Annabel greets him in the vestibule on the gleaming black-and-white marble floor with both arms outstretched to envelop him. He has the sense that she was already nearby, as if looking out the windows, in constant wait should he appear. She is still dressed in her widow’s weeds, black from head to foot, though she has somehow managed to find a dress that shows her ankles to good effect. She has magically made it cool in Thorne House too.
“My dear boy!” she veritably screams and grips him in a vice-like hold that he doubts even a monster could loosen. Then she pushes him back and looks him in the eye.
“Why did you not return home when news of that awful hotel fire was in the papers? It was a full two weeks ago. Your uncle burned to death! Dr. Godwin gone missing, presumed dead! Surely all that news reached you. You were only in Scotland, so you said. It is not the backwaters…well, actually it is, but did no one tell you?”
“Yes, Mother, I knew something of it, but not details and—”
“What, in the first place, pray tell, was this urgent hospital business to which you had to attend? And why did it keep you away even when such horrors were happening to your superiors down here? Did you take a side trip to Australasia or the blooming Arctic Ocean? I was without word after the first day you were gone!”
He has gotten better at lying but it is always difficult to deceive Annabel Thorne.
“I—I…”
“Actually, you seem like your old self again.”
“Thank you.”
“That is not a compliment! Your old self! A sad, bag-eyed and morose little thing, instead of the later model, the one that loves his mother, tries to be happy and helpful, and gets on with life. Surely, the passing of your uncle and the vivisecting Dr. Godwin cannot be so devastating to you, can it? You did not like Vincent Brim at all. I know it! No great loss concerning Godwin either, I say. I did not care a farthing for him! It is not their deaths that have turned you this way. Have you been thinking?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thinking!”
“I don’t understand what—”
“I have been reading a great deal while you were away, and there are new people about who study the brain, the feelings and the nervous disposition in an entirely different way these days. There is a young man in Austria by the name of Freud who is at the forefront of all of this, and he has written a wonderful study or two about it. Nervous disorders! Phobias! Neurasthenia! We are becoming a world full of contemplators and worriers and anxious sorts, depressing people always thinking and thinking and thinking…about ourselves! It causes all sorts of unneeded stress to your nervous system. You must DO, Edgar, DO! Stop all this inwardness.” She pauses for a moment. “Then, of course, you might simply be in love. Are you, Edgar? Is it a Scottish lass? Do tell!”
“Mother, I am merely fatigued, and yes, a little saddened by the terrible human cost of that fire. I will go to my room and have a good night’s sleep and return a new man.”
But in the night, his enemy comes again.
He is struggling to sleep when he hears her moving up the stairs, a light tread but her hobbled gait recognizable, the pace of a witch from a dark fairy tale, like the ones that his father used to read aloud, the ones that seeped into his infant brain. One is not supposed to truly hear the things that are happening in a story, but Edgar Brim could. It was as if someone, something, perhaps the author, perhaps God, was providing the sounds.
The footsteps draw nearer and then the door opens and he looks down toward the end of the bed and past it, paralyzed, and sees her hideous face in the entrance. She has never looked like this! The image before him is not a ghost, not ethereal and fictional, not translucent and amorphous, but real, three-dimensional and breathing and moving on two solid feet whose treads are audible. The old woman closes the door behind her and regards him. Then she starts across the floor toward him.
“I will do evil to you,” she hisses, “and to your friends.” This time there is no doubt that the words are coming from her. Her face looks made-up, rouged with red, black around the eyelids, white powder in the folds of her skin, her hair dark and long. She comes at him in a sort of glide. He tries to scream but when he opens his mouth, he cannot make a sound. That is the way it has always been, ever since he was a child.
Now she is standing over him, grinning. Then she seizes the covers and sweeps them back, leaving him cold in his nightgown beneath her. She has never done this before. She swoops down upon him and he can feel her this time, the weight of her torso on him, her body stronger and more powerful than before, her woman’s chest on his, her lips close to his mouth, her breath like a strange perfume that makes his head swim. He wants to die. Panic attacks him and his heart pounds so hard that he fears it will burst.
“I will do evil to you,” she repeats, “and to your friends!” The word evil stretches out until it seems to envelop the entire sentence—the e long and hard, the rest like a smooth blanket on which it sits.
Then the hag suddenly rises. This time, she does it differently: she does not float away, instead she walks backward, feels for the knob, opens the door and goes out. He hears her footsteps descending the stairs, the front door opening and closing. Then there is silence.
When sound returns, it is Edgar’s own breathing he hears, fast and hard. He moves his toes, then his knees, his thighs, his stomach, his fingers, his hands, his mouth. He pulls the covers back up over himself. Then he lies there for hours, unable to sleep. He thinks and thinks. He convinces himself that the old woman cannot be in any way real. This is simply the “hag phenomenon,” a psychic reality that descends on some people at night or at dawn, descends on their brains and their imaginations, not a real person upon their sleeping forms. It is in his power to send it away. Annabel is right. He must DO. Whatever it is, he must DO. Go back to work, train for another profession, leave the monsters behind and change his life, stop imagining a devil is nearing.
Then Edgar encounters Beasley.
The butler knocks on his door at dawn. It is an unusual thing for him to do. Beasley is well aware that Edgar never wants to be roused in the mornings or have his clothes prepared or his breakfast brought to him or anything of that sort. He hates all those kinds of services. Yet, there is Beasley, at his room.
“Sir, might I have a word?” he asks when Edgar opens the door.
“Of course, Beasley.” The boy smiles at him. He is already dressed for the day.
“I heard something in the night, sir, so I came down the stairs. It seemed like footsteps, each carefully set like those of a thief in the night. When I came to this floor, I had the sense that this intruder had been at your door. Indeed, your entrance was slightly ajar. I followed the sounds down the staircase, as quiet as a mouse, mind you, and saw someone go out the front door.”
“Someone?” Edgar’s voice is barely audible.
“An old woman, sir.”