The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  Finn had wandered through most of the markets in Greater London in his time, and had no particular regard for the organized markets of Covent Garden or Portobello Road. What he wanted tonight was the lowest sort, particularly a stall selling worn out clothing, of which there were many stalls to choose from, one of them lit by a single candle thrust into a cored-out turnip. He considered a shabby frock coat made of threadbare velvet that had once been dark green. It still sported three mother of pearl buttons and had the honor of being hung in the stall on an ill-fashioned tailor’s dummy contrived from sticks. The rest of the apparel that was recognizable as such was laid out on the street. Unrecognizable apparel was heaped up in piles and sold by the bundle.

  Finn looked through the offerings, finding an elbowless shirt with frayed cuffs that would do, and an old balaclava that had perhaps been through a fire. There was a down-at-heel pair of shoes, middling small, but with the toe-ends conveniently lopped off or perhaps chewed off. He found a pair of leather trousers, out at the knees and precariously thin behind, and decided impulsively to buy the old frock coat, which was long enough for decorum if the trousers betrayed him. The coat reduced the overall effect of poverty just slightly, but wasn’t flash enough to put him at particular risk. He bought two other shirts that he could tie up into a four-armed bundle and use to hold the clothes he was wearing. Square Davey would keep them safe for him, although he would have to be quick getting them back to Billingsgate, for the evening was wearing on.

  Finn paid for the goods, the owner of the stall being a boy not much older than he, undersized and underfed, with a wide, pimpled face.

  “Ball crackers, six the penny?” the boy asked him in a low voice, raising his eyebrows. “You won’t find them this cheap till Guy Fawkes, I’ll warrant.”

  “I’ll take a dozen,” Finn said, it seeming like a good idea for half-formed reasons, and left moments later with the clothing and a bag of crackers.

  It was an hour later that he found himself in Spitalfields, carrying the balaclava, slouching up and down the byways and alleys, getting to know the place as best he could in the short time he had. Despite Davey’s warnings about the rookery, Finn found that he had no real fear of the place. It was true that the narrow streets were populated with thieves and prostitutes, but he had lived among down-and-out people before, known some right hard cases, and he knew how to keep to himself. It was also true that the face of the Crumpet dwelt in the back of his mind. Although the knife had come into Finn’s hand quick enough under the bridge that night, when he hadn’t time to think, he had done a lot of thinking since, and he didn’t relish using it in that way again. He was in a practical mood, and preferred running to fighting.

  The fog was intermittent, although settling in now as if it meant to stay. He could scarcely be expected to find a man whom he couldn’t see for the fog, and so he hurried now. He found Smith’s Lodging House, which recommended itself only because of the even more hideous squalor of the lodgings on either side. He considered going in to ask about Sawyer, but he hadn’t the time now, and he went on past instead, studying the building and the street while the night was clear so that he would know it again if there were trouble.

  An alley opened on his right, from which sounded the vicious barking and growling of dogs and the shouts of unseen men. He stepped into it, looking down its length and seeing beyond it a courtyard milling with people. Overhead, he was surprised to see a bridge, built of three-or-four-inch line and boards, held steady with lengths of taut rope that acted as stays, the line affixed to rooftops and the sides of buildings. He couldn’t make out where it led – or where it started, perhaps the same thing – but he liked the look of the bridge, standing high above the reek and turmoil of the street. He had been an acrobat in Duffy’s Circus, and a wirewalker for a time, and there was something in the bridge’s rigging that recalled those years to his mind.

  Then it occurred to him that the bridge would provide a first-rate view of things, if only the fog didn’t spoil that view, as it surely would quite soon. But the fog would hide him, too, if it came to that. It was slightly strange that the bridge stood empty: clearly it wasn’t a well-traveled avenue. The neighborhood was a moldering ruin, but the bridge, curiously, was newish, or appeared so from where he stood. He walked down the alley toward the courtyard, passing an open area where a dozen men surrounded a waist-high enclosure, shouting encouragement at a small, growling dog that was busy killing a rat. Other dogs stood waiting in kennels, and rats in cages. In the courtyard itself, people were strangely subdued, talking in low tones among themselves, many of them looking at an old pump that stood in a pool of filthy water. He wandered in among them as if he were at home, saying, “Four a penny crackers!”

  “Here then,” said a man, who held out a penny. Finn dug four out of his pocket and handed them over, noticing that there was an odd atmosphere in the yard, as if people were waiting for something to happen.

  He noted an old woman sitting on an overturned zinc tub, an enormous black cat lying asleep in her lap. Behind her stood a tall, very thin boy, with a long face and teeth like a horse. His hair, startlingly white, stood up atop his head as if he’d been in a hurricane. He was younger than Finn by a year or two, and he eyed Finn with a look of vast surprise that made Finn look over his own shoulder to see if something were coming up behind him. He saw that there was a lopsided cast to the boy’s eyes that had something of the village idiot in it.

  “Good evening, grandmother,” Finn said to the woman, who nodded at him pleasantly enough. He showed her the coin and said, “I’ve just found a lucky penny. Perhaps it would buy supper for your cat. He reminds me of a friend of mine, old Hodgepodge, who I hope to see again some day.” He petted the cat, who didn’t complain, but raised one eyelid and looked at him without much appreciation.

  “I thank you, young sir,” she said. “I’ll take the penny, since you’ve asked so pleasantly. The cat’s name is Lazarus. He’ll have a bit of fish tomorrow with that penny.” She dropped the coin into a pocket in her apron and gestured behind her with her thumb. “Allow me to introduce Newman, one of my boys.”

  Finn put his hand out, and Newman shook it, his own hand long and narrow, like his face. “Finn Conrad,” Finn said, “at your service.”

  “It’s a good name for a cat, is Lazarus,” Newman said. “He was brought back from the dead, like the cove in the Bible. Drownded in the scuttle and dead as a pie.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Finn said. “What is this place? I’m from down Jacob’s Island way.”

  “Angel Alley, it’s called,” Newman told him. “There’s a ghost afoot.”

  “I thought there was something in the air tonight.”

  “Aye,” the old woman told him. “Newman speaks the truth. It was a ghost, clear as you’re standing before me. Carried in on the fog, and carried off the same way. I saw him plainly there by the pump, as did many of us.” She gestured in that direction, keeping an eye on the pump in case the ghost should return.

  “A ghost, ma’am? In a winding sheet, like? Laden with chains, like the spirit in the play?”

  “A boy, clothed in the old fashion, looking alive as you or me, although he’d been hanged.”

  “You could see the mark of the rope on his neck,” Newman said. “Plain as you’re a-standing here.”

  “Do you fancy a cracker?” Finn asked him, and when Newman nodded, Finn handed him four of them, holding on to four more – the last of the lot. “No charge among friends,” he said. Newman stared at the four balls in his open palm as if they were gold sovereigns.

  Finn looked up at the bridge overhead, seeing now that there was a sort of landing at one end, three stories up at the rear of a dimly lit room. The hanged ghost must be the same that he’d seen on the road last night, which meant that Dr. Narbondo lived hereabouts, perhaps making use of the bridge for his comings and goings. The farther end of the bridge still lay out of sight in the distance, where fog swirled through again.


  “Can you tell me about that bridge, ma’am?” he asked.

  She peered at him, smiling in a cagey manner now, as if he had revealed himself at last. “If it’s lead you’re be pinching from the roof, you’d best take your business elsewhere. Them there’s the hunchbacked doctor’s rooms. Perhaps you haven’t heard of him out on Jacob’s Island, so I’ll warn you to give him no cause to hear of you.”

  “Not lead, ma’am. There’s not enough money in it, and too much work unless it’s left lying about.”

  “Are you a cracksman, then?”

  “No, ma’am. I keep out of other people’s houses. It don’t seem decent to trespass, and the Bible recommends against it.”

  “What’s your specialism, then?”

  “The foist, mostly, but I gave it up when I left the island, unless it’s necessary. I worked for a coiner for a time before that, but he was hanged. I’m here temporary-like, buying and selling, bound for Portsmouth, where my brother has a pub on the harbor, in what they call Milton.” He held up his hand, showing her the penny that she had put into her apron pocket a minute ago. She reached into her pocket to make certain it was the same coin.

  “Clever lad,” she said, taking it from him again. “I might could find you work and a kip here in the alley. It’s share and share alike among my lads. Newman here is a messenger, mainly. He has knowledge of every street and byway in London, can name them and tell you the buildings along either side and who lives in which, and what they look like and who bolted with whose Uncle Bob. And he can run, too, like a fox when the dogs are on him. You’d scarce credit it unless you’d seen it. He’s what the Frenchman calls a savant. You’re the same, Finn. You’ve been trained up to pursue a calling, is what I think. God gave it to you to pick pockets. Don’t bury your talents under a basket. The Good Book recommends against that, too.” She nodded at him, apparently believing her own words.

  “I thank you for the offer, ma’am, but I’ve changed my ways for good and all.”

  “Well, they say that honest work is the ticket, if you can get it. I’ll tell you plainly that without you’ve got protection hereabouts, it’s best if you pass on through. This is a rough place when the night wears on.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s been a pleasure speaking to both of you, and to old Lazarus.”

  “If you shed some of your scruples and need work, come back to me, Finn. It’s not everyone can stand a regular situation. You might find that your brother’s pub don’t suit you, nor the pay.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “A pleasure,” he said to Newman, shaking the boy’s limp hand, and he walked in the direction of Whitechapel, which lay some distance ahead in the fog. He looked up at the bridge again, which, he could see now, ended at a second landing some sixty or eighty feet farther down. Behind the door on the landing there would no doubt be stairs to the street, although either they would be well guarded or the door locked.

  It wasn’t always vital to make use of a door, however, and he studied the walls and roofs of the buildings roundabout. A three-story, outward leaning, rickety structure stood at the corner of the street beside a rubble-strewn patch of ground that had somehow avoided being built on. He saw an ancient down-spout along the edge of the building, and two windows, one above the other, with broad sills, one of them a casement that was swung open, the room beyond it dark. There was a bit of a balcony with a tottering rail. The damp fog swept in now, grainy with the filth of coal gas.

  In the obscurity, which he knew mightn’t last, Finn stepped to the edge of the building and leaped upward, grasping the down-spout and settling his right foot onto the jagged corner of a broken timber, throwing his weight onto his foot so as not to wrench the spout loose. He grasped the sill of the window above him with his fingers and cast himself upward, pushing off on his foot and levering his hand against the spout, his elbow braced against the wall, all of this in one sure movement once he had left the ground. He perched now for half a moment, his feet wedged against wooden battens, his left foot tearing away a rotted board as he pushed off again, scrambling onto the sill at the base of the open window. It came into his mind to drop into the apparently empty – or at least dark – room, but then he heard a woman’s voice say something sharp from inside, and he reached upward and grasped the bracket that once held a pulley for heaving loads up from the street. It was held strongly to the wall, thank God, and in a trice he hauled himself far enough up to make a leap for the rope stay that secured the bridge. Then it was easy to pull himself upward through the rigging onto the bridge itself. He crouched on the boards now in what would be plain view if the fog cleared again. Behind him stood a door, recently reinforced with wooden cleats – made particularly sturdy.

  He pulled his balaclava over his head, since it was no longer safe to be seen. It was a cumbersome, saggy object, which he arranged as best he could. He stepped softly forward to try the door, which was locked, just as he had expected. If it had a dead-latch inside, he had no chance of opening it. He slid the blade of his oyster knife past the doorstop and moved it upward until it stopped. Then he wiggled it, slipping the latch. He listened but heard nothing, and so he opened the door carefully, leaving it ajar. He turned and made his way out across the bridge through the mist now, back toward the vague light cast from the “hunchbacked doctor’s rooms.” The snarling and barking of the dogs sounded from below and forward, and he heard notes of conversation rising from the courtyard. He wondered whether the ghost had put in another appearance, although it didn’t much matter to him. He had but the one goal, and no time to waste on amusement. If the Doctor was within, then so was Eddie. It stood to reason.

  The fog was even thicker by the time he gained the opposite landing where he crouched in the heavy shadows, with a view of the room itself through the broad window that he had seen from the courtyard. Within the room stood a table with a curiously decorated skull atop it – the vessel that held the ghost, perhaps. There were empty chairs, two plates of food, and a half-full glass of red wine. A second window, identical to the one that he looked through, stood in the farther wall, so that the room had a view both north and south. Soon Dr. Narbondo appeared leading Eddie by the hand, and the two sat down. Finn couldn’t catch all the words, but the Doctor seemed to be advising Eddie to eat. Eddie shook his head and crossed his arms, upon which the Doctor suggested that the alternative was to starve.

  Finn realized that he himself was hungry, and he watched with envy as Eddie poked at the food without any interest. The Doctor, however, cut his own meat and forked it into his mouth with the avidity of a cannibal, scarcely chewing it, gravy running down his chin. A gobbet of something dribbled out of his open mouth, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand and drained half his glass before spearing a piece of potato. He said something out loud now, not addressed to Eddie, but to someone else, almost certainly in the room beyond. There was a reply, but muddled, and then Narbondo said, quite clearly, that he very much understood his part of the bargain, but was uncertain that his Lordship could say the same. There was a reply, during which Narbondo put down his fork, picked up a gravy-laden chop from his plate, and, gripping the bone, tore a piece off with his teeth.

  Finn considered this second man – “his Lordship.” Why would any sort of Lordship be lurking in the rookery, which was a dangerous place for a man with tuppence in his pocket? The man’s presence would have to be taken into account, Finn thought, watching Narbondo’s grotesque eating with something akin to amazement. He wondered whether the savage eating meant that the Doctor was particularly hungry and enjoying his meal, or whether he simply didn’t care about food at all, and was shoveling it down in order to be done with it.

  It was a pretty question, really, and he thought now about the old woman in the courtyard, wondering what sort of creature she was. She had offered to do him a kindness, in her way, although doing so would make a sinner of him. Did she mean well, or the opposite? Did she know her own mind and heart, or did she lie to herself and believe it? H
uman beings, he thought, could be a strangely confounded lot. Cats were typically more sensible…

  A man with a round, bald head entered the room now from behind Narbondo. “She’s coming along,” he said. “Won’t be a minute now.” Then he went out. Narbondo mopped his face with a napkin and sent Eddie into the farther room where his Lordship was hidden away. Something seemed to be pending…

  Finn had a clear run at the window. If he made a prodigious, headfirst leap and balled himself up tightly he could throw himself through. The hateful balaclava might protect his head and neck from broken glass. He pictured it: springing up beyond the table, making for the second room, confounding his Lordship with exploding crackers, and then back out through the window with Eddie and away across the bridge.

  Narbondo fiddled with the skull now, which suddenly came alive, the eyes glowing brightly. The ghost of the hanged boy was reflected in the glass of the window opposite.