The topmost storey, where work has been halted, seems again to be accomplished in a style that is entirely unrelated to the floors beneath. The building’s lines and sweeping curves are unresolved, curtailed in jutting spars or girders that stand enigmatically against the skyline. Amidst these skeletal protrusions are two or three relatively finished works of decorative statuary, the most notable being a winged stone figure representing the archangel Michael, who is depicted standing with a shield held in his left hand and what seems to be a snooker cue clutched in his right.
A book discovered in Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet, the bulk of it taken up by a false bottom, inside of which researchers found the text by Alan Moore and a tiny architectural structure consisting of several floors, somewhat akin to a doll’s house, with a variety of odd objects inside each compartment or room.
The oddities listed below were all discovered in the confines of the structure’s bottom two floors, and are labelled with an indication of which level and which individual chamber or compartment they were found in.
1. Deathmonger’s aprons, two in number. Found on ground floor; chamber 10.
These two aprons, which have been dated as originating from the first years of the twentieth century, have stitched-in tags identifying them as property of one Mrs. Belinda Gibbs. Supporting evidence suggests that Mrs. Gibbs’s profession was that of an unofficial midwife/undertaker working in a badly disadvantaged neighbourhood located in the English midlands, persons of her calling being locally referred to as a “deathmonger.”
One of the aprons is entirely black, being apparently the mode of dress appropriate for “laying out,” or dealing with the bodies of the recently deceased. The other apron, meant for use on the occasion of a birth, is mostly white and yet around its edge is decorated with embroidered bees and butterflies in vivid, naturalistic colours.
In an inside pocket of the jet-black funeral apron, a discoloured handkerchief was found. Its sepia and burnt-umber stains suggest that Mrs. Gibbs was a habitual snuff-user, possibly as a precautionary measure to alleviate any olfactory distress occasioned by her work with cadavers.
2. Children’s toys from dream, anagrammatically derived. Found on first floor; chamber 13.
The second storey of the structure seems, from the inside, to border on the infinitely large, in terms of area, being much bigger than the floor below on which it somehow stands. Also, the actual substance of this second tier seems to be constantly in flux, with details of the landscape metamorphosing and shifting like the details of a dream. The overall appearance of this chamber is of an enormously wide wooden hallway or arcade, immeasurably long and with a grid of rectangular apertures set in its wooden flooring at regular intervals. These apertures look down upon the rooms and alleys of the floor immediately below, although for reasons that are as yet unexplained the holes are not apparent from beneath. Some of the spaces have entire (and massively expanded) trees growing up through them from the ground floor, with their upper branches reaching to the arcade’s ceiling, a glass roof supported by Victorian ironwork beyond which vast geometric clouds, more like a diagram of weather than weather itself, appear to drift. The giant thoroughfare is thought to be known by its currently absented population as “The Attics of the Breath.”
The hallway seems to be a magnified reflection of an ordinary shopping arcade found on the more naturalistic bottom level. Its endless walls are lined with shops, above which there are numerous wooden balconies. One of the businesses in the much smaller precinct on the lowest floor is a shop known as Chasterlaine’s, dealing in toys and novelties. In the exploded reaches of the upper storey, though, this enterprise is subject to the creeping, dreamlike transformations that seem to afflict the second floor, its name moving through various anagrams to finally express itself as “The Snail Races” by the point at which work on the structure halted. In the window, displayed resting on their cardboard boxes in the manner of miniature 1950s Matchbox reproduction cars, was found a range of die-cast metal molluscs that were manufactured to incorporate the features of the scaled-down vehicles which they resembled: one snail has been painted white and has a red cross stencilled on its shell so that it calls to mind an English ambulance of the same vintage. Another has been liveried in navy blue with white calligraphy along its side, identifying it as a Pickford’s removal van. A third has the snail’s body dyed a brilliant post-box scarlet, while its spiral shell has been replaced by a tightly wound fireman’s hose. All of the specimens discovered were roughly two inches long, two inches high, and an inch wide. Their value on the collector’s market, if any, has proven impossible to calculate.
3. Solidified puddle of gold, three feet in diameter. Found on first floor; chamber 18.
Discovered in a typically oversized arena-like construction (which once more appears to be a massively expanded version of a site existing on the bottom floor), this smooth and flat ellipse of precious metal is reputedly a pool of scabbed, coagulated blood remaining from a brawl between two of the so-called Builders that are to be found amongst the structure’s wildly variegated populace. According to reliable accounts, the Builders, upon this occasion, were perceived as being well over a hundred feet in height and were each armed with a proportionately massive snooker cue, their altercation having started in a nearby gaming parlour given over to the play of “trilliards,” apparently a form of billiards undertaken by four players upon an impractically vast table with perhaps a thousand balls but just four pockets, situated at the corners. It would seem that local trilliards champion “Mighty Mike” emerged victorious from the colossal scrap, but since both combatants were wounded in the course of the engagement, it is not known from which Builder this specific pool of priceless blood was spilled.
4. Unusual fungal growths, found on ground floor in chamber 4; found widely distributed across first floor with specimens discovered in most of this second storey’s chambers.
This peculiar variety of fungus seems to be a type that roots itself in higher mathematical dimensions, with the actual growth protruding down into the three-dimensional continuum below, where they are sometimes fleetingly apparent to a human viewer, despite being perceived very differently from a lower-dimensional perspective.
When viewed in their own environment, these growths have an attractive radiating symmetry, at first glance looking like some complex, delicately coloured form of starfish. Upon close inspection, though, it is apparent that the fungal bloom has taken the appearance of an interwoven ring of tiny naked women, all joined at the head with a communal tuft of “hair” (usually red, but sometimes black or blond) protruding from the centre of this strange, symmetrical arrangement. The bodies and the faces of these exquisite homunculi are overlapped in something of the manner of an optical illusion, so that three eyes will share two separate noses and two sets of rosebud lips, and that two distinct torsos will have only three legs with one limb shared by both.
Therefore, seen from above, these “fruit” have the communal tuft of usually crimson fibres at their centres, with a ring of glittering miniature eyes arranged around it, then a ring of noses, then lips, breasts, navels, and even dots of fibrous “pubic hair” set at the junctions of the radiating petal “legs.” Turning the fungus over to inspect its underside, we have a scaled-down rear view of the conjoined female bodies with the decorative addition of small and translucent insect wings growing out from the beautifully sculpted miniature shoulder-blades. This would seem to explain why this form of the fungus is referred to as the “fairy” type, and would appear to represent the riper, more mature stage of the fungus’s development. In its colouration, this mature form is astonishingly naturalistic in its mimicry of the nude human body, with a slightly carmine flush in the minuscule “cheeks” and bright green pinprick irises in the unusually animated-looking ring of eyes. The subtly graded pinks and creams have an appearance that is almost appetising, and the scent detectable upon the specimen is sweet and heavy, having notes of cardamom.