The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

“Don’t take what away?” Lambshead said reasonably. “Your odd artifact is safe with us. You can have it back once we’ve operated.” He wondered with growing irritation what on earth could be taking that nurse so long.

The monk’s thin arm shot from the gurney, grabbed the doctor’s crisp, white coat. “We were so alone,” the monk whispered. “The Isle of the Blessed is a cold and lonely and desperate place without our beloved saint. And I am alone, and not alone. My brother! My brother! Don’t take him!”

Lambshead reports that the monk shuddered so violently as the nurse came in, donning her surgical smock and mask, that he thought the monk might die right then, right there.

Five drops of ether, the doctor remembers thinking calmly. “Or, perhaps seven. Indeed, make it an even ten.”

Soon, Lambshead opened up the anesthetized man’s belly, and deep in the old monk’s gut he found a very large tumor—nearly the size of a rugby ball, though three times as heavy—and inside the tumor, happily burrowing and eating away, “was a specimen of some form of Turrilepus Gigantis! The mirror image of the complex clockwork artifact we had found in the monk’s pocket!”

After convincing the nurse to neither pass out nor leave the room, the doctor realized at once that the tumor, not the Turrilepus Gigantis—whether symbiotic or parasitic or belonging to some third classification—required immediate attention: “It was malignant and fast-growing, apparently too fast-growing to be mastered by the monk’s little brother.”

However, even Lambshead’s best efforts were not enough.

“Exhausted and saddened by the outcome,” Lambshead writes, “I nonetheless, in the interests of science, immediately performed an autopsy and attempted to preserve the Turrilepus Gigantis in an empty marmalade jar.” What he found startled him: “This very old, tired man had had the organs and circulatory system of a twenty-five-year-old. If not for the aggressive growth of the tumor, a million-to-one anomaly that his symbiotic brother could not devour quickly enough, the monk might’ve lived another sixty or seventy years at least.”

He also found that the mindless movements of the pre-wound replica had an oddly “hypnotic and vaguely dulling effect on me, its copper snout curling and uncurling rhythmically.

“What happened on the Isle of St. Brendan, I have no idea,” Lambshead would write after the war, in a letter to the then-curator of the Museum of Medical Anomalies as part of the grant that included turning over the mechanical Shank and a half-dissolved, sad-looking Turrilepus Gigantis, “but I remain convinced that the last surviving member of Order of St. Brendan died on my operating table on 3 November 1941, and that this order had hitherto survived for centuries in part because of a symbiotic relationship with a creature that provided a high level of preventative medicine and thus conferred on these monks extremely long life. That extremely long life in such isolation may, in fact, be its own kind of illness I cannot speculate upon.”

A month after the death and burial of the castaway monk, one Private Lansing wrote this in his journal: “Doctor Lambshead, always an odd duck, becomes odder by the day, afflicted as he is by a strange, growing sadness. He stands at all hours at the edge of the sea, his hand cupped over his eyes, scanning the horizon. He mutters to himself, and raves. And what’s worse, he’s given himself over to a bizarre religious fanaticism, calling out the name of a saint, waking, dreaming, again and again and again.”

Whether this temporary melancholy was caused by the events of the war or by possession of the Shank is unknown, but in later years, Lambshead was known to remark, “I must say I was very happy to give the thing away.”

Due to issues of medical ethics, the Shank displayed in this exhibit has yet to be tested on human patients. Nor have other specimens of this particular type of Turrilepus Gigantis ever been found.

ENDNOTES

1. There is unsubstantiated conjecture by Menard and Trimble that somehow the abbott conveyed his own seeming good health upon the Viking, as a way of saving the island, and that the monks then sought some way to avoid a similar catastrophe in future by creating an artifact that could, without a similar later sacrifice, perform the same function.