Demon

by Shane Peacock

  “She is right!” cries Edgar. “All the things he did to all of us were just tricks, HUMAN tricks, not Satan’s. Yet you believe in him.” He finds himself staring at Berenice, who will not look back. He turns on Mephistopheles. “You are NOT an eight-foot man!” he cries. “You and he are shams!”

  Mephistopheles grips his chair, pushes himself up onto his one remaining stilt and balances there, towering over them. Lucy steps forward and with one mighty swing of her grandfather’s kukri blade—the same one Edgar drove into the chest of the revenant vampire and of the same sort that killed Count Dracula—cuts Mephistopheles down, slicing off the extension of his other leg below the knee. He falls again though this time he gets his hands out to protect himself. He glares up at them.

  “You had best not test him!” he screams.

  “Best not!” shout the others. Hilda Berenice says nothing.

  “That devil-worship room is just a show,” says Tiger, “the red liquid in the jars simply dyed water, the huge black feathers manufactured and those footsteps just one of you acting a part to frighten us. The posthumous letter to Shakespeare was written long before Morley died, wasn’t it? And his appearance at the Crypto-Anthropology Society rooms after his supposed death either the work of a man dressed up to look like him or—”

  “No,” whispers Shakespeare, “it was him!”

  “—or he is, in fact, not dead! His death faked!”

  “He is dead,” says Mephistopheles. “He butchered himself in a ritual esoteric act. An ancient Far Eastern rite. You may question other things, but he is dead. I saw the result.” He shivers and stares at Berenice and then into the distance. “He has survived, risen.” Mephistopheles looks at Shakespeare. “But I did not know that he may have gone to visit this little human being…after that. When did you see him?” he asks.

  “Two days ago,” says Shakespeare.

  Mephistopheles appears to turn pale even under his red makeup. There is a shriek from the group, then shouts of glee and applause.

  Berenice just smiles.

  “The snakes!” shouts Edgar in the din. “Which one of you arranged that?”

  “Snakes?” asks Mephistopheles, his voice shaking now. “Snakes? When?”

  “Which one of you,” repeats Edgar, turning around in a mad swivel and surveying all of his enemies, “put those snakes in our beds? A week ago today!”

  There is silence.

  “He DIED the day before!” cries Mephistopheles. “Praise the holy beast! He is real! The covenant is fulfilled!”

  It is the second time he has used that word, but this time it has meaning for Edgar Brim.

  “Covenant!” he says to himself. He looks at Lucy and takes her hand, then turns to Tiger and takes hers too. “I know where he is!” he says.

  Edgar rushes out of the room toward the front door with Tiger and Lucy, and Annabel and Lawrence follow, the chairman rolling Alfred Thorne’s remarkable cannon behind him. Shakespeare pauses for an instant and then scurries in pursuit.

  “You know nothing!” shouts Mephistopheles behind them. “The prophecy will come to pass. You will all destroy each other! The electricity of fear that HE has his finger on will do it. HIS powers will do it from the afterlife. He will prove who he is, a monster, a holy beast beyond compare. We shall live under his guidance. We shall live in lust, greed and material gain. We shall please ourselves under Satan’s coming reign. We shall do what we will! We shall put fear in all who do not follow! His influence will grow everywhere. Seek him, Edgar Brim, and he will annihilate you! He is itching to test his powers!”

  Edgar leads his friends out onto the lawn in the dim light of the half-moon.

  “We need to get to Thomas Street, London, immediately. Morley is there, and I think I know exactly where.” He glances back and sees Mephistopheles, Berenice and the others coming to the big front doors of Lawrence Lodge. They are talking animatedly.

  “No!” cries Shakespeare. “Morley will destroy us if we seek him! That is what he wants!”

  “I wonder what they did with all the servants?” asks Lucy.

  “We need to go fast?” asks Annabel. “In the night? Through the countryside?”

  “If we only had my horseless carriage,” says Lawrence. “It won’t tire like horses and I know how to make it travel extremely fast.”

  “We have it,” says Shakespeare.

  “Pardon me?”

  “We brought your motorcar here,” says Edgar, “but the batteries died near the Devil’s Punch Bowl.”

  “Not to worry,” says Lawrence. “Come with me!”

  He leads them to his stables where he gets Edgar and Tiger to help him lift six fully charged batteries into a dogcart. Lawrence then lets out all the horses in the stable but one and smacks them on their hindquarters, sending them off into the forest. Then they hitch the remaining horse to the cart, lift Shakespeare onto it with the batteries and head back onto the lawn, and then over the water and across the causeway in the darkness. Morley’s followers are still at the front of the house, gesturing toward them. Then Mephistopheles rushes to the stables.

  Edgar and his friends move faster, jogging along beside the dogcart and horse.

  “It will take them a while to realize that we have sent the horses away, but then they will be after us!” says Lawrence. They pick up their pace.

  Once they are over the causeway, Edgar gazes back at Lawrence Lodge in the moonlight. Glancing down into the dark pond in front of it, he sees the building’s twin in the water. The image shimmers, and for an instant, it looks as though there is a crack in the center of the house, and as the wind blows across the water, the building seems to crumble and implode as it appears to crash to the ground.

  * * *

  —

  When they are out of Hindhead, the six of them barely glance at the Devil’s Punch Bowl beneath them to their left. Instead, they rush forward, seeking the location of the horseless carriage. Annabel runs with them, lifting her skirts, as quick as the rest, in fact, competing with Tiger for the front of the pack.

  They find the vehicle in the trees, pull out the dead batteries and replace them with the fully charged ones. The chairman of the London Hospital produces some matches and lights the two lamps at the front of the car and the one in back, then they leap in and Lawrence, the expert driver, takes the tiller bar. Annabel is beside him on the front seat and the others are jammed into the rear bench, Edgar in the middle with Shakespeare on his knee.

  Lawrence has a way of building the speed of the machine by slowly moving the floor lever forward as it gains momentum and somehow gets it to go at a devilish rate, forcing the lever so far toward the front of the carriage that it seems almost pushed through the metal. They absolutely fly along the road, bumping and banging on the rough surface, humming away, almost bouncing out of their seats, hanging on for dear life. Edgar imagines the speed they must be going. Nearly twenty miles an hour! He tries to suppress the fear that this is creating within him. He notices that the others, even Tiger, are tight faced and anxious.

  It seems to take barely an hour to get to the London suburbs, and soon after that, they are across the Battersea Bridge and the River Thames. Crowds increase as they advance, as do the numbers of horses and carriages, and the sounds and smells. Lawrence seems to pay all of it no mind, expertly swerving in and out of traffic, doing even better than his and Edgar’s previous trip, moving along the river, and then cutting up through the busy parts of the city on a straight line toward the East End. Surely Morley’s people cannot follow them at this pace. It is getting late now and play and concertgoers, men in black-and-white evening suits and women in colorful long dresses, many pursued by drunks and mongers, are still about. Lawrence eludes them all. They reach Whitechapel Road and the car dies, so they leave it pulled off to the side and race through the dangerous arteries to Thomas Street. The door with the black horns
is unlocked again. They climb the stairs quickly, Tiger with the rifle, Edgar and Lawrence carrying the cannon, but when they come to the doors at the top floor, none of them reaches out for the handle. They pause. Shakespeare is hanging back.

  “I…Don Quixote…cannot go in there!” he whispers. “If that terrible man is inside, he will glare at me and I will be taken straight to hell!”

  “He is just a man,” says Annabel, “and they were all tricks.”

  “Then, you open the door,” says Shakespeare.

  She cannot make herself do it.

  “There have been strange things happening, some that cannot be explained, we must admit,” says Edgar. “Even Morley’s followers were surprised by some of the things we told them. So…we must be honest, fooling ourselves will not help us here…we are about to face another monster.”

  “The worst one,” says Shakespeare.

  Annabel puts her hand over her mouth.

  “If the Bible is right,” says Edgar, “it could be a dark angel, an unearthly lion, a dragon or a beast—”

  “That’s what his followers called him! The holy beast!” cries Shakespeare. “What if he has transformed in death?”

  “Whatever form this demon takes,” says Edgar, “we must face it.”

  “We have this,” says Tiger, pointing the rifle at the door.

  “And this,” says Lawrence, nodding at the cannon.

  “We have never unleashed it on a creature,” says Lucy. “It is incredibly powerful. Maybe this weapon can blow our monster apart!”

  Edgar Brim’s mind is temporarily far away, at war with itself. He fears that he knows what their greatest enemy really is—not an angel with black wings, a lion or a three-headed beast, not a gigantic red demon with cloven hooves. He remembers the passage in the Bible where Satan, invisible and undescribed, confronted the Lord and seemed to enter his brain. Perhaps it is truly inside their minds. The devil was there for a while, there is no doubt. That means it can return. Edgar knows where to look for Satan.

  “I will open the door,” says Lucy.

  “And I will go in first,” says Tiger. “Take off the head! That is what Professor Lear always said! We have triumphed before and we will do so again. Mr. Lawrence, we will open both doors wide, so ready the cannon behind me, fire it if you must, even if you have to blast through my body. Should nothing come, roll it in slowly and be prepared for anything!”

  Lucy reaches for the doors and begins to open them wide, but before she can pull them completely back, Edgar steps through, directly in the path of Tiger’s rifle and Lawrence’s cannon.

  He looks up at the box on top of the pillar at the front of the room.

  “Edgar!” cries Tiger and darts after him and pulls him back. The others rush in, dispersing to either side, giving Lawrence a clean shot with the cannon from behind them. He points it into the space. Tiger veers to the left and puts her back against the wall as she moves toward the front of the room, her rifle cocked and aimed here and there.

  The dim room is as cold as before, and silent, as if waiting for the creature to explode onto the scene, the interior lit in the same way as before, with candles everywhere. The jars of red liquid are still on the floor, lining the center aisle of a dozen rows of large and elegant wooden chairs. Images of pyramids and inner eyes remain on the walls. That big black throne still sits on the stage.

  “There is no one here,” says Lucy.

  “No one human,” whispers Shakespeare.

  “If Morley’s followers have been at Lawrence Lodge since yesterday,” says Annabel, “…then who lit these candles?”

  Andrew Lawrence wheels the cannon up the aisle, his eyes wide and alert.

  Tiger is listening for sounds between the walls, the footsteps of a cloven beast, but there is nothing.

  Edgar gathers himself and ventures to the center of the room, stepping in front of the cannon again, much to his friends’ dismay. He is not surveying his surroundings like the others. He is still staring up at the ornately decorated oblong box at the top of the dark pillar near the stage. It is almost touching the ceiling, and its appearance is as he remembers it: a sort of Ark of the Covenant.

  “Covenant,” says Edgar quietly.

  “What?” asks Lucy.

  “That was the word that Mephistopheles used. He said that Morley made a covenant with them.” He examines the box. “No one knows where his body is? I do.”

  They all look up to the top of the pillar.

  “In the Bible, it is said that God left the Ten Commandments in that sort of box. In other words, he left his instructions to humanity there. Morley is Satan. His body, its miracle of defeating death, IS his instruction to humanity, his covenant. His very existence beyond death puts the fear into others that he requires, shows them his power, his immortality. We must destroy him!” Edgar points up. “He is in there.”

  Tiger snaps the rifle upward and aims it at the box.

  “In what form?” asks Lucy.

  In the silence that ensues, they all imagine a black-winged angel or some other unimaginable beast rising from the box and descending upon them.

  “We all must leave,” says a voice from the shadows at the front of the room. It is a woman and she sounds terrified. Hilda Berenice emerges into the light.

  “How…long have you been here?” Annabel asks.

  “I arrived before you did.”

  “That is not possible,” says Tiger, who has now trained the rifle on Berenice.

  “It is impossible. You are correct.” The mind doctor looks as white as a ghost and she is trembling. “When you raced away from Lawrence Lodge, I prayed that I could get here before you. I prayed to Alex…to Satan…and here I am. I do not know how. He spoke often of astral projection, in other words of traveling through space with the power of your mind. We must all leave!”

  The others are not able to say anything. Edgar smells her perfume. He looks at her aging face, down at her fit young body in that tight plain dress and knows that this woman is incredibly powerful. Edgar Brim is sensitive to a fault and he can feel something indescribable emanating from her. She would pray to no one. She has come here under her own power! He notices that she is holding her hands in front of herself, like an actor who wants to display how they tremble.

  Suddenly, Tiger runs down the aisle toward Lawrence, knocking some of the blood-filled jars over as she rushes. The liquid spills across the hardwood floor. She flings the rifle into Lucy’s hands, shoves Lawrence aside and trains the cannon on the base of the pillar. “OUT OF THE WAY!” she cries. The others scatter. “Let us see what this big gun can do.” She pulls the cord on the cannon, the chemicals mix and the mighty weapon fires, finally fires at an enemy target. The concussion inside the room is otherworldly, a deafening roar. Edgar imagines Alfred Thorne standing there watching his killing machine finally put into action, his pale face and dark mustache evident in the dim glow. Edgar wonders if his adoptive father would smile or frown. Annabel looks on with the same expression, as if she too is imagining her husband seeing his infernal idea unleashed.

  The big cannonball rockets out of the mouth of the weapon and strikes the thick stone pillar just a few feet above the base. It slices through stone like a sword through soft skin, strikes the wall on the other side and makes a hole the size of a door. The column seems to shiver for a moment and then it begins to collapse. The covenant box at the top hovers for a second and then descends, dropping toward the floor like a bomb. It does not, however, crash through the floor, but instead sticks a perfect landing like a powerful gymnast touching down unharmed on a mat from an ethereal apparatus.

  They wait for the sound to subside. Even when that has happened, no one dares to move toward the coffin. Then it rattles.

  Shakespeare runs to the far end of the room and buries his head into the floor, covering himself with his hands. They can hear h
im praying, shouting at God to save him.

  Tiger steps toward the oblong box.

  “No,” says Edgar, “I will do it.”

  He looks back at Berenice, who for an instant almost seems to be smiling. He turns and moves forthrightly toward his target. The top of the box beneath him has a lid, not fastened in any way, just set into the coffin. He reaches out and touches it. It is surprisingly warm. He waits for a reaction from it, but it sits there, an inanimate marble box. Then, Edgar starts to slide the lid away. It grinds like fingernails on a chalkboard. Edgar’s heart is pounding and he dares not look in. In fact, against all sense of self-defense, he keeps his eyes shut. The others stand back, weapons ready, faces tight. The lid slides all the way across as Edgar pushes it, but when he is almost done, it seems to move on its own. Edgar opens his eyes and glances back at Berenice again. She has her hands over her mouth now, her eyes apparently filling with tears. He lets go of the lid. It balances perilously on the edge, then falls to the floor and breaks in two.

  Everyone holds their breath as the sound reverberates in the room. And for a long moment, nothing happens.

  Then something rises up. It lifts into the air, a mass of black eyes and teeth and horns trying to take shape, as if in search of its body. Wings try to materialize and three skulls attempt to emerge from one set of massive milk-white shoulders. It howls and reaches out its black-and-red arms, with claws for hands, to seize Edgar Brim. It struggles to do so, its body forming and fading. It shrieks again, in a scream that rattles the walls, and then it collapses back into the coffin. There is silence. Edgar wonders if the others have seen what he has. He takes a deep breath and peers into the box.

  The sight is stomach turning. Alex Morley lies there dressed in black from head to foot, his hands across his chest with two long-nailed thumbs upright like knives, and a smile on his face. He is motionless. His shaved head is skeletal and his body has begun to decompose; the smell, which Edgar in his terror had not registered at first, is horrible.