The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock Page B

loneliness welled up within him now, although it was mixed with a draft of happiness, which led him to wonder at the strange good luck that had brought him here, this snug cottage being the first real home he could remember, discounting the wagon-roofed lorry in which he and his mother dwelt during their days traveling with Duffy’s Circus. He thought about his mother, their happy days on the open road, his two threadbare years following her death, living hard in and around Billingsgate where he earned a few coins shucking oysters, as they called it, for Square Davey the oysterman, and summer nights sleeping beneath London Bridge, where he had discovered on a particularly dark evening that a short-bladed oyster knife might shuck the blood out of a man in short order if a person knew just where to put the blade. He had left the man lying in a crimson pool, black in the moon shadow, although whether dead or alive he couldn’t say, because he hadn’t lingered.
    Remembering the man made him shudder, and he still had nightmares of the face looming up before him, and the soft voice, “...Come with me now, boy,” – just those five words, and the hand clutching his arm. He had wished the man dead more than once, if it weren’t already so, although doubtless it was a sin to make such a wish. But that was in another lifetime, it seemed to him now, and he was happy to have got out of London and into the countryside. He still possessed the knife, which he kept sharp out of habit.
    There was a scratching on the door – predictable old Hodge, wanting company. He stood up from his bed and slipped on his shoes. In the moment that he opened the door, Hodge flew in past his leg, leaping up onto the table and arching his back, looking keenly out into the night.
    “What did you see, Hodge?” Finn asked. “It wasn’t that old stoat out and about, was it?” Hodge didn’t answer, but seemed soothed at the sound of Finn’s voice and shifted his interest to the piece of shortcake that lay on the table. The light blinked out in the gallery windows of the big house opposite, the family settling down. Thinking to take in the night air, Finn stepped out through the door, closing it behind him, and stood listening to a nightingale singing in the trees nearby. The Professor had told him that it was only the male bird that sang at night, lonesome and without a mate. So it went for many things, or so his mother had told him. He saw that a fragment of moon rode in the sky, bright enough so that he could see a shifting in the shadows at the edge of the rose garden now – something solid, not a shadow at all. A deer, perhaps?
    He walked in that direction as quietly as he could, the shape of the animal revealing itself as the distance shortened – a red deer, right enough, a stag, enormous it seemed to Finn, with a broad set of antlers, eating the roses right off the stems, the scoundrel. It raised its head, looking at him indifferently. Finn picked up a stone and pitched it at the deer, hitting it on the flank. “Go on, sir!” Finn said to it. He had pruned those roses like old Binger had taught him, in such a way as to bring out the blooms. Precious few would be left by tomorrow if every animal in creation had its way with them. “Be off with you!” He shied another stone, a trifle harder, and the deer bolted up the alley in the direction of the road, but almost at once slowed down, walking at a leisurely gait, as if to have the last word on the matter.
    Finn saw a strange shimmering light then, a faint glow moving among the shadows of the trees, perhaps a man with a muffled lantern...? The deer, seeming to see it also, abruptly skittered sideways, as if pushed by a heavy wind, and in the blink of an eye leapt into the undergrowth and disappeared. Finn realized that the night birds and crickets had fallen silent, although he couldn’t say when it had happened, and he saw that the light wasn’t apparently from a lantern at all, but had