The Secret Laundry Monster Files

by John R. Erickson

  Yes, we had ample reason for avoiding a direct confrontation with this fearsome creature. No dog would have risked it, not even Drover who has only a tiny stub of a tail. We continued backing away from him . . . it . . . her . . . whatever it was, until we had backed ourselves into the yard fence. There, we came to a halt. Unfortunately, the creature kept slouching toward us.

  By this time I had gone into Fully Raised Hair, which means I had lifted a strip of hair that began at the base of my head and ran all the way out to the end of my tail. Sometimes we have trouble getting those tail hairs to lift, but this time . . . no problem. They were up and ready.

  Well, when we felt our hindmost parts making contact with the fence, I knew at once that we had . . . well, run out of yard, I guess you might say, and it was time to make some tough decisions.

  “Drover, what’s your feeling here?”

  “Scared.”

  “I know, but I mean your feelings about our next move. Should we make a stand and fight to the death?”

  “Oh, let’s not.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. I mentioned it as one of our options, but I agree that it’s not our best. That leaves us with a couple of other responses. I suggest we do a blast of Code Three Barking. If that doesn’t stop him, well, we may have to make a run for it. What do you say to that?”

  “Let’s run first and bark later . . . if we’re still alive.”

  “No. That would bring us some momentary satisfaction, but later we’d look back and regret that we didn’t . . .” The monster raised his arms. For a moment my tongue was frozen against the top of my mouth. “Lurr lurr lumlum lurr lurr lum.”

  “Hank, I can’t understand you, help, murder, Mayday!”

  “I said, this is getting out of hand. Go straight to Code Three Barking. Ready? Let ’er rip, Drover, give him the full load, don’t hold anything back for tomorrow!”

  And with that, we braced our legs against the ferocious recoil of the Code Three Barkings and cut loose with a withering barrage. Most monsters can be stopped in their tracks by such a display of bark­fire. Not this one. He kept coming.

  “Okay, Drover, that didn’t work. He must have raised his Barking Shield. We can’t touch him with these barks.”

  “Who’d want to touch him?”

  “Exactly my point. We have no choice now but to abandon our Last Stand Situation and go to a Second-to-Last Last Stand.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means run, Drover, run for your life! If you can fire off a few barks over your shoulder, so much the better. We’ve got to sound the alarm. Loper and Sally May must be warned so they can begin evacuating the house. We must save the children!”

  “Oh my gosh!”

  “We’ll regroup on the north side of the house. Ready?”

  ZOOM!

  Drover was already gone, the little weenie. He’d left without orders, a plan, anything. Our front line had collapsed, our troops were in disarray, it was every dog for himself. I took one last glimpse at the . . . yikes! I cancelled the last glimpse and went straight into the Rocket Dog Pro­ce­dure—hit full throttle on all engines and went roaring away.

  Maybe you think I didn’t dare to fire off a few Over-the-Shoulder Barks, but you’re wrong. It was dangerous, maybe even foolish of me, but I unloaded several blasts. I knew they wouldn’t stop him, but maybe they would slow him down.

  Within seconds, I was approaching Light Speed. I streaked around the corner of the house and looked up just in time to see . . . Drover. He was sitting there like a rabbit in headlights, his eyes as big as pies.

  “Get out of the way! I can’t stop this thing!”

  It was too late.

  CRASH!

  It was a terrible collision. Dogs flew in all directions in a blur of feet, legs, and ears. At first I feared that the impact had knocked poor Drover all the way out into the horse pasture, I mean, at such speed those collisions can cause unbelievable damage.

  I landed in Sally May’s flower bed, smashing a whole bunch of . . . uh . . . flowers, so to speak, Sally May’s precious flowers. In the deadly silence that followed the wreck, I feared the worst: I was still alive and would be captured by Sally May, who would march me out behind the house and cut off my tail with her butcher knife.

  Fortunately, I was spared that awful fate, but then I began to realize that I was badly hurt. I had lost all feeling below my ears. I couldn’t move. Perhaps I was paralyzed.

  “Drover? Drover, can you hear me?”

  His faint voice came from the darkness. “I’m not sure. What did you say?”

  “I haven’t said anything yet. Are you hurt?”

  “Yeah, I got run over by a truck.”

  “That was no truck, that was me. By the time I saw you, it was too late. Sorry. How badly are you hurt?”

  “Terrible. I can’t move. I think I’m paralyzed.”

  “Rubbish. You’re not paralyzed. Get up and come here at once.”

  “Well . . . I guess I could try. Hey, I can move this foot . . . and this leg moves and . . . oh boy, I can stand up! I’m not paralyzed!”

  “See? What did I tell you? Now get yourself over here. We’ve got a problem.”

  I heard his footsteps, then his face emerged from the darkness. “Oh, hi. Gosh, you smashed Sally May’s flowers. I’ll bet she’s going to be mad.”

  “Sally May’s flowers are the least of our worries, Drover. We have a much more serious problem than mashed flowers.”

  “Yeah, that ghost.” He ran his gaze through the gloom. “I wonder where he went.”

  “Shhh, quiet. Our problem is even more serious than the Laundry Monster, Drover. You see, I’ve been badly injured. I fear that I’m . . . paralyzed.”

  He stared at me. “That’s what I said, and you said ‘rubbish.’ It kind of hurt my feelings.”

  “I said ‘rubbish’ because you weren’t paralyzed, and I knew it.”

  “How’d you know it?”

  “Because you’re a little hypocardiac, Drover. You’ve spent your whole life being sick and injured, but when it’s time to run from a fight, you always seem to do pretty well. My problem is real. I’m in bad shape. If the Laundry Monster comes, I’m afraid you’ll have to . . .” I heard a rush of wind. “Drover? Drover! Why you little weasel, come back here at once, and that’s a direct order!”

  He had abandoned me to my fake. To my fate, let us say. My only hope was that the terrible Laundry Monster had given up the chase and had found something . . .

  I heard the snap of a twig. My ears shot straight up and swiveled around to the west. I heard the faint rustle of footsteps in the grass.

  “Drover? Is that you? If it is, please identify yourself. Drover?”

  No answer. The footsteps were coming closer. My heart began to pound and I felt the hair rising on . . . I almost said “on my back,” but that was impossible. Don’t forget that I was paralyzed, horribly wounded, unable to move. Hencely, the hair on my back couldn’t have risen.

  It must have been something else.

  The sound of the footsteps reached my ears again. I lifted my head and . . . no, wait. I couldn’t have lifted my head, right? I must have been mistaken.

  In the dreadful silence, I waited and listened. Footsteps, the swish of grass, and then . . .

  “I am the ghost of Kalamazoooooooooooo!”

  HUH? Holy smokes, he was coming after me!

  “Drover, I order you to come here at once, do you hear me? We’re moving into a serious combat situation and I demand that you . . .”

  He was standing right beside me—not Drover, but the monster, the horrible Laundry Monster. I could almost feel his eerie presence, and then—hang on, this is getting into the heavy-duty scary stuff—I felt the cold, icy swish of his sheet passing across my . . .

  That was it, f
ellers, that’s all I could take. Suddenly new reserves of energy poured into my bodily parts and—you might find this hard to believe—my terrible paralysis was . . . well, cured. It was very mysterious, even miraculous, and I don’t pretend to understand how it happened, but it did.

  Poof! In the brink of an eyeball, somehow the bones in my broken neck welded themselves together and I was back in the Security Business. I didn’t waste a second. I leaped to my feet and burned a hole through the darkness and didn’t slow down until I had reached a spot just beneath Loper and Sally May’s bedroom window.

  There, I took up a defensive position and threw the last of my energy reserves into barking a Total Code Three Alert. Our friends at the house had to be warned.

  “Alert, alert! Alarm, alarm! Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. We have an enormous Laundry Monster running lose out here. Wake up the children! Get the gun! Evacuate the house at once! This is not a test. Repeat, this is NOT A TEST!”

  Having done my duty, I could only wait for help to arrive—and hope that I had warned them in time to avoid a catapestry.

  Catastrophe.

  (The worst part is over. The kids can come back now.)

  Chapter Five: The Case Goes Plunging in a New Direction

  Lights came on inside the house. I heard the murmur of voices and the pounding of feet. I didn’t move until I heard the back door open and saw the glow of the porch light. Only then did I dare to leave my spot and welcome my human friends to the battle.

  I crept westward, down the side of the house. As I rounded the northwest corner of the house, I found myself standing face to face with . . . okay, it was Loper. Whew! Boy, was I glad to see him! He was dressed in boxer shorts, cowboy boots, and his felt hat. He carried a flashlight in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

  The expression on his face was . . . well, angry. Maybe even ferocious. Good. If we had to go up against the monster, we would need all the ferociousness we could mutter. Muster.

  He heard me approaching and turned the flash­­light . . . ouch! . . . right into my eyeballs. Then he spoke.

  “What is it, Hank?”

  I did my best to explain the situation. See, I had caught Eddy the Rac playing with a sheet on the clothesline, and just as I was about to place him under arrest, this . . . this HUGE Laundry Monster jumped out of the bushes and . . . and he ATE poor Eddy, just gobbled him down in one bite, and then he . . . he attacked me and I fought him off as long as I could, and then . . . well, I barked for help. That was about it.

  Loper threw the beam of the flashlight around the yard. “I don’t see anything. Wait.” The light fell upon something lying in the grass. It was . . . big and light-colored, with pale stripes.

  There, you see? It was the Laundry Monster, I knew it, didn’t I tell him? Hey, there was proof, living proof, that I hadn’t made this whole thing up.

  He walked over and picked it up. It was . . . that is, it appeared to be a . . . sheet. An empty sheet. Loper’s eyes came at me like bullets, and he stalked over to where I was sitting. He held up the sheet in front of my, uh, nose.

  “What’s this?”

  Well, it was a . . . sheet, an empty sheet. And it was dirty. Soiled. And torn. But I could explain everything. See, when Laundry Monsters see light or people, they run. And sometimes they run right out of their sheets, so what we had here was the abandoned sheet of a . . . uh . . . former Laundry . . .

  Gulp. I had a feeling my story wasn’t selling. It was true, every word of it, but who would believe it?

  I could feel Loper’s gaze burning down at me. I began to melt. My head sank and I gathered my tail between my legs.

  “Playing with my wife’s clean sheets? In her yard? Well, buddy, I’ve got some advice for you. Get your little barking self out of this yard, and if you wake me up one more time . . .”

  Yes sir, but . . .

  He opened the gate. “Out, and don’t come back.”

  Yes sir, but . . . I slithered through the open gate, but not quick enough to avoid his boot on my tail section.

  Muttering under his breath, he went back into the house and slammed the door. The lights went out inside the house and silence fell around me.

  Fine. If that’s the way he wanted it, by George, the next time I saw a monster prowling around the house, I would just go back to sleep. What was the point of having a Head of Ranch Security if nobody paid attention to him?

  I had never been so outraged. I had risked my life. I might have been killed. The whole family might have been . . .

  HUH?

  Wait a minute, hold everything.

  I put my vast memory banks into Rewind and tried to recall every detail of the night’s drama. Eddy was there at the clothesline, right? He was playing with a sheet. Only seconds later, we got our first sighting of the . . . of the so-called Laundry Monster, and if my memory served me right, it had been Drover who had reported it.

  Oh brother! Do you see the meaning of all this? Eddy was the phony monster! The little twerp had pulled the sheet over his . . . Drover would pay for this, I mean, I would see to it that he spent the next two weeks with his nose in the corner.

  And as for Eddy, the next time I saw him, I was going to . . .

  HUH?

  I shot a glance to my left. To my right. Who cares? He was standing right there to my left. Eddy the Rac. Can you believe that? Just as I had figured out his latest scam, he had presented himself for the thrashing he so richly deserved.

  He sat up on his haunches, grinned, and waved his paw. “Oh. Hi. How’s it going?”

  A growl began to rumble deep in my throatalary region. “Why you little cockroach! Did you think you could fool me with that phony ghost business?”

  “Wasn’t me. Honest.”

  “Honest? Ha! How dare you use the word? Hey, pal, I had the deal figured out from the start. It was you under that sheet, Eddy, and you thought it would be fun to scare the beejeebers out of us dogs, right? Well, you didn’t fool me, not for a minute, and now I’m going to have the pleasure of . . .”

  He shrank back and held up his hands in surrender. “Wasn’t me. Honest. I can prove it.”

  I caught myself at the very last second. “You can prove it? Okay, I’ll give you one minute to argue your case.”

  “Five. Give me five minutes.”

  “No. I’ll give you two minutes.”

  “Four. Just four. Four’s all I need.”

  “Forget it, Charlie. My heart is hard and cold on this deal.”

  “Three? Three minutes, that’s it.”

  I gave it some thought. “Okay, I’ll give you three minutes to prove what can’t be proved.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “And Eddy, even if you prove it, I won’t believe it. You know why? Because you’re a sneak, and nobody but an idiot would believe anything you said.”

  “Right. No problem. Here we go.” He rolled his little raccoon hands around. “I saw the ghost.”

  “Ha. I know you did, only you saw him from the inside.”

  “No, outside, just like you. How big was he?”

  “How big? Well, I . . .”

  “Small? Tiny? Little bitty? Teenie-weenie?”

  I gave him a knowing smirk. “Eddy, if you thought he was teenie-weenie, you didn’t see what I saw.”

  “Big, huh?”

  “Big doesn’t even come close to it. The guy was huge.”

  “How tall? Three feet? Four feet?”

  “Four feet? Ha, what a laugh. No, Eddy, the thing I saw was at least . . .”

  “Seven feet?”

  “No, eight. He was eight feet tall if he was an inch.” I stared at Eddy and suddenly realized . . . “Wait a minute. Is this some kind of trick?”

  He must have gotten tired of rolling his hands together, because he reached up and starte
d messing with my ears. That’s a raccoon for you. Their hands are always moving.

  He gave me a wink. “No trick. How tall am I?”

  “I don’t know, Eddy, but you’re tall enough to reach my ears.”

  “Eight feet?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “Seven feet?”

  “No.”

  “Six feet?”

  “Eddy, if you’re trying to suggest . . . What’s your point?”

  He clapped his hands together. “Couldn’t have been me. I’m too short. Bingo.”

  I marched several steps away. He was moving too fast for me. On the one hand, I didn’t trust him, not even a little bit, but on the other hand . . .

  I marched back over to him. “Okay, I’ll admit that what you’ve said makes a certain amount of sense. The problem is that you said it, and I don’t believe anything you say.”

  He threw a finger into the air. “More proof? Fine. That was a king-size sheet, right?”

  “I don’t know, Eddy, I didn’t check the label.”

  “It was a king-size sheet. Came off a king-size bed, right?”

  “Well, I suppose . . .”

  “Wouldn’t fit me. I wear a pint-size sheet. Wrong size. Bingo.” He chirped a squeaky little laugh. “Listen. Got a deal, you and me.”

  “Hold it, halt, stop! Do you think I’m nuts? Hey, you still haven’t convinced me about the monster business, and now you want to talk to me about a deal? What’s wrong with you?”

  He blinked his beady little eyes. “Sorry. Take your time. I’ll wait.”

  He picked up a weed stem and started chewing on it, while I tried to sort through the evidence he had presented.

  Evidence #1: Reliable witnesses had reported the Laundry Monster to be eight feet tall.

  Evidence #2: Eddy was nowhere close to eight feet tall. Our careful scientific measurements had established that as fact.

  Evidence #3: Other reliable witnesses had reported that the Monster had been wearing a gorilla-size sheet.

  Evidence #4: We knew for a fact that Eddy was not a gorilla, or even close to being a gorilla. He was a shrimpy little raccoon.