Don't forget also that Henry began as a serious novelist, but failed, and then turned to writing Homer McGrews. These made him rich, but he's always thought of himself as a failure.
Although literary anthropomorphism may not be my cup of tea, I do find some charm in it, in moderation, for it's after all a conscious effort of the mind to project itself into the minds of animals, thus making us feel less alone in our trip through Space-Time.
But there is a big difference between this conscious projection and an unconscious removal of part of the mind into the imagined minds of animals. It's similar to retreating into a dream world to escape the real world.
This is what Henry's doing, and it could well mean that he is hiding that part of himself which he dislikes in the “mind” of his dog. This is close to being a kind of death wish; it could presage suicide.
I of course feel sorry for Dash, who is slowly being murdered. Not so much by Henry. After all, Dash could refuse all those fattening tidbits, or he could run away. But, lacking any consciousness of self, the dog is being killed by his incapacity to deny his own appetites.
To be practical: I have two suggestions. The first is that you get from your Uncle Fred the name of a good Scottsdale psychiatrist, and have him standing by.
The second is that you put your tongue in your cheek and write a letter of encouragement about Dash's autobiography. Lie about me, if it helps. It's possible that Henry could purge himself of this nonsense by finishing the book.
Surely there cannot be more than one book in this dog. Unless, of course, Henry should teach the dog to play the piano. A second volume, titled: How I Played Chopin in Carnegie Hall is a fearful prospect.
I joke because I am really quite worried about Henry. Edinburgh I find a lonely city. That I love you goes without saying. That I miss you I will say.
Dad
* * * *
June 23, 1972
Dear Friend Dash:
Thanks so much for the letter. I think it's wonderful that you're learning to type! Maybe you will get so good that you can type your whole book all by yourself! The more I read what you write, the more I like the idea of your own book in your own words about your own exciting life as a Dog Detective.
Dad has changed his mind and would love to publish your book. So hurry and finish it, fella! My best to Henry.
Your pal,
Bill Benninton
* * * *
C. BENNINTON & SON
PUBLISHERS
551 FIFTH AVE.
NEW YORK 10071
June 23, 1972
Harold F. Seller, MD
Medical-Dental Bldg.
Scottsdale, Arizona
Dear Dr. Seller:
—
Dr. Frederick Carter of this city has given me your name. He is my uncle, and he remembers you well from Menninger Clinic days. He thinks you might be willing to help my father and myself with a problem.
As you may know, the novelist Henry Hesketh lives outside Scottsdale. We've published his Homer McGrew mysteries for many years, and he's my father's close friend, and also my godfather.
Recently, my father and myself have become increasingly disturbed by his letters to me. Put bluntly and unscientifically, they seem to indicate a growing mental disturbance in relation to his pet dog. More than that I don't think I should say, lest you prejudge him.
We are hoping that this condition will pass. But if it worsens, would it be possible for you to visit Henry Hesketh on some pretext, and give us your impression of his behavior? It goes without saying that we would expect to pay you a fee for this.
Cordially,
William Benninton
* * * *
June 27, 1972
Dear Bill:
Henry says I can call you by your first name. I am so thrilled that you and your father like the idea of my book after all!
I am now writing a chapter about my last master who was so angry with me because I could not learn the MORSE CODE and he was mean and beat me with a stick and let me get all skinny and hungry all the time. So I jumped out of a truck near Scottsdale and looked around, hoping I'd find some nice person. I am so happy it was Henry, because he has given me such a nice warm home and lots of affection and he feeds me so GOOD!
My typing is coming along just fine! Henry doesn't have to point at the letters anymore. I have made a connection in my mind between the SOUND of the letters and the various keys, and so Henry stands by me and TELLS me the letters and I try to hit the right ones, and if I do I get a tidbit. Henry has found that next to chocolate cherries I like caviar on a cracker the best. The real caviar, all the way from Iran! I eat a whole big jar every day.
Henry found me a big pair of glasses without any lenses in them and he puts them on my head with a rubber band. He's also bought me a baseball cap which he puts on my head backwards. I didn't like these at first because they are scarcely dignified, but Henry says I look distinguished and he has taken photos of me at the typewriter, to illustrate my book.
Henry and I have so many good times together. Except I was a BAD DOG the other night. Henry never sleeps very well, and this night he had a few boozies and some sleeping pills, and he always sleeps with his head under his pillow, and anyway during the night I got so lonely I came up the bed and went to sleep on Henry's pillow and almost smothered him! So now I have to sleep on his feet and not on his head.
Henry says I should type something all by myself to end this letter. Here it is. Henry is going to leave the room.
XXXXXXXXXX ... HI THER ... E THID IDDASHTY XXXXXXXXXXXPINGGG BYEB........YE
P.S. Henry came back and said that was so good that I am going to get a chocolate eclair full of real whipped cream!
* * * *
HAROLD F. SELLER, MD
MEDICAL-DENTAL BLDG.
SCOTTSDALE
ARIZONA
June 28, 1972
Dear Mr. Benninton:
On a professional basis I would be extremely reluctant to intrude upon the privacy of Henry Hesketh.
However, as it happens I know him, casually. I met him first in a local bookstore, some months ago. I told him I was a Homer McGrew fan, and that I was lucky enough to own some rare first editions of the earliest books. He said that if I ever wished them autographed, I should stop by his house.
Time passed, and I never got around to it. A month ago I met him in the street. He reminded me I hadn't been by with my books.
I still haven't paid him the visit. But should you tell me you feel the need has arisen, I will make a point of dropping by, since I have a valid reason.
I won't do this as a doctor. Forget any fee. I will do it because I admire Hesketh, and because Fred Carter is an old friend, and because you and your father are so obviously concerned, and also, because we are all members of the human race together.
Sincerely,
Harold F. Seller
* * * *
July 5, 1972
HIII THEREXXXXX THIDID
DAS HTYXXXX PING.......
—
Dear Bill:
Do you know that I typed that all by myself, when Henry was asleep? Yes, I did!
Henry leaves the pencils on my paws all night, and his electric typewriter humming and his light on in his office, because sometimes in the night I come in and jump into his chair and support myself with my left paw on the lid of the typewriter and strike the keys with the pencil on my right paw. Henry comes in and finds my typing in the morning, and if it makes any sense at all he gives me a big dish of LOBSTER NEWBURG for my breakfast.
I've just written a wonderful chapter about how I went after and tracked down a mean old porcupine who had been girdling and killing Henry's big pine trees, except that when I caught the animal I got a lot of his NASTY quills in my face and nose. Henry had to pull them all out one by one and it HURT! OooooooooH! But Henry kissed it well and the pain has gone ALL AWAY.
Henry has ordered an electric organ for me. He is going to teach me to pla
y BACH on it! Whatever that is. He says if I get good enough maybe I can give a little recital in a church he knows, near here. He says I can also make some recordings, and sell them to lots of people! Bye, bye, now. I am going to type again just for you.
HI THER ETHID IS DAS HT XXXXYPING ... BYEBYEEEEEXXXXXX
* * * *
NEW YORK NY SRX TC 559 JUL 7 72 HAROLD SELLER MD MEDICAL DENTAL BLDG SCOTTSDALE ARIZ 2:22 PM
I FEEL IT WOULD BE WISE IF YOU WOULD VISIT HESKETH AT YOUR EARLY CONVENIENCE
BENNINTON
* * * *
SCOTTSDALE ARIZ PFG 732 JULY 8 72 BENNINTON 551 FIFTH AVE NYC 11:23 AM
I AM GRIEVED TO REPORT THAT WHEN I VISITED HESKETH THIS MORNING I FOUND THAT HE HAD DIED IN HIS SLEEP. AUTHORITIES NOTIFIED. WRITING DETAILS. MY SYMPATHY TO YOU.
SELLER
* * * *
HAROLD F. SELLER , MD
MEDICAL-DENTAL BLDG.
SCOTTSDALE
ARIZONA
July 8, 1972
Dear Mr. Benninton:
Again let me extend my sympathy to you and your father. I realize you have lost a dear friend.
I drove to Hesketh's house around nine this morning. There was no answer to my several rings, but a dog barked inside. When no one came to the door, I decided to leave.
But as I was walking back to my car, a huge dog came around the corner of the house and up to me. He is the most monstrously obese dog I've ever seen. He is so outrageously fat he can scarcely walk. Also, and this puzzled me at first, there were pencils taped to his paws—eraser ends protruding. I finally guessed that their purpose was to keep him from scratching himself.
The dog indicated I should come with him, and he led me around the house to an open glass door. It was through this that I found Hesketh in his bed, his head under his pillow. He had been dead for some hours.
The blueness of his skin clearly indicated asphyxia. But how? There was no sign of any struggle.
Three clues gave me a probable answer. There were a few remaining drops of whiskey in a glass on the bedside table. There was also a bottle of sleeping pills. In addition, the top side of his pillow was covered with dog hairs.
So I can only conclude that Hesketh had ingested both alcohol and barbiturates, and went to sleep with his head under his pillow. Suicide is not indicated, for the sleeping pill bottle was very nearly full. I feel sure he would have awakened in the morning.
But I fear that during the night this huge dog came and lay upon his master's pillow and suffocated Hesketh while he remained in an intensely deep sleep.
It is tragic and ironic and somewhat incredible, but it is certainly physically possible, considering the great weight of the dog.
I then walked around the house to find a phone, but there is none. Nothing was amiss, but Hesketh's electric typewriter had been left running in his office, and his desk lamp was on. While switching off the typewriter, I noticed some typing in the machine. I tried to read it, but couldn't. It is gibberish—typed, I fear, by a man who has had quite a few drinks and pills and is falling asleep at his typewriter. Or, possibly, it could be some kind of code, but I greatly doubt it. I pulled this typing out of the machine because I didn't want to have anyone find it and try to make something out of it. The circumstances of Hesketh's death will make enough newspaper copy as it is.
When I left the house the dog was anxious to come with me, and so I took him.
After reporting the news to the sheriff's office in person, I stopped off with the dog at the office of a veterinary surgeon friend.
When he examined the dog he was gravely shocked—even horrified. He said he had never seen a dog who had been so grossly overfed. He surmised that the dog had been deprived of proper food and had been fed large quantities of sugars and fats. He told me that if this diet had continued much longer the poor dog was doomed to die.
I have decided to keep the dog, until and unless someone lays claim to him. I would like to restore him to good condition, with a proper diet and exercise.
Also, I find the dog tremendously appealing. He is affectionate, and in his ability to understand my every word he seems close to being human.
I've lived alone since my wife died two years ago, and I'll be happy to have the dog for company. He will have a good home with me.
Sincerely,
Harold F. Seller
—
P.S. I enclose the sheet of paper I found in Hesketh's typewriter. It's possible that this random typing might make some sense to you, although I very much doubt it.
H.F.S.
* * * *
TH ISISD ASHT
YPING.......IW XXXX
ASBEI INGMUR D
ERE DBY MYI
NABI LI TYTOC
ONQ UERM YO
WNGREE D..........
ITWA SEI THERH
E N R Y O R M E
X X X X X X X IAMDO
UBL YSOR RYF
O RMYC RIME BEC
A U S E N O W I NM
....YNEX TREIN
CARNA TIONI WI
LLHAV ETOCO
M E BAC KASANEV
......ENLOW ERCREA
TUR ESUCHASARA
T XXXXXXXXX THI
SIS DAS HIELLHA
MMETTT YPING
..........
[Back to Table of Contents]
Novelet: A Skeptical Spirit by Albert E. Cowdrey
As we've seen many times (most recently with “The Overseer” in our March 2008 issue), Albert Cowdrey excels at Southern tales of the supernatural. This month he offers us another such yarn, a light-hearted tale that turns askew one of the great conventions of the ghost story genre.
Albion Merkel may have been a bit mad, but that was par for the course in the small Delta city of Bonaparte, Mississippi, whither (as they say in old novels) he had removed (as they also say in old novels) after Hurricane Katrina erased his ancestral diggings in Biloxi.
He purchased a moderately historic cottage called Smith's Haven in Bonaparte's Olde Towne, near the kudzu-draped bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River and there installed himself, his dog Miss Scarlett (named for American fiction's most famous bitch) and a load of water-marked furnishings rescued from the wrack and ruin on the coast.
Behind his new-old dwelling's lichened brick walls, shielded from the street by azalea hedges and half a dozen red and white crape myrtles, he filled his days with gardening, with business—which consisted almost wholly in suing his former insurance company—and with his lifelong hobby, psychical research. In that department, everything looked hopeful. Bonaparte was richly supplied with ghosts. Spirits clumped about invisibly on wooden galleries, or whistled “Lorena” on winter evenings, or passed through walls where doors had once stood, or wept for lost lovers on moonlit nights, or frightened fornicators in the Confederate cemetery.
Unfortunately, they avoided Albion's cottage altogether. Even Miss Scarlett, who far surpassed him in the ESP department, after carefully examining the house did not find a single blank wall to growl and bristle at. On the other hand, for the first time in her pampered life, she chose to lie outdoors all day, making her nest under an azalea bush in the patio close by the garden gate, where she slept from dawn to dusk, rousing herself only to gulp meals and bark at the sixteen or seventeen vehicles that constituted Bonaparte's rush hour.
To Albion this seemed significant. Something made his new home unattractive to dogs and spirits. But what? He made the mistake of asking his housekeeper, an up-to-date black woman who'd returned to her Mississippi roots after thirty years in California in order (she said) to escape the traffic.
There was already a certain amount of tension between them. Placenta Wilson was the only cleaning lady he'd ever had who addressed him as “Baby,” a term that seemed to put their relationship on an uncomfortably physical basis. (Placenta? Baby?)
Her attitude about spirits was equally disconcerting. Briefly removing from her lower lip the cigarette that usually hung there as if sutured, Placenta
knocked some ash onto Albion's mother's gate-leg table, brushed it from the tabletop onto a saltwater-stained Persian carpet that couldn't get much more damaged anyway, and stated flatly that her son Antwon didn't believe in spirits.
"And what does he know about it?” snapped Albion.
"Well, he teaches computer science at Mather,” she said, naming a small but extremely upscale private college in New England, as if that settled the matter. Then she bustled away about her duties, wiggling the round bottom that decorated her minimal frame like an olive on a toothpick.
"Utter irrelevancy,” Albion muttered. What did computers have to do with spirits, anyway? As he liked to tell his new acquaintances in Bonaparte, he recognized that Placenta stood superior to most members of the cleaning-lady profession—he just wished she wouldn't keep reminding him of it.
* * * *
He put the problem of his ghostless condition to a new acquaintance, Mrs. DeFlores, one afternoon when they were having tea in the back parlor of her mansion, Cottonwood. An eighty-two-year-old widow who'd married into the town's feudal aristocracy, she yielded to none in her attachment to the old ways, and often seemed to converse in the language of 1900, if not earlier. Thus she told Albion that he needed to consult a “darky” she knew, who was a medium.
This was the first time in half a century that Albion had heard anybody say darky without winking, and he found it particularly remarkable since he knew that Mrs. DeFlores had been born Mabel O'Dowd in Philadelphia, PA. Sipping his Earl Grey, he reflected briefly on the rumors that swirled around the lady—one, almost certainly false, that she kept a slave in an outbuilding; another, hopefully true, that Cottonwood possessed (or rather was possessed by) a veritable costume ball of ghosts. According to Albion's barber, they had names like Captain Jack and Mister Dick and Darlin’ Sissy, and there was even a famous hunting dog of a few generations back called Powderhorn, who could be heard baying on moonlit nights.
If that was true, Mrs. DeFlores's recommendation of a medium might be worth following up. Albion had just opened his mouth to tell her so, when something began thumping violently inside the wall behind her chair. She murmured a word of apology, set her cup down, picked up a walking stick leaning against the wall and banged away vigorously, at the same time shouting, “Now captain, you stop that! It's safe—I've told you a million times, it's safe!"
FSF, December 2008 Page 10