and Caitlyn’s light falls upon another work room, this one with three benches surrounding a medical operating table and what rests upon this operating table makes us reel back in horror because it looks like a headless human body but it is not. It is an artificial body, a fake plastic body comprised of artificial limbs; a silicone-based torso roughly connected to a monstrous mix of limbs with uneven skin tones. A morbid hybrid horror of hack-test-dummy artificial-limb experimentation.
I run to the next door on the left, further up this horror movie hall, this spook hall like something from a fairground sideshow alley; a man missing his two front teeth is going to appear soon in a ticket booth, selling popcorn and another ticket to Tytus Broz’s Bunker of Doom. I drive the axe into the door, this time with more force because I’ve got a run-up. Hack. Hack. Crack. Shrieks of splintered wood as the door pops open. I kick it further ajar and pad breathlessly into this next room, my heart bracing for the impact of what we’ll find. Caitlyn’s light bounces erratically across the room. Concrete walls. Flash. Shelving. Flash. Glass specimen jars. Rectangular glass boxes, perfectly blown from one piece of perfect glass. Something inside the glass boxes. Something hard to see in the darkness, in such poor light from Caitlyn’s flashlight. Scientific specimens, my brain tells me, replacing grim fact with something I can understand. The stonefish my old high-school teacher, Bill Cadbury, kept above his desk in a jar of preservation fluid. Those specimen jars I saw in the old Queensland Museum on school excursions, jars holding organic matter. Preserved starfish. Preserved eels. Preserved platypus. That makes sense. That’s something I understand. Caitlyn’s orb of light finds another medical table in the centre of this room and upon this table is another artificial body of connected limbs. Another body built from artificial feet, legs, arms; four limbs and a woman’s silicone-sleeved torso. I understand this. This is within my knowing. Science. Experimentation. Engineering. Research.
But, wait. Wait, Slim. The breasts on this artificial adult female body are pale white and saggy and . . . and . . . and . . .
‘Oh my God,’ Caitlyn gasps. She unslings her faulty camera from her left shoulder and, in a kind of trance, snaps several photographs of the room.
‘It’s real,’ she says. ‘They’re fucking real, Eli.’
Snap. The camera’s flash pops, too bright for such a dark room. It stuns my eyes but it lights up the room too. Snap, she goes again. And this time my eyes adjust enough to take the whole room in. Not platypus. Not eel. The glass boxes are filled with human limbs. Ten, fifteen glass boxes across the shelves lining the walls. A human hand floating in a gold-copper-coloured formaldehyde solution. A human foot floating in glass. A forearm with no hand attached to it. A calf sawn neatly at the ankle so it looks like a leg of butcher-cut ham. Snap. The faulty and too-bright camera flash illuminates the medical table and Caitlyn vomits where she stands because the body on the table is a composite of uneven limbs, all frozen in time. Plastinates. Impregnated with a plastic solvent. Bathed in a liquid polymer. Cured and hardened in this room that smells like a hospital.
‘What the fuck is going on here, Eli?’ Caitlyn shudders.
I take her flashlight from her hand and run it over the body on the medical table. Epoxy resin covers the limbs so they shine in light, resemble the body parts of a waxwork. Each limb is disconnected from the other. Feet placed against shins and thighs but not fully attached. Arms placed beside shoulder joints but not connected. It’s like we’ve walked into some macabre problem-solving game tasking children to fashion a full human body from a toy box of plastinates. The flashlight runs along the body. Legs. Belly. Breasts. And the head of a woman who was smiling beside fake flowers in a shopping mall family portrait on page 3 of today’s Courier-Mail. It’s the plastinate head of Regina Penn.
By the medical table is a metal tray on rollers holding a large white plastic tub filled with a toxic-smelling liquid, another kind of clear preservation fluid. I take two cautious steps to this bucket and peer inside to find the head of Regina’s husband, Glenn, staring up at me.
I hand Caitlyn the flashlight and I run out the door of this fever room, raising the