GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: JACK’S TONIC

JACK’S TONIC

WARNING: Never drink a 150-Year-old Snake Oil Tonic—My Aunt did, and now she’s not human anymore

They told me the old milk house hadn’t been opened since 1947. My great-grandfather, Jack “The Milk Man,” died there—collapsed by the churn with his boots on. The room had stayed sealed ever since, the cold stone cellar beneath it undisturbed.

Until now.

I was helping my mom and Aunt Linda get the old house in Frankfort ready to sell. My grandparents were both gone, and Linda didn’t want to waste money on upkeep.

“Not for nothin’, but burn the whole thing down for all I care,” she muttered, puffing her Marlboro Lights like an angry dragon. “This house is cursed and so are we. Mom never left me nothin’ good.”

She was right about that. Linda was a clone of my grandma but even less of a pleasant ray of sunshine with a cherry on top. Bitter, mean, jealous—the constant gossip. Her two sons were useless, like their father. Uncle Billy was a good guy, but Vietnam fucked him into a shell of himself who eventually checked out on the barrel of a shotgun.

Allan, the youngest, was a bedwetting mama’s boy, coddled into social awkwardness as a teen. He grew up to be an overweight dwarf, a wannabe teacher who took ten years to get a bachelor’s degree and still isn’t teaching.

His older brother, Jimmy, was a broke-dick Army cast-off who developed a southern accent by the age of sixteen, despite never living in the South. He was shorter than Allan, walked with his shoulders puffed out, and had this annoying laugh where he’d repeat the words he just said like they were the punchline.

Two sons. Two short-man complexes. All because of their miserable, overbearing mother and a Vietnam-warped dad who wasn’t there when they needed him. Linda was drunk—always. Like my grandparents. Breakfast was Milwaukee’s Best, lunch was a nap, and dinner was more Milwaukee’s Best—with a highball or two.

My grandparents raised them while she ran around town looking for a husband. She failed and ended up in this house living with Grandma. And it was bad. They were drunk 24/7 until Grandma finally kicked the bucket due to bladder cancer in August.

With her idiot sons unable to do much of anything, Mom and I had to lead the way. She felt bad for her sister and often yelled at me for being so critical of her, but I couldn’t help it. Linda was a cloud of negativity that drained the room when she walked in. An energy vampire.

Right after I had that exact conversation with Mom, Linda walked into the room and bled us dry. I was telling Mom what we needed to do to renovate an area of the house. It required me to get into the cellar, when Linda walked in with a beer in her hand.

“That cellar’s a shit hole. Nothin’ down there but old milk bottles and your grandma’s Avon collection. Be careful of them, honey, Jackie says we can sell ’em on the internet.”

“I will, Aunt Linda,” I said, getting up to escape the ignition of cancer sticks that would soon consume the room in a cloud of smoky doom. I grabbed a flashlight and went down into the cellar.

I always hated this place. It had that moist, musty smell unique to East Coast basements. Limestone and long winters created a dank, dark dungeon of terror for us all as kids. Jimmy and Allan often locked me in there to torture me. I swore I heard things in the dark that terrified me when I was eight, begging for sunlight on the other side of that creaky staircase.

But as I got older, I learned not to fear what was down there. I found some neat things, in fact—old ashtrays, bottle caps, even a Brooks Robinson baseball card that belonged to my uncle Bobby, who died in Vietnam. I still have it.

So when I went down there, that smell hit me and triggered a whole wave of memories, both good and bad. I found the area I needed, but the wall was crumbling. I pulled away a brick and a draft of cold, rank air overwhelmed me. I moved a few more, shined the light in, and found another space that had been walled off—who knows how long ago.

Inside was a little cove, frozen in time, with two generations of Schmidt milkmen’s legacy. There, I found the bottles—hidden behind old milking equipment, buried in soot and mouse nests. Thick green glass, the wax still unbroken after a century and a half. Labels yellow and curling:

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

Jack was Jack Jr.’s father (yeah, they were really original with names in my family)—my great-grandfather. The original “Milk Man,” though he never milked a cow in his life. He sold these tonics from a wagon, then an old truck, all over the Northeast. People said he was a healer. Others said he was a conman. Some swore he was a devil.

I brought one bottle upstairs. Aunt Linda saw it and nearly dropped her ashtray.

“That looks just like Daddy’s,” she said, reaching for it. “He used to say one sip kept him young. Two made him strong. Three made him see things.” She laughed through her emphysema-ridden lungs, but her eyes didn’t.

My mother left to take care of her dogs in Rochester, so I was stuck with Linda in the house that night. I prepped my tools for the next day’s demolition. Then I talked to my wife in Oregon and assured her I’d be done as fast as possible. She was four months pregnant with our first.

I heard Linda talking to herself as I hung up. I hid around the corner and watched her pacing around the house with a constant beer in her hand, chain-smoking. By 8 p.m., she was a drunken mess. She was out of beer and begged me to go get her more. I refused. She finally passed out.

I went out to meet some old friends, and when I came home, I found the bottle of tonic—empty.

I was worried she’d be dead. That stuff had to be rotten. But when I checked on her, she was snoring away on the couch, her nightgown revealing far too much. I slinked away in disgust to my room.

The next morning, she woke me up coughing. I got up, made coffee, and asked about the tonic. She owned up to it, said it tasted like licorice and milk. Said it made her bones tingle.

“I feel like a young woman again,” she said, rubbing her arms. “Like I could dance all night.”

I worked my ass off that day, rebuilding a wall while her cycle of drinking and napping continued. But there was a noticeable pep in her step—and she wasn’t nearly as miserable. She even ordered me dinner: my favorite roast beef and barbecue sub from Tony’s.

That night, I showered and crashed early. Slept like a log.

The next morning, her skin was… different. Pale and waxy. She was a bit more hunched over. As I sanded drywall, she walked up behind me. Her spine cast a warped shadow across the wall. I turned around. She smiled without blinking, said nothing, then slinked away. I swore her eyes flashed yellow, then turned green again.

That night, she didn’t need her glasses anymore. Her cough was gone. She watched TV, perched on the couch like a possum in a dress. As she laughed, her tongue looked longer. Her teeth—sharper.

Later, as I prepped tools, I heard her whispering to the cellar door. Singing. Something in German. I had no idea she knew German—she barely had a grip on English.

I did some digging. I took the bottle and examined the symbols on it. They were occult. Possibly druidic. I searched for “Jack’s Tonic” and found an eleven-year-old Reddit thread. The OP had found a bottle, too. Said it had strange ingredients, some unidentifiable. Others like mugwort and mandrake root—common in occult remedies.

Then came the chilling part.

Jack Schmidt Sr.—my great-grandfather—was said to be a druidic conman whose “wonder-milk” was linked to disappearances in four states. Eventually, he was lynched.

Jack’s Tonic was a milker—a ritual in a bottle. A way to grow something ancient inside a human host until it was ripe enough to burst.

The final dose wasn’t meant to be consumed. It was meant to deliver.

When Aunt Linda drank the bottle, she didn’t just wake something up inside her.

She fed something else.

I locked my door and had trouble sleeping that night. I kept waking up every hour. The sounds of her creepy singing and visions of my horrific family shilling poison to people haunted me every time I closed my eyes.

Then I heard it. Loud and clear.

It was no dream. It was a horrific moan that curdled through the house. Just past three in the morning. I got up, put on my clothes, grabbed my phone, and turned on the flashlight.

I slowly opened the door and there it was again—that horrific groan. It was coming from downstairs. As I walked through the hallway toward the stairs, I could hear Aunt Linda’s faint whisper through the floorboards—deep, wet sounds, like something breathing through curdled lungs.

And the smell. It was putrid. Rotting sour milk, dead animals, and the rank of an old damp cave. The air was thick and stifling as I descended the stairs.

“Aunt Linda, you okay?” I called out, but she didn’t answer.

Then I heard a muffled yell from the cellar. It was her.

I sighed loudly, feeling like a fool. I’d gotten into my own head, reading Reddit conspiracies when really I was just watching my Aunt Linda fall deeper into dementia. I shook my head, realizing it was my duty to get her back upstairs and call my mother to get her into a home.

Determined and annoyed, I walked down the creaky stairs into the stench of the cellar.

She tackled me. I toppled down the stairs, breaking the banister. I smashed my head into the limestone wall and landed hard on my elbow, dropping my phone.

I tried to gather myself, but she was on top of me, hissing. She was strong, and her cold hands moved swiftly across my body, grabbing my throat.

I could smell her breath. Her yellow eyes gleamed like reptile eyes in the dim light of the cellar. Linda tried to force the last bottle down my throat, but I wouldn’t open my mouth. She dragged me over to the wall I had uncovered like a rag doll.

“You little pecker,” she growled. “You’re the missing piece. He’s thirsty again. It’s time to pay your dues to your family. Solidify your legacy. The family has to provide.”

Her skin flaked as she moved. Her hands cracked and re-formed with every gesture. Her voice wasn’t hers anymore—it was a wet, moaning thing, bubbling like spoiled cream. As she cackled and held me down, I saw a terrifying figure emerge from behind the wall.

In the shadows of the milk room, something ancient, rotten, and decrepit stirred. It lumbered forward and bellowed that unmistakable moan. It was an indescribable beast that perverted human form—its yellow piercing eyes tore right through me.

Before it could reach me, I reached into the darkness. I grabbed a metal pipe and fought her off with the broken stair rail. I drove it through her shoulder, and she fell into the creature. They both toppled over.

She shrieked so loud the walls shook.

I ran. The stairs collapsed behind me. I didn’t grab a thing—left my phone and my belongings. I grabbed my keys, hopped into my car, and peeled out into the moonlight. I drove the New York State Thruway trembling, that screech stuck in my head. I got to my mother’s house by morning and told her everything.

She was skeptical but had awoken to several messages from Linda that were clearly unhinged. She called the police, who were going to do a wellness check.

I took a shower and cried into the water silently, reliving the terror in my mind. As I was drying off, my mother knocked on the door and handed me her phone. It was my wife.

She was livid—screaming at me for the horrific messages I’d left her. I trembled as I explained what had happened. She was skeptical, as any normal person would be, and asked if I’d been doing drugs. I finally calmed her down and explained I didn’t have my phone.

I had to hang up on her when the police called my mother.

The house was on fire. The fire department was there now, putting it out.

They questioned me but confirmed it started after I had already arrived in Rochester.

As my mother hung up the phone, we received a forwarded message from my wife—from my phone.

We played it together.

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

A pause. Heavy breathing. 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. Mom hugged me. I called my wife, crying, and explained everything in more detail.

Time passed. I have a new phone. I’m back home, and the joy of my daughter’s birth has been a blessing. But the past is still unsettled.

When they sifted through the ashes, no human remains were found.

I hear the screeching at night in my dreams. I clutch my child closely and fear leaving her alone—ever. I see her face. I smell the milk. I dread the unspeakable horror of my family’s legacy coming for me and my baby girl.

I wonder when she’ll “be in touch.”

I know Linda is still waiting. Lurking.
So is he. 

But so am I.
Because my love for my daughter and our relationship is a powerful force, too.

Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio