by Sean Wallace
“I mean no disrespect, Professor, but it strikes me that perhaps you have gone and mistaken the provenance of that beast’s design. For my part, it’s far easier to imagine such a fiend being more at home in the sulfurous tributaries of Hell than the waters of any earthly ocean. Perhaps, my good doctor, it may be that you are merely mistaken about the demon’s having ever been buried. Possibly, to the contrary, it is something which clawed its way up from the Pit.”
Jeremiah Ogilvy stares at her a moment, aware that it’s surely wisest to humor this disagreeable woman. To nod and smile and make no direct reply to such absurd remarks. But he has always been loath to suffer fools, and has never been renowned as the most politic of men, often to his detriment. He makes a steeple of his hands and rests his chin upon his fingertips as he replies.
“And yet,” he says, “oddly, you’ll note that on both its fore and hind limbs, each fashioned into paddles, this underworld fiend of yours entirely lacks claws. Don’t you think, Mrs Larimer, that we might fairly expect such modifications, something not unlike the prominent ungula of a mole, perhaps? Or the robust nails of a Cape anteater? I mean, that’s a terrible lot of digging to do, all the way from Perdition to the prairies of Gove County.”
There’s more laughter, an uneasy smattering that echoes beneath the high ceiling beams, and it elicits another scowl from an embarrassed Mrs Belford. But the Professor has cast his lot, as it were, for better or worse, and he keeps his eyes fixed upon Mrs Charles W. Larimer. She looks more chagrined than angry, and any trace of her former bluster has faded away.
“As you say, Professor,” and she manages to make the last three syllables sound like a badge of wickedness.
“Very well, then,” Professor Ogilvy says, turning to Mrs Belford. “Perhaps I could interest you gentle women in the celebrated automatic mastodon, a bona-fide masterpiece of clockwork engineering and steam power. So realistic in movement and appearance you might well mistake it for the living thing, newly resurrected from some boggy Pleistocene quagmire.”
“Oh, yes. I think that would be fascinating,” Mrs Belford replies, and soon the women are being led from the main gallery up a steep flight of stairs to the mezzanine where the automatic mastodon and the many engines and hydraulic hoses that control it have been installed. It stands alongside a finely preserved skeleton of Mammut americanum unearthed by prospectors in the Yukon and shipped to the gallery at some considerable expense.
“Why, it’s nothing but a great hairy elephant,” Mrs Larimer protests, but this time none of the others appear to pay her much mind. Professor Ogilvy’s fingers move over the switches and dials on the brass control panel, and soon the automaton is stomping its massive feet and flapping its ears and filling the hot, pepper-scented air with the trumpeting of extinct Pachydermata.
2.
When the ladies of the Temperance Union have gone, and after Jeremiah Ogilvy has seen to the arrival of five heavy crates of saurian bones from one of his collectors working out of Monterey, and, then, after he has spoken with his chief preparator about an overdue shipment of blond Kushmi shellac, ammonia and sodium borate, he checks his pocket watch and locks the doors of the museum. Though there has been nothing excessively trying about the day – not even the disputatious Mrs Larimer caused him more than a passing annoyance – Professor Ogilvy finds he’s somewhat more weary than usual, and is looking forward to his bed with an especial zeal. All the others have gone, his small staff of technicians, sculptors and naturalists, and he retires to his office and puts the kettle on to boil. He has a fresh tin of Formosa Oolong, and decides that this evening he’ll take his tea up on the roof.
Most nights, there’s a fine view from the gallery roof, and he can watch the majestic airships docking at the Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal, or just shut his eyes and take in the commingled din of human voices and buckboards, the heavy clop of horses’ hooves and the comforting pandemonium made by the locomotives passing through the city along the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway.
He hangs the tea egg over the rim of his favorite mug and is preparing to pour the hot water, when the office doorknob rattles and neglected hinges creak like inconvenienced rodents. Jeremiah looks up, not so much alarmed as taken by surprise, and is greeted by the familiar – but certainly unexpected – face and pale blue eyes of Dora Bolshaw. She holds up her key, tied securely on a frayed length of calico ribbon, to remind him that he never took it back and to remove any question as to how she gained entry to the locked museum after hours. Dora Bolshaw is an engine mechanic for the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company, and, because of this, and her habit of dressing always in men’s clothes, and the fact that her hands and face are only rarely anything approaching clean, she is widely, and mistakenly, believed to be an inveterate Sapphist. Dora is, of course, shunned by more proper women – such as, for instance, Mrs Charles W. Larimer – who blanch at the thought of dames et lesbiennes walking free and unfettered in their midst. Dora has often mused that, despite her obvious preference for men, she is surely the most renowned bulldyke west of the Mississippi.
“Slipping in like a common sneak thief,” Jeremiah sighs, reaching for a second cup. “I trust you recollect the combination to the strongbox, along with the whereabouts of that one loose floorboard.”
“I most assuredly do,” she replies. “Like they were the finest details of the back of my hand. Like it was only yesterday you went and divulged those confidences.”
“Very good, Miss Bolshaw. Then, I trust this means we can forgo the messy gunplay and knives and whatnot?”
She steps into the office and pulls the door shut behind her, returning the key to a pocket of her waistcoat. “If that’s your fancy, Professor. If it’s only a peaceable sort of evening you’re after.”
Filling his mug from the steaming kettle, submerging the mesh ball of the tea egg and the finely ground leaves, Jeremiah shrugs and nods at a chair near his desk.
“Do you still take two lumps?” he asks her.
“Provided you got nothing stronger,” she says, and only hesitates a moment before crossing the room to the chair.
“No,” Jeremiah tells her. “Nothing stronger. If I recall, we had an agreement, you and I?”
“You want your key back?”
Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy pours hot water into a teacup, adds a second tea egg, and very nearly asks if she imagines that his feelings have changed since the last time they spoke. It’s been almost six months since the snowy January night when he asked her to marry him. Dora laughed, thinking it only a poor joke at first. But when pressed, she admitted she was not the least bit interested in marriage and, what’s more, confessed she was even less amenable to giving up her work at the mines to bear and raise children. When she suggested that he board up his museum, instead, and for a family take in one or two of the starving guttersnipes who haunt Colliers’ Row, there was an argument. Before it was done, he said spiteful things, cruel jibes aimed at all the tender spots she’d revealed to him over the years of their courtship. And he knew, even as he spoke the words, that there would be no taking them back. The betrayal of Dora’s trust came too easily, the turning of her confidences against her, and she is not a particularly forgiving woman. So, tonight, he only almost asks, then thinks better of the question and holds his tongue.
“It’s your key,” he says. “Keep it. You may have need of it again one day.”
“Fine,” Dora replies, letting the chair rock back on two legs. “It’s your funeral, Jeremiah.”
“Can I ask why you’re here? That is, to what do I owe this unheralded pleasure?”
“You may,” she says, staring now at a fossil ammonite lying in a cradle of excelsior on his desk. “It’s bound to come out, sooner or later. But if you’re thinking maybe I come looking for old times or a quick poke—”
“I wasn’t,” he lies, interrupting her.
“Well, good. Because I ain’t.”
“Which begs the question. And it’s been a ra
ther tedious day, Miss Bolshaw, so, if we can dispense with any further niceties.”
Dora coughs and leans forward, the front legs of her chair bumping loudly against the floor. Jeremiah keeps his eyes on the two cups of tea, each one turned as dark now as a sluggish, tannin-stained bayou.
“I’m guessing that you still haven’t seen anyone about that cough,” he says. “And that it hasn’t improved.”
Dora coughs again before answering him, then wipes at her mouth with an oil-stained handkerchief. “Good to see time hasn’t dulled your mental faculties,” she mutters hoarsely, breathlessly, then clears her throat and wipes her mouth again.
“It doesn’t sound good, Dora, that’s all. You spend too much time in the tunnels. Plenty enough people die from anthracosis without ever having lifted a pickaxe or loaded a mine car, as I’m sure you’re well aware.”
“I also didn’t come here to discuss my health,” she tells him, stuffing the handkerchief back into a trouser pocket. “It’s the stink of this place, gets me wheezing, that’s all. I swear, Jeremiah, the air in this dump, it’s like trying to breathe inside a goddamn burr grinder that’s been used to mill capsicum and black powder.”
“No argument there,” he says and takes the tea eggs from the cups and sets them aside on a dishtowel. “But, I still don’t know why you’re here.”
“Been some odd goings on down in Shaft Number Seven, ever since they started back in working on the Molly Gray vein.”
“I thought Shaft Seven flooded in October,” Jeremiah says, and he adds two sugar cubes to Dora’s cup. The Professor has never taken his tea sweetened, nor with lemon, cream, or whiskey, for that matter. When he drinks tea, it’s the tea he wants to taste.
“They pumped it out a while back, got the operation up and running again. Anyway, one of the foremen knew we were acquainted and asked if I’d mind. Paying you a call, I mean.”
“Do you?” he asks, carrying the cups to the desk.
“Do I what?”
“Do you mind, Miss Bolshaw?”
She glares at him a moment, then takes her cup and lets her eyes wander back to the ammonite on the desk.
“So, these odd goings on. Can you be more specific?”
“I can, if you’ll give me a chance. You ever heard of anyone finding living creatures sealed up inside solid rock, two thousand feet below ground?”
He watches her a moment, to be sure this isn’t a jest. “You’re saying this has happened, in Shaft Seven?”
She sips at her tea, then sets the cup on the edge of the desk and picks up the ammonite. The fossilized mother of pearl glints iridescent shades of blue-green and scarlet and gold in the dim gaslight of the office.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I seen most of them for myself, so I know it’s not just miners spinning tall tales.”
“Most of them? So, it’s happened more than once?”
Dora ignores the questions, turning the ammonite over and over in her hands.
“I admit,” she says, “I was more than a little skeptical at first. There’s a shale bed just below the Molly Gray seam, and it’s chockfull of siderite nodules. Lots of them have fossils inside. Matter of fact, I think I brought a couple of boxes over to you last summer, before the shaft started taking water.”
“You did. There were some especially nice seed ferns in them, as I recall.”
“Right. Well, anyhow, a few days back I started hearing these wild stories, that someone had cracked open a nodule and found a live frog trapped inside. And then a spider. And then worms, and so on. When I asked around about it, I was directed to the geologist’s shack, and, sure as hell, there were all these things lined up in jars, things that had come out of the nodules. Mostly, they were dead. Most of them died right after they came out of the rocks, or so I’m told.”
Dora stops talking and returns the ammonite shell to its box. Then she glances at Jeremiah, and takes another sip of her tea.
“And you know it’s not a hoax?” he asks her. “I mean, you know it’s not tomfoolery, just some of the miners taking these things down with them from the surface, then claiming to have found them in the rocks? Maybe having a few laughs at the expense of their supervisors?”
“Now, that was my first thought.”
“But then you saw something that changed your mind,” Jeremiah says. “And that’s why you’re here tonight.”
Dora Bolshaw takes a deep breath, and Jeremiah thinks she’s about to start coughing again. Instead, she nods and exhales slowly. He notices beads of sweat standing out on her upper lip, and wonders if she’s running a fever.
“I’m here tonight, Professor Ogilvy, because two men are dead. But, yeah, since you asked, I’ve seen sufficient evidence to convince me this ain’t just some jackass thinks he’s funny. When I voiced my doubts, Charlie McNamara split one of those nodules open right there in front of me. Concretion big around as my fist,” and she holds up her left hand for emphasis. “He took up a hammer and gave it a smart tap on one side, so it cleaved in two, pretty as you please. And out crawled a fat red scorpion. You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?”
And Professor Ogilvy thinks a moment, sipping his tea come all the way from Taipei City, Taiwan. “I’ve seen plenty of reddish-brown scorpions,” he says. “For example, Diplocentrus lindo, from the Chihuahuan Desert and parts of Texas. The carapace is, in fact, a dark reddish-brown.”
“I didn’t say reddish brown. What I said was red. Red as berries on a holly bush, or a ripe apple. Red as blood, if you want to go get morbid about it.”
“Charlie cracked open a rock, from Shaft Number Seven, and a bright red scorpion crawled out. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“I am.” Dora nods. “Bastard had a stinger on him big around as my thumb, and then some,” and now she holds out her thumb.
“And two men at the mines have died because of these scorpions?” Jeremiah Ogilvy asks.
“No. Weren’t scorpions killed them,” she says and laughs nervously. “But it was something come out those rocks.” And then she frowns down at her teacup and asks the Professor if he’s absolutely sure that he doesn’t have anything stronger. And this time, he opens a bottom desk drawer and digs out the pint bottle of rye he keeps there, and he offers it to her. Dora Bolshaw pulls out the cork and pours a generous shot into her teacup, but then she’s coughing again, worse than before, and he watches her, and waits for it to pass.
3.
What she’s told him is not without precedent. Over the years, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy has encountered any number of seemingly inexplicable reports of living inclusions discovered in stones, and often inside lumps of coal. Living fossils, after a fashion. He has never once given them credence, but, rather, looked upon these anecdotes as fine examples of the general gullibility of men, not unlike the taxidermied “jackalopes” he’s seen in shop windows, or tales of ghostly hauntings, or of angels, or the antics of spiritual mediums. They are all quite amusing, these phantasma, until someone insists that they’re true.
For starters, he could point to an 1818 lecture by Dr Edward Daniel Clarke, the first professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University. Clarke claimed to have been collecting Cretaceous sea urchins when he happened across three newts entombed in the chalk. To his amazement, the amphibians showed signs of life, and though two quickly expired after being exposed to air, the third was so lively that it escaped when he placed it in a nearby pond to aid in its rejuvenation. Or, a case from the summer of 1851, when well-diggers in Blois, France, were supposed to have discovered a live toad inside a piece of flint. Indeed, batrachians figure more prominently in these accounts than any other creature, and the Professor might also have brought to Dora Bolshaw’s attention yet another toad, said to have been freed from a lump of iron ore the very next year, this time somewhere in the East Midlands of England.
The list goes on and on, reaching back centuries. On 8 May 1733, the Swedish architect Johan Gråberg supposedly witnessed the release of a f
rog from a block of sandstone. So horrified was Gråberg at the sight that he is said to have beaten the beast to death with a shovel. An account of the incident was summarily published, by Gråberg, in the Transactions of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, a report that was eventually translated into Dutch, Latin, German and French.
Too, there is the account from 1575 by the surgeon Ambroise Paré, who claimed a live toad was found inside a stone in his vineyards in Meudon. In 1686, Professor Robert Plot, the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford claimed knowledge of three cases of the “toad-in-the-hole” phenomenon from Britain alone. Hoaxes, perhaps, or only the gullible yarns of a pre-scientific age, when even learned men were somewhat more disposed to believing the unbelievable.
But Jeremiah Ogilvy mentioned none of these tales. Instead, he sat and sipped his tea and listened while she talked, never once interrupting to give voice to his mounting incredulity. However, her cough forced Dora Bolshaw to stop several times and, despite the rye whiskey, towards the end of her story she was hoarse and had grown alarmingly pale; her hands were shaking so badly that she had trouble holding her cup steady. And then, when she was done, and he was trying to organize his thoughts, she glanced anxiously at the clock and said that she should be going. So he walked her downstairs, past the celebrated automatic mastodon and petrified titanothere skulls and his prized plesiosaur skeleton. Standing on the walkway outside the museum, the night air seemed sweet after the “pepper pot”, despite the soot from the furnaces and the reek from the open ditches lining either side of Kipling Street. He offered to see her home, because the thoroughfares of Cherry Creek have an unsavory reputation after dark, but she laughed at him, and he didn’t offer a second time. He watched until she was out of sight, then went back to his office.
And now it’s almost midnight, and Jeremiah Ogilvy’s teacups sit empty and forgotten while he thinks about toads and stones and considers finishing off the pint of rye. After she told him of the most recent and bizarre and, indeed, entirely impossible discovery from Shaft Seven, the thing that was now being blamed for the deaths of two miners, he agreed to look at it.