Throughout the historical record, then, the actual function of the Shank had gone assiduously unmentioned in its brief appearances. The witnesses to the Shank merely attested that it worked, remaining curiously mum on other important matters for quite some time.
Perhaps because of this very mystery, Dr. Lambshead became keenly interested in locating one. Through his deep and multilayered explorations of the history of the medical arts, Lambshead had encountered several modern references to the Shank—particularly in his extensive rereading of The Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies, edited by John Trimble and Rebecca Manard, long after his bitter and public feud with both Trimble and Manard—a kind of attempt through scholarship to reconcile. Still, he did not lay eyes on the object until many years later.
According to Dr. Lambshead’s journals, volume 27, book 4, he finally encountered the Shank during World War II, while performing his duty as a surgeon on the Island of Mykines, the Faroe Islands still under the British flag. (He would soon return to his wartime efforts at London’s Combustipol General Hospital.)
On October 5, 1941, the doctor wrote: “Patient arrived: an elderly gentleman, rapid heartbeat, high fever, terrible bleeding from the mouth and anus. Private Lansing informed me that the ancient man was found clinging to a leather-hulled skiff that had wedged between two large rocks at the lee of the island. The man was dressed in the manner of those bent toward monasticism—rough cloth, broken sandals, a rope binding the waist—and was impossibly old. His face had the look of leaves gone to mulch. His body was as light as paper and twice as fragile; his limbs fluttered and flapped as the breeze blew in cold gusts over the North Atlantic.”
Lambshead further notes, and the duty log from the day confirms, that “He claimed to be an abbot in the Order of St. Brendan, and asked for forgiveness several times, but for what we had no clue, except for frequent references to his ‘weakness.’ Where he had come from, we had no idea—due to the currents in that place and a partial blockade by the Germans, it was all but impossible that he had sailed his boat from another part of the island—he had to have come from the sea.” However, as Dr. Lambshead noted, there wasn’t another island within one hundred miles, and the monk’s boat could at best be classified “as a pathetic cockleshell.”
The man carried with him “an intricate mechanical device that he clutched tightly in his hands.” Although the artifact intrigued Lambshead, he had no time to examine it closely. The man was in need of immediate medical assistance. The bleeding was so profuse that it seemed to the doctor to have been caused by shrapnel, though that was “terribly unlikely.” There had been no attacks in the last week against any of the islands—just a long, tense stalemate—and the wound “was fresh, and flowing.”
The old monk explained that he had come from a place called Brendan’s Isle after his craft became tempest-tossed in a sudden gale, and the island disappeared, and the monk was left alone on the undulating waves. Somehow, the doctor did not quite believe this explanation, although “to this day I couldn’t say why I should doubt a dying monk.”2
“Come back,” the monk moaned, his eyes sliding past the rim of his sockets. “Oh, please come back with me.”
“Does it hurt here?” the doctor asked, ignoring the monk as he palpated the belly.
“Was this the fate of our beloved Brendan?” the old man wheezed. “To realize too late that he was wrong to leave, that he wanted to come home.” Tears leaked from the old man’s rheumy eyes. “Always we wander, and it is so lonely. No matter where our island travels.”
The doctor, assuming the man was raving, called the nurse to bring in the ether.
“Don’t operate,” the old monk raved, clutching his belly. “Oh, dear God, don’t take it away.”
“Don’t take what away?” Lambshead said reasonably. “Your odd artifact is safe with us. You can have it back once we’ve operated.” He wondered with growing irritation what on earth could be taking that nurse so long.
The monk’s thin arm shot from the gurney, grabbed the doctor’s crisp, white coat. “We were so alone,” the monk whispered. “The Isle of the Blessed is a cold and lonely and desperate place without our beloved saint. And I am alone, and not alone. My brother! My brother! Don’t take him!”
Lambshead reports that the monk shuddered so violently as the nurse came in, donning her surgical smock and mask, that he thought the monk might die right then, right there.
Five drops of ether, the doctor remembers thinking calmly. “Or, perhaps seven. Indeed, make it an even ten.”
Soon, Lambshead opened up the anesthetized man’s belly, and deep in the old monk’s gut he found a very large tumor—nearly the size of a rugby ball, though three times as heavy—and inside the tumor, happily burrowing and eating away, “was a specimen of some form of Turrilepus Gigantis! The mirror image of the complex clockwork artifact we had found in the monk’s pocket!”
After convincing the nurse to neither pass out nor leave the room, the doctor realized at once that the tumor, not the Turrilepus Gigantis—whether symbiotic or parasitic or belonging to some third classification—required immediate attention: “It was malignant and fast-growing, apparently too fast-growing to be mastered by the monk’s little brother.”
However, even Lambshead’s best efforts were not enough.
“Exhausted and saddened by the outcome,” Lambshead writes, “I nonetheless, in the interests of science, immediately performed an autopsy and attempted to preserve the Turrilepus Gigantis in an empty marmalade jar.” What he found startled him: “This very old, tired man had had the organs and circulatory system of a twenty-five-year-old. If not for the aggressive growth of the tumor, a million-to-one anomaly that his symbiotic brother could not devour quickly enough, the monk might’ve lived another sixty or seventy years at least.”
He also found that the mindless movements of the pre-wound replica had an oddly “hypnotic and vaguely dulling effect on me, its copper snout curling and uncurling rhythmically.
“What happened on the Isle of St. Brendan, I have no idea,” Lambshead would write after the war, in a letter to the then-curator of the Museum of Medical Anomalies as part of the grant that included turning over the mechanical Shank and a half-dissolved, sad-looking Turrilepus Gigantis, “but I remain convinced that the last surviving member of Order of St. Brendan died on my operating table on 3 November 1941, and that this order had hitherto survived for centuries in part because of a symbiotic relationship with a creature that provided a high level of preventative medicine and thus conferred on these monks extremely long life. That extremely long life in such isolation may, in fact, be its own kind of illness I cannot speculate upon.”
A month after the death and burial of the castaway monk, one Private Lansing wrote this in his journaclass="underline" “Doctor Lambshead, always an odd duck, becomes odder by the day, afflicted as he is by a strange, growing sadness. He stands at all hours at the edge of the sea, his hand cupped over his eyes, scanning the horizon. He mutters to himself, and raves. And what’s worse, he’s given himself over to a bizarre religious fanaticism, calling out the name of a saint, waking, dreaming, again and again and again.”