The Shrieking Horror
by Andrea M. Pawley
Andrea M. Pawley lives and writes in Washington, D.C.. She plans to start her own city quadrant as soon as the space-time continuum rips, and a new direction becomes available. Andrea attended Clarion West in 2017 and currently volunteers as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association Mentorship Program Coordinator. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. Andrea’s slightly odd takes on writing, art, and Washington D.C. can be found at www.andreapawley.com.
This story was originally published in The Nameless Songs of Zadok Allen and Other Things That Should Not Be, a March 2023 anthology edited by JayHenge Publishing.
Lavinia Honeytrap had not slept for three nights due in no small part to the wailing beast upon whose birth certificate she had written “Hereward Honeytrap” but who she inwardly referred to as “Little Monster.”
The infant, his appearance coinciding with the onset of Lavinia’s greatest troubles, had burst screaming from her nether regions during the darkest hour of the longest night six months ago. Although Hereward might be called “a beautiful boy” by easily-mesmerized strangers, in fact, the child was a voracious eater, a great insomniac, and, simply put, no use in her one-woman, one-parrot show “Lavinia and Mr. Prattle Talk Turkey.”
Like her mother before her, Lavinia Honeytrap had, preliminary to Little Monster’s advent, straddled the pinnacle of the dance hall and curious salon circuit. Mr. Prattle, last in a long line of Shakespeare-quoting parrots, was the somber half of the duo, and Lavinia the lively
ingénue. Through judicious management of her traditional entertainment income and augmentation of said via a series of petty, convenient burglaries, Lavinia had accumulated a large sum of cash and a small yet valuable reserve of purloined property.
Hereward Honeytrap changed all that.
On the positive side, Lavinia was pleased to discover that a larcenous proclivity was in Little Monster’s blood, too. He had stolen, with his own pudgy six-month-old hands, the queerest and most ornate metal ankh Lavinia had ever seen. The victim of Little Monster’s theft was none other than the infant’s accursed—Lavinia being the one to curse him—father, whose name Lavinia refused to speak so black were her thoughts on the subject of the man. Upon meeting his spawn, Hereward’s loathsome sire immediately set sail again for a far southern destination and some damned fate that Lavinia hoped was dismembranous.
The steam from the pathetic progenitor’s retreating ship had not yet disappeared from Boston Harbor when the authorities began making inquiries. Little Monster’s father, it seemed, was fleeing not only responsibility for his offspring, but also charges of pilfering a rare and valuable ankh destined for Miskatonic University’s eldritch collection. It was the same ankh Little Monster had so deftly lifted despite displaying no control over his tongue, his bowels, or the noxious odors that wafted from his body at all infernal hours.
Lavinia had no desire to dally in Massachusetts while officials obtained paperwork allowing them to inspect her possessions and to find other Honeytrap-liberated goods. She booked train passage to the farthest terminus of the Pacific Railways Line—Sacramento, California—for herself, Little Monster, and the parrot Mr. Prattle, in whose ample, false-bottomed cage lurked the majority of Honeytrap family wealth.
Too late, Lavinia understood that she should have asked the rail car attendant for Sacramento lodging recommendations before he and the others in Lavinia’s car were made to endure a stupefying series of sleepless nights compliments of the howling, hungry Hereward. Little Monster had not even begun to teethe. Only after that blessed event occurred might Lavinia dare to hope that the child would chew real food one day and fill his belly with enough sustenance to allow him to sleep for more than forty-five minutes at a time.
Little Monster’s mouth wasn’t the only orifice failing to produce. Over a thousand miles had passed since tears last accompanied Little Monster’s shouts. Suspecting since Cheyenne that the volume of Hereward’s turbulent proclamations was inversely related to his lacrimal productivity, Lavinia had begged from the master of the dining car a dish of onion slices to wave in front of her child’s face. Instead of crying, Little Monster grabbed at the mephitic mush and flung it about the cabin and his person.
Though lacking tears, Hereward nonetheless was possessed of a piercing oral range. It expanded the closer they came to Sacramento. The acoustics of a westward-bound Pacific rail car were madness-inducing. Little Monster could not be placated despite the various—and Lavinia suspected, occasionally laudanum-enhanced—liquids and soft breads pressed upon the child by the weary rail car denizens. Even the normally unperturbable Mr. Prattle had taken to frequent outbursts of the most disparaging Shakespeare quotes his bird brain could conjure.
It was midnight when they arrived in Sacramento, and the rail car attendant recommended to them the lodgings he said they deserved. Outside the grimy rail station, a frog-faced carriage driver lisped that, for a party that came so specifically recommended, he agreed there was no where else to stay but on Anura Street. The mad glint in the driver’s fevered eye did not bode well, but alternate accommodations would have to wait until Lavinia emerged from the far end of at least three hours of sleep. Until then, the remains of Mr. Prattle’s crackers would have to be enough to feed Little Monster.
With one hand on the bird cage and the other attempting to restrain Hereward, Lavinia climbed into the carriage. She girded herself for this final transit. Swampland slurped against the vehicle’s wheels. Mosquitos the size of puppies landed on Lavinia but were unable to pierce her tight-woven New England clothing with their summer-soft proboscises. A sheen of perspiration clung to Lavinia’s body like an unwanted second child.
The contraband ankh Lavinia bestowed upon Little Monster to occupy him tangled in his balled fist. The child swooped and circled the ankh in the air as if he were sketching obscure occult symbols intended to produce his greatest desires—a clean diaper, a platter of mashed potatoes, and a much larger audience at which he might shriek his indecipherable demands.
The gurgling convergence of Sacramento’s two shiftless, turgid rivers sounded in the distance. The noise grew louder with each creaking carriage turn but was never as distressing as the borborygmic din emanating from Little Monster’s stomach. The batrachian chauffeur led them through viscous gloom and past skulking Anura Street houses. Lavinia might have been disturbed by the street’s horrific stench if not for her acquired immunity to the malodorous productive capacity of her infant companion.
“‘Mine eyes smell onions,’” Mr. Prattle declared from his swinging, squeaking perch in the cage. Trained to properly attribute his Shakespeare quotes lest someone charge Lavinia instead of The Bard with salacious insinuations, Mr. Prattle added, “All’s Well That Ends Well.”
Lavinia offered the bird a wan smile and a bit of cracker previously stuck to Hereward’s forehead. “If only the onions had worked.”
With the ankh, Little Monster knocked himself on the skull in the place that had just held the cracker. He screeched without crying, which to Lavinia was strange beyond imagining.
Over the uproar of the clamorous child and the coital rivers, the lip-less carriage driver yelled. “Almost there!” His head lolled toward the looming, cyclopean house that shimmered like an oil slick at the end of the street. The rum-soaked way the house leaned toward Lavinia brought back fond recollections of the bacchanalian times before Little Monster’s arrival.
Once parked in the house’s starshine shadow, Lavinia paid her discomfiting driver a ruinous fare before helping herself, Hereward, and the caged Mr. Prattle down from the carriage. Lush, blackened vines that bled underfoot covered the stairs that Lavinia climbed to the porch. In the process of lashing cruel abuses upon the ponderous Honeytrap trunk, the driver delivered it to Lavinia’s side.
With Hereward on a hip, Lavinia set down Mr. Prattle’s cage and raised her free hand to the squid-shaped knocker splayed upon the door. A spark from the knocker shot toward the ankh in Little Monster’s hand. One of the squid legs seemed to shift. Lavinia made a mental note to cut back on her absinthe consumption.
The door swung inward to reveal a short woman well-armored against the attentions of the opposite sex. A lumpy black dress shrouded her form, and a dark lace veil about her face revealed only enough to suggest that her visage was best kept hidden.
“Welcome,” the woman said in the garbled, high-browed voice of a recently-drowned banker’s step-mother. “As the proprietress here, I am honored to host such esteemed guests as yourselves.”
Lavinia eyed the woman for a sign that news of East Coast Honeytrap exploits had reached Anura Street ahead of them. “You’ve heard of us then?”
“Of course.” The proprietress gestured to Lavinia with a too-large, gloved hand that appeared two fingers short of the standard design. “Do come in.”
With a glance over her shoulder, Lavinia searched the street for portents of police. The only lurker in evidence was the carriage driver heaving Lavinia’s trunk into the house and further tarnishing his reputation with a smile that anticipated additional remuneration.
Sleep-deprived as she was, Lavinia knew the ride already had cost more than enough. Before Lavinia could gather her thoughts on the matter, the proprietress produced from a fold in her dress what appeared to be a snail in all the wrong colors—midnight black, slime green, and a most-revolting tutu pink—and flung it. Little Monster reached for the polluted mollusk, but the driver’s blue tongue shot out and caught it instead. Lavinia’s eardrums were pierced by Little Monster’s familiar scream of betrayal. With a terrible crunching and a satisfied gulp, the thin-lipped carriage driver hopped back to his vehicle.
Lavinia glanced at Mr. Prattle for confirmation of all she had just seen. The bird was frozen in terror, his beak uncharacteristically sealed shut. Another parrot part attempted communication but without the announcement that often accompanied the dropping of a meadow muffin to the cage floor. Lavinia looked again at the proprietress’s hands to confirm that they were, in fact, strange, and not just one of several signs that Lavinia was experiencing sleep deprivation-induced hallucinations.
Ten gloved fingers were on the proprietress’s hands. The world hadn’t turned on end. Lavinia Honeytrap just needed to close her eyes while prone in a room that adjoined a sound-proof nursery.
Taking an invigorating breath of the foul air, Lavinia led her insomniac entourage into the Anura Street house.
Beyond the proprietress lay a narthexic foyer that appeared to have eaten a chorus of Christmas carolers and, after a lengthy period of digestion, regurgitated their inedible parts. Red velvet drapes hung from the walls with a sickening brightness, and a thin carpet the color of dying grass lurked underfoot. Overhead, a half-rat, half-monkey shape that had been tortured into a crystal chandelier burned like a waking nightmare. Little Monster reached a tiny, demanding finger toward the multi-faceted fixture. His pudgy arm having proved too short, Hereward yowled his displeasure.
The proprietress pulled aside a corner of her veil to reveal a single eye, the skin around which had a decidedly gray-green cast. Her gaze trained on Lavinia’s progeny. Little Monster shoved the ankh’s rounded end into his mouth and bellowed past it.
A gurgle like a slime-clogged fountain sounded in the proprietress’s throat. “He doesn’t sleep much at night, does he?”
From somewhere in this afflicted house, a bed called to Lavinia. “He’s just fussy from the carriage ride. Aren’t you, Hereward?”
Mr. Prattle cut in. “‘More of your conversation would infect my brain.’ Coriolanus.”
“Don’t mind the parrot.” Lavinia flicked a cracker corner off of Little Monster’s shirt and toward the caged Mr. Prattle. He caught the morsel. “Hunger makes him vengeful.”
“‘I scorn you, scurvy companion.’” Mr. Prattle munched. “Henry IV.”
“Is your parrot perhaps a virgin?” the proprietress said.
Mr. Prattle’s neck feathers fluffed the threat of a slowly-pecked death.
“Um…” Lavinia recalled the many times she had seen the parrot courting his water dish.
“Or is there at least a tasty morsel of meat on this sad descendant of Mesozoic bones?”
The minacious proprietress was rewarded with a cluck from Mr. Prattle. “‘I do desire we may be better strangers. As You Like It.”
A cascade, slimy and tepid, fell across Lavinia’s arm. She looked down, past Little Monster’s tufted scalp to where drool coated her flesh. Joy like lightning struck her. It was the sign she had been awaiting for six months. Hereward was beginning to teethe. Someday he would chew. Lavinia would sleep again!
With a hank of her dress, Lavinia wiped a tear of joy from her eye and a curtain of saliva from her body. To Lavinia’s unbalanced vision, the ankh in Little Monster’s hand had begun to luminesce.
“Your room is already prepared.” Effortlessly, the proprietress, who appeared to have grown several inches taller, lifted Lavinia’s trunk full of belongings.
“But we haven’t spoken about the cost.”
“Nearness to such an illustrious presence is payment enough.”
Little Monster caterwauled, but the proprietress’s delusions about Lavinia’s party had the slippery aura of opportunity.
Her own hands full of bird cage and child, Lavinia Honeytrap followed the loping mistress through a maze of staircases, more leading down than up, plus hallways whose widths varied from trunk-wide to yawning spaciousness. Little Monster had to be restrained from grabbing misshapen sculptures jutting from walls and from seizing embalmed animal snouts protruding into their path. Candles flickered at the ends of long corridors that Lavinia’s party consistently failed to reach before turning. From somewhere came the sound of water dripping. When a great wind blew through the house, Mr. Prattle briefly knocked himself out trying to fly from his cage.
The proprietress stopped suddenly and without regard to the common preference to keep one’s distance. In a most distressing manner, Lavinia banged into the woman, who set down the trunk.
“You can leave the bird there.” The proprietress pointed to a side table dripping with a gelatinous purple substance.
Mr. Prattle tutted. Lavinia Honeytrap met his glare with a look intended to remind him of his propensity for going off-script to the detriment of their joint income. The proud psittacine jumped from his perch and down to his false-bottomed cage floor. Defiantly, he scraped a clawed foot against the metal that hid their savings.
With no interest in taking a loss during this trip, Lavinia nevertheless was compelled to remind Mr. Prattle about his precarious position. “Perhaps tomorrow night my parrot can stay here if he doesn’t behave.” Lavinia’s eyes narrowed at her partner lest he quote MacBeth.
From the proprietress’s throat came an inhuman sound, like a hamster had been taught to laugh before it feasted on your fingertips. “As you say—tomorrow night.”
Lavinia contemplated whether it might have been better to try catching a snatch of sleep back at the rail station while Mr. Prattle stood guard dressed in his pirate costume. “Will it be much longer to get to our room?”
“What is time to those who know the void?”
The proprietress’s tone had changed in a way Lavinia’s sleep-starved brain almost recognized but could not understand.
A door was opened. They plodded into what appeared to be the original Yule-smeared foyer, though its color had moldered to an indescribable hue. Thick black mud seeped through the cracks between the front door and its frame. Not a bed was in sight.
“We have arrived,” the proprietress declared.
Lavinia contemplated reposing atop the dark, encroaching ooze. “It is perhaps a bit moist in here.”
The proprietress’s nostrils flared with a commodious inhalation. “The great riparian city of Sacramento journeys into and out of the swampland just as R’lyeh sinks to the ocean floor and rises back up again.”
Lavinia opened her mouth to protest not only the unstable nature of the Anura Street house, but also the circuitous, exhausting journey back to an even more decrepit version of the moribund foyer. Before Lavinia’s head of steam had built sufficiently to power the torrent of objections piling up in her mind, the proprietress swept back a drapery. Beyond it lay another room that contained the most agreeable-looking bed Lavinia had ever seen.
But for her armload of burdens, Lavinia might have run toward the longed-for berth. The coverlet called seductively to her. Squelching heavily across the room, Lavinia managed not to collapse before the ambrosial trundle.
“It’s more than I could have hoped for.” Weary gratitude choked Lavinia. Tears so copious they might have been Little Monster’s missing lacrimal emissions filled her eyes and turned the peculiar light emanating from the room’s closet into a hundred pulsating prisms.
Lavinia set Mr. Prattle and his cage down in a puddle. The possibility of sleep dangled before Lavinia like an unguarded diamond bracelet. Hereward tugged at his mother’s collar. The sensation was but a dim demand with little appeal compared to the bewitching bed’s allure. Distantly, Little Monster bawled. He beat the ankh against his mother’s chest.
Carefree words floated out of Lavinia. “I’m just going to rest for a moment. Then I’ll get my boy something to eat.”
“‘O you beast! I’ll so maul you and your toasting-iron, that you shall think the devil has come from hell!’ King John.”
The teratoid proprietress smiled, suddenly near. Behind her veil, too many teeth showed. Her clothes were different—like Lavinia’s own but bulging against the clasps and zips with girth where Lavinia had none.
“I know you won’t mind if I hold him.” The proprietress reached for the shrieking, clinging Little Monster. He was lifted away. Glistening tears matted his eyelashes.
“Would you…” Lavinia tried to remember if she needed to sleep or if she needed to wake.
“The chaos that cannot be contained,” the proprietress said from a chasmic distance. “If I died now, I would be fulfilled.”
“Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered. Cymbeline.”
Only for a moment would Lavinia’s back touch the beautiful bed. That was all she needed, just a snatch of sleep. Then she would take Little Monster again. He never let anyone but Lavinia hold him anyway.
An insidious humming rose up from beneath the floorboards. The noise was queerer than anything bubbling from the quaintest churches of Upstate New York and other godforsaken places. Lavinia’s back connected with the bed, and it was as if strong, gentle hands were caressing her worries away. She slithered into the covers. Her eyes closed, and her mind sought the shroud of sleep as insistently as Little Monster reached stickily for his mother.
Wakefulness hit Lavinia like an ornate ankh flung across the room. Something was terribly wrong. There had been tears in Little Monster’s eyes. He was crying. Lavinia’s dear demented child was being harmed!
The ankh that hit Lavinia’s forehead bounced to smack Mr. Prattle’s cage. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman! King Lear!”
Lavinia tried to sit up. The treacherous bed linen restrained her. She squirmed. Only her head could move. She whipped it from side to side like she might, with her neck, saw through the sheets. When Lavinia cried out, Little Monster was louder.
The proprietress held Hereward high in the direction of the open closet door. The horrid woman chanted in a guttural, incomprehensible language. Inside the closet lay nothingness. An icy gust from the void whipped back the proprietress’s veil so that her face was fully visible. But for the gray-green skin and the fifteen-pounds-too-heavy form, the proprietress looked exactly like the woman who stared back at Lavinia from the mirror.
“Now I will believe that there are unicorns,” Mr. Prattle said.
Lavinia wrenched at her perfidious restraints. “The Tempest?”
“No, really. Now I will believe there are unicorns.”
Lavinia pulled free an arm. “First, you take my son!” She elbowed the bed in its center. Something deep in the mattress seized up. “Then you insinuate I haven’t lost the baby weight!”
The proprietress’s now-bilious eyes turned on Lavinia. “You will cower before the Great Old One this very night and be sacrificed to him. Nyarlathotep in his infant form shall rule over Sacramento. I shall be his dark guide. He will venture out nightly from the temple here. His dark presence will haunt the city, unleashing a tide of terror that will banish the spoken word and leave only wailing where language once lived. Sacramento will become an inky city of baleful legend. Surrender hope of ever seeing the light again, for you shall not.”
Throwing off the tangled covers, Lavinia leaped from the bed. “Unhand my child, vile priestess! Hereward may be a monster, but he is my Little Monster!”
A nauseating, fetorous gust battered the room. It wasn’t coming from the void. It was coming from Lavinia’s child.
Raising Mr. Prattle’s cage like a weapon, Lavinia raged at the abductress. “Are you beyond insane? Did you feed my boy broccoli?”
The parrot squealed. “Unquiet meals make ill digestions! The Comedy of Errors!”
The wicked woman wilted, but not because of Lavinia’s shouts. The proprietress groveled in the direction of the closet void, where a hideous shadow was gaining form. A loathsome shape, only a fraction of the creature that must have towered to maddening proportions, resolved. It was Visible through the door, Lavinia beheld a closed eye, towering and viscid, behind whose lid the eyeball oscillated.
The body attached to the eye might be floating in a cold, oddly-lit void, but at least it was sleeping.
“Lucky bastard,” Lavinia said.
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” The parrot paused. “Hamlet?”
“No.” Lavinia Honeytrap had heard about this cosmic character before, but not in some dead poet’s prose. Hereward’s accursed father had spoken of the terror the same night Little Monster absconded with the eldritch ankh. The lascivious patrilineal lout said Cthulhu was so repellent and his proportions so deformed and horrifying that the mere sight of him would drive a person mad.
Lavinia examined the closed eye again to check that she wasn’t perhaps missing something obvious. The eye was just a giant orb flapped with skin. Unattractive, yes, but nothing about it approached even slightly the insanity-inducing day-to-day existence Lavinia Honeytrap had endured for the last six months with her child. Only a man who had never changed a diaper would call this creature horrifying. Cthulhu, great as he might think himself, held no mental sway over a sleep-impoverished woman in the process of raising a little one out of infancy’s derangement.
The trembling proprietress clearly was not a parent. In supplication, she collapsed to all fours. Little Monster tumbled, too, sliding out of the cultist’s hold. Lavinia gasped and dove, missing the child, who nevertheless landed safely on his bottom. The proprietress was not as lucky. A great tentacle with suckers the size of dinner plates flopped out of the closet door and seized the moaning woman. She was hurled into the void. The room’s freakish light swirled around where the proprietress had been.
The absence of the woman, who had so heartily tried and so rudely failed to imitate Lavinia, was a welcome shock, but not so great as the next jolt. Little Monster had fallen silent. Paralyzing joy squeezed Lavinia. She dared not breathe. The quiet stretched.
Onto his hands and knees, Little Monster rolled. Not far from him a tentacle twitched. More roiling than crawling, Hereward, a puerile babble bursting from him, made for the mire-beget appendage.
Lavinia lunged toward her boy. The terrible tentacle was faster than Lavinia but not fast enough. Little Monster pounced, gums-first, on the mucoid limb. A revolting squelch sounded despite Hereward’s lack of teeth. The great eye in the closet shot open. The corrupt tentacle wrapping Hereward tumbled him out to a thinner section. Laughing, Little Monster dangled in the air near the ceiling. The tentacle slid toward the closet door and the void beyond. Mr. Prattle, noble in word if not in deed, huddled beside his beloved water dish.
Bodily, Lavinia threw herself at the tentacle’s base, writhing astride it. Her heels dug in. Her fingernails pierced the putrescence. She held on.
“Hands off my boy, you fiend!” Lavinia’s own terrible gaze met the carbuncle-swathed eye. “If you want to see true insanity, just try taking him from me!”
The eye flinched. The Lavinia-wrapped tentacle contracted fractionally before lowering gently to the ground. Another tentacle had flapped out of the void and appeared to be entertaining the boy with a jouncy dance. Hereward gurgled.
Noise filled Lavinia Honeytrap’s mind. It wasn’t Little Monster. The cacophony resolved to a colossal interior voice.
MOVE AWAY FROM THE ENTRANCE TO THE VOID MS. HONEYTRAP WE DO NOT DESIRE YOUR KIND OF INSANITY HERE
Lavinia stood. She tensed as if to leap into the closet.
DO NOT MAKE ANY SUDDEN MOVES
“Or what?”
The eye looked from Little Monster to Lavinia and seemed to make a decision. The tentacle holding Hereward delivered him to his mother’s arms.
With the cuff of her sleeve, Lavinia wiped a chunk of Great Old One from Little Monster’s face.
IF YOU WOULDN’T MIND I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A QUICK WORD WITH NYARLATHOTEP
Lavinia stared back, uncomprehending.
HEREWARD
Smiling and unharmed, Little Monster burbled at her.
“There will be no talk of cowering and sacrifice,” Lavinia said.
YES MA’AM
“Go ahead then.” Lavinia nodded at the jittery, bulging eye. “But I will need to listen in.”
Solemnly, the eye blinked.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW INCARNATION NYARLATHOTEP EXCUSE ME I MEAN HEREWARD DO YOU REMEMBER THE STORY OF THE LITTLE AZATHOTH WHO CRIED WOLF
Little Monster spoke something adorable that might have been “no,” or perhaps it was “cake.”
HE WAS THE FIRST TO BE SACRIFI—
Lavinia cleared her throat.
—INVITED AGAINST HIS WILL TO INNSMOUTH AND NOW THE SOUNDS OF HIS ONGOING TORMENT ECHO ETERNALLY THROUGH THE VOID SO PLEASE SAVE YOUR NEXT SUMMONING FOR WHEN THE STARS ARE RIGHT
The blessed drool issuing forth from Little Monster’s mouth was noncommittal, but the eye appeared satisfied. It began to close. Lavinia stepped away from the tentacles, unencumbered now, as they slid back toward the closet opening. Their timid retreat stopped abruptly.
MS HONEYTRAP THE PROPRIETRESS SAYS THERE IS PORRIDGE IN THE CUPBOARD FOR HEREWARD AND FOR FLAVOR YOU COULD ADD A BIT OF THE CHICKEN FROM THE ICE BOX IT WAS BUTCHERED THIS MORNING.
Into the void, Mr. Prattle squawked, “‘My cousin’s a fool, and thou art another.’ Much Ado About Nothing.”
The closet door slammed shut, though the queer non-light stayed in the room.
The departed proprietress’s cupboard and ice box did, indeed, contain sufficient supplies to fill Little Monster’s stomach. The bounteous treasures didn’t end there. The rest of the house was replete with wealth old and new that made an ease of life in the ensuing years. Lavinia never could get the child to sleep through the night, but the day was good for uninterrupted hours of rest.
The Sacramento climate agreed with the Honeytraps, though the rising and the sinking of the house was wearisome, and the carpets were in constant need of drying out. Hereward’s outbursts continued at intervals that didn’t trouble Lavinia, who baffled the house’s echoes with expensive wall hangings and plush cushions.
Mr. Prattle similarly was unconcerned about the noise. He developed a grudging fondness for the little ear muffs Lavinia gifted him. The dear demented parrot never spoke again after that night, but he took great joy in covering himself in paint and rolling around on a canvas in the loving presence of his water dish. Mr. Prattle, also known as “The Artist of Anura Street,” saw his work sell fairly well in the United States and spectacularly well in the South Sea Islands.
Hereward Honeytrap’s fame grew, too, as did his power. He was a good boy who respected his mother’s wish that they always live near the swamp. The proximity guaranteed an ample supply of catfish, alligator, and snake—the flavors and textures of which ensured Lavinia’s Little Monster retained his taste for something akin to cephalopod flesh.
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