Demon

by Shane Peacock

  A drunk approaches. “I’ll play cricket with you! In me bedroom!” he shouts at Tiger. He has a leering expression on his face that would suit Mr. Hyde and a staggering young woman on his arm who is dressed in little more than rags, just a few teeth in her gummy mouth. There is a knife gleaming in the waistband of his trousers. He reaches for Tiger. She steps back and cracks him so hard on a kneecap with the bat that the sound echoes up and down the street, and the man drops like a rock onto the cobblestones, howling. “Well struck,” she mutters to herself. They move on.

  They get to Baker’s Row, pass a workhouse and the Broad School, slip onto Thomas Street and turn south, Whitechapel Road looking well lit and like an oasis at the end of this tunnel-like street. There are not many people here and the only ones who are about seem to be minding their business.

  “It’s about ten doors down,” says Edgar.

  Tiger pulls her lock-springing tool from her trousers. As Edgar learned when they were at the College on the Moors together, she can break into anything.

  Edgar finds the building and that wide wooden door with the big black handle with the two sharp points on it like horns. He swallows and tries it. It opens.

  “Not bolted? It must be three in the morning,” says Tiger, putting her tool back into her pocket, and gripping the cricket bat tighter.

  The door creaks as they push it farther open.

  It is difficult to know if they are alone inside the building’s nearly pitch-black confines. They start walking up the staircase, feeling their way, their footsteps whispering and echoing on the gritty steps. They are all the way up the first flight before their eyes begin to adjust.

  Suddenly, he is there.

  “You is back, is you?” says the big, bearded thug to Edgar, his thick, shaved head like a dark pumpkin and his wide body a wall on the dim landing.

  He can see Tiger but merely sniffs at her and reaches for Edgar, so she pivots and swings the bat even harder than her last effort, as if she were striking a six for England on a cricket field, and it connects with that big skull, which might as well have been sitting on the wickets for her. Edgar is tempted to look up the stairs to see how far the head will travel. The sound is like a gun going off and the rough becomes instantly limp and falls in heavy thumps nearly a dozen steps down the stairs to the bottom.

  “He won’t bother us for a while,” says Tiger.

  Edgar stands there with his mouth open as she continues to stride up the stairs. Tiger Tilley still surprises him. He wonders what it would be like to oppose her.

  “Let’s sneak up to the top as quietly as we can and investigate the floors from there, downward,” she says. “That way, if we encounter something else, it won’t come at us from either above or below.”

  Edgar does not want to think of what “something else” might be.

  As they step quietly upward, though, all is eerily silent, and they have the sense that the rooms on the lower floors are unoccupied. At the top, five floors up, they can see a dim light in the cracks of a big door. Tiger touches the knob and the entrance swings inward.

  As Edgar takes out the pistol, Tiger lifts the bat into striking position and pushes the door all the way open.

  Nothing comes at them, but what they see is breathtaking: a large, strangely cold room lit with candles. In fact, there are candles everywhere, even surrounding the big black throne that sits at the front of the room on a stage. It has red horns on the top of both sides of its back and on its arms. There is a red trident painted on the seat and carved green snakes curl up the legs. Arranged on the room’s floor, as if looking up at the throne, are more than a dozen rows of large and elegant wooden chairs. Painted images of pyramids and staring eyes with light rays emanating from them decorate the walls. There are just a few stained-glass windows, and large jars rest on the floor on either side of a center aisle. Edgar and Tiger walk toward the stage and pause at the first jar. It has something in it: a red liquid.

  Blood.

  It is up to the brim in every jar.

  Then there is the sound of something moving along the floor on the other side of the wall beyond the stage, thudding forward, moving in two beats at a time—boom, boom…boom, boom. Whatever is there seems to be on two feet, but they are not footsteps like any sort Edgar has ever heard. They sound unbooted and loud, striking the surface with the force of a large animal with hooves. He dare not look at Tiger, who has gone silent. “This does not make any sense,” he says so quietly he can barely hear himself. “We are at the far end of the building and up above the two beside it. Are those steps coming from mid-air?” Tiger does not respond, and when he turns to look at her, she is gone. He frantically surveys the room and finds her on the stage near the throne gazing upward. He wonders if she heard what he heard.

  “Look,” she says, still staring up. There is a dark column, smooth as marble, ascending to the ceiling, so dark that it was not visible from the back of the room. Up at the top there is some sort of big box, oblong shaped, carved and decorated with more pyramids, eyes, snakes and horns.

  Edgar walks toward Tiger and feels something underfoot. He reaches down and finds a feather. He lifts it so it is between their faces, and cannot believe its size: large and black, it is more than half the length of their bodies.

  “A dark angel’s wings,” says Tiger. He can see fear on her face, which is remarkable to observe, since he has never seen it there before.

  “We should leave,” says Edgar, and surprisingly, Tiger does not offer resistance.

  The two friends instantly turn and walk out of the room at a brisk pace. Edgar has never known Tiger to flee from anything, but she seems to be doing so now. They pound down the steps without speaking, descending all five flights of wide, winding stairs in a minute. As they reach the bottom, the big rough with the squashed nose and pumpkin skull is just getting to his feet, staggering, shaking that wide head, bringing the two young people who assaulted him into focus. Tiger smacks him again, another batter’s blow across the face, and he drops to the floor once more and lies still.

  It takes them half the time to get out of the seedy neighborhood that it took to get into it. Edgar looks back several times as they move, imagining the devil on the loose in London and chasing them through its streets, his mind reeling with vivid, changing images of something large, something red, black, grotesque, slithering, hobbling, flying, howling. Nothing, however, seems to be following and they slow a little as they progress. They go the safer route: down to Whitechapel Road and through Aldgate and the more frequented parts of the city. They say nothing. Only once they are past the Midland Grand Hotel do they start to talk.

  “Perhaps we should have stayed longer, investigated more,” says Edgar. “The candles were lit, so someone must have been there recently.”

  “Perhaps,” says Tiger, and when she turns to him, he can see that she does not look frightened at all. It is the old Tiger. He wonders again if she heard what he heard, saw what he saw. He realizes that she has not said a word to confirm any of it. She bears the expression of someone who has simply made a prudent decision.

  They walk on in silence, going up the hill along Kentish Town Road toward Highgate and the Lear home. The sun is just beginning to come up, casting a warm, foggy glow over London. They stop on Mansfield Road.

  “What are we going to do?” asks Edgar. “We are in much deeper trouble this time.”

  “So it appears.”

  Did she really say that? he asks himself. Simply that? We were just in the devil’s room!

  “We need to stick together,” he says. “That’s the first thing. Any one of us alone would be an easy target. We do everything together now, until we figure out how to survive…or kill it.”

  “Stick together…yes.” He thinks he detects a slight bit of suspicion in her face. Tiger is so good at being strong, even emotionless, so it is difficult to read her sometimes.<
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  They don’t say anything again for a while, trudging along Mansfield Road until they come to Progress Street. The Lear home is just a dozen houses away.

  “At least we came out of there unscathed,” says Edgar. “When we get to the house, we’ll have the weapons and be on our home ground.”

  Tiger does not respond.

  Then they hear a shriek. It takes them a moment to realize that it is Lucy’s voice.

  They run toward the house. She is sitting on the front walkway near the little brick wall that separates their tiny front lawn from the street, rocking a lifeless Jonathan in her arms.

  There will be no miraculous recovery this time.

  Jonathan’s heart has stopped. There is no apparent reason.

  Though he is pale, there are no signs of violence on his face or anywhere on his body, not a tear in his clothes, no traces of blood. Age eighteen, as healthy as a bull and with a young bull’s physique, he has simply dropped dead. Lucy looks up, still shrieking. She stares right at Edgar and Tiger, but does not see them. People have come out of their houses to gaze at the strange scene at the Lears’ house.

  Tiger faints, falling hard onto the brick walkway leading to the front door. It is difficult for Edgar to believe that she is even capable of such a thing. For a moment, he doesn’t know what to do, whom to go to, how to even form a word, but then he sits Tiger up against the house, ascertains that she hasn’t struck her head, takes Jonathan gently from Lucy, and lugs his heavy body into the house and onto a settee, and covers it with a blanket. Lucy follows in tears, her whole body quivering. Edgar goes out to revive Tiger. He does it all as if he were a walking dead man. He kneels down to his dear friend, takes her face in his shaking hands and strokes her cheek. She comes around and seems immediately to remember what has happened. She locks her face into a tight grimace and there isn’t a trace of a tear in her eyes. It is heartbreaking. Tiger cannot cry, cannot collapse, though it seems she desperately wants to.

  “He is dead,” she says bluntly, and gazes into the distance. “There is no use in falling apart about it. Let us tend to Lucy and then make plans. We are now under attack and we need to find out what happened here and respond.”

  She pushes Edgar away and gets to her feet, staggering for a moment as she seeks her equilibrium. Deep pain still written on her face, she marches into the house.

  It takes an hour before Lucy is even capable of speaking. She tells them what happened in sobs and convulsive heaves. Shortly after she and Jonathan had risen early that morning, as they were in the kitchen about to make breakfast, there was a knock at the door. Jon picked up the rifle and went to the front hallway, telling Lucy to stay in the back. He looked through the window next to the door, seemed to relax a little, set the weapon down inside and went out. She could hear him talking to someone and then there was silence. It lasted for a long while. When she finally went outside, she found him lying on the walkway, pale and still. Whoever had come to the door was gone.

  “He wasn’t himself when he rose from bed. He looked exhausted; I don’t think he had slept at all. He was worried about you, Tiger. He kept talking about the devil. It was as if everything he was holding inside, everything he had held inside forever, was trying to get out. It almost seemed like he was about to cry, but he was trying not to with a terrible effort. That was just before the knock came.” Lucy breaks down again.

  They find some laudanum, make Lucy take it and get her into bed. They stay awake in the sitting room, the cannon and rifle near them, not wanting to summon a coroner until the morning. Edgar is shaking, and Tiger is holding her hands together in a tight lock. They sit on the sofa, but a good three feet apart. She has the vacant look of someone in shock.

  “It couldn’t have been a creature,” she finally says. “Jonathan must have known whomever was at the door, that’s why he went out. That’s what puzzles me.”

  “Or at least whoever it was seemed so harmless that he didn’t sense any danger.”

  “We could go around to the houses on the street and ask if anyone saw this person.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a person.”

  “But it had to have been!” Tiger shouts at Edgar and gets to her feet and turns on him, her face filled with anger. “Did you not hear what I just said? Are you a fool? Have you lost all sense of reason? Are you as mad as your alienist said?”

  “Tiger, there’s no need to—”

  “Do not say anything if you cannot say something helpful!” She looks like she hates him for an instant, then her face falls and she sits back down. “He’s dead,” she says softly, burying her head in her hands.

  “Maybe he or she or it, at the door…” says Edgar softly, “just looked human.”

  “Jonathan had no injuries,” says Tiger through her hands. “What could make someone like him drop dead, just drop dead for no reason?”

  “Whatever was at the door made it happen…a look from it, a touch?”

  “How, in God’s name, will we fight this thing, Edgar, this being that must have seemed normal, this force that took Jonathan from me…from us…without any effort? How do we fight it?”

  He does not have an answer or even any sort of consolation for her, but he pulls one of her hands out of the other and holds onto her. He cannot remember whether he has ever done this in any sort of earnest way. Her hand feels smaller than he thought it might, and softer, and cold, but there is undeniable power when she grips him back.

  “I loved him.” Tears well in her eyes, but do not drop.

  It is not what Edgar wants to hear. He wants her to say that she loves him, not Jonathan, that they are still together as a team and that he and she care for each other like no one else does, and that they will survive this even if it is indeed the devil himself who is after them, the two of them working in tandem as they have almost since the moment they met at the College on the Moors long ago. But Tiger does not seem like his ally right now.

  “I know,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  They speak to the neighbors, but the incident happened so early in the morning that no one actually saw the mysterious visitor, and the few who were about did not notice anything unusual on the street at that time.

  Then Tiger and Edgar go indoors and stay there for the next two days. They try to keep alert but are barely able to speak to each other, and Lucy is inconsolable. They all put on dark clothes. Tiger doesn’t eat much though she makes sure both the cannon and the rifle stay in good working order and insists on taking a longer shift on watch at night. Beasley comes with Edgar’s clothes but they say nothing to him about what happened. They do not even ask the Thorne House butler indoors and send him home with a note saying that Edgar will be staying at the Lear home for a couple more days, and instructions to tell the hospital that he will not be coming in for that time either. When the coroner comes to examine the body, they make up a story of heart troubles in the family and early sudden deaths and dissuade him from a close examination. Edgar is not about to tell him that he fears the devil killed his friend. They do without a funeral and simply hire a gravedigger and have Jonathan buried, not in Highgate Cemetery near his grandfather but in a smaller graveyard near a little church nearby. When they go through Jonathan’s things, Tiger finds his notebook and reads his poems. Edgar hears her stifle a sob and walk out of the house, the book in hand. He never sees it again.

  They wait—for what, they aren’t sure—cowering in their house. Edgar dreams of the hag at night. When he is awake, he veers between believing that everything that has happened over the last few days is fictional, and a debilitating, mind-bending fear so extreme that he constantly wants to run from the house, run away, even though he has nowhere to go. He has spells where he has difficulty breathing. Tiger is no help. As the two days pass, she remains almost completely silent. Lucy is different—when Edgar goes into her bedroom to see her, she is honest an
d expansive about her feelings and cries a great deal. Edgar wants to ask Tiger about the sounds he heard in the devil-worship room on Thomas Street—was that just in his mind? She does not say anything about it, as if it never happened. He cannot bring the subject up: both his pride and his tenuous grip on reality will not allow it. They sit in the house for long stretches, barely moving.

  On the third day, Lucy suddenly appears in her bedroom door first thing in the morning with her dark dress on, her face cleaned and wearing a determined look. She comes into the living room and addresses her friends.

  “I am not going to lie here anymore and live in fear. Jonathan would not have wanted that, not in the least. This thing is after us and we have to fight it. Fight it or die trying. I do not care what it is! I’m not cowering for another second.”

  Edgar stops feeling sorry for himself almost the moment she speaks and her words seem to affect Tiger too. She gets up and is soon pacing, muttering, as if trying to find the old Tiger inside and drive herself into action. She stops and stands before them with her legs wide apart and her hands on her hips in old Tiger style. “If there is anything we can do, absolutely anything, even if it seems almost useless,” she says, “then let us do it, now. We cannot worry about leaving ourselves vulnerable. That simply is not a good tactic. It is getting us nowhere.”

  “We could go back to the room in that building on Thomas Street,” says Edgar, “all three of us this time, with the rifle, maybe even the cannon.” He thinks he sees fear flicker across Tiger’s eyes.