The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

sarkoform, consisting of weirdly mutated and miniaturized remains drifting through time until they find their correlative machinery.

The seventh and final manuscript in the folder is included here in its entirety, as a sample of the general condition of the whole of the folder’s contents.

The Seventh Manuscript

Once upon a time there was a man who loved volcanoes. From birth or not. At first, his instincts were innocent. His father his mother his uncle Brobisher His father had told him once of a volcanic eruption of Kraka of Herac Pomp of Krakatoa, and he’d done a book report in school in grammar school that had been well received that had won him his first real praise in school. He became a vulcanologist. Amateur. When he went to university he devoted himself to the study of vulcanology and in time became a professor of that subject, although his chief love was not in teaching about volcanoes in the classroom nor even of lecturing on volcanoes or conducting most forms of research into, for example, the history of volcanoes of volcanic of vulcanic vucl vulcanism and humans in human history. His great love was in visiting volcanoes and it was during one such visit that he realized his interest was sexual. When in the presence of erupting volcano he would experience all symptoms of intense arousal, including tumescence, tension in the groin, shortness of breath, an increase in temperature, a flush in the face, anxious nervous excite intension tension in the thorax. He often found that he’d be so lost in amorous contemplation of the gushing crater that he had made no observations of any scientific use utility. But only had penned such empty chestnuts as magnificent, breathtaking, beautiful, thrilling etc.

Finally taken aside by so-called “friend” and colleague.

“You had better be careful,” his friend said. “Now, you wouldn’t want to be catching ‘volcano fever.’ ”

“Why is now a bad time to catch ‘volcano fever’?”

“It happens to every vulcanologist, sooner or later,” he added muttered a moment later after a long pause hastily. “The intellectual intelligentsual passion spontaneously develops a sensual dimension, the dense, shielding foam that protects the gem facet of eroticism lamentably dissolves to expose the bare and tinglingly sensitized surface to the polyfluous exagamies of hermitanical and phantasmic erotimoids . . .”

“I gather your meaning—[Here is interposed a long list of possible names for the interlocutor of the stricken vulcanologist. In the interests of economizing our use of space, only a few examples will be given: “Earthflounder . . . Soildozer . . . Marldozer . . . Dozemarl . . . Claybeater . . . etc.”]—Your prognosis is a fetishistic transference a common, everyday fetishistic transference.”

“I’m glad we had this little talk, DAQUIRI.” [“DAQUIRI” being the name attributed to the afflicted vulcanologist, in this line only. The paper shows signs of a name that was written, erased, and rewritten again and again, until the name DAQUIRI was allowed to remain on the smudged and badly roughened paper.]

Finally, on occasion of witnessing eruption and heavy flow at close hand, perfectly understandable given the circumstances loses all self control and experiences spontaneous orgasm deliberately gets no accidentally—somehow ejaculates copiously into lava torrent before dragged away by hysterical, over-reacting and narrow-minded assistant who’s too busy prying into other people’s affairs to mind his own bloody business.

Few years later stories local legends begin to be told about a curious little man-like figure observed gamboling on slopes. Volcano’s slopes. Thought to be a child in outfit. Costume. Very young. Too young for costumes really. At play unattended, dangerous locations. Virtually in the flames at times, untroubled. Found eventually curled in blazing hot alcove, in softened recess, sucking at unusually rounded stalagmite tite mite TITE damn stalagTITE. Netted. Snared. Resemblance. Faint. Distorted. Yet, somehow plain. Unmistakable. Creature radiates fantastic heat. Handler must wear aluminium suit.

Recognition mutual?

Escapes.

Winter. Volcano enters less active stage, coincidence.

Child found dead. Hypothermia.

Cools to room temperature.

Transferred to jar. Former contents, a salted lammergeier chick, sent to taxidermist [seven pounds ten shillings] for stuffing never retrieved. Jar sent to the farmhouse in Essex.

Grief of the father.

The Singing Fish Researched and Documented by Amal El-Mohtar

This exciting find, titled Der singende Fisch (“The Singing Fish,” pen and ink with watercolour, circa 1860), is a rare reproduction of the last known work of artist, artisan, and poet Edith Abendroth. She created Der singende Fisch during her incarceration in the Lunatic Asylum at Eberbach Abbey from 1861 until her death in 1869. Until now, only scattered descriptions of the piece were available, reproductions suppressed by the unusual events following Abendroth’s death, which resulted in the superstition that surrounds Der singende Fisch to the present day.

The image contains the distorted proportions characteristic of all Ms. Abendroth’s work, but there are more symbols at work here: consider that the critic is cock-eyed, seen in profile, which associates him with the noble figure of one-eyed Odin, the Norse God of the gallows, who sacrificed an eye in order to gain all the world’s wisdom. Yet instead of Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s twin ravens named Thought and Memory, two parrots perch on his shoulders, symbolic of meaningless chatter and thoughtless repetition. Still there are ravens in the image, after a fashion: two raven feathers (one from Thought, one from Memory?) peek out of the well of Imperial Ink at the critic’s feet, suggesting that he has sacrificed Thought and Memory to produce the ink with which he will write his vicious tracts.

The fact that the critic leans against a stack of books could indicate any number of things: that he leans on the works of his betters without understanding them; that all his learning is useless to him as a means of understanding the singing fish; that all he can do is parrot the words of his educators without contributing thoughts of his own. Consider that he covers his mouth with his hand, and that he is dressed all in black—almost as if he had bathed himself in the death of Thought and Memory.

But where the critic’s mouth is covered, the fish’s mouth is wide-open; where the critic is silent, the fish sings.

What bait could hook such a throat?

Early Portrait of the Artist

Ms. Abendroth was born in Berlin in 1821 to Karl and Frieda Abendroth, who kept a prosperous print shop in the city, out of which they also taught drawing, painting, and etching. She showed a keen interest in these arts from an early age, and quickly grew quite skilled, in spite of—or perhaps partly due to—suffering from severe migraines. During such episodes she sometimes claimed to perceive things as larger or smaller than they truly were, and described the sensation in detail:

It is as if the pain in my head comes from the swelling of the object in my sight—as if the table captured by my eye has grown too big for my head to contain without agony. Yet while these things grow, I think surely I must shrink, must be dwindling to a speck, and tremble to look at my hands for fear of seeing them become either a bird’s or a giantess’s. It hurts—and yet I think there must be something terribly splendid in being able to see the world as in a story book, that perhaps I am a heroine of some sort, yet to discover my purpose. It is all terribly interesting.¹