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.