The Uttermost Farthing | Page 9

looked about me, and I don't
mind confessing that I felt distinctly creepy. It was not the skeleton of
the whale that hung overhead, with its ample but ungenial smile; it was
not the bandy-legged skeleton of the rachitic camel, nor that of the
aurochs, nor those of the apes and jackals and porcupines in the smaller
glass case; nor the skulls that grinned from the case at the end of the
room. It was the long row of human skeletons, each erect and watchful
on its little pedestal, that occupied the great wall-case: a silent,
motionless company of fleshless sentinels, standing in easy postures
with unchanging, mirthless grins and seeming to wait for something.
That was what disturbed me.
I am not an impressionable man; and, as a medical practitioner, it is
needless to say that mere bones have no terrors for me. The skeleton
from which I worked as a student was kept in my bedroom, and I
minded it no more than I minded the plates in "Gray's Anatomy." I
could have slept comfortably in the Hunterian Museum--other
circumstances being favorable; and even the gigantic skeleton of
Corporal O'Brian--which graces that collection--with that of his
companion, the quaint little dwarf, thrown in, would not have disturbed
my rest in the smallest degree. But this was different. I had the feeling,
as I had had before, that there was something queer about this museum
of Challoner's.
I walked slowly along the great wall-case, looking in at the specimens;
and in the dull light, each seemed to look out at me as I passed with a
questioning expression in his shadowy eye-sockets, as if he would ask,

"Do you know who I was?" It made me quite uncomfortable.
There were twenty-five of them in all. Each stood on a small black
pedestal on which was painted in white a number and a date; excepting
one at the end, which had a scarlet pedestal and gold lettering. Number
1 bore the date 20th September, 1889, and Number 25 (the one with the
red pedestal) was dated 13th May, 1909. I looked at this last one
curiously; a massive figure with traces of great muscularity, a broad,
Mongoloid head with large cheekbones and square eye-sockets. A
formidable fellow he must have been; and even now, the broad, square
face grinned out savagely from the case.
I turned away with something of a shudder. I had not come here to get
"the creeps." I had come for Challoner's journal, or the "Museum
Archives" as he called it. The volumes were in the secret cupboard at
the end of the room and I had to take out the movable panel to get at
them. This presented no difficulty. I found the rosettes that moved the
catches and had the panel out in a twinkling. The cupboard was five
feet high by four broad and had a well in the bottom covered by a lid,
which I lifted and, to my amazement, found the cavity filled with
revolvers, automatic pistols, life-preservers, knuckle-dusters and other
weapons, each having a little label--bearing a number and a date--tied
neatly on it. I shut the lid down rather hastily; there was something
rather sinister in that collection of lethal appliances.
The volumes, seven in number, were on the top shelf, uniformly bound
in Russia leather and labeled, respectively, "Photographs,"
"Finger-prints," "Catalogue," and four volumes of "Museum Archives."
I was about to reach down the catalogue when my eye fell on the pile of
shallow boxes on the next shelf. I knew what they contained and
recalled uncomfortably the strange impression that their contents had
made on me; and yet a sort of fascination led me to take down the top
one--labelled "Series B 5"--and raise the lid. But if those dreadful dolls'
heads had struck me as uncanny when poor Challoner showed them to
me, they now seemed positively appalling. Small as they were--and
they were not as large as a woman's fist--they looked so life-like--or
rather, so death-like--that they suggested nothing so much as actual

human heads seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There were
five in this box, each in a separate compartment lined with black velvet
and distinguished by a black label with white lettering; excepting the
central one, which rested on scarlet velvet and had a red label inscribed
in gold "13th May, 1909."
I gazed at this tiny head in its scarlet setting with shuddering
fascination. It had a hideous little face; a broad, brutal face of the Tartar
type; and the mop of gray-brown hair, so unhuman in color, and the
bristling mustache that stood up like a cat's whiskers, gave it an aspect
half animal, half devilish. I clapped the lid on the box, thrust it back on
the shelf, and,