The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  A capstan, perhaps? Surely it would take no more power to shift a section of the roof than it would to lift a large anchor aboard a ship. Cleo’s siege engine came into his mind, and he pictured an elephant hauling on the capstan bars, the roof sliding open effortlessly. He let the image stay there, taking a good look at it, and he found that he was attracted to the idea despite its superficial gaudiness. Keeble could no doubt fabricate an automaton, an immense reproduction of Cleo’s elephant, but it would cost them the farm to have it built. It occurred to him then that Finn Conrad had grown up in the circus and claimed experience in the training of pachyderms. Finn Conrad, it was true, claimed a number of things, some of them moderately implausible, but in the time that St. Ives had known the boy, he had seen no actual evidence that Finn exaggerated. He would no doubt be overjoyed to train an elephant. The barn would easily accommodate the creature and with room to spare, and, unlike a steam engine, an elephant’s vapors would be harmless. Its dung, in fact, might be efficacious as a fertilizer. Eddie and Cleo could ride into Aylesford atop it as if it were a pony.

  St. Ives pictured Alice’s likely response to the idea, and his smile waned. Convincing Alice to approve of the elephant might be more complicated than engineering the opening of the roof. Perhaps if the elephant weren’t mentioned until the work was finished? But that would be a variety of untruth. Alice would see that immediately. She had solid ideas about right behavior, and if St. Ives flew in the face of those ideas, the elephant wouldn’t materialize, and he would look like a scrub into the bargain.

  It might be simple enough, he thought, if he took Finn into his confidence from the outset. Finn was effortlessly persuasive, sometimes dangerously so. St. Ives wouldn’t have to coerce him into prevailing upon Alice; Finn would see the sense in the elephant himself. If St. Ives could contrive a way to make it seem like the boy’s idea from the outset…

  The barn loomed in front of him now. The sun hung above the horizon, shining into the open door, which would have to be enlarged in order to admit the craft in the first place, since it would arrive long before they’d tackled the roof and found a convenient elephant. Tomorrow he would hire workmen to do the job if Alice had no objection. He walked into the interior, where it was nearly dark beyond the sunlit ground immediately inside the doorway. The dark hill of a haystack lay to his right, and to his left stood the wagon and the two-horse chaise. It was only recently that they had been able to set up in quite such a grand style, courtesy of Aunt Agatha again, who had been a generous old bird, seeing to the well-being of several nieces and nephews in her considerable will. Alice owed her passion for fishing to the old woman, who had claimed a kinship to Izaak Walton and who had traveled through Scotland and Ireland, often alone, relieving the streams of their burden of salmon and trout.

  He stood still now, listening hard in the evening quiet and squinting into the deep shadows along the wall. He had seen something moving just now – a renegade sheep, perhaps, having come along home by itself…? He watched the darkness, seeing nothing for a long moment. Then there was firefly sort of flickering, a bit of witch light, dying away on the instant that he saw it, but leaving the shadow of what appeared to be a human image behind, which quickly evaporated into the darkness. It reoccurred, more brightly, the resulting shadow larger, taking on an even more decidedly human shape that was surrounded by an aura of soft, steady light. St. Ives took a tentative step forward, craning his neck to see, the hair standing up on the back of his neck. There was a boy – quite clearly a boy – sitting atop the vinegar keg. He was leaning forward, easily visible now, and no longer merely a shadow.

  The sight of him, suffused in the orb of misty light, confounded St. Ives, who was apparently either suffering from impaired vision or some variety of swiftly moving madness. The boy – clearly not Finn Conrad, but more or less the same age – held a stick in his hand. Bent forward at the waist, he was apparently drawing or digging with the stick in the dirt of the barn floor. St. Ives realized with an unsettling shock that he was looking through the figure. He could see the slats in the barn wall behind him and the vinegar keg through the boy’s legs.

  There was no rational explanation for what he thought he saw, and St. Ives despised the irrational. A boy sat on the vinegar keg, right enough, he told himself, and his transparency was evidently an illusion contrived of sunlight and shadow, no doubt easily explainable, if only he could bring his mind to bear on the problem.

  “Well, young sir,” St. Ives began, finding his voice at last, but the boy did not apparently hear him, and instead of responding he began to fade away, evaporating like steam on a warm day. After a few seconds only a vague, boy-shaped aura remained, the stick evidently holding itself aloft, still marking in the dirt. Abruptly the aura vanished, and the stick fell to the ground.

  St. Ives stood blinking, unable to accept what he had clearly seen. His mind denied it. It came to him that he had perhaps been poisoned by the hemlock after all, ingested it somehow, breathed a corruptive waft of the vapor that was only now making itself felt. What next? Paralysis, loss of speech, nausea, the mind remaining clear. He felt none of the symptoms except the clarity of mind. He stepped forward, intent on examining the stick, telling himself that it might yet be warm from the boy’s grip – if there had been a boy, which there could not have been. The stick lay at the base of the keg. It hadn’t been an illusion. He picked it up, but it told him nothing. It was neither warm nor cold. It was simply inert. He fetched a lantern from a hook in the wall, lit it, adjusted the wick, and held it over the keg. The name “Mary,” was scratched very faintly into the hard-packed dirt of the floor.

  He crushed his eyes closed, his mind revolving around useless explanations. He thought again of the hemlock, considering the possibility that in his poison-induced madness he himself had unconsciously wielded the stick, scratching the name in the dirt. He thought of women whom he knew with the name “Mary.” Surely there were several of them, but he couldn’t recall that any of them had passed through his mind in recent weeks or months. Why would he have written that particular name? Further madness?

  His ignorance terrified him, and suddenly he very much wanted Alice’s company. He turned his back on the vinegar barrel, squinting into the vast glow of the setting sun, which now filled the barn door. In the midst of that light stood the figure of a man, black as tar against the bright sunlight – a tall, narrow shadow with its arms to its sides. St. Ives stifled a surprised shout and stood gaping at the apparition in horror. The sun, blessedly, descended another fathom through the sky, lost a modicum of its brilliance, and the silhouette became a flesh and blood human being – a man whom St. Ives knew well enough, and he also knew that the man had been dead these eight years past.

  SIX

  THE RETURN OF BILL KRAKEN

  “I’ve come back,” the man in the doorway said in a living voice – the voice of Bill Kraken, an old friend.

  “From the dead?” asked St. Ives, his mind still swimming from the ghostly figure on the vinegar barrel, trying to equate the phenomenon of the transparent boy with the ghost of Bill Kraken, but having no luck.

  “That’s not far off, sir. I’ve been good as dead six times over, and I despaired of coming home. But the fates is strange bedfellows, as they say, even when they’re sober, which ain’t often.”

  With an effort St. Ives yanked his mind back on course, forced some dignity into his demeanor, and stepped forward, putting out his hand. The hand that met his was solid enough. Kraken had aged, to be sure, but there was something steady about him now, not so much of the cockeyed slope to his features which had lent him the visage of a resident of Bedlam back in the days when he was selling peapods on the streets of London and was known as “Mad Bill.” He was tall and narrow and walked with a tilt, his shock of hair angled away in the opposite direction.

  “By God, I’m happy to see you, Bill,” St. Ives said. “We thought you were lost to the Morecambe sands all those years ago. Jack and I found your wago
n and your pony on the bottom of the bay just a year back.”

  “Old Stumpy!” Kraken said, clearly still lamenting the death of the pony. He shook his head sadly. “How did he look?”

  “Tolerably skeletal, to tell you the truth. I was happy enough not to find your own skeleton still driving the wagon, in the employ of Davey Jones.”

  “It was a near-run thing, sir. I leapt clear of the wagon, do you see, onto a little rocky shingle that lay above the sands, but was nought but an island. I couldn’t do a blessed thing but sit where I was while poor Stumpy went under, along with the device. It would have been death, pure and simple, to do ought else. I failed poor Stumpy, and I failed you, sir, and I’ve come to ask your forgiveness.”

  “There’s no call for it, Bill. You’re quite right about the sands. It would have been death for you to venture off your bit of solid ground. And as for the device, as you call it, we’ve fetched it home again, safe as it ever was, so there’s no failing there, either.”

  The two men walked out of the deepening shadows of the barn, into the twilit evening. The air still carried the warmth of the afternoon, and there was the smell of blossom on the breeze. An owl flew past overhead, circled around, and landed on a branch of a nearby oak, regarding the two men openly. Kraken bowed to it – a little nod of the head, and the owl seemed to nod back, as if they were old friends.

  “How did you win free in Morecambe, Bill, when the tide came up? And where have you been, for all that? We’ve often thought about you, Alice and I.”

  “I’ve been here and there, sir, more than anywhere else. I’d most given up, there on Morecambe Bay. I was safe enough from the Doctor, but I was surrounded by the quicksands and daren’t move. When old Stumpy was gone I was alone and sad-like, thinking about him, and I made up my mind to shift, for better or worse. I’d either walk clear of the sands or follow old Stumpy down. But right then the tide come up raging – the Red Sea come again, sir, with no Moses at hand. The flood picked me up like a blessed leaf and bore me away. I nearly drowned four times a-sailing up the bay, and then I was caught up in some kind of river and was swept down again along the shoreline, going like billy-o, and it was all I could do to raise my head up into the blessed air and take a gulp before I was topsy-turvy again. I found myself in deep water by and by, out in Morecambe Bay proper, where I latched on to a drift log and floated half the night before I was picked up by a cutter out in the Irish Sea.

  “It turned out she was a smuggler with a full hold, running for the Irish coast with a sloop hot behind, its guns loaded with grape, or so I was told. The captain was a God-fearing man, or he wouldn’t have hove to and picked me up. They come around fast, fished me out with a hook, and were away again, with me wet and shivering and the seas coming in through the scuppers. It was the delay that cost them their liberty, for the sloop came upon us off what they call the Mountains of Mourne, when we were nearly ashore. They put a four-pound ball through the mainsail and we swung up into the wind, not being fond of death.”

  “The smugglers vouched for you, certainly?”

  “Aye, they did, but damn-all good it did me. I was transported, and thank God I wasn’t hanged.”

  “Transported?” St. Ives said. “That was given up years back.”

  “Tell that to the judge, sir. That’s what them that spoke for me did. They told the Beak that I was flotsam that they’d fished out o’ the drink, but the judge was a right devil, sir, set up in robes and a wig, and transported me is just what he did. No, sir – what’s been given up and what ain’t been given up is sometimes tolerably similar, if you follow me, depending on who’s doing the giving and the taking. I was four years shearing sheep outside Port Jackson before I won free and set out for home again.”

  “And now you’re living hereabouts? We’re neighbors? It scarcely seems plausible.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m out on Hereafter Farm.”

  St. Ives found himself nearly speechless for a moment. “That would be Mother Laswell’s community of spiritualists?”

  “Right as rain, sir. When I run off from Port Jackson I took ship and worked my way back, but I was right worried about being taken up again, and so I slipped ashore by night at Allhallows and lived in the marshes for a time, looking after the flocks for a man named Spode. We didn’t see eye to eye, though, and I made my way south afoot, down along the Medway, where I come upon Mother Laswell, whose horse had lost a shoe. She was sitting by her cart, all to seek, along with the boy Simonides, who was helpless. I lent a hand, seen her home to Hereafter, and stayed on.”

  “You’ve been there since?”

  “Nigh onto three years now. The farm harbored some bad sorts – I seen that straightaway – hangers on, you might say, taking and not giving, treating her shabby. ‘Mother Laswell,’ I told her, ‘you need new fittings on the garden pump, but you need a tugboat and a pilot a sight worse than that.’ Things had gone adrift on the Hereafter, you see, on account of her having a heart the size of a tub. Once she took someone in, she couldn’t bear to put them out, and they knew it. I could bear it, though, and I set out to tidy things up with a broom and spittle, as they say. I found my sixth sense on account of Mother Laswell, who one fine day I mean to marry, if she’ll have me.”

  “Your sixth sense?”

  “I know that’s not your way, sir, the mysteries of the spirits and suchlike, but I’ll tell you plainly that you’ve had spirits hereabout, right there in the barn just now, or I’m a hedge pig. It was the boy, wasn’t it, a-searching for his Mary?”

  St. Ives gaped at Kraken now, every iota of his scientific soul screaming in protest. “How on Earth do you know that?” he asked. “You saw the figure of the boy, didn’t you? Sitting on the keg? Surely you were standing in the doorway?”

  “No, sir, I weren’t. When I come up along the side of the barn I could feel him thereabouts, and quick enough I could see it in your face that you did, too. But I wasn’t standing in no doorway until you saw me a-standing in it. How do I know it was the boy? Because his spirit’s fluttering hereabouts, unsettled like. They’re nought but moths, you see, spirits is, with no blessed place to go unless someone bottles them up and takes them away.”

  At that moment Alice appeared from around the side of the barn and stood looking at Kraken’s back. Her face had turned ashen, and for a moment St. Ives thought she would faint, although fainting wasn’t really in her nature. Kraken, seeing something in St. Ives’s demeanor, turned slowly around, looked for a moment at Alice, and then took his hat off and bent his head.

  “Bill Kraken, ma’am, in case you’ve forgot me.”

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten you, Bill. Never in life.” She stepped forward resolutely, took his hand, and looked hard at him. “It was you today, wasn’t it, along by the river?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It were.”

  St. Ives was aswim yet again. “By the river?” he asked Alice.

  “The figure I saw in among the trees this afternoon, wearing that same green shirt.”

  “Of course!” St. Ives said, everything coming clear in a rush. “You were the one who came into the wood from Hereafter Farm. The man who wielded the club. My brain must be full of wool.”

  “That were me as well. I was coming along through the trees when I caught sight of the missus fishing the old weir. I scarce could credit it. I thought my senses had give out. I knew that Miss Agatha Walton was gone on to glory, and that someone had moved into the farmhouse, but I didn’t know it was you. You was dug so far in at Chingford that I couldn’t feature it, even when I saw Alice with my two eyes. I stood there a-watching her, and it made my heart glad as an oyster. Then I heard someone coming along the other way, and I stepped into the trees not wanting to be seen, and I weren’t seen, although I myself seen well enough, and you can believe me when I say that had I been a carp, the sight would have took the scales off my forearm when I realized who he was. Your old enemy, sir.

  “I picked up a stout piece of oak that lay there on the gr
ound, stepped out onto the path, caught up with him in three strides, and laid him out. I thought I’d done for him, but he was up again and staggering. I could see that he was wondering whether he knew me. He’d seen me before, here and there. The last time it was the back of me he seen, driving that wagon over the sands at Morecambe Bay all them years back, but I didn’t remind him of it. I raised the stick again, meaning to take his head off, but he bolted into the trees, bleeding like a pig in a butcher’s yard. I would have made a job of it, too, I can tell you. My blood was up.

  “I went back on up to Hereafter and my blood come down a fraction. I took to thinking that he might turn me in to the constabulary, which I couldn’t afford, and I’d find myself in Newgate Prison this time, a-swinging from a gibbet and dreaming of Port Jackson after all. But then I got to thinking about Alice and about you, sir, and I was main happy that you was here in Aylesford, and I knew that I must seek you out and tell you about meeting the Doctor in the wood. I had some hope that you could mayhaps speak to Mother Laswell, too, and shed some light on the murder of Mary Eastman and this grave robbery, which give rise to poor Edward’s ghost, God rest the boy’s soul. And that’s my tale, sir, first to last.”

  For the space of a long moment the evening was dead silent. Then the owl flew out of the oak tree, beating the air. Kraken waved his hand in a parting salute to the bird without taking his eyes from St. Ives’s face.

  “Narbondo, do you say?” St. Ives asked as the two men moved toward the house.

  “It was him, sure enough – the creature who calls himself Narbondo.”

  “You’re quite certain?”

  “Aye, that I am, and it was him who murdered poor Mary Eastman and robbed his dead brother’s grave of what they call the Aylesford Skull.”

  St. Ives could make nothing of this last part, but he knew that grave robbery and murder were nothing to an old hand like Narbondo, and it would have given the man vast pleasure to drench the pike in hemlock, knowing that Alice, whom he would recognize easily enough, would take it along home. St. Ives hadn’t wanted to believe it, despite his suspicions. He had wanted their corner of the world to be at peace. Even now it came into his mind to hope that Narbondo had fled, that he would be anxious to put some distance between himself and the scenes of his various crimes.