James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

He could see it below him now – a heavy iron pot lying atop a coal stove set out of the wind in a lamp-lit alcove. The pot had a lid on it, but thin smoke rose from the coals that heated the pot and from around the lid. In the light of a lamp hung on a peg, a bearded dwarf tended the fire beneath the kettle, which glowed with a raw white flame. He noted the dwarf’s careful attention to it. The man was leery of getting too close, as if the pot might explode. Very nearby stood a coster’s barrow, doctored up fancy. It had a polished metal bed, brass, apparently. It was long and narrow and with springs at the axles. Three kegs sat atop it. Finn took it at first to be a portable coffee stall, although soon enough he saw that he was wrong. The iron-bound kegs had no spigot. Instead, in one of them there appeared to be a bronze pipe set in the bung, with a flexible brass tube affixed to it, the excess coiled beside it on the bed, perhaps twenty feet of it. There was a nozzle on the end – the siphon, he thought, for spraying the syllabub. He saw the handle of a pump atop the keg, no doubt meant to pressurize it. The thing looked like a cross between a beer keg and a hubble-bubble, but he knew it was nothing as innocent as that. The long hose would allow a man to stand a good way off. A second keg with a funnel atop sat beside the first, an India-rubber hose with a broad-throated bellows connected to it, the bellows affixed flat to the wagon. A third keg, large enough to hold a couple of gallons sat alongside in a small heap of black dust.

He speculated over the apparatus for a moment, but couldn’t puzzle it out, and it was none of his business anyway… unless it was. He made his way back to the peak of the roof and looked across toward Angel Alley, which was still mostly hidden by the warren of buildings. He could see the roof of Narbondo’s apartment, directly opposite where he stood, which meant it was just opposite where the dwarf was cooking up syllabub. Were the buildings connected? Another way in and out, perhaps? He returned to his perch above the smoking kettle. Some distance away stood a convenient drainpipe that led downward to a lean-to roof that wasn’t above eight feet off the ground – easy enough to climb down. He moved away in that direction, testing the strength of the drainpipe before making his way hand over hand until his feet stood on the lower roof. He leapt from there to the stones of the courtyard, knees bending to take the force of the drop, and then walked around the side of the lean-to toward where the dwarf worked at his oven. The best way was the bold way, when you were up to acrobatics.

“I’ve got a message from the Doctor,” he said to the dwarf, who turned and looked Finn up and down as if he were a walking dustbin.

“You’ve got an ugly face, too,” the dwarf said. “You can use them both for bum paper for all of me, and tell the bleeding Doctor I said so.”

“You’re to give me a ride down to Egypt Bay.”

“Except I’m not a-going down to Egypt Bay, you little shit. Not till we’re done with this here caper.”

“Tomorrow,” Finn said. “I don’t mean tonight.”

“Then tomorrow you wait here, sitting in plain sight. If the Crumpet says we’re taking you to Egypt Bay, then that’s just what we’ll do.”

Finn was suddenly at a loss for words, the name “Crumpet” catching in his throat along with his breath. A door began to open behind the barrow, and Finn turned away, trying to affect the air of someone naturally taking his leave. He heard the Crumpet’s simpering, high-pitched voice say, “Do you want your bed sent out, dwarfy-dear? A nice nap, perhaps?”

“Shut your gob,” said the dwarf, “where have you been this past two hours while I’ve been brewing up this stinking pitch?”

“Shepherding the night along,” the Crumpet said. “Himself is in a pretty mood. Assassins everywhere, apparently.”

“Now you’re here, Crumpet, lend a hand. Clap on to that there tin and sort it out.”

Finn angled toward the roast pig, being butchered now on a board set up on two sawhorses, steaming chunks being handed out on sheets of newsprint. “I’ll buy a portion, sir,” Finn said, his voice husky, his heart beating hard.

“Take yourself off,” a man said to him. “This ain’t no public mess.”

“Stow it, Tom,” the man butchering the pig said. “It’s my bleeding pig. The boy needs a bite of supper.” He handed Finn a paper with a half-pound of dripping pork shank on it. “Keep your pennies,” he said. “Duke Humphrey’s treat.”

Finn thanked him and stepped away into the shadows, making himself inconspicuous, wondering at the odd business of himself giving Newman the crackers for no reason other than it came into his head to do it. And now here he was eating first-rate pork that a man had given him that same way, one thing leading to another, or so he hoped. He liked the idea that a person might be served out for good deeds as well as bad. From the safety of his hiding place he held the newspaper in front of his face and blew on the hot meat while he watched the Crumpet struggle with a heap of folded tin, unhinging it into a four-sided box with no top or bottom. The dwarf used a pair of iron tongs to set the smoking pot of syllabub carefully onto the metal bed of the barrow, securing it with twisted wire, and then the two of them climbed onto upturned crates and slipped the tin sides down over the kegs, hiding them. Painted on the tin was the word “Pine-apples” with an ill-painted depiction of the fruit alongside.

The Crumpet took a step back, looked the cart over, took the lamp from its peg and hung it on a hook protruding from the barrow, and then cupped his hand over the chimney and blew out the flame. He closed the still-open door of the building behind him, and the two of them trudged away across the courtyard and up the alley toward Wentworth Street, the dwarf pushing the barrow and the Crumpet walking on ahead.

Finn gave them forty feet and then followed, soon stepping out onto Wentworth Street, past a sign on the wall: “George Yard,” it read. Across Wentworth Street lay another narrow bystreet, toward which the two were evidently bound. There was a moderate crowd of people afoot, and the dwarf shouted, “Make a lane, there!” trying to push the barrow through the unheeding pedestrians.

Finn stood for a moment thinking, suddenly unsure whether to follow or to return to Angel Alley. The Crumpet was evidently going about Narbondo’s dirty business, and it would be interesting to know what business that was. But Finn had no desire to put himself in the way of the Crumpet, or to leave Eddie behind if he could help it. The hot syllabub and siphon apparatus hidden in the barrow had an ominous air to it, although what it portended he couldn’t begin to say – nothing so innocent as burning the Witch of Winter. There was little he could do about it anyway, he decided, and might likely get burnt to a cinder for trying.

Finn turned back toward Angel Alley, hurrying past the dog kennels now. His mention of Egypt Bay hadn’t confounded the dwarf as he feared it might; it had gone straight home. He entered the yard with the pump where the ghost had appeared. The old woman and Lazarus were nowhere to be seen, but he spotted Newman standing in a ray of moonlight along a dangerously leaning wall of shacks built of ancient boards. The boy stood rigid, staring upward, as if at the moon itself, and Finn realized with a start that his eyes were rolled back into his head. He seemed to have petrified. His mouth was open. Perhaps he was asleep, standing up.

“Ahoy, Newman,” Finn said, and then again louder when he got no response.

Newman’s face changed, its slackness tightening, his mouth slowly drawing shut, his eyes reappearing. He swallowed heavily, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing. He stared at Finn for a moment before apparently recognizing him. “’Lo, Crackers,” he said, blinking.