The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Indeed, by the year 1522, Pope Adrian VI—having had enough of talk of floating islands, healing that resulted in death by melancholia, bleeding, or worse, and other rumors that, in his opinion, were, at best, due to the infernal influence of the followers of that fallen priest, Martin Luther, or, at worst (and Heaven forbid!), an insidious Ottoman plot—banned the use of the Shank, banned mention of the Shank, and excommunicated the entire Order of St. Brendan. “Since the presence or absence of suffering is due wholly to the whims of God, it is a blasphemy and an insult to thwart the divine Plan,” he wrote in October of that year, though, in his writings, he demonstrates an acute ignorance of how the Shank worked. He died a year later. It is doubtful that the monks on the wandering isle ever knew of their excommunication, or, indeed, that they would have cared.

Throughout the historical record, then, the actual function of the Shank had gone assiduously unmentioned in its brief appearances. The witnesses to the Shank merely attested that it worked, remaining curiously mum on other important matters for quite some time.

Perhaps because of this very mystery, Dr. Lambshead became keenly interested in locating one. Through his deep and multilayered explorations of the history of the medical arts, Lambshead had encountered several modern references to the Shank—particularly in his extensive rereading of The Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies, edited by John Trimble and Rebecca Manard, long after his bitter and public feud with both Trimble and Manard—a kind of attempt through scholarship to reconcile. Still, he did not lay eyes on the object until many years later.

According to Dr. Lambshead’s journals, volume 27, book 4, he finally encountered the Shank during World War II, while performing his duty as a surgeon on the Island of Mykines, the Faroe Islands still under the British flag. (He would soon return to his wartime efforts at London’s Combustipol General Hospital.)

On October 5, 1941, the doctor wrote: “Patient arrived: an elderly gentleman, rapid heartbeat, high fever, terrible bleeding from the mouth and anus. Private Lansing informed me that the ancient man was found clinging to a leather-hulled skiff that had wedged between two large rocks at the lee of the island. The man was dressed in the manner of those bent toward monasticism—rough cloth, broken sandals, a rope binding the waist—and was impossibly old. His face had the look of leaves gone to mulch. His body was as light as paper and twice as fragile; his limbs fluttered and flapped as the breeze blew in cold gusts over the North Atlantic.”

Lambshead further notes, and the duty log from the day confirms, that “He claimed to be an abbot in the Order of St. Brendan, and asked for forgiveness several times, but for what we had no clue, except for frequent references to his ‘weakness.’ Where he had come from, we had no idea—due to the currents in that place and a partial blockade by the Germans, it was all but impossible that he had sailed his boat from another part of the island—he had to have come from the sea.” However, as Dr. Lambshead noted, there wasn’t another island within one hundred miles, and the monk’s boat could at best be classified “as a pathetic cockleshell.”

The man carried with him “an intricate mechanical device that he clutched tightly in his hands.” Although the artifact intrigued Lambshead, he had no time to examine it closely. The man was in need of immediate medical assistance. The bleeding was so profuse that it seemed to the doctor to have been caused by shrapnel, though that was “terribly unlikely.” There had been no attacks in the last week against any of the islands—just a long, tense stalemate—and the wound “was fresh, and flowing.”

The old monk explained that he had come from a place called Brendan’s Isle after his craft became tempest-tossed in a sudden gale, and the island disappeared, and the monk was left alone on the undulating waves. Somehow, the doctor did not quite believe this explanation, although “to this day I couldn’t say why I should doubt a dying monk.”²

“Come back,” the monk moaned, his eyes sliding past the rim of his sockets. “Oh, please come back with me.”

“Does it hurt here?” the doctor asked, ignoring the monk as he palpated the belly.

“Was this the fate of our beloved Brendan?” the old man wheezed. “To realize too late that he was wrong to leave, that he wanted to come home.” Tears leaked from the old man’s rheumy eyes. “Always we wander, and it is so lonely. No matter where our island travels.”

The doctor, assuming the man was raving, called the nurse to bring in the ether.

“Don’t operate,” the old monk raved, clutching his belly. “Oh, dear God, don’t take it away.”