James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

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.

“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 wagon 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.”