Just weeks earlier the view that met my eyes upon the opening of that door would have created within me of intense excitement and ecstatic disbelief. To my naïve, uneducated eye I would have been presented with the laboratory of a scientist of unique genius. A man on the cusp of history who was destined to be remembered forever as the great thinker who proved once and for all the existence of magic. Viewed through my newly-opened eyes however, the room before me was not the laboratory of a scientist, but the torture chamber of a murderer. As the Mr Romarticus stared at me proudly from the heart of his life’s work, I could only look back in horror. Every wall was adorned with the chemically-preserved corpses of creatures I had come to think of as human, if not in terms of their physiology, then at least in terms of their capability to reason and to feel. As an animal lover, I have never been a fan of taxidermy in any case, to me it had always seemed a barbaric and distasteful hobby to stuff the corpses of the creatures one had slaughtered and adorn one’s house with them as though they were trophies to be proud of.
