The Chimaera Institute

By Sheena Blackhall

Anecdotes, rumour, gossip...urban myths can straddle all those categories. Often they are short, like fables and can be told quickly in a paragraph or two. The tales in this book draw from various sources. The Book of Nasty Legends by Paul Smith (Fontana Paperbacks 1984: ISBN 0-00-636856-5) is one source. Another is the late Stanley Robertson, who liked to tell a version of ‘The Bridge’ in the form of a joke. (Of course it has much darker possibilities.) Ghost tales collected from the Aberdeen area mention a servant sacked for the loss of a fiver, wrongly accused of theft who subsequently committed suicide, and this is woven into ‘The Keeper of the Kennels’. I like to think of urban myths as little acorns desperate to grow into oaks, and love providing them with knots, gnarls and leaves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheena Blackhall
• Release date: Nov 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465707543

Book preview

The Chimaera Institute

Seven Tales by Sheena Blackhall

The Chimaera Institute

Seven Tales by Sheena Blackhall

Cover: A copy of The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli

Copyright: S. Blackhall 2011

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Sheena Blackhall except for the use of brief quotations in a book review

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Cover: The Nightmare: Henry Fuseli

Henry Fuseli (German: Johann Heinrich Füssli) (February 7, 1741 – April 17, 1825) was a British painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, of Swiss origin. His painting The Nightmare contains significant elements of sleep paralysis and has become almost an icon for the phenomenon. The presence of the horse brings into play the word mare from nightmare. The suffix mare is actually thought to be derived from maren - to crush. The nightmare is the night crusher, which suggests that the word nightmare might have been originally coined to describe sleep paralysis with dream hallucinations. Tate Britain held an exhibition titled Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination between February 15 and May 1, 2006, with Fuseli's Nightmare as the central exhibit.

Foreword

Anecdotes, rumour, gossip...urban myths can straddle all those categories. Often they are short, like fables and can be told quickly in a paragraph or two. The tales in this book draw from various sources. The Book of Nasty Legends by Paul Smith (Fontana Paperbacks 1984: ISBN 0-00-636856-5) is one source. Another is the late Stanley Robertson, who liked to tell a version of ‘The Bridge’ in the form of a joke. (Of course it has much darker possibilities.) Ghost tales collected from the Aberdeen area mention a servant sacked for the loss of a fiver, wrongly accused of theft who subsequently committed suicide, and this is woven into ‘The Keeper of the Kennels’. I like to think of urban myths as little acorns desperate to grow into oaks, and love providing them with knots, gnarls and leaves.

Acknowledgements

For more information on other publications by Sheena Blackhall, visit http://sheenablackhall.blogspot.com or the on-line catalogue of the National Library of Scotland http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/index/html

Sheena Blackhall, 2011

Contents

Foreword

The Chimaera Institute

The Ratter

The Keeper of the Kennels

The Shoes

The Cook

The Secret Crime of a London Diplomat

The Moral Compass

The Bridge

The Chimaera Institute

Caleb Anstruther could hardly believe his luck. For half his student life he’d dreamt of it, now it was hope made fact. He’d finally been selected to work at the Chimaera Institute in Vienna, Austria. Even better, as he spoke not one word of German, the Institute by nature of its research was self contained, a small scientific community where the staff lived in and had few, if any, interactions with the host culture. His time there would make or mar his whole future career.

A middle class young man from a small Scottish town, he had passed the usual psychometric testing, proving his ability to work in a team and as an individual thinker. His references showed he could adapt to challenging situations. He had no close family ties to distract his attention from the work. His CV was impressive, first class honours in DNA and Consequential Technology from Edinburgh University and a PhD in the historical implications of the Frozen Ark project in Nottingham University at the beginning of the 21st century. A 21st century Noah in the making, the Chimaera Institute had high hopes of their latest protégé.

The Frozen Ark project began at a period when rare animal species were dying out at an alarming rate. Cryogenically freezing their DNA samples and sex cells was seen as a way of conserving extinct species for possible future cloning should they be required for medical testing. In the period of time since the setting up of the Ark to the establishment of the internationally prestigious Chimaera Institute, 4 million species of mammals, birds, amphibians and fish had become instinct, existing only in the frozen vaults of government-funded scientific vaults around the world...a huge necropolis which could be resurrected at a moment’s notice.

Caleb was well versed in the collection protocols of harvesting biopsy/ tissue, putting samples into storage in bar-coded tubes, preserved in ethanol. Some were freeze dried in cryogenic tubes stored in liquid nitrogen. As a scientist, his skills were phenomenal. As a man, his own social development had barely progressed past overgrown teenager. He had pustules of acne, jug ears, and an almost child-like interest in the weirder areas of mediaeval science, specifically, that of alchemy. In particular he was fascinated by the work of Paracelsus, who claimed to have created a homunculus. This creation was purported to be 12 inches tall, vicious, and could be formed by laying a bag of skin,