The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

In 1986, under a brisk new administration, the British Dental Association Museum, until then an institution that had been allowed to tick over in a relatively sedate manner, somewhat insulated from the ravages of visitors, was subjected to a vigorous clearout and cleaning. What, in their later paper, the Trades Union Congress called “this notorious Cleansing Event” was conducted in an atmosphere of laissez-faire vim, blamed by some participants for several breakages and the disappearances of at least four artefacts. Considerably less discussed—meriting only an oblique and en passant mention in Thatcher’s Mops, Cecily Fetchpaw’s otherwise exhaustive book on the subject—is what was uncovered in the museum attic as it was emptied of cardboard boxes, spider corpses, and long-ossified cleaning products.

The agency staff, they later testified, hesitated as they ascended the stepladders at a sound they thought was a gas leak. When, gingerly, their team-leader raised her head through the hatch and scanned the area with her torch, she was shocked initially to realise how much further the unlit room extended. Immediately, she was shocked, and much more violently, again, when the light reached into a low triangular nook below a staircase at the windowless chamber’s rear, onto the heads of a sarcophagus and an antique Anubis, various other items of Egyptiana, and a bell jar containing a head, on the floor, eyes at the level of her eyes. What caused her, it emerged, to stagger on her precarious perch, fall, and break her hip, was when the ash-coloured lips behind the glass moved.

Word spread, of course. A number of staff bypassed the inefficient, jury-rigged security and went to look. This was an age before camera phones, but someone procured the Polaroid used for artefact records, and there exist three bad pictures of inquisitive students of dental surgery and museum workers ranged around the bell jar in what looks like worship. Even such inadequate still images give a sense of the atmosphere at the scene. According to those present, the head, though it did not at any point open its eyes, moved its mouth and bit startlingly white teeth, hard enough that the chattering was audible through the bell-jar glass. Next to it, wired up to it, hissing faintly and clattering like a telegraph machine, was a battery or engine, with gently pulsing gauges.

“We didn’t shine the lights on it too hard,” according to one of the cleaners. “Not too often. It seemed like that might be a bit . . . much for its eyes.” “It definitely wasn’t alive,” according to the Head of Dentures. “No way. Yes, I know it was moving. But it was grey, grey, grey. And dry. Mummified or saponified or something. No, I don’t know how it was moving. Electricity or something. No, I don’t know. I have nothing more to say.”

Even by the indirect light, the extraordinary texture of the head was clear. It moved in small spasms, creasing its dun self in unnatural directions. “Not like a head,” one witness said. Its teeth, gleaming from behind dirt-coloured lips, ceramic-white and vivid, look in the photographs overlaid on the picture like a crude collage, part of a wholly different image with a quite different palate. At seconds when the dials on the little motor twitched, the face might slightly crease its eyes or wince as if in pain, in response or cause, it was impossible to say.

Another unfortunate participant

It was not long until a small team of uniformed men and women arrived and declared the attic out of bounds. They hauled equipment up the ladder and in, and the staff on duty on the floor below grew used to the scuffing sounds of whatever their investigations were. It was two days before anyone from the museum realised that what the visitors wore were not scene-of-crime police overalls, although similar. The women and men who had received the information about the find and were performing their forensics in the attic were not police. (It was, indeed, for exactly such exigencies as this accidental discovery, and not for the spurious reasons set out elsewhere in this volume, that Professor Lambshead kept his extensive network of sleeper agents on retainer at most museums worldwide.) Before any scandal could ensue, Lambshead himself had arrived from his Polish trip and arranged a private meeting with the head of the Dental Museum, in the aftermath of which the police were never called and the cut of the director’s clothes improved.

it is not through pages turning to elements

nor through liminals nor tumbling streets

and there is no etherized sky above us as we

that we walk only rather by this cleanest

steel yet this steel glass this tough clean material

also sheds time’s exhaust

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”