes midnight as he is crossing a nearly deserted Trafalgar Square and he rushes the rest of the way. His friends have already arrived, every one looking frazzled. Shakespeare is in his usual spot at the center of the table and they have all left chairs for the three imaginary members.

  Thorne’s powerful rifle is propped against a wall behind Jonathan, and Edgar can see the pistol bulging in his coat.

  Lucy is well turned out, as usual, wearing a dark-blue dress and hat, but the look on her face is even sadder than her colors. She tries to offer Edgar a smile, but the expression she gives him is weak. Hatless Tiger, who looks as though she is still recovering from her injury and has been loaned the plain brown dress she wears, merely nods. Her black eyes don’t have their normal sparkle. Only Jonathan gets to his feet. He strides over to Edgar and takes his hand and thumps him on the shoulder. “Our condolences for your loss, Brim.” But that is all even Jon can bring himself to say. He returns quickly to the table and sits.

  Shakespeare hasn’t taken any notice of Edgar’s entry. Instead, he is conversing with the invisible Winker, Tightman and Sprinkle, nodding gravely at things he imagines they are saying. There is a stack of newspapers piled next to his right hand.

  “Oh, yes,” he says finally, turning to Edgar. “Master Brim, it is so nice that you could grace us with your presence this evening. My colleagues and I have several theories we must put upon the table, well not actually upon the table, one doesn’t set theories on tables, but in the air as it were, thrust from our minds and mouths and into the intellectual maelstrom…and then we have several news items we shall all want to peruse. But first I shall personally call the meeting to order, say the oath, sing the Queen (solo, mind you) and set things in—”

  “This is what it looks like,” says Edgar, ignoring Shakespeare. He takes Annabel’s drawing out of his pocket and flattens it on the table, push
ing it into the center so all can see. Everyone stares at it for a moment. Edgar regards it again too, this time noticing something that he hadn’t observed before: Annabel has drawn something on the intruder’s neck in faint lines. They look like cuts or perhaps stitches. It is almost as if she is drawing a head that has been attached to the neck.

  “Oh, my goodness!” says Shakespeare. “Do you see it, Mr. Winker? Do you have any thoughts, Mr. Tightman? Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Mr. Sprinkle?”

  “I don’t recognize it,” says Tiger. “I still can’t recall if my attacker’s face was visible.”

  “It doesn’t look like anything well-known,” says Lucy, “anything famous.”

  “That’s not a vampire,” says Jonathan, “though he is a rather handsome chap.”

  “No, not a vampire, nothing like that,” says Edgar, “but as for it being well-known, I—”

  “I have a theory, a possibility, a postulation,” says Shakespeare in a frantic interruption. “I tried to tell you this before, back at the Lear home.” He starts to his feet and waves his hands in the air, talking fast as usual. “I have been in the deepest of discussions with my colleagues here about it for some time and I shall put it to you all at the conclusion of another sentence or two. What you see before you is the likeness of a very famous monster, indeed.”

  “Not this again,” says Jonathan under his breath.

  “What did you say, young man? You not only interrupted me but Mr. Winker was about to add something.”

  Jonathan jumps to his feet too. “We need to be serious. There is no one in the room but the five of us and I could care less whether or not this creature is famous or was once written up in a novel or any other hogwash like that!”

  “Hogwash?” says Shakespeare, looking extremely puzzled.

  “All I care about is identifying what it is and where it is and whatever it is capable of, and either finding some way to get out of its path, though as you all know I think that ill-advised…or exterminating it as quickly as we can.”