by Ginger Marin

The English countryside offers many delights for the senses: flowers and trees, fragrant and most beautiful.  But deep within, also lies the moors: dark, dank and forbidding, a boggy area dominated by lusterless grasses and deep smelly peat.  Hawk Hill sits in just such a place.  It sounds funny, that such a regal sounding domain could be located in such a dismal place as the moors, but it's just a tiny hill and it was named after a tiny man called Andrew MacCarnegie Hawk.  Hawk wasn't just physically tiny.  He also had a tiny mentality; most rude, he was.

The hill was a giant lump of peat moss that had a little house on it.  Ten tiny rooms at best, but that was all the rooms needed because the inhabitants of Hawk Hill were as tiny as Mr. Hawk, roughly three and a half feet tall.

Betsy Hawk ran the house as a country inn for other rude people who had nowhere else to go. She cooked and cleaned everyday for Elsa Marble, Jezebel Shoofly, Jedadiah Shoofly, Godfrey Grimble, Ezra Quandry, Rebecca Willoughby, Carlton Carruthers, Roberto Guisseppe Quintano.

Who were all these people, anyway?

Betsy Hawk, obviously was old man Hawk's wife, rather rotund for a tiny person but she rolled around the inn ever so effortlessly, nonetheless.

She cleaned all day and cooked too but what else was there to do when you live in a peaty mossy kind of town? As for Elsa Marble, she's an old time movie queen who starred on the silent screen. She's the type who doesn't think her poop stinks.  Everyone hates her - she wears gobs and gobs of purple eye makeup! Yikes! Jezebel Shoofly and Jedadiah Shoofly, both are florists, husband and wife. They don't talk to each other anymore because they hate how they sound. Godfrey Grimble?  Why, he's a former TV anchorman who no longer has a job because he got too old to remember what he was saying, so now he just grumbles his way through the day, staring into mirrors. Well, these other people have a story too - but frankly, I'm not going to tell you about them just yet.

Anyway, In this tiny house full of crazy old people, there also lived a small old wrinkly man called Bert Fish. He hated everything. Rats cats, dogs, cows, mice, people, people who hate mice, EVERYTHING. The one thing he hated more than anything in the world was Roberto Guiseppe Quintano. Each morning as they both woke up they had a new plot for making each other's lives miserable. Roberto would steal Bert's toothbrush and Bert would steal Roberto's comb.  One morning things got so bad that grumpy old rude Mr. Hawk came downstairs and shaved them bald.

Anyhow, on October 23rd of that year, something strange happened. Most of the residents just magically disappeared.  The only ones left were Bert and Roberto. They argued over what to do; then, depressed, they just sat thinking in the great hall, but nothing came to mind.  They had lost all sense of time and nearly withered away from lack of food and interest.  

Then finally, they looked at each other and realized they must act soon otherwise they too would be gone forever.  So Bert and Roberto started cleaning up their act. They felt so odd being there all alone, just the two of them. It's was so dark and dank...scary it was. Even the moon refused to shine on Hawk Hill. Then one cold rainy night they started hearing strange noises. "Oh, my God", thought Roberto, "I bet it's old man Hawk come back to haunt us." "You idiot", said Bert, "if anyone is going to haunt us it would be fat Betsy....or it could be Elsa Marble, or maybe Jezebel Shoofly, or Jedadiah Shoofly, or perhaps it's Godfrey Grimble, maybe it's Ezra Quandry; it could be Rebecca Willoughby, but I bet it's Carlton Carruthers."

"Hey, Roberto - are you sure it isn't you?", Bert finally screamed.

Roberto Guisseppe Quintano had all he could take of Bert's stupidity so he hit him in the head with the only thing he could lay his hands on quickly - a candlestick. The trouble is, the candlestick came right back at him and now both Roberto and Bert lay there on the floor, knocked cold as the dark, dank moors themselves! Then, in through an open window, flew a really ugly bat, the size of a small dog.  It was pretty big when you consider how small the men are!  And, it landed right on Bert's head. (proceed to The Mystery of Hawk Hill - Part 2)