The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock Page A

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
    CORPSE CANDLE
    “S uddenly, 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 buttery shortcake that Mrs. Langley had brought over earlier today along with a pot of jam, which stood empty, the spoon still in it. He set what was left of the slice onto the oilcloth, carefully wiped his hands on his trousers, and studied the covers of his collection of Cornhill Magazine, eight copies in all so far. The Professor had passed them on to him, which sometimes meant within two or three days of the arrival of the magazine, the Professor being a prodigiously quick reader. Finn meant to tackle the stories one at a time, and he favored reading slowly, attending to the pictures along the way, looking back now and then to reread and savor a likely passage. He was in no hurry to finish good things, whether shortcakes or stories, and that was doubly true for “The Merry Men,” which he had undertaken to read through this evening.
    The lamp next to his bedside was smoking, and he turned the wick down a trifle, listening to the night breeze rustle the foliage beyond the window. Through the open curtain he could see that the lamps were still lit in the Professor’s house, or, more rightly, in her house – Alice’s house, Mrs. St. Ives – since it had belonged to her old aunt. Surely it wasn’t respectable to think of her as Alice, but he relished the name and repeated it often to himself, and it had come to sound like a variety of beautiful flower to him.
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