James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

“I’d be quite willing. And I don’t set up to judge anyone but myself, ma’am, although I make an exception for Dr. Narbondo. Your description of him is unfortunately accurate. I’m convinced, however, that he will go about his business and that you’ll be quit of him for another thirty years. I’m not sure that I can be of any use to you.”

“I’m not half so certain on either point. But if he has gone off, then the peril is even greater. A glass of sherry for you?”

“I can’t think of anything that would suit me more, thank you.”

She gestured at the table, and St. Ives pulled back one of the heavy chairs and sat down. Almost immediately a girl entered the room carrying a decanter and small glasses without apparently having been called upon to do so. A hidden bell , St. Ives thought. Then he saw that the girl was apparently blind, and yet she walked straight to the table without hesitation. Her left arm was awkwardly contorted, held out in front of her and bent sharply at the elbow. She set the tray onto the table, and then, her elbow aimed sharply downward, she poured sherry evenly into the three glasses, her milky eyes staring dead ahead. St. Ives wondered whether the milkiness was caused by some sort of covering – circles of very fine oiled silk, perhaps, or milk glass lenses.

“Thank you, Clara,” Mother Laswell said. The girl curtsied, turned, and walked back out again, straight toward the door, her arm bent in front of her, the tip of her elbow seeming to draw her forcibly along.

“ She sees with her elber ,” Kraken whispered heavily to St. Ives. “I’ve seen her do monstrous strange things for a blind girl. She can play at cards, sir, one handed of course, and shoot a fowling piece into a target. It don’t stand to reason, but it’s what she does.”

Mother Laswell nodded ponderously. “At Hereafter Farm we’ve got no grudge against reason, Professor, as long as it isn’t the only star in the firmament. But there are other ways of seeing, elbows included. As a man of science, a rationalist, perhaps a materialist, you no doubt disagree, but that’s the sort of strange company you’ve fallen in with this evening. I tell you this only because you will naturally have some fundamental doubts about what I have to say to you. I don’t take offense to that. Belief that comes too easily is a shallow and often foolish thing. Stubborn disbelief is much the same.”

“On that point we agree entirely,” St. Ives said, discarding assumptions by the bucketful and wondering exactly what sort of company he had “fallen in with.” Not entirely the company he had expected. “I’m anxious to hear you out, Mother Laswell. I have the highest opinion of Bill Kraken, and if Bill tells me that you’ve got something vital to say, I don’t doubt it for an instant. I’m wholly at your service.”

“Thank you, sir.” She sipped the sherry, looking for a moment at St. Ives as if seeing into his soul, before setting her glass down and pointing at the magic mirror lying in the center of the table. “I assume that you recognize this object?”

“I believe it to be a Japanese magic mirror, madam. I’ve studied them somewhat. Wonderful toys. I myself possess several of the objects.”

“And have you come to an understanding of them?”

“Not in so many words, no. I know that they’re fabricated from a cast metal alloy, ground into a lens, and then coated with quicksilver, tin, and lead on the convex surface, which is then polished. How the images on the back of the mirror are projected, however, I can’t quite say.”

“There are those who believe that such a mirror has what might be referred to as spiritual powers.”

“I’m not persuaded of any such thing,” St. Ives said flatly.

“Good for you. Neither am I. And yet there exist objects contrived by man which might… open doors.”

“Keys, for instance,” St. Ives said, smiling at her.

“Just so.” Mother Laswell smiled back at him. “Do you recall hearing of a man named John Mason? It’s a common name, of course. He fabricated Japanese magic mirrors – this very mirror, in fact. Some fifteen years ago John Mason managed to blow himself to pieces when he purposefully detonated the dust in a grain silo.”

“Indeed I do remember him, or at least I remember his demise. He was a colleague of Joseph Swann of incandescent lighting fame. His death was quite sensational.”

“That’s the man. Both of them were photographic chemists, you know. I believe that Swann severed ties with Mason a year or more before Mason’s death. When the police searched Mason’s house, they found a plethora of human skulls and dried bones. The skulls had been trepanned, the interior set with a mirror fabricated very much like the Japanese mirror you’re familiar with, the backs of the mirrors etched with children’s faces so lifelike that they could only have been reproduced from collodion negatives. It appeared as if Mason were attempting to construct a means of projecting an image through the eye sockets of the skull. It wasn’t until the headless remains of several small children were exhumed from graves on Mason’s property that he was revealed as a murderer and understood to be criminally insane.”

“That charge would be difficult to contest,” St. Ives said.

“There we disagree,” Mother Laswell told him, “although certainly that depends on one’s definitions of sanity. Certainly he was no more insane than my late husband, with whom he was acquainted, I’m very sorry to say. Such skulls, or mirrors, call them what you will, come into my story, but not until half the story is told. Here’s the long and the short of it.” She gazed up at the burning candles and squinted her eyes, collecting her thoughts, or perhaps seeing something in the soft haze of the light. The flames flickered on breezes through an open window in the far end of the room.

“The man who calls himself Dr. Ignacio Narbondo,” she said, “is my only living son. His father, who fancied himself a man of science, disappeared out of our lives when the boy was two years old. His father often spoke of going into East India, and would talk about fabulous cities in the jungle as if he were longing to see them. Perhaps he did, in the end. In any event, the boy and I – I won’t utter my son’s actual name now that he has abandoned it himself – took a room in Limehouse after that, in a low court of the worst type, but there was little money to advance ourselves. After less than a year I married my husband’s brother, only to discover too late what sort of a man he was. He brought me here to Aylesford, along with the boy, and I bore him a child whom we named Edward.”

“The boy what you seen in the barn,” Kraken said, nodding to Mother Laswell, who nodded in turn, as if this didn’t surprise her in the least. “And if the boy’s ghost lingers in Aylesford, Professor, so does the Doctor. That’s certain. He was somewhere nigh if Edward’s spirit was in the barn.”

“Certain?” St. Ives asked. “How so?”

“Because this Narbondo possesses the Aylesford Skull, do you see, which he took out of Edward’s grave. It’s the boy’s abode – his unnatural home. Edward never moved on, never crossed over the river.”

“And the Aylesford Skull, Mother Laswell, has been treated similarly to the skulls found in the home of John Mason?” St. Ives asked.

Mother Laswell’s mind seemed at that moment to be adrift, unmoored by recollection. After a moment she sighed and said, “Yes, although it is a considerably more advanced example. The bottle stands by you, sir. I might take another glass for the sake of the humors. I don’t fancy telling this story, and I haven’t told it, except to Bill early this morning. I’ve kept it locked away, you see.”