Return To The Haunted House (a sequel)

by Billectric

Posted to Stories on 2002-01-02 05:31:00

Supernatural hauntings, Victorian drug use, and the strange disappearance of a Sears plumber – all these thoughts swirled in my mind as I called my job this morning to say my car wouldn’t start. There is a cold, drizzling rain coming down in Jacksonville, FL almost turning into sleet. Jan 2, 2002. My damn car, i said, must have got too cold and the battery might be dead, or it might be the alternator.

Across the street, the haunted Florida house loomed like a sinister pirate ship. Port-hole window in which people could see a mysterious face peering out, the old rusted anchor in the front yard, the dead coconut tree where there purched a forlorn egret bird from time to time. My wife’s cousin Mark had done SOMETHING in that house but I wasn’t sure what. We had tricked the plumber into going to the deserted house and whatever Mark had done had unnerved the plumber so bad he pulled out a pistol. Mark is an expert at redirecting blame and had apparently convinced the police that the plumber was the dangerous one, not us. The next day the police questioned me as the plumber was missing.

“I wouldn’t know,” I told them. “Plumbers are always missing when I call them. He’s probably a drunk. Most of them are.”
I went back into my house and poured a generous dollop of MD-2020 into a coffee cup. I intended to write an article about Victorian drug use. See, back in the day when people like Charles Dickens were alive, people could get medicine at the drug store that contained narcotics. I may have my time-line off here, but it wasn’t long before Sigmund Freud was prescribing cocaine to help people get off morphine. Freud loved cocaine. I don’t. But the point is, aspirin is made from tree bark and a lot of the old witches were simply unlicensed pharmicists with an array of home remedies. They had a drug called laudinum which contained some derivitive of poppies, like opium or heroin. This drug was featured in a novel called “The Moonstone” by Wilke Collins sometime around 1868. Nowdays, all I take is the occasional beer and in the winter, a little Niquyl to slumber golden thru those cold, flu bouts. There is another cold medicine which, i forget which one, but, when I take it, I dream in color a complete movie from beginning to end, and if I could ever write these down, well, we’d really have something. But this morning is stark reality. Coffee first, then to the store for cigarettes. It was too early to buy booze so I picked up the Jack Kerouac favorite, strong cheap wine. I’m not trying to set a bad example for the young people, so DON’T drink in the morning. Unless you work all night, I guess that would be ok.

Questions needed to be answered. Of course, the place to start would be Mark, my wife’s gay cousin, who had been directly involved in the melee.

TO BE CONTINUED



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