The Dead Menagerie
“I SHAN’T GO IN WITH YOU,” SAID MRS OWEN AS WE arrived at the top of the stairs. “I’ve seen it twice. That is enough.” She motioned at the door that stood across a small landing from us. “It is not locked, but kindly take care not to touch anything. Mr Whateley is protective of his collection. He does not even allow me to dust in there, lest I accidentally break something. I do not mind in the least.”
“You make it sound as though the room holds appalling sights,” I said.
“Maybe I am oversensitive. All I know is that, for a naturalist, Mr Whateley likes the unnatural.”
So saying, the landlady retreated downstairs.
“Reilly-Logue, R’luhlloig,” I muttered to Holmes when she was out of earshot. “Please tell me it is coincidence.”
“There is no such thing,” came the reply, “not in the demimonde that you and I inhabit. Now—” he reached for the door handle “—if Mrs Owen’s dire warnings hold any water, we must brace ourselves.”
The attic was large, occupying practically the full breadth and depth of the house, and since it was situated beneath a mansard roof, there was a decent amount of headroom throughout. The walls were whitewashed, the floorboards limed, and there were projecting casement windows front and back, which would have let in plenty of illumination were their panes not occluded with rectangles of brown paper gummed securely into place.
Holmes lit the nearest gas jet, whose glow revealed dozens upon dozens of glass containers arrayed on shelves. They were specimen jars of varying shape and size, each with a label hung around its neck. The smallest was no bigger than a pint pot, the largest the dimensions of a firkin barrel. All were filled to the brim with a clear, yellowish liquid which, to judge by the sickly-sweet smell that hung in the air, was formaldehyde.
In each floated a creature, dead.
At first I assumed they were simply animals of the kind one might find in any pet shop or zoo or indeed at the home of Mr Sherman of Pinchin Lane, Lambeth, purveyor of exotic and not so exotic fauna. The jar nearest to me, for instance, held what looked like a tarantula, albeit larger and hairier than the example I had seen on display at the Natural History Museum. Only on closer inspection did I realise that this spider had ten legs instead of the customary eight and that transparent wings sprouted from its back. The label stated that it hailed from the jungles of the Niger basin.
Likewise, what I took at first glance to be a coiled-up snake – some kind of constrictor, its body as thick around as my forearm – proved to be more akin to a worm. It had skin rather than scales and two weird slits at one end, which were either eyes or nostrils. Then there were a score of tadpole-like things floating in a cluster, their place of origin a lake at Plitvice, Croatia. The body of each was larger than my fist and their tails were fused together at the tips, so that in all they resembled the head of a flower, albeit one made of flesh rather than vegetable matter.
There was more. More and worse. Whichever way one turned, one’s gaze fell upon the lifeless remains of some animal that would not be found in any normal bestiary. Some of them appeared to be wayward evolutionary offshoots of well-known species, while others bore physical traits that were readily identifiable – batlike wings, a lizard head, flippers, feathers, fins – but combined them with physical traits that had no obvious existing analogue or with which they simply, by the laws of nature, did not belong.
“Are these real?” I said wonderingly, moving from jar to jar, from monster to monster in this dead menagerie.
“Do you mean are they fakes?” said Holmes. “Has Whateley assembled them himself, rather as P.T. Barnum did when he attached the mummified head and torso of a monkey to the tail of a fish and created his ‘Feejee mermaid’? I fear not. This is no cabinet of curiosities, Watson. Or rather, it is, but not one for public consumption.”
My eye was caught by a true aberration: a jellyfish whose greyish pulpy frame was studded with dozens of protruding spheres. Organelles or polyps, I thought, leaning in for a closer look.
Then one of the spheres split open along a fissure to reveal an eye.
I leapt back with a startled cry. In my shock I collided with one of the larger specimen jars. It rocked on its shelf, formaldehyde slopping around inside. I caught and steadied it, breathing hard.
Holmes chuckled darkly. “What gave you such a fright?”
“That… that abhorrent jellyfish thing,” I said. “It opened its eye. It… it looked at me.”
My companion approached the jar. “I doubt that. The creature is long dead. The pressure of your foot upon the floorboard disturbed the balance of the shelf, which in turn disturbed the jar and its contents.”
“I hope you are right.”
“It would seem friend Whateley is a collector of biological anomalies,” Holmes said, “and a follower of the Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, who also pursues the incongruous in nature and is renowned as the discoverer of the black crested mangabey of the Congo. Look.” He pointed to a workbench upon which sat several large leather-bound reference works. “Here is Oudemans’ book on sea serpents. It is well thumbed and, if the slips of paper sprouting from between the pages are anything to go by, well annotated by Whateley himself. And there beside it is a copy of Unaussprechlichen Tieren, or Unnameable Beasts, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt’s lesser-known work, a companion volume to his Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Again, Whateley appears to have consulted the tome assiduously.”
Holmes commenced leafing through an assortment of papers, which littered the workbench alongside the books.
“Mrs Owen advised us not to touch anything,” I pointed out.
“You almost knocked over one of the specimen jars,” my companion replied. “Next to that sin, what I am doing is a mere peccadillo.”
“Hurry it up, at least.”
“Do you fear Whateley’s untimely return? Or is it that you dislike being in this room?”
“Principally the latter. Well, no, wholly the latter.”
“These corpses are not attractive, but their being dead presents an insurmountable obstacle to hurting us. I thought you were made of sterner stuff, Watson.”
Normally I was but, truth to tell, the way the jellyfish creature had “looked” at me had left me thoroughly discomfited. I could not help but think that at any moment another of the specimens might exhibit sudden locomotion. That one there, for instance, which was like some mutated elephant foetus; or that one, which was seemingly a hybrid of rat, centipede and eel and, according to the label, came from England’s own Severn Estuary. These misbegotten creatures should not exist, so by extension whatever hold death had over them could well be tenuous. Any of them could yet snap into life at the least provocation.
“A-ha!” exclaimed Holmes. “What is this?” From amongst the papers he withdrew a letter. “The handwriting is more than familiar. It is, in point of fact, familial. Do you recognise it? You should.”
“Even if you had not dropped such a heavy hint, Holmes, the heading on the notepaper gives the game away. The Diogenes Club, Pall Mall, St James’s. In light of that and your remarks, who else can the letter’s author be but your brother?”
“Quite so, Watson. You are not nearly the dullard you make yourself out to be in your tales. Now, what can Mycroft want with our American specialist in the extremities of the animal kingdom? Hum! That is interesting. The letter is inviting Whateley to the Diogenes to give a talk.”
“A talk? At the Diogenes?” The club, of course, was famous for the rule that speech was forbidden on the premises. Any member caught violating this directive three times was blackballed.
“I think we both know what that means,” said Holmes. “The talk was intended for the ears of that select subset of Diogenes members who belong to a certain clandestine club-within-a-club.”
“The Dagon Club.”
“Indeed. Brother Mycroft requested the pleasure of Nathaniel Whateley’s presence this April just past ‘to share with us your knowledge of non-Linnaean species and taxonomical deviations’.”
“Did Whateley accept the invitation?”
“There is one way to find out for certain.” Holmes consulted his watch. “But we must make haste. It is nearly eight, and Mycroft’s habits of punctuality are unbending.”
