“ ‘By this time, old man, as you can imagine,’ Thomas said to me, ‘I had my doubts about poor old Xanthe’s sanity,’ ” Lambshead wrote. “ ‘And where are you going?’ I asked her. Answer, as she left, came there none.” Thomas, aware in vague terms of his friend’s interests and predilections, had immediately decided to bring it to Lambshead. As for Xanthe, neither Thomas, nor Lambshead saw her again.
What would have looked to the nonspecialist like a disconnected pile of rubbish was not something Lambshead, with his considerable experience, would ever dismiss out of hand, of course. For two weeks, he fiddled. He put his ear close to the speaking tube. He tinkered with the battery. When one combination of switches were switched, he records, he heard a tiny hiss: pushed another way, he heard nothing. What the dials measured remained opaque to him, but measure it they did, tweaking and jumping in response to he knew not what. He, attuned to the importance of time, left the bell jar alone for several days. He waited, one of his assistants reported, “with more than mere patience.” On his return, all was as it had been.
“I gave it one last shake,” he writes, “listened to the rattle of the teeth through that upturned speaking trumpet, and nothing else.”
A year and three months after his visit from Thomas—during one of his periodic clear-outs of artefacts for which he no longer had space, or in which he no longer had interest, or which were “not working”—the professor is believed to have given what we later came to know as the Pulvadmonitor to the Dental Museum; on the grounds, presumably, that what it appeared to be designed to showcase, if for reasons beyond him, were the disaggregated dentures. In the museum itself, sterling detective work has uncovered an acquisition note for what is recorded simply as “Item,” on which note is an irate scribbled exchange in two hands: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” “Bung it in the bloody attic.”
Where, undisturbed, it did not so much languish as prepare itself for its second birth, for more than thirty years.
—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”
3. The Internatal Decades
Lambshead quickly ascertained, after the second birth of what was later named Pulvadmonitor, that it was too fragile to be moved. It remained, and remains, in the attic of the Dental Museum. It was simple, with the resources and unorthodox measuring equipment to which Lambshead had access, to ascertain that, contrary to the assumption made by all other observers in the team, no long-mummified head had been placed within the container to be minutely animated by current from the battery. There was no residue of any matter transference. The head was not a speaker of, or for, the dead.
The realisation came, at last, according to the simpler exigency of placing a hand over the mouth of the trumpet, and observing the start of a slow collapse and agitation in the face within, that rather than a speaking tube leading out, it was a funnel drawing in.
A little super-gentle unscrewing of the outer rim, and Lambshead uncovered a filter like a finely holed sieve, clogged by now with three decades of hairs and larger airborne particles. This he cleaned and replaced. There was another, finer-grained filter further down the tube. The inside of the bell jar was under constant negative pressure. Air emerged from the grille at its base, but it was sucked in fractionally quicker through the trumpet, and from it was removed in stages the larger scobs of airborne debris, so that what it deposited at last within the long-undisturbed glass was a constant, extraordinarily slow, stream of London dust.
And it was from thirty-plus years of that dust that the head within had slowly self-organised. Around the palate and fake gums and teeth from which it could make a mouth.
“She did it,” Lambshead was to write. “My poor lost friend Serkis. She found a means to give the dust a voice.”
—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”
4. The Dust’s Warning
With this realisation, it became doubly imperative that the object not be moved, the battery not turned off (not that any researcher knew what combination of dials and switches might perform that action, nor how it had been left in an “on” position initially). The tiny chatterings and whisperings of the head were already enough to strain the integrity of the desiccated coagulum, held together by air pressure and the willpower of dust clearly desperate to communicate a message.