James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

Ten steps farther on a group of four low men lounged in an alcove against a nearby wall, one of them fearsomely large and with black, lank hair and beard, his arm in a makeshift sling, another a man with a mutilated face. The filthy window beside the four appeared at first to look out from an empty house. The panes were filmed with dirt, several of them broken and stopped with rags or paper. But then she saw candlelight through the window, and the haggard, pale, slack face of an idiot child peering out. There was the sound of arguing within, something smashed against a wall, someone cried out, and there was a burst of high, drunken laughter. People moved about beyond the staring child like restless spirits in Hell.

It came to her that the squalid lanes and alleys of the rookery were densely populated despite the nearly empty streets. She felt the weight of thousands of dull, sorrowful, hopeless minds pressing in upon her own mind and soul like the fog itself. She sensed hunger and illness, avarice, too, and a grasping, roiling evil in the dark spirit of the place. She searched for hope, but found little, either within herself or in the gloom that surrounded her.

“Take a dram, mother?” one of the four men asked her, and she hurried away without answering, listening to the laughter behind her, clutching her bag beneath her cloak. No one with any sense would carry anything of value in such a place unless they wanted to be knocked on the head.

Mother , he had said… She glanced furtively back at the men. Coincidence, no doubt.

Her temples throbbed painfully, and it came to her that her son Edward’s spirit haunted the air roundabout, as if he were standing nearby. “Edward?” she asked in a whisper, listening with her mind rather than her ears. There was a courtyard ahead, with fog swirling through it. She was drawn into it, seeing now an illuminated figure hovering within the mists, its outline coming into focus: Edward’s ghost, fully formed. His three-dimensional semblance was made solid by the fog itself, almost as solid as if he were a living boy. He seemed to see her – she was certain he did. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart felt a yearning that made her faint. She stepped forward, holding out her arms until she was bathed in his light – not the meager candle glow that had generated his ghost when she had possessed the skull, but a vivid, living illumination. Images flitted through her mind now like pictures on a screen, memories of Edward’s time on earth: Mary Eastman as a girl, the books by his bedside, a fire in the hearth, a patch of ground with his shadow swinging across it, the shadow of the rope rising from behind his head…

A wave of pain and sorrow engulfed her, and she turned her back on his ghost and staggered into the darkness. When she looked back he was gone. She saw now that a long wall divided the courtyard she stood in from the courtyard beyond. Atop the wall stood a lighted room – the same room that she had seen in the mirror this morning when she had convened with Mabel Morningstar. Narbondo sat at the table, looking out at her, Edward’s skull before him, its eyes dark. The very sight of it once again filled her with both horror and longing – emotions that should have been incompatible, but were not. She heard footfalls, and turned toward a man who stepped out of the shadows to her left. He wore a low hat with a rounded crown, which gave him the air of a country parson.

“I’m sent to convey the Doctor’s wishes, ma’am.” He swept his hat from his head and bowed theatrically. He was bald on top, his hair in ringlets like an illustration of Nero. “He beckons you up, ma’am – bids you to come freely, of your own accord.”

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, damned if she would be cowed by the man. She was in unfamiliar territory here, but that was all the more reason to be forthright. Her communion with Edward’s ghost had solidified her resolve.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “Only that the Doctor would have a word with you. I’ve been waiting this past hour, since nightfall, and now you’ve come. I’m bound to do my duty and show you up the stairs.”

“Good enough. I’m bound to do my duty and follow. I wonder, though. Did you see the ghost just now?”

“Plainly.”

“It was the ghost of my son,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

“It’s not my business to think, ma’am. I leave that to the Doctor. Will you come up?”

“Only if I know your name.”

“That would be George Kittering, ma’am, at your service.”

“You can call me Mother Laswell. The man upstairs, whom you call the Doctor, once called me ‘mother,’ and it wasn’t figurative, mind you. I am indeed his mother.”

George nodded, considering this but apparently having nothing to say. He turned around, moving toward the arched passage in the wall that loomed before them, almost obscured by fog. She was aware of footfalls behind her now, and she glanced back, not surprised to see the man who had offered her a dram of gin, followed by his three companions, the largest of the three looming a full foot above the others. She knew now that they weren’t a threat to her. Quite the contrary, they had no doubt been waiting for her, four of Narbondo’s bullies on the lookout for her appearance, perhaps to guarantee her safe passage through the rookery.

It came to her that the night suddenly had a fateful quality to it, as if something that had been scripted long ago were coming to pass. She and her murderous son were strangely of a like mind. She came to him willingly, out of need. He invited her in willingly, but what was his need? She reminded herself that it lay within her to exert her will in order to alter the script. She was a free woman and she disbelieved in fate.

The wall before her was built of stone, stained black by years of grit. Further on lay the adjacent courtyard, which contained a warren of windowless shanties, what were called back-to-backs, leaning together around the perimeter like card houses, side by side and one atop the other, fading in the murk in either direction. The people dwelling in the depths must live in perpetual darkness, she thought – candles or lanterns day and night, although surely they could scarcely afford to buy either candles or lamp oil. Here and there windows were faintly aglow. A semblance of life was carried on within, entire families living in single rooms – many hundreds of lives having come to a standstill here in this place of darkness that was a biscuit toss away from the Royal Mint. Mother Laswell turned away unhappily, reminding herself that she was but one old woman in a city of millions, and that she had made a hash of her own family, or hadn’t prevented it from happening, and yet fortune had treated her well despite it, but leaving her with a deep sense of guilt that she wouldn’t cast off this side of the grave.

George opened a heavy door in the stone beneath the arch, nodding her into a little vestibule where a gas lamp threw out a sputtering glow. She climbed the stairs with a heavy heart and a sense of doom, hearing the door shut behind her, counting the sixteen stair treads that wound around on themselves, and finding herself in a passage that was richly decorated in its gaudy way, a stark contrast to the poverty below. She saw that George hadn’t followed, and was relieved.

Another door just ahead stood ajar, and she knew at once that it led into the room that overlooked the courtyard. Again it came into her mind that Narbondo had drawn her there: the men lounging in the street, George waiting to greet her, the door standing open before her now. The robbery of poor Edward’s grave and Mary Eastman’s murder had baited the trap, and now here she was, ten seconds from setting foot in it. If she walked away, she wondered, would he let her go?