Hank called just before the 11 o’clock rerun of MASH ended and I got ready for sleep. From the sound of his voice, I could hear he was upset, mumbling on about life and death and the near end of the planet.
“Calm down,” I told him. “Just tell me what happened. You sound scared.”
“You’d be scared too if you just had a brush with the supernatural.”
“Supernatural?”
“Whatever it was, even Pauly’s scared, and you know what it takes to get him upset.”
I did. Pauly was a cool fish mostly, someone who didn’t get upset by small things.
“So what happened?” I asked.
Hank mumbled something about Pauly nearly drinking the stuff.
“What stuff?”
“The grape drink,” Hank said.
“You say Pauly had a bottle of this stuff and it went bad?”
“Not bad exactly,” Hank said. “It changed. Pauly thought it was funny – I mean – he actually laughed. You know how Pauly is. He sat there for hours admiring the pattern that formed on the inside of the bottle.”
“Pattern?”
“Something that looked like roots,” Hank said. “I thought they looked like tentacles and told him so. He liked the idea.”
That was the Pauly I knew, intrigued by odd things. He often pontificated about how humanity didn’t know what it was doing, how science would end us all, causing this to heat up or that to cool down, and, in the end, unleashing unsuspecting nightmares on the world.
“How did Pauly explain the stuff growing in the drink?” I asked.
“He blamed it on preservatives, and when I pointed out that that brand didn’t have preservatives, he blamed it on the insecticide farmers used on the grapes that made the drink.”
“What do you think caused it?”
“I think it was his room.”
“His room?” I said, my weary mind drawing up a picture of the space Pauly had taken up residence in, an attic up a narrow set of stairs from the kitchen of our mutual friend, Garrick. “What on earth does his room have to do with it?”
“Strange things have gone on up there,” Hank said. “People in the neighborhood claim a boy died up there, hiding out years ago to keep from being deported.”
“So?”
“So people in the neighborhood say the room hasn’t felt right since, even though the landlady renovated the whole place more than once.”
“That’s superstitious claptrap,” I said.
“I’ve felt it myself,” Hank insisted. “Sometimes in the dark, I could near noises from the narrow alcove above.”
“Mice,” I said. “Have you ever talked to Pauly about all this?”
“Sure, I have, dozens of times.”
“And what does he have to say about it?”
“He loves the idea that the attic might be haunted,” Hank said.
“And did you tell him you think this – ghost – has something to do with the grape drink changing?”
“I think that’s why he decided to keep the drink even after he saw things growing inside of it. I would have flushed it down the toilet. I pleaded with him to get rid of the stuff, but he told me to calm down, that he knew what he was doing. He was more worried about Garrick’s finding out about it. Then Pauly started to feed it.”
“Feed it what?”
“Just lecithin and vitamin E. But he claimed the thing was started to respond.”
“Respond? How?”
“He lifted a cloth from off the bottle and showed me how the tentacles had grown, expanding across the entire inside surface of the glass, blotting out every inch of that interior with its strands of gray. And it stank.”
“What about Garrick? Didn’t he smell it downstairs.”
“Yeah, but he only shouted up from the kitchen saying Pauly better not be smoking any kind of herb drugs up there. Then one night, I stayed over. Pauly and I had had a few drinks and were very tired. Pauly urged me to stay. I was too drunk to care about the smell or the history of the attic. But in the middle of the night, the loud pop woke me. It woke Pauly, too, and he turned on the light and found that the lid had popped off the bottle, and something thick and gray oozed out. I was too scared to move. But Pauly, with much more nerve, grabbed up a coffee can and dumped it over the open end of the bottle – with its gray oozing mass – and headed towards the door.
“He shouted for me to come along and bring some matches. Garrick heard us as we clamored down the stairs and through the kitchen, shouting at us, wanting to know what the hell we were up to, and why we had to make so much noise when he was trying to sleep. We didn’t answer, until he shouted again when we reached the carport and I grabbed a can of gasoline from the garage. Pauly poured the gas into the tin can and I added the match, the grape drink and its creation exploded into a sudden blaze.”
“So whatever it is got burnt up, right?” I asked. “So what’s the problem?”
“Pauly says he wants to do it again, and made me buy him a case of grape juice.” – Al Sullivan