The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  The Crumpet took a step back, looked the cart over, took the lamp from its peg and hung it on a hook protruding from the barrow, and then cupped his hand over the chimney and blew out the flame. He closed the still-open door of the building behind him, and the two of them trudged away across the courtyard and up the alley toward Wentworth Street, the dwarf pushing the barrow and the Crumpet walking on ahead.

  Finn gave them forty feet and then followed, soon stepping out onto Wentworth Street, past a sign on the wall: “George Yard,” it read. Across Wentworth Street lay another narrow bystreet, toward which the two were evidently bound. There was a moderate crowd of people afoot, and the dwarf shouted, “Make a lane, there!” trying to push the barrow through the unheeding pedestrians.

  Finn stood for a moment thinking, suddenly unsure whether to follow or to return to Angel Alley. The Crumpet was evidently going about Narbondo’s dirty business, and it would be interesting to know what business that was. But Finn had no desire to put himself in the way of the Crumpet, or to leave Eddie behind if he could help it. The hot syllabub and siphon apparatus hidden in the barrow had an ominous air to it, although what it portended he couldn’t begin to say – nothing so innocent as burning the Witch of Winter. There was little he could do about it anyway, he decided, and might likely get burnt to a cinder for trying.

  Finn turned back toward Angel Alley, hurrying past the dog kennels now. His mention of Egypt Bay hadn’t confounded the dwarf as he feared it might; it had gone straight home. He entered the yard with the pump where the ghost had appeared. The old woman and Lazarus were nowhere to be seen, but he spotted Newman standing in a ray of moonlight along a dangerously leaning wall of shacks built of ancient boards. The boy stood rigid, staring upward, as if at the moon itself, and Finn realized with a start that his eyes were rolled back into his head. He seemed to have petrified. His mouth was open. Perhaps he was asleep, standing up.

  “Ahoy, Newman,” Finn said, and then again louder when he got no response.

  Newman’s face changed, its slackness tightening, his mouth slowly drawing shut, his eyes reappearing. He swallowed heavily, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing. He stared at Finn for a moment before apparently recognizing him. “’Lo, Crackers,” he said, blinking.

  “Hello yourself,” Finn said. “Do you know Jermyn Street?”

  “Jermyn Street? Oh, aye. The length of it. There’s Dunhill, where they sell the pipe tobacco, and Tarkenton’s along past it, and…”

  “I’m thinking about the far end. Near Green Park. Queen’s Walk side.”

  “Oh, aye. There’s…”

  “A toymaker named Keeble has a shop there. I’ll lay odds that you’ve looked into the window more than once.”

  A lamp switched on behind Newman’s eyes. He nodded happily.

  “There’s a door just beyond that shop, at the far corner, the little cut-off piece of Jermyn, with a sign that says ‘Scout’s Rest.’ Can you read?”

  “Oh, aye. Somewhat, leastways.”

  “Look for the sign, then, right there on the corner, set into the bricks. Bang the knocker next to the sign. Hard, mind you. Wake the house. There’s a speaking tube alongside. When they answer, tell them that you’ve a message for Jack Owlesby, or Mrs. Owlesby, if she’s in and he ain’t.”

  “A message is it?” Newman asked, looking at him shrewdly now.

  “You’ll hear them through the speaking tube, just as clear as if they stood before you. Tell them, ‘Finn Conrad says it’s Egypt Bay, in the marsh.’ Can you do that, say into the tube? Tell them that’s where the Doctor’s bound if he’s bolted.”

  “Egypt Bay if the Doctor’s bolted. In the marsh. Jack or the missus. Message from Finn Conrad to be shouted into the tube.”

  “That’s it in a nut. Tell them Finn’s gone on ahead as best he can. Can you go there now, to Jermyn Street? It’s late, but… Here.” Finn looked around hastily and, seeing no one evidently watching, he removed his toeless right shoe and took half a crown out of it before slipping the shoe back on. He pressed the coin into Newman’s palm and closed his fingers around it. “Will you help me?” he asked.

  Newman opened his hand and stared at the coin, then pocketed it. He nodded briskly.

  “Don’t tell anyone, not even old Lazarus,” Finn started to say, but he said it to Newman’s back, for the boy was already running, away up Angel Alley where he shortly disappeared from view. Finn followed him at a brisk pace, but by the time he got to Wentworth Street Newman had quite disappeared. To Finn’s surprise, however, the Crumpet and the dwarf were still there, across the street now, communicating with someone inside a carriage – a five-glass landau, black and gold paint, very swank, luggage strapped onto the back atop a capacious rack, headlights shining into the night. The two horses stamped impatiently while the driver, an ugly, wrinkled gnome-like man in an ancient, enormously tall beaver top hat, waited on his seat beneath a gas lamp on a post. His boots, Finn saw, had two-inch-thick soles. He tapped his fingers against his knees as if keeping time to music that only he could hear.

  Finn walked forward, as if to pass in front of the carriage, trying to get a look at the passenger. It was dim within the interior, but the silhouette of the hunchbacked man was clearly visible – Narbondo himself. The top of Eddie’s head was just visible on the seat opposite. Finn studied the luggage rack, which was placed low to the ground on a sort of flying bridge at the level of the axels. There was ten inches or so between the narrow, strapped-down trunk and the back wall of the carriage.

  The driver whipped up the horses now, and the coach moved away, the Crumpet and the dwarf setting out again. Finn took a running start, following the carriage as it gained speed, rocking on the rough pavement. As long as he kept tight to the rear corner, he would be out of sight of the driver. He ran faster, a measured distance from the moving vehicle. The two in the coach looked ahead. Abruptly he threw himself sideways and forward, pulling himself along the top of the trunk while pressing himself downward like a limpet, hanging tight to the straps to stop himself from falling off when the carriage took a sudden lurch. He pushed himself backward now, sliding down between the trunk and the stern of the carriage like a plate settling into a rack on the wall, sandwiched in tight and safe as a baby, although tolerably cramped, and with his nosed pressed to the trunk. There was no hint of the landau slowing down, however, no calling out from people who might have seen him fling himself aboard, and soon they rounded onto a broad, smoothly metaled street, Finn safely hidden away.

  After a time, he lifted himself carefully and craned his neck to see into the coach. He found himself looking past the back of Narbondo’s head, and was surprised to see Eddie staring straight back at him. He put his finger to the side of his nose and the boy looked away. Finn settled down again, laid his head on his arm, and closed his eyes. He had long had the habit of falling asleep at will under rough circumstances, and that’s what he did now, the coach jogging along through the midnight streets, bound for Egypt Bay.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTER THE BATTLE

  “Not much of a butcher’s bill if you ask me,” Tubby said, picking up a rasher of bacon from a platter in the middle of the table and folding it into his mouth. “Two of the villains dead, and four others off their feed for a month. Why thank you, Winnifred,” he said to Mrs. Keeble, who set a plate of fried eggs and beans in front of him. “This is kindness personified.”

  William, Winnifred Keeble’s inventor husband, snored in an upholstered chair, apparently indifferent to the promise of food. He was an early riser, up with the dawn, and was happily asleep by eight o’clock in the evening, which is to say, some four hours ago. Winnifred had driven him out of bed and compelled him to put on a dressing gown in deference to their late-arriving guests, but the effort hadn’t really awakened him. Hasbro came out from the kitchen now with a steaming platter of chops and another of black pudding, followed by Jack Owlesby and his wife Dorothy, carrying pots of coffee and more plates of food.
/>   “Vittles is up!” Tubby said, looking hard at his companions, who were still seated around the room.

  St. Ives found it incredible that Tubby was unscathed. Given his reckless abandon in the melee he might have been murdered three times over. And a melee it had been, a wild brawl that had achieved considerably less than nothing. Doyle had pronounced St. Ives fit after sewing up a flap of scalp that had been laid open, but any of the blows that he had taken on the head might have knocked him permanently senseless. The aching in his forehead, although easing up some, was still a distraction, and he studiously kept his head very still. He thought of Alice and of her threat to beat him with a coal shovel – no need for that now, really. He wondered what she was doing, whether she was asleep or lying abed worrying. He pictured her in his mind, and his heart was filled with sadness at his failure. “Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again,” he thought, remembering the old poem that had affected him so strongly when he was a younger man. He was surprised that its effect was squared and cubed now that he was older and had lived some. It hadn’t been but a day since he and Alice had parted, although it seemed like an eternity.

  He thought about how full of optimism he had allowed himself to be just a few hours ago at the Half Toad, when they were at the beginning of things. That was too often the way of it – the fate of hopeful plans: inspired anticipation ending in unhappy regret. Certainly Narbondo had anticipated their arrival this evening and so had easily escaped, just as St. Ives had feared would happen. There was no point at all in returning to Thrawl Street in the morning on the pretense of carrying ransom money. They had been soundly beaten, no matter how many of the enemy they had brought down. That was the long and the short of it. The precious information they’d got from Slocumb about Narbondo’s whereabouts was now yesterday’s news, useful for wrapping up fried cod. They had come to a dead end.

  Dorothy Owlesby, blond and pretty, fretted over her husband Jack, who had also been bandaged by an adept Arthur Doyle. Doyle’s own left hand still oozed blood from the knife wound, which Doyle had stitched closed himself, sweating and grimacing, although St. Ives and Hasbro were both competent with a catgut suture. Doyle was apparently happy with the wound – a badge of honor – but clearly made an effort not to revel overmuch in the heroic nature of the part he had played in the episode. His evident bonhomie very nearly matched Tubby’s. St. Ives rose from his armchair and took his place at the table, taking himself in hand and putting on a pleased face.

  “I can’t remember ever having eaten so well,” Tubby said, shoveling eggs and beans into his mouth and then mopping his face with his napkin. “A skirmish does wonders for a man’s appetite. Pass that beaker of coffee, if you will, and that jam pot.”

  “You say something of the same thing every time you sit down to sup,” Jack said.

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that,” Tubby said. “There’s scarcely a human being on earth who doesn’t ask for the jam pot now and then. The jam pot is a philosophical item, Jack, much prized by the ancients. I beg you to consider that the Wildman of Borneo keeps a jam pot in his hollow tree, as does the Queen in her cupboard. Indeed, the jam pot is the homely object that puts us all on the side of the angels.”

  “Not the jam pot, you oaf,” Jack said. “I mean that you insist absolutely that every meal is the best you’ve ever eaten. How can everything be the best of anything? If everything is the best, then it stands to reason that nothing is the best.”

  “I deny it,” Tubby said. “The jam pot shows us the way. Every day it’s filled afresh, you see – a new start, the world constantly turning toward the morning. We’re blessed with a renewable appetite, and not just for food, mind you, but for the things of the world. That’s the golden secret of the marmalade in the jam pot. Imagine if an appetite were like hair, that fell out as you grew older, and never grew back. You’d be in a sad way, Jack.” He plucked a piece of toast out of the rack and slathered jam on it by way of illustration.

  “I’m with you there,” Doyle said. “A hearty appetite of any sort is synonymous with life itself. And as for the English breakfast, to my mind it’s one of the wonders of the world. It seems to me that there’s something particularly artistic in its being served at the stroke of midnight.”

  “Just so,” St. Ives said, looking at his pocket watch. “It’s already tomorrow, and I for one am heartily glad to see yesterday gone.”

  They ate in silence for a time, devouring the food, making inroads into the toast and cutlets, which seemed to be in never-ending supply.

  “What’s the state of this fabulous airship that Jack’s been telling me about?” Doyle asked William Keeble.

  Keeble, whose appetite had awakened, and he with it, was illuminated by the question and at once set out to answer it. The airship would fly, he told them. The decorative elements wanted gilt paint, and he contemplated a figurehead of some sort – something that wouldn’t weigh it down too much by the nose. A pasteboard figure, perhaps, heavily varnished against the weather.

  “We’ll gild the lily in due time,” St. Ives said. “Tomorrow we’ve got to be about our business, however, if only we know what it is. She’s airworthy? You’re certain of it?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite certain. I spent the better part of the last two days on what might be called ‘finishing touches.’ Just this afternoon I fitted a fine brass periscope to a swivel on the craft’s undercarriage, built on the design of Marie-Davy, which will reflect an image onto a lens in the gondola. The periscope can sweep the field of view, quite uninhibited. Farther astern sits a Ruhmkorff lamp that will cast a light for a hundred feet or so in the dead of night. Quite blindingly bright, if I do say so myself.”

  “Tell them about the perpetual motion you’ve invented, Father,” Dorothy said. “It’s phenomenally clever.”

  “It’s not perpetual motion at all,” Keeble said, smiling lovingly at his daughter, “although it’s very like, I must say. And I did not invent it; I merely had my way with another man’s invention – a giant of a man, so to speak, upon whose shoulders I stood. I’ve built a bladed weathervane, if you can picture it, a propeller, which swivels with the direction of the wind, so that the blades spin constantly, their motion turning the disks in what is known to science as a Wimshurst influence machine. The electrical charge produced by the machine flows into an array of simple Leyden jar batteries. Under the right conditions there’s no reason the dirigible shouldn’t circumnavigate the globe, providing its own motive power with the help of the wind.”

  “That’s as perpetual as anything,” Dorothy said.

  “Indeed it is,” Tubby put in. “It’s the jam pot come again.”

  “The jam pot,” Keeble said. “Just so. Of course.” He blinked at Tubby several times, as if unable entirely to fathom the figure of the jam pot. “My men have begun the production of hydrogen, and the void has been filling for many hours.”

  “The production of hydrogen?” Tubby asked. “One hires an alchemist, perhaps, to conjure it out of the aether?”

  “No indeed, sir. It’s a simple business,” Keeble said. “One asks one’s apprentice to drip vitriol onto iron shavings. Hydrogen gas rises in the reek like a very phoenix, filling the body of the dirigible through an inverted funnel. In short order, the balloon is anxious to take flight, and will do so unless it’s moored to the ground.” He smiled at them over the rim of his coffee cup, very apparently happy with his revelations.

  “My only… apprehension…” he said, “has to do with flying the craft in a lightning storm, which might lead to an explosive result.”

  “Explosive?” Tubby said. “It’s a sort of floating squib, then?”

  “After a fashion I suppose it is, although I’ve attached an experimental lightning rod of sorts that should draw away unwanted sparks or electrical charges.”

  “What’s the nature of this rod?” asked Doyle. “It’s not grounded, as they say. It cannot be, since the ship would be nowhere near the ground.�
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  “The device consists of a solid glass ball mounted on the end of the bowsprit,” Keeble said, “much like the lightning inhibitors atop masts of ships at sea. It cannot be adequately tested without endangering the craft, of course, but theoretically everyone in the gondola should be as safe as babies. Nothing to worry about there, I assure you. Nothing at all. Perfectly safe.”

  Doyle nodded, perhaps out of a desire to be agreeable.

  “We’ve been told that you’ve built a miniature example of this Ruhmkorff lamp,” Hasbro said to Keeble.

  “Oh, yes,” Keeble said. “Wonderfully small, but throwing a prodigious bright beam. I built only the one example, although another man has recently commissioned a second. He seems to be quite anxious about it.”

  “Do you know the name of the man who commissioned the first?” St. Ives asked.

  “A fellow named George Kittering. Very polite cove. Extraordinarily round head, it seemed to me.”

  “The ubiquitous George! Of course,” St. Ives said. “We’re well acquainted with George, chatted with him tonight, in fact. I’d be surprised if half London doesn’t call him by name. This second commission – there was no apparent connection between it and the first? Not our man George again?”