A nearby sash window opens with a creak, and an inarticulate but musical cry of pleasure is thrown from it by what sounds like a tiny bird, so must be a little old lady. In all modern theaters at this juncture, audiences are wafted with the Pavlovian smell of roast chicken.
ACT II
Outdoors, under the stars, on the lawn at the base of the neighbor’s kitchen steps.
Ibsen is eating chicken out of the neighbor’s right hand. She looks exactly like the little old lady who Tweetie Pie owns. Like all ladies of this type, she wears orthopaedic shoes that look as comfortable as a muzzle.
With her left hand she gives Ibsen’s floppy ear a respectful fondle, so briefly that he almost nestles his head in her palm.She talks quietly to him of many things, but is either ignorant of H.P. Lovecraft or unusually sensitive to Ibsen’s sensitivities. He knows she reads, because he of course, has checked out her house, though she wouldn’t have dreamed of asking him to stay and he wouldn’t have done so, partly for ignoble reasons (sometimes he wishes that his master and her could marry so that she might end Hylam P Hector’s poetising days with real romance, and their two libraries would, in combining, vanquish her collection of Readers’ Digest Condensed books. Ibsen always thought the person who condenses a book to be quite as much a fiend as a person who clips a tail).
Tonight she talks of honeydew, how pretty the word it is, how extraordinarily ill-chosen by the ignorant compared to harsh reality, the black blight of aphids on roses. Ibsen understands her sentiments, if not the technicalities. He has always been a fine digger, but doesn’t have a green thumb. He gives her fingernails a final wash and issues a complementary tail-wag. She stands with many creaks, but as many complaints as an old chair when someone sits in it. They part wordlessly and without looking back. He’s off to explore the base of a birch tree or two before walking around the block pretending it’s around the world, toward home.
ACT III
If only this were merely a play, but life is unfortunately, life. So the mundane must be reported along with the extraordinary abdication of Ibsen’s responsibility for parting speeches, or at least a quip.
Ibsen lies asleep on an overstuffed chair in that same room that his master uttered the fatal O!–the room a real estate agent would call ‘the living room’, but Mr Hector calls ‘the library’.
A large gasp, like that of a hot water bottle sucking down fluid, comes from the bedroom down the hall. This is followed by an annoyingly pendant silence. Then that gasp with perhaps a hint of shudder and a muffled scream, followed monotonously, by more silence.
Ibsen hears them all, and doesn’t raise an eyebrow–all the sounds of normality to him who knows naught else but that all humans sleep as fitfully.
And now that we’ve ploughed our scene for action, we shall slip into the past-tense, the tense that dresses best bad memories.
Some things you should know about Hylam P Hector
In addition to his father wanting him to be an odontologist or something like that, or possibly because of that wish, little Hylam suffered from attacks of pavor nocturnus (night terror) so extreme that he used to sneak into his parents’ bedroom when they went to sleep, simply to stay awake. He sat on the bare wood floor in his thin nightshirt, listening to them snore.
Never bold enough to wake them up, he ended this practice one night at age ten when he heard a team of robbers clean out his father’s ‘rooms’ at the back of the house. The robbers had a horse with severe allergies to the flowers in the garden. It never stopped sneezing, and a horse who sneezes could wake a cemetery. But neither of his parents so much as turned over in bed.
He never told his parents about this incident, but it was only one of many that haunted him, before he met Lovecraft’s works just after a failed love attempt in his first year of college.
His father was by this time, dead, and Hylam frittered away the rest of his inheritance on magazines that contained Lovecraft, notebooks in which to attempt to write stories like Lovecraft, and blank books with leather covers, in which he wrote his Lovecraftian poetry.
The problem with his taking up with Lovecraft, however, was not just that Hylam became a writer of insufferably frightful verse. He became an undocumented statistic in one of the most dreadful pandemics ever to hit humanity (and as a side-effect, other species).
He could have been the poster child for the disaster that until now has been nameless, but we shall break that code of silence and speak up. In that little upstate college in Horsenail, New York, Hylam P Hector caught Apnoea Pavorlovcraftis, an anti-social disease.
Alone in his bed with his eyes tightly closed and his face turning purple from the effects of held breath, he’d inevitably break, issuing those antimacassar-shaking explosions of heretofore pent-up breath.
Every night come beddy-bye, he was so exhausted that he literally fell upon his gaping sheets, having barely had time to don his most beige pajamas. His eyes would close autonomically, and he would instantly be plunged into his first abyssal nightmare. And as everyone knows, now that we’ve revealed his disease, those nightmares were filled with grasping tentacled monsters and other women who were dangerously beautiful, strange gods with too many consonants to their names, things that lurk, hidden just out of view, more tentacles–and all the while he spent his sleep trying to hold his breath, so that he could not be seen (especially by the unseen). Then the air would blast out of his mouth and all those tentacles would reach out towards him till he made a pillbug of himself in the middle of his bed, holding his breath again . . . and so on, till his saviour, that he called affectionately and inaccurately, his ‘alarum clock’ rang at 8 o’clock a.m.
He never felt that he had slept a wink, yet he had nightmared loud as the Front all through the night.
Such a contrast to his day job. In his waking life, he was a writer, see–and not only that, but the celebrated enough never to reveal himself to his doctor: ‘Augusta J. E. Wilson’, author of AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS (New.), INFELICE; or, the Deserted Wife, ST. ELMO; or, Saved at Last, MACARIA; or, Altars of Sacrifice, VASHTI; or, Until Death us do Part, and INEZ: A Tale of the Alamo. (in cloth and paper covers at all good booksellers) “Who has not read with delight the Works of AUGUSTA WILSON? Her strange wonderful and fascinating style; the profoundest depths to which she sinks the probe into human nature toughing the most sacred chords and springs; the intense interest thrown around her characters, and the very marked peculiarities of her principal figures, conspire to give an unusual interest to the Works of this eminent Southern Authoress.” asks a back flyleaf of the “Intensely interesting” PRICE FIFTY CENTS D.M. Canright’s THE MINISTRATION OF ANGELS, and the Origin, History, and Destiny of Satan.
So not only was he a secret Southern Authoress of intense 25-cent mysteries, but he wrote them without a single O!, and even at their most terrifying junctures, he bashed away at them with the coldness of a butcher tenderising steak. All day he wrote commercially, but something happened when the lights outside were low, or maybe it was that green-shaded lamp.
Luckily for him, after that failed one-sided love affair the week before he discovered Lovecraft, passion for another woman had been something he didn’t feel the need of any more. Nor, fortunately for him, did he wish to have a dog in his bedroom at night. Ibsen had excellent hearing, but no wont to have his night disturbed by his master’s commotions, since there was no cure he knew of for the disease.
Ibsen was able and quite ready to tear robbers to shredded meat, should they venture into the house. And Ibsen being a dog who was faithful to his master, was always ready to defend his master against anything a dog can sink teeth into. But short of peeing on his master’s face, Ibsen couldn’t think of what to do to break the nightmare/breath-hold/gasp explosion cycle.
Back to the Action
On this penultimate evening, the one in which Hylam Hector tried too far, the affections of his audience, Ibsen, as we have seen, had settled himself on the soft overstuffed chair in the library, as us
ual of an evening. We thought that he was asleep, and indeed, his eyebrows twitched as if he were dreaming, and his paws lightly pawed. A careful observer would have noticed, however, that only Ibsen’s front paws pawed. His back legs were extended, and held quite rigid.
He was thinking out that problem of the hole, and being a dog who didn’t believe solely in theory, was acting the problem out.
From the bedroom came a sound like the hot water heater blowing up. Then silence. Then another sound, like that of a giant eggbeater trying to turn a bedspread into butter. Then silence. The normal night noises. Ibsen pondered on.
In the contrast between the imitative heckle that Hylam P. Hector wrote and the professionally paced artificial hyde turned out by ”Augusta J. E. Wilson’, we have forgotten to tell how fertile the man’s imagination was, somewhere in his crowded brain.
On this particular night, that imagination had caught fire, perhaps lit by that one-and-ten thousandth O!.
Whatever, by the time he’d brushed his teeth, gargled, counted the hairs on his head, and done his chin exercises, his mind was still full of moon and exotic shores. He didn’t fall into his gaping sheets, but lifted them up and inserted himself between them. And by this time, his thinking had spread to shadows. He laid his head on the pillow and glanced out through the diaphanous curtain, at the pale bright moon. He still wasn’t sleepy. The curtain fluttered, and he thought to close the window, but the bed felt as delicious as the arms of a beautiful woman who is coming through the window now, her long hair flowing, and a tentacle reaching from behind her toward the bed.
His lungs closed, mid-suck.
The tentacle ran its tip over his left ear, then caressed his chin, what there was of it. And it seemed to find him good. Whether it was a part of her or some limb from another monster of polypous perversion, this diabolic limb was followed by a horde of silent others.
He knew the eyes of the beasts were upon him–beaks ready, maws opening, bodies smelling of reek from the farthest eaons–and with each new horror that inched forward, his lungs contracted and his throat clutched harder . . . then released enough to let him scream–that fine high wail of a boiling lobster.
And all that slink and drop and terror was just the first assault and reaction. That first woman and the tentacles, just the first of many creatures, gods, horrors–each freshly risen, driven, called from the unspeakable reaches of hauntingness, that visited him that night.
He held his breath, exploded, screamed, writhed till his sheets turned to cream cheese and his pillow to aged Parmesan–and still the dog we know as Ibsen but who Hylam Pituitary Hector called Rover when he called him a name at all, never lifted more than his floppy right ear in the bedroom’s direction–and that, merely in a wishful surmise.
If only that fain poet had restrained, just one ‘O!’–(or even drafted just the ‘O’ without also throwing in that perpendicular projectile strapped to its back) think what would have happened. Ibsen would have gone forth to grab and dispatch with a shake of his head, each and every thing that had flown, crept, emanated, and oozed in over that window-sill, even the Tentacled One. And who knows? He might have succeeded. His strong jaws might have made hamburger of even the most dread overconsonanted god.
For after all, he was a brave dog; and faithful to his duty–before the fall-out.
By 3:40 am, however, Ibsen was a changed beast. He felt he was on the cusp of solving the problem of the hole, and just needed to sleep on it.
At 8:04, Ibsen woke groggily. He had always hated that alarum. It was still ringing, an untoward that had never occurred.
Ibsen marched to the bedroom door, wrenched it open, and beheld what was left of his master–perhaps a spleen, and his pipe. Telltale sucker prints led out the window.
[Ibsen walks down the hall, trying not to wag his tail, but the observant can see it sway slightly before he exits stage right, in the direction of the kitchen.]
ACT, THE CLIMAX
In the next-door rose garden, sun shining brightly upon.
LITTLE OLD LADY. [Her wrinkles look character-filled. She wears a pair of garden gloves and is throwing oaths at something we aren't privy to see on those gorgeous, big-headed blooms.] Damn you to asphalt! [She hears something coming up behind, puts a hand to her ear, and her face lights up. Suddenly she turns as if she forgets that she is not a young college girl. The object of her affections is the dog we know as Ibsen.]
IBSEN. [Drops bone at her feet. He gives her a wag-tail.]
LITTLE OLD LADY. [clasping hands in glee, and regarding the dog with upholsterer's eyes] I wonder. How soft do you like your bed? [She takes off her gloves and throws them and her secateurs into a trug, which she forgets as she trips up her kitchen stairs with Ibsen at her heel. They enter the kitchen triumphantly, and the door slams behind them, unattended.]
[A sound like a small bird singing in a shower wafts from the kitchen window.]
LITTLE OLD LADY. [still offstage, singing the words] I’ll put on the roast, but I never asked. Do you like stuffing?
IBSEN. [also still offstage] Tail-wag [uttered with a slight dip of sadness. He already misses the library next door.]
THE PLAY’S END
But that is why dogs don’t appreciate plays.
Ibsen, being a dog, didn’t waste time in Regret. He walked at the heels of the little old lady, through the kitchen and down the hall.
Ibsen’s nose twitched. He realised that he’d never been in this part of the house, and a strange, exciting smell emanated from the closed door. The floor boards groaned and grizzled under the LOL’s heels. It was that old a house. She reached out and tried to turn the china doorknob, but it didn’t budge.
She gripped her hand, grimacing, and inadvertently looked down at Ibsen. He understood completely, suffering from a touch of lumbago himself. Up he leapt, and that doorknob didn’t dare give his jaws trouble, not while the door itself was subject to his claws.
He’d looked back at the LOL, forgetting not to wag his tail. She went into the room ahead of him and . . . he didn’t know what to think.
The walls and ceiling were hairy and scaled with many thought-provoking artefacts, and two walls were lined with bookcases so filled to bursting that Ibsen’s tongue lolled. The LOL pulled out one oversize book, opened it and laid it on the floor beside Ibsen.
He’d never known a hole so wide and deep could exist.
Her laugh was a bit embarrassed. “I don’t know why I’m showing you a tourist shot. But Frank took it the day we started that trip.”
Ibsen nosed the book closed and read the words: Tectonic Geomorphies of the World’s Five Grandest Canyons; an Introduction [and the author] Franklin G. Orpington.
A small thin book was placed briefly on the floor unopened and then snatched up again with an embarrassed giggle. But not before Ibsen had had a chance to read, “The Cavnericolous Fauna of the Dambool Region in Ceylon” and author: V. Patchoulevsky.
Then a large ball the size of a watermelon was lowered in her arms for Ibsen’s inspection. It smelled like a mouse dipped in shaving soap.
“I picked up this in Trinkamalee. That’s in Ceylon, you know.”
She actually watched Ibsen when she talked, though he would have said that the strange ball was far more interesting than him.
“It was just upcountry from Trinkamalee that I was laid up with beriberi. I didn’t want us to leave. After all, we were finding species of bats that no one had thought possible.”
Ibsen was entranced. But why did she kept these treasures here? Of course! he blinked. They’re much too precious to expose to the unworthy. Without realising it, he sat up straight. His right ear slightly rose.
“Oh!” the LOL said (Ibsen’s eyes were misty by then, but not so much that he didn’t surmise from a print of a young beautiful woman and a handsome man with a full chin, that her name was Violeta Patchoulevsky, Dr. Patchoulevsky.)
“You must be suffering terribly!”
Ibsen hadn’t noticed, but n
ow that she had said so, he felt like a feather had been shoved up his nose, as the full effect of the camphor hit him.
His head wagged back and forth without him having the faintest control, and in shame and embarrassment, his nose shrunk till it was all wrinkles, and he stopped breathing and his eyes grew big enough that his eyebrow hedge parted . . . and he sneezed–all over the cover of that magnificent book that he had opened again and had been greedily reading surreptitiously.
“How thoughtless of me!” she cried. “If you’re to live here, we must get rid of these.”
This was all too much for Ibsen.
With every ounce of passion in him, the dog who was inexpressive as a barber’s floor and as silent as the tomb, rested one paw on the edge of the book, the other paw in the Dr’s lap, lifted his head, and howled.
Dr. Patchoulevsky was not only not a dog, but was a zoologist. Even so, she understood.
At six o’clock she served dinner. Since the night was cold outside and sopping, she made him lamb shank stew and noodle pudding with raisins; and she had a bowl of tomato soup over crackers.
After an hour’s silent companionable digesting, she put on her coat and a souwester hat, and picked up a large disorderly handbag, and they went for a walk. Not just around the block, no. This walk was a dog‘s walk. She waited at every tree that he needed to inspect, didn’t cluck when he squatted and took his time, and they walked past all the streets with houses till they got to the end of town and just past that, to a field.
Then she rummaged in her handbag and found a fresh bone that she gave to Ibsen.
He took it and dropped it solemnly. Then he dug its hole, savouring the pleasure of reaching in with both paws, flinging back the sticky mud, judging depth, slope, width of base. Barking sonarous soundings. By the time he dropped the bone into that hole, he’d never heard such a satisfying thud. And this time, when he filled the hole, he knew exactly why he had to cheat and dig another hole to top up the important one.
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