The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Evidence for this claim is flimsy at best, although Kiernan cites the speedy cremation of the body, the lack of any follow-up report, “due to the actions of a sleeper cell” within the police department, and “a damning history of collusion between the timing of Lambshead’s museum loans/artifact purchases and the movements of known spies and double agents in the area. It must be assumed that encoded into such transactions were secret messages, some of them from Helen and some of them from Lambshead to Helen.” Kiernan also notes the rapid reversal of some museum loans; in one case, involving “The Armor of Saint Locust,” Lambshead rescinded his approval for the loan five days after the exhibit had opened to the public. She also references “the timing of Lambshead’s visits to the Pulvadmonitor” (see: “Pulvadmonitor: The Dust’s Warning,” The Mignola Exhibits).

Kiernan saves her most pointed commentary for specific evidence: the rolled-up piece of parchment found inside a mechanical rhino in Zurich in 1976. “The text and image on this paper is ostensibly a maskh spell for constructing a pod for a journey toward the afterlife of the Elysian Fields. The spell is comprised of four main elements: a body wrapped in a shroud, one square and one rectangular chart, and lastly a scorpion, which in Middle Eastern folklore and talismans plays the role of a delivery system or a catalyst (here the scorpion is the engine for the pod to the afterlife). The dimensions of the pod (the shrouded body) have been given in the spell. The word ‘scorpion’ in Farsi has been hidden in this spell in the form of a cipher that looks like an abstract scorpion (the mark just above the word ‘Elysian’ at the bottom of the drawing). But what’s also been hidden here, encrypted, is a series of messages from a husband to his wife that, if ever properly deciphered, would no doubt prove to be a hybrid of a love letter and a complex series of orders or recognition of receipt of commands that might have agency over several years, if not decades. That is the true scorpion in this image.”

All of this “information” has been gleaned from what Kiernan calls “further encrypted evidence in Lambshead’s journals from 1965 on—the year he learned that Helen wasn’t dead—and supported by such circumstantial evidence as their heated public argument in 1959,” also documented in the journals, in which Lambshead confesses, with no small amount of anguish, that “Helen is much more radical than I could ever be. How am I supposed to follow her in that?” Kiernan points to Lambshead’s writings on “the second life of artifacts” in his “The Violent Philosophy of the Archive,” which she claims “isn’t about the objects at all, but about their repurposing by him.”

Spell or secret communication? The page found inside of the mecha-rhino, as photographed by Zurich investigator Kristen Alvanson.

Kiernan further claims that Helen attended Lambshead’s funeral, “the mysterious woman in white standing at the back, next to Keith Richards and Deepak Chopra.” However, photographs from the funeral clearly show many older women “standing at the back,” several of them mysterious in the sense that they cannot be identified and are not on the guest list.

A theory put forward by Alan Moore, who knew Lambshead late in life better than anyone, is more reasonable and doesn’t presume conspiracy and collusion. Moore suggests merely that the hectic pace Lambshead set from 1963 until his death in 2003 came from a sudden resolve: “It was merely one of the oldest stories, you see. A man attempting to outrun the knowledge of the continuing absence of the love of his life.” (In the subtext of his pornographic masterpiece The Lost Girls, Moore would reference both Lambshead and Helen, through the device of a mirror separating them forever.)

Loans with Strings Attached: The Museum Exhibits

Of all of Kiernan’s “evidence,” the most fact-based concerned Lambshead’s eccentric attitude toward the visual documentation of the contents of his cabinet, whether parts of it were at home or roaming abroad. Although it’s hardly evidence of secret messages being included with his loans, Lambshead usually forbid even the usual photographs a museum will commission for catalogs or postcards. His sole recorded explanation? “It creates greater anticipation if the public has no preconceived idea of what they may be about to encounter. A photograph is a sad and lonely idea of an echo of something real.” (Guardian, “Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham. a.k.a. Robotikus, Still on Loan to Imperial War Museum, But Nowhere to Be Seen,” June 4, 1998)