The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

by Vandermeer, Jeff

  An ordinary visitor to Lambshead’s home might not be tempted to take the next steps: to fall to his hands and knees, peer into the opening revealed, and then crawl in. But I, as a trusted member of the organization hired by Lambshead to evaluate the artistic portion of his collection while he was away (an organization which, for the purposes of this report, must remain nameless), did take these next steps. On my knees, I peered into darkness. And then, taking a deep breath, I crawled in.

  AT FIRST, I thought I had entered some sort of ventilation shaft. The passage was square, the floor and walls made of polished concrete, surprisingly warm to the touch. I was puzzled not to detect the fusty scent I often associate with such places; indeed, there was no smell to it at all. The passage itself sloped very slowly down, just enough that I could feel it. Glancing behind me, at first I could see the opening I had come through, but soon the passage had slanted enough that even that had vanished.

  How long I crawled I cannot say. It seemed like some time: I had the impression that I had journeyed outside the confines of the house proper, down into the soil of the grounds surrounding it, but perhaps it was no more than a few dozen meters. Several times I nearly turned back—and indeed would have if the passage had not been too tight to negotiate turning around.

  Then, abruptly, the passage reached its termination, concluding in a blank wall, a fact which, I have to admit, caused a certain amount of panic to well up within me. I pawed at the wall, looking for some hidden lever or some sign that what I was facing was not a wall but a door.

  But I found nothing.

  I AM GENERALLY not the sort to lose my composure. I am, in fact, known among my associates for my sangfroid, my ability to remain cool as a corpse no matter what difficulty I confront. I have no doubt that, despite my panic and the strangeness of the situation, I would have soon succeeded in mastering myself and proceeding in a calm and orderly fashion toward the nearest exit, backing my way slowly out. But in this task, I immediately encountered a complication. For as soon as I began to move backward, I discovered that not only was there a wall in front of me, but now a wall behind me as well.

  THERE FOLLOWED A period that I cannot account for, in which I lost track of myself. Perhaps I lost consciousness. Perhaps in my panic I became, for a few seconds, for a few hours, another person entirely. I cannot account for this period. This fact troubles me more than any other.

  Suffice it to say that, when I found myself again, my situation had changed. I was lying on the floor of a small, surprisingly modern room, architecturally dissimilar to the rest of the Lambshead residence. The contents of the room seemed to be an artistic installation. There was a painting hanging on the wall, with what I at first interpreted to be a sculptural object just before it, the word KNEEL inscribed in gothic script along the object’s base.

  Perhaps I was wrong in judging it to be an art installation, I thought, seeing this word. It had a dark, religious feel to it. Perhaps rather than a sculpture, this was an altar.

  A rare view from inside Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet, ca. 1995, showing Scott Eagle’s art installation.

  But, I wondered, an altar to what? I shook my head, told myself I was letting my time in the darkness get the better of me. Of course it was an art object, and I, as a member of the organization, was here to evaluate it.

  The painting associated with the installation depicted a teapot, flame spurting from its spout, its body seemingly bloody. It rested on a mound of what might be tentacles or intestines, though they had a machinic aspect as well, and at least one of them terminated in a long-fingered, sharp-clawed hand. There was no signature that I could see, though the technique recalled for me the work of Scott Eagle, or Scott Aigle (as the French call him). The frame was irregular, strangely patched on one side. The longer I looked at it, the more I came to feel that the artwork did not end with the painting proper but extended into this frame. I heard, when I approached the painting, a strange humming, as if I might turn it over to find its reverse swarming with bees. But perhaps this was a quality of the room tone and not of the painting itself.

  THERE WAS, BELOW the painting, what at first appeared to be a poem. A series of words, in any case. I read it, but once I had finished, found that I could not remember what it had said, nor, indeed, make any proper sense of it. I read it again, and a pressure began within my head, which, rightly or wrongly, I ascribed to the poem. I was tempted to read it a third time, this time aloud, but resisted, vaguely afraid of what might happen to me if I did.

  And what was that at the bottom of the wall, that strange grouping of blood-red, unidentifiable objects? I crouched and examined them, picked one up and turned it round and about in my hand. It was like a small stone, but soft, and made of a substance I did not recognize.

  I followed the line of objects back to the altar, for I had now begun in earnest to think of it as an altar. In the place of wooden spindles or legs, it rested on four simulacra of arms, lacquered. These supported a bottom platter, round, upon which rested sets of false (so I assumed) teeth, arranged in two rows. A top platter was cracquelured over with dried blood, and on this, other platters, other inexplicable disks, and finally, at the top, a glass bell, containing flecks of something like ice. Riding within the ice was an object of uncertain design.

  What was the object? I could make out aspects of it, had something of a grasp of its shape and color, but still could not determine what it was. Truth be told, I remained unsure whether it should be considered art or something else, something ritualized and potentially threatening.

  Kneel, the base of the altar commanded me. But I did not kneel. Instead I remained standing, hunched and leaning over the altar, my face nearly touching the glass bell. And then, on a whim, I reached up and lifted it away.

  Detail shot of Eagle’s art installation

  And here, I am afraid to admit, I suffered another lacuna, another moment of loss. There are things I remember. A roaring sound, but distant, as if miles away, as if there were still time to find shelter from whatever was coming. A horrible stench, like the air itself had been scorched. Brief flashes of motion and light, coming initially from the painting but quickly spreading all around me. And then nothing.

  I returned to consciousness in the bushes next to one wall of the estate, unsure of how I had arrived there. One side of my body was sore, covered with scratch marks and scabs. My earlobe was stiff with dried blood, though I found no sign of any injury or wound. My tongue was scraped raw and sat heavy in my mouth.

  When I stumbled back into the house, I discovered several days had passed and I had been replaced in my project of evaluating the collection.

  When asked to justify my absence, first by my replacement and then by my betters in the organization, I recounted all that had happened. And yet, no matter how I searched, no matter where I looked in the galleries, I could find no hidden entry or door. I did my best to draw what I had seen, what I had perceived, but my interlocutors remained incredulous. There was, they told me, no secret room, no private altar of forearms and blood and teeth; I had dreamed it; I had imagined it.

  When they told me this enough times, I stopped trying to convince them. Yes, I conceded, it was not real. I had merely fallen and hit my head. Nothing happened. I saw nothing.

  BUT, OF COURSE, I had seen what I had seen, and as time went on, I found the memory of what I had seen working away at me. I saw it there before me: a painting of tubes and tentacles, an unknown object on a strange altar, balanced atop teeth and arms. And sometimes, in my thoughts, the teeth begin to chatter and the arms flex and stretch, the fingers moving, calling me, beckoning me. And though I had originally been repulsed, I now found myself more and more attracted, more and more drawn in.

  Tonight I will break into the estate and then, with a sledgehammer, strike wall after wall until I find the vanished door. Once found, I will open it and again follow the passage slowly down until I find myself standing before the altar. This time, I will heed its advice and kneel. It wil
l, I am certain, reward me. But how, and with what, and whether for better or worse, I do not know.

  I am writing this record to stand in my place in case I do not return.

  2000: Dr. Lambshead’s Dark Room

  By S. J. Chambers

  About ten years ago, Dr. Lambshead published an article in the Psychomesmeric Quarterly about hypnotic techniques inherited from his grandfather, a great confidant of Monsieur Mesmer. Among Lambshead’s mesmeric family legacy was the Valdemar Method, which enabled the doctor, so he claimed, “to extract from even the most cavernous subconscious those diseases that afflicted the soul, as demonstrated in the mesmeric stories of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  As I am a Poe scholar, the doctor’s claims intrigued me and I wrote him requesting a demonstration. I knew the good doctor could not resist a challenge, so to further intrigue him, I mentioned that I felt riddled with a disease of influence that was affecting my work and love life, and offered myself up as the proverbial guinea pig. Within a fortnight, I received an invitation to his house, “the only place,” he wrote, “where the Valdemar Method could be manifested.”

  Surprisingly, Dr. Lambshead appeared to have no maid or butler, and was already waiting at the door when I arrived. An ancient but spry man in a tailored silk bathrobe, he was headed down the hallway before I could put my bags down and greet him.

  “To the matter at hand,” he said. “Don’t tell me a thing. That is for the Dark Room to show.”

  He waved me inside and led me to the back of the house, where he pulled aside a faded Turkish rug to reveal a trap door that fell open into a dark and dusty staircase. He descended into that darkness, and I followed him down several flights, feeling my way around the rocky walls, until he suddenly halted and clapped his hands repeatedly. When he stopped clapping, several floating orbs illuminated the basement.

  “Will-o’-the-wisps,” Lambshead said, “from the Iberian Coast. I caught them with one of Nabokov’s butterfly nets.” I looked at the floating lights, which graduated from green to purple, blue to red, like childhood’s LED sparklers. I held out my hand and one alighted on my finger—its touch cool as the Mediterranean.

  “How . . . how do they . . .”

  “Float? Live? Glow?” He shrugged. “Curious, no?” This response disappointed me. It was unlike a man of science to pass up a chance to explain away the world. As if he knew my thoughts, he smiled. “Even in this century, there are still wonders beyond explanation. They are rare, but they do exist, and it has been my hobby, I suppose you could say, to collect all the world’s true curios, as you will see. But no more words for now unless prompted; it disrupts the process!”

  We continued through the hallway, and the will-o’-the-wisps grew brighter as we walked through the cabinet until we entered a dark chamber, empty but with the exception of two worn Louis XVI chairs.

  “Ah, now we can really begin.”

  He sat in one chair and gestured for me to occupy the other. The will-o’-the-wisps floated out of our hands and hovered between our eyes. They undulated, glowing and dimming in tune with my heartbeat that swooshed through my ears.

  “I want you to watch the wisps,” he whispered, “and tell me: have you experienced these following symptoms: soaring soul, existential exigency, speaking in cryptically symbolic metaphor, vertigo caused by sublimity, vision heightened by chiaroscuro, dead-dwelling, or head-swelling?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “To all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmmm . . .” His disbelieving expression ebbed into a dare-to-hope.

  The two will-o’-the-wisps glowed blindingly blue and I became dizzy and hot, and the doctor and the wisps became double-exposed, and somehow I was split twain by the sides until there were two of me. One sat in front of Lambshead and the undulating wisps, while the other, conscious and seeing, was free to traverse the room.

  “Do you suffer from daydreaming reflex with reveries that include blackbirds, scents of an unseen censor, or aberrant alliterative applications?”

  Beady eyes glowed from the wisps, and wings fluttered by my ears. I smelled dried flowers and cut grass, upturned earth and the fading waft of fabric softener. I looked at my sitting-self in the chair and heard her indolent “Yes.”

  “What else do you see?”

  The wisps left Lambshead and my sitting-self to illuminate the corners of the empty room where ebon bookcases grew from the walls and within them appeared objects that my sitting-self described:

  Jaundiced blueprints of a non-Euclidian pendulum; a stuffed cat with a hissing throat encircled in white fur; a fractured skull chilling a broken bottle of blood-thick sherry; a tailor’s mannequin wearing a white, blood-soaked and dirt-streaked dressing gown, its neck a splintered pine plank engraved with claw marks.

  Beside the cases stood a stuffed gorilla. I couldn’t help but touch its fur, which turned to feathers and fluttered to the ground, revealing the tarred and malformed skeleton of a dwarf. Through its eye socket, a gold beetle climbed out and over to a shelf that held a jar of putrescence and nestled itself in an open locket containing a strand of blond hair speckled black.

  At the very bottom of the bookshelves were several jorums filled with animated landscapes: tiny ships thrusting within a maelstrom pint; a littoral liter with a weeping willow tree overlooking a craggy shore; and a quart of electrified clouds in the shape of women hovering over an abandoned manse, crying dust and leaves.

  “What are these?” I asked Lambshead. From his chair, he looked up to the ceiling, unsure of my voice’s source.

  “What do they look like?” he asked my sitting-self. I heard her describe the jorums, and he smiled.

  “Mood,” he spoke into the ether. “They are jars of mood.”

  I squatted at the bookshelf and selected one containing the cosmos. Several minute stars swam like strawberry seeds in a phosphorescent jam that churned and congealed into a sun that heated the glass. It burned my hand and I dropped it, and, with a loud bang, it exploded on the floor, incinerating all within the jar and melting the glass, which pooled and cooled into a Bristol blue fetus.

  Before I could retrieve it, I heard Lambshead command me awake, and suddenly I was back in the chair—whole—and subject to his sherry-sweet breath. The bookshelves, the taxidermy, curios, and jars were all gone, but on the ground remained the glass fetus, which the doctor rushed to rescue.

  He coddled it in his palm. “This—this is what ails you!”

  “A child?”

  “Of the imagination, yes. You thought you had a disease of influence, but it is much, much worse. You have a disease of the imagination, probably from too much Poe. But don’t worry, this here is your cure.”

  “I thought you said it was what ails me?”

  “You are cured,” he said. “And I have another child for my cabinet!” He waved the wisps away and they dimmed in rejection. Before I could ask what the other children were, he all but rushed me from the basement and out of his house.

  I did not see where he kept the Dark Room’s offspring, and I suppose now I never will, but after I left Lambshead and his curious cabinet, I admit I felt a lot lighter. Before booting me off the steps, he gave me permission to write of my disease, which seemed to ameliorate my condition more.

  Having been able to resume a normal, perhaps even an extra-normal life, I am forever indebted to that cabinet and to Dr. Lambshead. When I read of his death, just three years later, I mourned not only the loss of that great man but also of his Dark Room and its soul-ware nursery that has inevitably become overexposed and returned to the ether.

  2003: The Pea

  Related to Gio Clairval in 2008 at a Parisan Café, by Dr. Lambshead’s Housekeeper

  Dr. Lambshead had told me not to dust the object resting on the third shelf from the floor, a collector’s item hidden behind a maroon curtain. In my twenty years at the doctor’s service, I had never contravened an order. Nevertheless, my employer’s days being numbered, it seemed to me that I
should redouble my efforts in keeping the basement spotless.

  Behind the curtain stood a bell jar of oxide-stained glass, iridescent with blues, pinks, and greens, as tall as my forearm, protecting a Smyrna-red velvet cushion the size of a full-blossomed rose. Golden tassels hanging from a crown of braided trimmings strangled the cushion into the shape of a muffin, the top of which appeared to be decorated with an embroidery of silver-coloured human hair stitched at regular intervals to form a lozenge pattern.

  On the cushion sat a perfectly preserved pea.

  I gasped, suddenly aware of my staring at a piece of Dr. Lambshead’s secret collection, and lowered my gaze to examine the elegant pedestal. It was made of grey-veined marble carved into ovals framed by acanthus leaves. A slight suspicion of dust filled the carvings. After five seconds, I looked at the item again. How could a pea not shrink and shrivel, unless it was preserved in oil or in a vacuum? To judge by the colour, it was a young pea freshly spilled from its pod, full of water and life that made its skin turgid, ready to burst if squeezed between index finger and thumb.

  My stomach clenched at the unprofessional thought. I concentrated on my task, passing my feather duster with the greatest attention on the delicate pedestal carvings, but my gaze wandered back to the pea. It had never happened before. In all those years, never had one single question about any of the objects crossed my mind. My deference to the doctor’s wishes had always been absolute.

  Dr. Lambshead had become all my family after my parents died. No sensible person can lend credence to the cook’s rants; he attributes a selfish intent to each of the doctor’s good actions. It is untrue that my legal guardian discouraged my interest in humanities to secure the services of an unpaid employee. When a paralysing timidity forced me to abandon my studies at Oxford, the doctor restored my self-esteem by assuring me I was the only person he could trust to keep his ever-growing collection mildew-free. He had always treated me with consideration. And dust was our enemy.