• Waking Up •

The Hawkline Monster continued stirring in The Chemicals. It was now almost awake. The shadow sighed as the monster hovered on the edge of waking. The shadow dreaded again being a part of the next thing the monster would think up. He did not approve of the way the monster fooled with the Hawkline women, making them do things that were completely out of character. The transformation of one Hawkline sister into an Indian, the shadow thought, was a very gross deed.

There was no way of knowing what the monster would come up with next. No thing was too terrible for the monster not to consider and of course its powers of dark invention had just barely been tapped.

The light which was the monster continued to toss and turn in The Chemicals as waking roared toward it like an early winter storm.

The shadow sighed again.

God-damn it.

Suddenly the monster was awake. It stopped stirring about and lay very quietly in The Chemicals. It looked over at the shadow. The shadow stared helplessly back, resigned to its fate.

The light looked away from the shadow. The light looked about the room. The light was anxious. It continued looking about the room, still a little sleepy but rapidly becoming energized. The light felt something threatening but it didn’t know what it was.

Momentarily, it would be in full control of its powers.

The Hawkline Monster felt that something was very wrong.

The shadow watched its nervous master.

The monster’s mind, like a tree in an early winter storm, shook off the leaves of sleep.

The shadow wished that the Hawkline Monster were dead, even though it would probably have to follow the monster into oblivion.

Anything was better than the living hell of having to be in partnership with the Hawkline Monster and do all these evil things.

The shadow remembered back to previous stages of The Chemicals and how exciting it was to be created by Professor Hawkline. At that time the light was benevolent, almost giddy with the excitement of having just been created. There was a future with the possibility of help and joy for all mankind. Then the light changed in attitude. The light concealed its personality change from Professor Hawkline.

The light started pulling little pranks that the professor let pass as accidents. Something falling over or something being changed into something else, so that the professor thought that he had made the mistake or something had been mislabeled and then the light found that it could leave the jar and move about and of course the poor innocent shadow of the light was forced to follow and become a participant-observer in pranks that gathered in momentum until they became acts of evil.

After while Professor Hawkline knew that there was something very wrong with The Chemicals but he kept thinking right up to the moment that the monster did that terrible thing to him that he would be able to correct the balance of The Chemicals and complete the experiment with humanitarian possibilities for the entire world.

But that was never to be because one afternoon when the professor was upstairs working on a new formula in his study the light pulled its most gross evil prank upon him. The shadow shuddered to think about it.

The light was at last totally awake and knew that it was being severely threatened by the people upstairs and it had better take care of that threat right now.

The light crawled out of The Chemicals and balanced on the rim of the jar in preparation for departure and the shadow reluctantly prepared to follow.