The Aylesford Skull (53 page)

* * *

Doyle and Hasbro followed a small stream that coursed through a brick tunnel connecting the Fleet River to the Walbrook far below St. Martin Ludgate. There was the sound of what might be an engine, which grew louder as they moved west toward the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs. Soon they found the Fleet itself, raging with floodwaters from the storm, and they set out downriver in the direction of the cathedral.

Mingled with the noise of the engine now was the unmistakable sound of organ music. Hasbro drew his pistol, Doyle closed the shutter over the lantern, and they moved forward as quickly as they could, the Fleet flowing at their left hand. The engine abruptly fell silent, and the organ music dwindled. Hurried footfalls approached, and within moments two men appeared, coming along in a ring of lantern light – a giant of a man with a tangle of black hair, his arm in a sling, and a bearded dwarf. Neither carried weapons. Doyle opened the shutter on the lantern and Hasbro raised the pistol and stepped out to block the path. The dwarf turned and bolted into the darkness, but the giant rushed forward with a wild roar, heedless of the pistol. Hasbro calmly shot him in the chest. He staggered but came on again, his rage doubled, and Hasbro shot him a second time, the giant’s body spinning around with the force of the bullet and toppling into the Fleet where it was drawn under the dark water.

* * *

Helen
, St. Ives thought, the madwoman’s name coming to him – almost certainly the woman who had walked through Lord Moorgate’s blood after his throat was slit, who had only a moment ago shot the pistol that she gripped in a shaking hand. She looked away from St. Ives now, toward the paneled wall to her left, which slid open silently.

Dr. Narbondo himself stepped through it, dressed in a black, wide-belted Anglican cassock, looking around with satisfaction as if the cathedral were his own. In his arms he carried an open basket in which sat a black cone with the pointed end lopped off and capped with a thick, white wafer. It was clearly cast iron – an infernal machine, oddly shaped, certainly, but with an evil look about it.

Narbondo glanced around, nodding at St. Ives as if he accepted his presence there and wasn’t at all concerned with it. Then he saw Helen and his expression grew wary. He took stock of her – watched the pistol in her hand. St. Ives saw Eddie appear behind the altar, under which he had no doubt been hiding.
Not now
, St. Ives thought. But Eddie looked about unhappily, saw his father, and dashed in his direction, as if his father’s mere presence would protect him. St. Ives held his hand up in an attempt to wave him back. He saw Alice pull herself out from beneath the front of the altar now, and shout after Eddie, calling him to her. She tried to stand, but fell to the floor, her face running blood, the shoulder of her white blouse red with it.

Helen ran toward Narbondo, her mouth wide, spittle flying, knocking Eddie aside with her left forearm. She held the pistol out before her in her right hand. Narbondo set his basket down gingerly and in the same movement leapt forward to meet her. She shrieked in surprise and pulled the trigger, the recoil flinging her hand upward, the bullet flying wild. Narbondo snatched her wrist and yanked her around bodily. He grasped the hand that held the pistol, turned the pistol toward her, and shot her at close range through the throat, casting her mutilated body into St. Ives’s path as he ran toward Eddie. Narbondo reached Eddie first, plucked him up, and threw him over his shoulder, Eddie kicking and pounding with his fists.

Narbondo stopped St. Ives in his tracks simply by pointing the pistol at Eddie’s back and shaking his head with unmistakable meaning. St. Ives made a conscious effort to slow his breathing, to gain control of himself. He saw that Finn was kneeling next to Alice. She tried to sit up, succeeded. Narbondo glanced in their direction, aimed the pistol casually, and fired it, marble shards exploding from the corner of the altar.

“Calm yourself, Professor, as you value the lives of your wife and son,” Narbondo said. “You tread on dangerous ground. If you’ll just pick up that basket, we can be about our business. You have my word that your son is safe, although I’ll keep him close for the time being.”

St. Ives did as he was told. His mind, he discovered, was preternaturally clear now. He was aware that the storm had abated, or at least that the heavy rain and thunder had ceased. The canister in the basket, nestled in packed excelsior, was almost certainly a bomb. It was curiously shaped – a black iron vase.

“I’m reduced, as you see, to something cruder than coal dust, thanks to your grand heroics. What you carry is the ace in my sleeve, as the sharper says, although in this case it’s a gelignite ace in a wicker basket. Its crown, simply put, is a thermal detonator. I warn you that the gelignite is somewhat sensitive to being dropped, so unless you wish to blow you and your son to flinders, I suggest that you take great care. Walk with me, now, sir.” He gestured with the pistol and set out, carrying Eddie along the edge of the pews toward the open section of the nave, never taking his eyes from St. Ives’s face.

“Place the basket on the pew, directly beneath Edward’s revolving ghost,” Narbondo said. “We’ll send my mother’s beloved son to kingdom come, where he longs to be.”

St. Ives did as he was told and stepped away, looking up at the gondola, lodged in the roof. Now that the power of the storm had diminished, the gondola was still, held tight astern, the glass ball caught in the crotch of a bent iron strut.

“I want to make one last experiment,” Narbondo said, “and it must be completed while the souls of the dead haunt the streets roundabout us. I assume that my mother told you about the door I mean to open when she summoned you to Hereafter Farm?”

“She did,” said St. Ives evenly, his voice sounding mechanical in his ears. “The idea flies in the face of reason.”

“My brother’s ghost flies in the face of reason, Professor, and yet there he stands, undeniably. You’re a man of great learning; surely you trust your own eyes not to lie.”

The ghost was no longer spinning, but seemed to be looking down at them – or particularly at Eddie, St. Ives thought, if that were possible. Narbondo was correct. Everything about the phenomenon flew in the face of reason. St. Ives watched for his chance, some distraction, the creaking of the gondola or the shattering of a piece of falling glass. “Even if this door exists, how can you say that it be worth opening, or what lies beyond?”

“What care I for its worth? A door is but a convenient symbol for the way between here and there, a mere poetic figure until it’s made real. We cannot begin to come at its worth until we see with our own eyes what lies beyond. I bid you, sir, to cast off the fetters that enslave your mind.”

“There are a wide variety of fetters,” St. Ives told him.

“Alas, you and I speak different languages, sir. I’ll make myself clear, however. I am going to set young Eddie on the floor now, where he must sit passively like the swamis of old and contemplate the pending wonder. Do you hear me, boy? Will you sit on your backside and be still?”

“Yes,” St. Ives said for him, recognizing the cast in Eddie’s eye, the same cast that appeared there when his tin soldiers had had enough of his sister’s mechanical elephant. St. Ives shook his head warningly.

Narbondo shoved the pistol into the belt around his cassock and drew a fat, pistol-like weapon out of his coat, a bulbous thing with a vastly wide bore, as if it was meant to shoot cricket balls as bullets. He pointed it at the wicker basket and pulled the trigger. A flaming orb of white fire blew out of the barrel, igniting the basket and the pew cushion and the white disk atop the device, which flared up brilliantly in the brief moment before an explosion ripped upward out of the iron cone in a burst of fire and smoke and flaming wad.

Edward’s ghost disappeared within the flame and smoke, and in that moment St. Ives, half-deafened by the blast, threw himself forward, grabbed Eddie, and flung him across the dust-slick floor, Eddie sliding away as if he sat on a block of melting ice. A strange banshee wail arose in the air, finding its way through the ringing in St. Ives’s ears, rising in pitch. Narbondo held his pistol again, having cast away the incendiary weapon.

“It wants a blood sacrifice,” Narbondo shouted at him, cocking the pistol. “You’ll do as well as the boy.”

St. Ives threw himself forward, clipping Narbondo’s legs out from under him. Narbondo slammed down onto his side atop the compass rose, rolled out from under St. Ives and sprang into a crouch, aimed hurriedly downward, and pulled the trigger even as St. Ives was scrambling out of the way like a crab. The bullet punched into the marble floor, blasted-out fragments hammering St. Ives on the side of his head and face as he pushed himself to his knees, fully expecting to be shot with the second bullet.

Narbondo, however, was staring fixedly at the marble floor, which had split open along a seam defined by the north-south axis of the inlaid compass rose. The stones of the floor snapped and cracked, the fissure running outward in both directions from the flattened bullet, which was lodged in the center of the rose. Narbondo watched it fixedly, his face glowing with wonder and triumph.

St. Ives felt blood flowing into his collar and discovered that his ear was partly severed. What had begun as a banshee’s wail was now a harmonic vibration that filled the cathedral with a single note, circling around them, seeming to emanate from all points of the compass and rising slowly in tone.

Narbondo raised the pistol and pointed it at St. Ives from six feet away – a fatal distance – but still he didn’t shoot it. He nodded up at Edward’s ghost, which still had a human shape but was composed entirely of swirling sparks. The crack in the floor was widening, more quickly now, dust and fragments of stone falling into it, soil visible below, the very ground itself opening. St. Ives looked for Eddie and saw him within the several pillars that held up the arched ceiling of the portico, well back toward the wall. Alice and Finn were coming along down the pews, both of them looking anxiously upward at the gondola.

The iron framework of the cathedral sang now. The glass panes vibrated visibly, like square pools of water into the centers of which stones had been dropped. The whirling, densely packed stars that filled the void that had been Edward’s ghost glowed ever more brightly as the sound and vibration increased. Narbondo nodded with apparent satisfaction and cocked the pistol. Then, like the crest of a wave pitching over onto a beach, the swarm of stars fell out of the air and inundated him. He staggered forward, throwing his hands up. The pistol fell into the line-straight rift in the ground and flew out of sight. Narbondo, glowing within the whirling nebula of sparks, clutched at unseen things, his hands opening and closing spasmodically as he reeled at the edge of the chasm, several feet wide now. With an inhuman shriek he was dragged forward by the elemental particles of Edward’s ghost and cast into the depths in a shower of sparks. St. Ives saw him strike the sloped bank of the fissure, making a failed attempt to stop himself and rolling pell-mell downward into the darkness. In the moments before they winked out, the descending sparks illuminated a geometric field of pale structures far, far below, appearing to St. Ives to be a subterranean graveyard, perhaps, or the ruins of an ancient subterranean city, which vanished a moment after he perceived it.

The rift was closing in on itself again. The harmonic vibration had reached a crescendo, awakening St. Ives from his rapt attention on the spectacle before him. Debris fell from above, the marble beneath his feet shuddered, and the panes of glass in the roof and walls shivered themselves to pieces as he turned and ran toward the portico, ducking under the domed roof as if out of a hailstorm. There sounded the screech of rending metal high overhead. The gondola fell nose-downward, hung for a moment by the stern, and then dropped, the glass orb in the bowsprit carrying it straight downward into the narrowing chasm, which closed on it with a vast exhalation of air, shattering the craft utterly, the rudder and propeller skittering away across the floor amid a confusion of broken sticks.

Within moments, the cathedral walls and roof had been reduced to an iron skeleton. The south wind blew across the floor, stirring up little whirlwinds of coal dust from beneath the pews. The great window depicting the death of the Oxford Martyrs still stood, however – perhaps the only glass remaining entire. Rays of light beamed through it in a myriad of colors, the morning sun showing in the heavens through broken clouds.

FORTY-FOUR