A Curious Beginning

“What is your plan for moving the specimen when it is finished?” I asked. “Surely you don’t mean to haul it through the streets of London? It ought to have been assembled in situ.”


He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Yes, I did think of that. I am not entirely devoid of intellect, no matter what you think of my Phyllomedusa.” He had been working the back end of the beast and walked me around to see that the entire front half was missing. “You cannot mount an entire elephant in one go. The skin alone weighs more than a ton. It must be done in pieces, but no one has managed to do it properly, at least not yet. This one is simply an experiment, a chance to refine the process before I begin in earnest.”

“For a patron? A lord, I believe you said?”

He nodded. “The Earl of Rosemorran, dilettante and eccentric, but richer than Croesus. He acquired an enormous bull elephant—bones and hide—out of East Africa. I have done other mammal mounts to his satisfaction, so he agreed to let me practice on this smaller fellow to see if I can devise a better method before touching his prize.”

“And he is paying you for this?” I asked with a dubious glance at the elephant’s unfinished backside.

His lip curled. “Would I do this for my own amusement?”

I glanced meaningfully at the collected specimens in the workshop.

He sighed heavily. “These are not worth the sawdust they’re stuffed with. They were mounted using old methods, and now they are crumbling to bits. I acquired most for next to nothing just so I could tear them apart and assess their imperfections. One cannot innovate new improvements without understanding old failures.”

I poked the elephant experimentally. “And this one is proving a failure?”

“Thus far. I wanted to mount him on his own skeleton, but that won’t serve. It will have to be two separate displays, one of just the bones reassembled into an articulated skeleton. The other will be a mount made to look lifelike with the skin properly stretched over a form sculpted to simulate the flesh. The difficulty is in the sheer bloody enormity of it.” The fact that he did not apologize for his language made me like him better. “He must be pieced together, but I have not yet devised a method for doing so without making him look like Frankenstein’s monster. He shall be nothing more than a grotesque if I don’t work it out.”

I noticed again the black streaks upon his arms—glue as well as soot, I realized, a hazard of his occupation. But the hair was simply a matter of being badly groomed, for it hung past his shoulders in unfashionably long, snarled dark locks that shone with a bluish tint in the late morning light. His beard was heavy and untrimmed, and with the eye patch and the slender gold ring glinting in his earlobe, it gave him the air of a rather impoverished pirate.

I moved past him to the section he had indicated, peering at the stitches. “You want another pair of hands,” I said firmly. “Tell me where to hold so I do not mar the folds of the skin.”

He hesitated, and I clucked at him impatiently. “Mr. Stoker, I am offering you my help. I am bored and likely to grow far more so in the coming hours. We do not know how long the baron means us to be thrown together, and we might as well pass the time in some useful fashion. You require extra hands. I have them. Now tell me where to put them.”

He looked as if he wanted to argue, but in the end he merely pointed and I held the skin taut while he worked. “Hold it firm there,” he barked. “Harder! A kitten could make a better job of it.”

I tightened my grip and he grunted, the highest praise I was likely to receive, I understood. We worked for some hours, and at length it occurred to me that I was exceedingly hungry and thirsty. He must have sensed my flagging energy, or perhaps his own was dwindling. He brought out a loaf of bread and a suspicious-looking ham and hacked off wedges of both with a clasp knife. I produced a few soft apples from my carpetbag and we ate in silence.

When we had finished, he reached for a tin and withdrew a cigar, lighting it with a spill from the stove. He drew in great lungfuls of poisonously strong tobacco smoke, blowing it out in long exhalations.

He caught my stare and gave me a mocking glance. “Where are my manners? Would you like a puff?” he asked, extending the cigar.

I returned his gaze coolly. “No, thank you. I brought my own.” With that, I went to my carpetbag and drew out a packet of slim cigarillos, lighting one as he had done with a twist of paper at the stove. He stared at me in stupefaction until I blew out a perfect smoke ring, then gave a grudging laugh.

“Where did you acquire the habit?”

“Costa Rica,” I told him. “And your cigar is inferior tobacco.”

“Good tobacco is expensive and I am a pauper,” he said lightly.

We smoked in silence, and as we did, my gaze fell to the scars that ran underneath his eye patch.