The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock

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