He peered at her again over his wine-glass. She assured him (again) that he might count on her.
“More brandy, Miss Zimmerman, or a biscuit? Very well, though I hate to be a solitary drinker.” Selby sipped his own. “I was visiting the provincial museums, and had to go about checking it ever so circumspectly. Couldn’t come right out and demand to see it. Well, Larraby kept that Paper Doll thing hidden in a Rinso box in a broom closet! It was in three pieces, in totally deplorable condition. A great troll of a janitor was lurking around. Details shall be spared you. ‘Luke, confound it, this should be kept in a moisture- and temperature-controlled, sealed case.’ “
“Couldn’t agree with you more,” said Larraby.
“Then why isn’t it?”
“Haven’t got one, is why. Besides, our fragrant friend might spook the city senseless.”
“ ‘And there should be a series of tests made, examinations, measurements, tissue samples. Let me give this some thought.’ To make the matter short, a complex plan was worked out. Some recently acquired shekel medallions would be sent to Larraby as sort of hostages, and the head of his precious mummy would be sent north to Rhode Island to be tested, teeth for example. Meanwhile I looked into getting a proper sealed case for it. But after a very short time, old Luke Larraby began demanding his, um, object back, and making ridiculous charges that the shekels weren’t authentic. Said the shekel medallions, of 18th century European manufacture, had been represented as actual 2nd century shekels of the last Jewish Commonwealth, which was certainly not stipulated in the agreement. Said his miserable mini-museum had now provided a more secure repository than the broom closet. Well, the tests take a long time, so Silas Abbott Selby stood firm.” The empty glass came down firmly on the table and his eyes firmly held Claire’s.
“And I am not likely to yield, my dear Miss, ah, my dear Doctor Zimmerman, for in strictest confidence, there is a great deal of mystery about this whole thing. The tests are inconclusive, but I can disclose that the tests show no traces of such chemical embalming agents as arsenic or formaldehyde or anything more modern. Though what they did disclose was both interesting and puzzling. Certain tissues are inconsistent with. the state of certain sinew fragments, soft tissue, brain matter and spinal matter, epidermal cells. but I have no wish to be prolix. Oh, the press would like nothing more, nothing better than to compare us, by ‘us’ I mean the Carolina Coast Museum and the General Museum of the Province of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, compare us to Burke and Hare. Ha ha.”
“Oh, surely you need not rush away now. A glass of Fundador? Do let me pour you, our Fundador is famous — well, I have very much enjoyed. And should you hear, should you just hear any of, ha ha ha, Curator Larraby’s, he has no degree in museum science, you know, of his complaints against this ancient and august institution, older than our Republic, well, ha ha, just consider the source. Allow me to help you with your wraps — well, Goodnight, Miss, Doctor Zimmerman. Claire.”
In a semi-senile tortoise shuffle came Dr H. Brown Roberts. “Who was that young woman, Selby? Surely you were not entertaining a personal female guest in these semi-Senatorial chambers, endowed by Uncle Waldo Brown, eh? Looked like a flapper to me. Eh?”
Framed in the arch of the ancient gallery, Dr Roberts wagged his snowy head. His white-thatched nostrils gleamed. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t signify. I’m only old Harry Roberts, and I don’t signify, though I am still on the Budget Committee. I guess I know a flapper when I see one, and I know a good bottle of Fundador when I see one, so pour me a glass, Silas Selby. Call me a Brandy Baptist if you like, what care I; I’m only old Harry Roberts and my years of labor don’t signify. Pour metwo glasses of good Spanish brandy, or I’ll tell the Budget Committee about your stinking old head, and what will they say about that? — Ah. Hah ha. Mmmm. Tell you I know a flapper when I see one.”
Edward Bagnell, Doctor of Philosophy, friend of Dave Branch, and holder of other distinctions greeted Vlad Smith and Jack Stewart in the Elephant Room of Sumner Public College’s Museum of Ethnology. The Elephant Room contained a rather large and awful oil painting of the progress of some Hindu maharaja, the gift of a long-ago benefactor. The painting’s cleaning was fiercely resisted on the grounds that it was best left obscured.
Bagnell waved them to a large leather sofa. “I daresay you’d like to know why it’s Sumner Public College? Every body wants to. I am able to dispel the mystery. The founding fathers and the one founding mother put the word in to show that the college was a serf to neither church nor state. As some still are. How do you like the Elephant Room? It looks like the antechamber of a rather seedy club, but here the Department of Ethnology holds out by being part anthropology, part folklore, and part whatever. We claim to have pioneered the inter-disciplinary study; haw. And here is where the ethnologists gather to drink embalming fluid, as wine is only allowed on campus for certain ceremonial occasions. How is Allbright doing?”
Stewart took the reply upon himself. “Old man gives the impression that he’s mostly letting the kudzu grow over him, but he isn’t really. And the boy makes cryptic statements such as ‘Larraby’s got one locked up.’ “ He repeated what he had told Vlad and concluded, “You have any idea what that means, Dr Bagnell?”
Ed Bagnell shrugged. “Probably that Larraby, whoever he may be, has a report on the legend, and is keeping it locked up until he’s ready to publish. Typical academic paranoia, eh Vlad?”
After answering no more than a grunt, Vlad slowly began to speak of his own and immediate problem. Of encountering by moonlight in the old uninhabited house, something so hideous, noisome, foul that he might have thought it was madness to think it was real. Only to find the sight so real as to drive his small daughter past terror and hysteria. “Do you understand why I’m trying to find out. ” he waved his hands helplessly, “. what the damned thing was? That, that vanished in an instant? One minute it was there, another minute nothing was there, as though, just as though it had come out of the wall. The police say ‘Tramp’ — it was no tramp! The only thing it resembled was that old legend, and that’s why I’m here, Ed. In my file on the legend is a collection of items labeled Bagnell’s Notes. I won’t go so far as to say they are yellowed, but they are far from crisp. May I ask how you got interested in the legend of the Paper-Man, or whatever name you call it by?”
“I got interested when I read an unpublished paper on it, and remembered I’d long ago met a possible informant, and hadn’t realized it. One day when I was a kid, I was walking in a strange part of town and I came to an old house, abandoned and all overgrown. I thought I’d go in and look around, when a creepy old man hobbled from out of nowhere, with torn old clothes, and just a few teeth grinding in stubbly jaws, and he smelled very funny. Later an old lumberjack said to me, as if reading my mind, ‘Don’t go in that old house, boy, a Boss in the Wall lives there. They’re crazy people who think they’re dead, and they wrap themselves in paper, and they rattle like snakes and bite like snakes, so don’t go in there, boy.’ “