JACK’S TONIC
by Hal Hefner

03/29/26

My aunt told me the old milk house hadn’t been opened since 1947 but I knew that was bullshit. She exaggerates all the time to make things seem more dramatic. She must’ve forgotten that I had opened it up when I was a kid, to get the lawnmower out when she paid me fifty cents to mow the lawn. She was cheap too. The Milk house was a large, dilapidated, tan colored shed, with the broken remnants of a stable for cows attached to it.  

The thing likely hadn’t been cleaned out since 1947, that was the truth and there was a locked up area we never went in which likely inspired her little white lie. My great-grandfather, Jack “The Milkman,” died there, collapsed mid churn with his shitkickers on. And when my grandma took over the house, she made sure the old “milking room” (what we used to call it) stayed sealed after that, and the cold stone cellar beneath it went untouched for decades. She wanted nothing to do with cows or milk and just became a neglected link to the past.

That changed when the house went up for sale after my grandmother died and I became the cheap labor. I came back to Frankfort to help my mom and Aunt Lydia get the place ready. Frankfort was one of many weird little towns, with very specific identities, nestled in the heart of the Mohawk Valley. This town skewed Italian but the Germans that settled it and named it like our family, still remained. My grandparents were both gone now, and Lydia refused to spend a dime keeping a house she hated, alive. She wanted to use the money from the house to move to North Carolina to be near her high school friend Jackie. 

“Not for nothin’, but burn the whole goddamn thing down for all I care,” she said, puffing her Marlboro Lights like an ornery dragon. “This house is cursed and so are we. Mom never left me nothin’ good. I can’t wait to get the hell outta here.”

She wasn’t wrong. Lydia was my grandma’s twin if you drained out whatever warmth she’d ever had. Bitter, jealous, mean, always talking; yep, that was Aunt Lydia. Behind her back, some called her the town gossip, or the ‘militant midget’ (their nickname not mine) and others just pretended she didn’t exist. 

Her two sons were useless, just like their father. Uncle Billy had been a good guy once, I always liked him more than her and thought he was funny. He paid a price though, Vietnam hollowed him out with PTSD that turned him into an abusive alcoholic, often passed out drunk by 2pm on a good day.  Sadly, like a lot of others who went to ‘Nam, eventually Agent Orange got him and he checked out with a shotgun when he found out he had terminal cancer. Aunt Lydia’s youngest kid, Allan found him after six days in the middle of one of the hottest July months ever. 

She had divorced Billy back in the early 80’s and braved it on her own with her two sons. Allan, who I had fun with over the years, was four years my elder and a bedwetting mama’s boy who got coddled into social awkwardness. He grew up into an insecure energy vampire, with teacher dreams, ten years into a bachelor’s degree he still couldn’t do anything with. He was a lot like her too, bitter and jealous and a baby boomer trapped in a Gen X body. I was saddened by the man he became especially after he drifted so far right into his politics that I couldn’t even have a normal conversation with him anymore. So I didn’t.

Jimmy, the older one, was a high school drop out, Army cast-off who strangely developed a Southern accent by sixteen, despite never living south of New York. He wore my grandpa’s old snake skin cowboy boots, walked with his chest puffed out and laughed in an annoying way by repeating his own words like they were punchlines. He had a good heart once, but was easily sucked into conspiracy theories and fake news and drifted even further right than his brother. 

Two sons, two short-man complexes, raised by a miserable, overbearing mother and a dad who vanished into a bottle when they needed him most. Lydia stayed drunk, always had been, just like my grandparents. Breakfast was Milwaukee’s Best. Lunch was a nap. Dinner was more Milwaukee’s Best with a highball or two. 

My grandparents raised the boys while Lydia ran around town looking for a husband. She never found one and ended up back in this house with Grandma. It was bad living. They argued over the dumbest things and drank nonstop until Grandma finally died of bladder cancer in August.

With her idiot sons unable to do much of anything, only around when they needed something, while waiting for her to die to fetch an inheritance, Mom and I took over. Mom felt bad for her sister and yelled at me whenever I got too critical, but I couldn’t help it. Lydia sucked the air out of a room the second she walked in. She would always cast spells of snide, condescending remarks my way too, usually referencing my intelligence, going to college or bringing up something I wasn’t good at as a kid. 

“Sorry, I got an education and left, unlike your kids, not my problem.”

Right after I said that to Mom, Lydia wandered in with a beer and proved my point.

“Be careful Jackie, that cellar’s a shit hole. Nothin’ down there but old milk bottles and your grandma’s Avon junk. Be careful with those though, honey, Jimmy says we can sell ’em on the internet. You may be a college boy and all but you never were the most nimble of foot. Or as athletic as your Mommy was. So don’t break nothin’ ya here?” She chuckled a wet emphysema riddled laugh as she sucked on a cancer stick.

“I will, Aunt Lydia,” I said, already standing to escape the incoming fog of smoke. I grabbed a flashlight and headed downstairs. Oh yeah and my name is Jack, I’m the third one but not consecutively.  I’m just Jack and my last name isn’t Schmidt, it’s Morgan so I don’t have the Roman numerals after my name, but I am named after my great grandfather the Milkman, and his son, Jack, my grandpa.

I always hated the cellar. It had that moist, musty smell unique to East Coast basements. Limestone and long winters turned it into a dank dungeon that terrified us as kids. Jimmy and Allan used to lock me down there for fun, laughing while I counted my breath in the dark, until I cried. I swore I heard things moving when I was eight, begging for sunlight through the cracks in that creaky staircase. I’m not gonna lie though, while it was happening I was terrified, but looking back on it, being scared as a little kid is one exhilarating feeling that you seem like you’re chasing, your whole adult life. That is until it actually happens.

As I got older, the fear faded. I even found cool stuff down there, old ashtrays, books, newspapers from the early 1900s, bottle caps, and a Brooks Robinson baseball card that belonged to my Uncle Bobby, who died in Vietnam. I still have it and it’s one of my prized collectibles.

As I ascended down that creaky stairs, that smell punched me right in the nose, dragging memories with it into the cellar. I found the Avon bottles and started to stack them all near the stairs to bring them up. When I removed the majority of them I noticed the stone wall behind them was in severe disrepair. I pulled on a brick and a whole section of the wall crumbled to the ground at my feet. Leaping out of the way, I avoided being hit by any debris. 

Never the most nimble of foot, my ass Aunt Lydia I thought as cold, rank air spilled over me. I removed a few more bricks and shined the flashlight inside, revealing a hidden space sealed off for who knows how long. 

Hidden behind that wall, sat a little cove frozen in time, holding two generations of Schmidt milkmen history. Bottles hid behind old milking equipment, buried in soot and mouse nests. Bottles of thick clear glass, with wax seals still intact after a century and a half. I reached in and grabbed one to get a better look at the label, yellowed and curling.

JACK’S TONIC
For Health, Long Life, and Fullness of Form
Cold-kept
Shake before sinning

As I mentioned, my great-grandfather was the Milkman to many, for milk but he didn’t just sell milk. As kids, the family story we were told when we asked about him was that during the great depression, he also sold tonics made from Milk, from a wagon, then an old truck, all over the Northeast. Some said he was a healer. Others called him a conman. And what I’d come to find out to my surprise later on was that a few swore he was a devil. To me he was just Great Grandpa Jack, the milkman of legend and family lore.

I had just stumbled on a stash of his tonic and was enthralled by it. I brought one bottle upstairs. Aunt Lydia nearly knocked the ashtray off of the coffee table with her foot she shot up so fast from the couch.

“Oh my gawd….Is that? That looks just like Granddaddy’s,” she said, reaching for it. “Daddy always said one sip kept him young. Two made him strong. Three made him see things, it was so damn strong.” She laughed through smoke-scarred lungs, but her eyes stayed serious. 

Before she left that evening, Mom warned me to keep an eye on Lydia, because the truth behind Jack’s tonic was that it was a bottled version of a white russian. And where there is booze there is Lydia. Because when Mom left that evening to take care of her dogs in Rochester, it meant I was alone in the house with “Looney Lydia,” (that was my nickname for her) 

To avoid her and the permanent cloud of smoke that circled her, I prepped tools for the next day for the dry wall repairs. Then I talked to my wife in Oregon and I promised her, I’d wrap things up quickly. She was four months pregnant with our first child and I was chompin’ at the bit to get home to her. I didn’t want to come in the first place but mom really needed my help.

After I hung up, I heard Lydia talking to herself watching the news blaring on the TV so she could hear it in every room she went to.  She paced the house yelling at the TV from time to time, with a beer welded to her hand, chain-smoking, until she ran dry of both. She was cocked out of her mind by 7:30 pm and begged me to get her more. Slurring, while trying to convince me I like shitty beer too, she tempted me with the big sale on Milwaukee’s Best and Old Milwaukee at the Melrose convenient store. 

Though it was hard to resist, I refused politely, telling her I had to meet my friends. She mumbled something negative about me I couldn’t understand but received the message regardless. She eventually passed out right as I was leaving and I left her snoring on the couch.

I went out to meet friends I hadn’t seen in years, had a few drinks, told a few stories and made my way back to the house around 1 AM. When I walked inside, the bottle of my great grandpa’s tonic I brought up, was completely empty on the kitchen floor. 

I should’ve known better. This old fiend couldn’t wait until tomorrow, so she cracked open and guzzled down a one hundred year old plus, bottle of coffee and milk that most certainly was rotten just to taste the booze. 

I expected to find her dead from some kind of bacterial poison or something. But instead, there she was, passed out on the floor, near the couch, her nightgown riding up in ways I didn’t want to see, so I went to my room. 

She woke me up with her loud, liquid coughing the next morning. There she sat in the kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee, hangover free. She ignored me, as I made a cup. I cut the tension by asking her if she was okay. She just looked at me like I just farted in church. So I needed to elaborate about her drinking the tonic. She said it was fine, just tasted like licorice and milk and that it made her bones tingle.

“I feel like a young woman again,” she said, rubbing her arms. “Like I could dance all night and ride like the wind, if ya know what I mean.” She cackled.

I literally puked in my mouth at the thought she just sexually assaulted my brain with. So I got the hell out of there as fast as I could. Motivated to get away from her, I worked nonstop rebuilding the wall while she drank and napped. She moved better, complained less and didn’t bother me that day. She even ordered me my favorite roast beef and barbecue sauce sub with banana peppers, from Tony’s.

That night, I showered and crashed hard. The next morning, there she was again when I woke up, in the same pose, watching the news in the kitchen. But on this day, she had a bottle of Jack’s tonic cracked open that she was pouring into her coffee. Her skin looked different today, pale and waxy, and she sat more hunched. When I walked by to grab my coffee, she ripped a huge fart. “Whoops, the gooses are out this morning,” she said dully and looked at me with sunken eyes swallowed by purple, bruised bags. 

Again, motivation to get the fuck out of dodge, ASAP, made me hustle, sanding drywall and prepping my paint. As I was bent over taping the area down, she crept up behind me. Her spine cast a warped shadow across the wall. I turned around, and she smiled without blinking, said nothing, then wandered off. I could have sworn her eyes flashed yellow before settling back to green. It was unsettling and I cursed my mom for leaving me alone with her.

All I could think about while I was painting was George’s Marvelous Medicine, that Roald Dahl story where he makes a potion for his mean, hag of a grandma; that eventually makes her disappear. I felt just like George, trapped with her in this house and wished that tonic would just make her go away. 

That night she watched TV without glasses and I noticed her cough was gone. She perched on the couch like a possum in a dress. When she laughed, her tongue lingered out of her mouth a little too long and her teeth looked sharper. Something was off and I was homesick and pissed at my mom for leaving me here with Geroge’s fuckin’ Grandma but this hag was addicted to the Marvelous medicine.

Later, while prepping tools, I heard her whispering at the cellar door, soft words but spoken deeply in German. I had no idea she knew German, considering she barely spoke proper English. Shit was getting weird and I was getting tired of the shit, so I called my mom and let her have it in a voice message and asked her to come back and check on her crazy sister. She rang me back and said she’d be there by noon tomorrow. I wasn’t going home yet, but at least I wouldn’t suffer alone any longer.

I went out by myself and ate some wings with my buddy. He said something funny that stuck with me, when I told him about the tonic. I had no idea, but when we were little, his grandpa told him a story about my great grandpa. Back in the day, many people accused him of being a Satanist, someone who practiced witchcraft. I was baffled, numb but somehow I knew there was something to this. 

With that info sticking to my skullI started digging around the house later that night when I got back. I examined the bottles again and searched around the cellar for any other info I could find. That’s when I noticed something peculiar I had missed upon the original excavation when I went back in there with two flashlights. 

There were strange symbols painted on the wall. Some looked like they were made in paint and others chalk. Then I looked at the cases of bottles again. There was one set with the same symbols written on the outside of the wooden case that gave me goose bumps when I touched it, realizing it was written in blood. I took some pictures with my phone and retreated to my room. As I looked at them on my phone, it showed me the room in a way I had not been able to process while down there. I had a terrifying feeling that there was something else behind that wall with the symbols on it.

Obsessed now, I went sleuthing on the internet, searching for anything I could find on the town’s history with Satanism, my great grandpa, the symbols and Jack’s Tonic. I found an old Reddit thread from ten years ago, where someone else had discovered two bottles in their grandparents basement in Syracuse, about an hour or so from here. 

Caught up in the similarities between our finds, I kept reading and found a follow up post from a year later, where they had tested Jack’s Tonic. The ingredients they reported were like something out of Harry Potter, which included mugwort and mandrake root, along with bacteria, milk, mercury, and several other chemicals no one could identify.

But what stuck in my gut, even harder, was the history behind the bottles that this person reported. Apparently my great grandfather, aka “The Milkman”, had been linked to heinous sacrificial murders and several disappearances in four states. 

There were images of old newspaper articles to prove it too. He ended the story with something an old timer he interviewed told him, claiming a mob eventually lynched him, but nobody ever knew his real name or where he was from. 

Learning something this horrible about a member of your family is a feeling I cannot explain to you easily. Shock, repulsion, anger and the fear ate their way through my mind in a matter of seconds. Everything was a lie. He didn’t die in his boots or any of that bullshit Lydia and my Grandma peddled to us. This man was a murderer who drugged people with his snake oil that he intended to transform them or him into something awful. Some he cut up, and supposedly ate them in a sacrifice to some ancient god this person referred to as Vorrum The Curdsire. 

I said the name aloud, immediately wishing I hadn’t for fear of summoning it. Chills crept up my spine and manifested as goosebumps across my entire body. I felt like I was eight again, trapped in the cellar as the stench of Vorrum The Curdsire, a druidic god lost to time, appeared. I put my phone on the bed and stood up to gather my wits.

Jack’s Tonic wasn’t medicine. It was a milker, an ancient ritual sealed in glass, meant to grow something vile inside a human host until it was ready. The final dose delivered it. Terror engulfed me in the form of my reality; Aunt Lydia drank who knows how many bottles of that shit, all the while the bottle was really drinking her.

I locked my door and slept badly, waking every half hour. Vorrum The Curdsire, the creepiest name rolled through my mind over and over. Lydia was right about one thing, this place was cursed. It made me wonder if she knew about it all too. Did my mom? A game of cat and mouse ensued within my brain that night between the reality of my family’s past and the people I loved that may have known about it.

Just after three in the morning, a moan rolled through the house. A loud thud followed that made me spring out of bed. It wasn’t a dream because I couldn’t sleep. I dressed, grabbed my phone, and turned on the flashlight. The sound came from downstairs, in the basement and as I stepped into the hallway her whisper floated up through the floorboards, wet and slow.

The smell followed me down the stairs, thick with sour milk, rot, and the damp mineral stink of an old cave. Of death, old and forgotten.

“Aunt Lydia, you okay?” I called.

She didn’t answer.

Then I heard her yell from the cellar. That snapped me out of it. Dementia made sense. Possession by Vorrum The Curdsire through my great grandfather’s old ass tonic, didn’t. I told myself I was being stupid and went down to help her.

She tackled me on the stairs.

The banister snapped as I fell awkwardly through the stairs. My head slammed into limestone and I felt a piece of wood rip into my rib. My phone skidded away. She crushed my throat with freezing hands, eyes glowing yellow in the dim light. She tried forcing the last bottle into my mouth and dragged me toward the wall with the symbols. It was now open wide and she pushed me toward it with a strength that this five-foot, sixty-nine year old, should not have. 

“You little bastard,” she growled. “You’re the missing piece. He’s thirsty again. The family has to provide. It’s the pact!”

She began speaking in a language I could not understand, voice bubbling thick with malice. Her skin, reptilian and evil, flaked in the dim light of the cellar as she moved. Something shifted behind the wall, old and rotting. I saw its eyes gleam. It was watching me. She pressed me up against the wall and in one disgusting move she rubbed her crotch on my leg and shuddered in a moan I could only describe as ecstasy. I turned away repulsed, yet motivated to stay alive and find a way out.

As she rubbed on me again, her hand loosened around my neck. I reached behind me, breaking her grasp, to grab a metal stair railing that had broken off.  I swung it blindly with all of my strength. The rail punched into her neck, and she fell backward screaming into the dark.

Something stirred as a chorus of non-human sounds assaulted my mind with a pain that should have broken me as I turned to run. The thought of my unborn child willed me to push through the agony. Grasping onto a step still intact on the stairs, I pulled myself up. I could hear them, some-thing, multiple things, screaming, growling, hissing, all at once in one terrifying cacophony that was not just a sound by a weapon they were using to hurt me.

Adrenaline carried me as I ran upward. The stairs collapsed behind me and the large can of turpentine fell down, which I had placed on the top step, before I went out. The horrific sounds stopped and I could hear it glugging out onto the floor. My brain was free. I left everything there, grabbed my keys and hopped on the New York State Thruway. I drove straight to my mother’s house in Rochester. I drove until sunrise while visions of the turpentine catching fire and burning the ancient horror in the basement followed me until I arrived on my mother’s doorstep. Exhausted and in shock, I did my best to explain everything to my mother. I can read her well and I was relieved to see she knew nothing about any of it. Everything came rushing back to her and all the little clues that stuck in her mind over the years about her grandma, her mom and likely her older sister started to make sense. We experienced an emotional moment in that kitchen that nobody should ever have to share with their child or parent.

We wept and hugged until we were startled apart by the loud rotary sounding ring of her iphone. It was a call from the Frankfort fire department, who reported to her that the house burned to the ground this morning. They estimated that it started about an hour and a half ago, after I’d already reached Rochester. They found no remains and were unsure yet where it started or the cause. 

Had I willed it to happen in my mind while driving here, with some genetic, ancient witchcraft I unknowingly possessed? Was it just a coincidence? I did not know and I never will. 

After she hung up, I immediately drove to the nearest AT&T store, got a new phone and got a plane. 

When we landed in Oregon, I turned my new phone back on. I was shaken, to realize I had received several texts and a forwarded message from my wife…that came from my number…my phone. 

I couldn’t play it on the car ride home, dreading what was on there. Getting to my family was all that mattered.

When I got home, we showered, made love and went to bed. I said nothing at this point but she knew something was wrong. Now ready to explain to her what had happened, we played it together in bed.

“Hi honey… it’s Aunt Lydia. I’m looking for your husband. See, he left me and his great grandpa here in a bind. We need him.”

A pause, then heavy breathing followed. The voice was gravelly and deep, like a man trying to impersonate a woman, but with a tongue too big for their mouth.

“And if we can’t get him, well then, we’ll just take that precious little baby of yours. Matter of fact, that juicy little baby would be just what the doctor ordered for Grandpa. I’ll be in touch now. Bye, honey.”

I dropped the phone in terror. 

Time has passed since the incident and the birth of my daughter has brought me great joy. Her arrival helped pushed that memory into the shadows of time. But the past will always linger.

I still hear that screech in my nightmares that haunt me daily. It’s always the same, I wake up sweating and I hold my daughter tightly. The fear of leaving her alone, ever, is compounded by the unspeakable horror of my family’s legacy; that I dread is one day coming for me and my baby girl. 

I never stop waiting for that call or peering with caution around every corner. My eyes are open, always scanning the world for a sign or a symbol. The fear of letting my guard down a second too long, just enough for the past to claw back in, keeps me alert, while questioning everything.  Living a life that can never mistake silence for safety, is a terrible way to live.

I wonder when she’ll be “in touch.”I know what used to be my Aunt Lydia is still out there, lurking just beyond the edge where sanity gives way to a primordial terror. I know Vorrum the Curdsire is hungry and always will be. I know very little, and it’s the gaps in my understanding that casts a shadow of uncertainty, relentlessly following me into every sleepless night.

But, what truly keeps me grounded is simpler than knowing what, where, or why. I know who I am, that's all that matters. I stay on watch, because anything that comes for my daughter comes through me first. Love is as real as anything the darkness can summon, and once it’s set in motion, it doesn’t stop. 

That’s why I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my daughter. I won’t stop until there’s nothing left.

Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio