The Book of Counted Sorrows

You might wish to nap.

6

The Curse of Too Much Knowledge and a Trail of Frightful Destruction.

I feel wonderfully refreshed. Sedley Nottingham, the estate’s Com-mander of Beverages, provided a lemon beer and a wealth of amusing stories about his days as Defender of the Ardent Spirits at the Queen of England’s secret getaway castle in Misery Lake, Arkansas, where he was more than once forced to maim and even kill commoners who tried to steal a bottle or two of Her Majesty’s most precious vintages of fine Cabernet, some of Which date to the time of Moses, and her most exquisite Merlots, some of which date to the time of Og the caveman and the age of the mastodons. Sedley is a marvelous storyteller with an appearance that greatly enhances his every tale: a mane of white hair, huge muttonchop sideburns, twinkling blue eyes as bloodshot as those of a survivor of any Megadeath concert, a nose the size of a formidable yellow squash and the color of an overripe tomato, pendulously fat lips, a tattooed tongue, a robust and barrel-chested body, and hands large enough and strong enough to strangle an ox. Indeed, to keep fit for his work, he had just finished strangling an ox quite near the back door to the kitchen as I arrived for my lemon beer, and we sat on the cooling hulk of the enormous horned beast while we chatted – or at least until Mrs. Scuttlesby arrived to drag it away.

Justin Parsimonious, our mumbling but esteemed Comptroller of Cookies and Crackers here on the Koontz estate, provided me with the single saltine that I requested, served on a plate of polished jackal bone, and then sat with Sedley and me upon the unfortunate ox until Mrs. Scuttlesby dragged it away, whereafter we all moved to the bench-style veranda swing, upon which we sat uncomfortably close to one another, pondering the meaning of existence, until Mrs. Scuttlesby arrived to drag Justin away for God knows what purpose.

At the carriage master’s cottage, while Skippy measured my floss with a laser micrometer and photographed it against a black velvet cloth, he wondered aloud if there might be a Mr. Scuttlesby and, if so, what the lucky man might be like. The possibility of a Mr. Scuttlesby had never occurred to me, and I was so thoroughly boggled that I needed to sit down. Unfortunately, Skippy occupied the only chair in the measuring room, and no dead ox was handy. I could tell that Skippy himself was boggled by his question, for the third eye spun like a pinwheel at the pinnacle of his handsome face.

On my return trip here to the study, exercising the free and supple imagination of a novelist, in an uncharacteristically lewd mood, I found myself puzzling over what positions the Scuttlesbys, husband and wife, might assume in their marital bed, and in what mutually satisfying actions they might engage – assuming, of course, that Mr. Scuttlesby actually existed and that there was not, in his place, merely a disgusting electrical-powered eros machine fashioned from pig iron, latex, Spandex, cow hide, skin of eel, and cadaver cartilage, with giant meshing gear wheels and rattling pistons and whirling thingies and lights flashing in the urgent and insistent rhythms of animal lust.

For reasons entirely mysterious to me, I suddenly found myself in a state of absolute terror, running this way and that, weaving through the topiary as though I were a pathetic panic-stricken piece of potential road-kill on a freeway streaming with hurtling semis. I collided with two topiary gardeners, frightened the mustache off one of our decorative-rock technicians, and caused our worm auditor to drop his sonic nightcrawler-detection device and lose count in his vitally important worm census, before at last dropping to the grass in exhaustion in the scrub-pine grove that we have whittled out of a once-majestic grouping of giant redwoods.

I’m okay now, feeling wonderfully refreshed, and happy to be back here in the study, grateful that you have waited for me, and thankful that fate has not seen fit to visit upon you any of the horrors that have befallen some visitors in the past when they have been left alone in this room.

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