As Edgar enters the London, he wonders why he is having anything to do with Sir Andrew Lawrence, but despite his concerns, he reminds himself that the chairman offered to help them, and he has resources that might save them from destruction. It is a tantalizing offer he knows he should be considering. Edgar climbs the flights of stairs to Lawrence’s office, the precarious jar of blood still in hand, though held under his coat, and when he reaches the top floor, sees the door wide open way down at the end of the hall. That is not surprising since the chairman likes literally to have an open-door policy. He is available to everyone in the hospital at any time, whether doctors, nurses or even patients. Edgar senses something different this time though. He can see right through the doorway and into the room. Lawrence’s big gleaming wooden desk is straight ahead and behind it one of his nearly floor-to-ceiling windows. The midday sun shines in and lights up the office with a sort of heavenly glow. There is no one, however, in Lawrence’s chair.
“He is always here at this time,” says Edgar. “He must be somewhere in the room.” He moves quickly down the hall and enters, but there is not a soul in the office. Edgar wonders what to do with his jar. He does not want to give it to anyone other than Lawrence. What it is and what he wants done with it would be difficult to explain. He needs the chairman’s clear authority—his request to his best doctors to have something tested without any questions asked.
Ignoring the doubts he has about this puzzling man, Edgar dips a pen in ink and writes him a message on the stationery he finds on the desk, placing the jar on top of it when he is done, but when he turns to leave, he hears someone coming down the hallway behind him. His senses are acute and he picks up the soft gait and knows who it is. He slips the jar and the paper into a drawer and turns.
“Dr. Berenice.”
“Edgar,” she says with a lovely smile, her long black hair framing that aging but exotic face. It occurs to Edgar that she is like a raven, a large, beautiful olive-skinned raven, striking, intelligent and dangerous. She glides into the room, moving like a ballerina or a ghost, shoulders back, chest out, chin up and focused on her prey. Hilda Berenice, navigator of the mind. “What are you doing here?” she asks.
“Well…I…I came to see Sir Andrew but it is obvious that he is out. Might you know where he is? Is it not rare for him to be away from his desk at this hour?”
“I suppose, yes. I believe he had an emergency.”
“Then why are you up here?” He says it quickly, without thinking. It takes her a while to respond.
“Yes, why indeed, I get so used to coming to see him that I forgot that I’d heard he had left the building.”
“Do you know the nature of the emergency?”
“I try not to pry. Neither should you.”
Edgar nods and slips past her, their shoulders almost touching as he tries to evade her. He gets nearly halfway down the hall before he hears her call out.
“Edgar?”
He stops and considers running, but turns back to her. Do not trust her either, he hears his father say. She seems to be floating toward him.
“How are you today?” she asks.
“Fine, just fine.”
“No more devil in pursuit?”
“A temporary malaise.”
“Back to that, are we?”
“I am working my way through my difficulties.”
“Well,” she coos, “stay at it.”
It sounds like a command.
She does not follow him down the stairs and he imagines her returning to Lawrence’s room, looking through his desk and finding the jar of blood. Then he remembers the word she used in reference to him. Paranoid. He knows what that is. Used by a mind doctor, it has a clinical meaning.
Edgar walks through every hallway as he makes his way down to the ground floor, but there is no sign of Sir Andrew Lawrence. He stops by the matron at her high imposing desk near the main entrance and asks after him. She glares at this impudent youth.
“It is not your business to know the whereabouts of the most esteemed man in this institution.”
“I am his assistant.”
She takes in a long breath. “I received a note saying that he had left for the day but—”
“Is that not unusual?”
“…I did not see him leave the premises.”
Allen Brim is dutifully waiting outside.
“What did he say? Was he acting suspicious?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“Oh dear.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why would he not be in his office at this hour?”
“Why do you keep asking me the questions that are already in my head?”
A puzzled look comes over Allen Brim’s face. “I do not know, son. Perhaps because I am your father, I love you, and we think alike.”
“Well, I appreciate that, but I need more than your love right now.”
Edgar is thinking about the fact that Dr. Berenice told him he must encounter his father and speak with him. Then, there was Allen Brim in flesh and blood, not long after the words had come out of her mouth.
“We will defeat this thing, together. I keep telling you that.”
“I want to see Annabel Thorne, my mother.”
“She is not your mother.”
“She has been for a long while and she loves me, just like you.”
“And yet she has been running about with this insolent Lawrence fellow, a scant month after her husband’s death. She and your mother were best of friends but I can assure you that Virginia would do nothing of that kind. If I had passed from this life and Lawrence were attempting to seduce your mother, your real mother, and I could return to earth to deal with it, I would challenge him to a bloody duel. He and his fancy motorcar!”
“She is unusual, extraordinary. If she wants to enter into a romance with a wealthy, handsome man, then she has every right—”
“But you do not agree with it, do you, Edgar?”
He does not want to answer the question. They have been moving westbound along Whitechapel Road. He picks up the pace.
“I will not enter Thorne House with you, Edgar, but I will come along and wait somewhere down the street.”
As he promised, when they reach the Thornes’ street in Mayfair, Allen stops a good ten houses away and leans against a lamppost.
Edgar makes the familiar trip alone along the footpath feeling better with every stride. Yes, Thorne House is his home, his real home, and Annabel might as well be his real mother. Just the sound of her voice will make him feel safer.
The house looks dark and silent. He creaks open the black-iron gate and rushes up the steps to the front door, but it will not open. He pulls the cord and waits. No one comes. Then he notices the shutters pulled across the windows.
“Shuttered?”
It does not make any sense. In all the years he has lived at Thorne House, he has never once seen the windows boarded up. Even Beasley is not about. Then Edgar wonders about the butler. “Is he part of all of this?” he says quietly into the door. “Is he part of a conspiracy to drive me insane? Did he make up the story of the hag walking down the stairs in Thorne House?” Edgar hammers on the door with his fists.
“Mother!” he cries. No one comes.
He feels a slight tap on his shoulder and whirls around.
“Son, you are shouting. There is no one here.”
“But…but have they abandoned me? Has she abandoned me?”
“I am not sure that is the best way to state it…though it certainly has that appearance. It seems strange that she would unaccountably be away when you need her the most. Not in our interests to speculate though. We do not know exactly what has happened here, and we must not stay and be conspicuous on the street. That isn’t a wise thing when you are being pursued by a powerful enemy, an all-seeing and all-knowing—”
“But what else can I do, Father? Where else can I go? William Shakespeare knows nothing that can help me, the devil-worship room told us nothing, and Andrew Lawrence seems to have vanished! I do not trust Tiger anymore, so I cannot go back to her.” It is difficult for him to believe that he is saying this.
“Well, you could—”
“Lawrence! He has a home in Kensington! He might be there! I think I can find it!” Edgar has suddenly remembered Annabel gushing about Sir Andrew’s fashionable address on one of the richest streets in London, Phillimore Gardens, in a wealthy neighborhood on the western side of Hyde Park. Lawrence had shown it off after walking out with her one evening.
Edgar races south to Piccadilly Street leaving his father far behind. When he turns on that busy street and heads west, he sees several hansom cabs pass and an omnibus rattles by, but he does not want to wait for them and keeps flying on foot until he gets to Hyde Park Corner. He slows a little to cross into the great park and then cuts through it, rushing along Rotten Row, the wide dirt path where fashionable Londoners still sometimes come to ride their horses or carriages and “be seen.” Soon he is sprinting again, perspiring heavily in the still hot late afternoon, his father nowhere in sight behind him, a sinking feeling overtaking him as he thinks more of the disappearance of Lucy and Annabel, wondering if they are dead, anxious to get to Lawrence. He feels the blood pulsing through his body, his feet pounding on the ground, fear chasing him westward. It is as if he is trying to run to the end of the world and right out of it: away to an impossible place that is safe. He reaches the Albert Memorial, passes Kensington Palace and is finally in the posh streets where Sir Andrew Lawrence has his city residence. He turns north onto Phillimore Gardens and slows to a walk, nearly half an hour after he started out, his chest heaving. The houses here make the ones in Mayfair near Thorne House look ordinary. They are mostly white, in fact everything here is pristine and white—houses, doors, stone fences, even the footpaths—it is like walking into heaven. Only the gleaming wrought-iron low fences are black. Annabel had said it was the biggest house on the block and Edgar has no problem finding it, easily the most spectacular of many spectacular residences. He rushes up to it, leaps over the short fence, climbs the few outdoor steps on shaking legs and uses the knocker, black and iron in the shape of the letters A and L, pounding so hard on the door that he can hear the thuds echo in the house. He glances up and down the street and sees nothing suspicious behind him.
The entrance opens in seconds. A large footman stands there glowering at him, dressed in a spotless red-and-cream outfit that looks a century old. His breeches are velvet, his knee-high socks silk.
“Yes?” says the sour man, looking down his nose, barely able to observe the perspiring visitor.
“My name is Edgar Brim. I am a friend of Sir Andrew Lawrence’s. I must see him!” He begins to push past the man but feels a heavy hand on his chest.
“Entrance has not been granted to you, sir.”
“But I must see him.”
“You cannot.”
“But—”
“He is not in.”
“Not in to me…or not in at all?”
“He is, actually…not in at all. He usually comes home for tea, but for some reason, he never appeared. He seems to have been delayed.”
Edgar’s heart pounds.
“Delayed?”
The door closes in his face.
Edgar walks up and down the street for hours and is careful to keep an eye on Lawrence’s residence, but the chairman does not appear. At one point, the footman comes out onto the street and walks up and down it too, as if looking for someone. Finally, as the day begins to grow dark, Edgar gives up.
Where will I go? he asks himself. Back to Tiger Tilley? It seems like the only option. I need to trust her.
“Don’t do it,” says his father, who has been sitting on a wrought-iron fence a few homes south of Lawrence’s for a while now, watching Edgar pace back and forth. “Stay with me, out on the streets. We will find a place to hide. The devil wants you to go back there. Miss Tilley will kill you, Edgar. You know how capable she is.”
“That is insane,” says Edgar under his breath. He starts to move toward Kentish Town, trying to find it in his heart to believe in his oldest friend. His father does not follow him. Edgar could find himself a ride, but he has to think, decide if he go can through with this, so he remains on foot again, walking all the way back along the southern edge of Hyde Park, past the great palace, the monuments, and elegant trees and into Mayfair, everything dreamlike in the dimly lit night. It is a dazed, two-hour nighttime stroll and he tries to make his mind up with every step. Should he spend the night on the streets out in the dark with his father and risk an open-air attack from the devil or keep making his way back to the Lear home on Progress Street and spend it with Tiger, who may mean him harm?
He moves north through Marylebone, up Baker Street, past Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum with its famous Chamber of Horrors advertised in red letters and farther north along the edge of shadowy Regent’s Park and on and on to Kentish Town. He cannot bring himself to turn back. He approaches the Lears’ home, but its appearance shocks him.
He had imagined a single light on, perhaps Tiger staring out a window with the rifle in hand, but it looks dim and empty as if only the ghosts of his dear friends were lingering inside. If the creature has murdered Tiger and is in this house, then it will have the rifle and the cannon at its command too.
Not that Satan would need a weapon.
Then again, perhaps Tiger is in there, lights off, ready to ambush him.
He opens the door quietly and steals into the nearly pitch-black interior. It seems to take him a minute to land each footstep though his head swivels quickly on his neck like a buoy in rough sea. He goes through the living room, the parlor, the little kitchen at the back, and then dares to turn on a light. No one. If Tiger were here, surely she would show herself by now, even if she meant him harm. He heads down the hallway. For some reason, he investigates his room first and then poor Lucy’s. Finding both empty, he approaches Tiger’s place. He puts his ear to the door. It seems deadly quiet. He opens her entrance ever so carefully.
Tiger’s room is deserted, her bedsheets disheveled, her portmanteau open on the floor, her few clothes strewn about in it. If she were going somewhere, why is it still here? He remembers her untidy room at the College on the Moors. Is this normal, he asks himself, or has she rushed out…or been taken? Or did she meet the devil in that room on Thomas Street?
He cannot find the rifle anywhere and assumes that either Tiger has brought it with her or it too has been taken by their enemy. The cannon is gone as well. Again, he thinks that Satan would not need weapons. He wonders if he should leave, go back out onto the streets and find his father, or stay here where perhaps the beast will return to finish its dirty work. He is exhausted and cannot decide what might be best, so he simply remains. He goes to bed expecting to awake to the attack of a creature so horrible that he cannot even imagine its appearance. What form will it take now?
The empty Lear home at night is everything he thought it would be in this situation and he cannot bring himself to fall to sleep. Instead, he gets up and sits in the living room, still fully clothed, nodding off once or twice only to come violently awake, and each time reaching out for a nonexistent weapon. There are creaks and groans in the house and the distant sounds of voices and of people moving on the street outside. Several times, he thinks he sees a shadow at the door. There is absolutely nowhere for him to flee now, and no one to run to. He is alone. Even his father appears to have disappeared.
“They are all dead,” he says in a monotone.
He begins to believe that he is asleep and dreaming all of this. After all, he is an expert at nightmares, this must simply be his worst, or a particular sort of insanity where dreams and reality mingle. It is not possible that all of his friends are suddenly dead or have vanished into the air; it is inconceivable that his dead father has been walking the streets with him. It is madness that the devil is after him. He convinces himself that he is awake but still cannot stop his mind’s downward spiral. He sits next to the imaginary cannon, hallucinating. First, he thinks that the devil is actually in the room and that he cannot move a muscle and it is somehow sucking out his soul. Satan appears before him in black clothes with a hideous, shifting face, taking on different forms, eight feet tall, hag-like, then in red like Henry Irving on stage as Mephistopheles, cloven hooves banging on the wood floor.
Then he realizes that someone is actually knocking on the front door.
“You forgot something,” says a voice behind him, and he turns to see Allen Brim standing in the entrance to the kitchen. He must have slipped in during the night.
The knock comes again. Edgar swings back around toward the front door with its little glass window, thick and translucent, and observes that it is raining outside, but cannot see anyone at the door; some spirit is knocking.
“You forgot something he said,” continues Allen Brim.
“Who?”
“Our little friend.”
“What did he say?”
The pounding grows louder.
“He said that his dark-minded visitor asked him to report to him. Now, how might he do that? How would the little man know where to go?”
“He would need the address.”
“Indeed. Open the door.”
For the first time in his life, Edgar fears his father, whose words sounded ominous, who stands there dry as a bone, fresh from a rain-soaked night, glowering in a dark coat. Is this really Allen Brim? There is no avenue of escape. Edgar must open the door to the invisible creature or face his menacing father.
He advances toward the entrance as it almost bursts inward with the incessant knocking. He peers out through the thick glass and sees nothing there but rain, hard pelting rain in the hot, humid night. He opens the door.
“Master Brim!”
Edgar looks down to see William Shakespeare, short like a child, his big head not even reaching the window. He is drenched and wearing the Zouave clothing. Edgar gasps and steps back. Is this how Jon died?
There is no old woman present, though, and the little man does not lay a finger on him. He is clutching something, something small, to his chest, and he slips past Edgar and into the living room, trailing a river of rain behind him until he reaches the settee and slumps down on it. Shakespeare’s eyes look even wilder than usual, darting around in his head. Edgar approaches him cautiously and Shakespeare extends the small item in his hand toward him. Edgar takes it. It is a calling card, a black one with red lettering, its borders marked with snakes, pyramids, eyes and horns.
“What is this?”
“What…I should…have given you…when you graced me with your anxious presence some eighteen hours, forty-six minutes and twelve seconds ago. Take it, Sancho Panza! You lump of foul deformity!”
There is a name on the card and an address.
“I don’t know this person,” says Edgar.
“It is HIM! The devil-man! He gave me his card, you roast meat for worms!”
William Shakespeare’s eyes look as though someone is shining a bright light through them from the inside of his head. Edgar expects his father to say something but he seems to have left the room, perhaps the house too. Edgar looks at the address on the card again: 13 Thomas Street.
“Is this the devil-worship room?”
“Next…next…next…door!”
Edgar looks at the name again.
“Alexander Morley.”