After the death of the eccentric Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead at his house in Wimpering-on-the-Brook, England, a remarkable discovery was unearthed: the remains of an astonishing cabinet of curiosities. In keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Dr. Lambs¬head and his exploits, HarperCollins now proudly presents fully illustrated highlights from the doctor's cabinet, including exciting stories of adventure and reproduced museum exhibits. The Cabinet anthology is a secret history of the 20th century, an art book with over 70 images, and a treasury of modern fantasy containing work by over 85 creators, including some of the genre’s most exciting names.

Here’s an excerpt from critically acclaimed novelist Cherie Priest’s story based on Mike Mignola art dubbed “The Clockroach” by Priest. It exemplifies one of many approaches found in the anthology, which range from traditional fantasy tales to edgier material. Mouse over the footnotes for the somewhat tongue-in-cheek additional commentary.

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Documented by Cherie Priest

Museum Name and Location: The Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry; Port Angeles, Washington

Category information

Creator: Addison Sobiesky Howell (alleged); American, born 1828 in Chicago, IL. Died 1899 in Humptulips, WA
Title: “Clockroach,” built 1878(?)
Medium: Mixed, primarily steel, cast iron, rubber tubing, and glass
Donated in 1953 by the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, WA, at cost of transportation—and a gentleman’s agreement with regards to subsequent restoration and display.
Accession number: 1953.99

We at the Stackpole Museum of Prototypical Industry would like to welcome you to this exhibit and invite you to ask questions. However, we ask that you not touch the Clockroach—nor allow children to climb upon it and make the choo-choo noise, as this is both contextually inappropriate and bound to result in tetanus shots for all concerned.

(Oral tradition transcribed by UW graduate student Gregory Blum from an interview with Petra Oberg [1902-1996], daughter of Isac and Emma Johnson—two of Humptulips’ original settlers.)

Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the logging company, and mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, as my Daddy put it.[1]

Mr. Howell built himself a house, way outside of town, a big three-story place set back in the hills—and you couldn’t see it until you were right on top of it, what with all the trees.

He had a wife with him at one point, but she died up there. Folks said he’d murdered her with an axe, but there was never any proof of that and we didn’t have any law at the time nohow, not a sheriff or anything, much less a jail. We had a mayor, though—a fellow named Herp Jones—and I think if Herp could’ve rounded up enough warm bodies, he would’ve seen to a lynch mob.[2] But everyone he might’ve asked was either working or drinking, so I guess that didn’t happen.

The town gave Mrs. Howell a Christian burial in a little plot back behind the only church we had, and her guilty-as-sin husband paid a pretty penny to have a crypt built up around her. It was a real big deal, because nobody else in town had ever gotten a crypt, and only about half the folks who ever died even got a tombstone[3]. Then Mr. Howell went back to his house in the trees, and for the most part, nobody hardly ever saw him again.

A few years later, as I heard it, Addison Howell was out and about doing whatever it is a wicked man does on a Sunday, and he came across a homesteader’s camp just off the old logging road. There was a wagon with a broken axle, and two dead men lying beside a campfire. It looked like they’d been tore up by wolves, or maybe mountain lions, or somesuch creature. But inside the wagon he heard a little girl crying. He looked inside and she screamed, and she bit him—because like attracts like, I suppose, and the girl had a bad streak in her too. That’s why he took her home with him.

She was maybe eight or nine when he brought her inside, and legend has it she was mute. Or maybe she didn’t feel like talking, I couldn’t say. … [4] ... [4, cont.] … [4a] ... Anyway, he raised her as his own, and they lived together in the house in the hills, and nobody ever visited them because everybody knew they were doing evil things up there [5].

But people started telling stories about hearing strange noises out there at night, like someone was whacking on metal with a hammer, or sawing through steel. Word got around that he was building a machine that looked like a big bug, or a lobster, or something. It had a big stack on top and it was steam-powered, or coal powered, or anyway it was supposed to move around when he was sitting inside it.

I don’t know who was fool-headed enough to get close enough to listen, but somebody did, and somebody talked.

And later on, the mayor and some friends of his, all of them with guns and itchy trigger fingers, went up to that house and demanded to know what was going on up there. For all they knew he was summoning Satan [6], or beating up that girl [7], or raising whatever kind of hell I just don’t know.

Addison Howell told them they were welcome to look around, so they did. They didn’t find anything, and they were mad about it. They asked the girl what was going on, but she wouldn’t say nothing and they thought maybe she was scared of Howell, and that’s why she wasn’t being helpful. But she was a teenager by then, or old enough that she could live there with a dirty old man if she felt like it, and people’d look askance, but no one would take her away.

Not long after that, Addison Howell went into town to do some business—he was over at the logging foreman’s place, and nobody has any idea why, or what they were talking about. They got into some kind of fight—the foreman’s wife overheard it and she came out and saw them struggling, so she took her husband’s shotgun and she blew the back of Addison Howell’s head clean off, and he died right then and there.

But, dear reader, subsequent events suggested he might not really be dead…and that the “facts” as relayed herein might be lacking in certain important particulars.

Read the rest of the story in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities from HarperVoyager…

Endnotes:

1. Colloquialism for severe poverty. I offered to amend the “i” in “piss” to an asterisk for the sake of decency, but head of antiquities Dr. Meagher said to leave it alone, surprising no one even a little bit.

2. Census records for this region are all but nonexistent until well into the 20th century, so little is officially known about the town’s population; but anecdotal evidence and extensive, thankless, unpaid legwork by a graduate student (who is poor enough to warrant an analogy in need of an asterisk) suggests that fewer than three hundred people were in residence at the time.

3. Records kept at Saint Hubert’s Church imply an average of half a dozen deaths per year—startling only if one fails to consider that Humptulips was a logging town. As a side note, it turns out that St. Hubert is the patron saint of woodsmen.

4. Mrs. Oberg took this opportunity to speculate with regards to what wild animals might have eaten the girl’s family, and then suggested that maybe she was too traumatized to speak thereafter. She also brought up the possibility that Mr. Howell was a pedophile, though that isn’t the term she used. As Mrs. Oberg went on at great length upon the subject, her digression has been edited out. After all, a footnote is in better taste, unless Dr. Meagher wants a protracted diatribe about body parts and their respective fluids described with a good number of Anglo-Saxon consonant-heavy words engraved on a plaque right there on the exhibit, surely prompting a number of embarrassed parents[4a] to answer many awkward questions on the way back to the car.

4a. Do they still let children scale the Clockroach and pretend it’s a train? That was always my favorite part of school field trips to the SMPI, until one day I fell off and impaled my foot on a rusty spring. They made me get a tetanus shot.

5. When asked precisely how everybody knew this if no one ever visited them, Mrs. Oberg’s ironclad logic went as follows: “If they weren’t up to any mischief, they would’ve just moved to town like civilized people.”

6. This seems rather unlikely.

7.The interviewer considered the wisdom of interrupting to ask if the girl was made of metal, given Mrs. Oberg’s previous statement, but resolved instead to save his breath. After all, he wasn’t getting paid by the word. Or at all.