Edgar woke on a dark morning five years later with the old woman sitting on his chest again, pressing the life out of him. She came for him at dawn now, not just a horrid face growing on his mother’s body, but the full hag. She dug her knees into his rib cage, her filthy hands gripped him and her wrinkled face was inches from his. He couldn’t breathe and felt like he was dying, but he struggled against her and, slowly, she began to fade.
He sat up, trembling.
“I mustn’t tell father,” he said out loud. “He will worry. A nine-year-old boy is far too old for such things. And besides, who would believe it?”
During the night he had heard his father’s voice again, reading one of those frightening stories, the tale echoing through his room. Nightmares always came later, and then the hag. She seemed so real.
“I shan’t tell him that I can hear him. He will stop and he enjoys it. The old woman won’t kill me.” But he wasn’t sure.
He pulled on his clothes and walked out into the hallway. He could hear Allen’s familiar whistle in the kitchen far away and moved toward it with a smile, ready for whatever the squire had found for them to eat. It wouldn’t be much but they would have it together. It was earlier than Edgar usually rose, so his father would be surprised to see him. He paused as he neared the bare sitting room: two chairs were next to the squire’s desk in there, where they often sat while working on Edgar’s studies. Much of it was reading. They read everything in their big library, except the books on the top shelf. There wasn’t enough money for formal schooling. “Not yet,” his father said almost every day. “But sometime … soon.”
Edgar noticed something on the desk that usually wasn’t there. The journal. And the lock was undone! His father obviously intended to come back to it.
“What if I opened it and looked inside, just the first page?”
He walked into the sitting room, treading quietly, feeling guilty. His father’s whistling had stopped, but he was two rooms away. The squire wouldn’t suspect that his son was awake yet.
Just the first page.
Edgar moved to the desk and stood over the journal for a while. He reached for it.
But as he did, he heard the creak of a bad floorboard. He turned and saw his father just outside the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
But Edgar’s hand was on the journal.
Allen’s face grew pale. “I have told you that its contents are not for you to view, my boy.”
“Yes, father.”
“And you disobeyed me.”
There was a hard hickory cane in the room, the one the boy’s grandfather had used for disciplining his father long ago. It leaned against the doorframe gathering cobwebs. Squire Brim didn’t believe in its use. His eyes went to it now. So did Edgar’s and his heart rate accelerated.
But then Allen smiled at him. He moved to the desk and pressed the lock closed. “I shall share it with you when you are older … soon.”
They traveled to London the next day to the British Museum Library. The Thornes were away on a trip to Germany, so Edgar had to wait in the cold stone atrium, his thin bottom on a hard marble bench, two pleasant children’s novels in hand. When his father finally emerged from the Reading Room, his face was tense.
“Is there something the matter, father?” asked Edgar.
“Not a thing, my boy,” he smiled. But his words were forced.
After they left, Edgar learned the reason for his father’s nerves. Allen didn’t pass by the Royal Lyceum this time. He took the boy in.
“I am preparing to write a different sort of story,” he told his son as they rushed through the theater’s towering front doors. “I feel I must. It is a frightening tale with a sort of devil in it and it explores human fear. I need to prepare myself, and there is no better way than to see the production that is at the Lyceum now.”
They were almost late. Inside, Edgar stared wide-eyed at the red lobby with its giant golden chandelier. The room was beginning to clear. Edgar, of course, couldn’t go all the way into the auditorium. He was to wait, again, in the lobby on a bench, a softer one this time, plush and comfortable. His father spoke to a coat-check girl, handing her a coin to keep an eye on his son, and then said a few reassuring words to Edgar before he turned to go. As he did, someone came through the entrance, well behind the crowd. The man neared them, tall and thin, dressed in a long black coat and a black bowler hat that was pulled down over his forehead, his big, aquiline nose sticking out like a parrot’s beak. Edgar noticed how the man stopped when he saw his father, and then looked back and forth, examining both of them. Something about him made Edgar shiver.
But Allen didn’t notice. He strode across the thick carpet toward the inner doors, dressed in the worn-out evening clothes he had put on in the water closet at the museum, the tall man not far behind him. The theater’s burly, red-haired manager was standing in the doorway eyeing the lagging patrons. Allen swept by him and entered the auditorium. Instantly, he was in another world. It belonged to the man whose image had loomed above the theater five years ago, the one and only Henry Irving.
Allen’s knees were quaking as an immaculately dressed usher walked him up to his seat at the very back of the last section of the upper balcony, nearly two thousand packed seats below him. He had never seen Irving in the flesh before but he, of course, knew all about the great actor. One had to be living under a rock on the Scottish moors not to be aware of exactly what he looked like, things he had said and the roles he had played. It was said that his face, when seen in person, was like porcelain; his eyes like burning coals; his black hair, long and parted down the center and graying a little now, like the feathers of a strange tall bird. Tonight, he would play Satan in the flesh.
London had never seen a production like this. It was huge and lush, and it mesmerized everyone who saw it. Its special effects were astonishing and Irving was spellbinding. Even his leading lady, the great and gorgeous Ellen Terry, rumored to be his lover offstage, seemed unimportant beside him upon the boards. It was difficult to put a finger on just what Irving did to people. He pronounced words in strange ways, dragged his leg as he performed, didn’t simply stand facing the audience and declaim like other actors. He became his characters. No one could take their eyes from him.
There was always music during an Irving production, all the way through. The orchestra was playing the overture now, the strings rising in crescendos, building the excitement. A buzz ran through the audience, growing with the music.
And then the curtain rose.
For a while people held their breath, waiting for him to appear. Soon, a creature materialized out of a mist, red from head to foot. It slithered as it moved. Then it rose up and began to dominate scene after scene, forcing the hero to sign a pact in blood, giving him everything he craved, summoning witches. Allen was glad that Edgar was safe in the lobby, for the great artist took him places he would not want his child to go. He believed in evil that night. He believed he should live only for himself, that wealth and power were all that were important, that women were playthings for his pleasure, that powerful spirits existed that could help him fight God. He believed in the devil.
The play seemed to go by in a moment.
Afterward, Allen staggered out of the auditorium in a stupor, his face pale. His chest hurt. He had been so entranced during the action that he had felt as though he had been dragged down from the balcony to the stage and thrown upon the boards before Irving, where he watched him in the lurid stage lights, that made-up face lit up, those black eyes penetrating his, all the goodness inside him sucked away.
As he struggled toward Edgar in the lobby, he saw the manager again. Another patron whispered his name: Bram Stoker. The stolid Irishman looked dazed and glassy-eyed. Irving, thought Allen, had infected Stoker too. How could he still be that way after so many performances?
The truth is unbearable, Allen told himself, I dare not write it. He took his son’s arm. The boy was stunned and silent, having sat there in wonder for hours as strange sounds came from inside the auditorium’s doors, as though a demon were on the loose. Allen led Edgar out under the street lamps and they moved in silence through the remnants of the crowd. The squire felt absolutely exhausted and could barely walk. He got into his carriage like a dead man. The boy was staring at him, peering right into him. Allen knew something then that terrified him. Edgar could see and feel his agony.
As they drove home through the countryside, the squire tried to tell happy stories. All he could manage were old tales from the boy’s earlier years. But he was careful even with them. He took the big bad wolf out of the Three Little Pigs, the witch from Hansel and Gretel and the three ugly sisters from Cinderella. He made Edgar laugh once or twice. But the stories were flat. It took so much effort to sanitize them. And Allen remained tired, very tired. When they arrived home, he was barely able to make it to his bedroom.
When Edgar woke the next morning, he noticed the silence in Raven House. Had his father gone out without waking him? Edgar searched for him in the kitchen. It was empty, with no evidence of breakfast on the table. He went into the sitting room; also empty, the mysterious journal nowhere in sight. Then he climbed the stairs to his parents’ bedroom. He rarely saw his father there now, though he knew he always slept on one side of the bed, as if keeping the other free for his wife’s return.
“Father?”
Allen Brim was lying absolutely still. Edgar approached the bed. The fear that engulfed him when he saw the rigid white face was unlike any he had ever experienced, though fear often dominated his mind. He sat down beside his father on the big bed and stayed there for hours, shaking, the tears pouring down his face. The hag sat in a chair nearby, smiling at him.
“What shall I do?” he whispered. “What shall I do?”
Finally, he rose and left Raven House and walked many miles through the countryside until he found a doctor who would return with him. It was the strangest thing, thought the physician: a perfectly healthy man, not yet forty, dead in his bed of a heart attack, his eyes wide open.