Free The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock Page B

doubt it for an instant. I’m wholly at your service.”
    “Thank you, sir.” She sipped the sherry, looking for a moment at St. Ives as if seeing into his soul, before setting her glass down and pointing at the magic mirror lying in the center of the table. “I assume that you recognize this object?”
    “I believe it to be a Japanese magic mirror, madam. I’ve studied them somewhat. Wonderful toys. I myself possess several of the objects.”
    “And have you come to an understanding of them?”
    “Not in so many words, no. I know that they’re fabricated from a cast metal alloy, ground into a lens, and then coated with quicksilver, tin, and lead on the convex surface, which is then polished. How the images on the back of the mirror are projected, however, I can’t quite say.”
    “There are those who believe that such a mirror has what might be referred to as spiritual powers.”
    “I’m not persuaded of any such thing,” St. Ives said flatly.
    “Good for you. Neither am I. And yet there exist objects contrived by man which might... open doors.”
    “Keys, for instance,” St. Ives said, smiling at her.
    “Just so.” Mother Laswell smiled back at him. “Do you recall hearing of a man named John Mason? It’s a common name, of course. He fabricated Japanese magic mirrors – this very mirror, in fact. Some fifteen years ago John Mason managed to blow himself to pieces when he purposefully detonated the dust in a grain silo.”
    “Indeed I do remember him, or at least I remember his demise. He was a colleague of Joseph Swann of incandescent lighting fame. His death was quite sensational.”
    “That’s the man. Both of them were photographic chemists, you know. I believe that Swann severed ties with Mason a year or more before Mason’s death. When the police searched Mason’s house, they found a plethora of human skulls and dried bones. The skulls had been trepanned, the interior set with a mirror fabricated very much like the Japanese mirror you’re familiar with, the backs of the mirrors etched with children’s faces so lifelike that they could only have been reproduced from collodion negatives. It appeared as if Mason were attempting to construct a means of projecting an image through the eye sockets of the skull. It wasn’t until the headless remains of several small children were exhumed from graves on Mason’s property that he was revealed as a murderer and understood to be criminally insane.”
    “That charge would be difficult to contest,” St. Ives said.
    “There we disagree,” Mother Laswell told him, “although certainly that depends on one’s definitions of sanity. Certainly he was no more insane than my late husband, with whom he was acquainted, I’m very sorry to say. Such skulls, or mirrors, call them what you will, come into my story, but not until half the story is told. Here’s the long and the short of it.” She gazed up at the burning candles and squinted her eyes, collecting her thoughts, or perhaps seeing something in the soft haze of the light. The flames flickered on breezes through an open window in the far end of the room.
    “The man who calls himself Dr. Ignacio Narbondo,” she said, “is my only living son. His father, who fancied himself a man of science, disappeared out of our lives when the boy was two years old. His father often spoke of going into East India, and would talk about fabulous cities in the jungle as if he were longing to see them. Perhaps he did, in the end. In any event, the boy and I – I won’t utter my son’s actual name now that he has abandoned it himself – took a room in Limehouse after that, in a low court of the worst type, but there was little money to advance ourselves. After less than a year I married my husband’s brother, only to discover too late what sort of a man he was. He brought me here to Aylesford, along with the boy, and I bore him a child whom we named Edward.”
    “The boy what you seen in the barn,” Kraken