The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (7 page)

Greer put another shell into the magazine, replacing the one that had just gone like a-cat-catching-a-mouse into the chamber.

The Krag had a leather strap on it and Greer slung the rifle over his shoulder. Then he put a handful of shells in his pocket. He was ready to earn his living.

“One of us is going to have to carry a lantern,” Cameron said. “So he’s only going to have one hand free if something happens real quick with that monster. You carry the lantern and this Filipino bustin’ gun and I’ll do the shotgun.”

He handed the automatic pistol and the extra clip of bullets to Greer while saying, “Give me that .38 there.”

Greer gave him the .38.

“I can get this rifle working real quick if we need it,”

Greer said. “And if the son-of-a-bitch jumps us, we’ve got enough stuff here to turn it into sausage.”

“Can we be of any help?” Miss Hawkline said.

“No, girls. You’d just be in our way,” Cameron said.

“This is our line of work. So you just keep out of the way and we’ll kill your monster for you. Who knows? Maybe we’ll eat it for supper tonight. It might be real tasty.”

• Journey to the Ice Caves •

The Hawkline women guided them down the hall to a flight of stairs that led to the laboratory and the ice caves.

They were halfway down the hall when they heard a heavy slow shuffling sound. It was the butler. He emerged, head ducking through a door, into the hall.

“You’re going to kill the monster,” he said, in a very old voice. His mouth moved and his voice seemed to come out moments later.

He towered above them.

His hair was white like the frost on the grass outside the house.

“The monster ate my master,” the giant butler said. “If only I were younger, I’d kill that monster with my bare hands.”

His hands were huge and knotted with arthritis. Probably in their day they could have killed a monster but now they were in repose like old gray uneatable hams.

“You’re going to kill the monster,” the giant butler repeated. He was very tired from his trip to Brooks to pick up new things for The Chemicals. He was getting too old to make a trip that long.

The giant butler’s eyelids were drooping.

“Thank God,” he said. The word God almost lost itself in his throat. It sounded like somebody sitting down in an old chair.

• The Door •

The door that led to the basement was a heavy iron door with two bolts on it. Miss Hawkline pulled the bolts back.

There was also a large padlock on the door. The lock was very impressive. It looked like a small bank. Miss Hawkline took a huge key out of her dress pocket. She put the key into the padlock and started to turn it when suddenly there was a huge crashing noise behind them.

They were all startled and turned around to see the giant butler spread out, over 7 feet and 300 pounds, on the floor. He looked like a stranded boat in the hall.

Miss Hawkline ran down the hall toward him. The other Miss Hawkline followed like a shadow in her footsteps. They crouched on their knees over the giant butler.

Greer and Cameron stood there looking down. They already knew he was dead while the two Miss Hawklines still searched for life in his body. When they discovered that he was dead, they both stood up. Their faces were suddenly very composed. There were no tears in their eyes though they loved Mr. Morgan like an uncle.

Greer was holding a lantern in his hand and he had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a large pistol stuck in his belt. Cameron was holding a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands. The giant butler lay dead on the floor. The two Miss Hawklines stood there silent, totally composed, looking unreally beautiful.

“What do we do now, young ladies?” Cameron said. “Kill the monster or bury the butler?”

• Thanatopsis Exit •

“Do you know what I really want to do?” Miss Hawkline said.

“What?” Cameron said.

“I’d like to get fucked.”

Cameron looked down at the giant butler and then at Miss Hawkline.

“I’d like to get fucked, too,” the other Miss Hawkline said to her sister. “That’s what I’ve been thinking for the last hour. It would be very nice to get fucked.”

Greer and Cameron stood there with their guns while the giant butler lay there alone and forgotten with his death. Greer took a deep breath. What the hell? You might as well do one thing as another.

“First things first,” Cameron said. “Let’s move this body out of the hall. Where do you want it?”

“That’s a good question,” Miss Hawkline said. “We could put him in his room or we could lay him out in a front parlor. I don’t want to bury him now because I want to get fucked. I really want to get fucked. What a time to have a dead butler on your hands.”

She was almost a little mad that the giant butler had taken this particular time and place to die. He looked awesome lying there in the hall.

“Hell, this is too much to think about,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “Let’s just leave him here for a while and take care of getting fucked.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about him going any place,” Cameron said.

So they just left the giant old butler lying dead on the hall floor and went off to get fucked, taking along with them a 30:40 Krag, a sawed-off shotgun, a .38 and an automatic pistol.

• Thanatopsis Exit #2 •

Greer as he made love to Miss Hawkline kept thinking about Magic Child. Miss Hawkline had a body that was exactly the same in its appearance and delightful movement as Magic Child’s.

They were making love in a beautiful bedroom upstairs. The room had many delicate feminine things that were unfamiliar to Greer. The only thing wrong with the room was the cold. It was very cold in the room because of the ice caves under the house.

Greer and Miss Hawkline made love under many blankets in an incredibly ornate brass bed. Their passion had not allowed time to be spent building a fire in the fireplace.

Greer kept wondering as they made love if this Miss Hawkline were Magic Child. At one moment he almost said the name Magic Child to see if she would respond, but then he decided not to because he knew that Magic Child was dead and it did not make any difference in which Miss Hawkline she was buried.

• After Making Love Conversation •

After they finished making love, Miss Hawkline lay gently cuddling up against him and then she said, “Don’t you think that it’s kind of strange for us to be up here making love while the butler is lying down there dead in the hall and we haven’t done anything about it?”

“Yes, it is a little strange,” Greer said.

“I wonder why we didn’t do anything about his body. You know, my sister and I are really very fond of Mr. Morgan. I’ve been lying here for the last few minutes thinking about why we haven’t done anything about him down there. It’s not a very gracious thing to go off fucking while your family butler, whom you love like an uncle, is lying dead in the hall of your house. That has got to be a very peculiar way to react.”

“You’re right,” Greer said. “It sure is.”

• Mirror Conversation •

In a bedroom down the hall a similar conversation was taking place between Miss Hawkline and Cameron. They had just finished making some very enthusiastic love in which Cameron had not a single thought about this woman being Magic Child. He had really enjoyed their fucking together and had not allowed any intellectual process to cloud his pleasure. He used his mind for more important things: like counting.

“I guess we’ll have to do something about your butler,” Cameron said.

“That’s right,” Miss Hawkline said. “I completely forgot about him. He’s lying dead in the hall. He fell over dead and we left him there to come up here and get some fucking in. It totally slipped my mind. Our butler is dead. He’s down there dead. I wonder why we didn’t do anything about his body.”

“I asked you if you wanted to do anything about it down there but you girls wanted to come up here and get fucked, so we came up here and that’s what we’ve done,” Cameron said.

“What?” Miss Hawkline said.

“What do you mean what?” Cameron said.

Miss Hawkline lay very puzzled beside Cameron. There was a slight furrow between her eyes. She was in such a state of consternation that it was almost like slight shock.

“We suggested it?” she said, after a few moments of trying to figure out what events led them away from the body of their beloved dead giant butler and upstairs into the arms of love-making.

“We… suggested… it?” she repeated very slowly.

“Yes,” Cameron said. “You insisted upon it. I thought it was a little strange myself, but what-the-hell, you’re running this show. If you want to fuck instead of taking care of your dead butler, that’s your business.”

“This is very unusual,” Miss Hawkline said.

“You’re right there,” Cameron said. “It ain’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill thing to do. I mean, I’ve never fucked before with a butler lying spread-out dead in the hall downstairs.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Miss Hawkline said. By now she had turned her head away from Cameron and was staring up at the ceiling.

“He’s dead,” Cameron said. “You’ve got 1 dead butler downstairs in the hall.”

• Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey, Won’t You Come Home? •

Meanwhile, down in the laboratory above the ice caves everything was very quiet except for the movement of a shadow. It was a shadow that just barely existed between forms. At times the shadow would almost become a form. The shadow would hover at the very edge of something definite and perhaps even recognizable but then the shadow would drift away into abstraction.

The laboratory was filled with strange equipment. Some of it was of Professor Hawkline’s invention. There were many work tables and thousands of bottles of chemicals and a battery to make electricity out here in the Dead Hills where there was no such thing.

The laboratory was very cold. Actually, it was frozen because of its proximity to the ice caves underneath it.

There were some cast iron stoves around the laboratory which were used to thaw it out when the Hawkline sisters came down here to work, trying to unravel the mystery of The Chemicals.

Though there was no formal light in the room, there was still a slight portion of light coming from somewhere which for the moment wasn’t actually a definite place. The light was coming from somewhere in the laboratory but it was not possible to tell where the light originated.

The light of course was needed to establish the shadow as it played like a child’s spirit between object and abstraction.

Then the light became a definite place and the shadow was then related to the place where the light was coming from which was a large leaded-crystal jar filled with chemicals.

This jar of chemicals was the reality and mission of Professor Hawkline’s lifework. The Chemicals were what he had placed his faith and energy in before he disappeared. It was now being completed by his two beautiful daughters who lay in bedrooms upstairs with two professional killers, and his daughters were wondering why they had gone off making love to these men while the freshly-dead body of their beloved giant butler lay ignored, unattended and not even covered up on the front hall floor.

The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world. Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain. There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C.

There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas.

Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar. Witchcraft and modern science, the newest of discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar. There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis.

It had taken a tremendous amount of energy and genius to establish harmony between the past and present in the jar. Only a man of Professor Hawkline’s talent and dedication could have joined these chemicals together in friendship and made them good neighbors.

There of course had been the earlier mistake that had caused Professor Hawkline and his family to leave the East but that batch had been flushed down the toilet and the professor had started over again out here in the Dead Hills.

Everything had been fully under control with the ultimate results of his experiments with The Chemicals promising a brighter and more beautiful future for all mankind.

Then Professor Hawkline passed electricity from the battery through The Chemicals and began the mutation which led to an epidemic of mischievous pranks occurring in the laboratory and eventually getting upstairs and affecting the quality of life in the house.

It started off with the professor finding black umbrellas in unlikely places in the laboratory and green feathers scattered about and once there was a piece of pie suspended in the air and the professor took to thinking too long about things that were not important. Once he spent two hours thinking about an iceberg. He had never spent more than a few moments previously in all of his life thinking about icebergs.

This mischief led to the clothes vanishing off the bodies of the Hawkline women upstairs and other things too silly to recount.

Sometimes the professor would think about his childhood. He would do this for hours at a time and then afterwards not be able to remember what he had been thinking about.

Then one day a horrible monster started howling and banging on the iron door that separated the ice caves from the laboratory. The monster was so strong that it shook the door. The professor and his daughters didn’t know what to do. They were afraid to open the door.

The next day one of the Hawkline sisters went down to the laboratory to bring the professor some lunch. When he was working hard he didn’t like to come upstairs to eat.

Because of his immense dedication he continued working, trying to reestablish the balance of The Chemicals while the monster from time to time hollered and banged on the door with its tail.