Folly

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Its flame leaned into another wick. Fire spread. Wax dripped. Sebastian Rudolph Harold knew men his size shouldn’t snicker. The wrestler was a slab of Ivy League beefcake six and a half feet tall. He snickered anyway.

Sebastian was in a mood.

Counting humidity, that evening felt like a hundred and four degrees of oh hell no, and he hadn’t seen an air conditioner since getting out of a rented Lincoln Navigator in Chapellaix’s marina ten hours earlier. Locals described the lake as “miles long, yards wide, and bottomless.” Sebastian likened it to a giant centipede: long and skinny (he said “long and skinny”) with hundreds of streams spilling into inlets on either side.

The expedition had spent all day searching for the right inlet. They wanted to come across something that didn’t belong - without knowing what qualified as not belonging. One inlet had a small bay, or lagoon, or pond, whatever, with an old stone dock that clearly didn’t belong. It then fell on the wrestler to carry all the camping gear up ten thousand steps narrower than his feet were long. Sebastian saw no point in arguing. He was Atlas, Hespers was old, and Bryce could barely lift his own head.

But if all that hadn’t twisted his athletic straps into a bunch behind a pair of melting avocados, the cabin’s dust would have for sure. Sebastian moved carefully to avoid stirring up more. He was a graceful buffalo. Each of his graceful buffalo senses was strong, but his sense of smell was positively supernatural. The dust reeked of something metal, something acrid, something poison - and something dead. To prevent gagging, the wrestler yanked his faded Izod out of roomy cargo shorts and pressed the fabric, soaked to transparency, against his face.

That calmed him down. Whenever someone caught Sebastian sniffing his fingernails after biting them, he admitted to a smell fetish. Admission was part of any good fetish. Otherwise it was just an insecurity. Sebastian was not insecure, but he was a super smeller. Of course he had a smell fetish. Flashing corrugated midriff, the super smeller bumped his long white candle into other long white candles as he found them. A lot of wax dribbled down a lot of sides.

It was a frat party without bad music and stale beer.

Shadows gyrating like stripers defined a peculiar space. The cabin’s four main walls, not one of which paralleled any other, were joined by three small segments at odd angles. Two of the small segments contained arches. One led back to the entrance; the other, to antiquated facilities and a small kitchen. Technically, Sebastian had broken, then entered. He reasoned it was his property, even if he hadn’t known it existed. Now he knew. The Harolds were a family of voluptuous women and short men who used high ceilings as coping mechanisms. Sebastian’s coping issues swung the other way, but at least the cabin’s beams gave him headroom.

A huge fireplace took up half the longest wall. It was off center enough to notice, but not enough to qualify as a bold architectural statement. Sebastian scowled. Not even his ancestors were unbalanced enough to build such a ridiculous feature into a cabin. Some larger structure must have been knocked down and one of its fireplaces preserved. Victorian aristocrats did things like that.

They had a word for it.

“Folly,” Sebastian said to a gargoyle carved into the mantle.

The gargoyle’s head was nearly even with Sebastian’s. That was a tall fireplace. It was also deep. For short people, it would qualify as a breakfast nook. Despite suffering from more grandiose personality disorders than modern psychiatry knew existed, his family rarely expressed admiration for inbred gentry. For one thing, they were Scottish. For another, the Harolds bred with anything capable of reproduction. They went through the motions of breeding with sheep and wailing wind instruments, too, but Sebastian filed that under “no harm, no foul.”

Why would lusty Scottish sheep ranchers emulate dissipated Victorian fops?

The bottomless depths into which Sebastian tucked soapstone fertility goddesses he carved during school projects caused enough parent teacher summits on their own. To keep from developing even more fetishes too quickly, he stopped digging through family scrapbooks. The lusty lunk therefore knew nothing about what might have once stood on that remote piece of Vermont.

It wasn’t a small piece, either, so of course Sebastian had known about the land. Harolds proudly performed deviant acts with sheep, bagpipes, and soapstone; but were highly principled in affairs that mattered. The property had been devoted to sustainable forestry and animal husbandry since its purchase shortly before Lincoln’s ill-conceived attempt to drag the South kicking and screaming into industrialized civilization. The only roads were logging trails, and Hespers insisted there were no permanent buildings. That guy went back to Grandma Harold.

Sebastian inhaled the strong aromas soaking his shirt. Intoxicated, he realized knocking down an unserviceable mansion to save the family from bankruptcy, then memorializing it with a folly, made strong business sense. If more inbred gentry had knocked down country houses and moved into follies, they wouldn’t have been forced to sell everything a century later. The Harolds never stood among the most fabulously wealthy families in any era; but in every era, they maintained their spot on the next rung down by not doing stupid shit.

Breathing musk and dripping from his long white stick, Sebastian continued around the party. A nearly opaque rose window filled the narrow wall opposite the entrance. Its subject matter derived from profane classical pottery. Pan or Bacchus sat on a tree stump in the center. He had one hoof pulled up onto the stump. There, it wedged under his magnificently bulbous rump. His other leg angled to the side. Leaning back, his massive arms were draped around the shoulders of two nymphs with bulbous assets of their own. The god was made in Sebastian’s image. That was a little creepy. Satyrs and nymphs frolicked in an orgy around him. That was awesome.

Sebastian whipped out his phone and took pictures.

The Harolds had a long association with satyrs. With one recent exception, the family men were short, ripped, and hairy as fuck. Once a solid mythological education overlapped with communal locker facilities, Sebastian’s playmates delighted in comparing him to goat men, too. In part, their taunts flowed from beta male envy at the primordial grandeur of his reproductive apparatus. It was a pungent puffy mass beyond mortal comprehension. Mostly, however, his playmates were shocked by how much hair Sebastian grew below the navel.

A bit further down, it became a veritable kilt.

All the body hair someone might expect the wrestler to possess from the navel up, however, was instead pulled to the top of his head. His magnificently ripped chest, along with the aromatic recesses under his ferocious arms, were buffed and polished alabaster. Harolds were pale even among the Scots. Sebastian’s actual hair started right above his single eyebrow, and resembled that venomous briar patch Angelina Jolie used to imprison Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

The window’s artist actually failed to put enough hair on the god made in the wrestler’s image, but he or she nailed the color. As a juvenile squatting over mirrors to get a better look, Sebastian called the smoldering dark red hue “Harold butt rust.” After starting college, he changed it to “Harold butt carnelian.”

Not quite across from the fireplace, French doors occupied something other than the center of their own wall. They may have even come from France. The room’s furniture came from England. Italian sculptures with tiny penises occupied nooks and crannies. Sebastian would have sniffed each tiny penis if not for the dust. Fortunately for him, the university’s communal locker rooms were well ventilated.

With all its candles lit, the cabin transformed into a Prohibition era venue for seance orgies. Crusty stains in decaying upholstery supported that interpretation. Sebastian didn’t even need magic cop goggles to see them. None of the objects in the room, not even the ossified seeds of generations that would never be born, were replicas.

The cabin was not merely a folly, but a vault.

Someone should have checked it sooner. A hundred years was not that long. Why had it been completely forgotten? How was it so well preserved? Sebastian’s great grandparents were rebels. If they couldn’t turn the family into something reputable, they had resolved to make it something not pointed at by other disreputable families trying to make themselves look better. Perhaps Great Grandma Harold was so horrified by just how many lost generations had soaked into these throw pillows, she erased the structure from the record - but refused to recover anything inside for fear of contracting either an unwanted pregnancy or disease.

Having bumped all the long white sticks he was going to bump, Sebastian set his candle down, rubbed hot wax into his deep navel for reasons that made sense to him, and returned to the French doors. An unusually complicated lock held them in place. Steel bars went not only into the ceiling and floor, but also the walls on either side. His supply of pheromones was drying out, and he wanted to open up the room to start getting rid of that dust. The lock relented right before Sebastian forced the issue.

He stepped onto a wide flagstone terrace, discarded his shirt, stretched, and inhaled deeply. From outside, the cabin looked like a reinterpretation of a Viking longhouse. It was buried beneath a thick sod roof. Ivy had overrun the walls. The terrace wrapped toward the entrance and utility rooms on Sebastian’s right. To his left, a hedge as unruly as his kilt blocked a view of Chapel Lake.

Across from him, the terrace dropped off a cliff. Ten thousand steps wound through a series of switchbacks to the inlet’s stone dock. Bryce Whateley, one of Sebastian’s classmates, and Hespers, an ancient Howard retainer, were finishing with a large tent by the hedge. Even without knowing about the dust, their expedition anticipated that staying in a structure abandoned for a century was a bad plan.

“It’s in remarkably good shape,” said Sebastian. “I’m surprised locals haven’t smashed the windows and tagged the walls.”

“Loggers explain to trespassers how well wood chippers dispose of evidence,” said Hespers.

“Have they disposed of any evidence?” asked Bryce.

Hespers smiled. He was an intimidating old coot.

Despite standing only a few inches shorter than Sebastian, Bryce was not remotely intimidating. His waist wasn’t as wide as one of the Greek god’s legs. Bryce’s legs were scarcely wider than the Greek god’s reproductive apparatus. His chest was no thicker than anything else, and his abdomen had sunken so deeply into the valley of his pelvis, his belly button was an outie. Sebastian liked squeezing it while mimicking breeding motions.

Bryce wore his pants high, belt constricted to max, because if he wore them low they would stretch across his ridges and reveal everything underneath. The Dunwich twink had no hair below his chin, and his gender traits remained underdeveloped. In that respect, he had more in common with how Greeks actually represented male gods than Sebastian. Having been ridiculed for the opposite, however, Sebastian never made fun of the slouching meerkat.

While Sebastian kept a Disney princess prisoner in his burnt carnelian hair, the slouching meerkat cropped his golden locks to military code - except for his sideburns. Those were a spectacular pair of lemon velvet streamers that spiraled all the way down to tiny pink nipples. The meerkat had a small square face, large brown eyes, and a dainty mouth surrounded by lips that looked like they were always sucking raspberry popsicles.

It was Bryce who had insisted on looking for the cabin.

Sebastian agreed to the expedition because alone time in dark woods with a degenerate underwear model qualified as a summer well spent. As it turned out, however, there actually was a cabin - and it contained valuable stuff. None of the items were worth a large fortune, but small fortunes added up. More to the point of hidden agendas, the folly almost certainly contained some unknown wonder. No one from Dunwich could be trusted. Anyone from Dunwich with beautiful nipples and raspberry lips was even more untrustworthy.

Bryce and Hespers finished with the tent. Sebastian opened all the cabin’s other windows and doors. The expedition marveled at the candles. Sebastian asked Hespers if he thought it was safe to take the boat back to town after dark. The old man pointed out they knew where the town was, and therefore wouldn’t have to look for it. In addition, Chapellaix had lights and the boat had radar.

Sebastian nodded.

“Take pictures of all this, then,” he said. “Head back, and get with Michaels in the morning, Figure out what we’ll need to pack it up and….”

“We can’t move anything!” insisted Bryce. “There might be clues.”

Sebastian smiled. The meerkat did expect to find a hidden treasure.

“There will be plenty of time to look for clues,” assured the wrestler.

“This furniture, and the statues, will be heavy,” said Hespers. “Need a lot of trips, or a bigger boat. Loggers don’t bring trucks down to these inlets, so there’s no trail.”

“Big boat is fine,” said Sebastian. “Get some big fans, too - and some big air filters. Send them as soon as possible.”

Hespers took his pictures and departed.

Sebastian covered his face and extinguished candles. Stars gleamed. Insects and frogs screamed. Streams splashed over rock. Nocturnal predators hooted, purred, and growled. It was a lovely spot to host seances and orgies. French fur trappers founded Chapellaix centuries ago, but resorts and vacation properties were new. Back in the day, this spot was far enough from New York, Boston, and Montreal to escape the prying eyes of proper society - but near enough to remain practical. Sebastian wrapped an index finger and thumb around the back of Bryce’s fragile neck.

“Let’s see that diary page again,” he said.

“Batteries are low.”

Pinching the meerkat’s shirt, Sebastian removed it like a magic trick.

“We’ll have the solar charger in the morning,” he said.

Constricting the underwear model in a back hug, Sebastian penguin-walked him to the tent. Picking Bryce up was too easy to be any fun. He had avian bones and weighed less than air. Now that a structure was confirmed, Sebastian thought some clues they already had might make more sense. He adjusted the underwear model’s shorts until they stretched across his hips. Fabric helped concentrate what aromas the hopeless creature managed to produce.

“You like clues,” Sebastian observed.

Bryce conceded that he liked clues. Sebastian turned on a lantern, and ran thumbs up and down the meerkat’s spine as the redefinition of slender bent forward to dig out his iPad. When he straightened, Sebastian ran his hands around to the sunken belly and pinched its protruding button. Bryce opened an image and held the tablet for Sebastian to see. Sebastian leaned his head forward, nibbled on an earlobe, and moved his fingers back and forth in the gap between belted shorts and pelvic ridges.

The image showed a page of yellowed paper covered with sketches, words going in all directions, numbers, lines, and splatters. Typical conspiracy nonsense. As a student of esoteric and occult methodologies, however, Bryce had rearranged the letters before starting high school. Deciphering gibberish was a Whateley rite of passage. The poem read:

Harold found a Wellspring right of Green.

He dropped his Bucket down

and then raised his Drink.

In a hidden Bordello

pretty Dead soldiers preen.

How can Harold hide their stink?

The rounded End goes up.

The Laudanum goes in.

The old God goes

and goes

and goes.

When he first deciphered it, Bryce interpreted Harold as a first name. He found several Harolds in his family but got nowhere. Sometime after making Sebastian’s acquaintance, the meerkat experienced an epiphany. The Harolds of Boston, New Hampshire, and Vermont were known for banking, real estate, and certain indiscretions.

Halfway through sophomore year, the meerkat experienced another epiphany. Sitting in a booth eating lunch with the wrestler at one of Arkham’s pubs, Bryce bit a nail and pushed his finger under Sebastian’s nose. During the torrid night of slobbering indiscretions that act provoked, Bryce became an inside man. Over the following months, Sebastian started accepting the meerkat’s narrative. That got them right of the Green Mountains. But….

“All you have is this one poem?” asked Sebastian.

“It takes a long time to decipher Whateley journals,” said Bryce.

“You had years.”

“I gave up until I connected Harold to your family.”

That was fair. But Sebastian knew Bryce had a better reason than curiosity to justify so much nipple work. Sebastian didn’t behave inappropriately merely to satisfy his fetishes. Anyone who would subject themselves to mutual fertility goddess play was one motivated individual.

“There’s an old god in the window,” said the wrestler.

“Let’s see!”

Bryce tried to grab a flashlight, but was restrained. Sebastian insisted something remained seriously wrong with the cabin’s dust. Best to let it air out overnight and check the window in the morning. The meerkat squirmed. It made his button pop out more. Sebastian reached into roomy cargo shorts, whipped out his phone, and opened pictures of the window.

“It looks like you,” said the meerkat.

Sebastian put away his phone.

“And I’m right here.”

He placed the index finger of his right hand behind Bryce’s left ear and pushed the meerkat’s head sideways. Feeble neck muscles strained. Sebastian hooked a strand of sinew with a canine tooth. The giant’s supernatural sense of smell, and its cousin taste, caught the instant any bite drew even a drop of blood. That defined his limit.

But the urge to devour was strong.

The primordial Greek god could close his mouth and bite halfway through the Dunwich abomination’s neck. Sensing his peril, the abomination trembled and whimpered. Those shivers were maddening. Sebastian ran teeth down to a pronounced collarbone. He could crush it like a pretzel. Strong fingers pressed an anxious ribcage. Each bone was clearly delineated beneath the meerkat’s skin. Sebastian could snap them off one by one, shred their pitiful meat with his teeth, and suck out the marrow. The role of a predator was to remove the weak and sickly.

But the wrestler’s control was stronger than his urge to devour. He settled for a lot of shallow nicks and rivers of saliva. After rolling around on tent pads for a good long while, he squeezed the meerkat’s pelvis lightly between gnarly legs and let the hopeless creature’s frantic hips do their thing. The meerkat had an itchy trigger and fired a single low caliber round. But he put in effort and reloaded quickly. It was not Sebastian’s place to throw stones. The puffy mass beyond mortal comprehension was not suitable for many purposes other than gawking.

He went to sleep with the meerkat curled on his chest, and dreamed about wrestling some druid’s animated tree. Sebastian needed to feel bodies being squeezed. His strength was overwhelming, but clever opponents often figured out what he wanted and used that against him. Gideon Roth was a genius at using his body surfaces in ways that broke the letter of no laws but guaranteed victory. An animated tree didn’t need to be a genius. Once Sebastian realized he was dreaming, he panicked. He always panicked whenever he realized he was dreaming around the meerkat. Crushing the hopeless thing to death in his sleep was a real possibility.

Instead of waking into his own body, however, Sebastian woke into the body of a nocturnal predator. He felt the forest floor beneath his paws. He smelled the fear of his prey, and tasted its flesh as he ripped it apart with salivating fangs. Sebastian focused hard on waking up for real, because this was weird shit and he did not want to actually devour a helpless underwear model.

He became another predator. Emerging from the lake, he climbed ten thousand stone steps and reached a flagstone terrace. He saw a tent and a pair of open French doors. Approaching the doors, he came upon a naked abomination sliding around on decaying furniture. His nose recoiled at the smell of the room, but bony hips moved in a way that made salivating fangs want to shred them.

Sebastian was already out of the tent before recognizing he had finally woken up for real. A creature turned to look at him from the French doors. It was not a wolf, a mountain lion, or a bear. Its body resembled a big cat, but its head blended a hyena with a ferret. There was no hair on its hind legs, tail, or knotted rump. Its midsection was covered with something like a tight velour shirt. Thicker fur covered its forelegs. The hyena anubis ferret was a soft blue black color, fearsomely muscular, and perhaps five feet long from rump to snout.

Naked except for his kilt, Sebastian threw his arms forward, pushed out his chest, and roared. The hyena anubis flashed fangs and lunged with a terrifying snarl. Unfazed, Sebastian caught the creature by its throat. His own speed and strength surprised him. Perhaps necessity made him stronger and faster. Squeezing, he lifted. The creature stood on its rear legs and clutched Sebastian’s arms with its forelimbs. The anubis didn’t match a primate’s range of motion, but was more dexterous than a large dog or cat. Topaz emerald eyes glittered.

“No!” said Sebastian forcefully.

The command struck him as ridiculous the moment he said it, like talking to a family pet and not an Egyptian demon dog. The creature’s snarl subsided. Sebastian walked the beast backwards along the side of the cabin. The anubis smelled earthy and appealing. It was a boy, with the dangly bits of a large dog who hadn’t made any trips to the vet.

They reached the edge of the terrace. Sebastian loosened his grip. The anubis responded positively to the change in pressure. His short tail almost wagged. Was Sebastian projecting pet characteristics onto a demon? Possibly. He let go anyway. The creature sat down on its haunches and bobbed its head respectfully. Had Sebastian’s ancestors brought back a mating pair of hyena cheetah mastiff anubis hybrids before hunting the rest to extinction? Possibly.

Sebastian backed away, motioning for the creature to stay. He stayed. Good boy. Sebastian wondered if Egyptian demon dogs had more to do with the lack of vandalism than loggers. Possibly. But there was a more pressing concern. Sebastian raced to the French doors.

Covered in pale silvery dust, Bryce continued grinding bony hips into soaked throw pillows as if he hadn’t almost been eaten by an Egyptian demon. Sebastian moved forward, and retreated. That damn dust! Enraged by indecision, he raced back to the tent, pulled out a pair of his own jeans, crushed his feet into shoes, wrapped his face in another shirt, and returned to the French doors. Taking a breath, he shot into the cabin, wrapped the abomination’s hips in the jeans, and lifted him like a crane.

“You’re not Private Clements,” giggled the meerkat.

The hillbilly weighed nothing and Sebastian still felt stronger than ever. He swung Bryce around with a single arm. His jeans could easily handle the absence of weight. The meerkat giggled more, and scraped at the tile floor with his hands. The closest stream was not far behind the anubis. Watching the creature’s jaws, Sebastian moved past it and lowered Bryce into water.

“Cold!” the meerkat squeaked.

The anubis followed Sebastian when he walked past, but showed no aggression. Bryce was covered in a glaze of humidity, sweat, other fluids, and dust. The glaze refused to wash off just because of running water. Sebastian got over his reservations, climbed into the stream, and worked his hands over Bryce’s shivering body without crushing it. Satisfied he had removed the glaze from every crack, Sebastian picked up his half-drowned companion and carried him back to the tent. The anubis had disappeared.

Sebastian laid Bryce out on the tent pads.

“You must be Sergeant Mallone,” the meerkat giggled.

Despite presently exasperating circumstances, Sebastian never got tired of the meerkat’s giggle. Were Private Clements and Sergeant Mallone preening dead soldiers? Possibly - but this was definitely a medical emergency. Sebastian grabbed his phone. He was not surprised to find no bars.

Dawn would break in an hour. The wrestler got back into roomy cargo shorts, stuffed Bryce into a change of his own clothes, tossed an emaciated torso over a godly shoulder, and clamped one palm across both of the meerkat’s tiny rump bumps at once. The meerkat squirmed. He wasn’t trying to get away. He was trying to click his trigger. From the condition of those pillows, he had been going for hours. Like the old god?

“You could have just listened!” said Sebastian.

“I’m listening, Major Harold,” replied Bryce sincerely.

Sebastian blinked. In what way did he mean that? The wrestler descended ten thousand steps as if doing exercises in a stadium. From the inlet it was only a few miles to where the first vacation properties started. They had cell reception. Everything was under control.

Or was it?

The police could not fail to suspect Sebastian. The cabin would become a crime scene. It was legitimately a hazardous waste site. Laudanum was… opium? Morphine? Sebastian had only wanted to wash the dust off, but any investigator would ask if it was instead to cover up a sexual assault. That evidence lingered in a bottomless void no one would check, but health professionals would spot shallow bite marks all over the underwear model’s neck, back, and perky rump bumps.

Sebastian slowed his pace.

A few moments later, he caught an appealing earthy scent. Was the anubis following his thoughts? Would a body eaten by “wild animals” be less trouble than an overdosing underwear model who was at that moment urinating on himself from excessive trigger grinding? Possibly. Sebastian would have to report a missing person. They would want to know why Bryce “wandered off.” Sebastian might have to disclose that his family’s cabin was once an opium den. But nobody had known about it for a hundred years, and it would explain why someone might run into the woods and get eaten.

The anubis bumped Sebastian’s leg.

Sebastian stopped. Bryce was telling imaginary privates and corporals to quit arguing and take turns. Sensing they had stopped, the meerkat straightened his back and looked around. He smiled at Sebastian.

“Why are we in the woods, Major Harold?” he asked.

Sebastian bounced him on his arm as if reassuring a child. The anubis stood on his hind legs and sniffed the meerkat’s rump. Bryce shivered as if being tickled, but gave no sign of appreciating the nature of the creature tickling him. Sebastian pushed his face against a narrow tummy and puffed on its protruding button. The urge to devour was strong.

“Why not walk in the woods?” he asked.

Bryce thought about that.

“I like the woods!” he said brightly.

Sebastian puffed a few more times, reached up, and brushed the side of Bryce’s face with a thumb. Would he even know what was happening? The meerkat smiled through raspberry sorbet. Lowering his hand, Sebastian scratched the back of the Egyptian demon dog’s head and started walking again. The anubis remained standing on his back legs. It should have been guarding King Tut’s tomb. Did Sebastian’s family have anything to do with that excavation? The demon’s dangly doggy bits were in a fluff.

“You and me both,” said Sebastian.

Almost a year later, the wrestler sat in a comfortably appointed waiting room inside a psychiatric hospital associated with his university. They had extensive experience in cases like Bryce’s. Zachariah Whateley sat across from Sebastian. Bryce’s grandfather was a narrow wraith with long white hair. Many people found him intimidating, but Sebastian Rudolph Harold was not easily intimidated.

“You should have left him in the woods,” said Zachariah curtly.

“Impossible.”

“Families like ours can’t be sentimental,” insisted Whateley.

“Do you know what he was looking for?” asked Sebastian.

“He wasn’t ready for whatever he did find. Now he’s a liability.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Sebastian. “I can take care of him.”

“Why would you?” asked Whateley suspiciously.

“I think the soldiers he’s talking to are real.”

“So what?”

“I’m sentimental,” said Sebastian.

“Sentimentality begets doom,” sighed the old man.

Bryce entered the lobby on the arm of Gideon Roth. A genius at more than wrestling, Gideon was preparing for a career in sports medicine by interning at the hospital. Five foot eight and fabulously fit, he was helping the meerkat rehabilitate limbs after a long period of restraint and isolation. The Dunwich abomination was no longer perpetually copulating with phantoms, but issues remained.

“Hello Major Harold!” the meerkat squeaked.