Dobson's Uncanny Time-Pod

Dobson was prone to listlessness. Lacking inspiration he would generally eschew his escritoire and visit sawdust-strewn dockside taverns. When these moods took him, he could be found swilling stale grog and exchanging apocryphal nautical tales with peg-legged sea dogs.

Indeed it was under such circumstances, in the arctic port of Murmansk that Marigold Chew once-again located Dobson, and bade him translocate to climes more pleasant.

Why then did he choose a milk-processing factory as his next home? It is clear that Dobson found this locale arresting, however our sources do not state what caused his infatuation with this dilapidated industrial building on the frozen shores of Lake Winnipeg.

Dobson’s surviving work from that period provides few clues. On his arrival he began work on an incomplete series of outré ornithological tracts describing such topics the nesting, mating and flight patterns of mythical, hypothetical and imaginary pond-fowl.

Growing weary of all things feathered his later “factory works” were obscure ontological and theological essays. Fragments of a treatise comparing the theories of “Trebizondo Cullpepper” with those of “Goon-Fang” and “Tundism” suggest that Dobson’s mood was becoming more introspective than usual.

None of these texts provide any clues as to the purpose for Dobson’s seclusion. Even the hellishly rigorous Concordance Dobsonia merely umms and ahhs around these most perplexing issues. It is likely that our sorry state of ignorance would have persisted were it not for a single remarkable discovery made on the eve of St. Bibania’s Feast five years ago.

A weed-festooned pod was dredged from the tidal basin of the Great Frightening River. It was taken to the institute for the study of uncanny pods, part of the University at or near Ack where Professors Bindweed and Tadaaki stripped it of its maritime encrustations.

The professors’ pointy tungsten tweezers removed barnacles and kelp, eventually revealing a glimmering metallic lozenge-shaped pod. Further studies revealed that the container was made from an alloy of tin and zinc with gaskets of gutta-percha. On what the professors assumed to be it’s front could be observed an heraldic device: A plummeting cormorant, traced in cerulean bip.

Such was the quality of this pod’s construction, the pod-scientists opined that it could have withstood the lashings of the Frightening River for another hundred-year before succumbing to it’s icy waters. It was sealed with monstrous welds, and required the combined might of the village wrestling team to rent it asunder. Finally the uncanny pod’s contents were exposed.

It contained a single burlap gunnysack, which in turn held a collection of scrawlings knick-knacks and bitty-bobs; The professors had discovered a trove of original Dobsonia:

They found unsent letters to legendary luminaries, unaccepted invitations to campanology conventions, incomprehensible drafts of unpublished pamphlets, empty phials gak and goop. More importantly they discovered answers to all pertinent questions about Dobson’s lonely vigil in a milk-evaporation plant on the Western shore of Lake Winnipeg:

Questions such as:

What eerie phosphorescence lured Dobson to his industrial retreat? How did he write with nought but a Tilley-Lamp to illuminate his scribbling? From which spigot did he eek sustenance over the long frostbitten nights? Why then did he need to steal evaporated milk cans and what possessed him to weld them into a pod? From whence did he obtain his welding gear? What possessed him to take his few remaining possessions and seal them in that pod, and how did that pod having been sealed come to be sunk beneath the treacherous waves of the Great Frightening River, the river upon which I plied my trade as the dredge-meister all those years ago?

I now know all of the answers to these questions, plus many more which would no doubt befuddle your puny mind were I even to pose them. If you were to glimpse but once at the Dobson trove (which has been entrusted to me as curator), all this and more would be made plain.

But you shall never see the treasures of which I speak. They are interred within the locked display cabinet in the basement of the museum at (or near) the Gruesome Copse at Ack. The museum will be forever closed and barred to you, for you are a land-lubber and have been judged unworthy of it’s secrets.

Be Gone!