The Last Adventure of Dr. Yngve Hogalum (The Magnetron Chronicles) Read Online Free

was my mother, who had raised me with her memorably fiery spirit. The other was Petión, a Haitian household servant who had lavished me with his peculiar brand of fatherliness after my own father was flogged to death by a mob of angry investors.
    Petión seemed frail now, but in good health, and his tolerance for liquor remained as outsized relative to his diminutive frame as was his great booming voice.  It was late, but we had much catching up to do and a well-stocked liquor cabinet to drain. We were both quite intoxicated, I on bourbon whiskey, and Petión on his rum, when I broached the ticklish subject which had prompted my invitation in the first place. I blurted my entire plan in abstraction, offering some detail as to his role in the undertaking.
    “ I b’lieve you have taken leave of your senses, young man,” he replied with a sober expression on his face. “This is not a plan, but a badly crafted horror tale. I know enough only to tell you it cannot work!”
    “ But are you not skilled in the vodoun arts?” I pressed.
    “ Yes, I am a houngan , it is true, but I am no bokor , and I have never performed a reanimation ceremony. Besides, even a zombi needs a body, my boy. A zombi is a mindless thing, undead, without volition, you see? Now tell me, Phinny: Of what use is a mindless head ?”
    I continued my argument until within hours of daybreak, beseeching, imploring, pleading. Petión was steadfast in his refusal, but I began to repeat a plaintive refrain until he could no longer resist. “Please, Petión! Will you not even make the attempt?”
    Several hours later, Mrs. Mackenzie woke to hear a cacophony of drums and boisterous singing emanating from my Masterstroke Mill. Undoubtedly, she was red-faced with anger as she flew down hallways under a full head of Scotch-Irish steam. However, when she entered the laboratory the color drained from her countenance, which thereupon took on an ashen quality. Before she could complete a proper genuflection, the poor woman was again rendered unconscious by what she saw.
    “ Oh dear,” said Dr. Hogalum’s head. “She appears to have fainted!”

Chapter 9 ~ Magnetron Ponders the Unthinkable
    “ I made the observation that his head was his most significant appendage, whereupon he replied dejectedly that he had become rather fond of all of his appendages.”
    Later that morning, I reluctantly bade Petión good-bye. I begged him to stay, but he would not be deterred. He was returning home—not to his hometown in Kenner, Louisiana, but to his birthplace in Haiti. “It is a sad place these days,” he said wistfully, “but it is my home.” It was a heart-rending departure, all the sadder as we had spent not nearly enough time getting reacquainted.
    He confessed to me his utter amazement that the reanimation ceremony had been successful and offered a most extraordinary theory. I questioned him exhaustively on the point, but the obscure conduit by which he had gained this unusual knowledge was sufficiently nebulous that he was unable to provide more specificity beyond his supernatural cognizance that Dr. Hogalum had not died of natural causes, as had been reported. In fact, Petión felt that Dr. Hogalum’s lwa , or spirit, had been infused with an exceptional resilience due to a profound displeasure at its corporeal vessel having been murdered!
    As Petión ’s wagon made its way down Mugglesworth Hill into town, a brisk wind came up from the east, filling the air with autumn leaves and dust. “Good-bye, old friend!” I called out with as much warmth as I could muster, but my mind was then a frigid whirlwind of horror and bewilderment.
    When I returned to my Masterstroke Mill, Dr. Hogalum ’s head—now ensconced upon a platform which I had constructed for this purpose—was convulsed with fury. Several of Pung’s cats had sneaked into the laboratory by their maddeningly undiscoverable route and had made great sport of the doctor’s ears, nose, and facial hair.