Shakespeare can barely keep up. He looks behind as he runs, his little legs moving as fast as he can make them go. He reaches out for Edgar several times, almost as if he wants to take him by the hand.
“Edgar! EDGAR BRIM!” he cries. “Alex Morley was sending me messages when he was dead! He butchered himself and THEN he came to see me! This proves who he is!”
“Nonsense!” shouts Edgar, not even looking back at him. “It proves precisely the opposite. The devil cannot die!”
“He looked perfectly well yesterday, Edgar, perfectly well! Quite striking, actually.”
They cross wide Whitechapel Road and enter the hospital. It is approaching mid-morning and both the street and the London are hot and bustling. The wilting matron is fanning herself. She stares at them and even calls out, but Edgar ignores her, crosses the crowded, noisy reception room and begins to climb the first set of stairs, his little companion huffing and puffing as he tries to stay close. As they approach Berenice’s door, Shakespeare throws himself at Edgar’s legs and slows him down.
“Edgar Broom,” he whispers, “before you open that door to this woman, this mind doctor who is connected to the evil that pursues us, I must tell you something! It may make you come to your senses and flee with me! It is about a particular visit that the devil Morley made to the Crypto-Anthropology Society of the Queen’s Empire.”
Edgar sighs. “What is it? And quickly.”
“One day…one day…one day…”
“Out with it.”
“He turned on an electric light.”
“Why are you wasting my time?”
“And…and he moved an inkwell across the table.”
“This is ridic—”
“He did not touch these items when he did these things.”
“Shakespeare, you are a fool.”
“He did not touch them, Edgar Broom. He turned on the light and moved the inkwell by simply looking at them. He used his powers. That was how he made me go to Master Jonathan, I am certain, and he somehow caused him to die. He many times told me that if I did not do the things he instructed me to do, tell him the things he wanted to know, he would take my soul with merely a look.”
Edgar swallows and hopes it does not sound as loud to his little companion as it does to him. They are just a couple of steps from Berenice’s door. He turns to it. The blind is pulled down on its window. He doesn’t knock and enters without saying a word.
The alienist has her back to them, on her knees against the bed as if in prayer, but with her hands held out to either side of her shoulders, palms open and downward, as if receiving some sort of spirit from below. She is naked from the waist up: her tight brown dress pulled down to her wide hips, her back slim but taut, an extraordinary network of fine muscles evident, as if her torso belongs to an athletic woman in her twenties. Her feet are bare too.
“Dr. Berenice!” shouts Edgar. Shakespeare comes to a halt and gasps.
The mind doctor does not move even one of her well-defined muscles. She remains motionless for a moment, then, still turned away from them, reaches behind her waist, her shoulders popping out and back into place, pulls up the top of her dress to cover herself and does up all the buttons, right to the bottom of her neck, her arms, wrists and fingers remarkably supple. Then she gets to her feet, seemingly without effort, and turns to her visitors, swinging her long black hair around so it falls over her back. Her exotic face betrays her age, perhaps approaching seventy or maybe older.
“Oh, my Lord!” cries Shakespeare.
“Good day, Edgar. Who is this little man?”
“This is William Shakespeare.”
“I see. Are you sure it isn’t Charles Dickens?”
“It is what he calls himself.”
“You…you look familiar, s-sound—” stutters Shakespeare.
“I doubt that.”
“H-how…” stutters Shakespeare again, pointing at her, “how do you do that?”
“Do what?” asks Berenice.
“Reach behind yourself like that. Be so supple, so…so…”
“So young of body?” She stands towering over him, a perfect and strong hourglass shape. Something about her seems to terrify the little man.
“Yes.”
“It is an ancient Indian art, where one stretches the body daily. It is that and other things that keep my body young, but the mind retains all the true power. Its power is limitless. A great man taught me that. He showed me how to keep my body the way he liked it to be. He and I were experimenters in life and love and magic. He believed that your mind might have the power to allow you to live forever.”
“Alex Morley,” says Edgar.
Berenice’s eyes flare at the mention of the name. “Yes,” she finally says. “How did you know that, Edgar?”
“I want to know more about him.”
“Once you know a little, you will want to know a great deal.”
“He is the devil incarnate!” says Shakespeare. “He is Satan in the flesh!”
“You are mad, little man,” says Berenice.
“Then I am too,” says Edgar.
The alienist turns away. “You will not defame a dead man. You will not defame a man who took his own life…in such a horrible way.”
“How do you know that he is dead?”
“I saw his corpse, here at the hospital.” She keeps her back to them.
“You claimed it and took it away too. Where is it?”
“I did not. I did not have the right to do that.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps one of his insane followers.” Her voice sounds bitter.
“I saw him alive, yesterday,” shrieks Shakespeare.
Berenice whirls around. “That is impossible!”
“He sent me a note this morning too!”
“Do NOT say that!” cries Berenice.
“Because it is true?” asks Edgar.
“No, it is not true. He cannot defeat death. He was merely brilliant. Merely.” She sniffs. “He truly understood the secret abilities of human beings. His brilliance was too much for even the Order.” Shakespeare takes in his breath with a start. “He was under the impression that he could have taught me so much more.”
“Perhaps his power comes from below,” says Edgar. “Perhaps he entranced you because he had more than mortal power.”
“I could believe that,” says Berenice, gripping her arms with shaking hands and running them up and down as though to warm herself. “But I do not. You are not sane when you say these things, Edgar Brim. You need to send this little man to Bedlam and then lie on this sofa for me and tell me why you would believe that any man, or woman, is not mortal. You have said such things before.”
Edgar steps back. “I will do nothing of the sort.”
“I beg you to reconsider.” There is aggression in her voice.
“Where is his body? I need to know that he is dead.”
“I do not know.”
Her mouth is a straight line, her face unreadable.
“Where is Lawrence? I need to speak with him.”
“I told you before, he isn’t here.”
“But that was yesterday. He still hasn’t returned?”
“He must have gone home.”
“I went to his residence and there was not only no sign of him but his footman seemed perplexed as to his whereabouts.”
Berenice turns her back on them again. “He has another home. In the country. A place he calls Lawrence Lodge. It is in Surrey, a few hours from London near the village of Hindhead on the road to Portsmouth, just past the Devil’s Punch Bowl.”
“What is that?” asks Shakespeare, barely able to say it.
“You will see.”
“You speak of his estate and its location as if you have been there,” says Edgar.
“I have not. He merely mentioned it during a session here. It is a place he is very fond of, a remarkable place, mysterious he called it, with a stunning view of the countryside.” She keeps her back to them.
“Why did Lawrence need your help, Dr. Berenice?”
She turns on him. Her face is red. “I have told you! One cannot reveal such things!”
There is silence in the room for a moment.
“We are not going there, Edgar Broom. We cannot trust him. We cannot trust anyone anymore. We are fleeing!”
A whirlwind of thoughts invades Edgar’s mind. Where is Annabel? Is she with Lawrence? Is the countryside, safely away from things and with this rich man’s resources and protection, the best place to be? Or is Lawrence in league with our enemy and drawing me out there to finish things in a remote location where no one will see what happens? Edgar looks to Dr. Berenice and something makes him ask a strange question. It is as if he cannot resist saying it. “What would you do?” he asks her.
She seems to be holding back a smile. “I…I cannot tell you what to do.” She takes several steps toward a window and looks out it. Edgar advances to her side and casts his gaze downward, in the direction she is looking. Sir Andrew Lawrence’s motorcar sits there, pulled up close to the side of the building where the carriages are sometimes left. It gleams in the midday sun. Edgar wonders why Lawrence would not have taken it to his country estate, if indeed that is where he has gone. It occurs to him that the roads in the countryside might not be fit for such a conveyance…or that Lawrence may have had too many people with him to carry them in that slight machine. Does he have Lucy, Tiger and Annabel? Edgar knows that he cannot afford a hansom cab’s fare that far out into the countryside. Something also tells him that he must get to Lawrence as fast as he possibly can.
Ten minutes later, when Edgar and Shakespeare arrive at the vehicle, the little man literally trying to dig his heels into the footpaths again to keep from being brought along, they notice that someone is sitting in the front passenger seat.
“Hello, my boy,” says Allen Brim.
“Hello, Father.”
“He is here?” asks Shakespeare. “In which seat? I should not sit upon him.”
“Take the rear bench,” says Edgar. “We have a long trip in front of us.”
“Oh! I cannot actually ride in such an infernal machine! What is it, steam? Electric? Petrol powered?”
“It is electric and quite safe,” Edgar lies.
“ELECTRIC! Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my! Electric is evil, Edgar Broom. It has such power! Everyone knows that! It frightens me to my very soul!”
“Get in or I will frighten you far past that.”
The little man, seeing he has no option, steps up into the carriage and squeezes himself into the back and onto the tiny rear bench. “She spoke of the Order,” he says, barely above his breath.
“I meant to ask about that,” says Edgar. “What did she mean?”
“The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.”
A memory, a difficult one, comes back to Edgar from many years ago, when he was being reprimanded by the headmaster of the College on the Moors, the Reverend Spartan Griswold, a six-and-a-half-foot praying-mantis of a man with wicked ways. The old tyrant had mentioned this very same group, an offhand reference that had sent chills down Edgar’s spine. Edgar knew it was a secret society, that it had something to do with the occult and black magic and perhaps even evil. Its members had some sort of belief that invisible powers could, and perhaps did, run the world, the universe. Bram Stoker, creator of the blood-soaked Dracula, was a member. Now, it turned out, so was Alexander Morley. Edgar thinks of what Berenice had said about Morley’s involvement. “He truly understood the secret abilities of human beings,” she had said. “His brilliance was too much for even the Order.”
Edgar does not want to think about that, not now. He must focus on the task at hand. He slides onto the front seat and gets behind the steering mechanism. “Now,” he says, trying to sound calm, “how to operate this.”
He thinks back to the day when he sailed through London with Lawrence and considers how this machine was piloted. He recalls Lawrence did very little to start it, simply turned a key, if he is correct, somewhere under the seat. He reaches down, finds it and turns the switch to start the battery. Nothing seems to happen. That makes sense though. This is not one of those petrol-powered cars with a starting crank that can break your arm and a noise that pierces the eardrums of anyone within a mile. It is much simpler and quieter. Edgar pulls the tiller bar toward himself, finds the two foot-brakes and settles his hand onto the lever that extends up toward him from the floor, just to the right of his right leg. There are goggles on the dashboard and he puts one pair on and hands the others to his passengers. He remembers how careful Lawrence was with this lever that accelerates the vehicle, pushing it forward in slow motion, as if it would allow the car to travel at a certain speed partway up and faster and faster as the lever was pushed forward.
He realizes that his heart is pounding and it surprises him to feel the sort of fear that has plagued him in very different circumstances throughout his life. This is not psychological…or is it?
“This is ridiculous,” he says out loud. “This is a machine. It is new and different, and everyone fears things that are different, usually without reason. Be rational, calm down, pilot the carriage.”
“Are you talking to your father?” asks a frightened little voice from behind.
“Just to myself,” says Edgar, “trying to talk some sense.”
He pushes the lever forward and the car moves out onto the street. He only allows the machine to advance very slowly at first, trying to get the hang of the tiller steering mechanism. He pulls up to the intersection with Whitechapel Road, decelerates and gently touches the brakes. The car lurches to a stop. He falls forward and Shakespeare comes crashing into him from behind, banging his big head on the back of the seat. He groans. Somehow, Allen Brim sits there as still as a statue.
“I beg your pardon,” says Edgar, and then he looks out onto bustling Whitechapel Road. Fear envelops him again. The wide street is teeming with activity—horses and carriages, hansom cabs, rivers of pedestrians, shouting hawkers and even the odd motorized vehicle. It seems as though he sees all the colors of a rainbow out there and smells all the odors known to humanity. For an instant, he cannot move. It is as though the task of stepping from the womb into life confronts him.
“There is a solution to this,” says his father, “and you know what it is.”
Edgar steels himself, pushes the tiller forward, and turns left onto Whitechapel Road. “Oh, my Lord!” shouts Shakespeare from the back seat and covers his eyes as they enter the melee. Edgar wishes that he could conquer all his fears this way.
“It is possible, actually,” says Allen Brim.
Edgar drives cautiously through the mob of traffic as he makes his way out of the East End, picks up the pace through the Old City and then hums along the Embankment beside the brown River Thames into Chelsea until he reaches the Battersea Bridge and crosses over that narrow, five-span passage into Brixton and the southern suburbs. He knows the way to the road to Portsmouth. It takes a while to emerge out of the heavily populated area, which worries Edgar, since he thinks they are easy targets there for anything that might be pursuing them, but once they reach Wimbledon, the population begins to decline. They are soon near the countryside, buzzing southwest into the sweltering county of Surrey where the roads are dirt or gravel, meant for horses and coaches, rough for the hummingbird motor vehicle. Mud flies up and splatters on their goggles as they whizz along at something that seems terribly in excess of thirteen miles an hour, trying to find the smoother parts of the bumpy road. As the natural world around them grows greener and more beautiful, Shakespeare sits on the back bench, looking terrified; Allen Brim in the passenger seat, a picture of intensity; and Edgar at the tiller, frightened that their enemy may be finding a way inside his very soul. He wonders if it has already done that to Lucy and Tiger. Perhaps it has taken them away to join the evil side, against him. “Perhaps they are all against me,” he says to himself, “every single one of them. Perhaps that is what this is all about, what it has always been about.” All the while, he is worrying about material problems: that they will break a wheel and, left alone in the country, become sitting prey. His mind swirls one way and then the next. “Is a dead man somehow in pursuit of me?” They pass through villages, past the great Epsom Downs horseracing park and onward, drawing stares from people everywhere they go. It takes them several hours to get to their destination.
Edgar begins to calm a little as they near the village of Hindhead where Lawrence’s estate must sit on one of the hills overlooking the surrounding area—Berenice said it has a “stunning view of the countryside.”
Then the car begins to slow. It does so on its own, as if possessed. No matter how far forward Edgar pushes the lever, the car keeps slowing down, and then it comes to a complete halt.
“Edgar Broom? What is going on?”
“We have come to the end of our ride,” says Allen Brim. “This is an electric car powered by six batteries at the front and rear of the machine. They have limitations and thus the vehicle has a finite range. Thirty miles or so, I would say, and we have done it.”
“We have to get out and walk,” says Edgar, looking up at the sun, which has descended a good deal in the sky. He gets from the car. They are in a heavily wooded area. Something could emerge out of the trees and attack them without giving them much chance to respond, or run. “The vehicle is spent. We have, I’d say, another half hour to walk.”
“But it will be pitch-black in an hour or two!”
“All the more reason to hop to it,” says Allen.
Edgar pushes Lawrence’s amazing horseless carriage a couple of feet into the trees. Then the two Brims begin to move along the wooded road and Shakespeare scrambles to keep up to them, moaning and whining as he comes. In ten or fifteen minutes, the scenery suddenly changes. In fact, the entire world appears to fall away to one side of the road. It seems that the trees, the rocks, the earth are instantly miles beneath them, and the vista is extraordinary. It is as though a giant or a god reached down and shoveled out the ground with one enormous hand for as far as one can see. It is remarkable to behold. They are moving along the road on the edge of this mammoth pit and one has the sense that if you took a couple steps toward it, you would vanish into its depths. Edgar stares at it.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. Is it real? he asks himself. What delusion is this?
“I don’t like it,” says Shakespeare. “It isn’t right; it isn’t natural!”
“Look,” says Allen Brim, “there is a sign here.”
Expecting to see a marker giving them the distance to Portsmouth or hopefully even an indication that Hindhead is just around the corner, the sign instead contains no numbers, just four words.
The Devil’s Punch Bowl.
The three of them stand stock-still for a moment, listening to the breeze, to the crows cawing in the distance as they fly high above this aberration in the earth.
“It is just a coincidence,” says Allen Brim.
“Yes,” says Edgar.
“Yes? Yes?” cries Shakespeare. “What does that mean? There is no ‘yes’ about this. This is a ‘No!’ A NO ALL THE WAY! We must remove our posteriors from these premises and skedaddle at unheard of speed back to London!”
“I am going to Hindhead and you are coming with me!”
Edgar’s mind, however, is swirling again. There are too many coincidences, too many delusions. He has to press himself to keep moving forward.
Two more signs, however, almost make him turn back. One marks the death of a sailor here long ago, killed by three highwaymen later hanged for their crime on a nearby hill, and the second is a remarkable stone Celtic cross sitting on the very edge of the abyss, described by the engraving as being erected there to ward off evil spirits. “The Devil Made This Place,” someone has written across it in chalk.
“We are not in a story,” says Edgar to himself. “This is not just inside my mind. This is real.” By another force of will, he keeps himself and his companions moving farther, and in ten minutes, they pass a few homes and a public house, just past the sign for the village of Hindhead. They have no need to ask for directions to Lawrence Lodge. It appears above them before they have gone far, huge and looming on a hill that must command a magnificent view of the countryside. From the road, with the setting sun behind it, the big house, stretching along the horizon, has a dark, ominous look.
“I am not going up there, no indeed,” says William Shakespeare, who turns and begins to walk back the way they came.
“Then we shall leave you to the wolves,” says Edgar.
“Wolves?” asks Shakespeare, stopping on a dime. “Are they not extinct in England?”
Edgar gives him an evil smile.
A dirt road winds up the steep hill toward the residence. Edgar and his father begin to climb it. In a second, their little companion is following them.
“Berenice wanted you to come here,” whispers Allen. “I think she has sent you here. It is a trap.”
“What did you say?” asks Edgar, but his father does not respond.
The house does indeed look down upon its surroundings. Once they reach the grounds, a whole world opens up, as if separated from the rest of Hindhead. There is a small dark pond in front of the building and vehicles must travel across a short causeway to reach the front door. Lawrence Lodge is an elongated brick home, almost the full length of a ridge, with a sloping lawn laid between it and the water. It has three floors with gabled windows and a wide wooden entrance bearing Lawrence’s trademark A and L doorknocker.
Edgar expects a liveried footman to step from the huge door to greet them, dressed in the family’s red-and-cream-colored uniform and with a phalanx of other servants behind him.
The house, however, is silent.
They walk across the causeway and up to the entrance. The big doors do not open. It is as if the building is dead, while its backdrop of singing birds, wind in the trees, and the beautiful scenery descending below it, are alive with sound and sensation. The setting sun lights it all in an eerie way.
The stables are to the left of the main house, but they are dark too, giving no evidence of whether or not anyone has come here recently.
They stop and stare at the doors. None of them says anything for a while.
Then a light comes on in an upper room and then another dim one on the ground floor. A big black bird sits in the upper window.
“It is time for us to leave this place,” says Shakespeare, and it is as though his tiny voice is broadcast across the county.
“No,” says Edgar, “we are going indoors.”