Mother Laswell looked slightly abashed, as if she had overreached herself. She turned the magic mirror on its base, the polished surface reflecting the candlelight. “I beg your forgiveness,” she said. “I don’t mean to speak slightingly of you.”
“I find your words wholly complimentary,” St. Ives said. “And perhaps no man can know himself entirely. Pray continue. Leave nothing out.”
“Aye,” Kraken said. “Speak your heart.”
“I’m nearly through it, Professor, and just as well. I don’t relish calling it up. It fell out that they took my Edward’s body to the laboratory, where my husband… where my husband removed the head. It was then, or so I speculate, that he had Narbondo drag the corpse to the river to dispose of it, leaving the bloody knife as a piece of false evidence. Narbondo, clever boy that he was, disposed of the body in his own way. He wanted a corpse of his own to work on, you see, and the cost of a body as fresh as Edward’s was too dear. He hid Edward’s corpse in a garden shed and locked the door, visiting his brother in his spare moments thereafter, learning what he could of human anatomy. In the weeks that followed the murder, with Narbondo as a pupil, my husband fabricated a lamp from Edward’s skull – the sort that John Mason had been at work on, but hadn’t sufficient skill to contrive. My husband had taken photographs of Edward some time back. His aversion to sentimentality made me wonder at his motives at the time. He always had a motive, you see. He did nothing but with an eye toward gain.
“I became increasingly certain that he and his acolyte were responsible for Edward’s death, and one afternoon, when I could stand it no longer, I made my way to the laboratory and surprised him at his work. It sounds insane for me to say that I knew my own son’s skull when I saw it sitting atop a copper-sheathed table, but I did know it. It was no longer a mere skull, for he had completed his work upon it, to my horror. Beside it lay a notebook written out in my husband’s clear hand. He had kept a record of his experimentations, as if he had been dissecting a cat.
“I confronted him with the murder, and he was quite bold in telling me to look to my own progeny if I needed a party to blame. The deformity, he told me, was in my own seed. I knew then that Edward had been murdered by his brother. My husband wasn’t a timid man. He would happily have admitted to the crime if he had committed it. I gestured at Edward’s skull, turned into God knew what. ‘You would use him this way?’ I asked my husband. ‘Your own son?’ ‘He’s no longer my son,’ my husband said to me. ‘He’s dead. A mere corpse. And as for using him, my intention is to compel his ghost to remain among the living. You can thank me for that, for I believe that I’ve succeeded. I can summon him for you, if you’d like.’
“I was suddenly quite certain that he meant to murder me into the bargain, and I determined to impede his efforts now, since I had been dead in spirit for a very long time, and at that moment actual death seemed far more reasonable than life. I picked up a heavy glass cube with both hands and smashed it down onto my husband’s head when he foolishly turned away, knocking him to the ground. And there he stayed, perhaps dead, although I scarcely believed it at the time. I snatched up Edward’s skull and looked about for a place to hide it, because I meant to take it with me if I won free. It was a thing of horror, but it was all that was left to me. There was no place, however, that was safe, and so I pitched that glass cube through the window and the skull after it, watching as it rolled into the greenery on the banks of the little stream that runs down along the top of the farm. Then I snatched up the notebook and slipped it beneath my bodice. I began to smash things generally, then, caught up in a growing rage for what my husband had done, and in the smashing I knocked over a lamp, which cast burning oil on a heap of crates and papers and set the place alight. Good, I thought. I’ll burn him to death.
“But luck wasn’t with me. My husband staggered to his feet just then, not knowing whether to murder me or attend to the blaze, which had spread to the curtains. The old wooden boards in the wall caught fire, and the smoke drove us both out into the open air, my husband just then realizing that the skull had vanished from the tabletop. But he was scarcely in a position to mention it, for coming along toward us at a run was a group of men from the village, some of them carrying weapons. Among them was my own disgraced son. Aylesford still had a watchman in those days, and Narbondo had summoned him, having revealed that his own father was a vivisectionist and had murdered his brother Edward. The boy was clearly surprised to see me there, and watched in something like dismay as the laboratory burned. I knew what he regretted, and I was happy in my way for having deprived him of it, and for seeing the loss in his face. He had let his father complete his detestable work and then had betrayed him, intent upon taking the skull himself. Now it was lost to both of them.
“They dragged my husband away, and what they found beneath the charred floor of the laboratory was sufficient to hang him. At the trial Mary Eastman swore, no doubt at Narbondo’s insistence and to her own undying shame, that she had seen my husband murder Edward, and so his fate was doubly sealed. There was no blame cast at me. I had long been considered an object of pity thereabouts, and when it was known that I had beaten my husband and set the laboratory alight, I was very nearly a heroine.
“Soon after, Narbondo disappeared from Aylesford and didn’t return, there being nothing left for him here. He needed a larger stage on which to work his mischief. I’m aware that he searched for the skull in the ashes of the laboratory, knowing that several skulls had been found, each in a different state of ornamentation and blackened in the fire. I believe now that he suspected that I had it, but he never once accused me of it. Perhaps he was afraid of Mary Eastman, fearing that she would step forward if I came to harm at Narbondo’s hand. He found my husband’s notebook, however, and took it, although by then I had read it many times, and I knew the secret of Edward’s skull, which I had retrieved from where it lay hidden along the stream. I buried my son’s bones in the churchyard when they were discovered in that locked shed, but the skull I kept in my possession for thirty long years. I communed with Edward’s spirit many, many times, Professor.”
She fell silent then and St. Ives realized that she was weeping. Kraken put his hand on her arm, and she covered his hand with her own.
“Communed with his spirit?” St. Ives asked after an interval. “Do you mean literally?”
“Quite so,” she said. “On nights when the fog rose off the fields I projected his… features, if you will, on the mists, and he appeared as he had been, as a boy, and with a semblance of life, or at least movement. He knew I was nearby, although I’m certain he couldn’t see me, not in the sense that I can see you sitting before me now. He couldn’t speak, of course, but his face betrayed his anguish, and I was haunted by the fear that I promoted his anguish each time I called him forth. There was a depravity on my part, too, which I very well knew. I resorted to laudanum in an effort to restore my sanity, but the drug magnified my longing, and soon I had two vices rather than just the one. Endeavoring to keep the dead alive is to murder oneself slowly, do you see? I knew I had to bury my Edward, and with William’s help I finally did.”
Kraken sat staring at the tabletop now, nodding silently. “Nearly a year ago, it was, sir – mid-July. We paid a visit to the churchyard, and with the sexton’s help, we laid him to rest in his coffin.”
“And now Narbondo has recovered it,” St. Ives said. “He had only to murder Mary Eastman to complete his work.”
Kraken stirred in his chair and cleared his throat. “Or to begin it, sir.” And then to Mother Laswell he said, “The door, Mother. Tell the Professor about the door. It’s the door, sir, that we’re up against now.”
She nodded, considered for a moment, and said, “It’s here that we’ll come a cropper, Professor. I don’t ask you to believe what I’m about to reveal, but you must know that I believe it. My late husband had no interest in his son’s ghost for its own sake. As was ever his way, he meant to make use of it. Spirits are misplaced in the world of the living. They long to move on, but for reasons beyond our ken, they sometimes do not. To put it into the simplest terms, John Mason had attempted to contrive a means to open a lane to the land of the dead, through which a ghost might pass on, and through which a man might follow, and might return through it again.
“I’m unaware of the particulars, sir, for the discussions in my late husband’s notebook, when it referred to the opening of the gate, were mere sketches and implications, although there was some discussion of his affairs with John Mason, touching on Mason’s inept work contriving the lamps, as he referred to them. My husband carried his own knowledge in his mind, for the most part, and his mind is closed to us now.
“It was open for a number of years to the youthful Narbondo, however. John Mason blew himself to pieces when he detonated the dust in a grain silo, attempting to project an earthbound spirit onto the suspended cloud before it exploded. Whether he was successful in opening a gate to the netherworld, if you will, God alone knows. I’m certain, however, that my husband was far more adept at necromancy than John Mason had been. My husband was a man of vast knowledge, Professor, arcane, evil knowledge, if you’ll permit me to use the word, and he was very much feared in certain circles. Narbondo, however, had no fear of him, even as a boy, but used my husband to his own ends, just as my husband used others. Narbondo, we’re certain, is in possession of what my husband referred to as the Aylesford Skull, simply to keep it distinct from others of its kind. He never for a moment thought of it as the skull of his only son, objects and people being merely more or less useful to him.”
“You’re worried that Narbondo will make use of the skull, as John Mason attempted to do?” St. Ives asked. “He means to open one of these fabled gates?”
“Exactly, sir, except that his goal, I fear, is to open the gate fully, and to leave it open.”
“I don’t quite follow you,” St. Ives said.
Kraken tugged on his chin, widened his eyes, and said, “She means there’ll be a-coming and going when he’s finished, sir. That a man might walk across Piccadilly and into Hell as easy as kiss-my-hand and back out again with a bucket of brimstone and his hair afire, and so with them that dwells there, the dead and the living in a sort of hotchpotch, as the Scotsman said.”
“Why would a man desire to bring about that end?” St. Ives asked.
“Bill’s account is perhaps a bit fanciful,” Mother Laswell said, “but your question is well taken. Morbid curiosity, might answer, or an opportunity to travel where no man has traveled previously. It is quite possible that a man possessed by evil would be drawn to such an atrocity for reasons of his own, or perhaps in his narcissism he fancies himself a modern Virgil, who would lead people through the realms of the dead. We know nothing of the nature of the gate, Professor, or what lies beyond. We cannot say whether it leads to an actual, earthly place, or to the spirit world, or to both in some manner. But such questions are of secondary importance. It’s the very attempt that we fear – the detonation, the spilling of human blood, perhaps on a massive scale.”
St. Ives nodded. “I would very much like to see that notebook,” he said. “No fragment of it remains?”
She shook her head decisively.
“And the laboratory? Perhaps the foundation still stands?”
“An oast house was built on the site.”
“There’s nothing then?”
“Nothing, Professor. What I know you now know. The only thing separating our mutual understanding has to do with belief.”
St. Ives sat for a time in silence, and then said, “At the moment, Mother Laswell, I’m at a loss for a suitable response. You pay me a great compliment simply by taking me into your confidence, but I’m not certain that I can repay you in kind. Your story has a good deal to do with the ways in which a man’s endeavors might betray the very things that he most loves, or should love – his wife and his children. Since you’ve been candid with me, I’ll pay you in kind. At the moment my life is full of the duties I’ve mistakenly ignored to my own peril – my home and my wife and children. I’ll consider what you’ve told me, and in fact won’t be able to do otherwise, since the tale is compelling, but I tell you truthfully that I see no clear course of action, and, if I did, I’d be disinclined to pursue it. There’s little profit in my speaking falsely here.”
He stood up from the table as the clock was striking ten o’clock, and it came to him that Cleo and Eddie would be in bed by now, quite likely asleep, perhaps Alice also. He had meant to speak of air vessels and elephants to them tonight, simply to inform their dreams, but it would be too late for that. “Good evening, ma’am,” he said, but Mother Laswell’s eyes seemed to be focused on something that was a very great distance away, and his words apparently went unheard.
“I’ll show you out, Professor,” Kraken said in a low voice, leading the way toward the door. They passed through the entry hall and into the starlit night. Ned Ludd the mule was still abroad, as if standing sentinel until St. Ives had gone away and the imaginary drawbridge could be hoisted and secured. The sliver of moon shone in the sky in the direction of the river.
“I can find my way home, Bill. You remain with Mother Laswell. She needs some comfort.”
“Aye, she’s in a state, sir, and has been since the news of Mary Eastman’s death this morning. As soon as she heard of the grave being dug up and the skull gone, she vowed to hunt Narbondo down. She brought him into the world, she said, and it was her bounden duty to take him out of it again and to put poor Edward to rest. She means to kill her own son, sir. I talked sense to her six to the dozen, but I don’t have the words to make her see, and I was hoping that with your help she would…” He fell silent now, as if he had overreached himself.
“I honor you for it, Bill. And I envy your faith in both of us. I’m convinced that she will abandon any idea of killing Narbondo. She’ll see things more clearly when the sun rises. Come round to meet Eddie and Cleo tomorrow. You’ll understand me better, perhaps. A man changes over the years. We’ve had some adventures, you and I, but for me that season has passed away, or nearly so.”
“Perhaps for the best, sir, if only you’re in the right of it. Here now, Ned!” He stepped down off the porch and put his hand on the mule’s neck. “Time for bed, old son.” He nodded to St. Ives, deep worry visible in his face, then turned Ned Ludd around and headed in the direction of the barn, the shadowy outline of which St. Ives could see beyond the now-dark palm house.