Read Online Curse the Names by Robert Arellano - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Arellano
Tags: Horror
Ads: Link
crumbling plaster.
I flicked my lighter again and saw something familiar in the typeface, the layout: high-quality photos and plenty of white space to set off the meager sustenance of the story. The words looked familiar.
That’s when I saw. A thing in the lettering drew my eyes.
Those are my words. I wrote those stories. They are pages torn from Surge . My name stands out at the top of every page.
I pulled into the Mustang parking lot and bought a four-pack of Kahlua Mudslides. Then I got back in the car, shook up a Mudslide, and opened it. I sat in the Spider and drank.
The taste of the sugar and milk solids gave my heart a lift, and then easing the jitters came the Kahlua and the vodka. Was it really even vodka? I checked the label:
Contains Real Vodka ! I felt better already.
Why would my articles be on the wall of that house?
I removed the other three Mudslides from the carton, turned the cardboard inside out, and found a pen in the glove compartment to work my way through the names and associations.
Sunshine
didn’t know me before today
doesn’t want anything to do with the house
Mel Woburn
weak connection with the house
six years pot dealer
Blood tech
got me out there in the first place
didn’t show up
I had left the pages hanging on the wall, part afraid to touch them, part afraid of what would happen in my head if I admitted I was afraid to leave them there. It would be an acknowledgment that I suspected this had been deliberate, something depraved.
Two Mudslides down and I started to relax. Copies of Surge , bundles of them, get dumped all over northern New Mexico like so many Thrifty Nickels . Someone just tore a few up and tacked those pages to the ugly mud wall to cover it. Ridiculous to think of it as anything more than a coincidence. I live over the mountain in Los Alamos—just drive away.
Ready to get back on the road, I opened another Mudslide and pulled out of the Mustang parking lot.
When I got back to Los Alamos it was going on dark, and I found a note Kitty had written in the kitchen. Where the fuck have you been??? At the top of the stairs, the bedroom door was closed. I listened. Oppie did not get up and I did not bother going in.
I went down to my study, rolled a joint, and woke up the PC.
Googling Mora and Johnson massacre got me nothing, and New Mexico plus Johnson House yielded thousands of hits, but nothing on the first page more relevant than the newspaper headline, Johnson: House Stays on Schedule.
What if I looked up the owner in county files? Resources sucked online, and even if I made the special trip to Mora it might not lead to anything worthwhile. There were thousands of absentee owners in these valleys.
Sometimes it was because the grandparents willed the house to kids or grandkids they never saw in Albuquerque, and Albuquerque changed people. They might say, Oh, I’ve got a beautiful patch of land up in Mora County I’m going to retire on and farm someday. But someday never came because the SUVs, the Cottonwood Mall, and the fast food on Central Avenue was the way they really wanted to live.
Sometimes it was because the titular owner was someone up the valley in a McMansion who wanted a pristine view of an old adobe without any junk cars on it and without any redneck renter shooting guns and running four-wheelers.
Sometimes the entitled were distant relatives of the former owners, heirs who barely knew they owned a place in the middle of nowhere—sometimes they didn’t know they owned a place at all.
I got on LexisNexis and the Lab’s username and password autofilled. Straight to WorldCat, search entries containing Johnson and Mora and New Mexico , and limit results by publication date before 1900. I got a hit with full text online: Mora marriages, births & deaths: Book no. 1, February 4, 1856, to December 1875; authors: Padilla y Baca, Luis Gilberto.
I searched the text for Johnson , and there he was on Aplanado Road: J. Johnson. In 1860 he
I flicked my lighter again and saw something familiar in the typeface, the layout: high-quality photos and plenty of white space to set off the meager sustenance of the story. The words looked familiar.
That’s when I saw. A thing in the lettering drew my eyes.
Those are my words. I wrote those stories. They are pages torn from Surge . My name stands out at the top of every page.
I pulled into the Mustang parking lot and bought a four-pack of Kahlua Mudslides. Then I got back in the car, shook up a Mudslide, and opened it. I sat in the Spider and drank.
The taste of the sugar and milk solids gave my heart a lift, and then easing the jitters came the Kahlua and the vodka. Was it really even vodka? I checked the label:
Contains Real Vodka ! I felt better already.
Why would my articles be on the wall of that house?
I removed the other three Mudslides from the carton, turned the cardboard inside out, and found a pen in the glove compartment to work my way through the names and associations.
Sunshine
didn’t know me before today
doesn’t want anything to do with the house
Mel Woburn
weak connection with the house
six years pot dealer
Blood tech
got me out there in the first place
didn’t show up
I had left the pages hanging on the wall, part afraid to touch them, part afraid of what would happen in my head if I admitted I was afraid to leave them there. It would be an acknowledgment that I suspected this had been deliberate, something depraved.
Two Mudslides down and I started to relax. Copies of Surge , bundles of them, get dumped all over northern New Mexico like so many Thrifty Nickels . Someone just tore a few up and tacked those pages to the ugly mud wall to cover it. Ridiculous to think of it as anything more than a coincidence. I live over the mountain in Los Alamos—just drive away.
Ready to get back on the road, I opened another Mudslide and pulled out of the Mustang parking lot.
When I got back to Los Alamos it was going on dark, and I found a note Kitty had written in the kitchen. Where the fuck have you been??? At the top of the stairs, the bedroom door was closed. I listened. Oppie did not get up and I did not bother going in.
I went down to my study, rolled a joint, and woke up the PC.
Googling Mora and Johnson massacre got me nothing, and New Mexico plus Johnson House yielded thousands of hits, but nothing on the first page more relevant than the newspaper headline, Johnson: House Stays on Schedule.
What if I looked up the owner in county files? Resources sucked online, and even if I made the special trip to Mora it might not lead to anything worthwhile. There were thousands of absentee owners in these valleys.
Sometimes it was because the grandparents willed the house to kids or grandkids they never saw in Albuquerque, and Albuquerque changed people. They might say, Oh, I’ve got a beautiful patch of land up in Mora County I’m going to retire on and farm someday. But someday never came because the SUVs, the Cottonwood Mall, and the fast food on Central Avenue was the way they really wanted to live.
Sometimes it was because the titular owner was someone up the valley in a McMansion who wanted a pristine view of an old adobe without any junk cars on it and without any redneck renter shooting guns and running four-wheelers.
Sometimes the entitled were distant relatives of the former owners, heirs who barely knew they owned a place in the middle of nowhere—sometimes they didn’t know they owned a place at all.
I got on LexisNexis and the Lab’s username and password autofilled. Straight to WorldCat, search entries containing Johnson and Mora and New Mexico , and limit results by publication date before 1900. I got a hit with full text online: Mora marriages, births & deaths: Book no. 1, February 4, 1856, to December 1875; authors: Padilla y Baca, Luis Gilberto.
I searched the text for Johnson , and there he was on Aplanado Road: J. Johnson. In 1860 he
Similar Books
