Four

“I hope you appreciate the atmosphere down here,” Mr. Leclerc whispered in my ear. “I love it. Every time I step out of the elevator, I wait a moment or two before I flip the switch. One rarely has the opportunity to savor silence or darkness as deep as this. Isn’t it just so soothing?”

Soothing? The word that sprang to mind for me was nerve-racking. Obviously I didn’t say that out loud.

“Some people fear the silence,” he whispered. “That’s unfortunate. For me, it’s the sweetest of sounds.”

At last the fluorescent lights on the ceiling blinked to life and I could see again. We were in a vast underground storage room, piled high with old dismantled school desks and tired-looking globes, projectors and other ancient relics. It was about time someone tidied up this mess, but that wasn’t what I’d been hired to do.

We walked deeper into the room. Behind a heap of desks and chairs there must have been hundreds of curiosities, all things that could have been displayed in a chamber of horrors. There were stuffed birds of prey and monkeys, mammal skeletons, giant insects and glass vials with a variety of snakes and deformed amphibians suspended in a yellowish liquid.

“Interesting, aren’t they? Most of these creatures were part of a collection meticulously curated by our religious community at the beginning of the last century. At the time, we had missionaries on every continent, and they would send us specimens of some very unusual critters. The collection used to be much bigger. It even included some human fetuses and a great many organs preserved in formaldehyde. Nothing remains of those today, at least not officially. Shame.”

I was intrigued to hear him say “we” when he mentioned the missionaries. I wanted to ask him about that, but the things around me were so disturbing, I was a little distracted. On one shelf there was an impressive set of glass jars from the Congo. The labels suggested they contained eyes from chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos. It was scary how much they looked like human eyes.

The librarian was walking more slowly now, as if he wanted to give me time to properly take in the giant bat from Sri Lanka (Pteropus giganteus), the eagle carrying a rattlesnake (Crotalus catalinensis) from New Mexico in its crooked beak and the dozens of black widow spiders (Latrodectus mactans) pinned inside frames.

“You can look forward to observing these creatures during your downtime. Who knows, perhaps they’ll become your friends.”

If that was supposed to be a joke, I didn’t find it funny.