The Skull of Lady Edmonton

a horror story

The family graveyard erupted like Atlantis from a sea of dying herbage. Weeds clung to slanted tombs and as I picked my way through the macabre jungle I imagined the Lords and Ladies of the Manor coming here, hundreds of years ago, decked out in their finery to see off their dead. Little did they know that one day a plebeian like me, decked out in cheap sports clothes from a high street chain would be walking over their ancestors’ bones, and probably theirs as well, not with a glass-doored lamp from an old romance but a steel flashlight.

My pocket buzzed. Taking the phone out carefully lest it falls and be forever lost among the weeds I saw that Eric, my employer in this bizarre situation, was trying to call me. ‘Idiot’ I muttered and put it back. He’d be pacing his loft flat while a couple of junkies dozed on a broken-down sofa. If he was anxious about the job he should have come with and helped me retrieve the skull. But no, that wasn’t his style. He was a middle-manager if ever there was one, striding the office and looking over people’s shoulders, making useless comments and pathetic demands.

I reached the tomb in question, a huge stone coffin tilted on a tangle of undergrowth, snakes carting off the Ark of the Covenant. The lid was loose, meaning that if I applied all my upper-arm strength I might get it off without tearing a muscle. I remembered Eric’s excuse that if I was caught all I’d get is six months in chokey, where he was a “person of interest” to police because of his connection to low-level gangland figures, and if the law started sniffing around his den all manner of things might emerge. Hence he needed to stay in the warm while I needed to be the Igor to his Dr Frankenstein. Git. Never trust a man with stubble where a moustache should be, that’s what my mother always said. Or should have, then I might have learned something from her.

I shouldered an end of the lid as far as I could without letting it fall from the tomb. Though it was gone midnight and I seriously doubted that anyone from the house would hear my grisly work, still paranoia haunted me. Why wouldn’t it? I was stealing the bones of a noblewoman. Even if, according to research Eric and I had conducted, her nobility extended only to her heritage.

A shrivelled set of bones greeted my invasion. Tanned by time, they seemed more like papier-mâché cured with tea. Only her dust-encrusted, once bright-pink dress remained to indicate her femininity, clasped at the neckline by a brooch made of angular crystals. Beneath a blazing chandelier, they would have been blinding in their catches of the light. I set down my backpack and took from it a large plastic baggie. Separating the head from the spinal column was easy; it came away with barely a click, like opening an old door. The brooch was harder to remove, and in my haste, I tore a bit of the dress away with it. No matter; the crystals were the important thing. Sealing up both like evidence from a crime scene, I placed them in my backpack and made my way carefully back through the woods.

A half-moon shone through the large windows of Eric’s flat. Eric looked like he was wishing he had curtains, even though no-one would see us this high up. One of the junkies who’d come to sample the heroin that Eric sold had left. Only his companion stayed, an eighteen-year-old girl in a white tank-top whose dirty blonde hair covered her face as she lay prone on a couch. ‘You didn’t think to kick her out?’ I asked on entering with the bounty.

‘You didn’t think to answer when I rang?’ he shot back. I sighed and let it go. She seemed far removed from the world at present, anyway. Perhaps forever. Wouldn’t that have been just our shitty luck? ‘Don’t worry about her. She won’t be coming out of her coma before noon.’

I slung the backpack onto a table and enjoyed Eric’s wince. Mustn’t damage the goods. I lifted out the skull in its plastic baggie. He seemed almost more taken with the brooch, at first. I wondered, not for the first time if his current fondness for long sleeves was hiding needle marks up his arms. Eric had expressed disdain for partaking of his own product, but he seemed especially skinny and nervous lately. Maybe a part of his mind, unbidden, was asking itself how much that brooch would go for at auction.

A lapse into addiction might also explain his sudden enthusiasm for this whole endeavour, of disinterring bones and playing a necromancer. An eternity in which to take heroin. A junkie’s dream. As for me, I had other plans. ‘You’ve got the book?’

‘Of course,’ he said, and opened a drawer of the table, from which he slid what seemed to be a self-published novel, with its cheap plastic cover and cheese-ball art of a woman in a white gown holding a lit candelabra. The title was Spells for the Modern Witch, author’s name Rose Underwood, which I guessed was a pseudonym. The writer was probably some middle-aged crystal fancier, a self-proclaimed “druidic priestess” who read pulp romance and distrusted modern medicine. Still, she’d stumbled across something useful.

‘It was a bastard to find’ said Eric. ‘Not on Amazon or anywhere mainstream. In the end, I had to buy it from this bullshit blog called “The Sisters of Cosmic Science”.’ He snorted. I slid the skull from the baggie and propped the brooch beside it as he flipped through the book. I recalled that Eric Sampson had been a student of Oxford University, of theology, would you believe it? He came from the upper fringes of the middle-class, and now he lived in a freezing loft, reduced to associating with riffraff like me.

Though I refuse to think of him as the brains of our operation, his arcane knowledge was what had led us to this prize, this dead woman’s skull and priceless brooch. Eleanor Edmonton, died 1850, aged thirty-two, of what was described in parish records as consumption. Edmontons still lived in the manor where she spent her entire life, destined to become a spinster. The current patriarch was a conservative MP.

The occult legend recorded that, though seemingly aloof in her feminine way, well-mannered at parties and never too individual, away from Christian eyes she was a loyal Satanic bride. I’d come into contact with the family lore after infiltrating a posh party at Edmonton House. Eric had already shown me some occult powers of his, learned through the study of hidden spells that he claimed was guided by Arab shamans in dusty caves, not far from where our western militaries still operate. Somehow I doubted that, but Eric was secretive by nature, always hiding his true actions and motivations behind a smokescreen of silly myths.

Regardless, he was learned enough to make fire appear at will in a dry ceremonial dish, and small objects levitate. The latter I’d seen him do not long after we met in prison, where he was doing time for his role in some credit card scam too involved for the likes of me to comprehend. I asked him why, with occult gifts like his, he wasn’t on television putting Uri Gellar to shame. He replied that, given my own experience with black magic, I should know why, and I suppose I did. Whatever forces allow you to use them for the manipulation of natural laws aren’t keen on being noticed by mankind at large.

I told Eric I often came to the woods around Edmonton House at night, so I could meditate among those graves, drawing to me their magic as it flowed from buried bones and danced throughout the trees. He recalled hearing of the legends that followed Lady Edmonton’s ghost and a certain necromantic recipe hidden in Spells for the Modern Witch. My task was gaining entry to Edmonton House and stealing a particular scroll, hidden among family artefacts in a walk-in safe secreted behind bookshelves. That was relatively simple. The current heiress to the Edmonton estate only needed a little encouragement – both verbal, liquid, and narcotic – at one of her various parties to give away the secret. By sunrise, I had the scroll in my possession and was wheedling out its secrets. It contained poems by the Lady which supposedly concealed necromantic instructions.

Eric performed his little rituals with Rose Underwood as a guide. They included basting a dish with vegetable oil then dripping a vial of your blood into it. He said some old Latin prayers over the dish, added some red wine, then carefully washed the skull in the mixture. ‘That’s my end done’ he said, ‘now what does the scroll say I have to do?’

I explained.

‘You’re kidding’ said Eric with a slightly uncertain smile.

‘Not even a little’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to put the “necro” in necromancer.’

‘Where does it say that? Show me the scroll!’ I sighed and took it out of the backpack. He scrutinised it, squinting to discern the scratchy cursive verse. The pertinent lines read:

To see life return to her,

Please spill a seed inside her jaw.

Make love between her teeth, good sir,

And feel the grip of the burning maw.

‘This reads like you just made it up.’

‘And trained in calligraphy so I could write it on a perfectly mocked-up scroll? A lot of effort just to see you fuck a skull.’ Eric stroked his chin and stared hard at it as if contemplating whether to go home with an unattractive woman in a bar. ‘Adjust those beer goggles as much as you like, Eric old son, she ain’t going up to a 10.’

‘I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re going to have to do this too. Now turn around.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘What, you want to watch?’ I put up my hands in concession and did as I was told. Facing a dog-eared movie poster which depicted a beach babe in lovelier climes than these, I heard Eric open the jaw with an audible click then unbuckle his belt and pull down his jeans. I glanced at the girl on the couch. She was a pretty one, with full pert breasts and an air of dirty innocence that appeals to some men. Godiva in the gutter, so to speak.

Although I’d been expecting it I still flinched a little on hearing the scream. I turned around just in time to see Eric fling the skull across the room; an ugly tearing noise greeted this action, and he fell to his knees, crotch a mess of bloodied meat. His testicles hung limply from a few strands of skin, and he fell onto his back, eyes rolled up into his head as blood gushed from the wound. I was thankful that he didn’t live in a ground floor flat, let alone a part of the city where a scream in the night might be remarked upon.

The skull didn’t shatter on hitting the wall and falling to the floor. Instead, its charred tan started to colour behind the red wine base, plumping and pinking like a rose whose life cycle was being watched on fast forward. Teeth whitened to a well-brushed standard, mouse-brown hair begun sprouting from the skull; and in the dark hollows of the sockets, two eyeballs emerged, milk-white marbles which then grew an iris with a light blue outline. As this happened the mouth continued chewing, mashing what was left of Eric Sampson’s penis to a fine paste. At one point the head almost escaped, until Lady Edmonton’s tongue drew it back like a frog capturing a fly. I have to admit, seeing the slit of my late colleague's penis vanish behind eager white teeth almost brought my gorge to boil, but soon she was finished and all that remained was her pretty little head.

Her eyes swivelled towards me. ‘Well don’t just stand there, pick me up!’ I did so, holding her so that our eyes could meet. Blood dripped steadily from her neck. ‘You gave him the scroll then’ she said. I nodded. ‘Fell for it almost too easily’ I replied. ‘If he wasn’t such a twat I’d pity him.’

She smiled, and I picked a pubic hair from between her teeth. ‘I still cannot believe people fall for that’ she said in her refined, 19th-century accent. ‘My own half-brother had a try not six months after I died. Of course, I was then stuck in his room and had to project what little energy I had to convince daddy to return my head to its body.’

‘Couldn’t you have had him find you another?’

‘Oh no, I’d need someone truly gifted in necromancy for that. Hence you, my sweet.’ She glanced at Eric’s corpse, still bleeding. ‘I’m guessing he thought that once I was back on

this plane I’d grant him wishes, like some bloody genie. Make love to the skull, just as one would rub the lamp.’

‘He wanted eternal life.’

‘Don’t we all? The Good Lord knows I’ve had a fair few chances. One time in the 1950s I thought I was home free, but then my own Van Helsing managed to trace me… Thank god he’s dead now. Still, there’ll be time enough later to give you the details. You’ve saved my brooch, I see. Good. Do you have a body for me? If it’s some old bag you’ve plucked off the streets I may have to chew your penis off as well.’

I grinned and showed her the girl on the couch. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘you’re going to look perkier than you’ve done in years…'