Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

We of the Present Age

To prevent the newest discovery from winding up in yet another showman’s dime exhibit, we decided to send one of our own to bring it back for safekeeping. Tall, cheerful Dr. Anders was the first to volunteer for the trip, though among the naturalists in our Academy interested in vertebrate fossils, he was by all accounts the least qualified. The young doctor had recently caused a stir by mistaking an adolescent mastodon jaw as proof of an entirely new genus and species. A laughable idea. But what Anders lacked in credentials, he made up for with his unwavering enthusiasm — and (it need be mentioned) with his political connections. By luck or by connivance he had become engaged to a woman from one of the city’s wealthiest families, and that family, thanks to Anders, had made significant contributions to our esteemed Academy. Those kindnesses considered, we could find no reason why it shouldn’t be Anders we sent to procure what was rumored to be the most complete specimen yet unearthed.

On the morning of Anders’s departure we accompanied him to the station, the trains steaming and hissing all around us as we clapped him on the shoulder and wished him well. “You won’t be disappointed,” he said, confident. “Because when I return, I will come bearing gifts millions of years in the making.” Prepared remarks, no doubt. It was winter and we stomped our feet to keep out the cold. “Very well,” we told him, and watched his train crank away and disappear into a gauzy rain.

He traveled twenty hours south to a provincial town called Newton, where we had arranged for his transfer to a stagecoach. Unfortunately the promised coach did not manifest (its driver, we later learned, had fallen down drunk and been trampled by his own horses), and Anders was forced to finish the journey on the back of a mule cart that happened to be on its way to the town of Golly, his final destination. If not for this setback, perhaps history would have been quite different for Anders, for our Academy — and for science.

These events transpired many decades ago, before we had a name for many of the fossilized creatures that once populated our planet, before we even had a name for their particular field of study; in the days before we’d completely mapped the wilds between East and West; before Mr. Morse sent his first electrical message whipping across two miles of wire; when a young Mr. Darwin was still filching finches for his sketches in the belly of HMS Beagle. The world was on the verge of a great transformation, to be sure, a scientific awakening, and we were the agents of that coming and necessary change.

Before his journey south, Anders professed to share this belief. He was an ambitious and adventurous man. In the years before he received his formal medical training, he had worked as a ship’s surgeon aboard a vessel called the Holy Wonder. During one of its southern voyages, the Holy Wonder had been inundated by a powerful storm, and Anders had slipped on deck and broken his leg. Despite a months-long convalescence in a Buenos Aires hotel, the injury had not properly healed and was, all these years later, still easily inflamed. It was for this reason that his ride to Golly on the bumping and bouncing mule cart was such an unfortunate development. When he finally reached the town late that night, he could hardly walk at all. Two men had to carry him into the boardinghouse, where a special room was prepared for him on the first floor so that he could avoid the unnecessary punishment of the stairs.

Anders’s recovery required two full days of bed rest, and it was during this time that a delegation working for Dabney Dubose slipped into town and purchased the bones for the showman’s infamous traveling museum.

This was not the first time that our efforts had been thwarted by someone as nefarious as Dabney Dubose. All varieties of huckster, scoundrel, thief, and hype-man had been busy snatching up every new fossil find. Some of the bones were shipped to Europe for exhibits in London and Paris. Others were fashioned into parlor furniture and sold for small fortunes.

Mr. Dubose called his personal bone collection Monsters from a Darker Age, and it constituted one of the chief attractions in the Dubose Brothers Traveling Museum, a caravan of oddities and curiosities that rattled from town to town on creaking wooden wheels, charging poor dupes at every stop for the chance to see its Gander of Six-Headed Geese, Rumpkin the All-Seeing Seer, the Infinity Box, the World’s Smallest Preacher, etc., etc., etc. To claim his newest acquisition, his entire caravan now turned south for the town of Golly.

Workers had discovered the bones by accident while blasting for a new well on a farm on the western edge of town. For their protection, the bones had then been transported to a nearby barn and nested in bales of hay. Dr. Anders, unaware that he’d already failed in his mission, visited the farm on his third morning in Golly to make the acquaintance of the property owner, a knobby man with two buttons missing from his work shirt.

“You’ve come too late,” the man said.

Anders was shocked. That the sale had occurred only the previous afternoon, as he lay in bed recuperating, only worsened the blow. He had traveled so far and, it seemed now, for nothing. If he returned home empty-handed, what would we say? What would we think of him?

“Can I at least see them?” Anders asked. “Would you mind if I catalogued and sketched them?”

The farmer scratched at his bristled chin with a jagged dirty fingernail, perhaps looking for a reason to say no. They were standing in front of the man’s miserable one-room house. A strange animal skull hung on a nail above the open door. “You want to draw them, is all?”

“If you don’t mind, yes. I’ll stay out of your way. I assure you.”

The man shifted from right foot to left. “All right, then,” he said at last. “But if you try and run off with—”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Anders said.

He followed the farmer across a long frosted field that stretched behind the house. His leg still aching — a sharp stabbing pain that radiated from hip to toes — Anders hobbled along on an ivory-handled walking stick obtained for him the previous evening by the town doctor. The cane left a trail of small divots in the hard soil. When they reached the barn, the farmer threw open its tremendous doors, and dusty sunlight spilled across the compacted straw floor. Both men’s shadows stretched long and distinct ahead of them. Anders coughed, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The farmer motioned at the hay bales and said that so long as the bones didn’t leave the barn, there wouldn’t be any trouble. He gave Anders a final appraising look before spitting in the straw and leaving.

From his bag Anders removed his pen, ink, journals, caliper, and measuring rods. He was thrilled to find, among the bones across the bales, dorsal and caudal vertebrae, a partial pubis, distal ends of the right radius, the left femur, and the proximal end of the left tibia, ribs, and, best of all, the entire lower jaw. The farmer and his friends had done an adequate job of chiseling away the rock, though some pieces were still embedded. This was no mammoth or mastodon, of that Anders was quite certain. (Our museum already had in its possession a nearly intact mammoth skeleton.) It was not an ancient horse or deer or sloth or cat either. It was much larger, and very likely reptilian. He catalogued the bones in his journal. A truly remarkable find. That it now belonged to Dabney Dubose, of course, was a travesty.

By no means was Anders an accomplished illustrator, but with help from the Academy he had improved upon his shading, crosshatching, and stippling techniques. He endeavored to make his drawings as scientifically accurate as possible. One day, he hoped to include the figures with the papers he aimed to publish.

Anders was engrossed in his drawing of the jawbone when he heard the squeak of wood overhead. He glanced up and saw that a wild-looking creature with long twisted hair and ruddy cheeks had climbed into the rafters. The creature — a boy, Anders decided — stared down with deep brown eyes, his toes hugging the splintery edges of the beam upon which he crouched.

Anders returned to his drawing and said, “You’re welcome to join me. No need to hide.”

The boy didn’t say anything.

“My name is Dr. Anders,” he added.

The boy thudded down into the straw, kicking up more dust. Anders stood to greet him with an outstretched hand. The child shook it uncertainly. His shirt was soiled with dirt and sweat and probably a thousand messy meals.

“You can sit with me if you’d like,” Anders said, making room. “I don’t mind.”

The child, noiselessly, fell into a cross-legged jumble at the scientist’s feet. He watched Anders’s pen dance across the page, as if the transference of the ink was a minor miracle.

“How does it look?” he asked, and the child shrugged.

“Your name?” Anders asked.

“Temp.”

“Temp,” Anders repeated. “Short for what? Temperance? Or temperature? Or temporary?”

“Tempest.” The child’s eyes darted from bone to bone. “I’m told it was my mother’s family name.”

As Anders drew, he told Temp of his own childhood, about his mother’s death in a fire, about his minister father, about their lonely years with a congregation in a town much like Golly, about his early fascination with the Creation story and, in particular, with a tantalizing verse in the Book of Job that described a behemoth with a tail like a cedar and bones like bars of iron.

Temp gazed at the jawbone, fascinated. “So it’s a monster from the Bible?”

“Well,” Anders said, “that depends on what you mean by monster. Certainly it was of a monstrous size. By my calculations, this creature stood at least ten feet tall. I believe it was bipedal. In other words, it walked like you and me. Upright. On two feet.” He stood to demonstrate, shifting his weight to his good leg. He snarled at the boy playfully and smiled. “But I don’t care for that word, monster. Calling it a monster implies that it was a wholly unnatural creature. In its time, this was no more a monster than any other animal that currently walks the earth. Including you and me, by the way.”

“But,” the boy said, somewhat alarmed, “how’d it get here? On my daddy’s farm?”

“Same way as you and me. The evidence suggests there were multiple Creations before our own. You’ve heard of Noah’s Ark? The Flood? Well, before the Flood, there was a different set of creatures here on earth. And before them, there was an altogether different set of creatures that were wiped out by a different and earlier Flood. Each catastrophe makes way for the next Creation, you see, and each Creation is a little better than the last. We’re the latest. And hopefully the last.”

The child ran his hand along the jaw, hard and gray as stone, bits of rock still clinging to it, and asked what the creature would have eaten and what it might have looked like with the skin attached, and Anders — though aware that to make such physiological inferences was well beyond his expertise — guessed that it ate both plants and animals and that it might have had the smooth, scaly skin of a snake. “Yes,” he said, “I’m very sure that it did. It stood upright like us, ate plants and animals like us, and when it craned its long neck skyward it saw the same yellow sun as us.”

The child looked up into the rafters.

“Ink, please,” Anders said, and Temp scurried toward the satchel, already proving himself a useful assistant.

• • •

The morning that Mr. Dubose arrived in town to collect his prize, Anders was out on one of his early peregrinations. His walks were imperative. In addition to his leg injury, Anders suffered from poor circulation and a weak heart, and a strict routine of exercise was of vital importance. After his walk, he took a bath — always cold with two tablespoons of castor oil over his head. His delicate system demanded that he ingest only a simple breakfast of water and plain whole wheat bread. Butter was a gross injustice to the constitution.

Mrs. Lang, the owner of the boardinghouse, didn’t care for his diet. “But wouldn’t you like some fruit, Doctor? I have all these lovely apples. It’s such a waste,” she said, eyeing his crusty bread. She was a beautiful if odd red-haired woman who insisted Anders take all his meals with her in the dining room.

“I’m afraid the fruit would upset my system,” he explained. “But thank you.”

She couldn’t understand why he’d only munch on hard bread when her cook had prepared them such an elaborate breakfast. She ate the apple with a fork and knife and dabbed the corners of her thin lips with a fresh white linen napkin. Mrs. Lang had traveled to London and Paris as a small girl, and Anders gathered that her childhood had been full of such luxuries — trips abroad, new dresses for every season, tutors. It seemed her father had played a minor role in brokering the Louisiana Purchase, a fact that somehow found its way into more than one conversation. (Mr. Jefferson, it should be noted, was an early member and supporter of our Academy. During Jefferson’s administration, one room at the White House was dedicated entirely to the fossils collected by Mr. Clark on his famous western expedition!) But since those days, Mrs. Lang’s family had come down in the world. Their fortune had been lost in poor investments, though she was hazy on the particulars. Her parents had all but arranged her marriage to a businessman with roots in Golly, but now, fifteen years later, both her parents and her husband were dead, and Mrs. Lang lived alone, childless and perhaps a bit lonely. She took in the occasional lodger, she said, for the company and not for the income.

“Forgive me,” she said, “we never even blessed the food.”

“I don’t mind, really,” Dr. Anders admitted, but she grabbed his hands anyway and bowed her head, waiting for him to speak. After a considerable pause, he muttered a succinct but sufficient blessing. She released his hands slowly.

“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.

Dabney Dubose was not a patient man, and he had doubts about having his show ready in time with Anders at the helm. Perhaps another naturalist from our Academy might have been better suited to the task, it’s true. But then again, no other of our naturalists would have dared partner with such an unscrupulous man. As Anders was feasting on beef and potatoes and then later as he dreamed in the big white bed set up for him on the first floor of the boardinghouse, Dubose and his crew continued their work by the light of lanterns hanging from barn nails.

“Make it bigger,” he instructed his team. “Do what you have to do. Put cork between the joints. I want it on all fours. That horny spike there — I want that on the head.”

Mr. Gustafson, reinstated as architect, started with the feet, connecting tarsals and phalanges and claws with wires and rods. As the beast began to take shape on its wagon pedestal, Dubose clapped and cheered. Rough plaster molds were made to fill in the missing sections. When the rib cage collapsed, Gustafson had them insert wooden dowels where the organs would have been. Bones were attached to bone, even when they did not properly join. Unnecessary parts were tossed aside. With all four legs on the ground, the spine sagged in the middle like a toothy smile. The tail pointed skyward at the tip. At the other end, the neck craned up and forward, as if the animal had just been caught in the act of feeding on a fresh carcass.

The creature they were building of course bore no resemblance to what the physiology of its bones actually suggested. Dubose brought in his tailor to measure the beast and test various fabrics that might serve as a skin. They tried cotton and silk and wool but ultimately decided on a thin pounded leather, which they could ornament with layers of iridescent flakes. Dubose wanted to leave the top ridge of the spine exposed as proof that that their monster contained the actual bones. The tailor worked from the bottom up and, when he reached the spine, suggested that he glue on horsehair, dyed gray and blond, to resemble a scraggly mane. “Do it,” Dubose said. As the tailor’s assistants stitched the silvery flakes into the hide, the creature began to shimmer under the burning lamps.

By midmorning, when Anders returned, he was stunned by the overnight transfiguration of the creature. What had been scattered and flat across the straw now towered overhead, twelve feet tall and at least thirty feet long, atop the cart bed. With its sparkling scales and hideous mane, the headless chimera was like something out of the Greek myths. Never in his wildest dreams had Anders imagined the behemoths as such.

“As you can see”—Dubose stepped toward him—“we took the liberty of continuing your work last night. Your guidance was crucial.”

“This is all wrong,” Anders said. “You need to strip it back down.”

“As for the head,” Dubose said, undeterred, “do you have any ideas? I suppose we’ll need to dream up something, won’t we?”

“Dream up?”

“Yes, since we don’t have those bones.”

“But if we dream it up, then how will it be accurate?”

“I take your point, but people will be let down if it’s headless. Just give me a rough idea. Do you think it had tusks like the mammoths? That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? I have a few in my collection that we could include.”

“No, I don’t think it had tusks. We can’t know what it had. You… you might as well make it a Cyclops. That’s how little we know. Why do we need to provide a head? Put up a sign, explain to people that the head has not yet been located. People will understand.”

“Yes,” Dubose said, nodding. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. We’ll figure something out, I’m sure. You will be coming to the show on Saturday, I hope? Your admission will be complimentary, that goes without saying.”

He escorted Anders out of the barn and shook his hand amicably. “See you then,” the showman said, and returned to his project. In a daze Anders wandered back in the direction of the ramshackle farmhouse, his toes so cold and numb in the tips of his shoes that he had to subtract them from the idea of his feet. It was a drizzly day, the earth and sky washed in gray. Temp appeared on the horizon as a peachy dot, moving toward him at a run. As the distance closed, Anders was surprised to discover certain changes in his assistant. Temp’s hair had been brushed flat and parted neatly down the middle. Not only that, the child was wearing an oversized dress with a white ruffled collar and a dusty too-long hem. Temp, he realized, was a girl.

“You like it?” she asked, pulling the loose fabric tighter at the hips. “I didn’t want it, but my daddy said it was time I dressed right.”

Anders didn’t know what to say. That he’d so grossly miscategorized a member of his own species was no doubt distressing. How could he understand a creature that was thousands of years behind him, if he couldn’t make sense of the world directly in front of him?

Temp smiled politely and held out a small gray bone. “There’s a whole pile of these in the barn,” she said. “The ones they couldn’t get to fit right. I don’t think anyone will miss it.”

Anders accepted the bone. It was one of the creature’s ribs. “Did they see you take it?” he asked, already tucking the bone into his jacket pocket.

“I doubt it,” she said. “They’re very busy.”

• •

Of all those forms now passed into extinction, the Gollysaurus, as I have dubbed it, is the most impressive and inspiring. Anders’s letter, composed later that afternoon in his room at the boardinghouse, reached us far too late to be of any use. Contained therein was what he called “a serious attempt at objective description despite his overwhelming excitement.” Only in his conclusion did he reveal to us his failure to procure the bones, and Dubose’s scheme to use them as an exhibit for his Monsters from a Darker Age. But through other sources we had been kept well apprised of developments in Golly and our representatives were already en route to try to repair the situation.

When Mrs. Lang knocked on his door for supper that evening, Anders shouted that he wasn’t hungry and was in bed with a headache. Alarmed, Mrs. Lang let herself into the room to make sure that her guest was comfortable. Did he want food brought to him, perhaps? Could she prepare a wet cloth for his forehead? Did he want the windows open or closed? Anders wanted only to be left alone. He wanted to sulk. But Mrs. Lang refused to abandon him in his time of need. “It could be a fever,” she said.

She dragged a chair to the edge of his bed and sat with a book while he pretended to sleep. Afternoon sunlight through the window danced violently, orange and red, inside his lids. When the room went dark, he opened his eyes and discovered that Mrs. Lang, by candlelight, was watching his chest rise and fall.

“I’m feeling better,” he said.

“It was the bones that did this to you.”

“No,” he said, not mentioning the bone under his pillow. “That’s not possible. Sickness comes from the air. From unhealthy vapors. It’s been proven.”

“Was it bad air that killed off the monsters, then? Maybe some of that bad air got trapped down there in its grave.” She grabbed his hand. “Now we’ll all get sick, everyone in town.”

Anders assured her that she was mistaken, that the monster posed no real threat, at least not to her physical health. “If you say so,” Mrs. Lang said. He asked her to retrieve the paper and pen from his bag. When she brought it to him, he thanked her for taking such good care of him. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “You can go to bed now. Really.”

She hesitated at the door but, seeing him put the pen to paper, left the room. Anders was writing a letter to his fiancée. In it, he likened his love for her to a bed of flowers blooming in unison. He wrote that he was her moon, forever loyal in his revolutions.

My trip hasn’t gone as planned, he confessed, finally, and told her of Dubose and the bones and their upcoming unveiling, and of Temp, the girl he mistook for a boy, and then, curiously, of his own misgivings regarding our scientific mission. Some part of me fears, he wrote, that the world as we know it only exists as a set of shared beliefs, which change and grow according to our needs and intellects. Meaning, the world becomes more complex as we do, forever outwitting and confounding us. In the beginning, perhaps all that was needed to sustain us was the idea of a small garden, a plot of land bordered on all sides by nothingness. The earth formed around us as we explored it, the stars burst into light when we looked up. Microorganisms might have only sprouted into being the first time we gazed through a microscope. The sun might have revolved around the earth until the very moment we needed it to be otherwise. Did we dream the fossils into the ground? If enough of us believed it possible, maybe Dubose’s monster would walk right out of the barn and destroy us all. I fear we’re on a wall that can’t be scaled, one we climb with one hand while we build it higher with the other. If that’s the case, we might as well stand back and just paint pictures across the stones — one-eyed monsters, cataclysmic floods, the universe as imagined by a caveman or a carnival barker or a wild-haired prophet.

Forgive me, my darling, he concluded. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been napping with a fossil under my pillow.

His disturbing and faithless letter is stored in our archives to this day along with Dr. Anders’s other personal papers, all willed to our collection at the time of his death.

• • •

The Dubose Brothers Traveling Museum arrived on Saturday morning. Sitting on the front porch of the boardinghouse after his cold bath and simple breakfast, Anders watched people stream into town on foot and on horseback, entire families crammed onto rattling carts. Anders’s ears burned from the cold. Mrs. Lang emerged from the house in a long brown jacket over a frilly apple-green dress.

“Are you sure you won’t join us?” she asked.

Anders had decided to skip the event. “I’ll be fine here. Go ahead.”

Slowly the boardinghouse emptied, and Anders was alone. Across the street the shop had closed its doors for the day. A billy goat with a white sagging neck and two short horns hopscotched down the street and stopped abruptly to consider Anders rocking on the porch. It stepped toward the gate that divided them. But Anders had no scraps for it.

One day, after the next Catastrophe, the town might look like this, empty and abandoned to the billy goats. In his notebook, Anders sketched his own skeleton embedded in the stone beneath the boardinghouse porch. He imagined his gray bones on a pedestal, the identifiable fissures in the right femur that would make him a particularly interesting specimen. If his skull was missing, some future showman would stick some other animal’s head there, a skull disproportionate to his own body, a fox head perhaps, its long, thin, haggard mouth with sharp hanging incisors, eyes on the side of its head. A monster for a brighter age. They’d give him a glittery hide, a demon’s horns.

“Aren’t you going to see it?” It was Temp. She was wearing her dress again. Over her shoulder she carried a bulky burlap sack. It clattered when she dropped it at Anders’s feet. “The rest of the bones,” she said. “If you want them.”

Anders uncinched the top and peered inside. There were probably thirty bones and fragments in the bag, none bigger than his forearm, but still: thirty bones for the Academy’s collection — or maybe even for his own. He took the bag inside and deposited it under his bed. When he came back out onto the porch, buttoning up his coat, he said, “You lead the way. I’m ready to see the monster.” The billy goat skittered away, the bell around its neck clanging, when Temp kicked open the gate and stepped into the street.

What Anders didn’t know was that some of us were already there on the farm, waiting and touring the exhibits.

The Infinity Box, we discovered, was a room full of old fractured mirrors. Inside a wagon lined with puffy red fabric sat Rumpkin the All-Seeing Seer, a man with a long drooping white mustache that he twisted and twisted between his fingers before offering his vague prognoses of life, love, and death. The museum’s Gander of Six-Headed Geese had already flown south for the winter. The caravan curved snakelike through the farmer’s fallow brown fields, and the well-dressed crowds stepped carefully over the rutted earth. The smell of spiced meats and stewed apples wafted over the open land, and people lounged on quilts with their plates and drinks.

At dusk, the World’s Smallest Preacher emerged from the barn. He was three feet tall and dressed in a black robe, his thin dark hair combed neatly. In one hand he gripped a tremendous Bible. When he stepped forward, three bonfires burst into flames, blue, then red and orange. Men wearing Indian headdresses paraded out on white horses. We heard drums and a trumpet fanfare. The World’s Smallest Preacher, his voice strained, yelled out the name Dabney Dubose, and the infamous showman emerged from behind the barn door to massive applause.

“Before Jesus, before Moses, before Noah… a million years ago a monster roamed these ancient forests and devoured any poor animal that crossed its path,” he shouted to an enraptured audience. “It was the scourge of the world! More terrible than a tiger! Bigger than an elephant! Ladies and gentlemen, using the latest scientific methods available, and with the cooperation and approval of a prestigious scientific Academy, we have exhumed and rebuilt the animal. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in the history of man, the behemoth returneth!” One barn door creaked open and a line formed. “Have your fifty cents ready, please,” the preacher added, as if it were an afterthought.

Needless to say, our Academy had given no such approval to Dubose and had not cooperated with him in any way. That can’t be emphasized enough. It was Anders who had done these things, and certainly not as our dutiful representative. Those of us present resolved then and there to take a vote at our next meeting — to oust Anders, no matter his backers. We could not allow this exhibition to besmirch our good standing in the wider scientific community. We went in search of Dubose to demand he apologize publicly for claiming such an affiliation. If he refused us, we were resolved to destroy his creature by any means necessary, even if it meant setting fire to the barn.

We found Anders before Dubose. He was exiting the barn, along with Temp, a dazed look on both their faces. “So you’ve come,” he said when he saw us striding toward him. We didn’t like how pleased he seemed by all of this, by the music, by the celebration. When we informed him of our plan, he said, “Yes, well, I expected you might try something like that.”

We ordered him to take us to Dubose.

“He’s in there,” Anders said, and pointed back to the barn. “With his monster.” Every single crack between the dark wood slats exploded with yellow and orange light. We told him we had absolutely no intention of setting foot inside that barn. We wouldn’t give Dubose the satisfaction of gazing upon his creation. “Suit yourselves,” Anders said, smiling now. “But if you want to find Dubose tonight, if you want your apology, you’ll have to go in that barn. No other way.”

When he moved to leave us, leaning forward on his cane, we grabbed him by the arm. We asked why he couldn’t go into the barn and drag Dubose out to us.

“Something has occurred to me,” he said, shaking us loose. “If you made Dubose a member of our Academy, the bones would, in a certain sense, be ours too, would they not?”

He was talking nonsense. We told him so. He shrugged and disappeared into the crowd along with the girl.

We were divided on what to do next, but a quick vote decided our course: we would take our place in line. They were admitting only four people at once, and the line moved at a snail’s pace. By the time we reached those immense barn doors and reluctantly dropped our coins into the preacher’s jangling bucket, night had fallen and the only light was that provided by the lanterns. Inside, the straw was soft beneath our feet. We saw no sight of Dubose. We were told to keep moving. Smoke danced through the rafters of the barn, and there, up ahead, illuminated by a ring of red and blue glass lanterns, like something plucked from a nightmare, was the creature, lurching toward us with rows of sharp teeth and two long curving tusks, its chest puffed with breath, a single knowing blue eye at the center of its giant apish head. We were very, very quiet.