Hall of Small Mammals (24 page)

“Oh, thank you,” she said. “Will you be visiting that barn again today? I suspect so, but I'd hate for you to leave town without seeing what else Golly has to offer besides a dirty old barn. Have you seen the waterfall down at the end of Dempsey Road? It's a very nice place to take a lunch.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“But you want to look at those bones.”

“That's correct.”

“What's so interesting about those bones? They probably just came from a big old buffalo. They used to roam all the way to the Atlantic, isn't that so?”

Anders smiled. “Perhaps, but these are not buffalo bones. They belonged to a much more fascinating creature than that. If you study the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, you will find many clues that the world is very old and very vast. In the beginning, it was filled with gigantic animals that would have towered over us. These bones are the proof of that.”

“Interesting,” she said. “You know, my father used to tell me stories about the Cyclops. Do you know about the Cyclops? Well, my father would make up his own silly stories and tell them to me before bed. He told me that the Cyclops's name was Figaro, and that he was very lonely giant. Poor Figaro wanted a mate, but there were no female Cyclopes on his island. There were only the normal, two-eyed variety, and these women wanted nothing to do with Figaro. They thought he was so hideous. And big. And malodorous.

“One day Figaro got a grand idea. He picked the most beautiful woman on the island and used a slingshot to knock out one of her eyes. It was very gruesome, and she was utterly depressed, as you can imagine. She had to wear a patch over the hole. People no longer called her beautiful, but it was all she'd ever known how to be. She threatened to throw herself off a cliff. But then Figaro showed up with his one giant eye. He called her beautiful. He said he loved her one blue eye. She saw no other options but to run away with him. So they married and moved into his cave. She was embarrassed about all of it. She imagined her old friends laughing
at her misfortune. That night Figaro lifted her into his big bed. He had to be careful he didn't crush her, but—” Mrs. Lang blushed a little, but pushed ahead with the tale. “Well, let's just say, after
that
night, she no longer cared what anyone thought about them.”

“It's been a while since I read my Homer, but I don't believe I'm familiar with this particular myth,” Dr. Anders said. “And your father told this to you as a little girl?”

“Something like it. So is it a Cyclops in the barn?”

Anders assured her it was not.

“Shame,” she said, and blinked across the table. “By the way, I meant to tell you, your little assistant is downstairs waiting to speak with you.”

“Temp is here? In the house?”

She nodded with a quick stab of her chin.

“For how long?” he asked, irritated she hadn't mentioned it sooner. He had instructed Temp to come and retrieve him upon the arrival of Mr. Dubose.

Temp had been downstairs, she said, ever since Anders had returned from his morning stroll. He excused himself and dropped his napkin on his chair. The child was waiting for him in a plush red chair at the base of the stairs, hands folded in his lap. He sat there frozen like a museum exhibit, perhaps overwhelmed by Mrs. Lang's home, its fine white curtains and vases with fresh-cut flowers and crystal figurines and oil paintings in gilded frames. Seeing Anders on the stairs, he stood like a soldier at attention.

Dabney Dubose had arrived, Temp reported in a rush, and now something strange was under way in the barn.

•   •   •

“I could use someone like you,” Dabney Dubose said to Anders outside the barn. He was a dough-faced man with icy blue eyes, his dark hair receding but wild and curly where it did grow in tufts. He seemed amused by Anders. By everything. “I'm told you've been examining the bones over the last few days? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on them. Until now what we've seen has been so . . . preliminary. Bits of this, bits of that. I never knew what to make of it. I couldn't
see
it. And as a man who prides himself as a visionary, that's quite an admission. But what we have here, well, now. It really is spectacular. I can almost imagine it.”

Frustrated, Anders scratched his cane in the dirt. His leg throbbed. In the distance stretched long fallow fields, gloomy and brown. It felt like it might snow. The barn doors were shut, but a commotion of hammering and sawing and the clink-clink-clinking of a chisel escaped between the gnarled slats.

“Let me buy the bones from you,” Anders said. “Please. For our museum.”

“I'm afraid that won't be possible,” Dubose said. “Not even for a good price.” The bones, he explained, were going to become his main attraction. Using wood, papier-mâché, plaster, and anything else necessary, he would present the world with the first fully reconstituted Monster from a Darker Age, a three-dimensional model constructed from the bones themselves. Never before had anyone seen something of its kind. For a few coins, you would be able to view the creature up close, stand in its towering presence, rub its hairy hide.

“I don't think it had a hairy hide,” Anders said. “I believe that it belonged to a Tribe of Ancient Lizard.”

“And that's precisely why I need your help. You can be my scientific advisor. Help me make the creature as real and accurate as possible. Accuracy is crucial. I'll give you full oversight of my crew.”

Anders was aware of course that a compact with such a man was not a wise decision, that Dubose's intentions were very likely anathema to science. Science eats the dark. Fear not that which is illuminated. Science names the nameless—megalonyx, mammoth, mastodon, megathere. Fear not that which has a name. Science excavates; it makes the unfamiliar familiar. Science knows all; it demystifies. Dubose was an author of mystery in the world, not its unraveler.

“Think of it this way,” Dubose said. “This is your chance to educate the public. To open minds. Most people won't believe in something unless it's right in front of them. You've got to wow them. Shake them up.”

“Yes, but,” Anders said. “But you have a responsibility to—”

“Of course, a responsibility,” the man said solemnly.

Anders, we are sad to report, proved himself susceptible to the showman's false promises and logic. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has examined Anders's notebooks from this period (now in our archives). The pages are marred with all sorts of revealing marginalia; with fanciful sketches of creatures inspired by the bones he'd long admired in the cabinets and display cases of our Academy's museum; with his wild questions too: Had the creatures leathery skin? Could they have been pink and soft like
us? With long tangled hair or short fine fur? How about feathers? Did their eyes bulge like a fish's? Did their claws rip and grip like a bird's? How big or lean were their muscles?

And so it was that Anders agreed to help Mr. Dubose with his project. Elated, the showman clapped his hands together. There was no time to waste. The rest of his traveling museum would arrive in mere days, Dubose said, and after the monster's debut in Golly, it would go on the road, winding its way north to New York, where he was in the process of building a more permanent home for his entire collection. Beyond that—who knew?—perhaps he would ship it to Paris and London. Anders could not imagine how Dubose planned to transport a ten-foot-tall creature, but in the barn he discovered that at least some of the hammering and sawing had been in the service of a massive cart with giant wooden wheels. It would take a team of horses to pull it. The bones themselves had been placed at intervals across the straw floor.

“It's going to take longer than three days,” a man with frayed blond sideburns came over to report.

“This is my architect, Mr. Gustafson,” Dubose said to Anders. “Mr. Gustafson, you're in luck, we have a scientist here who has extensively studied the creatures. He has even published papers on the topic.”

Anders did not correct the showman regarding his publication history, despite the fact that he had not published a single paper on vertebrate fossils (or, for that matter, on any other topic zoological).

“Expert or not,” Mr. Gustafson said, “I'd like to see
him
try and fit the pieces together.”

Anders's knowledge of nonhuman anatomy was, to put it delicately, incomplete, but at the boardinghouse he had with him a number of engravings from the Academy's holdings. He sent Temp for his books, and when they arrived, he opened each to various illustrations—of mammoth molars and giant sloth skulls—looking desperately for any correlations between those figures and the dark gray chunks cast about the straw. Gustafson and his team had chiseled away more of the rock, though not with any precision. Some of the fossils now had small fissures, cracks, and chinks. About this Anders said nothing.

He shuffled the bones. He traded one toe for another, experimenting with angles and directions. The spiky horn: Was it a feature of the tail, of the foot, or of the head? The rib cage he arranged and then rearranged. Temp watched from his perch in the rafters as Anders spun the femur like a windmill blade, around and around until it paired with the tibia. As for the
other
tibia, the missing one, they'd have to make it from plaster. They'd have to form much of the skeleton from plaster, Anders slowly realized.

The men who'd been busy building the cart and freeing the fossils now leaned back in the hay with straw between their gray teeth, murmuring and laughing as Anders hobbled around on his cane, exhaling loudly whenever something failed to fit, which was most of the time.

The spine, Anders eventually decided, was the best place to start, and so he began all over again, this time focusing on the vertebrae. But which were the dorsal and which were the caudal and what was their order?

“Where's the head?” one of the men asked. “It's got a head, right?”

Anders didn't answer him. Other than the lower jaw, there was no skull.

“Looks like a giant horse to me,” another man said, and Anders saw that the way in which he'd laid out the spine did make it appear rather horselike.

At the end of the day, Mr. Dubose reappeared in the barn and asked the men to lift him into the air so that he could get a better view of what he called Anders's
diligent scientific study
. They hoisted him up and sat him on their shoulders, his waist squeezed between their heads. He loomed over all, barking at them to move backward, then forward. Clearly he was displeased with his new scientific advisor's progress. He didn't try to hide this fact. The skeleton on the barn floor was messy and incomplete and not at all terrifying or impressive. The showman closed his eyes and then popped them open. “What about those over there?” he asked, and pointed to all the bones not yet utilized.

“Tomorrow,” Anders said.

“Tomorrow,” Dubose said, “it gets a head. I want to see its head.”

•   •   •

Mrs. Lang's dinner table was more crowded and livelier than usual that night. Mr. Dubose and his representatives, it seemed, had been hard at work drumming up enthusiasm for the project in the nearby towns. Word had spread and people were arriving in droves for the chance to see it on Saturday, when it would be unveiled for the paying public.

“Is it true that the jaw is longer than my arm?” the man sitting across from Anders asked. He was gnawing on a fatty piece
of beef. “Gracious God!” he said when Anders nodded vaguely. “How many animals do you think it crushed?”

“Crushed?” the woman to his left said, eyes wide. “This is like something from a horrible dream. Somebody pinch me. I'm afraid if I see it once, I'll see it everywhere I go. I'll never be rid of it again. It will be there—and there and there—hiding behind every house and tree.”

“I suspect it wouldn't be very good at hiding behind trees,” the man said, “or anything else.”

“You know,” another man said, tugging at his wiry gray chin beard, “I've heard Indian stories about beings that used to stalk this continent. They say that their ancestors were giants, just as big as the buffalo and lions that lived here. They say everything was bigger back then, including us.”

“I doubt that very much,” Anders said. “Every creation is an improvement upon the last. We in the Present Age are God's most perfect creation. Everything that came before us, God destroyed for a reason.”

“But giant men. Can you imagine?”

“Is it a form of crocodile?” the woman asked. “That's what I heard.”

Anders explained that though the bones indicated certain lizard qualities, it was not a crocodile but a distinct and unrelated species, heretofore undiscovered and unknown.

“Heretofore undiscovered and unknown,” the man across from Anders repeated, his squirrel's tail of a mustache shining with roast beef grease. “Now you sound like Ol' Dab.”

“Dabney Dubose,” Mrs. Lang said. “You know him, then?”

“My whole life, just about. Been all over the world with him.
London, Calcutta, Constantinople. No place that man hasn't traveled to. If anyone can figure what the monster is, it's him.”

“To be well traveled hardly qualifies him for this,” Anders said.

“Not the travel,” the man said, and formed two fingers into prongs that poked away from his eyes. “It's this that qualifies him.”

“And what is that, exactly?” Mrs. Lang asked.

“Sight,” he said. “Insight. Outsight. Pastsight. Futuresight. Take your pick of the sights.”

“Well,” Mrs. Lang said. “I for one think we should defer to Dr. Anders's authority on these matters.”

Anders nodded gratefully in her direction—though he couldn't help wondering if she was right to do so.

•   •   •

Across town, at that very moment, a behemoth was being born.