In the Valley of the Sun

Bill shook the lingering crumbs from his Cheetos bag, mostly missing his mouth. He was picking them out of his beard when someone approached his table.

“Is that genuine?”

“Yup. The real deal,” Bill replied, knocking the final day-glow orange crumbs from his lap.

“Can I hold it?”

“Only if you pay the deposit.” Bill pointed to as sign taped to the front of his table, which read, “$100 Deposit Must Be Paid Prior to Any Handling.”

“A hundred bucks? No way, that’s too much,” the man complained.

“Then you’re not a serious collector.”

Bill had been going to low-end antique shows around the country since he retired from the oil company. Prior to that he drove from Boise to Sun Valley five days a week delivering furnace oil to wealthy vacationers.

When Sun Valley was established, only the very well connected and wealthy bought vacation homes in the valley formerly known as Brass Ranch. They had to be executives, or friends and family, of the Union Pacific Railroad. Averill Harriman, the owner of the Railroad, was developing a world-class ski resort and had imported Swiss experts to build it. If you knew the right people, you could buy and build a vacation home for a few hundred dollars that would one day be worth millions.

Over the years, Bill became friends with many of his customers. The oil company offered furnace repair and maintenance services, and Bill was known as a discreet and reliable worker. He’d seen their kids grow up, new wives come and go, and old age and illness begin to take their toll. As retirees these wealthy elites lived out their remaining years in aging vacation homes. Their children, trust funds safely secured, did not visit. They no longer wielded power and influence, and as they grew frail they became paranoid about visitors. When Bill would come by to top off their oil tanks or tweak their aging furnace, they would make him lunch or have him sit and visit over a cup of Sanka.

Bill had always been a collector. On the weekends he’d go to flea markets and estate sales in the Sun Valley area looking for treasures among the antique junk. Occasionally he’d actually find something valuable. At a yard sale put on by the grandchildren of Mrs. Reynolds of Reynolds Aluminum he bought a painting that turned out to be by Earnest Hemingway. During his expatriate years in France he bumped up against enough artists that he tried his hand at it. It was terrible but it was an authentic Hemingway. Bill sold it to a museum for thirty thousand dollars.

His other great find was hidden in a toolbox attached to an ancient Franklin oil furnace. John F. Kennedy’s personal physician had retired to Sun Valley and after his death his executor had an estate sale. Years earlier, Bill had noticed there was a mysterious leather case stored in the toolbox. At the sale, he went to furnace room and recovered a leather case with a zippered closure. It was the injection kit the doctor carried for the President. Kennedy needed regular injections of steroids and pain medication due to his Addison’s disease and chronic back pain. In the kit he found prescriptions for morphine and prednisolone written out to John F. Kennedy in elegant script. The medicine bottles had dried out, but four syringes, needles and a needle sharping kit remained. The lining was black velvet and the leather was worn but still in good condition. Bill hid the prescriptions in his pocket and bought the kit for five dollars, making sure to get a written receipt. He sold that through an auction house for one hundred and sixty five thousand dollars. He used the money to buy a top of the line RV.

In getting to know his customers over the years, Bill told them about his interest in collecting which would sometimes lead to the search for a remote box filled with some promised treasure. Bill was kind when he was shown a worthless relic with no value other than sentimental. Sometimes he’d pay for the item just to be nice, and save it for a future yard sale. Bill didn’t have to pretend when Mrs. Manfred showed him her husband’s collection.

Mrs. Manfred’s husband had been a high-ranking executive with the Railroad. He traveled the world gathering mementos as he went. Bill became friends with his widow and one day, after finishing his tuna fish sandwich and lemon water, the widow asked, “would you like to see Frank’s collection?”

The home was a modified ranch style; part Frank Lloyd Wright and part Brady Bunch. It was over four thousand square feet and the Mrs. Manfred only used a small part of it. The rest was shut behind doors and no longer heated. Mrs. Manfred was shrunken and appeared ancient, which may have accounted for the Fort Knox-like modifications she had made to the house.

“Come on down to the basement,” she said, holding onto the handrail with her bird-bone hand. Bill worried as she unsteadily descended the stairs. At the bottom they reached a door with a padlock. “Water tight security,” she winked, pointing to a key hanging on a hook. She unlocked the door as stale, dusty air escaped.

“That light is somewhere,” she said, disappearing into the dark waving her hand in front of her. She finally found the string and pulled it; a room as large as a grade school cafeteria was revealed. It looked like an archive of the Smithsonian, filled with shelves and glass cases, each crammed with statues and figures and ephemera from all over the world.

“Frank was an engineer, so everything is organized and cataloged. I don’t know what he planned to do with it all. I tried to have him donate it to a museum, but he refused. Then when he passed, I just let it be. Too much to go through, and so much of it gives me the creeps.”

It was easy to understand why. The collection was overflowing with medical oddities and religious relics. Dozens of animals were preserved in large jars of yellowed liquid. There was also had a selection of human remains. Bill saw a baby with lower half that came to a point like a mermaid. Several two-headed and conjoined twins were displayed; some had not survived an attempt to be separated. There were also mummified remains; some dried up and grey others a dark bronze color which seemed freshly dead. An entire bin of shrunken heads sat next to a stuffed monkey.

“Are those real heads?” Bill asked.

“Probably. He loved all that sort of stuff. Frank’s father made Frank go into engineering and his brother into medicine, but Frank dream was to be a doctor as well. I guess this collection was a part of that.”

Bill continued to marvel at the items. One bookshelf was overflowing with voodoo trinkets; amulets, dolls, rattles, paintings, robes, jewelry, bottles of potions, monkey paws and genitals, and books recording the rituals and incantations used by voodoo priests.

On still another bookshelf was a vast collection of outsider art; self-taught prolific artists who made crude sculptures, paintings and signs. Some religious, others described visions seen by the artists that they tried to express in their rough art. There was a large section of Chinese and African medicinal items; rhino horn, whale penis, bear gallbladders, and what looked like the dried remains of body parts from African albinos.

“Mrs. Manfred, this collection is amazing! It’s priceless!”

“Do you want it?”

“I can’t afford to buy this collection.”

“Sweetie, you can have it. It’s just junk to me.”

“What about your family? This is worth a lot of money.”

“Screw them. I’ll tell you what. I’ll sign it all over to you, we’ll put it all in a storage locker somewhere and if you sell any of it we’ll split the profits. What do you say?”

Bill retired later that same week, and Mrs. Manfred died shortly after the last item was moved into storage.

To Bill’s great frustration he found the collection difficult to sell. No reputable auction house would touch it; Ebay, Craigslist and Etsy banned the sale of most of the items in the collection. He also found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service and The Justice Department had stiff penalties for trading in human and animal remains and actively scanned the Internet for those trafficking in such items.

Bill’s goldmine was slowly turning to dust, and the fee for the storage locker was eating into his savings. He knew there had to be a black market for the collection but didn’t know how to find it. That’s when he started traveling to sketchy antique shows and cautiously displaying a few of his tamer items. He’d been traveling for almost a year before he finally found a possible customer.

“Is that real?” the man asked.

“It is.”

The man handed Bill a hundred dollars and Bill handed him a rhino horn. He tapped it, checking its density and scratched it with his fingernail to release fresh oil, which he smelled.

“This is real. Do you have any more?”

“Possibly,” Bill was trying to play it cool. “Why to you want to know?”

“I know some collectors, some very shy and cautious collectors, who enjoy rare items. What else do you have?”

“Meet me after the show, at the A&W across the parking lot. I’ll show you some more items.”

“I’ll see you then.”

Bill watched the man carefully as he walked away. He tried to figure out if he had any body language that might give him away as a government agent. The rest of the afternoon he was expecting to be arrested, but nothing happened. Bill packed up his wares and headed to the restaurant.

The man was in a booth with a half-finished root beer float, thumbing his phone as Bill entered, his laptop under his arm. He sat, opened the computer and began showing the man items from the collection. As the man scrolled through his blank expression changed to one of interest. After viewing about a third of the items he asked, “Is this the Manfred collection?”

Bill was surprised, but remained cautious, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It is. I’m sure of it.” The man closed Bill’s laptop.

“This is an amazing collection. Incredibly rare items; things you can’t get anywhere else.”

“Did you ever wonder why?”

“It was the husband’s stuff. His wife didn’t know what to do with it.”

“You poor sap. The wife was the collector. She travelled with her husband, stealing all that stuff from the locals while he was busy cutting deals for the railroad. But she crossed the wrong shaman or voodoo priest at some point and they put a curse on her and the collection.”

“What? That’s crazy. She was a little old lady living alone in a giant house. She was lonely.”

“Most of the doors were locked, right? Because she was afraid of what might be coming for her. That house was a prison, she couldn’t leave because she knew she’d be killed, or worse, just like her kids and her husband.”

Bill was reeling. How did this guy know the rooms of the house were unused?

“How did you know Mrs. Manfred?”

“Not exactly, but everyone in my business has heard of her. She was alone because her kids, grandkids, husband, and all the rest of her family were killed in freak accidents. Plane crash, hit by a train, fell down a sewer, slipped on a wet sidewalk and snapped a neck; all sorts of weird accidents and all of them fatal. Everyone she cared about died. She finally figured out it was due to the collection, so tried to sell it. Anyone who bought an item would also die in a freak accident. After word got out she couldn’t give it away, well, until you came along.”

“This is crazy. There can’t be a curse on anything. Voodoo isn’t real. It’s just a collection of stuff. Creepy stuff granted, but just stuff.”

“Look, several of my clients were interested in the collection, and I met with Mrs. Manfred once to discuss it. She showed me the collection room too, but didn’t you notice how the house was locked down like fortress? She lived in her bedroom and kitchen, everything else was blocked off. She had bars on the windows, the doors were solid steel and the place had a security system that would put the White House to shame. She was keeping something out.”

“She was an old, rich lady living alone; of course she was nervous about strangers.” Bill paused. “What was she keeping out?”

“Demons. Zombies. Vampires. I don’t know. Whatever shamans send when you piss them off.”

“Why didn’t she just kill herself ?”

“She tried, but it wouldn’t work. She’d wake up the next day unharmed.”

“Like Groundhog Day,” Bill said.

“Like Groundhog Day,” the man repeated. “Until she got rid of the collection, she couldn’t die and lived every day in terror over whatever was clawing at her doors at night.”

“But I have the collection now, and nothing has happened to me.”

“You’ve done a good job of hiding your whereabouts. You move around a lot and you don’t live with the collection so they haven’t been able to find you. Until now.” The man took Bill’s picture with his phone and texted it to someone.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry pal, just doing my job. As I said, my clients are interested in the collection. They want their stuff back.”

“You work for them? Tell them it was an accident! I didn’t know!”

“Now c’mon, you saw what was in there. Body parts? Animal organs? You knew that stuff was wrong. You got greedy, and now you have to pay for it.”

“What? Money?? I don’t have any money!”

The man chuckled. “They don’t want your money Bill, they want you. They’re going to cut you up in little pieces then slowly and painfully extract your soul, which they’ll keep. Not sure how that works exactly.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Keep my soul? For what? What will they do with it?”

“I don’t know all the ins and outs, but it’s not good. Mrs. Manfred gave you the collection which you freely accepted, transferring the curse from her to you. Once she was safe, she killed herself. On the upside, you can’t die. Ever. Even if they chop you up you’ll still be alive and feel the whole thing even with your little cubed parts scattered all over. Sorry.”

Bill ran out of the A&W, leaving his laptop behind. The man opened it and explored Bill’s other files.

“You’ve been a naughty boy, Bill,” the man said as he clicked through photos of jewelry and other trinkets Bill had stolen from homes over the years; all of it carefully indexed. In another file he found photos taken through windows homeowners and their family in various states of undress, or with partners other than their spouses. These were also meticulously annotated with names, dates and locations.

“And a Peeping Tom to boot. You’ve been a very bad boy,” said the man. “Looks like this is going to work out just fine.”

He finished his float, leaving the laptop behind.

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