The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Though the relic Chalmers may or may not have seen while in Paris as a child doesn’t appear in the story, it is plainly echoed in the recurring motif of keys, both literal and figurative. Most notably, the terrible old man who first speaks to the story’s l’enfant innocent of “the mysteries of the worm” describes nine magical keys. Each key bears the name of one of the muses of Greek mythology, as set forth in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593). The old man tells the girl that the two most powerful keys, Polyhymnia and Calliope, are required for the ritual of resurrection (“shredding the veil, casting back, fetching up”). If Chalmers’s choice of these two muses is meant to hold a particular symbolic meaning, it escapes repeated . . .

Excerpt from “The Thousand and Third Tale of Scheherazade: A Survey of the Arabian Ghûl in Popular Culture,” Esther Kensky, The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 42, no. 6 (December 2009):

. . . will, instead, quote at length from the summary provided by Niederhausen and Flaschka (1992): “This was the time before the war between the Ghûl (plural, Arabic and the other races of the Djinn —the Ifrit, the Sila, and the Marid. In those days, the men of the desert still looked upon all the Djinn as gods, though they’d already learned to fear the night shades, the Ghûl, and guarded their children and the graves of their dead against them. Among the fates that could befall the soul of a man or woman, to have one’s corpse stolen and then devoured by the Ghûl was counted as one of the most gruesome and tragic conceivable. It was thought that to be so consumed would mean that the deceased would be taken from the cold sleep of barzakh, never to meet with the angels Nakir and Munkar, and so never be interrogated and prepared for Paradise , Hebrew cognate jannah).

“It is said that these demons fear both steel and iron, like the other Djinn, and so people wear steel rings or place steel daggers where protection from Djinn and ghouls is needed. Salt is another means of protection, since ghouls hate it. The names of God, Qur’anic verses, magic squares (Muska), or that group of magical symbols known as ‘the seven seals’ are frequently worn by people or attached to their property to ward off the demons.

“One of the more obscure customs meant to provide a ward against the Ghûl is mentioned briefly in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957). According to Borges, these creatures have an obsession with keys and locks, and can be thwarted by scattering a dozen or so keys near a locked door or gate, none of which actually fit the lock in question. The ghoul will try each key repeatedly (despite its purported fear of iron), so doggedly determined to find the correct match that it immediately forgets a given key has already been tested. It may continue this for hours, neglecting to watch for dawn, and be destroyed by the rising sun. It’s believed that the severed hand of a ghoul dispatched in this manner, still holding tight to the last key it tried, is a powerful talisman against all manner of evils and misfortune. Interestingly, a similar predilection to arithmomania is ascribed to vampires in certain Chinese and European traditions, and to witches and other mischievous . . .”

Excerpt from a letter found among the correspondence of the late Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, from Ms. Margaret H. Jacobs (7 Exegesis Street, Cincinnati, Ohio) to Lambshead; undated but postmarked May 25, 1981:

. . . the crouching thing, that goddamned horrid thing like a huge rat, and it scampers over the threshold that hadn’t been there before it used the key. Its tiny claws scritch, scritch, scritch against the granite, a sound that makes me shudder whenever I remember it. I can be wide awake and driving to work, on a sunny day, and I recall that scratching noise and shudder. So, it crosses the threshold and calls for me to follow. I glance back at the flooded cellar, and see that the stairs have vanished, that it’s not even a cellar anymore. It’s a cave opening out onto the sea, a sea cave.

This is one of the new twists, Dr. Lambshead. Always before, always, when I’d pause and look back over my shoulder, the stairs would still be there. And they were a comfort to me, because the stairs implied a way out, that I could escape simply by retracing my steps. I could run back and hammer at the locked door until the silver-eyed women or the Bailiff came to let me out. It’s awful, just awful, not having the reassurance of those stairs. I look at the entrance of the cave, and it’s night outside, but I can see the water gets deep very fast out there. I’ve never been a very strong swimmer, Doctor.