Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western

She pulled back the first bolt on the door. It was a little hard to get back, so she had to give it a good tug.

That umbrella stand was so familiar.

Who was it?

She pulled back the second bolt. It came back much easier than the first one did. She barely had to pull on it.

I’ve seen that umbrella stand thousands of times before but not as an umbrella stand , she thought, but as somebody I know .

She took a large key from the pocket of her dress and inserted the key into the huge padlock on the door and she turned the key and the lock fell open like a clenched fist and she took the lock off the door and hung it on the hasp.

Then she yelled, “DADDY!” and turned and ran down the hall to the elephant foot umbrella stand.

The Hawkline Monster had found itself a good position of concealment in the laboratory and now just waited for Greer, Cameron and the Hawkline women to come into its domain.

The Hawkline Monster was so confident of their future that it was not even curious when it heard one of the Hawkline sisters scream and run back down the hall away from the laboratory door, followed by everybody else.

What difference did it make what they did up there for soon they would return and come down that flight of stairs and the Hawkline Monster would play with them a little bit. Then it would change them all into shadows and the monster would have five shadows following after it instead of one incompetent shadow.

Perhaps, these four new shadows would be skillful at playing the role the Hawkline Monster had devised for them. Yes , the monster thought, it could stand a little competence in the shadow line .

The Hawkline Monster had concealed itself behind some test tubes full of chemicals which were a rejected possibility of de-eviling The Chemicals that the professor had worked on for months before abandoning them as failures.

The shadow had concealed itself behind a clock on the table beside the test tubes. As soon as there was light in the laboratory the incompetence of its concealment would be revealed.

The shadow could not do anything right.

“Soon you will have playmates,” the Hawkline Monster said to the shadow.

The shadow didn’t know what the fuck the Hawkline Monster was talking about.

Miss Hawkline was on her knees and she had thrown her arms around the elephant foot umbrella stand and she was sobbing uncontrollably and saying over and over again, “Daddy! Daddy!”

The other Miss Hawkline stood there looking down at her sister, trying to figure out what was happening.

Greer and Cameron were busy looking around for the Hawkline Monster. Had they missed seeing it when they had looked for it before? Or had it come up behind them in the hall? They looked all over but they cou1dn’t find the monster anywhere.

Then the other Miss Hawkline bent forward and looked very hard at the elephant foot umbrella stand.

Suddenly a huge flush flash of emotion exploded itself across her face and she fell to her knees beside her sister and said, “Oh, Father! It’s our father! Daddy!”

The Hawkline sisters were not as emotionless as they thought they were.

Greer and Cameron stood there watching the Hawkline sisters hugging and calling an elephant foot umbrella stand Daddy.

Greer and Cameron left the Hawkline women with the elephant foot umbrella stand and walked back down the hall to the laboratory door. It was time to do something about the Hawkline Monster and right now. Greer and Cameron had had enough of its antics.

Greer was now carrying the lamp.

Cameron had a glass of whiskey in his hand.

Greer still had not noticed anything different about Cameron carrying the glass of whiskey. His mind was really someplace else because under any other conditions, he would have noticed the glass of whiskey. This was a first for him. Perhaps it was time that he should start thinking about retiring, about hanging it up and finding a good woman to settle down with.

Yes, that was probably a good idea. Maybe one of the Hawkline women. He of course had no way of knowing that the Hawkline Monster had already planned a sort of group marriage for them, anyway.

Greer went first. He opened the laboratory door and the light from the lamp in his hand illuminated the stairs and part of the laboratory. It was a very complicated place. Greer had never seen anything like it before. There were tables covered with thousands of bottles. There were machines that would have been at home in a dream.

“Go on, Greer. Let’s go down and look around,” Cameron said.

“OK.”

The Hawkline Monster was watching them. The monster was amused by their helplessness. The women were not with them but the monster would take care of them after it had finished with Greer and Cameron. There was plenty of time for everybody.

The monster was so gleeful about the horrors that it was about to perform that it did not notice that a strangeness was being generated inside the shadow.

The shadow had been watching Greer and Cameron as they came down the stairs and then went over and lit three or four lamps, so they could see better, but then the shadow turned its attention to the Hawkline Monster and was staring at it and a strange for-the-first-time feeling was being born in the shadow as it continued to stare harder and harder at the Hawkline Monster.

A unique thought was now in the shadow’s mind and the thought was linking itself up with a plan of direct action to take place when next the monster chose to move.

“This sure is a weird place,” Greer said.

“It ain’t any weirder than Hawaii,” Cameron said.

Cameron had spotted the hiding place of the Hawkline Monster when he and Greer were halfway down the stairs. He saw strange sparks of light on a bench behind some funny-looking bottles. He didn’t know what a test tube was.

“Why don’t you light those lamps over there?” he said, motioning Greer over to a bench on the far side of the laboratory.

The Hawkline Monster was amused as it watched them. The monster was deriving so much pleasure from this that it decided to wait a few minutes before changing Greer and Cameron into shadows.

This was real fun for the monster.

Meanwhile, its current and only shadow waited for the monster to move so that it could put into action a plan of its own.

Cameron had also spotted a large leaded-crystal jar on a table in the opposite direction that he had sent Greer to light some lamps.

From the description that the Hawkline women had given him, he knew that this was the source of the Hawkline Monster… The Chemicals. He was standing about ten feet away from the jar. And the monster was “hiding” about five feet away from the jar.

Suddenly Cameron yelled, “It’s over there! I see it!”

Greer turned toward where Cameron was yelling and pointing. He couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why Cameron was yelling. This was not like Cameron but he turned anyway to the direction.

The Hawkline Monster was curious, too. What in the hell was happening? What was over there if it was over here?

So the monster moved… involuntarily… out of curiosity.

Cameron in the interim of artificial excitement moved over to the table where a jar called The Chemicals was residing and he was standing right beside it.

When the Hawkline Monster moved to get a better view of what was happening, the shadow, after having checked all the possibilities of light, had discovered a way that it could shift itself in front of the monster, so that the monster at this crucial time would be blinded by darkness for a few seconds, did so, causing confusion to befall the monster.