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 will, 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
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!”
