Demon

by Shane Peacock

  “So, how long has she been widowed?” He leans against the huge desk and crosses his arms.

  “Just a month, sir.”

  “Terrible thing, to lose a husband.” Sir Andrew regards Edgar. “And a father, of course.”

  “They adopted me, sir, when I was nine.”

  “Nevertheless, his loss must have been a trial for you too, my boy. May I ask how he died?”

  “He…he was murdered.”

  “My Lord, murdered?”

  “Yes, sir, by an intruder in our home.”

  “Dear, dear.” Lawrence pushes himself up from the desk. His ornate office is spectacular. The walls are red and gold, and its latticed windows, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, offer a view of Whitechapel and the River Thames, with the Old City of London in the background. “She seems to be bearing up well.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s Annabel Thorne for you.”

  “Remarkable woman.”

  Edgar is uneasy about Sir Andrew’s interest in his recently widowed adoptive mother and wonders when he will turn the conversation to business and to what he will have Edgar do, but the billionaire seems to have almost forgotten about all of that. He continues to talk incessantly about Annabel Thorne. It is a conundrum for Edgar. Despite this off-putting obsession, Lawrence is offering him an enticing opportunity, and he is an easy man with whom to converse, gracious and warm. The fact that his office is lined with bookcases filled to the brim, the books looking worn and read, many of them fiction, makes Edgar feel surprisingly relaxed too, as if he is in a home rather than an office, his sort of home.

  “It would be improper for me to ask her to dinner so soon after her tragedy, but perhaps I might dine with both of you. What do you think, Edgar?”

  It takes him a while to respond. “I don’t know, sir,” he finally says. “I suppose that would be acceptable, though Mother doesn’t worry very much about what is acceptable.”

  Lawrence smiles. “Indeed. Remarkable woman.”

  As you keep saying, thinks Edgar.

  “What do you think she thinks of me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely you could ask her.” He pauses. “Though that is tricky, isn’t it, getting into the area of feelings with a woman, not our territory, is it?”

  “I believe we have feelings too, sir. They aren’t so unlike us, in many ways.”

  “Quite so, good point, Brim. We are so often not fair to them. The genders are perpetually judging one another…and races and nationalities do too. I certainly should know better. I am of rather low birth, you know…and a dark-skinned Irishman, Black Irish as some put it.” He pauses. “But…ask her, will you?”

  Edgar takes a mental note to make up something the next time he sees Lawrence.

  The conversation continues in the same vein for what seems like nearly an hour before Sir Andrew finally addresses Edgar’s new role at the hospital, a vague sort of job description that seems to entail mostly his reporting to this office and helping with whatever business emanates from it. He covers the subject in a few sentences before returning to Edgar’s past.

  “So, how about your own background, Brim? How did you come to be adopted by the Thornes?”

  “Well, sir, my mother, my real mother, was an American, and she died giving birth to me.”

  “Goodness me. Another very difficult thing for you, I am sure, my boy.”

  “My real father was a squire, though he fancied himself a writer, and Raven House, our home, was falling apart because he spent so much time reading and writing books rather than paying attention to his duties.”

  “Well, authors, good ones, do not write for the money they will make from it.”

  “We lived alone, the two of us, and he died mysteriously…of a heart malfunction.” Edgar can barely get the words out. He still vividly recalls that night when he, just a little boy of nine, found his father dead on his bed in Raven House, in that room from which Allen Brim had read the horror stories that had crept down the heating pipes and entered the infant Edgar’s brain, the stories that had seemed so alive, that had infused his soul with fear and anxiety. He also thinks of what he now knows was done to his father, of the vampire creature, the revenant, puncturing a hole through Allen Brim’s breastbone and sucking out his blood.

  “Are you all right, Brim? You look pale.”

  Edgar realizes he has been grimacing, pulling his lips back from his teeth. He grips the arms of the chair. “I am fine, sir.”

  Lawrence pours him a glass of water from the jug he keeps on his desk, walks over to give it to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It is all right, my boy. They are memories, difficult ones to be sure, but just memories, the past. One must make one’s peace with the past. You are safe here.”

  Edgar takes a drink. “I have a sort of nervous disorder,” he blurts out, shocked that he would say such a thing to a relatively new acquaintance. “And I have had strange experiences.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Strange things have happened to me.” His voice sounds almost foreign to him. “Perhaps I have imagined some too.”

  “Imagined?” Lawrence pauses for a moment. “Delusions?” He takes a long look at Edgar. It is almost as if he is not sure if he wants to say more about this. “I…I have learned about such things of late. We have a new doctor here…a psychiatrist, an alienist, a specialist in nerves. That profession is the coming thing in medicine these days. This person helps with mental disorders of all sorts; though I am told such problems are rarely seen in men…perhaps men are not coming forward, being honest.” His voice drops lower and he hesitates for a second. “There is no shame in it,” he adds, much louder. “None whatsoever. But I doubt you—”

  “I believe there are monsters.”

  Lawrence says nothing for a moment. “How do you mean, monsters, Brim?”

  “Well, perhaps not monsters. It’s just that…when I read, when I look at a painting or see a play…I saw Henry Irving once, playing the devil at the Lyceum Theatre…” Edgar’s eyes enlarge.

  “Brim?”

  “…when I read a book I enter it.”

  “Enter it?”

  “I feel like I am really there in the story, and I can hear the things that go on and see them and smell them. They are very real. The characters are alive for me. Perhaps the villains, the creatures, are the most vivid.”

  “That is extraordinary…so do I.”

  Edgar cannot believe it. “You do?”

  “Don’t tell anyone, that’s not the sort of thing a man of industry wants to be known for, but it is true nevertheless. It was not until later in life that I became an avid reader, but when I did, I took to it like a duck to water. Now, when I read the likes of Dickens or Collins or most anyone who is good, I can actually feel as if I were a boy meeting a gruesome man in a graveyard or a chap seeing a ghostly woman walk past his house. It can be ghastly, though at times it is marvelous. We are sensitive sorts, you and I. Let’s not spread it about!”

  They both laugh and Edgar is suddenly exceedingly happy, a joy that feels like it infuses his whole body and soul. He wonders how much he can tell this man. Can he reveal that he helped kill two monsters who veritably seemed to rise up from the pages of famous novels? Can he tell him that the last one was Dr. Percy Godwin? He decides that all of that is for another time, if ever.

  “Sir, I could ask my mother what she thinks of you, but…I already know.”

  “And?”

  “She calls you charming, which I believe is a word that women use when they mean a great deal more. She also said you were a fine figure of a man.”

  Lawrence had sat down in his chair. He leaps to his feet.

  “Heavens, what good news!”

  “And your offer of a ride in your motorcar and dinner would be met with acceptance. Just a friendly ride and dinne
r, though, sir, with me along as well, as you suggested.”

  “Why, yes, of course. Well, that is fine indeed, but I am still somewhat concerned about staining her reputation, with you in tow or not, and doing harm to Annabel Thorne would be the last thing in the world I would want. What will people think if they see me running about with her, and you, in my horseless carriage and squiring you two off to dinner a scant time after her husband’s death? To say nothing of my being a foreigner!”

  “Like I said, sir, her reputation is not important to her. She likes you. She wouldn’t care a fig how others view it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Remarkable woman.”

  “You’ve said that, many times.”

  “Yes, I suppose I have.”

  “I admire her a great deal, sir. Imagine not caring at all about your reputation, especially being a woman and feeling that way, with all that society says they must care about. She believes in happiness, in kindness, and in being true to yourself, and that is it. Take her for a spin in your car. She will adore it.”

  * * *

  —

  Edgar spends the rest of the day doing odd jobs for Lawrence—carrying messages for him, bringing papers to sign—then says good-bye for the day around four o’clock. As he reaches the floor directly below Lawrence’s, he notices a room with a blind fully drawn on its door. That is unusual. The entrance bears the name DR. BERENICE and under it the words ALIENIST—NERVE SPECIALIST. He wants to peer inside. He nears the door and pauses. He can tell that the lights are dim inside, and there is some sort of indistinguishable sound, a moan at first and then a voice speaking in a monotone. It makes his heart rate increase. “Why did Lawrence mention the person in this office to me? It was out of the blue, almost like a warning,” he says under his breath. He puts his hand to the knob but then chastises himself. “I am being ridiculous.” He thinks again of the billionaire’s smiling face.

  He goes out the entrance of the London Hospital with a spring in his step, feeling as though he hasn’t been this happy since the days when his own loving father was alive, or at least since Tiger befriended him and stood by his side like a lioness while Fardle and those other morons bullied him at the College on the Moors. Then he catches himself. He stops dead on the street. “What am I doing? What have this man’s generosity and fatherly ways done to me? Has he drugged me! He has convinced me to offer my grieving mother to him. And she, somehow, is a willing accomplice!” He puts his hand to his forehead. “Accomplice? What a word. There is nothing wrong with this. It is innocent. Two people attracted to one another simply desiring to be friends. Surely Alfred would want her to be happy.”

  Then he sees William Shakespeare again.

  Edgar is on the south side of wide Whitechapel Road at the far west end of the hospital across from a spot where two small streets, the first no more than an alleyway, run north from Whitechapel, knifing into the wicked slums of Spitalfields. Buck’s Row, where the Ripper took his first victim, is no more than two minutes into that rookery. Carriages are passing and pedestrians are going about their business and dirty-faced boys and girls are standing around in ragged clothes and bare feet staring aimlessly or looking for opportunities. Through and beyond them, Edgar sees Shakespeare come into view out of a doorway a good distance down the second of the two alley-like arteries. As Edgar watches, the little man looks both directions, then starts moving toward Whitechapel Road at a good pace, his big head down, but his eyes up, looking deadly serious. Edgar turns around so Shakespeare cannot spot him, and when he turns back, the little fellow is out on the main road, hailing a hansom cab. In moments, he has one and is gone.

  It is difficult for Edgar to imagine that the little lunatic would ever even step outside his enclave in Drury Lane let alone be this far away from home, looking so grave, as if intent on some sort of mission. Edgar darts across Whitechapel and into narrow Thomas Street. There are only a few pedestrians on these footpaths and before he is more than a dozen strides down the road, a sense of foreboding fills him. Buck’s Row is nearing. He can hear the screams of Mary Ann Nichols, the woman the Ripper butchered there. He can see her lying on the street near a brick wall not far from the Broad School, her image not black and white like the drawings he saw in the papers when he was a child, but in color in the dim alley light, her throat slit in a smile, her abdomen mutilated. He shakes his head to expel the scene from his brain and rushes along Thomas past a man in a sweat-stained kerchief, eyeing him, and a woman with an ugly bruise on her face, watching him too, her dress obscenely low around her chest. He comes to the door from which Shakespeare seemed to have exited. It is large and wooden with a big black handle, two sharp points on it like devil’s horns. Edgar tries the door and discovers it is unlocked. On the outside, the grimy nondescript brick building appears to be just three stories high. Inside, he finds a dirty winding staircase that looks like it goes up many flights. There are no inner doors on the ground floor, just the stairs. He starts to climb but then feels a hand on his shoulder, a big one with a firm grip. It violently turns him around.

  “Might I ’elp you?”

  The face is broad, the nose squashed into the cheeks, the black beard obscuring most of the face. The head, under the woolen cap, looks shaved.

  “I…I noticed an acquaintance come from this building, a little—”

  “Been no one ’ere all day.”

  “But—”

  “Been no one ’ere all day!”

  The big man spins Edgar around and shoves him down the four steps he has ascended, knocking him face-first onto the stone floor. He barely gets his hands up in time to save his teeth from being knocked from his mouth. Two gleaming boots step right up to his head, resting below the well-tailored cuff of navy-blue, pinstriped trousers.

  “A good day to you,” says the man.

  Edgar gets to his feet and leaves without another word.

  * * *

  —

  By the time he is on Fleet Street, he is wondering if he imagined the whole scene, just as he imagined the Ripper mutilating his victim. It could not have been William Shakespeare in that alley. Not just because of the look on his face but because he was walking about in this neighborhood and, more importantly, how he was dressed—in a dull gray business suit. As Edgar thinks about it now, Shakespeare moves in his imagination in slow motion, spectral and unreal, floating down Thomas Street toward Whitechapel Road.

  He is scared, but this time not because of an imminent threat—he wonders if his mind has truly become unhinged. What sort of fantasy world am I in? he asks himself. What sort of reality is my fevered brain creating?

  I imagined that the hag was real, that one of William Shakespeare’s ghostly friends inhabits the interior of his apartment, that the little lunatic himself has dealings in the East End…and that the DEVIL IS AFTER US! He realizes it is all absolute insanity and that the existence of the vampire and Frankenstein creature is just as absurd.

  How much of my life am I imagining?

  He stops suddenly and bends over, hands on his knees. Even in the bustle of the London crowd on the footpath on Fleet Street, people hear him cry out. For a moment, several of them stare at him.

  Edgar straightens himself to a standing position, and then picks up his pace and almost runs all the way home to Mayfair.

  * * *

  —

  Annabel is singing, loudly, as Edgar climbs the stairs and passes her room, belting out “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” a melody generally meant to be a good deal more sedate than her robust rendering. Her lovely voice often filled the house when he was younger, but he has not heard her in such fine form for a long while. Every word sparkles. It makes him smile and he needs that. He steps up to her door, but as he raises his hand to knock, he pauses to listen for just a little bit longer. The singing suddenly stops. He hears soft footsteps padding in his dir
ection and the door flies open.

  “Edgar! My dear, you will not guess what has happened!”

  She stands in front of him in bare feet and underclothing, her slim figure fastened into a girdle and petticoat that leaves little to the imagination. He looks down at his feet.

  “Mother!”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old lady, dearest. I have news! Lawrence of London has sent out an invitation!”

  “An invitation?”

  “I am to be his guest at the Café Royal on Regent Street, just me and him, ushered there in the terrifying Vauxhall horseless carriage. He said I might even pilot the thing! A dangerous offer, that one. He shall soon learn not to be so careless, for I will take him up and we shall see what speed that miracle can actually achieve!”

  “But…I was supposed to…just for you? You and Mr. Lawrence, alone together?”

  “Well…I believe we are adults. Why, do you want to chaperone?” She lets out a belt of a laugh.

  “Should you really accept a dinner date, Mother, so soon after Father—”

  “Oh nonsense, Alfred would want me to enjoy myself. And I can assure you, Edgar, I will!” She raises her eyebrows to depict a sort of enjoyment her adopted son would prefer not to imagine her experiencing.

  “But I was just with him, not more than an hour or so ago.”

  “Well, he works with great haste then, doesn’t he? He is obviously a gentleman who knows what he wants. There was a boy here with Sir Andrew’s card a half hour ago. The message also said that our man might squire me over to see his lovely home in Kensington! Edgar, I have just another two hours to dress! I cannot wear these horrible widow’s weeds simply as they are. I shall color them up a little.”

  Lawrence lied to me, thinks Edgar. “Should you? Perhaps a little restraint would—”

  “Yes, my son, I should. I am not Alfred Thorne’s possession and neither shall I be a chattel to the chairman of the London Hospital, though I would not mind being a slave to some of his money. This idea that we women must mourn our deceased men for months and years on end is positively medieval. I do not see widowers with nearly the same dedication. No, sir, their eyes begin to wander before their wives have even begun to rot in the ground!”