The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Although it is worth noting that the location of these objects is unstable, due to a phenomenon particular to The Book of Categories known as “wobbling,” which can result from stored conceptual potential energy escaping through the frame of The Inner Book and resonating with The Outer Book.

10.5 It is clear from certain sites in the book

that Chang remained obsessed with naming what had happened to his child.

10.5.1        Chang’s last entry

is a clump of (A)CTE paper consisting of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of blank pages, known as The Chang Region. On each page of The Chang Region of the book is written what appears to be an ancient form of a Chinese character. Scholars disagree as to the identity of the character.

11 Eventually, a possessor of the book comes to realize

how hard it is to find any given page, lost among the pages. Trying to find that slice, to cut through it on either side, before the page has been lost.

[INSERTED]

8.1.1.1.1.1      A name actually being

a memorial to the site where an idea once

rested, momentarily, before moving on.

8.1.1.1.1.1.1        If you listen carefully,

you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed.

[1] Which itself is listed in The Book of Books of Categories, vol. III, p. 21573, row K, column FF.

[2] And counting.

[3] The Intended Purpose is unknown, so this is basically just a wild-assed guess.

[4] Lambshead himself has been the caretaker of the book on two separate occasions, each time receiving it from Bertrand Russell, and each time passing it to Alfred North Whitehead.

Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction

Documented by Alan Moore

The following items have been retrieved from the construction site of an uncompleted novel, Jerusalem, where completion of the structure’s uppermost level has been delayed by unanticipated setbacks that are unrelated to the project.

The site itself is gigantic in its dimensions, with more than half a million words already in place and the three-tier edifice as yet only a little more than two-thirds of the way into its lengthy building process. The intimidating silence that pervades the vast and temporarily abandoned landscape is exacerbated by the absence of the novel’s characters and by the lack of any background noise resulting from the engineering and the excavation usually associated with such ventures.

Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambience is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that’s suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.

The topmost storey, where work has been halted, seems again to be accomplished in a style that is entirely unrelated to the floors beneath. The building’s lines and sweeping curves are unresolved, curtailed in jutting spars or girders that stand enigmatically against the skyline. Amidst these skeletal protrusions are two or three relatively finished works of decorative statuary, the most notable being a winged stone figure representing the archangel Michael, who is depicted standing with a shield held in his left hand and what seems to be a snooker cue clutched in his right.

A book discovered in Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet, the bulk of it taken up by a false bottom, inside of which researchers found the text by Alan Moore and a tiny architectural structure consisting of several floors, somewhat akin to a doll’s house, with a variety of odd objects inside each compartment or room.

The oddities listed below were all discovered in the confines of the structure’s bottom two floors, and are labelled with an indication of which level and which individual chamber or compartment they were found in.

1. Deathmonger’s aprons, two in number. Found on ground floor; chamber 10.