Casting the Runes – Lee Duigon

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We ordered some $70 worth of groceries from Whole Foods the other day. In due course, the order was delivered. End of story–well, no. More like the beginning.

Shortly after we’d put away our groceries, we got an email from amazon.com telling us “We were unable to deliver your order”–and therefore we are refunding your payment.

Somebody made a mistake. The order was delivered, all shipshape. Somebody got the address mixed up or something.

Well, you wouldn’t believe how hard we had to work to set it right. Phone this number, phone that one, talk to robots, and to the occasional human being who happened to be present. It took two days to give these people their money back! We hope that goal has finally been achieved. Maybe there’ll be another error somewhere and the bailiffs will break down our door and drag us off to Camp Biden. For a time there we felt like characters in M.R. James’ Casting the Runes: maybe whoever winds up with that money will regret it.

Didn’t take this long to morph into a conspiracy theory, did it?

This is really weird. Coos Bay, Oregon–Five people are suffering from hallucinations and nobody knows why: but doctors suspect they might be having them because maybe, maybe… they touched something. ( http://www.aol.com/article/2016/10/17/mysterious-hallucination-causing-illness-seemingly-spread-by-tou/21584672/ ).

But the bottom line, so far, is, they just don’t know.

First a 54-year-old caregiver called the sheriff to say a gang of ruffians was trying to tear the roof off her car. When this turned out to be like, totally not true, deputies took her to the hospital.

But then the two deputies started having hallucinations. Then a hospital worker. And then the caregiver’s patient. Five people seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, and no one has been able to find out why.

The only thing that would make this story even weirder is if they all had the same hallucination. But that would take us out of our own world and into M.R. James country. As is, it does sound a bit like his classic horror story, Casting the Runes.

Who ever heard of any kind of disease, transmitted by touch, that causes you to have hallucinations? Well, nobody–otherwise they’d have diagnosed the thing by now. To me it sounds like some funky kind of secret weapon that somehow got out of the lab; but maybe I’ve read too many thrillers.

I hope this is not one of those stories–in a fallen world that falls a little farther every day–that just dries up and blows away without any explanation of the mystery. Let’s keep an eye out for further developments.