The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  Mother Laswell looked back toward the penthouse above the arch, but the lamps had been put out, all but one. Two shadows passed behind the broken window, carrying what appeared to be crates. A night breeze had sprung up out of the east, and the fog had cleared away, the stars shining overhead, roundabout the tired moon. She considered screaming at the top of her lungs as she shepherded Eddie along before her, just in case George’s fears were correct, and her screaming would fetch the police. But George might be compelled to silence her – surely he wouldn’t hesitate to do so – and there was Eddie to think of, along with everything else. Alive and healthy she might yet do some good.

  An oil lamp, emitting greasy smoke, lit the stairs spiraling downward, the stairwell so narrow that her shoulders nearly brushed the walls and she was compelled to let Eddie go on ahead of her, although he clutched her hand fiercely. She was happy for the solid footing. They came out into the courtyard, which was filling with people again, bending out from within their homes, such as they were, now that the mayhem was apparently over.

  A small, weasel-faced man, flashily dressed, walked up to them, bent over, and chucked Eddie under the chin. “What have we here?” he asked, grinning falsely. Eddie trod backward, pressing into Mother Laswell.

  “Bugger off, Crumpet,” George said to the man. “It’s like you to show up when the jollification’s over.”

  “Or just begun,” Crumpet said, looking at Eddie rather than George. He thrust his tongue out and touched the tip of his own nose, and then winked. “But as for all that, I’ve got a job of work to do in the morning. I’ve been busy with the apparatus while you’ve been brawling.”

  “Then you and your apparatus can blow yourselves to damnation. You’ve got the Doctor’s sanction for the moment, slipgibbet, but your time will come, mark my words,” George said. To Mother Laswell he added, “I’ll take charge of the lad now. That way leads to Whitechapel Road ma’am. You’d best be moving along now, while it’s still early. Fred and Coker here will see you clear of the rookery. Bear south for the river and Tower Bridge. Perhaps there’s a late train to Aylesford. The Doctor made it clear that we were to bring him the boy, but he said nothing about you, ma’am, and so you’d best be away before I’m told different. There’s nought that you can do here now. For your own sake go home, and let the fates see to the future.”

  “The child is innocent,” she said, looking hard into George’s face. “I charge you with keeping him safe, for the sake of your mortal soul. It’s not the fates that will see to your future. You’ll see to it, sir. We all of us will, if we want to save ourselves from the fires of Hell. I don’t believe it’s in you to see a child hurt. I can tell that much in your face, although not in your friend’s face.” She nodded at the small man, who stood leering, but kept George’s eye. “He’s rubbish,” she said, “but you’re a better man than you know. Think on that.”

  “He’s no friend of mine, ma’am. But you’d best move along. You can’t change things here.”

  George didn’t look away, but held her gaze, and she wondered if her words would have any effect. She turned abruptly and hurried off, Fred and Coker following close behind. Eddie cried out, but she was forced by circumstance to keep on, swearing to herself that she would return for him, although she had no idea what she meant or how she would do it.

  Presently the broad thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road opened before her, and she found herself walking southward, as George had suggested. When she crossed Commercial Street through the traffic, she looked back. Fred and Coker had vanished, and she was alone, although not adrift. She had no notion of a late train to Aylesford. She had left Mabel to her own devices three hours ago, and would return to Lime Street now to look in on her. She wanted a friend, although she was unsure whether Mabel would especially want her back, given the trouble she had brought with her.

  She hadn’t gone twenty paces, however, when she saw a man whom she recognized coming along in the opposite direction across the street, his features clearly visible in the gaslight. He looked straight ahead and walked at a steady pace, as if he would be happy to quit the neighborhood as quickly as he could, but without attracting attention. He wore the chin whiskers, the wig, and the black coat of the man who had been hidden in the room with Eddie. But there was something else about him…

  And then suddenly she knew him, beneath the disguise and despite his being much older than when she had last seen him. He had visited her husband several times at Hereafter Farm, not long before Edward’s death. Now here he was closeted with Narbondo. After the scene in Narbondo’s rooms, he would of course know her identity, but had he seen her here on the street, or did he suppose that she had gone on her way after being dismissed? In for a penny, she thought, and took six more steps before crossing the road, turning to follow him as he rounded the corner.

  Mabel Morningstar felt very nearly human again. She had awakened famished – the pain in her forehead quite disappeared – and had gone downstairs to the tavern for a bowl of barley soup and some bread and cheese, which had set her up remarkably. Over dinner her mind and heart were caught up in considerations of her friend’s sad state, the warring emotions and the maelstrom into which she was determined to fling herself. Mabel could think of nothing she could do to help; indeed, she scarcely understood Harriet Laswell’s motivations or intentions. Rarely had she sensed a mind so terribly unsure of itself and yet so utterly compelled to act.

  It was late when she returned to her rooms, carrying the uneaten portion of cheese and bread for the next morning’s breakfast. Having slept away most of the day and evening, bed was out of the question, so she poured herself a glass of cognac, which, she considered, she heartily deserved, and sat down in her reading chair in the corner of the room, where there was the best light. Northanger Abbey lay on the table beside the chair – not her favorite of Miss Austen’s novels, but by no means to be despised. When she tried to read it, however, she found that she couldn’t attend to it.

  She studied the ruined table map again, astonished anew at the long, straight tear in the vellum, recalling the terrible moment when her senses had been overpowered and she had lost consciousness. She mouthed a silent prayer for her friend: that Harriet come out of this with her wits about her and without regret, or at least no more regret than she could tolerate.

  She heard footfalls on the stairs now – a man, from the sound of the heavy tread. She snatched up the paper knife without a thought, fear surging through her as the memory of that staring, slowly approaching face imposed itself upon her mind. At the same time she was astonished that the memory had returned with such potency. The footfalls stopped outside the door, and there was a long silence in which she composed herself, the fear having passed away as quickly as it had arrived. It came to her that this was a complete stranger, a customer, perhaps. She set down the paper knife, feeling slightly foolish. There was a hesitant knock, a shuffling of feet.

  She arose and opened the door, bracing it with the toe of her shoe. A tall, lanky, haggard-looking man stood on the landing, twisting his cap in his hands. He had evidently taken two steps back from the door, so as not to impose himself upon her.

  “I’m Bill Kraken, ma’am,” he said. “You don’t know the name, but I’m a friend of Mother Laswell, and I’ve come up to London to see her safe back home to Aylesford. I come here straightaway on the chance that she called upon you, you being her friend.”

  There was something about his demeanor that appealed to Mabel – a natural humility, certainly, and some sort of goodness that shone in his admittedly odd features. “She did indeed,” Mabel said. “Will you come in?” She stood aside and gestured.

  He entered hesitantly, as if it were beyond his station to do so. “I’m main desperate to find her,” Kraken said. “She left Hereafter Farm this morning in a thundercloud. When I found out I most despaired of finding her once I got here, London being the behemoth of old. But it come to me to search for her logbook before I left, which is what she wrote
in before supper. It took me most of an hour to find it. I come across your name in it, ma’am, and a mention of the Ship Tavern, what stands below on the street and what I knew well enough of old, and here I am, a-searching for lost things, like your sign says, and I mean to find her come what may.”

  “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Kraken,” she said, “and I’m happy to hear that she has a stalwart friend. Take a chair at the table and eat a morsel. You’ve had a long day of it.”

  He stood staring, still twisting his cap, which she took from him and laid on the sideboard before gesturing at a wooden chair by the dining table. “Right there, sir. You can take five minutes to collect yourself and eat some of this cheese and bread. I can offer you a glass of this capital French brandy or a bottle of ale, or both.”

  “Ale would go down most grateful, ma’am,” Kraken said.

  She set the plate in front of him and fetched the ale from her small kitchen. “Eat that, sir,” she said. “Don’t stand on ceremony. I’ll tell you straightaway that Mother’s gone into Spitalfields to find…”

  “I know who she means to find and what she means to do to him,” he said, talking from behind his hand as he chewed his food. “I mean to stop her, although I’m late in coming. It ain’t right that she kill her own son, and no matter the reason. It would do for her, do you see? For good and all. I’ll gladly take up the burden and…”

  “Kill her son?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She took her little flintlock pistol out of the case. She’ll use it, too, if I don’t find her, or else she’ll come to harm trying. Spitalfields, you say?” He rose from the chair, draining half the bottle of ale at a gulp and apparently determined to be on his way, dinner or no.

  She picked up the vellum map and handed it to him. “It’s just here,” she said, pointing at the endpoint of the tear. “Do you know the area? It’s a Hell on Earth, the rookery is, so mind yourself.” She picked up a napkin and loaded the bread and cheese into it, tying it up into a bundle.

  “When I was a pea-pod man I knew it well enough, although it’s nowhere for…” He shook his head darkly. “Ah, Christ,” he said. “I thank you for your kindness ma’am, but I’d best be on my way. If she should return, you’d do her a service were you to lock her in.”

  With that Kraken snatched his hat from atop the sideboard, put it on, and took the bread and cheese in both hands. Mabel opened the door, and he loped away down the stairs clutching the torn map under his arm, his footfalls quickly fading. She stood for a minute looking down after him. In the many years she had known Mother Laswell, she had thought that both her sons were dead, but apparently she hadn’t known her friend well at all. The more a secret torments us, she thought, the more we keep it near, as if it were a precious stone and not a fragment of Hell.

  She closed the door and sat back down, taking another swallow of brandy, which she relished – a small good thing at a time like this. The clock on the sideboard chimed midnight, but sleep was even farther off than it had been fifteen minutes ago. She settled into her chair again, opened her book, and took up where she’d left off.

  TWENTY-THREE

  FLAMING SYLLABUB

  Finn Conrad hunched across the rooftop, keeping out of sight as best he could. If he were seen he’d be taken for a thief, and although he could evade pursuit, he didn’t want to be forced to do so. He contemplated a return to Angel Alley – and why not? – no one knew his face. He might have a second chance to find Eddie, the dawn being hours away yet. Finn knew that there had been desperate fighting in the courtyard, with several shots Fred. If it had been the Professor and Hasbro, it might have changed everything. And yet if things had changed, he needed to know how. The fighting also meant that different lots of them were looking out for Eddie, if you counted the game old woman who had fired the pistol at Narbondo before following him out onto the bridge. She hadn’t any idea of shooting, but he honored her for the attempt. He also wondered who she was. In any event, she couldn’t help Eddie any more than she could help herself.

  Crouching in the shadow of a chimney pot, he looked down at the alley and courtyard just west of Angel Alley, very nearly its twin, the same dozens of layabouts lounging in the yard, gin served out of a keg, a trussed up pig just then being hauled down from a spit over an open fire, the process watched intently by a knot of men, the smoke blowing away on the breeze. There was a curious smell on the air – not the roasting pig – rising apparently from directly below him – the smell of rotten eggs mixed with the odor of pitch. Finn had smelled it before during his days in the circus. It was a memorable smell, nothing else quite like it, not in his experience, anyway. What he remembered was something called “flaming syllabub” by the man who concocted it in order to cast liquid fire on the Witch of Winter in an open field where Duffy’s Circus was set up in Yorkshire. The man’s face was burnt off when the siphon tube blew to pieces. They had buried the corpse, its head and upper body charred, no longer recognizably human, behind a hedgerow, along with the syllabub and the pressurized device for spraying it. It was quite the most awful thing that Finn had seen in his life, and the dreams had taken months to pass away.

  He could see it below him now – a heavy iron pot lying atop a coal stove set out of the wind in a lamp-lit alcove. The pot had a lid on it, but thin smoke rose from the coals that heated the pot and from around the lid. In the light of a lamp hung on a peg, a bearded dwarf tended the fire beneath the kettle, which glowed with a raw white flame. He noted the dwarf’s careful attention to it. The man was leery of getting too close, as if the pot might explode. Very nearby stood a coster’s barrow, doctored up fancy. It had a polished metal bed, brass, apparently. It was long and narrow and with springs at the axles. Three kegs sat atop it. Finn took it at first to be a portable coffee stall, although soon enough he saw that he was wrong. The iron-bound kegs had no spigot. Instead, in one of them there appeared to be a bronze pipe set in the bung, with a flexible brass tube affixed to it, the excess coiled beside it on the bed, perhaps twenty feet of it. There was a nozzle on the end – the siphon, he thought, for spraying the syllabub. He saw the handle of a pump atop the keg, no doubt meant to pressurize it. The thing looked like a cross between a beer keg and a hubble-bubble, but he knew it was nothing as innocent as that. The long hose would allow a man to stand a good way off. A second keg with a funnel atop sat beside the first, an India-rubber hose with a broad-throated bellows connected to it, the bellows affixed flat to the wagon. A third keg, large enough to hold a couple of gallons sat alongside in a small heap of black dust.

  He speculated over the apparatus for a moment, but couldn’t puzzle it out, and it was none of his business anyway… unless it was. He made his way back to the peak of the roof and looked across toward Angel Alley, which was still mostly hidden by the warren of buildings. He could see the roof of Narbondo’s apartment, directly opposite where he stood, which meant it was just opposite where the dwarf was cooking up syllabub. Were the buildings connected? Another way in and out, perhaps? He returned to his perch above the smoking kettle. Some distance away stood a convenient drainpipe that led downward to a lean-to roof that wasn’t above eight feet off the ground – easy enough to climb down. He moved away in that direction, testing the strength of the drainpipe before making his way hand over hand until his feet stood on the lower roof. He leapt from there to the stones of the courtyard, knees bending to take the force of the drop, and then walked around the side of the lean-to toward where the dwarf worked at his oven. The best way was the bold way, when you were up to acrobatics.

  “I’ve got a message from the Doctor,” he said to the dwarf, who turned and looked Finn up and down as if he were a walking dustbin.

  “You’ve got an ugly face, too,” the dwarf said. “You can use them both for bum paper for all of me, and tell the bleeding Doctor I said so.”

  “You’re to give me a ride down to Egypt Bay.”

  “Except I’m not a-going down to Egypt Bay, you little shit. Not till we’re
done with this here caper.”

  “Tomorrow,” Finn said. “I don’t mean tonight.”

  “Then tomorrow you wait here, sitting in plain sight. If the Crumpet says we’re taking you to Egypt Bay, then that’s just what we’ll do.”

  Finn was suddenly at a loss for words, the name “Crumpet” catching in his throat along with his breath. A door began to open behind the barrow, and Finn turned away, trying to affect the air of someone naturally taking his leave. He heard the Crumpet’s simpering, high-pitched voice say, “Do you want your bed sent out, dwarfy-dear? A nice nap, perhaps?”

  “Shut your gob,” said the dwarf, “where have you been this past two hours while I’ve been brewing up this stinking pitch?”

  “Shepherding the night along,” the Crumpet said. “Himself is in a pretty mood. Assassins everywhere, apparently.”

  “Now you’re here, Crumpet, lend a hand. Clap on to that there tin and sort it out.”

  Finn angled toward the roast pig, being butchered now on a board set up on two sawhorses, steaming chunks being handed out on sheets of newsprint. “I’ll buy a portion, sir,” Finn said, his voice husky, his heart beating hard.

  “Take yourself off,” a man said to him. “This ain’t no public mess.”

  “Stow it, Tom,” the man butchering the pig said. “It’s my bleeding pig. The boy needs a bite of supper.” He handed Finn a paper with a half-pound of dripping pork shank on it. “Keep your pennies,” he said. “Duke Humphrey’s treat.”

  Finn thanked him and stepped away into the shadows, making himself inconspicuous, wondering at the odd business of himself giving Newman the crackers for no reason other than it came into his head to do it. And now here he was eating first-rate pork that a man had given him that same way, one thing leading to another, or so he hoped. He liked the idea that a person might be served out for good deeds as well as bad. From the safety of his hiding place he held the newspaper in front of his face and blew on the hot meat while he watched the Crumpet struggle with a heap of folded tin, unhinging it into a four-sided box with no top or bottom. The dwarf used a pair of iron tongs to set the smoking pot of syllabub carefully onto the metal bed of the barrow, securing it with twisted wire, and then the two of them climbed onto upturned crates and slipped the tin sides down over the kegs, hiding them. Painted on the tin was the word “Pine-apples” with an ill-painted depiction of the fruit alongside.