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.”
“But you can unburden yourself now,” Kraken told her solicitously. “You’re amongst friends. Share it out, and let us take up the weight of it in your stead.”
St. Ives poured sherry into the glasses and then settled back in his chair, giving her room to breathe. She held her glass aloft and peered through it at the candlelight in the chandelier. Then she tasted it, set it down again, nodded, and went on.
“My sons grew up together, but not as brothers. The older one couldn’t abide the sight of the younger. I saw him turn away from his… humanity, month by month, till I scarcely knew him. Perhaps the corruption was my husband’s doing. He taught the boy what he knew of necromancy and vivisection. And the boy was a willing pupil, incredibly apt. I couldn’t stop the thing that I could see growing within him, not with them both attracted to the same unnatural studies. My husband’s laboratory stood at the top of the property, hidden among the trees. What they did there I can’t say, and didn’t want to know, and when fresh graves were dug up in the churchyard I turned a deaf ear, so to speak, to my shame, just as I suffered the crimes he did to me, and kept them secret. So time passed, until Edward was twelve years old and his brother nearly sixteen. Your Narbondo was completely foreign to me by this time, a hateful stranger, although he lived in this very house. Edward was fond of little Mary Eastman, and she of him, although both of them were children, really. This… Narbondo… fancied Mary Eastman himself, although I knew little of it until years later, when Mary took me into her confidence, for she was as guilt-ridden as I.
“To get to the heart of it, the man who calls himself Narbondo murdered his own brother in cold blood. He hanged him from the limb of a tree, endeavoring to make it seem that Edward was a self-destroyer. But fate is eccentric, Professor, and never more so than in this instance, for my late husband apparently found Edward still swinging from the branch, and Narbondo gawking at him, quite satisfied with himself, I’m sure.
“How do I know this, you’re wondering. I can reveal that to you now, although I could not have yesterday, when Mary Eastman was still alive. Mary was a witness to the crime. Narbondo had the temerity to suggest that with Edward removed from the world, Mary might naturally favor himself, Narbondo, who was bound for glorious things, for power over life and death. Of course she spurned him. She saw quite clearly that he was a living horror, and she told him that she would see him hanged, an eye for an eye. And so he threatened her with the same fate, and she knew absolutely that he meant it. She fled, in fear for her life, but almost at once my late husband appeared, and she turned aside from the path and hid herself.
“They cut the body down, the two of them, and took it away. When Edward failed to come home that evening, there was a general hue and cry. A bloody knife was discovered, and marks of a body having been dragged to the edge of the river. It was spring, and the river was in flood, and it was assumed that Edward’s body was somewhere downstream, tumbling toward the sea, and on that assumption the search ended.
“I understood the tale to be true, for what else was there for me to believe? Part of me suspected that Narbondo had wielded the knife; his demeanor, however, showed no trace of it. Years would pass before Mary Eastman told me the tale, although it was nearly beyond her powers to do so. The poor girl bore no blame, of course, for Edward was already dead, and she was afraid for her life. Narbondo sent her letters over the years, with clippings from the London papers, accounts of murders and mutilations, just to keep his threats fresh in her mind. She burned them, but they struck home in any event. She told me that she had never slept peacefully, although I pray that she does so now.
“What I tell you next is speculation, although much of it I heard from the mouth of my own shameless husband in the end. He spoke lightly of hellish things, as if there were no such place, if you take my meaning. He saw no virtue in sentiment. You believe yourself to be a rational man, Professor, but I tell you that there are depths of rationality that you haven’t plumbed, and never will, for you don’t have it in you to do so.”
St. Ives looked out through the window at the moon that had risen above the treetops. It was quite dark outside, and he wondered abruptly what Alice and the children were doing while they waited for his return.
Mother Laswell poured another inch of sherry into the glasses, and studied his face. “You’ve a conscience,” she said to him, “and you’ve compassion, and William tells me that you’ve done good in the world. I believe him, sir. But I tell you plainly that those three things are as irrational as any bed-sheet ghost. It’s because of the scientist in you that you do not know who you are, or that you deny it.”
EIGHT
“Suddenly, out in the black night before us, and not two hundred yards away, we heard, at a moment when the wind was silent, the clear note of a human voice…”
Finn laid his magazine on the deal table next to his bed, his mind revolving on sunken galleons and drowned corpses awash on a wave-shattered coast. He wished mightily that he were on that very coast, watching the storm waves crash against the rocky shore and on the lookout for treasures cast up from the sea. He took a bite of the
