The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Shamalung (The Diminutions) Documented by Michael Moorcock

SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM

13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, England

St. Odhran’s coll

Reverend Orlando Bannister 1800–1900

Miniaturisation experiment? (c. 1899)

Organic material (wood, etc.) plus metals (various)

Loaned by the Barbican Begg Bequest at the City Museum (note, proprietorship challenged by Battersea Municipal Museum, by the Lambshead Trust, and by Greyfriars School, Kent)

L1922.11. bmm/LT/GFS

(Private viewing and reading of associated notes by appointment only.)

Notes

Greyfriars School in Kent claims this odd piece on the grounds that (a) Reverend Bannister was an ex-pupil still funded by the school to perform certain scientific investigations and experiments, and (b) the piece is possibly the work of another of its alumni, the sculptor and scientist John Wolt. Wolt disappeared from his lodgings in 1899, leaving only a brief note suggesting that he intended to take his own life (“My final journey, undertaken voluntarily, should not prove a difficult one, and I could ultimately come face to face with my Creator. Even if a little discomfort is felt, it will be as nothing compared to the joy of bringing the word of Our Saviour to God’s tiniest creatures. B. has convinced me of their intelligence and individuality, and therefore they must be possessed of souls, just as St. Francis, apparently, believed that animals, too, have souls. I am filled with humility and ecstasy when I consider that I was their first missionary. Though the transition be painful and not a little difficult, I am assured by B. that all will be well in the ultimate.”). This note and others are attached. In Reverend Bannister’s remaining journal fragments (the majority were eaten by rats while in storage), he writes for January 1, 1900: “W. proves to be an enthusiast, perfectly willing to aid me in my work. We both feel God has chosen us.”

One of the early cases of Seaton Begg (“Sexton Blake,” as he was known to readers of detective fiction) was reported as “The Fairy Murders” in the Union Jack magazine, a patriotic weekly, of February 16, 1901, featuring Griff the Man-Tracker, probably an invented creature.

This manuscript being by far the most complete, believed the work of Sir David Garnett Blake, great-great-grandson of Sir Sexton Blake of Erring Grange, Erring, Sussex.

The bare facts of the case were as bizarre as they were brief: The small daughter of a Bermondsey tailor claimed that her half-grown cat, Mimi, had eaten a fairy. Of course, no one would believe her, even though she insisted she had seen Mimi nosing around a tiny leg. Rebecca, of course, was rightly punished for telling stories. But a few days later, she came to her mother holding triumphantly a little human ear. The Rabinowitzes, her parents, were unusual in those days in that they were vegetarians. The only meat they bought was for their cat. It came from their local butcher, Jacob “Cocky” Cohen. They inspected the ear and decided it was not human. When they went to Cocky’s next, they would complain that monkeys and possibly other animals had been used in the preparation of his cats’ meat.

Then Rebecca found part of a miniature arm, dressed in what appeared to be a tiny silk blouse sleeve, and brought this to her horrified parents, who could no longer hide the truth from themselves. The following Tuesday, they confronted the butcher.

Suspecting them of an extortion plan, so before witnesses, including PC Michael McCormac, Cocky began to sort through his supply of cats’ meat in order to prove the Rabinowitzes wrong.

To his shocked astonishment, he discovered several items of what could only be human remains, but of such tiny proportions, they were immediately called “Lilliputian,” by one of his witnesses, a Dr. Jelinek, Bohemian music teacher, originally of Prague, who would later give his part of the story in German to his sister. Upon informing the police, the witnesses were sworn to secrecy and made to sign Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act, but this did not stop the disgusted Cocky Cohen from taking the case to a young consulting detective who had recently set up practise in Norfolk Street, London E.

Seaton Begg (not yet knighted) would become famous under another name when his adventures were sensationalised and written up for a popular weekly, but in those days, he was scarcely a household name. He worked at that time with a gigantic creature of no known breed, whom he had raised and trained and named “Griff,” or sometimes “Man-Tracker.” An invaluable asset. Begg eagerly undertook to investigate the case, and within hours, Griff had found the source of the butcher’s meat. A Battersea slaughterhouse advertised as The Metropolitan Meat Supply Co., which supplied sausages, animal food, fertilizer, and pie-filling to the trade, the firm seemed conscientious as far as its sanitary arrangements were concerned, and had passed its recent inspection with colours flying. When he confronted them, Begg himself considered their professional ethics beyond reproach.

An unfortunate participant in an ill-fated conversion

With the help of his strange, unhuman assistant, Griff, Begg next discovered that Metropolitan Meat was being used by a corrupt entrepreneur known as Moses Monk to get rid of unwanted flesh. Aided by an accomplice on the premises, he introduced the meat into MMP’s supply. Monk made most of his money by working as a “waste-disposal merchant,” employed by unscrupulous merchants to get rid of organic material local councils refused to handle. However, Monk had a rather grislier arrangement with the Brookgate undertakers Ecker and Ecker to dispose of what they termed their “overspill”—paupers who had died without relatives in surrounding London boroughs. The council paid the Eckers by the corpse, supposedly buried in consecrated ground in simple lead coffins. It was far more profitable to let Monk handle the business, no questions asked, and sell the spare plots to grieving relatives. Yet this still did not explain the tiny “fairy” body parts discovered in Bermondsey. Under threat from young Begg and his strange assistant, Griff, Monk eventually confessed.

Of course, it was completely against the law to mix human remains with meat sold for consumption by animals, so Begg was at least responsible for bringing that filthy practise to an end.

The central mystery remained. Who were the “Lilliputians” and why was the government covering up their existence? Once again, Begg decided to put Griff the Man-Tracker on the case. Here is a description of Griff from the original fictionalised report in Union Jack no. 356, quoted on the Blakiana Web site:

Can it be a man—this strange, repulsive creature so stealthily stealing along? Surely no human being was ever so repulsively formed as this? Yet it is garbed as a man!

A bowler hat, long, loosely fitting black overcoat, baggy trousers, tan-coloured spats, and great, ill-shaped boots. But the face! How can we possibly describe it—or, rather, the little that can be seen of it? The bowler hat is full large for the head, and is drawn down over the forehead and skull, and rests upon large, outstanding, and hair-covered ears. Great blue spectacles, of double lens, cover the eyes and some portion of the visage. The nose is very flat, and of great width of nostrils. The unusual sight of a “respirator” can be seen well covering up the mouth. A great and light-coloured muffler also is so arranged that chin and jaws are both concealed; but what little of the face that can be detected is covered to the cheekbones with short and stiff-looking hair of a dull-brownish colour.

There is something strangely inhuman in the general expression, while the small, round eyes peer through the deep blue glasses like two brilliant sparks of fire.

Of wonderful breadth of shoulder, girth of chest, and length of arm, this is an individual who must be endowed with prodigious strength. A crooked back and bowed legs greatly add to the general grotesque hideousness of the figure as a whole.

This would be the first time that the government stepped in to dissuade Begg from unleashing his horrid assistant (ultimately, Griff would be housed at a facility—he died some time in 1918, where he had been employed in the bloody trench fighting which developed during the first world war), for, within an hour or two of putting Griff on the scene, Begg was summoned to the offices of the Home Secretary Lord Mauleverer, who told him that, since he could not put Begg (younger son of his good friend General Sir Henry Begg) off the scent, then he had better put him on it. There were two conditions: (1) Griff must be “retired” as soon as possible, and (2) Begg must sign the Official Secrets Act and consider himself to be working not for Cocky, the Bermondsey butcher, but for His Majesty the King. Begg agreed. Turning over all available evidence in the case, Mauleverer commissioned Begg, under oath to the monarch, to investigate the matter as discreetly as possible.

The fictional version is, of course, well known. Clue by clue, Begg tracked down the fairy murderer to a deserted mill in the heart of Kent, where, with a secret grant from “Blackmonk Academy” (easily identified as Greyfriars School), mad scientist “Professor Maxwell Moore” had found a way to grow plants so much like human beings they deceived everyone. His aim was to breed a race of “peace-loving plant people,” who would eventually take over from the human race. Begg’s first clue was in the cat’s refusal to eat vegetable matter.

Typical story-paper rubbish, of course, which satisfied the rumour-mongers when inevitably the tale got out in a garbled form. The truth was far more startling.

At this stage, we must introduce one of the key players—if not the key player—in this melodrama:

Orlando Bannister, D.D., the so-called Barmy Vicar of Battersea, at that time enjoying the living of St. Odhrán’s, a Methodist and a master of the Portable Harmonium, also amateur inventor, had successfully weighed the human soul but not the mind. As a missionary, he had served for some years in the jungles of Guatemala, where he had become known for his unorthodox views concerning the nature of both dumb animals and even dumber plants. His scientific investigations informed the nature of his theological views. His book Our Lord in All Things, in which he argued that every individual blade of grass, every leaf or flower, possessed a rudimentary soul, went into many editions and was in the library of every sentimental lady in the land. The Blavatskyians embraced him. Sales from his book funded his travels and his scientific investigations. A devout Methodist, he was of a missionary disposition and had travelled everywhere on what he amiably called “the Lord’s work.”

With a fellow evangelist Sir Ranald Frieze-Botham, D.D. founded missions not only in several leading zoological gardens but also a score or so of botanical gardens, most of them in New Zealand.

Having done all he could do for the creatures of the land, at least for the moment, Bannister turned his attention to the deep. He built his rather spectacular Underwater Tramway, or Submersible Juggernaut, in order to carry the story of Creation to the creatures of the sea. He had pretty much exhausted his attempts to bring the Gospel to the Goldfish (as the vulgar press had it) when he happened upon Pasteur’s study of microbes and realized his work had hardly begun.

Bannister and Frieze-Botham spent long hours discussing what means they could employ to isolate and introduce the word of God to the world of microorganisms. They did, in fact, receive some funding from Bannister’s old school after he had persuaded the board of governors that, if a will to do evil motivated those microbes, then the influence of the Christian religion was bound to have an influence for good. This meant, logically, that fewer boys would be in the infirmary and that, ultimately, shamed by the consequences of their actions, the germs causing, say, tuberculosis would cease to spread.

The crucial step, of course, was how to reduce a missionary, complete with all necessary paraphernalia, to a size tiny enough to contact individual—or, at any rate, small groups of—microbes.

As it happened, Frieze-Botham was in regular correspondence with the inventor Nikola Tesla, who at that point had lost his faith in his adopted homeland of the United States and planned to emigrate to England, where he felt his less conservative ideas would find more fruitful ground. Upon disembarking from the S.S. Ruritania, he was at once met by the two divines, who hurried him off to Bannister’s vicarage in leafy Balham.

There, Tesla was allowed to set up his Atomic Diminution Engine in what had been the vaults of an old abbey created on the site by the so-called Doubting Friars, or Quasi-Carmelites, in the thirteenth century.

Tesla needed an assistant, so the obvious person was John Wolt, who had been at school with Bannister and Frieze-Botham and was a great admirer of Tesla. He had already read his hero’s paper On Preparing a True Atomic Diminution Engine, printed privately in Chicago, and could think of no better way of serving both God and Science than helping carry the scriptures to the germs. “Better than trying to persuade the Germans,” he quipped, referring to Tesla’s humiliating experience in Berlin, which had rejected his electric recoilless gun, among other inventions.

Their work began apace.

Tesla, Wolt, and Frieze-Botham set to work unpacking and assembling the massive crates as they turned up from America. Soon an entire machine took shape in the church basement, and Tesla’s mood became increasingly elevated as his dynamos set to mumbling and whistling, then yelped into sudden life, drowning all other sound before being brought under purring control by their master.

“Messieurs, we have our power,” declared Tesla in his preferred language. His wife had always preferred it, too.

From what Begg pieced together and lodged under the “50 Years Act,” we can see that only Tesla, and perhaps Bannister, survived their attempts to shrink through what Tesla named “metamultiversal plates” down through the alternative universes to near-infinity. Practicing first on dead animals, then on human corpses obtained from Monk (which was what was turning up as parts of “fairies” or “Lilliputians” in the “meat” Monk disposed of through his usual means), the inventor and his colleagues were soon prepared to experiment on living animals and eventually on human subjects—and then themselves. All human subjects were volunteers and paid well, but only advanced to the first and second levels. Four died, all at what was called “the first level of descent.” Which was when Monk, who had supplied the corpses, now offered to take them off the vicar’s hands. He was growing rich on what they paid him and rather neglecting his usual dumping business.

When Tesla was satisfied that no harm could possibly come to human organs subjected to his electrics, he announced that he was ready to send a living creature straight through into what he termed the Intra-Universe, or Second Aether, down to worlds subtly different but ranged according to scale and mass so that the smaller one became the denser one, and the larger the more amorphous. The process had to be endured by degrees, stepping down a level at a time. All the laboratory guinea pigs used returned safely and indicated what was likely to happen to a human subject. At the first level, one remained small but visible and yet one’s normal weight. At the second level, one vanished from human sight, though one’s weight could still be measured as identical and the subject could be observed through a microscope; and at the third level, far more powerful instruments were needed until the traveller vanished completely from the scale, and weight became meaningless in the context. Wolt would, at his own request, be the first to be sent “downscale.”

Tesla was by no means oblivious of concern. He was nervous. He asked Wolt over and over if he felt ready. He received a steady affirmative. And so, the process began as Wolt stepped into the apparatus and the tall bell jar was lowered over him until it came to rest on the sturdy mahogany plinth. Lights and gauges let into the wood indicated the progress as Tesla’s dials and graphs began precise measurement of the man’s molecular structure before sending him on the first stage of his journey. Wolt carried with him portable versions of the crucial instruments, together with Dr. Bannister’s patented Portable Harmonium and a case of Bibles. On his left were the controls he would use for his return through five groups of six levels. Before returning, however, he would establish a base camp, where, before he returned, he planned to leave the majority of items he took with him.

The others watched eagerly and with concern the first transition, which the guinea pigs were known to have survived. Before their eyes, within a glorious, pale green aura, Wolt grew smaller and smaller until, triumphantly brandishing his Bible, he disappeared from view—to reappear in the viewing screen of the electric microscope still waving, evidently in good health. Another stage, and Wolt could be observed staring in awe at the lush, almost infinite world of the Submicroscopic.

He could be seen to consult his Bible at this point, and begin to preach. He was still preaching when he vanished at last from human ken, beyond the range of all Tesla’s detection devices.

Now the men waited impatiently. Would Wolt return safely?

Hours went by. Tesla, who always ate voraciously when nervous, sent out for sandwiches.

And then, as dawn began to touch the horizon with a delicate grey, Wolt’s image popped onto the microscope lens, and soon he was looking up at them and showing them that apart from his crucifix, he was empty-handed.

Another ten minutes, and a breathless, grinning Wolt stepped from his plinth with stories of wonderful landscapes, new spectra, and sometimes dangerous types of flora and fauna—all, he felt sure, waiting to be instructed in the ways of the Bible. He was full of the emotions and feelings he had experienced in the other world. He had feared he might be descending into Hell, but instead he had been close to Heaven. “Ah, the ecstasy.” He had felt at one with the raw stuff with which God made the world. Far from reporting failure, Wolt was almost raving about his success. There were intelligent creatures in our bloodstreams, discussing ideology that could destroy or save our world, and when their fight was decided, so our fate was decided. Not only could these creatures learn from the Bible; it was a matter of grave urgency that they be converted to the Christian faith as quickly as possible. “Whole armies of missionaries are needed down there!” Wolt insisted. He would help train them, perhaps draw maps from the sketches he had made.

Overjoyed, the three Methodists congratulated Tesla, who was anxious to remind them that the work was still at an early stage. Privately, he wondered if Wolt had experienced a series of delusions and was merely mad.

As Begg wrote in his report to the Home Office: “They did not know what the effects on a living human brain might be, let alone to what harm his body had been exposed. There could be terrible side-effects, which might materialise in days or even years, produced by the rapid change of size while retaining the same mass.”

Wolt spoke of “making holes in the cosmos,” and nobody was sure what that meant. Nonetheless, the experiment seemed to have proven everything they had considered in theory. Bannister, in particular, was anxious to make the next trip. Wolt drew him a map, showing where, protected from the strange elements of the submicroscopic world, he had left the Bibles, the Portable Harmonium, and all the other materials that had accompanied him. With more Bibles, perhaps some firearms for self-defence, and provided with food and a few other necessities, they could probably remain in the Second Aether for months. The four men celebrated, inflamed by the knowledge that they had found new worlds to conquer for their beloved Saviour.

Although Wolt was anxious to return, they decided to send another of their company and drew lots, Frieze-Botham winning the right to be the next to descend. He took another case of Bibles, more supplies of soap, tinned butter, bully beef and so forth, ammunition and firearms. His experience was pretty much identical to Wolt’s. He reported a rather peaceful scene, with herds of oddly shaped herbivores moving placidly through dimensionless veldts and forests whose crowns were invisible. More like fresh coral than anything above the waves, said Frieze-Botham on his return. He said he felt like some heavy sea-beast brought by gravity to the only depths it could comfortably negotiate. And, at last, it was the eager cleric’s turn to experience what he had, after all, first sought to explore. Equipping himself with more Bibles, bully beef, and bullets, he gave the signal to Tesla and ultimately was gone.

This time, however, the hours became slow days as the trio prayed that no accident had come to Bannister. Tesla cursed himself for not rigging up some kind of subatomic telephone. A week was to pass before the apparatus began to flicker and spark, and still the men did not dare to hope. When all was over, they stared into an empty stage. Only the controls and wires were to be seen, perfectly intact, as also were the levers and gauges.

Before the others could stop him, Wolt had vaulted the brass rail and given the signal to raise the bell. “It’s up to me to find him. Don’t try to stop me. I know those timeless, dimensionless spaces like the back of my hand.” He then remembered to call for the last Portable Harmonium, the only instrument to send out sounds loud enough for the reverend to hear. His crucifix clutched to his chest, Wolt gave the signal to begin the descent across the planes of the multiverse into what were essentially alternate worlds. Tesla and Frieze-Botham remained to operate the equipment and rack their brains for further means of communicating with the micronauts.

This time, the apparatus was back in minutes, rocking crazily and empty of most supplies. A crazed and battered Wolt, his clothing in shreds, fell from the gigantic bell and reeled to the rail of the crypt, mouthing a single word: “Shamalung.” And that was all. Next, he seemed to remind himself of something and, reaching into the jar, clambered back aboard the machine. He pulled two levers, then waved from the apparatus as it disappeared on another journey down the dimensions. The two observers were at a loss to control what was happening.

But the next time it returned, it came bearing a different passenger successfully up through stage five and four, and made it shakily through three before jamming at two, showing a small Orlando Bannister, brass crucifix in one hand, a Bible lying on the surrounds of the ruined electrics next to some loose notes,¹ as if from a book,² and a small Portable Harmonium, which, on further inspection, proved to be a perfect working model. The figure of Bannister appeared to be made of a very heavy metal, so far unidentified, and was exquisitely carved, impossible to tell from its original.

Tesla and the others knew exactly what had happened, realising the effect of repeated atomic shifts on a living creature, especially a creature of Bannister’s venerable years. His atoms had atrophied, as the few knowledgeable scientists of the day described the process. What was a lifelike statue to the world, was really the last remains of a brilliant scientific mind and a man of almost childlike faith in the workings of his Maker. The apparatus was eventually dismantled, after Tesla and Frieze-Botham had worked for almost a year attempting to reverse time and to rescue Wolt, but it was as if, said Frieze-Botham, growing increasingly spiritual, the Almighty had made it clear that these experiments, however innocent and moved by faith, were to cease.

To this day, people interested in such things continue to debate the meaning of the word “Shamalung,” but, as yet, no credible interpretation has been offered. It could be from any one of millions of microbe languages.

ENDNOTES

1. Subsequently much enlarged, each a perfect page of writing, sadly not sequential, in OB’s hand.

2. See above.