The Aylesford Skull (37 page)

It’s the Professor
, Finn thought, his heart leaping. St. Ives had spoken of the airship at every opportunity for weeks now, and surely this must be selfsame ship.
Good old Newman
, he thought. He had delivered the message. If Newman wasn’t a Christian name, it was something just as good. Finn raised the coffee pot in a sort of salute, then quickly recovered his wits and pretended that he was merely shading his eyes to get a better view, and in that moment he noticed that Narbondo’s head was thrust through the open cottage window, and that he, too, was watching the airship. He disappeared back into the room without looking in Finn’s direction.

Finn walked on now, around the side of the stable, heading boldly toward the cottage door carrying the plate and the coffee pot. He stepped up onto the wooden stoop and casually looked behind him and to either side, seeing no one. It occurred to him that someone might be watching through one of the inn windows, and so he mimicked knocking on the cottage door, listened for a moment, and then laid the plate and pot on the stoop and walked away, around the side of the cottage to where the window stood open, out of sight of the inn. He hazarded a glance over the top of the sill, seeing that the room was empty of people, the piece of carpet on the floor pushed aside and a trapdoor standing open. There was a chair in the room, a lamp on a small deal table, a narrow bed against the wall, and a scattering of books – rough living for a man who possessed such a great deal of power, but then Narbondo’s lodgings in Angel Alley had been much the same.
Easy to abandon when there was trouble
, Finn thought.

The cottage stood atop a low hill, and Finn crept toward the bottom, moving silently and listening hard. If he were caught his guilt would be obvious. The hill had been cut back and leveled behind the cottage, forming a small landing outside the cellar door, sheltered by willow scrub. There was a barred window beside the door – more a grate than a window, since there was no glass in it. Farther below lay a stand of trees around a small pond, choked with reeds and lilies. A hay bale was set up, with a target for shooting, and nearby stood various pieces of junk furniture, burned to cinders.

Finn peered in at the window, immediately seeing Narbondo, who stood at a high table, perhaps eight feet long and half as wide, built like a butcher’s block and heavily stained. On the table in front of him sat a human skull, although something had been done to it, for the top of it shone silver in the lamplight as if the bone had been removed and the skull had been crowned with metal. Finn was stricken with the same diabolical unease that he had felt when he was first in Narbondo’s presence – something in his face? He had seen many faces more frightful by far. This was something else, something best not considered too particularly, lest he attract some sort of hellish attention. “Naming calls,” his mother used to say, and Finn had no desire to call forth anything.

The room itself intensified the feeling. Ring-bolts had been set into the sides of the table, useful, no doubt, for strapping things down. The room was clearly a surgeon’s cabinet, and held two wooden chairs and another small table with a basin and pitcher atop it. An ochre-stained coat hung on the wall along with dozens of surgical tools – clamps and bone saws and knives and a heavy butcher’s cleaver, and other appalling instruments that Finn couldn’t identify and didn’t care to. Leather-covered chains, both long and short, hung among the rest. A human skeleton dangled from a hook in the low ceiling, its arms outstretched and fixed with slender iron rods as if it were crucified. On shelves stood a variety of human and animal skulls as well as organs floating in liquid-filled jars, one of which was half full of human eyeballs.

Narbondo stepped around behind the table now, blocking Finn’s view. He bent over, evidently fiddling with the skull, from which an intense light shone forth. Finn felt abruptly as if he was being watched, and he looked around him, seeing no one. He recalled the corpse candle near the road two nights ago, how he had felt the living consciousness of the ghost of the hanged boy. This was something similar – not someone watching
him
, but some entity that had come into the room. He sensed a great sorrow and fear and anger, principally anger, not a child this time.

He deliberately moved his mind away from the fell presence and watched Narbondo, who had crossed the room to fetch a three-tiered, wheeled tea cart on which sat a glass box perhaps three-feet high and one-foot deep and wide, built of a framework of thin metal. Finn saw then that it was in fact two boxes, one inside the other. Narbondo pushed the cart into the path of the light emanating from the skull, and when he stepped away Finn saw the entity itself – the palely visible doll-sized ghost of a woman, its transparent image hovering within the glass boxes.

There was a large leather bellows affixed to the side of a wooden box on the middle shelf, the mouth of the bellows connected to a coiled tube that entered the boxes, running through the outer box and into the inner. Finn was reminded of the pineapple barrow in Angel Alley, except that the smell of hot syllabub was missing. A slender pole hanging from a ceiling beam held a broad glass lens in front of the boxes. Narbondo maneuvered the lens down into the light now, positioning it in order to peer through it at the glowing homunculus imprisoned within the glass walls.

Finn heard the noise of an approaching carriage now, very close by, and apparently Narbondo heard it also, for he set out up the stairs to the room above, leaving the trapdoor open behind him. He would find his breakfast, Finn thought, and someone would cop it for having left it there. That would perhaps start a general search, which would be the beginning of the end for Finn Conrad. He heard voices within the cottage now, and he saw Narbondo descend into the cellar again, followed by a man and a woman. Both stopped when they reached the floor, where they stood and stared, first at the glowing glass boxes with the image of the woman within them and then at the source of the light – the skull on the table.

The man wore a black top hat and was tall and imposing, with gray hair and a narrow face, his features reminding Finn of a bloody-minded weasel. The woman had raven hair beneath her hat, her face covered by a black veil.
It’s him
, Finn thought suddenly, recognizing the man as the one who had been in Narbondo’s rooms last night. He had worn chin whiskers and a pince-nez and an obvious wig, but it was his Lordship, to be certain, undisguised now – or so Narbondo had called him. Last night he had drawn back into the corner of the room when the crackers exploded, fearful of gunfire, and then had lunged at Finn and Eddie at the last moment, and might have had them if he hadn’t been timid. Clearly the man hadn’t wanted to be identified, nor had he been keen to involve himself in any sort of danger.
No wonder
, Finn thought: he had a face that might be recognized on the street easily enough – a public figure, involved in low deeds.

Being veiled, the woman’s face was impossible to read, but his Lordship affected a look of tired indifference. He removed his top hat and set it on the table.

“Very interesting work,” he said, taking in the entrapped ghost and the skull with a broad gesture.

“This particular skull inhabited the head of a common prostitute. I took it on loan.” Narbondo smiled at them, but got no response. “But come,” he said, “I promised you an assurance of my powers, and an assurance you shall have. It will cost me this valuable skull, over which I’ve toiled, but I believe that it will give you an idea of the impending calamity. You and your consortium – I believe that’s the cant term – can be easy in your minds.”

Narbondo drew the lens downward, peering through it again, and for a moment Finn had a clear view of the ghost’s startling visage. There was an appearance of intense, raw loathing radiating from it that Finn could sense quite clearly – more clearly than he could see it. He saw Narbondo recoil from it, and then hurriedly draw the great lens downward so that the light from the skull shone through it. A ray of pure white light illuminated the two boxes now, and the ghost vanished within that light, the intensity of its fierce emotion diminishing. Narbondo pressed the handle of the bellows half a dozen times, and a dark powder – coal dust, Finn supposed – flew out of the hose and swirled within the inner box, the ghost suddenly reappearing, showing plainly now against the suspended dust, looking almost solid and apparently cognizant that it was trapped within a glass coffin.

“You’d be advised to step back,” Narbondo said as the glow within the boxes intensified. There was a penetrating wail in the air roundabout now, the sound of a mourner keening for the dead, a high note at the very edge of apprehension. The glow formed itself into a tiny sun, which began to smoke. Narbondo ceased pressing the bellows and stepped away himself, putting out his arm to sweep the other two even farther back, nearly to the window beyond which Finn watched. If they had looked behind them now, they would have seen him, but there was no chance of that, for they watched intently as the light in the box redoubled in intensity and then redoubled again. The keening noise rose to a higher and higher pitch, and then the interior of the box flashed brightly.

There was the sound of a muffled explosion, very small to Finn’s ear, and in that instant the ghost erupted into a mass of bright sparks that spun for a moment in the void, accompanied by the sound of an inhuman shriek. The sparks winked out, and for a moment the box appeared to have flattened, taking on the semblance of an open door, beyond which lay an infinite darkness, the shriek echoing away into the void.

Finn was compelled to look away, his heart hammering with a dark fear. He watched a white crane fly low above the pond, its neck outstretched, the gray-black feathers spread along the edges of the white wings. When it had disappeared from sight, Finn took in a deep breath and turned back to the window. The light from the skull had gone out. A wisp of smoke arose from it, and there was the smell of sulfur and burning metal on the air. Around the skull the wooden table was aflame, a small circle of white witch fire. Narbondo looked about himself, shrugged, picked up Lord Moorgate’s top hat, and dropped it over the skull. He pushed the magnifying lens up toward the ceiling, rolled the tea cart back into its place, and lit a second Argand lamp on a shelf above it, casting a light on the glass boxes – or rather a single box now, for the interior box had been shattered in the explosion. The exterior box had contained the blast, although the very heavy glass in the front panel had cracked in half and opened outward like a clamshell now.

“And so the vitality of the skull has been consumed,” Narbondo said, “and the soul whisked away to the netherworld. You felt the darkness of that place when the door opened, I’ll warrant. I saw it in your face, Lord Moorgate.”

“I felt something, yes, although nothing that warrants my driving out into this godforsaken marsh.” Moorgate’s voice, intended to be commanding, quavered slightly too much to be persuasive. “You meant for this display to be an example of your powers, sir, and you ask me to take it on faith that something similar will bring down the cathedral, which is many hundreds of times the size of your trifling glass boxes. Your powers are impressive, but on a very small scale – scarcely the sort of assurance we had in mind. The Bayswater Club and Fleet River debacles were entertaining, but comparatively simple.”

Narbondo shrugged. “It pains me to have fallen out of your good graces, my lord. I’m desolated, I assure you.”

“You see fit to jest. I’ll put it to you simply. My associates and I have done our part at great expense. You promised us the skull of the boy in payment, fully realized. In anticipation I had de Groot purchase one of the miniaturized lamps at considerable expense. I paid out a substantial sum to further our project, including hiring a man to produce forged letters that will damn that traitor Gladstone for good and all, indeed, will hang him. I’ve another twenty-five thousand pounds promised to see the plan through till the end. Our friend in the War Office tells me that everything is arranged. My man de Groot will make a payment as soon as he hears from me, and will deliver another sum when the thing is finished. All he needs in order to carry it out is the money, which is laid by. I’ve risked my career, my very life, in other words, in order to further both our goals, but aside from this... display, this teapot tempest... you, sir, have done nothing but make empty promises.”

“Your political aspirations bore me, Lord Moorgate,” Narbondo said, “as does the phantom noose that encircles your hypothetical head. We both stand to profit by this venture, but only if it’s successful. My cheating you would scarcely lead to its success.”

“My thinking exactly. I’ve been given to understand that you’ve offered to ransom the boy to his father for a sum equal to what I’ve agreed to give to my man in the War Office. I don’t make any accusations, but it seems to me uncommon possible that you’ve promised the boy to two different parties, standing to gain twice if only you can hold out another day or so. Last night you were in London. Today I find you in the marsh. Heaven knows where you’ll be next week, after the deed has been done.”

“Heaven keeps no track of my comings and goings, I can assure you. I’ll remind you that I did you the favor of letting you know where I was bound, for here you both are. I could scarcely remain in the rookery.”

Moorgate waved the statement away, as if it didn’t signify. “I mean to say that time is short, as you very well know. You promised to contrive a lamp from the skull of the boy, but you haven’t undertaken to do it. I’m compelled to believe that you keep the boy alive because you mean to play us false if you can find a way.”

“You’re a bold man, Lord Moorgate. Once again you’ve come into my domain and made unwarranted assertions. I’ve only to whistle, and ten bloodthirsty men will come running. Perhaps
you
would like a turn atop the table here, my lord? Your own skull shows great promise.” Narbondo gestured at the surgical instruments on the wall, his downturned face looking wantonly demonic.