A CHILD was born at the Four Columns, which were as old as the town. Her husband ended up being the one to deliver the child. Cape Town looked like a good day for boating, or anything else that day, for a baby girl to be born. Nearby, down at the beach, a man was getting off a boat. It was Paul Eshien. “Where is the harmonica?”
He had been going on and on, talking to himself. The sky was clear, and people greeted him, although he was of little importance. Underneath the sun, the warm land of the African soil felt nice to him. Standing to the side of him was a man juggling knives. He had dropped one, picked it up and tried to toss it into a basket.
A black man wearing a green turban then put his hand out to catch it, but one of his fingers got sliced off. Panic ensued from this incident, which caused many to look around in amazement. Madness again broke out later that night when Wanda’s Woos Shack, known as Woos Bar N Grill, went up in flames. They saw Denise Cambridge, the lady from the bakery, running in, but nobody ever saw her come back out.
She owned a dog, which is the reason why she ran into the blaze.
They later found her dog, but she was missing.
It turned out that somebody by the name of Beefy Jazz was leading a small ring of cocaine smugglers from inside Woos Shack’s kitchen. They were smuggling drugs, working for a drug cartel operating out of the North Pacific. Towards the end of May, after the fire, things got busy as the tourist season picked up.
That was where one of the oldest hospitals stood, built around the same time as the Four Columns. The two-story hospital was close to where the fire broke out. They said a guy once saw a straw-hatted lady chained to a gurney being wheeled out of there.
Nobody was at the other end of it though, and the gurney went rolling out of control. And soon, in the distance, she dissolved with the gurney into a wall. It turned out that the lady was Gretta Schmitz, an old clerk who used to work in Cape Town in 1890.
One day she went mad and dressed up in a fairy costume, so the people committed her to a mental institution.
Paul Eshien arrived in Cape Town the same day the woman at the Four Columns gave birth and on the same day someone committed Gretta Schimtz, Friday the 13th. This man was set on being the best gamer.
All he did day after day and night after night was play games in the small room he rented for the summer. Then one summer's day, a man by the name of Will was coming up the stairs tugging the large armoire Paul had ordered; it was Will and this other man who were trying to bring it up the five big stairs.
The sled that they had the armoire on gave way, and it fell back down the five stairs and slammed into the red brick wall at the bottom. It then smashed into a million pieces. “Look what you made me do, you idiot!” the other man shouted.
“Me?” cried out Will, "You’re the idiot.”
The men hurried away, walking down the road, but not before passing a meat bone that was crawling with ants. Then the men were never seen again, and the broken pieces of the armoire that had laid there for weeks eventually got put to good use by an old man.
This man was the spitting image of Ernest Hemingway, who had used the lumber to aid him in building a skiff. Then along came Denise’s funny-looking dog again, seemingly showing no signs of caring for her former master. After all these months, people still couldn’t get used to it. Every old town seems to have a dog like this in it, and this was Cape Town's. The dog they called Voodoo. People were mostly scared of it because of its eyes. It was half blind with one albino eye.
This is the dog that was believed to have been possessed by the spirit of Gretta Schmitz and believed to have cursed Paul, causing him to meet his untimely demise.
The death still remains shrouded in mystery to this very day.
