The police were called to the scene at the museum. The message was simple: a foot had been found. The note was passed to an inspector at his desk, who took pleasure in reading these five words aloud to himself. The case had pleasing potential, he thought, rising to fetch his coat. 

Arriving at the museum the inspector was ushered around to the side entrance of the building. Inside, he found the curator waiting for him beside an audio point, signalled by a large graphic of an ear. 

He knew nothing of curators; she was the first of her kind he had met, and he suspected the situation was mutual. He sniffed at her, expecting the earthy scent of a digger but she gave off a peculiar hint of rare elements and death. Startled, he reminded himself to assume nothing. He was here to ask questions, and yet there was a great deal that even an inspector could not ask.

Withdrawing his notebook from his top pocket, he turned to a blank page and licked his pencil, fighting the compulsion to sniff its new-sharpened point. He began.

Was it you who reported the incident? 

She nodded.

And discovered it also?

She hesitated. 

You can nod.

She nodded. 

His pencil awaited an elaboration, but when none was forthcoming, he offered her a way in.

A foot, I believe? 

She nodded again, her expression distressed. He could hear her pulse quickening over what he could only assume was the sound of a clock ticking, which of course was impossible.

Perhaps I could see for myself?

Of course. 

The whole conversation possessed an underlying tension. It was some moments yet before the inspector understood that some of that tension was arising from him. As he put it to himself later, he felt on the other side of things here, in this place of former worlds. Closing the notepad, he nodded at her rather formally, and suggested she lead the way. She walked ahead of him, noiselessly, he noted. His own shoes squeaked against the tiles, and his breathing was magnified by the otherwise total lack of sound, which he experienced as pressure against his eardrums. The light everywhere was constant and brilliant. The walls and floor had a strangely indescribable neutral colour that was yet dazzling. The curator finally paused at an area that had been roped off and used the iris scanner to open the doors. He followed her into the first of a series of interconnected galleries. As he entered, he inhaled deeply. Ah, he thought to himself, this is the scent of antiquity!

The smells that greeted him were complex and overwhelming. His nose reddened and his eyes watered. Withdrawing his standard issue cambric handkerchief, he started swabbing. The scent was strongest, he observed, in the centre of all this whiteness. He followed it to its source. Something human appeared to be suspended in the air. 

Is that—

He moved closer. Three torsos were apparently levitating in the centre of the room, though he very quickly spotted the near invisible wires on which they were suspended. 

As a professional man who made every effort not to express shock at crime scenes, nevertheless, he understood that shock was the desired response, indeed the very intention of the exhibition’s design. The curator seemed content with him until he withdrew his notebook again and waved the pencil at her unspoken criticism. Police protocol, he assured her. It’s perfectly safe. She looked unconvinced. No hacking this way either, he added. She stared back at him.

Trying to put the awkwardness of the moment behind him, he set to work jotting down all that he saw and smelled and heard. He was particularly partial to sketching evidence. It made him notice things he might otherwise overlook. There were three suspended torsos and one lying on its back on the pure white floor. The wires and rig that had held it suspended from the ceiling were neatly folded in a pile. 

His sketch carefully noted differences among the three hanging torsos and, despite the damage, the fourth on the ground. The furthest left torso, he noticed as he captured it with his pencil, and the most complete of the four, was the torso of a man, from chin and neck down to the right hip, the left side being slightly truncated at both ends. He had the remains of both shoulders, but nothing beyond the deltoid. He might, once, have been carrying something, for the finely wrought muscles of his chest and belly seem tighter on one side, and the other side subtly elongated. The torsos to the right down to the one on the floor were each slightly less complete, the first having only one shoulder, the third beginning at the pectoral muscles and ending at the belly. Still, the inspector noted, it was possible for him to know the whole from the fragment. The only individual sense from one to the other was the potential attitude each might have held. That was the only aspect requiring a degree of conjecture.

Lastly, he started to note the damage to the torso lying on the floor. Sketching also avoided the use of language, he noted, words like damage over the word wound, which was hovering in his head. Images simply showed evidence without implying opinion which was, in his position, far safer ground. All the time he was sketching the curator continued observing him, as though he were somehow under suspicion rather than the other way round. What stuck him when he came to stand over the torso very carefully, so as not to affect the spatter pattern on the ground around it, was the shape of the mutilation of the belly. The damage appeared to be blunt force trauma from below, and from the side, such as the prison stompings he had seen early in his career. He squatted down and craned his neck to see as low as he could. Certainly, some damage had been inflicted from below in an upwards motion, like an uppercut or a kick. There was no damage from dropping it all the way from suspension to the floor, that kind of impact on the diaphragm area would be notably different. He turned his attention to the spatter evidence from the different blows. The material was quite well distributed across the floor, a fine dust. Licking the tip of one finger he pressed it into the dust and tasted it. He heard the curator’s shudder of disgust.  

Mmmm, he said aloud. Interesting.

It was more than interesting. For his palette possessed a capacity for history that his brain lacked, recognising the musk of long dead beasts, the barest hint of the east wind, the rains that had scoured the land when this torso was first created; he felt the hum of half-life from a hint of granite, tasted lime, calcium, potassium, and underlying carbon. 

Still squatted down amid the spatter of dust, he gestured to the torsos. Tell me about them. 

The curator, who had drifted away slightly, turned back to him. What would you like to know?

The way she said it was quite clearly a rebuttal and at odds from the words of her arrival when she had still been in shock. Then he had felt her silence as an inability to find the words. Now she was digging in her heels and resisting which could slow things down. He cleared his throat.

For example, are they copies or originals? 

Her eyebrows rose and fell in what appeared to him to be genuine shock at his ignorance. Then said, I can’t believe you really have to ask? I thought they had sent me an inspector. No museum of our calibre would display copies. 

Over the spiral spine of his notebook, he noted her disgust in the margin as an observation, nothing more. He could get in serious trouble for noting down certain kinds of things, he knew. 

He felt he needed to explain in case she made things unpleasant for him later. Someone like her could. A quiet word, no more, and his career would be over. 

The thing is, he began and then stopped himself. The planets, the stratosphere felt closer to him than history. This whole conversation made him feel like he was floating, unmoored. It wasn’t as if this kind of thing had been taught at his school. Not history this ancient anyway. He’d learned exactly what he needed to know and nothing more. His sense of a period beyond his own lifetime was hazy. 

So, originals? He felt the need to be explicit.

Yes!

Rare?

Priceless.

This was not entirely what he had meant but he recorded the comment anyway. He had the strange sensation that the more he asked the further away from the details of the crime he was travelling. 

He sketched out the spatter pattern and scribbled notes about scent and texture and colour in the margin. He had by now a shorthand which he had to practise regularly since crimes of any sort were so rare these days. He took his time, though she started to pace and circle around him. He felt her agitation was merely fuelled by a discomfort of his craft. He possessed the ability to smell and taste her loneliness which her agitated state only seemed to heighten, and what he smelled and tasted of her brought out his compassion for her hard edges: how difficult it must be to possess all this knowledge that no one can share. 

They are so fine, he mused, so beautiful, he continued, staring down at the damaged torso. 

Is that a rhetorical question? 

What? No. I was just thinking.

She consulted a small display near her wrist. 

You don’t need to stay here, if you have something pressing, he said. I can find you if I have any other questions. 

This really isn’t somewhere you can just wander around.

Her words hurt him and as a result the hurt cut free a question that he had been pondering but knew better than to ask. 

How did they get here anyway? 

She restarted pacing again in a rather stressful manner. 

Everything is documented, she said, and all documentation is in order if that is what you are suggesting.

He frowned. He felt he was stumbling around mines not knowing which might erupt in his face. I just meant, he began, if they are so rare, so very old, how long have they been here? What has been done to preserve them?

She tapped her finger against her hand, as though she were counting down to one in her head to calm herself. 

We’ve had them since their rediscovery. They were removed here for their protection and held here ever since. 

Removed from where? 

You know I cannot tell you.

He was meant to look away at this point, to act subservient. That was the drill with these types. They didn’t like being required to explain themselves to people like him. They resented it. Before he could say anything aloud, she was talking again in a curt voice, as though he were the one who needed reminding of the law. 

It is for me to know what is and isn’t relevant, she said. What you should be considering, the question you should concern yourself with is the crime itself. 

Which is?

Category violation.

He stood up too quickly feeling pins and needles in his legs from having been squatted down taking evidence for so long. Aware of her power on him, he dropped his head to his chest as though in apology, and took a step back, stumbling backwards over something unseen. Winded at first, he spun himself round by the arms to see what he had tripped over and found the foot! 

Of course, he said aloud, for he had forgotten all about it. 

It was almost the same colour as the interior of the museum. It would have been difficult if not almost impossible to detect from a distance. There was something lonely-looking and vulnerable about it lying there on its side which tugged on his heart. He estimated it was about three times the scale and size of the torsos, which were life-sized., and although, when he first saw it, he had been certain it was laying down, now, as he sketched it, it stood upright, the flat of its sole pressed to the floor. Getting back onto his feet he circled it. It had the air of something quivering with the effort of staying still, about to take flight. Such a fine ankle, showing just a hint of shin and calf. The foot was balanced perfectly on a sinewy arch, its toes splayed, as though it had never known the restriction of boots. It was the most beautiful foot he had ever seen. He fought an urge to lift his trouser leg, remove his shoe and sock and regard his own foot. 

He came and stood behind the heel and looked in the direction in which its toes were pointing. 

Hmm, he said, following the direction of the centre metatarsal with difficulty because of the flat colour of the walls into which it seemed to merge. Over there, he said firmly. It’s pointed over there. Where does that direction lead? 

Though he didn’t expect an answer, the curator wearily walked in the direction he had indicated. As she neared the wall, he saw something. 

Is that a door? he asked, excitedly, pointing beyond her as the curator leaned towards a scanner to get the door. The inspector hurried over. The door silently opened.

Where does it go?

Gallery Four, she explained. She held the door for him. 

Gallery Four?

Legs.

Legs. He smiled but she did not. Well, worth a look I should think. 

He hurried into the room in case the doors suddenly shut him out, and yet for all this rushing and excitement to explore the museum, he felt part of him remained in the first gallery beside the foot. It was a curious thing how much it moved him. Without intending to, he had slowed down and now lagged some distance behind the curator. Doubtless he would lag still further as there was so much to take in, so many pairs of legs—hundreds and hundreds—in cabinets lining the walls of this narrow space, floor to ceiling. Most were behind glass though not all. He couldn’t grasp the basis on which some were protected while others were not. A small number were evidently still in pairs, but many more were lined by their original side of the pairing, with left legs on one side and the right on the other.  

Legs seem more common than torsos, he called after the curator.  

He walked slowly, observing that the similarity of display here with that of the torsos, each ranked in order of completeness, starting, where he had first entered this gallery nearest the torso exhibition, with legs that were in a few cases whole, or in larger parts, preserved, with less visible joins. All stood upright. Progressing down the room, they shortened and there were visible differences in quality, but the presiding factor remained height. About mid-way he reached the legs cut off at the knee, and beyond that they were fragments of kneecap, and then fragments of what he took to be shins. 

How he wished he could just linger, take it all in. He made a note to himself to return, but it seemed their intended destination was in yet another, more distant gallery. The curator had long since exited and so he was forced to continue. When at last he spied the curator waiting for him, he asked. Is this how they want to be catalogued? 

She scissored her jaws looking annoyed.

Again, you are missing the point, inspector. We curate. That does not mean we consult.  That is not how curation works. They are grouped by their aesthetic significance, their contribution to aesthetics.

And who decides that?

He regretted the question. It was the foot, he realised, it had made him a little daring. 

Do you really want to be thrown off this case? 

You could explain, couldn’t you, but you won’t.

You don’t need to know! 

It was odd because one of the central tenets of the police core was that all policemen were the same. That rank did not duly matter. Rank was more connected with age and pension criteria. Long service. Lose a policeman and he can always be replaced. One is the same as the other. He muttered something along those lines and the curator, hearing him, finally made a sound of approval.

Exactly.

A head is a head, he said, quoting without remembering where he had read it. A leg is a leg. 

At last she seemed to be pleased with him. For someone like you, inspector, she concurred, A head is a head, a leg is a leg. But heads are not legs. Not the same value, you understand. As you see we have many legs but, alas, scant few heads.

It was true. He had yet to see a single head. 

Why is that? he asked. 

I would have thought it was obvious.

Apparently not, he thought, looking at her inquiringly in the hope she would enlighten him, and surprisingly, she did. 

Because we destroyed them, she said looking strangely pleased. Before we brought them here to be conserved. 

You destroyed them in order to conserve them? 

The idea was far from absurd. With the population as it was, with so many more arms and legs able to work than were necessary, it was difficult to find to occupy them all. Sometimes a hole was dug only to be filled in, a disease manufactured only to be cured.

Not exactly, she replied. You know nothing of history, that is clear. That is as it should be. However, if you did, you’d appreciate the natural way of things. Every great civilisation including ours is necessarily built in the desecration of an older one. No civilisation believes itself defeated while their gods still smile and the glories of their civilisation, their art and so on, still exist. A civilisation only knows itself to be defeated, truly, when its achievements are crushed, its art is destroyed, its gods decapitated, their genitals cut off. Their hands too. Hands signify so much of what a people can achieve.

And their feet? 

Pardon?

You must cut off their feet? he suggested. There are no feet.

Not here, no, she said, in the foot gallery, just through here. 

Oh, he said. Well lead on. 

I fear you learn nothing, she said as they entered the gallery five: feet. It’s not at all the same with feet, she continued. Anatomically, feet are just lower and therefore easier to reach. Feet are nothing, she said firmly. They are cultural barbarians. As you just witnessed. Only able to stamp and crush and pursue.

And dance, and run, he wanted to add, but did not, and still her words affected him deeply. By the time he could shake off the mood her words had brought down on him, she had moved on to talking about security, something he had neglected to ask. 

We should have foreseen such vandalism! 

Vandalism? he queried. Is that what you consider has happened here?

Immediately her gaze dropped to his employee number on his inspector’s badge. 

Civilisation requires order and classification. But sometimes it needs to be imposed. We can’t expect that everyone will understand even though it’s for the benefit of the whole system. I would have thought you, inspector, would appreciate that part. 

They have come to the end of a long line of left feet, where an empty case with broken glass around it drew the inspector’s attention. Presumably the foot had smashed its way out. The bulk of the glass had been pushed out and remained where it had fallen on the floor, though glass was still wedged in the joint between the plinth holding the box and the ceramic tiled floor. He took a sample and pocketed it before noting something further. 

I think we are finished, the curator said from the far end of the gallery. Fill out your report, file it, you know the procedure. 

Of course. Consider it done. As he walked towards her, it occurred to him to ask what happened next. What will you do with the—

He had been about to say foot, but the curator interrupted him on the presumption he had been about to say torsos. She explained, and as she spoke, a reinforced gurney appeared in the corridor behind her heading through the foot and leg gallery back towards the torsos.

It will be taken to the lab and repaired, she said. We are experts in restoration of course. 

Yes. Of course, he said politely. Can I just—he asked, gesturing that he would like to follow the gurney which was just then vanishing through the door.

Of course, she replied with evident disapproval. We have said we will cooperate fully.

He nodded and hurried after the gurney, arriving just in time to see the damaged torso being lifted off the floor and wheeled away. A large machine appeared from another door hovering a few millimetres off the floor. It was controlled remotely by an attendant also in silent shoes. It cleaned the spatter-dust into a museum grade filter ready to be inspected and potentially reused. The room was back to how it had been, the remaining torsos virtually invisible against their backdrop. The inspector’s eyes started watering again. The foot, he noticed, must already have been removed for it was gone.  

He set off for the entrance, and arriving there to find it empty, pushed his way out of the gallery’s revolving doors. He thought he saw the foot reflected in the glass, as though it were standing behind him. He turned around, but it was nowhere to be seen.

 

Back at the station, the inspector completed his report, had it triple stamped by reports-received and saw it dropped into its appointed pigeonhole, where it would sit for the necessary number of years before being destroyed. At his desk, alone, pondering the case, he felt the beginnings of a yawn. Everyone else had turned down for the night. He pulled his standard issue cot out of the knee hole of his desk, and was retired for the night, when a message came through. It was the exchange. He was needed back at the museum. 

The communication indicated that the situation was extremely urgent. Hurrying back to the underground, the otherwise empty carriage moved him at double speed to the area of antiquities. The street of the museum was silent. At the museum entrance, he was asked to show his security pass and he stood waiting for clearance, mulling over the statistical unlikelihood of first crime let alone a second. 

The night porter let him in. The lighting in the halls had been dimmed. A smaller, older model of the curator met him, since the museum was closed. 

You’d better come, was all she said, before leading him through the museum back to the gallery of the torsos. There, on the floor, in the centre of the room, two of the remaining three torsos had been removed and laid on their sides, their ribs dented with what appeared to be the same blunt force. The hint of a neck in the larger of the two torsos had snapped clean off from the blow so that despite their original differences, they resembled the earlier torso almost perfectly. 

The inspector searched for signs of the foot and found a trail of dusty footprints leading towards the leg room. The curator hung back, he noticed. Have you inspected where these prints lead? he asked.

She shook her head. 

He felt slightly buoyed up by the fact that her presence proved older types still had their place. 

If you have access to an office, I suggest you stay there, he said, and I’ll come find you when I’m done. As he ushered her back towards the cordons, he was aware of his keenness to get on and use his skills to hunt and seek. His phenomenal nose led him forward, his eyes trained on the faint markings of dust prints. Even for a foot of its size, the gap between each print was significant, requiring, he estimated, a considerable will to achieve in addition to great litheness of form. His left leg, always the eager one, quivered with anticipation. The door to the leg gallery was open. Letting his nose lead, sniffing deeply, he hurried towards the foot room negotiating a much more sparsely populated display case on his right, and an empty case on his left. He circled the empty case, the tip of his nose twitching. The scent indicated that the foot had lingered by its old case. What had it been thinking, he wondered; did it feel fear at leaving its glass cage? His compulsion to find the foot was overwhelming. He reached the door, only to discover it led to an emergency exit. The realisation was a powerful disappointment, and he pounded the walls with his fists. The scent of the foot was everywhere at the door. He sniffed the locking mechanism, the bar, the artificial eye, and came away with powder on his nose. Doubling back, he hunted for a window that looked outwards in the direction of the emergency exit. He found one, and saw beyond a courtyard, illuminated with security lights, and then a wall. He knew the foot was out there, somewhere beyond the perimeter.

Before he could investigate outside, he must let the curator know. On his way to her office, he spoke to security. Just a few questions, he explained. Had they checked the emergency exits, the windows, the sensors? Had they evaluated whether there had been any breach?

Yes, he was assured. Everything had been checked. The place was locked tight, alarmed, no sensors had been tripped. 

Have you walked the perimeter? he asked urgently. Outside? 

Nothing can breach our system, he was told.

But what about something in here trying to get out?

Their blank stares answered him and he hurried to inform the curator that he needed to widen the search, and then asked to be let out. 

He had never, he realised, standing in the unlit back road, possessed the leisure to walk the streets for no purpose, day or night. Turning west, he followed the museum perimeter until he reached the part of the wall with the courtyard on the other side. On his approach, his nose began to twitch, his eyes to stream. He did not even need to inhale; he could taste the foot on the pad of his tongue, the arch of his tonsils. The scent was focused acutely on a spot about five meters from the pavement where the foot had landed. Standing on that same spot he felt rooted by a connection to the foot that was far more than this shared location. He felt exhilarated, as if he were trapped in mid-chase while standing still. Lifted by it—made younger even. Immediately he scoffed at himself. Surely this was evidence of nothing more than age and senility, and would lose him his job. 

Engrossed in thought he didn’t sense the movement until the air rushing past seemed to knock him backwards. At best he had a fraction of a second’s warning in his peripheral vision, no scent at all. He felt violently displaced though nothing had directly touched him. It took him precious seconds to regain his balance. 

The only sound that came out of his mouth was not a word at all but a sigh, a sigh that made him sound like he was deflating. 

There, in the hazy moonlight, was the foot, magnificently drawn upwards, balancing on the toes and metatarsals.

Wait, he called, fearing the foot was about to go. Please.

The foot swivelled slightly on its toes to face him. Its simple beauty made him believe that the curator was wrong: a foot was not nothing. 

I should, he began without conviction, I should, by rights have you destroyed.

The foot made a slight bow. Of course. It replied. What cannot be categorised … you know how it goes.

And he did. Of course he did. He had worked on little else but miscategorisations throuhgout his career. The foot hesitated as though it might say more, or at least the inspector hoped it might, but then it pivoted on the ball of its big toe and bounded away, leaving the inspector sniffing the empty air. It was there again, he acknowledged, that scent, that feeling he had first encountered outside the foot’s shattered cage, only now more acute, and yet still imprecise and indefinable as ever. A sort of yearning, he decided, drawing down a deep breath; craving an outcome that could not happen. Like taking a stroll in the evening, he thought. Like wanting a child of your own. Or falling in love. 

 

Subscribe For The Latest Publications
We’ll send you only the best works from our selected authors.
  • Linden Hibbert has completed the MA in Prose Fiction at UEA and is currently pursuing a creative-critical PhD. She is a recipient of an Escalator award and her first novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel award.

    Recent Posts