Like his father, Lionel Dacey eventually decided to raise his own child with the Automatic Nanny, but rather than look for a willing bride, he announced in 1932 that he would adopt an infant. He did not offer any updates in the following years, prompting a gossip columnist to suggest that the child had died at the machine’s hands, but by then there was so little interest in the Automatic Nanny that no one ever bothered to investigate.
The truth regarding the infant would never have come to light if not for the work of Dr. Thackery Lambshead. In 1938, Dr. Lambshead was consulting at the Brighton Institute of Mental Subnormality (now known as Bayliss House) when he encountered a child named Edmund Dacey. According to admission records, Edmund had been successfully raised using an Automatic Nanny until the child was two years old, the age at which Lionel Dacey felt it appropriate to switch him to human care. He found that Edmund was unresponsive to his commands, and shortly afterwards, a physician diagnosed the child as “feebleminded.” Judging such a child an unsuitable subject for demonstration of the Nanny’s efficacy, Lionel Dacey committed Edmund to the Brighton Institute.
What prompted the institute’s staff to seek Dr. Lambshead’s opinion was Edmund’s diminutive stature: although he was five, his height and weight were that of the average three-year-old. The children at the Brighton Institute were generally taller and healthier than those at similar asylums, a reflection of the fact that the institute’s staff did not follow the still-common practice of minimal interaction with the children. In providing affection and physical contact to their charges, the nurses were preventing the condition now known as psychosocial dwarfism, where emotional stress reduces a child’s levels of growth hormones, and which was prevalent in orphanages at the time.
The nurses quite reasonably assumed that Edmund Dacey’s delayed growth was the result of substituting the Automatic Nanny’s mechanical custody for actual human touch, and expected him to gain weight under their care. But after two years as a resident at the institute, during which the nurses had showered attention on him, Edmund had scarcely grown at all, prompting the staff to look for an underlying physiological cause.
Dr. Lambshead hypothesized that the child was indeed suffering from psychosocial dwarfism, but of a uniquely inverted variety: what Edmund needed was not more contact with a person but more contact with a machine. His small size was not the result of the years he spent under the care of the Automatic Nanny; it was the result of being deprived of the Automatic Nanny after his father felt he was ready for human care. If this theory were correct, restoring the machine would cause the boy to resume normal growth.
Dr. Lambshead sought out Lionel Dacey to acquire an Automatic Nanny. He gave an account of the visit in a monograph written many years later:
[Lionel Dacey] spoke of his plans to repeat the experiment with another child as soon as he could ensure that the child’s mother was of suitable stock. His feeling was that the experiment with Edmund had failed only because of the boy’s “native imbecility,” which he blamed on the child’s mother. I asked him what he knew of the child’s parents, and he answered, rather too forcefully, that he knew nothing. Later on, I visited the orphanage from which Lionel Dacey had adopted Edmund, and learned from their records that the child’s mother was a woman named Eleanor Hardy, who previously worked as a maid for Lionel Dacey. It was obvious to me that Edmund is, in fact, Lionel Dacey’s own illegitimate son.
Lionel Dacey was unwilling to donate an Automatic Nanny to what he considered a failed experiment, but he agreed to sell one to Dr. Lambshead, who then arranged to have it installed in Edmund’s room at the Brighton Institute. The child embraced the machine as soon as he saw it, and in the days that followed he would play happily with toys as long as the Nanny was nearby. Over the next few months, the nurses recorded a steady increase in his height and weight, confirming Dr. Lambshead’s diagnosis.
The staff assumed that Edmund’s cognitive delays were congenital in nature, and were content as long as he was thriving physically and emotionally. Dr. Lambshead, however, wondered if the consequences of the child’s bond with a machine might be more far-ranging than anyone suspected. He speculated that Edmund had been misdiagnosed as feebleminded simply because he paid no attention to human instructors, and that he might respond better to a mechanical instructor. Unfortunately, he had no way to test this hypothesis; even if Reginald Dacey had successfully completed his teaching engine, it would not have provided the type of instruction that Edmund required.
It was not until 1946 that technology advanced to the necessary level. As a result of his lectures on radiation sickness, Dr. Lambshead had a good relationship with scientists working at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, and was present at a demonstration of the first remote manipulators, mechanical arms designed for the handling of radioactive materials. He immediately recognized their potential for Edmund’s education, and was able to acquire a pair for the Brighton Institute.
Edmund was thirteen years old at this point. He had always been indifferent to attempts by the staff to teach him, but the mechanical arms immediately captured his attention. Using an intercom system that emulated the low-fidelity audio of the original Automatic Nanny’s gramophone, nurses were able to get Edmund to respond to their voices in a way they hadn’t when speaking to him directly. Within a few weeks, it was apparent that Edmund was not cognitively delayed in the manner previously believed; the staff had merely lacked the appropriate means of communicating with him.
With news of this development, Dr. Lambshead was able to persuade Lionel Dacey to visit the institute. Seeing Edmund demonstrate a lively curiosity and inquisitive nature, Lionel Dacey realized how he had stunted the boy’s intellectual growth. From Dr. Lambshead’s account:
He struggled visibly to contain his emotion at seeing what he had wrought in pursuit of his father’s vision: a child so wedded to machines that he could not acknowledge another human being. I heard him whisper, “I’m sorry, Father.”
“I’m sure your father would understand that your intentions were good,” I said.
“You misunderstand me, Dr. Lambshead. Were I any other scientist, my efforts to confirm his thesis would have been a testament to his influence, no matter what my results. But because I am Reginald Dacey’s son, I have disproved his thesis twice over, because my entire life has been a demonstration of the impact a father’s attention can have on his son.”
Immediately after this visit, Lionel Dacey had remote manipulators and an intercom installed in his house and brought Edmund home. He devoted himself to machine-mediated interaction with his son until Edmund succumbed to pneumonia in 1966. Lionel Dacey passed away the following year.
The Automatic Nanny seen here is the one purchased by Dr. Lambshead to improve Edmund’s care at the Brighton Institute. All the Nannies in Lionel Dacey’s possession were destroyed upon his son’s death. The National Museum of Psychology thanks Dr. Lambshead for his donation of this unique artifact.
Honoring Lambshead: Stories Inspired by the Cabinet
Stories Inspired by the Cabinet
In early 2002, Ray Russell of prestigious specialty press Tartarus approached Lambshead about publishing a charity chapbook. It would celebrate Lambshead’s life from an unusual angle: by focusing on the objects in the doctor’s cabinet. Russell and Lambshead shared a fascination with supernatural literature that included a love for Arthur Machen, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Thomas Ligotti. Several years earlier, Russell had even visited the cabinet for the express purpose of viewing some letters from Machen to Lambshead.
After some deliberation, Lambshead gave his blessing—“as long as all proceeds benefit the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects and the Institute for Further Study,” both of which he thought were underfunded and “staffed by wraiths in ragged clothes; it might be good for morale if they could afford sandwiches at least.” Russell agreed and immediately embarked on the project, hoping to ride the coattails of the forthcoming Bantam/Pan Macmillan editions of The
Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.
Choosing from a list of items drawn up by Russell, several writers contributed, including the then-unknown Naomi Novik (who at the time wrote period ghost stories under the name N. N. Vasek). By January 2003, the chapbook was ready to be sent to the printer. It also included a somewhat overenthusiastic introduction titled “Virile Lambshead: Catch the Disease!,” written by an editor at the medical journal the Lancet.
The inspiration for the stories varies greatly. For example, the actual foot that sparked Jeffrey Ford’s “Relic” probably dates to the Crimean War’s legendary Charge of the Light Brigade. As Lambshead put it, “unless the family mythology is wrong, this foot of my saintly grandfather was mummified due to the chance confluence of devastating military technologies and a freak dismount caused by a faulty stirrup.” Similarly, Holly Black’s story is mostly conjured up from the imagination, the item in question being “an odd Paddington knockoff that I felt sorry for.”
However, Novik’s teapot did, according to a Sotheby’s auction catalog, belong to Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, a.k.a. Lord Dunsany. “Threads” by Carrie Vaughn gently mocks Lambshead’s all-too-real predilection for scheduling interviews and then either not showing up or “observing my interview from afar.” As for other allusions in the stories, Lambshead’s involvement with various British secret service organizations is still murky, and the Meistergarten was probably never used by Lambshead to curb the rambunctious children of visiting relatives.
Unfortunately for readers, Lambshead died before publication, and the chapbook became a casualty of the free-for-all of lawsuits surrounding his estate. This decision was made easier for the estate because of an unfinished letter from Lambshead that began: “Dear Ray: Cease, desist, herewith take it upon yourself to remove me from . . .” (Russell claims the letter would have continued along the lines of either “from your overblown introduction” or “your annoying mailing list.”)
Here, then, for the first time, in defiance of potential lawsuits, we are honored to publish those stories, along with all of the original art, sans Robert Mapplethorpe’s piece for Novik’s story. These tales do indeed form a bizarre tribute to Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet, if not the man himself.
Threads
By Carrie Vaughn
Unicorn
For the twentieth time, Jerome reviewed the invitation that had brought him, more than prompt, to the parlor in the doctor’s obscure manor house. Mr. Kennelworth, Brief interview granted, ten minutes only, be prompt. Signed, Lambshead. It appeared to be his actual signature, and not a note by some assistant.
The stooped housekeeper, who no doubt had been with Lambshead for decades, had guided him here to sit on a velvet-covered wingback chair and wait. The loudly ticking clock sitting at the center of the marble mantelpiece over the fireplace now showed that Lambshead was three minutes late. Would his ten-minute interview be reduced to seven minutes?
Not that sitting in the parlor wouldn’t have been fascinating in itself, if he weren’t so anxious. He’d arrived at the village the day before, to prevent any mishaps with the train, and spent the night in one of those little country inns with a decrepit public house in front and sparse rooms to let upstairs. The included breakfast had been greasy and now sat in his belly like lead. The village had exactly one taxi, whose driver was also the proprietor at the inn. Jerome had had to practically bribe him to drive him out here. He needed that interview, if for no other reason than to make sure the newspaper reimbursed him for his expenses.
But all he could do was wait. Breakfast gurgled at him. Perhaps he ought to review the questions he hoped to ask the doctor. Doctor Lambshead, what of your sudden interest in occult experimentation? Is it true the Royal Academy has censured you over the debate about the veracity of certain claims made regarding your recent expedition to Ecuador?
He ought to be making notes, so that his readers would understand what he was seeing. The parlor was filled with curios of the doctor’s travels, glass-fronted cabinets displayed a bewildering variety of artifacts: elongated clay vases as thin as a goose’s neck; squat, mud-colored jars, stopped with wax, containing who knew what horrors, wide baskets woven with grass in a pattern so complicated his eyes blurred. Weapons hung on the walls: spears, pikes, three-bladed daggers, swords as long as a man. Taxidermied creatures of the unlikeliest forms: a beaver that seemed to have merged with a lizard, a turkey colored scarlet.
The tapestry of a unicorn hanging in the center of one wall amid a swarm of serious-visaged portraits seemed almost ordinary—every country manor had at least one wall containing a mass of darkened pictures and a faded, moth-bitten Flemish unicorn tapestry. The beast in this one seemed a bit thin and constipated, gazing over a pasture of frayed flowers.
Jerome was sure that if he got up to pace, the eyes in the portraits would follow him, back and forth.
When he heard footsteps outside the parlor, he stood eagerly to greet the approaching doctor, and frowned when the doors opened and a young woman appeared from the vestibule. She stopped and stared at him, her eyes narrowed and predatory.
“Who are you?” they both said.
She wore smart shoes, a purplish skirt and suit jacket, and a short fur stole—fake, no doubt. A pillbox hat sat on dark hair that curled fashionably above her shoulders. She had a string of pearls, brown gloves, and carried a little leather-bound notebook and a pencil. He pegged her—a lady reporter. A rival.
In the same moment, she seemed to make the same judgment about him. Her jaw set, and her mouth pressed in a thin line.
“All right. Who are you with?” she said. Her accent was brash, American. An American lady reporter—even worse.
“Who are you with?” Jerome answered.
“I asked you first.”
“It doesn’t matter, I got here first, and I have an exclusive interview with the doctor.”
“I have the exclusive interview. You’ve made a mistake.”
He blinked, taken aback, then held out the note, which he’d crushed in his hands. Chagrined, he tried to smooth it out, but she took it from him before he could succeed. Her brow creased as she read it, then she shoved it back to him and reached into her handbag for a very similar slip of paper, and Jerome’s heart sank. She offered it to him, and he read: brief interview granted, ten minutes only, for the exact same time. The exact same signature decorated the bottom of the page.
His spectacular opportunity was seeming less so by the moment.
“So the professor made a mistake and booked us both for exclusive interviews at the same time,” she said.
“Evidently.”
James A. Owen’s depiction of the medieval tapestry from Lambshead’s collection, the original so badly burned in the cabinet fire that only the fringe remains (now on display in the International Fabric Museum, Helsinki, Finland).
“Figures,” she said. She crossed her arms, scanned the room, then nodded as if she had made a decision. Her curls bobbed. “Right, here’s what we’ll do. You get five minutes, I get five minutes. We coordinate our questions so we don’t ask the same thing. Then we share notes. All right?”
“Hold on a minute—”
“It’s the only fair way.”
“I didn’t agree to a press conference—”
“Two of us are hardly a press conference.”
“But—”
“And don’t try to blame me, it’s the doctor who double-booked us.”
I wasn’t going to, Jerome thought, aggrieved. The afternoon was crumbling, and Jerome felt the portraits staring at him, a burning on the back of his neck. “I think that since I was here first it’s only fair that I should have the interview. Perhaps you could reschedule—”
“Now how is that fair? I came all the way from New York to get this interview! You’re from where, Oxford? You can show up on his doorstep anytime!”
He blinked again, put off-balance by her identifying his accent so precisely. He was
the son of a professor there, and had scandalized the family by not going into academics himself. Roving reporting had seemed so much more productive. Romantic, even. So much for that. “I can see we’ve gotten off to a bad start—”
“Whose fault is that? I’ve been nothing but polite.”
“On the contrary—”
Just then the double doors to the library opened once more, freezing Jerome and the woman reporter in place, her with one hand on her hip, waving her notebook; him pointing as if scolding a small child. The housekeeper, a hunched, wizened woman in a pressed brown cotton dress, scowled at them. Jerome tucked his hands behind his back.
“The doctor is very sorry, but he’ll have to reschedule with both of you. He’ll send letters to confirm a time.” She stood next to the open door, clearly indicating that they should depart.
The woman reporter said, “Did he say why? What’s he doing that he can’t take ten minutes off to talk?”
“The doctor is very sorry,” the housekeeper said again, her scowl growing deeper. She reminded Jerome of a headmistress at a particularly dank primary school. He knew a solid wall when he saw one.
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities Page 6