The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

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 Psychomesmeric Quarterly about hypnotic techniques inherited from his grandfather, a great confidant of Monsieur Mesmer. Among Lambshead’s mesmeric family legacy was the Valdemar Method, which enabled the doctor, so he claimed, “to extract from even the most cavernous subconscious those diseases that afflicted the soul, as demonstrated in the mesmeric stories of Edgar Allan Poe.”

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: