Narbondo’s laboratory on Pratlow Street is both a secluded site of experimentation and a node in the hidden routes beneath London. Its aquaria, instruments, and concealed access points support work on reviving the dead, while a passage and a sliding panel let people, bodies, and danger move between the laboratory and the street. When the bodies stored nearby begin to rise, the house’s carefully concealed arrangements become impossible to keep private.

Setting and Hidden Access

The laboratory occupies part of a house on Pratlow Street, but the building’s most important feature is how it can be entered and left without using its ordinary rooms. From the street door, a person can slip into a downstairs closet and find a spring-latched panel behind its corner. Beyond the panel lies a passage leading upward to the laboratory. Hasbro and Bill Kraken also carry a lantern through this passage from the street, arriving beyond the laboratory wall. These details make the house less a single enclosed room than a network of thresholds: street, closet, passage, hidden panel, and laboratory.

A second access point leads toward an alley and the London sewers. Billy Deener closes an alley door while relying on fog and darkness to obscure movement; a hole below the street leads into the filthy sewer system. The Kermit Street sewer is itself unstable, with sinking ground, standing water, and damaged foundations above. Deener has used its cesspools to conceal the bodies of murdered men, whose remains may later be carried into the Thames River and recorded as drownings. The passageways and sewers thus form a criminal infrastructure beyond the laboratory, but one that shares its defining feature: the city’s ordinary surfaces conceal what has been placed beneath them.

Experiments and Stored Bodies

The laboratory’s scientific work is material and methodical. In one scene, Narbondo turns from a corpse to large aquaria thick with plants and stocked with koi. He feeds the fish a mass of threadlike worms, then watches one carp that ignores the food, gulps air, and struggles to remain near the surface. He removes a small gland from the fish, places it in a vial of amber liquid, and sets the vial beside fetuses. The scene connects the aquaria and animal dissection to Narbondo’s broader interest in reanimation, without making the laboratory’s work seem like an abstract theory: its methods depend on living fish, preserved materials, and bodies kept close at hand.

Shiloh enters while Narbondo is preparing the specimen and watches with a mixture of wonder and loathing. Narbondo dismisses the dead fish as cat food, an abrupt reduction of the apparent scientific procedure to a practical aside. Elsewhere, Narbondo and Willis Pule prepare a fresh corpse on a gurney beside a sluggish carp, while Narbondo moves a misting device through the room. His concentrated work, the apparatus, and the pairing of fish with the body suggest the controlled conditions of an experiment. The scene also places Shiloh’s mother’s remains in the laboratory, making the room a point where his personal history intersects with Narbondo’s attempt to manipulate death.

The passage serves as a kind of storehouse for bodies brought to the house. After a disturbance, Theophilus Godall tells Langdon St. Ives that he had known many bodies were being taken there and had suspected Narbondo was using the passage for storage. The bodies later identified include a woman recovered from the Thames, a child killed in a street accident, and a hanged forger taken from the gallows. Their different origins show the breadth of Narbondo’s supply and the way the hidden rooms and routes gather people who would otherwise remain separate in the city’s records and public spaces.

Exposure and Conflict

The laboratory’s hidden design shapes the attempts to enter it. When Bill Kraken slips inside to steal the Keeble box, he finds the room apparently empty; the box sits on the piano, visible in the faint candlelight. He means to take it and leave by the same route, with a plan to retreat upstairs if he hears Narbondo or Pule approaching. But a struggle at the door and Willis Pule’s recognizable voice turn the theft into a confrontation. Elsewhere, St. Ives and Hasbro wait below rather than charge unarmed into a room where desperate men may be present. They expect anyone leaving with the box to come out through the street door, since the alley door has been nailed shut. The building’s entrances dictate who can safely pursue whom and where an encounter can take place.

The danger does not remain contained in the laboratory. When a wooden panel slides open, St. Ives and Hasbro see two animated corpses emerge from behind it. Their appearance reveals the practical consequence of keeping bodies and experiments in the same concealed structure: the passage meant to hide Narbondo’s activities becomes a route through which the dead can enter the house. Godall later recalls that bodies had been brought there over several days and wonders how they came to move together. The laboratory’s hidden passage has protected the work, but it has also made the consequences of that work harder to anticipate or control.

Urban Significance and Aftermath

Pratlow Street links private experimentation to the wider city through a chain of concealed spaces: the laboratory, its closet and panel, the passage, an alley, and the sewer. Those routes allow bodies and people to be hidden, moved, or pursued outside ordinary notice. The setting is consequently more than a backdrop for Narbondo’s research. It gives his secrecy a physical form, while exposing how that secrecy relies on the same urban systems that carry waste, traffic, and the dead.

The conflict returns to the street when Willis Pule approaches the house with a lit bomb, intending to roll it into the laboratory through the hidden panel. He enters by the street door, passes into the closet, and reaches for the concealed latch. Before the explosion, however, Hasbro and Kraken use the passage to reach a cupboard beyond the laboratory wall and escape upward through the roof route. The blast leaves a smoking crater in Pratlow Street, and Pule flees toward Holborn. The evidence does not establish that the laboratory itself is destroyed; it does show that an attempt to attack its concealed interior has carried the conflict into public space. The house’s secret architecture, initially a means of concealment, has become the route by which the struggle reaches the street.