Sitting alone in a darkened building full of dead animals, fake shrunken heads, and, of course, His Sunflower Holiness might have been creepy if I wasn’t used to it, but it didn’t feel that way. Even when a passing car would splash its headlights through the window and the glass eyes of the animals would catch the light, it didn’t bother me. Sure, they briefly looked alive, but so what? They had a kind of benevolence, like stuffed and mounted guardian angels. Uncle Earl’s basic kindness infused every corner of his beloved museum.
It was a kind place. It was beginning to feel like home. I could feel it working its way into my bones, and that worried me a little, because a few months ago I had been a graphic designer with a house and a husband, safe and stable, building up a career a little bit at a time. My life had stretched out in front of me, not terribly exciting but comprehensible.
Now I was on a completely different track. I had barely any money, my job prospects were awfully thin, and stability was starting to look like a room with a stuffed elk head and a portrait of Elvis over the bed.
It’s only been a week, I told myself. You get at least a month to recover from your marriage before you have to start worrying that you’re a slacker. Which was all the excuse I needed to pull up some suitably smutty fanfic and go to bed.
* * *
The UPS guy came in with a box the next morning, shoving the door open with his shoulder. Uncle Earl started to get up, winced, and I hurried to grab the pad and sign for it so that he wouldn’t have to.
“Got a new helper, I see.”
Uncle Earl nodded. “This is my niece, Car— Kara.”
The UPS guy tapped the brim of his hat. “I’m sure we’ll see each other plenty.” He headed back toward the door. “At least until your donors slow down a bit!”
“Not much chance of that,” I muttered, glaring at the box. I’d been working all week, including most of the day we were closed, and I felt as if I’d barely made a dent. And here was more stuff coming in.
Oh, well. I took the job on myself, after all.
“Let me photograph these,” I said, getting out my phone, while Uncle Earl unpacked the box. “For the catalog.”
“Okay, Carrot.”
He pulled newspaper-wrapped bundles out of the box and laid them on the counter. “From my old friend Woody,” he said. “He haunts estate sales and sends me things. I like his because he always includes the provenance when he can find it.”
Woody’s gifts were eclectic, to say the least. The first bundle was a bag of leg bones from Soay sheep, barely as long as my hand. “Soays are tiny,” said Uncle Earl. “Up to your knee, maybe.” The next two were modern primitive carvings of birds with their beaks gaping open and strange, flopping fish in their mouths. Then a lynx skull—“We can always use more skulls”—a blank book made of banana leaves, and a woman’s face molded out of fish-skin leather.
“Oh, fish leather,” said Uncle Earl wearily. “You have to keep it in the cases or Beauregard gets it.” Beauregard is the latest of the Wonder Museum cats, an immense tabby with a skull like a fist. He had come up briefly when I was unpacking, headbutted me in the shin, and slouched off. Beau is excellent at catching the mice that might gnaw on the edges of the taxidermy and has a personality like a benevolent feline Genghis Khan.
The final object in the box was wedged crosswise to fit. It was a wooden carving, about the size of my forearm. Uncle Earl unwrapped it on the counter and paused, slowly crumpling the newspaper in his hands.
“Yech,” I said. “That’s a creepy one.”
He picked up the card and read, “Carved corpse-otter effigy, Danube area, circa 1900.”
“Corpse-otter?”
“That’s what Woody says….” Uncle Earl slid off the stool and actually came out from behind the counter to study the carving from both sides. “What a strange piece.”
The carving was fairly crude, but you could still tell what it was. One side was an otter, turned with belly toward the viewer, head tilted up. The skull was too broad for any otter I’d ever seen, and it had a distinctly un-otter-like expression, but the tucked paws and long tail were unmistakable.
From the other side, it was a dead body. You could tell by the crossed arms and the wrapped shroud that covered everything. The artist had scored lines that had been filled with dark dye or simply with years of dirt, which clearly indicated tightly wrapped cloth. The corpse’s head was at an odd, broken-neck angle, to match the otter on the other side.
“That’s messed up.”
“It’s a bit weird, yeah.” Coming from a man wearing a T-shirt proclaiming BIGFOOT LIVES!!!, this was quite a statement. He turned the carving over a few times. The carved lines seemed to squirm under the fluorescent light.
Beauregard sauntered up and eyed the fish leather hungrily.
“Well, we’ve got space in the raccoon case,” said Uncle Earl. “Masks with masked bandits.”
“And the carving?”
“Put it over by the otter, I guess.” He fished out the keys. “Would you mind, Carrot?”
I took the mask and the carving and the keys and headed upstairs. Beau followed, trying to look as if he were just interested in me as a person and not because I was carrying a delicious-smelling art object.
There are at least three raccoon cases, so I picked one that wasn’t too cluttered. Raccoons are easy. But the stuffed Amazonian otter was the pride of the Wonder Museum.
Amazonian giant otters get around six feet long and weigh seventy pounds. They’re huge, bigger than wolverines. The natives call them water jaguars.
Even by those standards, this one was a monster. He was closing in on eight feet, and Lord only knows what he weighed when he was alive.
They’re also super-endangered. My uncle’s otter was a donation from an old trophy hunter who had lived up at the retirement village until recently. His kids all thought trophy hunting was revolting—I’m not saying they’re wrong—and he couldn’t sell his trophies because all his taxidermy was from years ago and didn’t have all the various certificates you need to have to prove it’s legal to have endangered-species skins. Nobody would buy them on anything but the black market. So this old guy was living in his little senior-living condo, the walls covered in mounted heads and skulls, facing the fact that when he died, his kids were going to throw all the animals in the trash.
“It was real sad, Carrot,” Uncle Earl had told me on one of my visits. “He talked to all the heads like they were his friends. Asked me to keep his animals from winding up in the dumpster. So he donated them all to the museum and I promised to do my best.”
He did, too. The wildebeest skull hangs on the wall behind the cash register, and kudu and blesbok and whatnot from this guy are scattered all through the museum. And the otter.
I still don’t approve of trophy hunting, but the thought of the old man talking to the animal skulls, all alone in his room, was sad enough that I couldn’t muster a lot of outrage. If there was a sin there, he’d obviously done a lot of penance. Honestly, it reminded me a bit of that fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” where the severed horse head gets nailed to a wall and the heroine talks to it every day. That kind of bleak down-at-the-bone enchantment.