A few years later, in the bleakest part of winter, Allen Brim ascended Raven House’s creaking wooden stairs with a smile emerging on his lips. His breath puffed in clouds in front of him and he wrapped his arms close to his frayed coat. Young Edgar was such a sensitive child. Even at age four, it took him forever to settle in his bed. Every night when Allen tiptoed up to his own room, the boy was still fussing. But this evening he seemed to have drifted off!
“It is time,” said the squire out loud.
He trembled with excitement. He had been waiting for this for a long time. He wouldn’t even think about the empty bed with its two pillows arranged there, just as they always had been when his wife was alive. He would walk past it to the ceiling-high bookcase that ran along every wall. He needed to stand on boxes to reach the top shelf. Books were the only thing he spent his traces of money on these days; that, and a yearly trip to the theater. There was little left for anything else.
Squire Brim was planning to let himself go. Tonight, he would read out loud from one of the stories up there in those lurid covers, exclaiming and gesticulating, wrapped up in its essence. That was the only way to come to grips with a literary work of art. At night in this grim house, these dark tales would arise. He hadn’t been able to do this for four years, but tonight, with the boy finally appearing to be deeply asleep, he could unleash them. He knew the words would resonate in the stillness of the room while the blackness glowered through the windows! He tried not to run to the shelves. He wished he had the courage to write such vivid tales, such dark truths.
But which would he choose? He climbed onto his two wooden boxes and moved his shaking fingers along the spines. How about the Russian folktale that told the feats of history’s most fearsome witch, Baba Yaga? He imagined that story scaring the life out of him! Or what about John Polidori’s The Vampyre? Was there ever such a villain as the beast in those pages? Tomorrow, he would go to the village bookshop and purchase The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the new novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, just published last week. It was said to be terrifying, the monster so authentic he seemed right next to you. If all went well, Allen could perform it next!
He searched farther along the top shelf. And there it was: the only story for this night. He took it into his hands and descended to the floor. Dare he? He gave it one last thought and reassured himself. His little boy was far away in dreamland, and the floor between them was thick. “Frankenstein,” said Allen in a cold clear voice, “by Mary Shelley.” He opened the novel:
With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.… His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
The story came down through that heat pipe and found its way to Edgar Brim as he lay in his bed half-asleep. It electrified his brain.
The next day they took their carriage, a little hansom drawn by an old horse, down to London. They shared the threadbare blanket. The child snuggled up to his father, and Allen allowed it. He wasn’t one for making a man out of a boy before his time.
“You seem tired, my son. Did you not sleep?”
“I slept well, father.”
“What shall we do about those circles under your eyes?”
“Hereditary,” said the little voice.
Allen Brim smiled, not just because of Edgar’s extraordinary vocabulary, but because the observation was accurate. Allen’s own eyes were not exactly sparkling advertisements for a good night’s sleep.
“Edgar, you may not have much in life, but you will be smart and caring, you will speak well and be well read. There is no question about it.” The boy must learn to grapple with fear too, thought Allen. The day would come, Squire Brim vowed, when he would introduce his son to the dark literature.
They moved along gravel roads through the countryside, south toward the great city. Edgar loved to watch the locomotive trains whistle past at unearthly speeds, and the one that thundered by today was faster than any before, its head hissing steam and its tail like a gigantic snake’s. Edgar wondered what it would be like to ride in one. There seemed to be many things to learn in life, many secrets. It made him think of something mysterious the squire often did.
“What do you write in your journal, father?” he said suddenly.
Allen was taken aback. He kept the journal locked.
“Oh, nothing, my good fellow.”
“Nothing, sir? It can’t be nothing, for there are words in it. I have seen you putting them there.”
When Squire Brim wasn’t writing novels, he liked to record his thoughts. And one subject dominated his journal’s pages. His interest in it began with an idea a wise man had offered him long ago.
“I have a theory about stories,” the gentleman had whispered, almost as if his words should not be spread about, “especially in sensation novels and horror tales with demons and dark characters.” He surveyed the room from behind his desk and lowered his voice even more. And what he proceeded to say had stayed with Allen Brim to this day. He could remember every word.
“Father?”
Allen had been gazing off into the distance. Now he turned back to his son and smiled.
“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say I write exactly nothing in my journal, Edgar, but it is nothing with which to concern yourself.”
These trips into London were monthly journeys. Little Edgar found the city disturbing—horses and carriages, rattling omnibuses, pungent smells and absolute rivers of people moving at top speed. Squire Brim’s destination, however, was a quiet place—the world’s greatest library at the British Museum where, he told his son, he researched the backgrounds for his novels. But he always dropped Edgar at a tall, narrow home in wealthy Mayfair beforehand. Allen Brim would walk his young son up to the entrance and before he even had time to grasp the bronze knocker, the door would be flung open and a smiling woman would pull Edgar into her arms.
Mrs. Annabel Thorne had been Virginia Brim’s dearest friend and had loved her from the moment they met, through the days before the Brims’ fortunes had slid, right up until Virginia’s death. Allen’s unusual American wife—the daughter of actors, of all things, from Baltimore, Maryland—had been shunned by London society, but Annabel would have none of it. “Such spirit!” she told others, who often soured when she said so. Now the childless Mrs. Thorne loved Virginia’s son with the same devotion.
These were the only times Edgar ever felt the embrace of a woman. Perhaps his mother had clasped him to her the day he was born, the day she had died, he didn’t know. Mrs. Thorne’s hugs always made him feel warm inside, and he loved to sit with her at tea in front of the drawing room’s big fireplace, tasting raspberry scones and sweets, the sorts of things he never had at home.
But there was a mystery in that house, a deep, dark one. Mr. Thorne never appeared. He inhabited a space upstairs at the top of the house, all the way up on the fifth floor, and never came down when the boy was about, and Annabel said nothing of him. Edgar wondered what he was doing up there.
Allen reappeared late that night, lit up from his researches and the play he had attended. Edgar questioned him closely as they walked down the white stone steps of Thorne House past the black wrought iron fence toward their old carriage.
“What was it like?”
“What, my boy, the British Museum Library or the theater?”
“The former first, father, then the latter.”
Allen hesitated. Though he said he sought information for his books at the library, he rarely did. He often searched for something else, something he dared not tell Edgar. But he hated to lie to his son.
“Well,” he said, “the library is an enormous, round, dim room, as quiet as a cathedral, with walls of books that ring it from floor to ceiling and sliding ladders that allow you to reach them. You hear only the muffled sounds of people moving dusty chronicles and other echoes as you sit at your wooden desk with your little lamp. It is marvelous!”
Edgar could see it as his father spoke. He imagined the books he would find there. Not one like the story his father read last night, which was inhabited by a monster and had given him a terrible nightmare, but calmer tales like others he was now being allowed to hear, with colorful characters and happy endings. They took him to intriguing worlds.
“You are forbidden to make any noise. You must imagine the things you are reading.”
Edgar loved that. He hoped there would always be places like this magical library. Would they still be there when he grew up?
“I am a transgressor, though.”
“A what, father?”
“Well, I sometimes make a little noise.”
For some reason, they both laughed at that.
“I find particular things in books that make me say, ‘Ah!’ Today I did so and it brought a rebuke from a gentleman nearby.”
Allen laughed again, but Edgar didn’t.
“What things, father?”
This appeared to make the elder Brim uncomfortable. The carriage was a good distance down the street, and they walked a few more strides along the footpath before he answered.
“Oh, nothing, really.”
“If I were in that library with you,” said Edgar, “and I heard you say, ‘Ah!’ I would whisper something to you.”
“And what would that be?”
“What, exactly, are you reading, father?” whispered Edgar.
“Oh, nothing,” said Brim. He realized he had said it again. “I am sorry, my boy.” He wondered how much he should tell his son. “It was an obscure account of a day in the life of an author named Mary Shelley. In the book, she saw something frightening in the woods in Switzerland near a renowned scientist’s laboratory.”
“Something frightening?”
“Yes, but it was a long while past, my lad, and Mrs. Shelley has been dead for some time. Her work is most certainly not for children. You won’t even know of her.”
But of course Edgar did know. His heart started to pound when he heard the name that had traveled down the pipe to his ears the previous night.
They reached the carriage. Allen noticed the anxiety on the boy’s face as he reached down to lift him into his seat. “Perhaps we should speak of something else. You asked about the theater?”
“Yes, father, might I attend the play next time?”
“Come now, Edgar, it wouldn’t be right. The theater is not for individuals of your age.”
“When can I come?”
Allen got into the carriage. “Perhaps in a few years.”
“Then tell me the story of the play you saw tonight.”
“I traveled east on Piccadilly after I dropped you here, my boy,” he said, as he stared out into the fog that had settled over Mayfair, “then down Bow Street into the West End, past the Royal Opera House. Bow became Wellington Street and the Royal Lyceum Theatre appeared, its pillars rising on the pale exterior, gaslights illuminating the entrance so it became some sort of palace, a palace of the imagination. The roadway was teeming with gleaming carriages. There were shimmering dresses and famous faces.”
“Was that the theater you attended?”
“No, my boy.” He had seen a silly musical at the Gaiety and could barely recall the story.
“Then why are you telling me this?”
“I like to imagine the plays that happen at the Lyceum.”
“So, why do you not see them?”
“I am not sure I am up to it. The man who performs on that stage has a talent given to him as much by the devil as God.” He paused. “There was a giant drawing of him on a banner above the main doors.”
Allen remembered the face as if he were seeing it coming toward them out of the London fog, the skin painted with dark makeup, looming there like a monster.