Edgar leads the way. He walks up the six steps, presses the latch on one of the big wooden doors. It is hot like a furnace, baked by the boiling country air. In all his life, he cannot remember weather this searing. He pushes the door wide open and waits to see if anything comes at them. There is silence. He goes in. No one greets them in the vestibule. It is not entirely dark, one of the lights they saw from outside remains on in an adjoining room—the dining room, perhaps, or a sitting room—and it is dimly illuminating the vestibule too. Edgar leads them toward that light. There are animal heads nailed to the walls amongst clutters of paintings and dark paisley wallpaper in this hallway that leads inward. The eyes of these creatures seem to be staring at them. They reach a large sitting room and see that there are papers left on tables and knitting with the needles still in them on a love seat, as if the room’s occupants have disappeared from the premises in a flash. Then Edgar sees something that chills his heart. It is a bonnet, but not any bonnet. It is black with peach lines in it, little threads that spell out the word Love. Annabel’s!
He gasps and picks it up.
“What is that?” asks his father.
“It belongs to my mother!”
“That may not mean—”
“It means HE is here!” shouts Shakespeare and his voice echoes in the big room, bouncing off the paintings and the animal heads. “He has her here! Lawrence is in league with him!”
“Nonsense,” says Edgar, but his voice is quavering. “There is no proof of that.”
They remain silent for a moment, listening for sounds in the big house, but it seems deserted.
“Let us go upstairs to where the other light is,” says Allen Brim.
Edgar starts moving toward the staircase.
“No!” cries Shakespeare, as loudly as he dares.
“All right then, you stay down here, alone.”
“But we are not even armed!”
“We have our courage,” says Edgar, as if trying to convince himself, “and our stealth.” He notices a suit of armor standing against a wall near the foot of the stairs, the headless figure holding a long sword. “And we have this.” He takes it into his hands, surprised at its weight. It reminds him of Professor Lear’s big sword-like kukri knife. He wonders where that weapon is.
They ascend the stairs onto the first landing, then up the second set to the third, and tread carefully since there is almost no light here. Then they begin to hear muted voices.
“Lucy!” says Shakespeare, and Edgar has to put his hand over the little man’s mouth. It isn’t just her voice though; he can hear Lawrence’s and Annabel’s too.
Shakespeare seizes Edgar’s hand and tries to pull it off, mumbling about their friends and loved ones being near.
“We cannot trust them,” whispers Allen Brim.
“He is right,” says Edgar. A part of him is thrilled that they are alive and another part terrified of them.
“What?” mumbles Shakespeare.
“We cannot trust them. None of them.”
“What?” repeats the little fellow, this time a little louder.
“Lucy ran off on her own. She was acting suspiciously before that. Lawrence deceived me more than once and…and my mother, lately she has not been the person I knew as a child. She threw herself at that man just weeks after Alfred died!” There is anger in his voice.
“What?” says Shakespeare again. Then he mumbles something that sounds like, “You cannot be serious, Edgar Broom.”
“They mean you harm, Edgar,” says his father. “Dr. Berenice as much as said it. They are talking together as if they are in conspiracy with each other. And where is that strange girl, Tiger Tilley?”
Edgar does not want to think about it. It is bad enough that Lucy and Annabel are against him, perhaps plotting with the devil up here in this strange house, drawing him out to a lonely place in the countryside, but Tiger is another story entirely. Her capabilities are formidable to begin with, and if she were in league with Satan, her powers would be so much worse.
Edgar takes his hand from Shakespeare’s mouth and puts a finger to his lips to make him keep silent. “We need to get closer to them, hear what they are saying.”
The little man’s eyes are wide. He looks at Edgar as if he terrifies him, but he nods his big head.
They move along a hallway in the direction of the voices, which grow louder and soon appear to be coming from inside a room at the end of the hall. The door is closed and a line of light is apparent under it.
“We cannot stay here forever,” says Lucy.
“We have no choice but to wait.” Lawrence sounds tense. “Who knows what is out there and what they are capable of.”
“Are you referring to Edgar or the devil?” asks Annabel. She sounds unlike herself, like someone impersonating her.
Shakespeare draws in his breath and Edgar puts his hand on him. Then he tightens his grip on the sword.
“Either,” says Lawrence. “I don’t like saying it, but it is the truth.”
“If Edgar is indeed mad,” says Lucy, “if what you say about him is true, sir, then he could be capable of anything. I just hate to think of it.”
“I will kill him if I have to, with one of these.”
Annabel says nothing in protest and Edgar drops his head.
“Your guns won’t be useful, sir,” says Lucy, “if he has Alfred Thorne’s rifle or the cannon. Common shotguns like these might as well be from the Middle Ages in a fight with those weapons.”
“Why are we assuming he has them?” asks Annabel.
“How do we know he hasn’t?”
“Maybe Tiger has them.”
There is silence for a moment.
“I have no idea where her loyalty is in all of this,” says Lucy. “I don’t understand her at all, never have. Lord help us if she is against us.”
Edgar thinks of Lawrence telling him that he would excavate the revenant’s corpse from the basement of the Lyceum Theatre. He had promised, but it seems he had not done it. In fact, he had never mentioned the subject again. Had he ever intended to do it?
There is a sound in the building, a thud like something or someone falling to a floor. Quiet reigns for a minute, both inside and outside the upper room.
“I will kill anyone or anything that I have to,” repeats Lawrence. “Dr. Berenice has taught me how important it is to know who my enemies are, and how to identify them.”
“I can hear someone,” whispers Allen Brim. “Someone is walking through the house.”
Edgar listens carefully and thinks he hears footsteps too, far off in the building, perhaps one floor beneath them, perhaps lower, but he is not sure. He thinks of Poe’s magnificent sensation story The Fall of the House of Usher and of the woman in it who had been given up for dead and put in a coffin in the basement of a building not unlike the one they are in right now…only to appear, very much alive, right before the eyes of the narrator. The footsteps are coming upward, just as hers had.
“One of us needs to venture out and search the building,” says Lucy. “I’ll do it, if necessary.”
“No,” says Lawrence, “I’ll go, just give me a minute or two to brace myself.”
Edgar motions to the other two to move back from the door and down the hallway. When they are far enough away, he gathers them together.
“If someone is moving about in the house, we have to find him or her. We have to do it before Lawrence sees us too. We have to do it now.”
“That is an excellent idea, my son.”
“No,” says Shakespeare. “All the servants seem to be gone. They have somehow vanished! We know where the lovely Lucy, the wealthy Mr. Lawrence and your apparently dearest mother are at this moment, Edgar. So, that leaves only a couple of possibilities as to the identity of this intruder.”
“Satan,” says Allen Brim.
“Or Tiger,” says Edgar.
“Yes, indeed,” cries Shakespeare, “and neither she nor the devil are opponents we want to face, especially if the valiant Tilley has that blunderbuss weapon or that infernal cannon!”
“We could take whatever is lurking by surprise,” says Edgar.
“YOU, you could take it by surprise. I will have nothing to do with this! For it will mean certain death!”
“You are as brave as a lion.”
“I am a survivor!” says Shakespeare.
“You must kill whatever you find,” says Allen. “Tiger Tilley is no friend of yours. Kill her and cut off her head with that sword. Bury her in a deep grave with her severed head between her feet, just like you did with the vampire creature.”
Edgar wonders if he ever told his father what they did to the revenant’s corpse. If he did not, then how could he know all that? He regards Allen Brim for an instant and wonders again if he too is his enemy. He glances at William Shakespeare. I am alone in this. I always have been, he thinks.
“You two stay here and I will search the house,” says Edgar out loud. “If I do not come back in a short while, then flee. There is no use in all of us perishing.”
His father takes him into his arms and hugs him but offers no resistance to the idea of his confronting their enemy alone. Shakespeare stands there watching with a puzzled expression on his face.
Edgar leaves them at that intersection in the hallway and heads out into the house with his sword held in front of him, stepping quietly and stealthily, every one of his acute senses alert. The moonlight filters dimly through a window or two. When he gets to the top of the staircase, he stops for a long time and listens. For a while, all he can hear is his own breathing. Then he hears that sound again, those quiet footsteps, a single floor down.
He descends the stairs.