Lydia Millet - Magnificence

Desiccant, she thought. Desiccant?

She heard someone call, then — it must be Portia. She propped the basement door open quickly with a bag of the silica so the light would fall into the hallway, then ran back along the hall.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. № 911 needed,” she called up from the bottom of the well. “It’s a basement. It’s just a basement. But there’s a lot of storage space and I want to check it out.”

“I’m curious,” came Portia’s voice. Flashlight beams shone into Susan’s face.

“Relax, get on with your evening,” said Susan. “I’ll give you a full report. Go inside and have dinner, don’t wait outside in the dark. Really — it’s just a basement. Concrete and brick and there are lights that work. The walls aren’t going to fall in on me.”

She waited till they took their flashlights and left, then went back down the hallway. In the morning, she was thinking, she’d bring Jim down and he could help her look for the connection between the basement and the main house — there must have once been a door, must have once been a passage between them. It made no sense, this isolation.

The metal cabinets were of all different widths, she saw, some tall and thin like lockers, others as wide as a walk-in closet, and all closed tightly, though she could see no locks. When she pulled at the handle on the first locker she felt another pull against her, as though the door was vacuum-sealed. But the handle moved down, there was a pop, and the door was open.

She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur — beautiful, striped — or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.

She pulled it out gently — it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a hook or something — and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe — a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters: Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883. In wild, @ 1870s .

She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point — she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something — possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.

She counted the doors, moving back through the room — dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.

She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors, two metal handles that met in the middle. She took one in each hand and wrenched them downward. It took a minute, but then the seal broke, they too came open and she stood back.

It was a wolf, already mounted. A gray wolf, it looked like to her. It stood with its front paws close together, its head raised, as if listening. The mouth was shut; it did not look fierce at all, merely attentive, even faithful.

She turned to look at the right-hand door, where another white sticker read North America Mammals 1.1.7.01. Newfoundland wolf, Canis lupus beothucus. Canada native. Extermination. Wild specimen, @ 1911. It was a kind of wolf she hadn’t heard of, she thought. But she couldn’t leave it here: she would have it moved upstairs. The next cabinet took her by surprise: a huge penguin-like bird, black on its back and white on its stomach, standing on a fake rock. It was almost three feet tall, and had big, webbed feet and atrophied-looking wings. North America, Europe Birds. 1.2.1.02. Great auk, Pinguinus impennis. Iceland native. Collection. Zoo specimen, @ 1844 .

The great auks were extinct — had been for a long time. She had read about it in one of the old man’s natural history books, a thick one in the library with lithographs or pen-and-ink drawings, she didn’t know which. She’d trailed her fingers over them for their minute details and the fineness of the lines. She found it while she was looking up another bird, looking up albatross . She’d wanted to know what kind of scenery an albatross would need, to order a fix on an albatross mount, and then she came to auk and read the auks’ story and it was impossible to forget. Auks mated for life; they did not know how to fly and walked very slowly, so they were easily taken. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the last known pair in existence was found incubating a single egg on a rock in Iceland. Both the adults were quickly dispatched by strangling and their only egg was crushed beneath a boot.

The auks had been known to be on their way out, down to that one last, isolated colony, and collectors had wanted them for the skins.

Had the wolf and the quagga also vanished?

She crossed the room and opened another cabinet at random — a small, square one at eye level. She saw what looked like a mouse. South America Mammals. 3.1.8.06. Darwin’s rice rat, Nesoryzomys darwini. Galápagos native. Competition by nonnatives. @ 1929 .

Beside it, in another square compartment, was a brown frog with yellow spots sitting on a large plastic leaf, which looked, like most of the amphibian mounts in the old man’s collection, as though it had been shellacked. South America Amphibians. 3.3.7.14. Long-snouted jambato, Atelopus longirostris. Ecuador native. Uncertain; disease, weather warming. @ 1989 .

She turned and went to another wall, opened another small locker and this time found a bird: Asia Birds. 5.2.2.08. Bonin Islands grosbeak, Chaunoproctus ferreorostris. Japan native. Habitat destruction by nonnatives. Zoo specimen, @ 1827 .

She stopped and looked around her — the many closed doors beneath the fluorescent tubes, the few she’d left standing open with their mounts visible within. The bags of silica gel must be to keep them from molding, though it wouldn’t work forever. Maybe they were already gathering mildew, breeding the larvae of beetles and moths beneath their wings or claws. . they should be moved, she should move them as soon as she could. She wondered what T. would say, with his interest in rare animal species. All of these were extinct, obviously; the dates would have to be when they disappeared.

In a dark back alcove off the main room, past what looked like a disused furnace, she saw a big glass case. There were no fluorescents on that section of ceiling and it was too dim to see; but maybe the case had its own light. She walked over and looked around on the wall for a switch, but couldn’t find one and impatiently turned on her flashlight instead.

Inside the case there was no backdrop — no diorama at all, only a bare plywood floor and an oversized bird skeleton. It was brown and ancient, not the usual clean white of bones, and its bill had a bulbous, rounded end. From head to foot the skeleton was easily the size of the great auk and looked like a dinosaur to her, maybe a kind of bird dinosaur, but the sticker on the side read Raphus cucullatus. Dodo. Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715 .

That was all.

It had to be: the old man’s legacy.

•

Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen — Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.