Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western

“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.”

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.

His daughter found the door to the ice caves open and the professor gone. She went to the door and yelled down into the caves, “Daddy, are you in there? Come out!”

A horrible sound came from deep in the caves and started coming through the darkness of the caves toward the open door and Miss Hawkline.

The door was immediately locked and one of the sisters, dressed like and thinking she was an Indian, went to Portland to find men qualified to kill a monster but who also possessed discretion, for they wanted to undo the mistake their father had made without public attention and finish his experiment with The Chemicals in a way that he would have approved of for the benefit of all mankind.

But they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by a mutated light in The Chemicals, a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind. The light was dependent upon The Chemicals for sustenance as an unborn baby relies upon the umbilical cord for supper.

The light could leave The Chemicals for brief periods of time but it had to return to The Chemicals to revitalize itself and to sleep. The Chemicals were like a restaurant and a hotel for the light.

The light could translate itself into small changeable forms and it had a shadow companion. The shadow was a buffoon mutation totally subservient to the light and quite unhappy in its role and often liked to remember back to the days when harmony reigned in The Chemicals and Professor Hawkline was there, singing popular songs of the day:

“Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?

She moans de whole day long;

I’ll do de cooking, darling, I’ll pay de rent;

I knows I’ve done you wrong.”

As he poured a drop of this and a drop of that into The Chemicals in hopes for a better world, little realizing that each drop led him closer and closer to the day when he would pass electricity through The Chemicals and suddenly evil mischief would be created and the harmony of The Chemicals would be lost forever and soon the mischief would be turned in all its diabolical possibilities upon himself and his lovely daughters.

A lot of the contents of The Chemicals were not happy with what had happened since the electricity had been passed through them and the mutation occurred that created evil.

One of the chemicals had managed to completely separate itself from the rest of the compound. The chemical was very unhappy with the recent turn of events and the disappearance of Professor Hawkline because it had wanted very much to help mankind and make people smile.