The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

sorts. Witnesses in the 1930s identified her as the “Hard-Boiled Egg Woman” in Berlin’s infamous Der Eigenartige Wandschrank club, who was said to be able to fling an egg fifteen meters with her reproductive parts while leading the crowd in singing “Wir Wollen Alle Kinder Sein!”

WOUTER K., the most materially successful of the doctor’s subjects, founded a number of private hospitals for the care of “difficult children” (which, some alleged, were merely “holding cells” for the unwanted offspring of the wealthy) and then funneled the profits into the manufacture of chemical agents such as mustard gas, which was banned after the Great War by all sides but still bought and stockpiled by many nations for years after, so that Wouter K. became known in international military circles as “Meister Senf,” or “Mister Mustard.” Soon his factories were making many other kinds of poisons as well, and his scientists are linked to the discovery of the infamous G- series poison gases, including sarin, tabun, and cyclosarin. Wouter K. made millions but used the money primarily to shield himself from the public eye, and was not heard from again until he issued the following “proclamation” to the world’s leading newspapers in early 1939:

The work of Doktor Adelbert Dunkelblau has been much maligned in the international press, especially by those whose minds are too small to understand his vision. What his work proved was not that the Meistergarten was unworkable, or a “crackpot” scheme, as some have termed it, but simply that the experimental sample was too small. I was one of five subjects, and I have become one of the world’s most successful and richest men. Surely a success rate of twenty percent is not to be mocked, especially with a discovery that will literally change the world. A generation of supermen is a goal that no one can fault, and I will provide the first seeds for that wondrous human accomplishment. Twenty percent. It is something to think about—something to thrill the human soul!

I have purchased a quantity of land—no one will know where!—and on that site I shall build Dunkelblau’s Meistergarten anew. But instead of five, I shall commit five hundred or even five thousand subjects to the test (there are orphanages the world over that will happily contribute their superfluity), and from these humble materials will our first generation of “Meistermenschen” be born. But unlike the clownish National Socialists of the current German government, our gifted ones will not reveal themselves, let alone brag of their superiority, but instead they will turn around and create newer, larger generations of others like them, until one day we shall emerge from the wild places where we have hidden ourselves and take our true place as leaders of a fallen, but not entirely hopeless, world. Be warned! On that day, everything will change.

It was rumored in some circles that throughout the 1920s and 1930s “Wouter K.” secretly bought extensive tracts of land in the largely unexplored Chaco Boreal region on the border between Paraguay and Bolivia. Others claim his major holdings were uninhabited volcanic islands in the South Atlantic and Southern Ocean. In either case, to this day, nothing definitive has ever been heard of the last Dunkelblau test subject, and although a few businesses with the name “Meistergarten” have shown up in international registries from places as distantly separated as Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, no sign of the promised “first generation of Meistermenschen” has yet been seen. However, it is clear that even at this late date, the book on Dunkelblau’s experiment cannot quite be closed for good.

Microbial Alchemy and Demented Machinery: The Mignola Exhibits

The Mignola Exhibits

The artifacts researched as part of the Mignola Exhibits tend to reflect Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s own fascination with Lambshead’s cabinet. Mignola says he first remembers reading about Lambshead “in a comic when I was nine—it was one of those two-page spreads they used to fill space, with a title like ‘Strange but True.’ It might’ve been a Tales from the Crypt.”

The images of such iconic Lambshead pieces as the Clockroach were originally intended for an abandoned Mignola project titled Subsequently Lost at Sea, which would have been a detailed illustrated chronicle of, as Mignola puts it, “important stuff that got lost at sea.” The book would have reached back as far as the Romans with their “often unreliable galleys.” Mignola feels the results “would’ve been as important to the study of all kinds of crap lost at sea as Alasdair Gray’s Book of Prefaces is to the study of the English language.”

The pieces documented herein were initially lost at sea in the spring of 2003, following an urgent directive from Lambshead that rescinded the museum loans on the Clockroach, Roboticus mask, Shamalung, and Pulvadmonitor.

Lambshead’s directive sent the exhibits to the Museum of Further Study in Jakarta, Indonesia, all by circuitous routes. Roboticus and Shamalung left via the HMS Dorsal Fin of God, which disappeared seventy miles west of the Canary Islands. The USS Jeraboam II, carrying the Clockroach, was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia, led by, as the BBC put it, “What looked like someone’s Greek great-grandmother with a knife in her teeth,” who managed to elude U.S. and British naval units during a heavy storm. The Baalbek, flying the Libyan flag and carrying a twice-hermetically sealed Pulvadmonitor, vanished off the Horn of Africa. (Some—specifically, Caitlin R. Kiernan—have suggested that the route of the freighters and the points at which they disappeared form a complex message from Lambshead “to parties unknown,” if we could only interpret it.)

By then, the good doctor’s heart had finally given out and his heirs countermanded his orders, an act that seemed to have no agency. However, astoundingly enough, Roboticus, Shamalung, and the Pulvadmonitor (babbling incoherently) turned up at Lord Balfoy’s Antiques on London’s Portobello Road two years later, selling for fifty pounds apiece. The artifacts were turned over to the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects in Saragossa, Spain, where experts eventually confirmed that all three pieces now met “all of our requirements regarding Immateriality, Intangibility, Elusiveness, and the Ephemeral.” When the objects were returned to their respective museums, the attendants therein seemed united behind Billy Quirt—thirty-year velvet-rope veteran of Imperial War exhibits—in believing that the artifacts are “a bloody lot more and a bloody lot less than they were before they went traveling.”

The predicament does underscore one reason Mignola abandoned the book: “Too much stuff eventually washes up. Sometimes just when you’d like it to stay lost. I’d rather just draw stuff that’s always there, like monsters.”

Addison Howell and the Clockroach Documented by Cherie Priest

Museum Name and Location: The Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry; Port Angeles, Washington

Name of Exhibit: Pioneer Myths and Lore in Peninsular Victoriana

Category information

Creator: Addison Sobiesky Howell (alleged); American, born 1828 in Chicago, Illnois. Died 1899 in Humptulips, Washington

Title: “Clockroach,” built 1878(?)

Medium: Mixed, primarily steel, cast iron, rubber tubing, and glass