• The Hawkline Diamonds •

By the light of the morning sun the house was gone and in its place was a small lake floating with burned things. Everybody got up off the ground and walked down to the shores of the new lake.

The Hawklines looked at the remnants of their previous life floating here and there on the lake. Professor Hawkline saw part of an umbrella and shuddered.

One of the Hawkline women noticed what had disturbed her father and reached over and took his hand. “Look, Susan,” she said to her sister and then pointed at a photograph floating out there.

Greer and Cameron looked at each other.

Susan!

“Yes, Jane,” was the reply.

Jane!

The Hawkline women had first names and another prank of that damn ingenious monster had been dispelled.

Some of the house was still smoldering at the edge of the lake. It looked very strange. It was almost like something out of Hieronymus Bosch if he had been into Western landscapes.

“I’m curious,” Cameron said. “I’m going to dive down into the basement and see if there’s anything left of that fucking monster.”

He took his clothes off down to a pair of shorts and dove into what just a few hours before had been a house. He was a good swimmer and swam easily down into the basement and started looking around for the monster. He remembered where the monster had been hiding before he poured the whiskey into The Chemicals.

He swam over there and found a handful of blue diamonds lying on the floor. The monster was nowhere in sight. The diamonds were very beautiful. He gathered them all together in his hand and swam upward out of the laboratory to the shore of the lake which had once been a front porch.

“Look,” he said, climbing up onto the bank. Everybody gathered around and admired the diamonds. Cameron was holding them in such a way as for there to be a shadow. The shadow of the diamonds was beautiful, too.

“We’re rich,” Cameron said.

“We’re already rich,” Professor Hawkline said. The Hawkline family was a very rich family in its own right.

“Oh,” Cameron said.

“You mean, you’re rich,” Susan Hawkline said, but you still couldn’t tell the difference between her and her sister Jane. So actually the name-stealing curse of the Hawkline Monster really hadn’t made that much difference, anyway.

“What about the monster?” Professor Hawkline said.

“No, it’s destroyed. When I poured that glass of whiskey in The Chemicals, that did it.”

“Yeah, it burned my house down,” Professor Hawkline said, suddenly remembering that he no longer had a house. He liked that house. It had contained the best laboratory he’d ever had and he thought that the ice caves made a good conversation piece.

His voice sounded a little bitter.

“Would you like to be an elephant foot umbrella stand again?” Greer said, checking in with his arm around a Hawkline woman.

“No,” the professor said.

“What are we going to do now?” Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house.

Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the Hawkline Monster.

“We’ll think of something,” Cameron said.