The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities Read online

  All that ended in the one-car accident that left Lambshead in shock and Aquilus dead, her remains cremated and buried in a small, private ceremony almost immediately thereafter. Lambshead would never remarry, and often spoke of Helen as if she were still alive, a tendency that friends at first found understandable, then obsessional, and, finally, just “a quirk of Thackery’s syntax,” as Moorcock put it.

  From 1963 on, however, despite his journals containing any number of elaborate descriptions of medical exploration and of artifacts acquired or sent off, there is only one mention of Helen. “Helen chose a different life,” he writes in 1965, on the anniversary of her accident. The words are crossed out, then reinstated and emphasized overtop of the cross-out, with a violence that has torn the page, and several pages after, so that many entries thereafter are marked by and linked to that one sentence.

  What to make of the statement “Helen has chosen another life”? Since 2005, when the journals first became available to the public through the British Library, many a researcher has attempted to make their reputation on an interpretation—everything from psychological profiling to outright conspiracy theories. Riffing off of the ideas, if not the political inclination, of the second endnote in Reza Negarestani’s “The Gallows-horse” (see: The Miéville Anomalies), unexplained-phenomena enthusiast and self-described “heretic Lambsheadean” Caitlín R. Kiernan has speculated that “Helen Aquilus did not die in a car crash in 1960. She staged her own death to join a secret society devoted to radical progressive change in the world, and spent the next half-century of her life in that struggle until a car bomb in Athens took her life in 2005, the body unclaimed for forty-eight hours and then mysteriously disappearing.”

  Evidence for this claim is flimsy at best, although Kiernan cites the speedy cremation of the body, the lack of any follow-up report, “due to the actions of a sleeper cell” within the police department, and “a damning history of collusion between the timing of Lambshead’s museum loans/artifact purchases and the movements of known spies and double agents in the area. It must be assumed that encoded into such transactions were secret messages, some of them from Helen and some of them from Lambshead to Helen.” Kiernan also notes the rapid reversal of some museum loans; in one case, involving “The Armor of Saint Locust,” Lambshead rescinded his approval for the loan five days after the exhibit had opened to the public. She also references “the timing of Lambshead’s visits to the Pulvadmonitor” (see: “Pulvadmonitor: The Dust’s Warning,” The Mignola Exhibits).

  Kiernan saves her most pointed commentary for specific evidence: the rolled-up piece of parchment found inside a mechanical rhino in Zurich in 1976. “The text and image on this paper is ostensibly a maskh spell for constructing a pod for a journey toward the afterlife of the Elysian Fields. The spell is comprised of four main elements: a body wrapped in a shroud, one square and one rectangular chart, and lastly a scorpion, which in Middle Eastern folklore and talismans plays the role of a delivery system or a catalyst (here the scorpion is the engine for the pod to the afterlife). The dimensions of the pod (the shrouded body) have been given in the spell. The word ‘scorpion’ in Farsi has been hidden in this spell in the form of a cipher that looks like an abstract scorpion (the mark just above the word ‘Elysian’ at the bottom of the drawing). But what’s also been hidden here, encrypted, is a series of messages from a husband to his wife that, if ever properly deciphered, would no doubt prove to be a hybrid of a love letter and a complex series of orders or recognition of receipt of commands that might have agency over several years, if not decades. That is the true scorpion in this image.”

  All of this “information” has been gleaned from what Kiernan calls “further encrypted evidence in Lambshead’s journals from 1965 on—the year he learned that Helen wasn’t dead—and supported by such circumstantial evidence as their heated public argument in 1959,” also documented in the journals, in which Lambshead confesses, with no small amount of anguish, that “Helen is much more radical than I could ever be. How am I supposed to follow her in that?” Kiernan points to Lambshead’s writings on “the second life of artifacts” in his “The Violent Philosophy of the Archive,” which she claims “isn’t about the objects at all, but about their repurposing by him.”

  Spell or secret communication? The page found inside of the mecha-rhino, as photographed by Zurich investigator Kristen Alvanson.

  Kiernan further claims that Helen attended Lambshead’s funeral, “the mysterious woman in white standing at the back, next to Keith Richards and Deepak Chopra.” However, photographs from the funeral clearly show many older women “standing at the back,” several of them mysterious in the sense that they cannot be identified and are not on the guest list.

  A theory put forward by Alan Moore, who knew Lambshead late in life better than anyone, is more reasonable and doesn’t presume conspiracy and collusion. Moore suggests merely that the hectic pace Lambshead set from 1963 until his death in 2003 came from a sudden resolve: “It was merely one of the oldest stories, you see. A man attempting to outrun the knowledge of the continuing absence of the love of his life.” (In the subtext of his pornographic masterpiece The Lost Girls, Moore would reference both Lambshead and Helen, through the device of a mirror separating them forever.)

  Loans with Strings Attached: The Museum Exhibits

  Of all of Kiernan’s “evidence,” the most fact-based concerned Lambshead’s eccentric attitude toward the visual documentation of the contents of his cabinet, whether parts of it were at home or roaming abroad. Although it’s hardly evidence of secret messages being included with his loans, Lambshead usually forbid even the usual photographs a museum will commission for catalogs or postcards. His sole recorded explanation? “It creates greater anticipation if the public has no preconceived idea of what they may be about to encounter. A photograph is a sad and lonely idea of an echo of something real.” (Guardian, “Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham. a.k.a. Robotikus, Still on Loan to Imperial War Museum, But Nowhere to Be Seen,” June 4, 1998)

  However, as even the barely suppressed emotion evidenced by the quote may suggest, it seems more likely that Lambshead’s intense personal commitment to the core collection made the loaning of items, while necessary and part of what the doctor considered his “civic duty,” also painful, and that forbidding photographs gave him a measure of control, a way he could allow the public to experience his cabinet and yet keep it from the Public Eye. As might be expected, the compilation of a book chronicling highlights from Lambshead’s cabinet has been made much more difficult due to this eccentricity.

  The Doctor Versus the Collector

  For the majority of his career, due to his insistence on remaining true to his main passions, Lambshead existed on the fringes of medical science. He was wellrespected by some of the world’s best doctors, but it was only by becoming a kind of cult figure in the 1960s and 1970s, when he forged friendships with many of pop culture’s elite, along with “sheer bloody persistence and endurance,” that his medical exploits began to receive the media attention he believed they deserved. Later on, there would even be factions of Lambsheadologists who clashed in their interpretations of the doctor’s theories, with Lambshead rarely if ever willing to put an end to such conflict with a definitive conclusion. “Definitive conclusions are for politicians, proctologists, and those who wear mascot costumes,” he liked to say.

  Despite the time spent on his cabinet, Lambshead’s interests always manifested most concretely in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. First published in 1921, the Guide gave agency and credence to real but obscure and often only anecdotally documented instances of diseases, parasites, and tumors. Not only did many young doctors from all over the world, who would later publish influential findings, receive a sympathetic welcome from the doctor, but marginalized peoples often found the Guide took up their cause, sometimes creating publicity for situations that local governments and foreign-relief agencies wished would ju
st go away.

  Published almost continuously until the doctor’s death, the Guide received a controversial send-off with Bantam Books’ commemorative eighty-third edition in 2003. That reviewers and readers were often confused as to whether the book constituted fact or fiction was the result of a colossal blunder by Bantam’s marketing and PR departments, which were, as would be well documented later, largely dominated by pot-smokers. However, the doctor’s legacy was vindicated by the fact that a large number of medical libraries now carry that edition in their medical-guides section.

  Legendary Czech artist and animator Jan Svankmajer's tongue-in-cheek tribute to Dr. Lambshead’s so-called “Skull Cucumber” hoax, perpetrated on London’s Museum of Natural History in 1992, during as Lambshead put it, “a period of extreme boredom.”

  However, as should be clear, the doctor’s career was only half the story. Just as his exploration of eccentric diseases forms a secret history of the twentieth century, so, too, his cabinet of curiosities, in all of its contradictions, provides an eclectic record of a century—through folly and triumph, organized, if you will, by the imaginations of the eccentric and the visionary.

  Resurrecting the Cabinet

  Not until well after Lambshead’s death of banal pulmonary failure did anyone except for his housekeeper seem to have had even an inkling of the full extent of the underground collection. This situation had been exacerbated by the old man’s knowledge of his impending extinction. He had, for three years, been issuing a “recall” of sorts on many of his permanent loans. (This fact did not go unnoticed by Kiernan, who claimed these particular exhibits “had expired in their usefulness for communication with Helen.”)

  A long process of discovery awaited those assigned by the estate to take care of the house, which still begs the question: Why did it take so long to unearth the collection? Estate representatives have been vague on this point, perhaps hinting at some private foreknowledge and personal plundering prior to the British government, in 2008, declaring the property a national treasure—nothing was to be touched, except with extreme care, and certainly nothing removed.

  But it is also true that Lambshead had left enough aboveground to keep archaeologists and appraisers busy for several lifetimes. In later years, Lambshead’s housekeeper had gotten lackadaisical, and Lambshead made eccentric purchases of furniture—which, the week before his death, he’d hired movers to stack against the front door, as if to barricade the house against what he must have known by then was coming.

  An invention commissioned from Jake von Slatt demonstrating the doctor’s commitment to the future as well as the past. Some have speculated this device supports Amal El-Mohtar’s “space Ark” theory. As described by Annalee Newitz, this image “illustrates an ideal system, where the knobs on the lower right demodulate cultural transmissions, and the amplifier beneath the bell transmits a psionic signal that can reach any analog neurological entity within 7,000 kilometers.” (See Newitz’s extended description in the Catalog section.)

  More evidence of the disarray of the cabinet space, in a photograph taken during a 2009 appraisal. (Found in the display case at the back, a half-finished letter penned by Lambshead: “As Lichtenberg said of angels, so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God’s name should we understand? And even if so, how then should we reply?”)

  Therefore, the man’s house was in a catastrophic state of disarray, with letters from heads of state mixed in with grocery lists, major medical awards propping up tables or sticking enigmatically out of the many cat litter boxes, and several hundred volumes of his personal journals shoved into random spaces in a library as shambolic as it was complete. The only clean, uncluttered space was Helen’s study, which remained as it had been upon her death.

  No doubt because of this disarray, and the introduction of an administrative red herring—Moorcock has suggested that Lambshead left instructions for someone to “plant the herring, no matter how badly it might begin to smell”—indicating that the collection had long ago been sent into storage in Berlin, it took caretakers until last year to unearth perhaps “the most stirring find,” as Le Monde put it. In the basement space, lost under a collapsed floor, were found the remains of a “remarkable and extensive cabinet of curiosities” that “appeared to have been damaged by a fire that occurred sometime during the past decade.” (Le Monde, “Une merveille médicale: Le curieux cabinet d’un médecin renommé enflamme l’imagination,” April 14, 2010) Strangely, there is no report of any fire from the many years Lambshead owned the house, and we have only a brief anecdotal (and probably false) statement from the doctor’s estranged housekeeper to guide us to any sort of conclusion.

  The cabinet of curiosities took more than eighteen months to unearth, reconstruct, document, and catalog. Many of the pieces related to anecdotes and stories in the doctor’s personal diaries. Others, when shown to his friends, elicited further stories. In many cases, we had only descriptions of the items. Still, we were determined to build a book that would honor at least the spirit and lingering ghost of Lambshead’s collection. Thus, in keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Lambshead and his accomplishments, we are now proud to present highlights from the doctor’s cabinet. These have been reconstructed not just through visual representations but also through text associated with their history and (sometimes) their acquisition by Lambshead. (As with any cabinet, real or housed within pages, it is, as Oscar Wilde once said about an exhaustive collection of poetry, a “browsing experience, to dip into and to savor, rather than take a wild carriage ride through.”)

  We also have Lambshead’s own wistful words from his diary, written on a long-ago day in 1964: “It is never possible to completely reconstruct a person’s life from what they leave behind—the absurdity of it all, the pain, the triumphs. What’s lost is lost forever, and the silences are telling. But why mourn what we’ll lose anyway? Laughter truly is the best medicine, and I find whisky tends to numb and burn what’s left behind.”

  Holy Devices and Infernal Duds: The Broadmore Exhibits

  The Broadmore Exhibits

  Greg Broadmore came by his interest in Lambshead’s cabinet of curiosities honestly: through a familial connection. “Lambshead’s family and mine were connected by an uncle, so even after my grandparents moved to New Zealand, they kept in touch.”

  On a trip to England at the age of twelve, Broadmore and his parents visited Lambshead. The artist remembers “a man in his eighties who looked more like fifty, but was as big a curmudgeon as you could possibly imagine. But he seemed to have a soft spot for me. At the very point where I was getting bored listening to them talk in the study, Lambshead suggested he step out to take me to the kitchen for some dessert . . . and instead he brought me down some steep steps into an underground space filled with wonders. The place was hewn out of solid stone and had that nice damp cool mossy smell you find in caves sometimes.”

  Broadmore remembers Lambshead giving him a wink and saying, “Don’t break anything,” and leaving him there with a glass of milk and some banana bread. “For me, it was like being given a free pass to an amazing fairyland—the outward expression of all of the visions in my head of anything miraculous. It had a deep and lasting effect on my art.” For two hours, Broadmore roamed through Lambshead’s collection, finding “countless old toys and ridiculously complex machines and scandalous artwork and comics and . . . well, I began to wonder what wasn’t to be found there.”

  Broadmore never visited the cabinet again, and since then has, of course, gone on to forge a near-legendary career as an artist and creator aligned with Weta Workshop. “I was particularly saddened to hear of Lambshead’s death a few years ago,” Broadmore remembers. “It brought back all of those memories of those perfect hours in his cabinet of curiosities.”

  For this reason, among others, Broadmore kindly agreed to provide illustrative reconstructions for four of Lambshead’s museum loans, which have never been photographed, even after his death, pursu
ant to instructions in his will.

  The Electrical Neurheographiton

  Documented by Minister Y. Faust, D.Phil

  Constructed: March 14, 1914 (patent still pending)

  Invented by: Nikola Tesla (Serbian subject of the Austrian Empire, later an American citizen, born July 10, 1856; “died” January 7, 1943)

  History: Stolen from the “robotorium” (barn) of farmer-tinkerer Rhett Greene in St. John’s, Dominion of Newfoundland, 1947, by Yugoslavian agents. Held in the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation, until sold to Thackery T. Lambshead in 1997 and subsequently lent by his estate to the Slovenian National Museum of Electrical Engineering; L2010.01

  Biographical Sketch

  Few intellects in the history of Man achieved such Daedalian heights as those conquered by Serbian inventor, mechanical engineer, psychemetrician, and electrodynamist Nikola Tesla. Men as grand of conjecture and achievement as Tesla attract, along with their many accolades, such a volume of obloquy as to produce an aneurysm among all but the most robustly confident of souls. And while Mr. Tesla was confident indeed, even “galactically arrogant,” as one detractor called him, he was also terrified of the charge that many of his foes in the scientific and journalistic establishments had hurled at him, viz., that he was insane.