The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  He had a difficult time swallowing his mouthful of pie, but he nodded his head with what he hoped was agreeable determination.

  “There exist in London what have come to be called ‘the police,’” she continued. “You seem already to be aware of that fact. I distinctly recall your mentioning only five minutes ago that at least one of them was there on the grounds of the Club not long after the blast, before you made your foray into the tunnel. Did it occur to you that they might take some interest in the very thing that was interesting you at that moment?”

  “I… It seemed to me that…”

  “It seems to me that I don’t want a dead husband, Langdon, and your children don’t want a dead father. Can you grasp that? I believe that the cat has sufficient genius to catch my meaning. Easier than catching a mouse, I should think. It’s not your business to bring anarchists and book thieves to justice in any event. I honor you for your bravery and sacrifice, you know that, but… For God’s sake, Langdon!”

  “Of course,” St. Ives said. “Of course. Quite right.” He reached for his glass and was sorry to find it empty. It came to him abruptly that she was more distraught than he had imagined – more distraught than angry. He wondered whether she was on the verge of tears, something that was blessedly rare, but far worse than anger when it happened. He felt hollow and wretched. She glared at him now, shaking her head as if confounded by his antics. In that moment he knew that it was as good as done. She would let him down easily after all.

  Alice picked up the pitcher of ale and filled his glass. “Drink it,” she said. “You’ll sleep better. You look done up.”

  “In a moment, Alice. Have a look at these.” He reached into his coat pockets and began to haul out chunks of begonia rhizome. There hadn’t been an opportunity earlier, but now that the storm had begun to clear, the promise of exotic begonias might chase it over the horizon. “I haven’t any idea what species. Shorter had a recent lot from Brazil, and this could easily be them, or pieces of them, rather.” He drew more from his trouser pockets, and then opened his portmanteau, which sat nearby on the floor, and picked several more from among his things. “They rained down over the lawn when…” Abruptly he pictured Shorter lying dead on the grass, and the enthusiasm went out of him.

  “They’ll abide here quite well until tomorrow morning,” she told him, arranging them alongside the sink. “You, however, will do better in bed. I’m more than a little tired of it being empty.”

  THREE

  THE AYLESFORD SKULL

  Dr. Narbondo watched as the woman, Mary Eastman by name, crossed the green and stepped over the stile into the Aylesford churchyard. Even in the moonlight he could see that there was an element of angry pride in her walk, nothing furtive or fearful, as if she had some hard words for him and was anxious to throw them into his face after all these years. “Careful you don’t take a fall,” he muttered, but at the same time he was aware that she still had a certain beauty, her hair still red, as he remembered it. He stepped clear of the shadow of the tomb behind him and stood at the edge of the open grave with its small headstone.

  She stood staring at him, the grave standing between them now. “Of course,” she said. “I knew it would be you. I prayed that you were dead, but my prayers clearly went unanswered. I wanted to be certain.”

  “Prayer is indeed uncertain, Mary. Flesh and blood are certain enough.” He affected a smile. The night was warm, the air clear and dry. In the grave lay a broken coffin and a scattering of bones, the skull conspicuously missing. A high mound of soil lay heaped at the head of the grave, burying the foot of the headstone. Hidden behind the nearby tomb lay the body of the sexton, his coat soaked in blood. He had taken Narbondo’s money happily enough, and had been richer for the space of some few seconds. Until Narbondo had made up his mind, he wouldn’t let Mary see the dead sexton or the skull that he had taken from the grave.

  “The years haven’t been kind to you,” she said bitterly, choosing to look into his face rather than into the grave. “You’ve grown a hump, which is as it should be. It’s the mark of Cain, sure as I’m standing here.”

  “The years are never kind,” he said. “But in any event I have no interest in kindness. As for the hump, I’m disappointed that you would cast such stones. That was never your way, Mary.”

  “My way? What do you know of my ways, then or now? I deny that you know me.”

  “And yet you knew that it was I when you received the note. Surely you did. Edward’s ghost is restless, but it hasn’t taken to writing missives. And yet despite your knowledge you came freely. That gives me a degree of hope.” He kept his voice tempered. There would be no hint of pleading or desire – quite the opposite. Just an even-handed statement of the facts, such as they had undeniably come to be over the long years.

  Abruptly she began to weep, the moonlight shining on her face. A breeze stirred the leaves in a nearby willow. Somewhere in the village a dog barked and then fell silent, and there was the low sound of a horse’s whinny nearby and its hoof scuffing against loose stones. She looked up at the scattering of stars, as if searching for solace. He found the gesture tiresome.

  “I thought that you would profit from seeing my half-brother’s condition,” he said to her, looking about to ascertain that they were indeed alone. “I won’t say ‘brother,’ for he was never more than half alive to me. The flesh is gone from the bones now, and the skull, the salient part of his skeleton, is missing, as you can see for yourself. He was half a brother and half a man – half a boy, to be more precise – and in death he remains so. Your kindness to him was laudable, no doubt, but misconceived. Sentimentality pays a very small dividend.”

  She stared at him now with a loathing that was clearly written in her features. “What do you want?” she asked. “It’s late, and I’m weary of hearing your voice.”

  “You ask a direct question. Excellent,” he said. “I have a simple proposition. I want your hand in marriage. You’re a spinster, with no prospects other than that doom that awaits us all, some of us sooner than others.” He gestured at the grave by way of explanation. “I can offer you wealth and freedom from want. I won’t press my affections upon you, however. In short, I desire what was rightfully mine thirty years ago when you were a girl of fifteen. Think carefully before you deny me.”

  “Rightfully yours? Do you say so? You hanged your own brother from a tree branch, leering at him as he swung there choking. It’s my undying shame that I was too cowardly to come forward, although I still can, and you know that. You have no right to ask anything of anyone but forgiveness, which I can assure you you’ll never find on Earth. Even your own mother despises you. I’ve been told that you’ve changed your name. No doubt you despise yourself.”

  “I have the right to do as I please, Mary, including abandoning a name that I had grown to loathe. And the truth is, as we both know, Edward would have hanged himself eventually, or some such thing, if I hadn’t done him the kindness. He was a sniveling little toad. As for your not coming forward when you might have, that was simply good sense. Surely you recall our bargain, and so you know that your silence has so far gained you thirty years of life. Now I’m offering you that same bargain again, except that the life that I would grant you is considerably more handsome than the life you enjoy. You’re a serving wench, or so I’m told, in my own mother’s employ. Or is it a mere charwoman? It amounts to charity in either event. I tell you plainly that you might have servants of your own, if that’s what you desire.”

  She stared at him as if he were insane. “I’d sooner die,” she said.

  He nodded, momentarily silent, and then said, “You’ve always been a woman who spoke plainly, Mary, when you chose to speak. One thing, though, before you take your leave…”

  He turned and drew out his murdered brother’s skull from where it sat atop the wall of the tomb behind him, holding it out to her as if it were an offering. She stared at it in horror, recoiling from it. Unlike the dry bones in the grave, the sku
ll had a mocking semblance of life: the hollows of the eyes were set with illuminated silver orbs, the mouth agape, the skull itself trepanned, the opening fitted with a clockwork mechanism beneath a crystal shell. It sat on a polished wooden base, like a trophy.

  “Your paramour has been well-treated, as you can see,” he said. “In life he accounted for nothing, but in death, thanks to the skills of his own loathsome father, he has ascended to something very like the plain of glory.”

  Narbondo’s interest was drawn to a movement beneath a heavy branch of the willow, a shifting glow like misty candlelight on the fine curtain of leaves. He peered at it, turning his head slightly to the side to see it more clearly. He returned the skull to its resting place, and then nodded for Mary’s benefit at the figure that was slowly taking shape in the light that hovered within the wavering shadows. “The ghost walks,” he whispered.

  The semblance of a boy, Narbondo’s murdered brother, paced silently toward them, his hand outstretched, the animated branches of the willow visible through his transparent body. He seemed to see Mary standing before him, and she put her hand to her mouth in happy surprise. The ghost flickered in the moonlight, winking away and then reappearing beneath the branch as before, walking toward them again over the same ground, reaching out as if there were something that he wanted – to touch Mary’s hand, perhaps. Again he flickered away, and again he reappeared and set out. His mouth worked, as if he were trying to find words that had been choked out of him thirty years ago.

  Mary started toward the ghost, sobbing aloud now, putting out her arms as if to embrace it. In that moment Narbondo sprang across the open grave like an ape, his black cloak flying behind him, a knife glinting in the hand that had held the skull only moments before. She heard him alight, and she spun around, looking in horror at the knife, reaching upward to stop the hand that swept toward her, but too late. The force of the blow knocked her over backward, blood spraying from her lacerated neck, welling out of her voiceless throat where she lay now on the ground beside the open grave. She tried to push herself up onto her elbows but fell back again and lay still.

  Narbondo saw that there was a rose-shaped spattering of her blood on the headstone, shining crimson in the moonlight, which struck him as slightly theatrical, although entirely fitting. It would bloom there considerably longer than would a living rose, especially after the summer sun had baked it into the stone.

  FOUR

  THE WEIR

  With two hours remaining before the tidal surge, the river below Aylesford was shallow, slow moving, and deserted. The day was warm and the breeze had dropped, so that the silent afternoon had a brooding and timeless air, the shadows deep and still along the wooded shore. Alice St. Ives, wearing men’s trousers and India rubber wading boots over her shoes, moved farther into the river, throwing her fishing line into the deep waters behind the weir, jigging it hard, feeling it jerk once and then release. Something was interested in it.

  She was fishing her own lure, tied up out of peacock feathers, silver wire, and a strip of green wool with a barbless treble hook. She had lost two big pike in the last twenty minutes, although it might have been the same pike twice. Both of them had thrown the hook, which was frustrating, but she was anxious not to do any damage to the fish’s lips with a barbed hook, since her goal was taxidermy and not dinner. There was nothing wrong with pike stuffed with ground veal and tiny pearl onions out of the garden, though, and she might have Mrs. Langley roast one for the family after all if she caught nothing larger than the single fish that lay now in her creel.

  She found that she was distracted by the silence, and her gaze was drawn again to the forest, her mind running on the unpleasant idea that someone was hidden among the trees, watching her. It was a foolish apprehension. She had actually seen nothing, and nothing stirred now in the dead air. The only sound was the tiny chatter made by small stones in the moving water that flowed out of the narrow passage in the weir. She looked back downriver at her creel – an oversized salmon basket, big enough to hold a pike. It was apparently still lodged securely among the stones on the river bottom.

  She’d had to kill the pike when she’d caught it half an hour ago. Despite the damage from the gaff, the ten-pound fish was ferocious enough to tear the creel apart if it were given a chance. She had used a pike-gag to hold its mouth open in order to work the hook out of the tongue, but the creature had twisted in her grip, dislodged the gag, and lacerated her hand with its teeth. Now the fish rested in wet moss, which, along with the cool river water, would keep it fresh. She wanted a larger fish if she could catch one, for the sake of the head, which she intended to mount on a plaque and give to her husband. There was a particular giant living in the weir, which she’d had on her line more than once. Langdon had volunteered to persuade it to the surface with a nitroglycerin bomb, but Alice was a proponent of fairness, especially when it came to fishing.

  Their friend Tubby Frobisher had brought the greenheart wood for her fishing rod back from an expedition to South America. It looked like English walnut, but was light and flexible, the ten-foot-long rod weighing only a couple of pounds despite the heavy fittings. It was too short for salmon or trout fishing, but perfect for the kind of coarse fishing that was Alice’s passion. She had caught a heavy-bodied carp with the pole in the pond on their own property – an enormous thing with scales the size of twopenny pieces, black with burnished gold slashes on the side and a golden underbelly, quite the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Unfortunately the fixative that St. Ives had developed had failed to harden the skin, and in the end the carp was ruined, which seemed an almost criminal offense to her. She would try his newly reconstituted fixative on the pike, if she managed to land him.

  She threw out the line again, but in the moment of silence that followed she heard a snapping and stirring of underbrush in the trees. She looked sharply in the direction of the sound, holding her breath and making an effort to sort out the shadows and the mottled sunlight. A man was standing there – she saw his figure clearly now – some fifty feet into the wood among the oak and chestnut trees. He was tall and thin and was standing perfectly still, his green shirt illuminated by a ray of sunlight. Certainly he knew he could be seen.

  She resisted the urge to wade to the opposite bank, retrieve her creel, and walk back downriver to the farm. She and her husband had only lived on the place for a couple of months, having inherited it from her Aunt Agatha Walton, but Alice had already come to consider this quiet stretch of the Medway her own, and she was damned if she were going to flee from a shadow. She could acquaint the man with the hook of her gaff, if it came to it. A gaffed wrist or neck would be a most unpleasant thing.

  She realized now that the figure had disappeared, but she was still uneasy. She would far rather know where he was than not know. Her rod dipped, and there was a tentative jerk on the lure. Nothing. The pike was teasing her. She reminded herself that there was a path in the wood. It was no crime for people to use the path on their way to and from the village of Aylesford. One could walk all the way to Maidstone that way more quickly than along the road. That no doubt accounted for the man she had just seen. The sight of a woman dressed as Alice was dressed and fishing the Medway for pike might easily strike a foot traveler as amusing or curious. In any event, clearly he had moved on.

  Her line jerked heavily now and instantly began to run through the eye on the float, taking her by surprise. The big pike exploded out of the lumber of driftwood along the shore. She could see it swim in the clear water, angling fast toward the top of the weir, perfectly enormous. She stopped the line from spinning out of the reel and set the hook hard, fixing the rubber butt of the rod into the leather depression in the belt below her waist, gripping the cork handle tightly and watching the tip bow and bend as the pike raced upriver toward her again, weaving through the water, then turning and heading back. She reeled in the line, heaving the rod back against the considerable weight of the fish, putting her back into it. The sun glint
ed on the surface of the weir, nearly blinding her despite her blue-tinted goggles as she worked her way backwards toward shore.

  She heard a sharp cry from behind her, and she glanced into the trees but still saw nothing. It had been a man’s voice, pained and high, as if he had been knocked on the head. She felt the pike turn abruptly, pulling heavily on the pole, which slipped out of its anchorage and twisted in her hands before the big fish yanked it entirely out of her grasp with a force that astonished her. The pole rocketed away across the weir. Alice staggered forward, stepping into a deep hole so that the river ran freely into her waders, which were leaden with the weight of the water in a matter of moments. She slogged to shore, climbed heavily up the bank, removed the boots, and drained them. She could see the pole right enough from her higher vantage point, its cork handle visible in the sunlight, its tip borne down by the pike, which was a monstrous thing, surely forty pounds if it were an ounce, taking into account the magnification of the water.

  The fish disappeared from view, darting into the depths among the waterweeds and stones. Suddenly the pole shot forward, jammed into the stones, and the line snapped, the tip of the pole ascending slowly toward the surface, the base held down by the metal reel. She slipped her waders back on and went in again to fetch it, hooking it with the gaff in order to draw it to her. The peacock feather lure, the best she had ever tied, was no doubt lost forever.

  At least she had the fish in the creel, she thought, removing her wading boots again and setting out along the bank. But the fish in the creel was small compared to the sea monster from the weir – definitely something to be eaten rather than hung on the wall. She bent over to pick up the creel, but stopped, her hand hovering over the handle. She looked at it curiously, fear rising within her again. The basket was still firmly set among the stones on the river bottom, but one of the stones that should have anchored its handle had been pushed aside and lay now a foot away. She was certain of it. The stone was boxy, some dark stone. There it lay, where she hadn’t put it. Someone else had put it there. The creel sat in shallower water, too. The pike lay inside the creel as ever, although the moss had been pushed aside and then rearranged, leaving the top half of the fish uncovered and dry.