The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  “All of us do,” said Jack. “What variety of object?”

  “Carvings, sir. Of soapstone and ivory. Representations of the heads of devils or gods, I believe, which amounts to the same thing, to my mind. Nasty looking items. Grotesques. I recall that one was tentacled, with a diabolical human face, much elongated and with sharpened incisors. It was meant to suggest cannibalism, without a doubt.”

  “And these were dug out of graves?” Doyle asked.

  “I’m sure I don’t know. But I would guess that they were taken from crypts.”

  “Is it conceivable that Ignacio Narbondo would be aware of these catacombs? He certainly wouldn’t scruple to rob graves.”

  “I would be most remarkably surprised if he were not aware of them,” Merton said, “given that they exist at all. It was his nefarious stepfather who attempted to persuade me to traffic in the diabolical carvings. Of course I sent the man away. Would Narbondo have learned his stepfather’s secrets? Assuredly. Depend upon it.”

  A bell tolled the hour somewhere beyond the walls of the shop, and Merton removed his apron, folded it, and hung it on a peg. “That was the bell of St. Mary Abchurch,” he said. “Remarkable tone and accuracy, gentlemen. Correct to the minute. It informs me that it’s time for me to lay down my work if I desire peace with Mrs. Merton.”

  “We’ll need a map before you go,” Tubby said. “Do you have such a thing, Harry? Not a common ordnance map, but something more arcane?”

  “I might,” Merton said. “Although it comes at a price. And I warn you that it’s monstrously dangerous ground. The catacombs and their environs lie far beneath the Fleet River in a land of perpetual night. The door to that world was shut many years ago, according to all sources, hence the value of these detestable objects. There were only those few, you see. As collectible items, there is perhaps nothing rarer on Earth.”

  “We have no idea of seeking out these catacombs,” Jack said. “A reliable map of the several underground rivers and their tributaries and access ways will do nicely. We mean to scour the area, Mr. Merton, but only the more modern passages, in order to head off an enormity contemplated by Dr. Narbondo.”

  “The man is my bane, gentlemen, as I told Professor St. Ives quite recently. I warn you that you take him far too lightly. How do you know that you were not followed here tonight?”

  “We were followed,” Tubby said, “but we knocked the man on the head and pitched his body into the river. We’re the bane of Dr. Narbondo, sir. He won’t survive us. We mean to pull his nose for him.” He took de Groot’s purse from his coat now and dumped the contents among the pots and jars and brushes on Merton’s workbench.

  Merton looked at the money and shook his head, as if he were suddenly weary and defeated – particularly weary of money. “Because you three are particular friends,” he said, sweeping the bills and coins into an open drawer beneath the desk, “I’ll help you. I’m doomed as it is, perpetually hunted down and taken to task. It’s my lot in life, I suppose, to be victimized by my friends and enemies both.”

  He opened one of a series of wide, shallow drawers now and withdrew a map, and it occurred to Jack that five pounds would have purchased it as easily as fifty, for there was another apparently identical map beneath it. But it was another man’s money that they were paying with, which was spent far more easily than one’s own. “Might we have two?” Jack asked. “You seem to have a plethora of them, and we’ve two friends who are equally in need.”

  Merton widened his eyes, shrugged, and drew a second map out of the drawer. They wished him a good night and went out carrying their rolled-up maps, bound for Jermyn Street, supper, and sleep. Tomorrow would arrive tolerably early.

  “It must be very like heaven, sir,” Finn said. He had abandoned the telescope and stood next to St. Ives, looking intently out of the window of the airship.

  St. Ives marveled at the fact that the boy apparently had no fear, that he was filled with wonder instead; the beauty of what lay beyond the windows of the gondola pushing any darkness from his mind. He searched his own mind for fear, but didn’t find it. Perhaps it, too, was banished by the utter peace and great purity roundabout them. Passing below was a school of very low-flying gray clouds like great whales, the edges silver in the light of the moon, which shone brightly overhead, the sky awash with stars. Far below lay more stars – the lights of a small city, seeming to wink in the darkness. The clean air smelled like the air on a Scottish hillside or on the edge of the ocean, laden with moisture, it seemed to St. Ives, and the world aloft was almost silent, just the thrum of the wind in the rigging. He looked at his watch: three o’clock in the morning. Finn had slept for a time, and they had eaten most of the food that Madame Leseur had put by. St. Ives would have paid a good deal for hot coffee, or cold coffee, for that matter, but they had been in far too much of a hurry to think of it.

  He tried to determine just which illuminated city lay below. Oxford, perhaps. Reading if they were lucky. Certainly not Swindon, he thought. God help them if they were that far out. They had been blown many miles off course to the northwest in the first hours, leaving the lights of London far behind. Finally, out of desperation, he had risen to two thousand feet, according to the clever Cailletet altimeter that Keeble had installed – high enough so that the black expanse of the North Sea was visible in the east. The altimeter was a very new invention, however, untested for the most part. Keeble had warned him about rising too high, for there was some risk of blowing up the airship like a penny squib because of the pressure of the expanding hydrogen gas. How high was too high? Keeble couldn’t say. There were too many variables, mostly untested. A “test,” it seemed to St. Ives, might likely prove fatal, and he wished he had studied the science of the craft more thoroughly, although of course he hadn’t known that he himself would be tested in such a hellfire hurry.

  The experiment of seeking the higher altitude had succeeded, however, for he had found a contrary wind, and they had made a wide circuit to the west and south, the North Sea disappearing below the horizon. Although they could not be said to be on course quite yet, they were in a fair way to run even farther south and west, drop down to a more sensible altitude, and make another attempt at London with a more favorable wind behind them.

  Finn returned to the telescope, looking toward the horizon, the clouds having passed away for the moment. “I see darkness, sir, due south by the compass. The sea again, I believe, with towns along it.”

  “The Channel, I’d warrant,” St. Ives said. “Fifty miles away, given our altitude. Perhaps sixty. The lights of Brighton and Eastbourne.” There was some fair chance, then, that the city below them had been Reading – a piece of luck if it were so. He depressed the tiller, and the balloon canted downward, St. Ives turning the wheel to port, watching the compass and feeling the wind. It would be a bad business to hurry it out of anxiety, only to be blown back to the west, and have to rise to the higher altitude again in order to take another run at it. Dawn was three hours away.

  They descended through scattered clouds, the gondola bouncing and jigging erratically, and then abruptly they were caught by the wind off the Channel – the same that had blown them so far off course hours ago. But it was their ally now that they were far enough southward, and St. Ives carefully brought the airship around farther, contemplating a sensible course for London. The starry sky overhead seemed to him to be darkening by degrees, and very soon the stars ahead of them disappeared behind massed clouds. The storm he had seen from his dune beside Egypt Bay would soon be upon them, for they were heading straight into it with the wind nearly at their back.

  Rain began to fall, although they were running before it, for the most part, and for a time it spattered against the rear windows, which were already closed. Soon, however, drops began to sail in through the front windows also, falling onto the balloon above and washing down the sides. St. Ives closed them with the hinged frames of glass, his mind revolving on the general subject of windows, on the more sensi
ble ports and portholes – whether the window was the hiatus itself, or the wood-and-glass barrier that filled it. It was a question that seemed philosophical, and he was on the verge either of coming at it or falling asleep when he realized that his vision was obscured by the rainwater coursing down the glass. He could perhaps fly by the compass…

  “Can you see anything telling?” he asked Finn, the telescope being fit quite sensibly with a hood.

  “I believe I see London, sir, in the far distance, away off to the right, off to starboard, I mean. A vast field of lights, and the river, I believe, snaking through it.”

  St. Ives felt a monumental relief. Their success wasn’t assured by any means, but by God they had managed a bit of smart navigation. Some few minutes after that thought had receded from his mind, he saw the first bolts of lightning descend from the clouds ahead of them.

  FORTY

  MORNING

  “Who would have thought that there were so many costers selling pineapples?” Jack asked. He and Tubby were standing under an awning out of the rain. “And at this early hour of the morning. We’ve got to look into every cart, I suppose, although I’m worried that we’re wasting our time. One of Narbondo’s people might be setting up shop a few yards away as we speak.”

  “Not a waste of time at all,” Tubby told him. “One can never eat enough pineapple. And as for these fiends being a few yards away or half a mile, there’s nothing we can do about it but continue to search. Perhaps Hasbro and Doyle are having better luck.” He shoved the last of the slice into his mouth and chewed it up. “Uncle Gilbert spent some time in the Sandwich Isles, do you know, and grew very fond of the pineapple. He taught me to eat them as a boy, fried up in cane sugar of an afternoon, and served with a tot of brandy poured over and set alight. Those are glorious memories, Jack.” He wiped the juice from his face with a kerchief.

  “I don’t doubt it for an instant, but here’s another of the damned barrows,” Jack said, “just now turning into the alley ahead. Two men this time, and a headlamp on the front of the barrow.”

  “By God that’s one of Merton’s alleys,” Tubby said, as the two of them set out, Tubby carrying the dark-lantern. “‘Carmelite Culvert,’ it’s called on the map. Look to your weapon, Jack. It’s a dead end ahead. They’ll fight like rats.”

  Jack was carrying de Groot’s tiny pistol in his pocket, but he had never shot the thing, had never shot a pistol at all, let alone at a man. He had thought there would be some comfort in carrying it, but at the moment he felt nothing of the sort. The alley was empty when they reached it. Halfway down stood a deep, foul-smelling alcove an inch-deep in standing water. Several feet into the alcove stood a low, iron door, heavy with rust, not just quite tight.

  “They’re in a hurry,” Tubby whispered. “Too much of a hurry to bother shutting the door, the fools.”

  “They mean to come back out this same way, no doubt,” Jack said. He peered into the passage beyond the door, immediately seeing the lantern moving along some distance down – two lanterns, he saw now, one carried in a man’s hand and the other the headlamp on the front of the cart, considerably brighter and showing far down the steeply descending tunnel.

  Tubby set out, Jack following, pulling the door nearly shut behind them. The brick tunnel was thankfully dry – perhaps an access to the Fleet Sewer – and the loud creaking of the cart emboldened them to move even more hastily. Tubby carried his blackthorn raised across his chest for a backhand blow.

  They were upon them quickly, apparently unheard until the last few steps. The man carrying the lantern turned toward them, his illuminated face bearing a puzzled look. He flung the lantern into Tubby’s face out of sheer surprise, and Tubby knocked it aside with his left forearm, the lantern clattering against the bricks on the opposite wall. Tubby struck with the blackthorn in the same moment, knocking the man sideways as Jack leapt past him, pursuing the one who pushed the cart, who was trundling along ever more rapidly down the decline, some distance ahead.

  The man stopped abruptly, gripping the handle of the cart with one hand and skidding along for a moment on the soles of his boots. As momentum carried Jack helplessly forward, he saw the pistol come out of the man’s coat. There was the crack of the weapon firing as Jack threw himself down, realizing even as he did so that the man had missed the hasty shot, and tumbled forward into the man’s legs, bringing him down. His assailant hit him awkwardly on the side of the head, bit him on the hand, and then sprang up and sprinted down the tunnel in pursuit of the runaway cart, which careened away, bouncing on the uneven brick of the floor.

  Jack followed at a run. The cart’s headlight showed a turning in the wall dead ahead of it. The right-hand corner of the cart struck the wall at the turning and the cart caromed off the brick. Immediately the front wheels caught against something unseen, and the cart overturned, its tin sides flying off and its contents tumbling. The man pursuing it, too close to it to stop, pitched bodily over the top and into the waters of the Fleet River along with a smoking kettle that instantly threw a blanket of roaring flame over the waters.

  Jack reached the fallen cart seconds later, Tubby following behind him now. They saw Narbondo’s man rise from the flood entirely aflame, some ten feet down the river, the horror visible on his burning face. He tore at his clothing, yanking off his flaming jacket, wading downriver through the flood, shrieking inhumanly. He stumbled and went under, but when he rose he was once again covered with the burning sludge, and in another moment he fell and disappeared for good, the river carrying away the body and the flames together.

  Tubby and Jack made their way back up the tunnel, silenced by what they had witnessed. Halfway along they passed the other of Narbondo’s people, who had been shot through the back. Jack realized that the man had caught the hastily shot bullet meant for him, and was startled by the sight of the body, unhappily imagining his own body lying on the bricks, the life leaked out of him.

  They went on without speaking until, near the alley door, they discerned the dark mouth of another tunnel, which they hadn’t seen earlier, so intent had they been on their immediate task. Vague noises sounded from somewhere deep within.

  * * *

  From the centermost of the arched windows on the third floor of the old house, Narbondo watched with great satisfaction as the storm moved in over London. The sky was black to the distant horizon, and lightning flickered from the clouds, too distant yet for the sound of thunder to reach him. It was perfectly droll that it had appeared on this very day – life spectacularly imitating art – and it would add monumental impetus to the chaos he intended to provide for the city’s amusement. People were gathering in the streets for the ceremony, dressed in capes and hoods and carrying umbrellas, costermongers threading through them despite the weather, selling hot potatoes and pea-pods and pies. Narbondo had seen a pineapple cart move through half an hour ago, pushed by Sneed the Dwarf accompanied by McFee, the two of them disappearing into an alley that led to the river and to the iron door that opened onto the Fleet Sewer, disused since a century past, when the Fleet was first arched over with brick and mortar and hidden from the sun. In the cart were kegs of coal dust, with several more already delivered and waiting below, along with the bellows device consisting of several pneumatic tubes of great circumference, powered by the steam engine from Merton’s very useful launch and cleverly cooled by water drawn from the Fleet itself. Very soon the black dust would fly up, and it would begin.

  He considered the myriad of tunnels that led away from the walls of the Fleet and the other underground rivers – the turnings, the double-backs, the hidden doors and iron ladders that went ever downward into the Stygian darkness. He had traveled those tunnels the first time as a sixteen-year-old boy, carrying rush-and-paraffin torches and lucifer matches of his own inventing, which had ignited for no good reason, burning him badly. Even then white phosphorous was known as “the devil’s element,” and perhaps that explained his attraction to it. His stepfather had regaled him wit
h the legend of the ancient, long-buried world far beneath the London Temple, with its rumored access under Carmelite Street, and two days later Narbondo had betrayed his stepfather to the authorities. He had been on hand for his stepfather’s hanging, and had watched gleefully as he swung out over the crowd, his eyes and tongue protruding, his neck having failed to break due to the hangman’s ineptness. Narbondo had sold the body to resurrection men, and his stepfather’s skeleton no doubt lived on in an anatomical theater now, perhaps at a great university.

  A light rain began to fall, umbrellas blooming below him like black flowers. The time was drawing near, and Narbondo turned away to inspect the rifle that leaned against its stand next to the window, and the small but very flammable bullets that lay waiting in their copper tray. He found that he was in a state of high anticipation, which he despised in himself as weak, and for a moment he was tempted toward a dose of laudanum, but he rejected the idea. If ever there was a time for his faculties to be sharply honed, it was today.

  A bell at the rear door rang now – two rings, followed by a pause, and then a third. He stepped to the wall and tugged on the bell rope, hearing the faint sound of its chime. In a few moments Beaumont appeared at the door, his beaver hat in his hand, ushering in the very enterprising Helen and a man whom Narbondo knew to be connected to the War Office, a colonel, apparently, and the man Lord Moorgate had insisted on calling Guido Fox. Beaumont disappeared, leaving the door open.