The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

These two aprons, which have been dated as originating from the first years of the twentieth century, have stitched-in tags identifying them as property of one Mrs. Belinda Gibbs. Supporting evidence suggests that Mrs. Gibbs’s profession was that of an unofficial midwife/undertaker working in a badly disadvantaged neighbourhood located in the English midlands, persons of her calling being locally referred to as a “deathmonger.”

One of the aprons is entirely black, being apparently the mode of dress appropriate for “laying out,” or dealing with the bodies of the recently deceased. The other apron, meant for use on the occasion of a birth, is mostly white and yet around its edge is decorated with embroidered bees and butterflies in vivid, naturalistic colours.

In an inside pocket of the jet-black funeral apron, a discoloured handkerchief was found. Its sepia and burnt-umber stains suggest that Mrs. Gibbs was a habitual snuff-user, possibly as a precautionary measure to alleviate any olfactory distress occasioned by her work with cadavers.

2. Children’s toys from dream, anagrammatically derived. Found on first floor; chamber 13.

The second storey of the structure seems, from the inside, to border on the infinitely large, in terms of area, being much bigger than the floor below on which it somehow stands. Also, the actual substance of this second tier seems to be constantly in flux, with details of the landscape metamorphosing and shifting like the details of a dream. The overall appearance of this chamber is of an enormously wide wooden hallway or arcade, immeasurably long and with a grid of rectangular apertures set in its wooden flooring at regular intervals. These apertures look down upon the rooms and alleys of the floor immediately below, although for reasons that are as yet unexplained the holes are not apparent from beneath. Some of the spaces have entire (and massively expanded) trees growing up through them from the ground floor, with their upper branches reaching to the arcade’s ceiling, a glass roof supported by Victorian ironwork beyond which vast geometric clouds, more like a diagram of weather than weather itself, appear to drift. The giant thoroughfare is thought to be known by its currently absented population as “The Attics of the Breath.”

The hallway seems to be a magnified reflection of an ordinary shopping arcade found on the more naturalistic bottom level. Its endless walls are lined with shops, above which there are numerous wooden balconies. One of the businesses in the much smaller precinct on the lowest floor is a shop known as Chasterlaine’s, dealing in toys and novelties. In the exploded reaches of the upper storey, though, this enterprise is subject to the creeping, dreamlike transformations that seem to afflict the second floor, its name moving through various anagrams to finally express itself as “The Snail Races” by the point at which work on the structure halted. In the window, displayed resting on their cardboard boxes in the manner of miniature 1950s Matchbox reproduction cars, was found a range of die-cast metal molluscs that were manufactured to incorporate the features of the scaled-down vehicles which they resembled: one snail has been painted white and has a red cross stencilled on its shell so that it calls to mind an English ambulance of the same vintage. Another has been liveried in navy blue with white calligraphy along its side, identifying it as a Pickford’s removal van. A third has the snail’s body dyed a brilliant post-box scarlet, while its spiral shell has been replaced by a tightly wound fireman’s hose. All of the specimens discovered were roughly two inches long, two inches high, and an inch wide. Their value on the collector’s market, if any, has proven impossible to calculate.

3. Solidified puddle of gold, three feet in diameter. Found on first floor; chamber 18.