Monster

by Shane Peacock

  Shakespeare looks heartbroken. “Hogwash?” he repeats. “I was simply going to say that I, my esteemed colleagues and I, have a good idea of the identity of this beast that attacked Mr. Tilley—”

  “Miss,” says Lucy.

  “No, it didn’t miss, Miss Lucy, not at all. It has now struck twice against us and done so very effectively. But it is my theory, my contention, my sacred supposition, that this very creature has struck many times in the past and you have merely been awakened to its existence.” His eyes are on fire. He violently pats the stack beside him. “I bear with me a collection of newspaper articles that I have culled over the years, encircling in red ink the incidents in question, attesting to the activity of the beast which is now in pursuit of you!”

  “And it is?” asks Edgar.

  “A very beastly beast indeed!”

  “And it is?” asks Tiger.

  “A villainous, insidious—”

  “Stop running your gob and name it before I throttle you!” cries Jonathan.

  “Well, if you put it that way, then I shall tell you.” The little man pauses.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” says Jonathan.

  “It is Mr. Hyde!”

  Jonathan laughs and William Shakespeare glares at him.

  “Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde infamy from Mr. Stevenson’s novel?” asks Lucy.

  “The very one.”

  “And what leads you to this brilliant deduction?” blurts Jon.

  “Why, thank you for your compliment, Mr. Lear. That is more like it! I knew you would come round!”

  Jonathan throws up his hands.

  “I spoke to Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson some time ago whilst conducting the most delicate research on behalf of our Society into his motivations for writing the Hyde novel.”

  Edgar could have sworn that Shakespeare once admitted that he had never met Stevenson.

  “This is nonsense,” says Jonathan, still pacing. “Why are we still talking about this sort of thing?”

  “Because grandfather, for one,” says Lucy in a very quiet voice, “was convinced that the creature he killed on the moors was Grendel from the Beowulf story.”

  “No he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure.”

  “But it was a creature of some sort, like something from someone’s imagination.”

  “And then,” says Tiger, “the thing that first came after us appeared to be almost directly from the pages of Dracula.”

  “But it wasn’t, not exactly,” says Jon.

  “But it made its way into that novel,” says Lucy, “because it was the living thing from which the vampire legends came. And from the moment we killed it, something else has pursued us.”

  “That is the spirit!” cries Shakespeare.

  “We cannot discount the possibility,” says Edgar, “that this creature also has some sort of presence in some novel or story, because that may be our only lead…despite the apparent insanity of the idea.”

  “Insanity?” says Shakespeare.

  “Why do you think it may be Hyde?” asks Lucy.

  “Are you really asking him that?” says Jonathan.

  “Because of what Mr. Stevenson told me when I spoke to him,” replies the little man. “He used to spend much of his time in the South Pacific you know, amongst the natives. But he came back to England every now and then. I read in the papers one day, this is a good five or six years ago, that he was in London visiting his publisher. So I went to that publisher’s office and waited for him to appear.”

  “Did Stevenson tell you what a lunatic you were when he realized why you were there?” asks Jonathan.

  “No, he didn’t mention that. But I did ask him, point blank, whether, as legend had it, he dreamed up Edward Hyde in a nightmare. ‘Might that be inaccurate, apocryphal?’ I asked him. ‘Might the TRUTH be that you actually knew or heard of someone like this strange creature in real life?’ I queried him. Stevenson was a strange-looking one, you know, wore long hair and a mustache and goatee like a Musketeer, and he was so slight, so sickly looking that he appeared to be a walking cadaver, a dead man alive. He looked at me with an expression of horror, as if I had unearthed some terrible secret, as if he were seeing something in his imagination. And then he walked away without saying a word.”

  “Because he was then certain you were a lunatic,” adds Jonathan quietly.

  “These stories I have encircled in these newspapers are about beastly attacks that have occurred over the years where people were brutalized at nighttime and the perpetrator was never found. They are so much like the two attacks you have experienced! Sudden aggressive encounters with terrible body blows! And strangulation may be involved. And in the novel, Hyde tramples a child without an ounce of pity! He tramples another man too, crushing his spine, his limbs! Your creature did the same to Thorne!” Shakespeare leaps toward the bookcase behind him and runs his finger along the volumes on a shelf there. “Ah!” He pulls out The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The little man turns to the others. “Look at your drawing and listen.” He sits, searches the pages, then reads: “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable…he gives a strong feeling of deformity…the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy.” Shakespeare drives his forefinger into his mouth to wet it and flips a few pages to find the next line, which he delivers with great drama. “…It wasn’t like a man.”

  He snaps the book shut.

  “You have proved nothing,” says Jonathan. “That’s just a story, like all the others.”

  “What about the fact that Hyde is a LONDON monster? THE London monster! Who always strikes at night! That is what yours does too! Does it not seem to be living here? Right in the center of the city, ready to attack the lot of you the moment you left the Lyceum Theatre with that vampire’s blood on your hands!”

  Jon says nothing.

  “I tell you that you are seeking something very much like Mr. Hyde!”

  During the silence that follows, Edgar’s mind is working fast. We are indeed dealing with a brutal London creature with a face like a monster, he thinks, one that prowls at night and delivers thunderous blows and batters his victims, like Mr. Hyde. Despite Shakespeare’s lunacy, Edgar wonders if his guess might be a good one. But something doesn’t seem quite right about it, though he isn’t sure why. And another image from another book keeps coming to Edgar’s mind, probably because of that plaster corpse with the mismatched body parts, and perhaps because of his work with Dr. Godwin too. And what about the other book, the one that lies on Vincent Brim’s desk, the one Edgar had just read in Alfred Thorne’s lab, about the man who made half-human beings out of animals in the House of Pain? Those little stitches on the neck of Annabel’s drawing…

  “There is a second author who is bothering me these days,” mutters Shakespeare. “He has ideas about murderous invisible men and time travel into a horrifying future and creatures from outer space, and even a story about someone who makes human-like creatures. Where, in God’s name, does he get such ideas?”

  “H.G. Wells,” says Edgar, startled. It was as if Shakespeare had been reading his mind.

  “Indeed!” exclaims the little man.

  “We are losing focus again,” says Tiger. “Whatever and wherever this thing is and whatever it is planning, we must decide for once and for all whether or not we need to lie low or attack it. I vote we seek it out and destroy it.”

  “So do I!” exclaims Jonathan, smiling at her. Then he looks toward Edgar and silently mouths, “I told you so.”

  “I don’t know,” says Lucy. “I just don’t know.”

  Edgar loves that Lucy always tells the truth. There’s no pretense about her when it matters. If she is afraid, she just says so. He knows he rarely has that sort of courage, and that Jonathan never does, nor does Tiger. He wishes he had such clarity. “First, we need to somehow observe it,” he says, “and then decide IF we can kill it. We can’t be rash.”

>   “And if we can’t destroy it?” asks Lucy.

  “Let us not worry about that until we track it to its lair!” shouts Shakespeare, leaping to his feet. “Then, brave men and women we are, we shall slay it like Godly knights destroying a dragon!”

  “Ah yes,” mutters Jonathan, “I can see you on the scene now, your little posterior wiggling up and down…as you run away.”

  “What did he say?” asks Shakespeare.

  “First, it killed grandfather,” says Lucy, ignoring the little man’s question, “then it offered a warning and then it went further. What does that tell us?”

  “The Thorne House attack was a warning too,” says Edgar.

  “How can you say that? It was so much more!” says Jonathan.

  “It could have come into my room, but it paused, just after it had brutalized Annabel and murdered Alfred Thorne both within my earshot. It was sending a message again, but this time a more extreme one, and with a chosen audience, a message delivered directly to me.”

  “Professor Lear said,” says Tiger, “that you hated monsters in a different way. You chose to hunt them. Perhaps these creatures see you as our leader?”

  “Whatever it is and whatever it wants,” says Jonathan, “it is escalating things!”

  “Let us all think about what we have discussed tonight,” says Edgar, “about Mr. Hyde, about the likeness in this drawing, about this Wells fellow and his stories, about the manner of the attacks on us, and let us meet here again tomorrow night with a specific plan of action. Everyone bring an idea. We will choose the best one…and do it!”

  But Edgar already has an idea. And he has some questions for Dr. Godwin.

  11

  Edgar doesn’t mention a word to Annabel about the curious marks on the villain’s neck in her drawing when he says good-bye to her in the morning. His mind is fixed on what he is going to say to Dr. Godwin.

  But when he gets to the lab he is distracted by the fact that the good surgeon is holding a bunny down by the neck on the operating table.

  “Ah, Master Brim, I was waiting for you. We are going to cut off this little one’s limbs while it is alive and see how it reacts. I need to see how the bones, the blood vessels and arteries, and the nervous system work under these conditions, during trauma, while life is still in it.”

  Edgar gulps, but he steps forward.

  “The first thing we shall do is tie it down. I have made these little straps that you see fastened to the table. We will place Mr. Rabbit here on his back and tie him so the larger straps are tightened around his shoulders and his hind legs, and the four smaller ones pin him down about a quarter of the way along each appendage. We must cinch them all up so they are extremely tight since he must not move whilst we are severing.”

  Edgar is frantically trying to think of an excuse for saving the animal or at least getting himself out of the room before the dismembering begins. But he can’t think of anything.

  “Hold him,” says Dr. Godwin.

  Edgar puts both hands around the rabbit’s thumping little chest and belly, but it squirms loose and is about to leap off the table when Godwin seizes it in an iron grip, almost squishing it into the cold metal surface. It whistles and screams.

  “There, there now, little one, do your duty,” says Godwin. He offers Edgar one of his smiles. He has many of them, though all seem rather awkward. Still, the surgeon is a remarkable man, never given to anger. Edgar thought he would have shouted at him for nearly letting the bunny loose, but he didn’t bat an eye. Godwin takes over, keeping the rabbit pinned with one big hand and strapping it down tightly with the other. He cinches up all the straps. The rabbit squirms and cries out but it can barely move now.

  “Hand me one of those saws,” says Godwin.

  Edgar can’t move either. He is thinking of the face on the rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the fantastic little animal with the pocket watch who is always late.

  “I see,” says Godwin. “This is not unexpected either. You are a fine young man and this disturbs you. And so it should, on the surface. But remember what I have been telling you about the needs of humanity, science and medicine. This creature is giving its life to all of that, a noble thing indeed.” He pauses. “My boy, I have had children come to me with severed arms and legs from industrial accidents, brave men with exploded limbs from the battlefield. I have done my best for them. But one day I would like to do better. I should like to re-attach limbs. Think of a small child, a little boy, without an arm or a leg, think of me replacing it and the smile on his face for the rest of his life…then look at this rabbit.”

  “Sir, might you just give me a moment. Let me sit down. Perhaps you could sit with me. Let me gather myself and then I will continue.”

  “An excellent idea from an excellent young man with a good heart.”

  Edgar smiles a genuine smile.

  They sit at Godwin’s desk across the room and say nothing for a moment. Finally, Edgar speaks.

  “Sir, I think it is certainly an admirable thing that you are aiming to do, to replace human limbs.”

  “Thank you, Master Brim. I am glad you concur.”

  “How far do you think you might take it?”

  “I am not sure I follow you.”

  “Perhaps you will be able to replace a limb, but what about a foot, the toes or something even more difficult, the hands and the fingers. Could you replace them so they might function as good as new?”

  “A challenging task, for certain, full of intricate work based on many, many hours of experimentation, but I have no doubt about the capacity of the human brain to achieve almost anything.”

  “Well, sir, in a sense that actually leads to my next question…what about the brain, what about replacing it?”

  Godwin doesn’t answer immediately. “That,” he finally says, “is another situation entirely. Then you are entering a sort of forbidden realm. The brain is the seat of the mind and the mind is the seat of everything. You would be…you would be making a new human being.” A wild look flares in Godwin’s eyes for a moment and then subsides. “But that is nonsense, Edgar. We are not talking about replacing the human mind here.”

  “Would you…would you ever think of going that far yourself?”

  Godwin pauses again. Then he gets to his feet and strides back toward the table. “This is nonsense! It is mere speculation and hypothesis.” He stops suddenly, as amazed at his slight anger as Edgar is. “Pardon me, Master Brim, but I have been accused of considering this sort of thing and it frustrates me.” He offers another smile, going a bit overboard this time, a huge toothy grin, which he quickly adjusts. “There are many articles in the newspapers about vivisection that are uninformed and filled with emotion and have no place in a scientific discussion. Our critics sometimes actually bring up this ‘making a human being’ nonsense, as if I were in favor of such a thing or working away on it secretly somewhere in my laboratory. This organization called the Fabian Society, for example, and sometimes the so-called ‘progressive’ ladies who call themselves suffragettes, have their say against my experiments as if it were something that it really is not. They are all out of their league. Perhaps the National Anti-Vivisection Society is the worst but there is also the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the English Vegetarian Society. I am sure they are all fine chaps but they simply do not understand. At times, I really believe there are more societies and leagues in England now than there are cats and dogs!” He lets out a bolt of a laugh. “Only God can create human beings, my boy, only God, though I am not a believer, so perhaps I should say: Mother Nature or evolution, as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Huxley did. This fantasy of having faith in something that cannot be proven is absolute insanity and it causes human beings to accept all sorts of fantasies and often be terrible to one another. To me, believing in God is almost like believing in an invisible man, like that silly novel by that fellow, what’s his name?”

  “H.G. Wells.”

  “Yes, Well
s. I somehow knew you would know of him, since he is so much in fashion these days. He is quite the young fellow with his modern and futuristic ideas. He has had a go at me, you know. Some people claim that one of his books has a terrible villain that he based on me. I have been told that he actually snooped around this hospital and even followed me to my home several times. Do I seem like a villain to you, Edgar, here in my lab attempting to find ways to extend the lives of women and children and gentlemen? Do I look like a villain?”

  “Uh, no, sir.”

  “Now, come here and let us carve up this bunny.”

  Edgar comes forward.

  “Pick up the aforementioned saw as you approach.”

  Edgar stops at the metal tray. He simply can’t go through with this. He needs to find a way to get out of it. And he also needs more information. “Sir, I understand why you are so upset by the criticisms you have received and the insinuation that you are the sort who would experiment with human life, but might I ask you this—do you think anyone, any scientist during any time in history or recently, has ever made the attempt to create a human being…a monster?”

  Godwin had opened his mouth to answer but when that last word was uttered, he stopped suddenly, his perfect lips still held in a circle.

  “A monster?” he finally says. “That is a strange choice of words.”

  “Would such a creature not be that?”

  Godwin nods. “Yes, perhaps it would be. I have no answer to your main question. I have never heard of the thing you suggest actually being attempted and have no desire to speculate. Now, please, pick up that saw and approach.”

  Edgar picks it up. There is a noise like a thump from across the room and then a sound like something scurrying. It seems to be coming from behind the sealed door of the Elephant Man’s room.

  There is silence for a moment.

  “What was that?” Edgar asks.

  “Nothing,” says Godwin.

  “It was something, sir, and it was coming from behind that door.” He points to the closed entrance to the room.