Dear Mr. Mesure: Another Haunted House

It's funny how things you think about by day can make guest appearances in your dreams that night. Recently I looked at celebrity photos with an eye to adding a few to my FACES albums and chose one of Mr. Roark and Tattoo from Fantasy Island.  Roark, played by Ricardo Montalban, has a smile that reminds me of Charles Mesure's smile.  Not quite the same but close.  I hope Mr. Mesure's character on Outrageous Fortune, DS Zane Gerard, gets to smile; so far he's been grumpy.  Maybe he has and I won't know until November brings DVDs.  That's like astronomy where things happen in deep space and we don't know about them for years, millennia, millions and billions of years, the time it takes the image of the event to travel at the speed of light to Earth.  There are signs on the Outrageous Fortune Forum that something big breaks next episode, July 21, and I have reason to believe Gerard is amongst it.  That ought to put a smile on his face.

Anyway, yesterday I looked at other photos of Ricardo Montalban and especially in his role as Khan in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.  He had long flowing white hair and looked muy macho.  I thought that this is what Charles Mesure might look like in 30+ years.  Montalban was only 62 when TWOK came out, but they made him up rugged and weathered, for all Khan had been through on that terrible exile planet, causing his wrath.  And last night I finished up a novel for the Mystery Readers Club at the library here, Nevada Barr's Track of the Cat. She filled the story with wonderful phrases, conversations, descriptions, and a heroine who exhausts me with all her hiking and climbing in the hot western Texas national park.  There was also a white-haired villain.  And then I saw a picture of George W. Bush on late night Comedy channel fare, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.  And oh, yes, I also reread the paragraph from the previous entry about haunted houses.

So in this dream this morning, I was one of several people in an old house, maybe one I'd lived in or been in before, and looked out the window and saw Air Force One with an accompanying jet, just as recently seen in Independence Day -- that movie was all over TV the last two weeks for the Fourth.  Air Force One -- which wasn't technically Air Force One because George W. is no longer president -- landed and Mr. Bush came to the house I was in.  I was supposed to make coffee, but twice it turned out awful, also reminiscent of a scene in Track of the Cat.

Some Goonie-age kids were around who wanted to go to the haunted house across the street.  The neighborhood was crawling with cops, military, Secret Service, media, and citizens.  I wanted to go up to the attic in the haunted house to prove how brave I was, and maybe leave treats for the kids if they dared to get them, but the legal types wouldn't let me go in.  One of them tugged on my silky skirt and pulled me to the ground to stop me.  There was a problem in that some people wanted to demolish the house.  (A house that was the scene of an actual fatal assault was demolished, as reported by yesterday's news, another waking clue added to the mix.)  But then a professional psychic or medium arrived to enter the house and look for the ghosts reported to be there.  I left and returned later, wearing a military uniform.  Not the camouflage (camo was mentioned often in Track of the Cat) outfit seen today but a WAC's straight skirt and blouse with heels.  (I've got a dufflebag full of them in my closet.)  This time the officials said the medium wanted me to go in and look around, so I did.

I went up to the attic first.  The architecture was like an old log cabin added onto and updated over the years.  The ceiling was the underside of the slanting roof.  I was surprised to discover that the house was fully furnished with the possessions of the families who lived there over the years.  Sounds like my house, only neater.  I went into a bedroom with a double four-poster in the middle of the room and furniture and shelves all around it against the walls.  There were toys that a boy had once owned.  The bed was rumpled, so I neatened the sheets and blanket.  Suddenly I noticed an elderly white-haired gent was there in the bed, smiling pleasantly, eyes twinkling:  a good face.  We chatted a while before he vanished again.  I told others that yes, the house is haunted, but it's a nice place, not scary at all.  Maybe he reminded me of my silver-haired mother who, by the way, though she loved me dearly, has not come back since her death a year and a half ago -- that I know of.  I wish she'd whisper the winning PowerBall numbers in my ear some night.  [I think I'll post a future entry about just what I'd do with the money if I did win a big PowerBall prize.]

The next room in the attic had belonged to a woman.  I don't know exactly how it happened, but next thing I woke up from a nap in bed...in my underwear.  A woman's ghost sat in an easy chair in the corner.  One of the people guarding the house told me I had a phone call, so I got dressed and took the call.  I was wanted across the street in the other house.  Four women were in trouble for some reason. 

But I hadn't seen the rest of the haunted house.  I took a quick look around, noting all the arranged furniture, a folded drop-leaf dinner table used as a room divider, soft carpet.  Not what I'd expect in a haunted house.  As I looked, I reached out for bad vibes but felt none.  I opened a door downstairs on a small room just as a bearded man came in from a door in the opposite narrow wall to use the toilet there.  He looked like the stereotype of the ancient, dusty prospector of the Gold Rush.  He asked me if there was a magazine on the small table by me that he could use as toilet paper, but there was a roll of TP behind him, and I left.  Was he another ghost or a costumed docent or recreator?  Another door led to an empty bathroom.  Maybe by this time Nature was calling me for real.  While reading Track of the Cat, I noticed Barr didn't mention "going" on the trail, if there's a protocol the park rangers had to observe:  dig and cover.  It's the same practical curiosity that makes kids wonder how astronauts use the bathroom in space.

I looked in one more bedroom downstairs where two real people sat, a young woman on the bed and a young man in a chair.  I saw a china plate with bite-sized pieces of tuna fish on the bed, picked it up, and started eating.  The couple wondered what I was doing.  Eating tuna fish, I said.  I offered a bite to the girl but it vanished off the fork.  Ghost food!  But the guy took the plate and finished eating.  (Last night I put out some "day-old" tuna fish on a plate for the cats and the local possum.)

Well, that's when i woke up.  Still don't know why the four people were in trouble.  Maybe the dream will pick up tonight where it left off and I'll find out.  This haunted house dream was different, in that I wasn't afraid OF the house but FOR the house in danger of demolition.  Ghost Hunters might have made ghost hunting so prosaic that it doesn't affect me the way it once did.  But then I can watch the screamers on Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted for a jolt to the nerves.


This was Entry #36.  Next Time:  Chapter Two