The Thing in the Jar
Researched and Documented by Michael Cisco
The Thing in the Jar was presented to Dr. Lambshead by an African anthropologist specializing in the study of Europeans, one Prof. Manjakanony Ramahefajonatana, of the University of Antananarivo, Antananarivo, Madagascar, in exchange for some assistance rendered in accumulating a representative collection of items of contemporary everyday English use. The object was discovered by Prof. Ramahefajonatana’s principal research assistant, Vololoniaina Rasendranoro, who, owing to a condition of amnesia brought on by a clout she received on the head as she was escaping from a burning barn in Essex, was entirely unable ever to account for how she came across it. The only definitely known fact about the jar’s past is that it was found in England, and does not appear to have originated elsewhere.
The object is a cylindrical glass jar, fifteen inches tall and six inches in diameter, weighing about twenty-five pounds, with a bronze base and lid. The bottom is wrapped in a fringed skirt of faded red velvet with gold tassels, and bears at its center an engraving of an owl in semi-profile and the legend “Griscyple Bros.—1737.” The top is hermetically sealed with black wax.
The jar contains an anthropic creature.
This object is associated with a manuscript in Dr. Lambshead’s own hand, consisting of a great many sheets of different hotel stationery, contained in a manila file folder. The folder’s projecting tab is covered with a stack of adhesive labels, one laid atop another. The exposed, uppermost label had something written on it which was then aggressively scribbled over, and the rest of the folder is leopard-spotted with scribbled-out words or phrases. The only unmarred writing on the folder itself consists of three words inscribed in a column on the inner surface of the front, or untabbed, half of the folder. They are, from top to bottom: MUSHROOMS, BACON, OVALTINE.
Not unlike the folder, the manuscript is also heavily emended, with many strikethroughs and insertions. The battered, fraying pages show signs of having been much handled. Not only are all the pages from different hotels, but they are written and marked in a variety of media, including ink, pencil, lipstick, crayon, pastels, and, in one case, a dry and crusty reddish-brown fluid that has the characteristics of blood. The alterations are, more often than not, written in a medium different from that of the older text. The implements used also must have been highly varied, ranging from rare and expensive Sheaffer or Pelikan fountain pens to the quills of exotic birds to ordinary run-of-the-mill ballpoint pens and No. 2 pencils to sharpened fragments of bone or medical implements dipped in ink or stain. In one case, a correction is actually cut into the paper with a sharp instrument, perhaps a scalpel, and there are minute discolorations around the incisions suggesting the scalpel had been in surgical use quite recently when the correction was made, or, perhaps, that Dr. Lambshead had been struck by an idea in the very midst of performing an operation, and had paused to make the change in the text using literally what he had in his hand just at that moment.
In content, the manuscript consists of a list and seven fragmentary narratives or descriptions, all of which seem intended to account for the existence of the Thing in the Jar. All of them are, also, mutually exclusive, and it is impossible to ascertain which of them, if any, is the true explanation.
The list reads, in part, as follows:
imp / witch’s brat
immature yeti
immature yama / yamantaka
buffalo spirit
buffalo minotaur
hoax by M.
motile fruiting body from enormous Kamchatkan mycelium
found in meteor / chrysolite
automaton replacement for lost child, abused, becomes monster
Japanese legend: pregnant mother murdered, stillborn child avenger
stillborn specimen, ankylopsoriasis
found blocking sewer drain under big city
infant gorilla raised by crocodiles
wandered into small German town in 1762 with note
discovered in exhumed coffin in place of body: cadaver changeling
conceit of insane taxidermist
small island North Atlantic where wrecked Vikings married wolves
mature specimen of gnome
“Thing in Jar” as first reproduced within Ramahefajonatana’s dissertation, Les Articles des Usages Quotidiens des Communautes Rurales et Semi-Rurales de l’Angleterre du milieu du Siècle Vingtième (Paris: Plon, 1957)
According to the first narrative, the Thing is a fetish, created for some religious purpose. A sentence to the effect that it was made by the Akimel O’odham people of the American Southwest is struck out and somewhat ambiguously modified to mean something else that isn’t exactly clear. The intention seems to be that this fetish was found among or traded from, or possibly to, the Akimel O’odham, and/or might be Aztec in origin. The text does clearly state that the fetish was placed in the jar by a white American individual who acquired it by theft. Many possible names for this recipient, or thief, are given, all of them crossed out: Buckwaldo Mudthumper, Eustace Bucke, Cornelius Abereustace, Haldernablou Yuchachev, Steven Williams, Shi Mu-ke, Beldu Terrance, Josephine Mouse, Melinda Postoffice, Macfitzhugh O’Donaldin, Wigberto Fuentes, Mustafa Mukhtar al Kateb, Bradford Frederic. The story breaks off after mention of this person, with no indication of its intended ending.
The second manuscript bluntly identifies the Thing as an aborted minotaur. This is cancelled and replaced with the phrase “reverse minotaur,” meaning not the offspring of a bull and a woman, as in the fable, but of a man and a cow. A partial list of the less well-known of the Greek islands is included; most likely, Dr. Lambshead intended to select one of these as the setting for his story, but abandoned it altogether before doing so.
The third and longest fragment is a rambling narrative, based on documented events, of an expedition to Saibai in the Torres Strait, and the Biak-Numfoor rain forests of the Schouten Islands. After many pages of laborious description mainly devoted to detailing their efforts to capture a living specimen of the Biak Naked-backed Fruit Bat (Dobsonia emersaa), Dr. Lambshead turns his attention to the island of Saibai and the Zaman Wislin cargo cult he and his companions discovered there. One practitioner in particular, a “pariah” who was compelled to live apart from the other inhabitants of the island, was rumored to have made strange use of an infant for magical purposes. Deleted segments of the story made this person a member of the cult in good standing at first, then “a demented European convert,” but in the end Dr. Lambshead chose the native pariah variant. It was said that this man [“woman” was written first, then struck out] used to put a baby in a pot of boiling elixir [“water” had been written first, then struck out]. There is a careted phrase for insertion that indicates this was to be after incantations had been chanted over the baby for . . . and then this is followed by only a blank, presumably to be filled in later, but which remains empty.
When the enchanted baby would be placed in the pot, the boiling fluid would recoil away from the baby’s body. Unharmed in any way, the baby would go to sleep in the warm pot, “in a kind of magnetic bubble” that prevented the fluid from injuring it. Meanwhile, “the crazed practitioner would solemnly open an elaborately carved box, and, with many gestures of sanctification and holiness, take out from the box a battered, ramshackle pair of aviator headphones. Handling them with exaggerated care, he would insert the plug at the end of the headphone cable into a crude, jury-rigged jack, basically just a hole cut into a large, hollow nut, affixed to the side of the pot by a stinking lump of coal tar. Then, placing the headphones on his own head, this man would pantomime efforts to ‘tune’ the pot by turning knobs he’d fashioned out of spools, and attached to a board. Through these headphones, the man claimed to be able to hear the voices of ancestral spirits, and of the gods themselves, talking to him. When asked what they sounded like, he raised his voice to a high falsetto and faintly repeated distinct phrases, much separated in time. While some were in Kalau Kauau Ya [the native language], most were American English. I plainly heard him say, ‘I am the one who does not come when called.’ What could be discerned of the remainder in English consisted of fragments: ‘. . . the water of skulls . . .’ ‘. . . too much is happening when I try to sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . . in my sleep . . .’ ‘. . . anyone dead must be treated or they may do more . . .’ With this last, he began to shake violently, and threw a fit that seemed to me to have no obvious somatic cause.”