The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock

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