Dr. Narbondo’s laboratory is both a working cabinet of experimental apparatus and the hidden center of the book’s struggle over reanimation. At 266 Pratlow Street, aquaria, specimen jars, chemical equipment, corpses, and secret routes converge: the laboratory makes Dr. Ignacio Narbondo’s experiments possible, while exposing how dependent they are on bodies and materials obtained through violence and theft.

Setting and Equipment

The laboratory is crowded with equipment that gives its work a material, improvised character. Glass coils, beakers, bell jars, and heavy cubes stand among jars of amber liquid; one of the cubes contains the floating head of a Carp. A human skeleton hangs by a brass chain, while large specimen bottles hold fetuses at different stages of development. Elsewhere, vast aquaria contain aquatic plants and arm-length koi. The room is less a single-purpose scientific chamber than a storehouse in which living animals, preserved specimens, chemical mixtures, and experimental subjects occupy the same working space.

Its equipment extends beyond the glassware. Dr. Narbondo uses a hand-held device fed by a coiled tube to direct yellow mist toward a body on a slab. A fire, burning herbs, a jar of liquid, and a press-like instrument are brought into the same procedure. This combination suggests an experimental method assembled from several linked operations: the mist is applied, material kept in a jar is prepared, and the prepared substance is introduced into the body. The laboratory’s function therefore depends not on one machine alone but on the arrangement of instruments, chemicals, animal organs, and human remains.

Animal Materials and Experimental Practice

The aquaria are not decorative. Dr. Narbondo tests the koi by feeding them worms and watches one fish that appears weak and struggles to remain near the surface. He catches it, prepares it on a board, sprays it with fluid, and removes its organs. From the cavity he extracts a small, pulsing gland and places it in amber liquid. The sequence makes clear that the fish provide a crucial experimental ingredient, not simply convenient specimens.

This dependence reaches beyond the laboratory. Bill Kraken recalls driving a wagon during a nighttime theft of roughly half a dozen large Carp from the aquarium. Sebastian Owlesby cut them up nearby, and the fish were then passed to a beggar woman to sell at Billingsgate Market. The recollection links the laboratory’s scientific supply to theft, rapid processing, and resale. Sebastian Owlesby’s papers reveal a still darker history: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo urged his experiments onward until, in late May 1861, the work required the brain of a living man. The laboratory’s pursuit of knowledge is thus tied to an expanding willingness to treat living people and the dead as sources of experimental material.

Patients, Patrons, and Bargains

The laboratory also serves as a place where Dr. Ignacio Narbondo negotiates with people who want the results of his work. Shiloh the New Messiah comes seeking the restoration of his mother, Joanna Southcote. Dr. Narbondo, meanwhile, worries that his experiment will not satisfy the evangelist and considers staging a lesser spectacle rather than producing the result Shiloh expects. When Shiloh arrives, Joanna Southcote’s remains lie on the slab in a disassembled, incomplete condition. Her state exposes the gap between the promised miracle and what the laboratory can actually deliver.

The disagreement is not merely about scientific success. Shiloh treats the remains as his mother and demands an outcome; Dr. Narbondo treats the experiment as work that must be supplied and managed. When a fresh corpse is brought in, Dr. Narbondo places it on a gurney beside a living but sluggish Carp and prepares to continue. Shiloh grows agitated over the missing hands, while Willis Pule responds only intermittently to Dr. Narbondo’s orders. The room brings together incompatible claims over the same bodies: religious expectation, experimental procedure, and the assistant’s reluctant participation.

Secret Access and Failed Control

The laboratory is connected to concealed spaces as well as to its visible rooms. In one encounter, Willis Pule and Dr. Narbondo bring a corpse through a panel in the oak wainscot, which opens onto a dark, low hallway before being shut again. Bill Kraken, held in the room, witnesses the transfer and understands it as another concealed act. The panel makes the laboratory’s secrecy architectural: bodies can be moved through the building without using its ordinary entrance.

From a room across the street, Theophilus Godall watches an experiment through a window. He sees Dr. Narbondo direct the yellow mist toward a body while Shiloh prays and Willis Pule recoils after being accidentally exposed to the spray. Dr. Narbondo then prepares material from a jar and introduces it into the body’s mouth. The figure on the slab lurches upward. The observation confirms that the activity inside the laboratory is no longer only private experimentation: its effects can be witnessed from outside, and the procedure can animate bodies in ways that exceed the control its operator appears to claim.

Narrative Significance

The laboratory connects separate forms of power without making them equivalent. Dr. Narbondo’s apparatus depends on animal glands and human remains; Shiloh seeks a religious miracle; other observers attempt to understand or exploit the results. Even the Keeble box, set atop an aquarium during the preparations, becomes entangled with the scene: the heap of remains appears to shift when the box is moved, momentarily unsettling Shiloh’s attention. Objects and materials in the room alter what its occupants believe is happening, while the hidden panel and window make the work vulnerable to discovery.

As a setting, Dr. Narbondo’s laboratory turns scientific ambition into a chain of dependencies and risks. Stolen Carp, preserved specimens, reluctant assistants, secret passages, and bodies brought in for experiment all contribute to its operation. The room’s recurring promise is that life can be made to move again; its recurring contradiction is that every attempt depends on taking, preparing, or manipulating life and death. What begins as a concealed workshop consequently becomes a point of contact between criminal practice, religious expectation, and the wider danger posed by reanimated bodies.