The Last Adventure of Dr. Yngve Hogalum

Chapter 3 ~ Magnetron Hatches a Scheme

"When I began to speak, they listened attentively, but as the details of my proposal became known, they shifted uneasily in their posture and demeanor."

It was late afternoon several weeks after Dr. Hogalum had been laid to rest. I had called a meeting of the Hogalum Society, our first without Dr. Hogalum serving as chair.  The mood was somber, and the usual high jinks of the ordinarily garrulous Hogalums was nowhere in evidence.  My housekeeper Mrs. Mackenzie was grim but effectual, shuffling her squat, ample figure to and fro in the pursuance of her household duties.  My butler Anders seemed his usual taciturn self except that his characteristically poor posture had worsened to a dreadful slouch.  Pung the gardener remained pitiably disconsolate, his bantam frame crumpled on the floor in an inert ball of melancholy.  He had wept loudly and uncontrollably for two full days, his wailing eventually subsiding into a forlorn moaning.  Even his cats seemed listless.

At my direction, Anders brought out five tall glasses of Dr. Hogalum's Inebriol Elixir as a nostrum for our suffering as much as for refreshment.  At his full height, Anders was a full two feet taller than Mrs. Mackenzie, but I observed as they exited the room that they now appeared equal in height, so burdened by grief was his stature.  At length, I arose and addressed the assembled Hogalum brothers with what amounted to a eulogy for our fallen champion.  We became aware that Pung had failed to leave the room when he began to weep once again, his melancholy rejuvenated by my honorific memorial.  Tears gushed anew from behind outlandishly thick spectacles, flowing down his flushed, soggy cheeks.

Anders re-entered the room and hoisted Pung from the floor, cradling him in his enormous arms, and commenced to carry him from the room.  I asked him to deposit Pung on a settee at the far end of the room and leave him be, and also to fetch Mrs. Mackenzie from her kitchen so that all interested parties might be present to hear the heartening news of my forthcoming ambitious undertaking.

In my mind's eye, a wave of contentment and gratitude was to have swept away the pall of sadness and tribulation smothering that room, but it was not so.  When I began to speak, they listened attentively, but as the details of my proposal became known, they shifted uneasily in their posture and demeanor.  Soon they had taken on the passionate esprit de corps of a Salem witch hunt—with me as their wicked quarry.

Valkusian reacted first and most ardently, swearing in his mother tongue and unceremoniously exiting the room in a plume of pipe smoke.  "Deplorable tomfoolery" he called it, as I recollect.  Cerebelli attacked my methodology and my motives, snorting out a series of exaggerated satires of my plan.  Coburn laughed uproariously at my "inimitable waggery."  Satyros wore a horrified expression but remained silent.  I believe he was at that time concerned for my sanity.

Mrs. Mackenzie's face went crimson with apoplectic fury (which was not at all unusual) while a barely perceptible penumbra of displeasure fell sparingly over Anders' implacable countenance (which was tantamount to an unrestrained outburst in Anders' case).  Only Pung seemed to have received any solace from my proposed course of action.  He began to titter fatuously, waving his fingers and directing a dreamy expression toward the ceiling.

I was mortified.  I had hoped to receive assistance and guidance from my compatriots but clearly nothing of the sort would transpire.  Stinging with disappointment, I resolved impetuously to begin work at once—in secret—and was suddenly imbued with an unshakeable confidence in my own resourcefulness.  Of course, at that moment I had no conception of the difficulties with which I soon would be presented.  Had I known how truly difficult my task would prove to be, I might never have made the attempt.