The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  A patchy fog hung in the dark streets now, the gas lamps glowing with a gauzy, yellow light, the buildings tolerably distinct close at hand, but ghostly across the road and vanishing utterly in the distances. The stones beneath her feet were solid enough, however. Figures loomed up out of the murk, their footfalls strangely loud for the space of a few moments and then passing away into silence. She recalled the bright sunlight of her morning trek across the bridge and the press of people going about their daily business, all of it seeming almost cheerful to her now. The city had been very much alive. There was a sinister quality to things tonight, though, and she wondered where it originated – whether it was mere atmospheric stagecraft, a product of fog and shadow, or was it the offspring of her own mind, made dark by what she had become and what she must accomplish? Perhaps it was a glamor of sorts, a spell emitted from the room in which Narbondo sat alone with the ghost of his brother, his mind drawing her along through the gloom, her own mind convinced of the dull-witted notion that it was she who acted out of rational necessity.

  That Narbondo had been able to project himself, to intrude upon Mabel’s conjuring, had been a vast surprise, although she saw now that it oughtn’t to have been. Narbondo was her son, after all. She should have suspected that he had the gift. She should have warned Mabel so that Mabel might have guarded against his intrusion. But she had not, and her friend had paid dearly for the oversight. And yet for all that, now that she herself was forewarned it did her little good. Narbondo could murder her if he chose, and would no doubt do just that if he knew what she intended. When she searched her heart for motherly emotions that might stay her hand, she found mere darkness.

  Well, she thought, so be it. She came to herself and discovered that she stood on the corner of Commercial Street and Flower and Dean without quite knowing how she had got there. She walked south, picturing Mabel’s vellum map in her mind, and, on impulse, turned the corner onto Wentworth Street, although Whitechapel lay another long stretch to the south. She abandoned the mental image of the map and pictured herself a living planchette, drawn forward now by a magnetic tugging in her second mind. Edward’s spirit was abroad, or had been; she sensed it clearly.

  She slowed her pace, feeling her way with her mind more than with her eyes. Although Commercial Street had been a broad thoroughfare, Wentworth Street was narrow and crowded, and with a deviant personality, if a street could be said to have such a thing. A window opened now in the murk, and for a moment moonlight allowed her a view of a narrow byway – “Angel Alley,” a sign read – a street of mean lodging houses, the second and third stories jutting out over the first so that the street seemed narrower yet. A strumpet with a sweet face passed, clutching the arm of a sailor who was evidently drunk, the two of them entering a door that revealed a set of stairs in what was apparently a nameless lodging house. A sign in the window offered “couples beds” for eight pence. There was a reek of garbage and human filth and general decay roundabout now, but she went resolutely up the alley.

  Ten steps farther on a group of four low men lounged in an alcove against a nearby wall, one of them fearsomely large and with black, lank hair and beard, his arm in a makeshift sling, another a man with a mutilated face. The filthy window beside the four appeared at first to look out from an empty house. The panes were filmed with dirt, several of them broken and stopped with rags or paper. But then she saw candlelight through the window, and the haggard, pale, slack face of an idiot child peering out. There was the sound of arguing within, something smashed against a wall, someone cried out, and there was a burst of high, drunken laughter. People moved about beyond the staring child like restless spirits in Hell.

  It came to her that the squalid lanes and alleys of the rookery were densely populated despite the nearly empty streets. She felt the weight of thousands of dull, sorrowful, hopeless minds pressing in upon her own mind and soul like the fog itself. She sensed hunger and illness, avarice, too, and a grasping, roiling evil in the dark spirit of the place. She searched for hope, but found little, either within herself or in the gloom that surrounded her.

  “Take a dram, mother?” one of the four men asked her, and she hurried away without answering, listening to the laughter behind her, clutching her bag beneath her cloak. No one with any sense would carry anything of value in such a place unless they wanted to be knocked on the head.

  Mother, he had said… She glanced furtively back at the men. Coincidence, no doubt.

  Her temples throbbed painfully, and it came to her that her son Edward’s spirit haunted the air roundabout, as if he were standing nearby. “Edward?” she asked in a whisper, listening with her mind rather than her ears. There was a courtyard ahead, with fog swirling through it. She was drawn into it, seeing now an illuminated figure hovering within the mists, its outline coming into focus: Edward’s ghost, fully formed. His three-dimensional semblance was made solid by the fog itself, almost as solid as if he were a living boy. He seemed to see her – she was certain he did. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart felt a yearning that made her faint. She stepped forward, holding out her arms until she was bathed in his light – not the meager candle glow that had generated his ghost when she had possessed the skull, but a vivid, living illumination. Images flitted through her mind now like pictures on a screen, memories of Edward’s time on earth: Mary Eastman as a girl, the books by his bedside, a fire in the hearth, a patch of ground with his shadow swinging across it, the shadow of the rope rising from behind his head…

  A wave of pain and sorrow engulfed her, and she turned her back on his ghost and staggered into the darkness. When she looked back he was gone. She saw now that a long wall divided the courtyard she stood in from the courtyard beyond. Atop the wall stood a lighted room – the same room that she had seen in the mirror this morning when she had convened with Mabel Morningstar. Narbondo sat at the table, looking out at her, Edward’s skull before him, its eyes dark. The very sight of it once again filled her with both horror and longing – emotions that should have been incompatible, but were not. She heard footfalls, and turned toward a man who stepped out of the shadows to her left. He wore a low hat with a rounded crown, which gave him the air of a country parson.

  “I’m sent to convey the Doctor’s wishes, ma’am.” He swept his hat from his head and bowed theatrically. He was bald on top, his hair in ringlets like an illustration of Nero. “He beckons you up, ma’am – bids you to come freely, of your own accord.”

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked, damned if she would be cowed by the man. She was in unfamiliar territory here, but that was all the more reason to be forthright. Her communion with Edward’s ghost had solidified her resolve.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “Only that the Doctor would have a word with you. I’ve been waiting this past hour, since nightfall, and now you’ve come. I’m bound to do my duty and show you up the stairs.”

  “Good enough. I’m bound to do my duty and follow. I wonder, though. Did you see the ghost just now?”

  “Plainly.”

  “It was the ghost of my son,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s not my business to think, ma’am. I leave that to the Doctor. Will you come up?”

  “Only if I know your name.”

  “That would be George Kittering, ma’am, at your service.”

  “You can call me Mother Laswell. The man upstairs, whom you call the Doctor, once called me ‘mother,’ and it wasn’t figurative, mind you. I am indeed his mother.”

  George nodded, considering this but apparently having nothing to say. He turned around, moving toward the arched passage in the wall that loomed before them, almost obscured by fog. She was aware of footfalls behind her now, and she glanced back, not surprised to see the man who had offered her a dram of gin, followed by his three companions, the largest of the three looming a full foot above the others. She knew now that they weren’t a threat to her. Quite the contrary, they had no doubt been waiting for her, four of Na
rbondo’s bullies on the lookout for her appearance, perhaps to guarantee her safe passage through the rookery.

  It came to her that the night suddenly had a fateful quality to it, as if something that had been scripted long ago were coming to pass. She and her murderous son were strangely of a like mind. She came to him willingly, out of need. He invited her in willingly, but what was his need? She reminded herself that it lay within her to exert her will in order to alter the script. She was a free woman and she disbelieved in fate.

  The wall before her was built of stone, stained black by years of grit. Further on lay the adjacent courtyard, which contained a warren of windowless shanties, what were called back-to-backs, leaning together around the perimeter like card houses, side by side and one atop the other, fading in the murk in either direction. The people dwelling in the depths must live in perpetual darkness, she thought – candles or lanterns day and night, although surely they could scarcely afford to buy either candles or lamp oil. Here and there windows were faintly aglow. A semblance of life was carried on within, entire families living in single rooms – many hundreds of lives having come to a standstill here in this place of darkness that was a biscuit toss away from the Royal Mint. Mother Laswell turned away unhappily, reminding herself that she was but one old woman in a city of millions, and that she had made a hash of her own family, or hadn’t prevented it from happening, and yet fortune had treated her well despite it, but leaving her with a deep sense of guilt that she wouldn’t cast off this side of the grave.

  George opened a heavy door in the stone beneath the arch, nodding her into a little vestibule where a gas lamp threw out a sputtering glow. She climbed the stairs with a heavy heart and a sense of doom, hearing the door shut behind her, counting the sixteen stair treads that wound around on themselves, and finding herself in a passage that was richly decorated in its gaudy way, a stark contrast to the poverty below. She saw that George hadn’t followed, and was relieved.

  Another door just ahead stood ajar, and she knew at once that it led into the room that overlooked the courtyard. Again it came into her mind that Narbondo had drawn her there: the men lounging in the street, George waiting to greet her, the door standing open before her now. The robbery of poor Edward’s grave and Mary Eastman’s murder had baited the trap, and now here she was, ten seconds from setting foot in it. If she walked away, she wondered, would he let her go?

  But walking away wasn’t in her. She had come too far. She pushed the door wide and stepped through boldly, purposefully ignoring Narbondo who sat in a chair regarding her. She took in the room at a glance – the crates of books, the heaps of papers, the mean furnishings, the bare walls, as if the abode were merely temporary, the books and papers residing in the wooden crates that they had arrived in, ready to be carried out on the instant. She saw that a second immense window with curtains hanging to either side stood in the rear wall, bowed inward, weak with age. A second door, barred with a timber, stood adjacent to it, the window and the door looking back toward the hovels in the farther courtyard. Through the window she could see in the hazy moonlight what appeared to be the first few yards of a narrow, wooden suspension bridge leading away across the rooftops, or perhaps into a distant building.

  There was a second room beyond the one in which she stood. Through its open door part of a long workbench was just visible, the top littered with tools and pieces of equipment that conveyed nothing to her mind. There were more wooden packing crates disgorging excelsior, and the place had an odious chemical reek. She heard what sounded like footsteps from within the room, someone pacing, and she got a brief glimpse of a man who peered out at her for an instant. It seemed to her that he wore a wig, and that his chin whiskers were false.

  On the table, in front of her only living son, lay two plates, covered in broken meat and bones, potatoes and congealed gravy. She regarded Narbondo openly now. She compelled her mind into a cold objectivity, closed against sentiment. She could see in his face very little of the boy she remembered, which was hidden by a malignancy that he had purchased dearly over the years. He exuded an unnaturally vile essence – not an odor, but something very much like it – a palpable, repellent evil.

  Her eyes returned to the table. Two plates? The man in the farther room, perhaps?

  “My small houseguest,” Narbondo said to her, as if knowing what was in her mind. “I’ll introduce the two of you. Edward!” he cried, in a sharp voice.

  The name electrified her. From the room beyond there appeared a small boy, four or five years of age, dressed in a white nightgown and black vest. He stood in the doorway, clearly hesitant to come any closer. He was apparently unhappy, although she saw something in his face that might be hope when he looked into her own. He was pushed from behind just then – she saw the sleeve of a black coat, perhaps velvet – and he staggered out toward the table.

  “This is my beloved mother,” Narbondo said to the boy. “She hails from Aylesford, and is in fact a neighbor of yours. Say ‘good evening’ to her, Edward.”

  “Good evening,” the boy said, and then, after staring at her for another moment, he turned sharply around and disappeared back into the other room.

  “I was quite pleased when I discovered the boy’s name,” Narbondo said to her. “Not that the name Edward is in short supply. It’s serendipitous, though. You’ll agree with me there. Our own Edward come again, I thought when I learned of it.”

  She stared at him for a moment without speaking, her wits fuddled by the boy’s being there at all. His presence changed things, and she made up her mind – remade it – abruptly. “What I think is of no concern to you,” she told him. “I’ll take the boy with me when I go. I won’t allow you to keep him, if that’s what you had in mind.”

  “Not at all what I had in mind, mother. He’s not worth keeping. He’s a dull boy, says almost nothing, can barely read, cannot amuse himself. He can eat, but then a fly or a mouse can eat, so there’s nothing in it to recommend him.”

  “What do you mean that he’s a neighbor of mine? Who is the child?”

  “The son of a man called Professor Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice, lately hailing from Aylesford, the old Walton estate. Both of them have long been treasured friends of mine, and so I’ve taken it upon myself to borrow their son. The Professor was at your house, I believe – what was once my house – on the evening of the night that I abducted the boy. He no doubt awoke to his loss in the morning. I very much wish I could have been there to witness it. There’s nothing more amusing than the face of someone happening upon dire knowledge. It effects a change that is imprinted on one’s features forever. My,” he said, smiling broadly now, “this is indeed splendid. Do you realize, mother, that this is the first conversation we’ve enjoyed together in… How long has it been?”

  She didn’t answer, but set her parasol on the table and took her handbag from beneath her cloak. She reached into it calmly and drew out a pistol. It had belonged to her husband, and was many years old, although she had kept it clean and oiled so that the barrel wouldn’t be corrupted, and had actually shot it twice after Bill had come to the farm. She had managed to hit a large sunflower at five paces, blowing it to bits in a hail of seeds and petals.

  “A flintlock, by heavens!” Narbondo said with mock approval. “Very fine filigree work. Primed and loaded, I suppose? Half cocked already, if my eyes don’t deceive me. Capital. It’s a foggy night, though, as you no doubt observed when my dear brother – your own Edward – put in his brief but entertaining appearance. You were wise to have stowed the weapon in out of the wet. Damp powder won’t answer, you know, no matter how badly you wish to murder your only living son.”

  She said nothing, but kept her mind steady, concentrating on the thing she must do, reminding herself of the man’s manifold crimes, the murder of Edward and of Mary Eastman. Certainly he also intended to murder the poor boy in the other room – to make use of him as he made use of Edward. God knew how many others had suffered at his hand. She fel
t her own hand shaking, the now-heavy pistol dragging itself downward, and she firmed her grip and raised it again.

  “Do you know that I once wept for the loss of your love?” Narbondo said to her.

  She stared at him, confounded.

  “I recall it with great clarity. It was when Edward was three years old, his birthday, and had acquired some resemblance to a human being rather than a mewling little beast. I felt the turning within you that day, your heart drawn to him, and my share diminished.”

  “You imagined that, Clarence,” she said, using his Christian name and watching for any effect that it might have. It apparently had none, except for a thin smile, as if this were a bit of theater to him. She went on doggedly. “It was your imagining that made it so. You see darkness where there is light, and you revel in it. You much prefer the darkness. Perhaps you always did.”

  “Those are hard words, Mother, coming from your mouth. I’m quite scandalized.”

  “Nonsense. I can see in your face that you’re amused. You know that I speak the truth, and yet the truth is meaningless to you. You knew quite well what Edward’s death would do to me, and it was that very knowledge that prompted you. Mary told me that you capered around that tree like a mad thing, gibbering with glee. She could scarcely find the voice to describe it.”

  “She could scarcely find the voice to say anything to anyone. Something put the fear into her, perhaps.” He grinned at her openly.

  She raised the pistol, pointing it at his face, her hand shaking so badly now that she clutched her wrist with her free hand. She had been wrong. She could see something of the boy who had been her first son, the shape of the face, the fine, straight hair, the evident intelligence in his eyes – a faculty that he had squandered on wickedness. In her mind she pictured the sunflower, blown asunder…