Annabel invites everyone to Thorne House the next day, even Andrew Lawrence. In fact, she spends a good deal of time with him. Beasley and the other servants have returned after the two-day holiday Annabel secretly gave them while she explored her adopted son’s situation at Lawrence Lodge. Everything in Thorne House shines: the chandeliers, the cutlery, the plates and even the people. Their meal is sumptuous—pork and beef and lamb, blood pudding and wine. There is a good deal of laughter.
Annabel leads it all, her laugh ringing off the ceiling as she throws her head back, her smile nearly splitting her face as she glows at the wealthy and handsome Andrew Lawrence, finally getting her wish that everyone around her stop thinking and worrying and being sad.
Even little William Shakespeare is happy. He sounds more lucid than he has in years.
“I had no real fear of the devil,” he cries, “that was merely a pose, I tell you. Had he actually risen up from his sarcophagus, I would have seized that blade from you, dear Miss Lear, and smote him through the chest and head like a knight of old! But I knew it was the mind doctor all along!”
The laughter, at this, is nearly as loud as the cannon’s blast.
“What?” the little man cries. “You doubt me? You infections that the sun sucks up! O gulls, o dolts, as ignorant as dirt!”
Edgar Brim’s joy is forced. He sits between Tiger and Lucy wearing a new suit Annabel has purchased for him, his wild red hair somewhat tamed, pretending to be happy, but his greatest fear still inside him. It is not Alexander Morley or Hilda Berenice. The devil remains banished from his mind and he refuses to allow her or him back. It is something else. Someone else. Nighttime is approaching. Bedtime.
He says good night to Tiger at the door, while Lucy talks to Annabel. The dear friends embrace each other. Tiger feels so lithe and strong, and he admires her so much. It is difficult for him to believe that he ever doubted her.
“Now that it is all over,” she says softly into his ear, “come with me.”
“Where?”
She pushes him gently back and looks at him. He loves her dark eyes.
“To America,” she says.
“America?”
“Yes, that is the only place for the likes of me. It is the land of opportunity! I can do what I want there. I can be whatever I choose to be. We could go together. I would look out for you.”
It is such a tempting offer. His anxiety subsides a little as she gazes at him. He feels like a child in her arms. Then his heart begins to speed up again.
“No,” he says. “America is the place for you, not me. You must go alone.”
She appears shocked for a moment and he thinks he detects a slight reddening in her eyes.
“You do not need me,” adds Edgar. “I need you. I must stop that…going away with you is not what I should do.”
She takes in a breath. “You are right,” she says, stepping away from him and turning her face so he cannot see it. “I do NOT need you. I do not need anyone.” Then she turns back, her expression softens and she kisses him on the cheek. Then her lips tighten again and she goes out the door without another look.
“Edgar?” says a voice behind him. Lucy. She walks up to him, shy, looking down, her face reddening a little. He takes her hands in his.
“What will you do?” she says.
“That’s what Tiger was just asking.”
“Well, now I am.”
“I’m not certain.” He glances upstairs, thinking he hears something moving around in the dark hallway outside his bedroom. “Mr. Lawrence has made it known that he would have me. He would groom me to run the London, a chance to help heal others, a life at the helm of a great science. I am uncertain, though, what I am capable of, what my fate will be.”
“You spoke of writing more than once.”
“Yes.”
“I know those stories your father read are still alive for you. I know you think about them all the time. All sorts of other tales too. Books are your strength, Edgar, perhaps your fate. No one has an imagination like you.”
“I…I don’t know,” he says, glancing upstairs again.
“You would write frightening stories, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he says in a small voice, and gulps.
“Meaningful ones.” She pulls him close to her and hugs him tightly. “Come and see me. Read them to me. I’ll listen,” she says into his ear.
They slowly pull back from each other.
“What do you want, Lucy, in your life?”
She simply smiles at him. When she goes out, she glances back with a look. Edgar watches the door for a while after it closes, then sighs and turns toward the stairs. For a wonderful moment, he had forgotten what he must face. His greatest challenge is before him now. He starts up the steps and realizes that his legs are trembling. In fact, they are shaking so much that he stops halfway to the first floor. He hears a noise downstairs behind him, laughter, and turns to see Annabel and Andrew Lawrence heading toward the front door. When they get there, the chairman of the London Hospital takes her hand and kisses it, but she seizes him and plants a long smooch on his mouth. Lawrence almost staggers, but then goes out the door singing. His pitch seems to have improved.
“I know you are standing there, Edgar,” says Annabel, turning to look up at him. Her smile is resplendent. “Mr. Lawrence is truly a charmer, my son. He is a gentleman and devilishly attractive, and that is how that adjective should be employed! It was truly not his way to try to push me in any direction—that woman put thoughts into his brain just as she put them into yours. Perhaps now though, I shall do the pushing. I really do not care a fig for anyone’s reaction to that. Not even yours! I shall not be a slave to my late husband, as much as I deeply loved him, or to any role society asks of me. I shall live for today! In the moment! It is good advice. You, Edgar Brim, should heed it.”
She walks past him up the stairs to her bedroom, so enamored that she does not notice the terror in his eyes.
He comes to his door.
The hag.
She was there before Berenice and the others and she will be there again. Tonight. He is sure of it. This is his final battle. If he loses it, he loses everything. He will be back at the beginning or worse. Berenice may rise from her cell. All the monsters had proved to be real, in their way, and that was good because he and his friends could fight them. He did fight them. He faced them and won, just as his father, his real father, told him to do. This, however, is different.
Edgar starts removing his suit and putting on his nightclothes and discovers that his whole body is quivering. He stands over his bed, looking at it, not wanting to get in, and remembering his days at Raven House, the sensation stories that came down through the heat pipe, the panic they put into his mind.
“Father?” he asks, but Allen Brim is not in the room, nor anywhere else. He is indeed dead, fully and completely. Edgar must do this on his own.
He thinks of the College on the Moors, of the bullies, of Fardle, of Spartan Griswold and the frightening teachers. He thinks of Professor Lear, of killing the vampire creature, of destroying the Frankenstein beast with the harpoon gun. He thinks of Alex Morley and Hilda Berenice, trying to exert power from here and beyond the grave.
Then Edgar thinks of the hag. She has been with him for so long. She is as real as all the other monsters. He thinks of how easily Berenice controlled him, how quickly he slipped into a fantasy world of eight-foot men and friends who intended to kill him. The hag is the very oxygen behind all of that. The hag allowed it all to come alive.
“I need to live in reality,” he whispers, and a tear rolls down his cheek. “If I cannot do that, then nothing else will matter. I will die.”
He lays his head on the pillow and tries to stay awake. He knows he cannot sleep again, ever.
He drifts off.
She comes at him unlike before. He can see her, hear her and smell her. She descends from the ceiling, her weight upon him before she even lands on him. This is not Berenice. It is not the devil. This is much worse. Her stringy hair hangs down like white, dying vines and touches him first. Then her bony knees, then her wizened chest, then her toothless, wrinkled face.
“Be afraid!” she cries. “Let fear be in you and control you!”
He tries to twist and turn under her, sick to his stomach from the putrid smell of her breath.
“Look at me!” she shrieks. “Look at me!”
He wants to fight her and flee from her at the same time. His mind is on fire. He cannot move though. His arms and legs, everything, is paralyzed again. She clutches at his throat.
“The time has come to kill you,” she says softly.
In seconds, he cannot breathe. The force on his chest is like the weight of a whale. He becomes very still. It is the moment, finally, to give up.
His father is somehow near again, though not alive, and Edgar cannot see him. For an instant, he struggles with that. “Where are you? I need you!” he hears a voice say, and realizes it is his own. Allen Brim is invisible.
“Do not be afraid,” says someone. Edgar cannot pinpoint who is speaking. It is not his father and not his own voice. It seems, however, to be bearing the truth, telling him what matters in life.
“Do not be afraid!”
He moves his head and looks the hag in the eyes. He stares at her, boring a hole into her face. Slowly, the weight on his chest gets lighter. The old woman lifts from him. Her body begins to dissolve and her face registers the pain. She cries out as she disappears, sucked upward in a spiral, taken from his world for good.
Edgar Brim falls asleep.
When he wakes in the morning, he is refreshed and alone. He smiles, gets up, pulls back the drapes and lets the brilliant sunshine pour into the room. It illuminates everything. He looks around and sees rays of light glowing on his desk. Several novels rest on a shelf above it. The characters inside start calling out to him. They whisper, cry and scream. An inkwell and pen sit on the desk’s surface next to a stack of blank paper, rustling in the breeze, as if alive.
He sits at the desk and picks up the pen, fearless.