Truths and Consequences, a kolchak: the night stalker fanfic

TRUTHS AND CONSEQUENCES

By Chuck Miller

Background info may be found here: http://en. Skorzeny- "The Night Stalker" (1972)

Dr. Richard Malcolm- "The Night Strangler" (1973)

The Ripper- "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" premiere episode (1974)

Francois Edmonds ("The Zombie") - "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" second episode (1974)

Catherine Rawlins ("The Vampire") - "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" fourth episode (1974)

(Author's note: The two Kolchak TV movies and each episode of the series were self-contained stories. There was no continuity between episodes, and no subplot to connect any of them. All connections between and relationships among the characters are my own invention, so if it sucks you can blame me and not the original screenwriters. I do not make much use of anything past the first four episodes because, sadly, the quality of the scripts dropped off sharply after that point. All the characters in the story likewise come from the original productions, with one major exception. She's all mine!)

I didn't know it at the time, of course, but my stint with the Independent News Service in Chicago was engineered from start to finish. I was duped and I was played. And I never even caught on. That's the truly galling part. Some who are familiar with my "secret" career—I never tried to keep it secret myself, but none of my more noteworthy stories ever saw print—often express amazement that I took so much in stride. So do I. Now. But at the time, believe it or not, none of it struck me as particularly odd.

It really should have. The fact that it didn't was, I believe, part of the engineering. It must have been. My track record for those strange months—the things I encountered, seemingly at random-- was enough to shatter the very concept of probability. What were the odds that I would encounter, one right after another, a series of nightmarish creatures that, according to popular wisdom, not to mention science, did not and could not exist? "Astronomical" is far too mild a word. One bit of folklore after another proved not merely to have a basis in reality, but to be the literal truth. It could not possibly have happened. None of it. But it did.

My name is Carl Kolchak. I was once, in the words of my managing editor, Anthony Vincenzo, "one hell of a reporter." In fact, I was even better than that. (False modesty has never been one of my virtues. Neither has genuine modesty, come to that.) I was a crime reporter, back in the days when that meant getting your hands extremely dirty, and often taking your very life into those grimy hands.

Chances are good that you've heard my name, and you may even have read some of my work. But nothing you have ever read by me will do you any good here. This is completely different territory. As they used to warn travelers on old maritime maps back when the world was largely unexplored, "Here there be monsters."

The first thing you need to know is that what you probably think of as the "supernatural' does in fact exist. Do you believe that? Does the sentence I just typed convince you of that truth? I'm betting not. If you already believed it—and I frequently find myself preaching to the choir, such as it is—then I have accomplished nothing. If you didn't and still don't, the result is the same. Of course, a single sentence isn't much of a persuader, but you're not meant to take this exercise literally. That sentence is the representation—the distillation—of all the stories I wrote that no one ever read. You are the one who should have read those truths. You might not have believed them. You probably wouldn't have. But the fact is, they never stood a chance of seeing print in any newspaper you would take seriously. And my stories were, if anything, too mundane for the supermarket rags. Once you got past the fact that the perp in the article was a zombie or a werewolf, that is. Swallow the premise, and you had a pretty standard crime piece, really. Contrary to any rumors you may have heard, truth really isn't stranger than fiction. Never has been. The true story of Janos Skorzeny is pedestrian and rather seedy compared to Dracula.

My real job was to make sure you KNEW what was out there. Whether you believed it or not, you should have heard about it. And you never did. Unless, of course, you encountered me late at night in a bar in some town somewhere in America where they were not hiring any crime reporters with more pink slips than clippings, and you looked sympathetic enough and I was drunk enough to haul out my little scrapbook of true horror tales and deliver myself of a sermon. I did that a lot during my meanderings from Vegas to Seattle to Chicago.

Yes, I found a real live dead vampire in Las Vegas, late in the third quarter of the twentieth century. That should have been a once-in-a-lifetime deal. It should have been a never-in-a-lifetime deal. But it happened. I accepted it. The cops didn't. I was right. They were wrong. I solved it—and stopped it—on my own, with no help from the law. At least six women had died. There was a single survivor, one Shelley Forbes, and I couldn't begin to imagine the scars she must have carried away from the experience. The pressure was on law enforcement and city government. Vegas is a tourist town and nothing but. Some would argue with that, but it is, for most practical purposes, true. The authorities needed not only to bring the murder spree to a halt, they needed to do it in a way that would provide a feather for everyone's cap. They needed to demonstrate that Vegas was safe, and any aberrations that might pop up, like the psychotic Mr. Skorzeny, would be dealt with quickly and effectively. Also, those were the days when the good fellows and their thing held sway, and though I never confirmed it, I take it for granted that they, too, were applying pressure of their own. The cops needed a clear victory. I upstaged them. I made them look and feel silly. And they'll forgive you for anything but that.

When the powers that were cast me out of their dubious paradise for the crime of knowing more than they did, I bounced a couple times and landed in Seattle. I had received word that Tony Vincenzo was there, and that he just might have enough guilt or sympathy left to give me a job. He did. Within a week I found myself bumping up against Richard Malcolm. And it just so happened that I arrived in town during a very narrow window of opportunity. He wasn't a glutton like Skorzeny. He wasn't a vampire. Richard Malcolm killed five women every 21 years, and that was all he needed to keep himself alive for the next 21. Malcolm was an alchemist who had lived and murdered for 144 years before I sent him to his long-overdue grave. Had I shown up two weeks later than I did, he would have gone underground again for another fifth of a century.

Two weeks.

Things were quiet, more or less, for a year after Malcolm. I got fired again, of course. Same basic plot as the Skorzeny thing, really. And this time I took Vincenzo with me. We both wound up in Chicago, working for the Independent News Service, which is to the Associated Press what nothing at all is to something.

And that, dear friends, is when it started getting weird.

Here's how the game always worked.

I'm on a story. It's usually crime, but it could be anything. Something strange happens. Then something even stranger happens. Then something absolutely impossible happens. People stop talking to me. I pry. It's what I do. I start to see a pattern that only makes sense if you have a certain perspective. That being a near-pathological willingness to consider possibilities that are utterly impossible. An infinite capacity for spotting the square pegs and knowing they have to fit SOMEWHERE. Most cops—and editors—drop out well before that. But I don't. I'm stupid that way.

I think my ability in this regard owes a great deal to my lack of imagination. Yep, that's what I said. Sound strange? Think about it. I am reminded of the case of Catherine Rawlins, a vampire I knew briefly—VERY briefly—out in L.A. (Poor Catherine had made the acquaintance of Mr. Skorzeny not long before I did.) There was a series of murders with odd common denominators. The bodies had been drained of blood, and each had a pair of small puncture wounds in the neck. The cops thought the killings were the work of a satanic cult performing unholy rites, and that the blood was removed from the victims' bodies by means of some sort of unknown and completely efficient suction pump device. I thought they were the work of a vampire. Of the two theories, which requires more imagination? All I have is a talent for stating the obvious.

The cops busted a couple of drug-addled amateur Satanists, but the murders did not stop. I hammered a stake into Catherine Rawlins' heart, and they did. The authorities, of course, gave me a ticker-tape parade and the key to the city, that's how grateful they were. (Not really, but they did kindly buy me a plane ticket back to Chicago after they dropped the murder charge they were holding me on. My understanding was that, during the Rawlins autopsy, the pathologist found some astonishing irregularities that would have been made public had I gone to trial. Chief among those was the fact that she had already been dead for three years by the time I killed her. Johnny-come-lately, that's me.)

It wasn't rocket science. I once encountered a seven-foot-tall Native American who could change into a wolf or a crow. That's a pretty narrow field. There aren't a whole hell of a lot of things he could be. I did my research, found a knowledgeable source, learned about the Diablero (that's what it was) and how it could be killed (there was always a way to kill them), and killed it. And then, a week or two later, it happened again.

That, with minor variations, is what I did to a doppelganger, a rakshassa, a succubus, and other assorted walking nightmares. Jack the Ripper… I never found out his real name or what kind of a creature he actually was, but I killed him too, in 1974, an hour after he murdered his final victim, eighty-six years after his first. Francois Edmonds, a Haitian numbers runner, murdered in a gang war, walked the earth executing his own killers for several days after he went to his grave for the first time. I put him back in the ground to stay because I knew what he was—a zombie—and how to stop him.

I did it twenty times, more or less, from the summer of '74 through the spring of '75, usually in Chicago. In a way, it was nothing more than common courtesy. If you saw a plank with nails through it in the middle of a residential street, you'd move it out of the way so it wouldn't flatten anyone's tires. It's an ingrained response, part of the unwritten social contract. Well, if I saw a nightmare creature of any sort meandering around in the world causing multiple fatalities, I felt compelled to remove it. It's just a matter of degree. I never set out to find a monster. The only time I ever looked for a supernatural agent from the very beginning was the case of the aforementioned Catherine Rawlins, and she could actually be considered a continuation of Skorzeny. A postscript or a coda. Apart from that-- not once.

And then, in the spring of 1975, it all ended. After my odd experiences at the Merrymount Archives, my life returned to what had been normal before Skorzeny. I had no further encounters with ghosties or ghoulies or long-legged beasties, and the only thing that went bump in the night was me, stumbling to bed after a night of liquid excess. Of which there were many. There were many, many things, many nights, that I couldn't stop thinking about. And wondering. It started to bug me. It started to frighten me. Why? How? I wondered about the fact that I had never wondered about any of it until now. A weird solipsistic paranoia began to settle in. When the booze started causing more problems than it blurred, I quit that and threw myself into my work. I gave myself little time to ponder and no time to pursue any explanation, even if I'd had the slightest notion where to begin. I stuffed everything away for what I thought was the sake of my sanity. Life went on. I learned not to think. I padlocked my memory. The stories I covered became mundane, at least by comparison. Mundane is a very relative term. Some of my stories were big. Others were huge.

Much of my life since then is a matter of public record. The transformation was, for me, profound and sweeping and just gradual enough that I did not fully appreciate what was happening. I don't want to include or exclude too much. So, for the purposes of this narrative, I will treat it as though you, the reader, were a friend or acquaintance of mine up until the middle of 1975, after which we lost touch. You have enough of the basics to play the role. So, old pal, let's get caught up, shall we?

My involvement was instrumental in the arrest of a now- famous Chicago area serial killer who proved to be neither a vampire nor a werewolf. He was just a very sick human being who killed more than a score of young men and hid their bodies in the crawlspaces of his attractive suburban bungalow. The police were uncharacteristically grateful for my input. (The killer, many years later, sent me a portrait he'd painted of himself in clown makeup, with a note assuring me there were "no hard feelings." Even so, I breathed an audible sigh of relief when he was finally executed. A collector offered me $40,000 for the painting, but that was two months after I burned the ugly goddamned thing.)

From then on my relationship with law enforcement improved dramatically, as did my relationship with Vincenzo. My "crazy" stories were forgotten in the glare of a string of successes. The Kolchak stock, personal and professional, hit unprecedented highs. Not so very long before, a senatorial candidate in league with the devil (I've already thought of all the jokes in that one, so don't bother), and later a witch, peeped into my head by whatever means and told me of my heart's desires, personal and professional, and why I would never achieve them unaided.

Well, in spite of these pronouncements, many of my fondly cherished dreams actually DID come true during those salad days, and I did it on my own. I earned respect and even admiration. And I stopped talking about vampires. Later still, I stopped even thinking about them. Well, that's not entirely true. Once you've actually met one, you can't. But I stopped brooding over them.

Until one week ago.

One week ago, I got a package. It was waiting for me on the desk I used when I, for one reason or another, actually dropped by the newsroom to do some of my work.

I don't go out on assignments the way I used to. In fact, I am not technically a working reporter. I hold the utterly meaningless title "writer in residence" at a nice paper in the middle of America, where I more or less write my own ticket. I gained that wonderful ability on the strength of a book I did about my involvement with the crawlspace killer. The name Carl Kolchak hovered for several heady months near the top of the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Three more lesser but still impressive successes followed that one, and now I get checks every month for things I wrote a decade or more ago. My books were filled with truth, though it was leftover truth, served up to you long after the urgency behind it had died. The human monsters I wrote about had been de-clawed and tucked away where they would never again share the air of freedom with you. I still feel like a failure, but at least I'm a successful failure…

So I slipped, somewhat uneasily but eagerly, into the role of eminence grise, and I wrote whatever I wanted to write about, within reason. Mostly features with some angle or other that made them tasty.

I wandered in, nodding and speaking to various staffers. I gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that the president had said something stupid earlier in the day. Everyone was far too tickled over his gaffe to notice that he had also committed three or four violations of the Constitution at the same time.

It was a manila envelope. It looked quite new. As an inveterate re-user of manila envelopes, I noticed that. It was addressed to me in care of the paper. No return address, of course. The handwriting was big and loopy. Girlish, almost but not quite to the point of dotting the "i"s with little circles containing smiley faces. Somehow it seemed off-kilter, discordant, in a way I can't really describe. I'm looking at it now, but I can't put a name to how it makes me feel. Sadness is part of it. Like I lost something I can't even remember. I don't know.

The contents were the main attraction. Not much to it, but for me it might as well have been a letter bomb. I think I must have cried out just a little because I was peripherally aware of a couple heads turning in my direction. But my eyes were glued to the two news clippings I had slipped from the envelope.

Two stories. Two deaths. Not regular obituaries, though, these were stories with bylines, and it looked as though they had appeared on the front page.

Two deaths. Three days apart. The dates had been jotted onto the margins in the same loopy hand. Two names I had avoided thinking of for many, many years. Two men I hated, but not exactly personally. I hated them the way you might hate a fire or a tornado or some other force that ripped through your life and scattered everything you had far and wide, wrecking much of it beyond repair.

Former Las Vegas District Attorney Thomas Paine Jr. and retired Sheriff Warren A. Butcher were dead. Foul play was strongly suspected, but the authorities had very pointedly not released any details apart from the fact that homicide detectives in both the city and county departments were investigating the deaths.

Paine and Butcher. The last time I had seen the two of them was the morning of the day I left Las Vegas for good. In fact, my abrupt departure was at their "suggestion," a "geographical cure" for the ills that they were threatening to heap on my head if I didn't comply. The incentives they offered started with a murder warrant with my name on it, and went downhill from there.

I might at one time have wished such a fate on both of them. I probably had. Even now, my heart wasn't exactly breaking for them. Payne had been a politician of the very worst sort, the kind of a guy who would have been tossed out of Tammany Hall for going too far. Butcher had managed to polish himself up a bit for public consumption, but underneath that, and not very far underneath, he was a bully and a thug.

Each story carried a file photo of the victim. They were older than when I knew them, of course, and Payne seemed to me to have the slightly vacuous expression of a person in the early days of senility. Butcher, who had once looked stupid, now looked old and stupid.

I told myself there was any number of reasons the details were being withheld. The men were public figures, or had been at one time. They had been in law enforcement in a notoriously corrupt town, and they hadn't exactly been sweethearts in their approaches. That's a recipe for making enemies, and I couldn't imagine them acquiring any less than the maximum possible number.

So there was that. But there was also the fact that they had both been involved in a multiple murder case characterized by the withholding of information on the victims. And I was one of a very small group-- now smaller by two-- that knew exactly why those details had been suppressed. Further, there was the fact that someone had taken the time to send me the clippings anonymously. And whoever had done that obviously knew that I would be very interested, which very likely meant that the sender, too, knew why.

That was disturbing. Very. So few people had known the entire story. A couple dozen, perhaps, had known bits and pieces that would never have added up to anything sensible. I sat and thought for quite some time, examining my memories of the whole nasty business. And when I finished, I was certain that the number of people who knew everything was four. There was me. There was Payne and there was Butcher, and they no longer were. The former Vegas police chief, whose name I do not even recall, had died more than 20 years ago. That left just one unaccounted for.

I would have to find Bernie Jenks.

Bernie had been the SAC in the Las Vegas office of the FBI during Skorzeny. I'd known him for years. He was reputed to be a friend of mine, a tale I believed up until the morning he stood and watched Payne and Butcher drop the axe on me barely an hour after I had removed 170 pounds of angry vampire from his neck. His hands were tied, he told me, and there was nothing he could do. Bernie was very near tears that morning, and I was very near the kind of rage that can impel you to murder an FBI agent right in front of a sheriff and a district attorney.

I'm not one to hold a grudge, but after what had happened in Vegas, I had never felt any particular urge to renew our friendship. On the one hand, I really couldn't blame him for how things had turned out. On the other hand, screw him. I knew he felt awful about the whole business, and I didn't have a problem with that. I was being unfair to him and I knew it, but sometimes you just don't care. I had no desire for revenge. I would almost certainly have pissed on him had he been on fire. But beyond that…

Hell, maybe I do hold grudges.

Tracking him down wasn't easy, but I had a lot of experience finding hard-to-find people. I started getting shooting pains in my conscience when I learned that he had left the F.B.I. very shortly after the Skorzeny affair. I didn't imagine that was a coincidence, and it wasn't. I gathered that he had left under something of a cloud, which had been prettied up by his superiors and christened "health reasons." Bernie Jenks, I learned, had taken wholeheartedly to drink following our little shindig in Skorzeny's house. It was a perfectly natural response to the events of that night. I did it myself for a while.

As it happened, though, I had fared much better in the wake of that debacle than he had. Bernie had either resigned or been fired from the Bureau—probably a little of both. The vampire's death had been a grade-A traumatic event, comparable to anything one might find on a battlefield. We called it "shellshock" or "combat fatigue" once upon a time. Now it goes by the name Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and civilians can get it in any number of ways. Like, for example, witnessing the brutal destruction of a malevolent, walking corpse.

It may seem odd that the seasoned law enforcement officer was scarred more deeply than the somewhat cowardly reporter who, after all, had actually done the bloody deed. It struck me that way too. All I can figure is that Bernie, a tough veteran who had never encountered a situation he couldn't handle, felt disoriented and helpless when confronted with an enemy who was bulletproof and strong as an undead ox. I, on the other hand, who had never before been in a hand-to-hand life-or-death situation, knew exactly what Skorzeny was and how to deal with him.

What I did not know firsthand—and Bernie did—was what, exactly, had happened during the mopping up phase of the Skorzeny affair. What had the officials who knew the truth done in the aftermath? None of them ever admitted in my presence to believing that the killer was a genuine vampire. But they had his body. Had they disposed of the remains properly? I had heard that Skorzeny and all of his victims had been cremated, but that came from a source in the sheriff's department who had a soft spot for me and another one for rye whiskey, so his reliability wasn't a given

And it occurred to me then, speaking of whiskey, that there was actually a fifth individual who had possessed all the facts.

What if they hadn't burned Skorzeny after all?

God only knows what the pathologist found during the autopsy. Surely there would have been enough anomalies to warrant further study. Could a vampire that had been staked somehow return to life? Or undeath. Or whatever. Christopher Lee did it several times. If the body had been carelessly handled… Could he possibly be back?

I was prepared for any sort of a reaction from Bernie, or so I thought. I had already steeled myself to weather any verbal assault. Another one of my specialties. But I wasn't prepared for what I actually heard in his voice.

He sounded pathetically glad to hear from me. He sounded as though a phone call from me was the very thing he'd been waiting for all his life. My conscience stabbed me right in the solar plexus. The guilt felt as physical as cold steel. You know that imaginary place inside your chest where you feel strong emotion? Bernie's voice sliced across it like a very thin razor. Far subtler than a blow from an axe, it was the kind of cut that looks superficial at first until the edges pull apart and you start bleeding a river.

I taped the conversation. I did not inform Bernie or request his permission. But that sort of thing is par for the course these days.

"Carl, buddy," he said. "You've… How have you…Carl. Jesus." I heard him swallow a sob, which had never happened before.

"Bernie," replied, cool but not cold. I didn't know how the hell I felt. "How are you?"

"Um… I'm good, Carl. I've been doing okay. I've… I'm not with the Bureau any more, I don't know if you know that. I've got a… I do some consulting. Security company, you know. International. It's real busy, you know, lotsa business, what with… everything the way it is. You know, terrorism and so forth. It's been… I don't know. Some of it is questionable, but… The government isn't what it once was…"

"That's great, Bernie," I said, plowing over any opportunity he might take to start a rambling monologue. He sounded bad. He sounded broken and diminished. I didn't want to give myself a chance to care. "You seem to be doing okay then."

"Yeah. You've been doing good, Carl? I read your book. All of them, I mean, but the first one was… I was glad that… You know, after… Vegas, that you could sort of… you know, get a…Well, you did good, and I'm glad. I am. I was sorry to hear about Kathie, I almost called or… or sent you a…" I could feel a breakdown coming, and I wasn't disappointed. "Ah, God, I'm sorry, Carl!" His voice was very, very low, but somehow it sounded like a howl. "I let them… I let the wolves have you. I did. Sheriff Butcher and… that Payne. God, I…"

"Bernie," I said soothingly but without much warmth. "We don't have to go into that, okay? That was… long, long ago. Actually, it's the reason I'm calling, but not for recriminations. I got past all that. Bernie, I need to know something. I have to ask you. You mentioned Butcher and Payne. You know what happened to them?"

"Ah, no," he said, regaining a sliver of a shade of his composure. "I don't keep up… That is, I haven't lived there in years, and of course…"

I had a line of bullshit ready in case Bernie knew what had happened, but I didn't need it. The poor bastard was clueless. "They're dead, Bernie," I said. I wanted a clean conversation so I spoke surgically, every word completely sterilized. "Both of them. They died last week."

There was a silence that needed filling, so I turned over my bucket and dumped it all out. "They were both murdered. I cannot corroborate this, but I have information I consider reliable that both bodies had been drained of blood. [This was a different line of bullshit, okay? I always carry a spare. -- CK I don't suppose I have to go into why that interests me.

"Bernie," I said slowly and calmly. Numbly, actually. "I have to ask you something. About Skorzeny. After I left. Bernie, hang on. This isn't about you and me. I didn't call for that. This is something else. I have to ask you. Do you know-- can you tell me beyond any doubt-- that Skorzeny was destroyed?"

Silence. Not quite silence, because I could hear Bernie breathing in an odd way that I could not characterize. I said nothing further, sensing that the whole thing had suddenly become unbearably fragile. And then, so suddenly that I jerked back in my seat, Bernie yelled, "He's dead! He's dead! That goddamn Skorzeny is dead!" He sounded vehement, but not exactly angry. There was more fear in it than anything.

Gently, I prodded. "You're certain of that? There's no way he might have gotten… misplaced, or…"

"No, no, they burned him Carl. I know. I saw it. I watched it. I did it, I helped. I looked at… You see, Butcher and Payne, they… The victims too. We got them… They were exhumed, every one. Those poor girls. No court orders or anything, they just… we just… we got them and took them… there was an old, old crematorium all the way over in Barstow, and we took them there, and him too. He was in a black bag, you know, body bag. The women, the victims, they were in these sort of crates, wooden boxes. We had left the actual caskets in the graves and covered them over, because… you know, they're heavy, and also there was the volume of dirt we had to put back in the holes…

"We went out there in a van. One van. More like a panel truck. It was pretty large. They were waiting for us at the crematorium. I don't know how that was arranged, Payne did that. The furnace was going, it was so hot. Well, it has to be, of course, but I… Well, there's a big metal drawer, with no sides on it, just sort of a screen, that they put the casket on in a normal cremation. It just shoots right into the furnace, you know, the chamber.

Skorzeny went in first. We took the bag off him first, so we could see… And it was him, Carl. I couldn't forget him. So we had him on the sliding drawer and we pushed him on in… You know, it takes a long time to cremate a body. Maybe two hours, that's what they told us. But Skor… he just went up like a… I don't know… it was just "Whoomph!" Totally gone in a few seconds. Well, there were some… a few bones, and they were like chalk… they were just… You know, normally they will rake the remains out of the chamber and sort of crush everything up into a powder, pulverize it for the urn. But those bones, they were just… They crumbled at the slightest touch.

"The rest of them… They took longer. Hours. Load one onto the drawer, box and all, and slide her in. It was late in the afternoon before we finally…" His voice wobbled and I heard him take two or three deep breaths. "Hold a minute, Carl? I'll be back."

"Sure Bernie."

He was gone for almost three minutes. When he once again picked up the receiver, I heard what I took to be ice cubes clinking around in a glass of something. My old friend Bernie Jenks, resorting to Dutch courage at nine in the morning just to finish telling a story. I felt sadder but, strangely, no more sympathetic-- and not a whole hell of a lot wiser.

He dove right in, speaking rapidly, getting it over with. The only interruptions were for quick slugs of whatever.

"It was just at sundown when we got to the last one, which was the first victim. Cheryl Ann Hughes. We hoisted her crate up onto the drawer. We didn't look inside. The boxes had been sealed before we left the cemeteries. We slid her on in. And then…" The rush of words abruptly cut off. "And then… and then… Something hit the side of the crate."

"What?" I asked. "Something fell from somewhere?"

"No, something hit the side of the box. From the inside. It sounded like a… It was like a fist, Carl. Someone knocking. It happened again. Like knuckles rapping on a wooden door. 'Let me in!'" he laughed, and it was the most miserably barren excuse for merriment I had ever heard. "The guy… the mortician, the one who was actually operating the machinery, he said sometimes… Y'know, muscles can draw up or gases in the bodies can do things, especially when there's a rapid increase in temperature. It happened a lot, he said. So the box went ahead into the chamber, right into the middle of the flames, and, uhhh…." He trailed off again.

"What, Bernie?" I prompted.

He gave me that awful little laugh again. "Well, put it this way, Carl. The mortician said he had seen all kinds of odd things that dead people did while being burned. But he had never in his life, before that day… He had never heard one scream."

It was indeed a hell of a punch line, and since he seemed to derive some grim sort of satisfaction from delivering it, I responded dutifully with a stunned silence followed by a whispered, "My God." I toyed with the idea of telling him about Catherine Rawlins, but decided that there was nothing to be gained by trumping him in such a way. But the thought gave me an idea, which was actually more like one of those queasy hunches I used to get way back when. Once I got off the phone with Bernie, which I did quickly and bloodlessly. More or less. I could tell he wanted to stay on the line, that there were Things Unsaid, but I wasn't interested. I would come to regret that later.

I dialed directory assistance and got the main information number for the Los Angeles Police Department. I asked for Lieutenant Jack Matteo, the LAPD official who had played the Paine/Butcher role opposite Carl Kolchak as himself and Catherine Rawlins as Janos Skorzeny in my California vampire sequel in 1974. After a long pause dripping with icy disapproval I was informed that former Assistant Commissioner Jack Matteo had retired many years ago, and I evidently had not heard the news that he had passed away very recently. I got a cold knot in my gut at that, the first of its kind in many, many years, but I guess it's like riding a bicycle. I identified myself as author/journalist Carl Kolchak, a former friend and associate (the first one was an outright lie, but a purely technical argument could be made for the second) of Mr. Matteo's, and gingerly inquired about the cause of death. The cold knot warmed and loosened a bit when the operator told me he had died in the hospital after a brief illness, but froze and cinched up again when she told me he had been the victim of a sudden case of pernicious anemia.

My informant, who had recognized the Kolchak name and warmed up immediately (I still find it hard to swallow the fact that I now have cachet), confided that it had seemed rather strange, but of course poor Mr. Matteo had been getting on in years (he was four years younger than I am…) and his health had not been good since '74, when he had pushed himself to the limit on the Dark Star Coven killings, which I might have read about, as the case made the national news. I told her I was indeed quite familiar it.

After I hung up, I sat back in my swivel chair and thought. I won't even try and chronicle the chaotic stampede of the memories, hunches and ideas inside my head, but I did wonder if the following day would bring another package. I tried calling Bernie back, but I got no answer. Nor would I ever. I found out later that Bernie, at some point during the two or three days after my call, had died. There had been a massive loss of blood, but no need for crucifixes and crematoriums. The blood had left his body by way of a hole he had blown in his left temple with his old FBI service revolver. I considered him Skorzeny's final victim, albeit one who had taken a couple decades to stop breathing.

What would have been the official word, had any officials released anything officially was that Bernie Jenks had been suffering from depression for quite some time. The security contractor he had been working for had gotten mired hip-deep in charges of fraud and impropriety in connection with work they were doing in a certain oil-rich Middle Eastern nation our armed forces had recently "liberated." This bit of drama was "leaked" by somebody somewhere in the maze of government and private entities that meandered from the corridors of power in Washington to the dirty, bloody streets of Baghdad. And it was done in such a way as to very strongly imply that the alleged corruption was probably the sole responsibility of the late Mr. Jenks. This is how our current administration takes care of its little PR problems.

I did not, and have not yet, stopped to consider the role played by an old hack journalist who had gotten lucky. Nor have I pondered the idea that the noise I thought was ice in a glass might actually have been made by a box of shells.

Yet.

Butcher and Payne. I brooded over them that night. I reflected on the goofy irony of their names, how each had the surname the other should have had. The sheriff had been stupid and crude, but not smart enough to be truly lethal. He was merely a major irritant. The DA, on the other hand, was the one who had wielded the blade that eviscerated what passed for my career in 1970.

At home, propped up in bed, I was poring through my old Las Vegas scrapbook. I stared hard at the artist's rendition of Skorzeny accompanying one of my page-one pieces that had run before the clampdown. At that stage of the drama, I had still believed Skorzeny was a man. The portrait was a good one, skillfully done by an artist I had recommended, a truly remarkable piece of work based on witness' descriptions. But it wasn't Skorzeny. I overlaid it in my mind's eye with the memory of Skorzeny's face as I had seen it the morning I killed him. The details meshed perfectly, but something very vital was missing. Not from the portrait, but from Skorzeny. The sketch artist had imbued his creation with a certain warmth and humanity that the creature himself had not possessed. The counterfeit was more alive than the subject had been.

I laughed at myself and wondered if my next literary rebirth would be as a poet, and a bad one at that. Is there any other kind? I gathered up the yellowing scraps of the past, stuffed them into their cardboard box, turned out the light and went to sleep. If I had dreams, they were too vague and too bizarre to be remembered.

The following day did indeed bring a second manila envelope addressed in the same hand. It contained two clippings, one of which was a standard obit for Jack Matteo, formerly of the LAPD, who had died following a "brief illness." I lay it to the side and picked up the other, expecting more of the same. And that's what I got. More of the same. Only it wasn't the same man.

It was from Seattle. Seattle was where Doctor Richard Malcolm (or Malcolm Richards, depending on what century it was) had lived for a very, very, very long time, in his ghastly hidey-hole beneath the streets. He had emerged from his moldering lair every 21 years to kill the five women whose blood he needed to see him through the next 21. This had been happening for around a hundred years, and might have continued ad infinitum had I not blundered across his path and performed a bit of immortalis interruptus .

(Seattle was quite a breeding ground. The subject of my third true-crime potboiler was from there, and he left a swath of dead young women behind him through Colorado, Utah and Florida before he was "tied, tried and fried." I had no personal involvement in his case, but while writing the book, my time in Seattle was very much on my mind, and if you read the book and thought I employed some odd analogies and metaphors, now you know why.)

Seattle had, in many ways, been a replay of Vegas. And for some reason, that had not seemed to me at all unusual. Oh, it was unusual enough, don't get me wrong. It was only the fact that it was happening again that didn't strike me as particularly odd. Having swallowed a camel named Skorzeny, I did not strain at a gnat named Malcolm. The Seattle cast of characters had included what would become the obligatory police department foil, an officious and skeptical adversary whose like I would encounter too many more times in the years ahead. This one had been a Captain Schubert. I had neither known him as well as I had Payne and Butcher, nor loathed him as much, though the terms we parted on could not have been called even remotely friendly.

Schubert had retired from the Seattle PD after 30 years of service. He went into politics and won a seat in the state legislature and lost one in the U.S. Congress. He was still an active and vigorous man up until the moment he died, it said. He had choked to death in an upscale Seattle eatery. Surely that was an accident.

Then it occurred to me. Choking is basically the same thing as strangulation. And Richard Malcolm had strangled his victims. But it was such a feeble connection. Paranoid, actually. It would never even have occurred to me had the clipping not come to me in the same way and from the same hand as the others. Somehow, I knew that made it murder. Jack Matteo's "anemia" had been murder too. Neither of the two conclusions made any logical sense, of course. But I suddenly found myself operating once again in a mental arena where the connections between certain events were crystal clear to me and logic was just an annoyance. Logic as commonly defined, I mean. Sherlock Holmes once said that "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." And he had a point. The only problem is, damn near nothing is impossible. And anything that is possible will someday become the truth, given time.

As for murder, the dictionary defines it as "The unlawful killing of one human by another human, especially with premeditated malice." I define it that way too; it's just that I don't insist on the "by another human" part.

And then, in my brain, there came a ping! I pulled open a desk drawer and got out the first envelope, the one with the Vegas stories. It was postmarked Los Angeles and had been mailed the day Jack Matteo died. The new envelope, with the Matteo and Schubert obituaries, was postmarked the day after Schubert had died, which was interesting, but not as interesting as the city from which it had been mailed.

Chicago.

Strangely, I felt no frisson, no chill up my spine, no sinking feeling in my torso. What I felt, at least immediately, wasn't even technically a feeling. I was going to Chicago. I sort of knew why, though I had not of course considered any details. But I felt certain that if this clipping sender was doing a Kolchak monster tour, and possibly generating the clippings he or she was sending, then the only possible place to end up was Chicago. And there was some urgency if the sender was killing cops with whom I had crossed swords during an investigation.

There were at least 20 of them up there.

I could sit at the phone all day, calling the PD and getting nowhere. Or calling the newspapers, which would be even less productive, since if nothing had happened yet, what kind of info could they possibly have? I had once had a few contacts there, but I couldn't be sure that any of them would be available, and if they were, it would be better if I could handle them in person. The Kolchak charm doesn't always manifest itself properly through phone wires.

So there was nothing else for it but to go. And this presented a problem. Oh, hopping a plane at short notice and arranging a hotel room and rental car would be as nothing. I did not have to bamboozle an editor to send me where I wanted to go under some desperate pretext. And even if I had, it would be falling off a log compared to the single obstacle I knew I'd have to face.

I would have to somehow get around my daughter.

Yes, my daughter. I forgot that you hypothetically know nothing about my life since 1975. Well, a lot happened. Obviously. I have a daughter and at the moment I was making my snap decision, she was back at my apartment. Home for spring break. I crept into the house, hoping that a casual remark to the effect that I needed to make a quick trip to Chicago because (mumbling something incoherent that sounds like meaningful dialogue), and she could have the run of the place while I was gone-- as though she didn't already-- and don't forget to put the chain on the door at night.

She was hunched over her laptop, which was actually in her lap of all places, reminding me oddly of the three witches from Macbeth. Not all three of them, of course, but maybe a sort of composite. It could be that I hit on that particular simile because I had a feeling that I, like Macbeth, was about to hear from her lips tidings that would bode me ill.

She gave me an odd look that I might have interpreted as incipient panic, had Janie ever in her life panicked over anything. Then she twitched her head, tossing the strange expression away and said, "Okay," with her customary fire. "I'm gonna just sit here, then, and let my geriatric father get on a plane to Chicago with no idea what the hell he's doing. You must have a fine opinion of my daughtering skills." She was mounting her assault on me with part of herself, while the rest stayed busy with her laptop computer. I believe this is called "multitasking."

Submitted for your approval-- one Janie Marie Kolchak, age 21 going on ageless.

Janie currently attends a college in the Midwest where she majors in music. She's quite a good cellist, and a dab hand with almost any other stringed instrument, though she has always been hopeless with woodwinds. She's minoring in political science. How the two fit together in her head I have no idea. She belongs to no political party, and in fact avoids dogma of any kind. If you had to pin her down, you could say she's a radical socialist with an uncanny feel for Bach, and serious doubts over whether or not she's an agnostic.

My father was Polish and my mother Irish, which makes me 100 percent Irish, because that's how Irish blood works. Janie's mother Kathie, who passed on three years ago, and whom I don't miss any more than I would, say, both arms and legs, was Eastern European by way of Hoboken, which made Janie 200 percent Irish. She never quite hit five feet, but she didn't need to. She glared at me with blue eyes set in a perfectly round face, topped by hair she had recently cropped short so that it looked like tightly curled strands of copper wire.

"Geriatric?"

"To anybody living in a reality-based community, yeah! You're what, about two hundred? You'll wander off somewhere and get killed, and then it'll be on my conscience and people will look at me funny. This is what you want for me? Branded as a patricide? I am utterly culpable if I allow a senile relative to wander off out of my sight."

"Where do you get this I don't know what I'm doing? And I am not senile."

"Today you aren't. Who knows what tomorrow might bring? You are of an age, Dad. And do you? Know what you're doing, I mean? Or…" She was silent for a moment, looking at me, then the little flashbulb went off in her head and she smiled skeptically. If there is such a thing as a skeptical smile. I've never seen one on anybody else, but Janie can do it. Sort of knowingly, I guess you could call it. It somehow conveys two interlocking messages at once. The first one is, "Waaaait a minute, I know what you're up to." The second is, "You are so full of shit."

"Waaaait a minute," she said, "I know what you're up to. This is weird stuff! Isn't it? It's weird stuff!"

"No, it's nothing weird."

"I knew it! You are going there to get involved in a weird thing! And you presume to think I'm not going with you! Hubris, thy name is Kolchak. You are so full…"

"Janie, I just told you…"

"Yes, yes. I heard you tell it, I was right here. I'm not Uncle Tony, you know. You can't befuddle me. I am the fruit of your loins and a force to be reckoned with."

Yes she is.

Janie knows a great deal about the "weird stuff." More than I ever wanted her to. But what other people want Janie to do has never been much of a factor. It was my fault, though. It was only a couple of years ago that I learned how much she really knew.

"You remember all those stories, Dad," she had said to me one day when she was home for Christmas. "The bedtime stories. I always thought you had the best bedtime stories of any father. I mean, my friends all got 'Goldilocks and the Seven Dwarfs' and crap like that. Good God. But with you! The one about the headless motorcycle guy with the sword! Sweet! And the guy whose dreams created a swamp monster in the sewers! Classic! Oh, and my very favorite was Jack the Ripper! I loved the end where the Brave Reporter lured the Ripper into that little pond and ZAPPED him with electricity.

"How come you never told me that really happened?"

That was when my jaw dropped.

"No, don't say anything. I know all about it now, because, you see, my roommate Missy is from Chicago, and one night we were sitting up really late studying. Well, actually we were drinking more than we were studying. Okay, to be perfectly candid, we weren't studying at all. Which is not at all germane to the point I'm trying to make. Somehow or other we got on the topic of fables or folktales or whatever, and I told her a couple of yours. And we were screaming, laughing our asses off because they seemed so funny. Not that they are intrinsically all that humorous, but if you insist on the truth, better you hear it from me instead of someone on the street, we were pretty stoned as well. But I haven't done that in four months come this Friday, so I'm not like a dope addict, so don't worry.

"So I told her the Jack the Ripper story and she got really quiet and when I was done she was like, 'Goddamn, Janie, that really happened! At which point I informed her that the needle on her shit level gauge was pointing right at 'F.' And she goes, 'No, I swear to God,' even though she's not the slightest bit religious that I've ever seen, she's even worse than I am, one time she found one of those Jesus fish things somebody had left in her closet and she made me get it and throw it away, she didn't even want to touch it.

"Well, one day after that she took me right to the place where it happened. We went up there for a week, to Chicago, that being her point of origin. She showed me some news clippings about the Chicago Ripper of 1974. None of them were by you, interestingly. They didn't really say much of anything. There was a whole big thing about massage parlors and how tacky they are, which was written by your pal Ron Updike. There were a few by a reporter named Jane Plum and those were totally kickass. Then there was one that claimed the Ripper had been killed by the police in a 'pitched gun battle,' though they never explained why Jack the Ripper, or anyhow some guy that thought he was Jack the Ripper, would be packing heat, but whatever. And somehow his house got burned down in the process. It was a huge deal at the time, at least in Chicago. It has become folkloric in Wilton Park. Ab-so-goddamn-lutely.

"So we went to where the house had been. It was a big lot. Right there in the middle of this old residential neighborhood. And it wasn't, you know, an empty lot. It was a lot where nothing was. If that makes any sense to you. I'm not sure it does to me, but… There was the lot, and a big space where there was no house. And next to that was a big spot where there wasn't any pond, and that's how I knew it was the right place. Missy said all the kids around there said the place was haunted, even though there wasn't much of anything to really haunt. It was before her time, obviously.

"Anyhow, we went and looked up a few other things, names and places and events from some of your stories, and goddamn if we didn't find a treasure trove! I saw where Francois Edmonds was buried-- and it looks like he stayed put this time, Pop-- But I mean, goddamn!"

"Honey, do you have to say 'goddamn' all the time?"

"Yes, I goddamn do. I love it. It's the most fantastic goddamn word ever invented. The best I can do would be to replace it with 'fucking,' and that one's way harder to get by with in polite society. Not that you are, mind."

Well, what could I say to that? I pled guilty to all charges and told her everything she wanted to know. To her credit, or maybe mine, I don't think it ever occurred to her to doubt a goddamn word of it.

Here endeth the flashback.

"I don't know that I'm all that thrilled," I said, back in the present, "with you talking about my loins."

"Then I guess you need to get over yourself in that regard."

"Don't try to obfuscate. The point here is, I am going to Chicago and you aren't. I won't tell you it isn't weird stuff because I am an excellent liar when it comes to anyone but you. I seem to feel some quaint, old-world compunction against lying to my child. But I don't know that it actually is "weird stuff" per se. It may just be stuff. But I'm not going to let…"

"Don't even, Dad, don't even! I have not yet begun to obfuscate, whatever the hell that means. In me you have sown the wind. Don't start bitching when you have to reap some whirlwind." She pounded the keyboard some more-- I marveled that the flimsy plastic keys were not sent flying all over the room-- and said, without looking back at me, "What I have just done is I have sent an email to my friend in Chicago telling her to expect me, so it's really all settled."

I sighed. "You know perfectly well what obfuscate means."

"Yeah, but it was a funny line. I'm all about the material."

"People will think you're uneducated."

"Good. I like being underestimated. One should never underestimate the value of being underestimated."

That's what it's like talking to my daughter. Where I rely more on guile, Janie has a fondness for making herself into a blunt instrument. She can exude an aura of self-confidence powerful enough to repel the Spanish Armada. On the surface she is brash, abrasive, cocksure, and somewhere in the neighborhood of arrogant. But deep down, she is brash, abrasive, cocksure, and somewhere in the neighborhood of arrogant. She's also smart as hell. And if she has ever been afraid of anything, I'd like to see what it was. Do I need to mention that the purest joy I have ever known comes when we have our little verbal jousts?

And so it came to pass that we boarded American Airlines Flight 18 for Chicago. Janie treated all the security personnel to her hateful glare, the one she uses on people she thinks are "stupid government drones." I never argue with her judgment, but I find it safer to play the indulgent, befuddled, but ultimately well-meaning father whenever she attracts the wrong kind of attention.

She glared at a pair of airport security types who were coldly reciting some kind of spiel to a man who appeared Middle Eastern. He seemed to be almost in tears, and was trying to interject a word here and there in heavily accented English. I put my hand on her shoulder and we moved on through the line. Evidently neither of us was carrying anything lethal and we were shunted on through to boarding. Janie was boiling just a little, and I was none too thrilled myself with the current state of the Land of the Free.

We didn't talk much on the flight. I had things on my mind, of course, and Janie seemed to be in a world of her own. Which, actually, she almost always was, but she generally pulled whomever else might be present into it with her. Not today. She had a book open in her lap, but I noticed she had not turned the page in over an hour. Just to be saying something, I said, "So you're going to see your friend Missy then? That's good. I wondered about her. You never mention her any more."

Janie shrugged. "She moved. Went away, bye-bye. It happens. The peripatetic life of the co-ed. We're in touch, though. Electronics. Telephones. The occasional atavistic paper and ink letter with a stamp."

"Well, I wondered because you used to talk about her all the time, up until a year or so ago. It seems like you two were inseparable before that."

"'As if,' Dad," she said, never taking her eyes from her book.

"Huh? You didn't like her?"

Janie sighed. "No, I was not using contemporary teenage argot. I was correcting your grammar, Mister Bestseller List. It doesn't seem like we were inseparable, it seems as if we were. Which evidently we weren't. Any further questions you have, you may submit in writing at some future time."

I was silent for a moment. I remembered back to when I was a kid-- In the old Wonder Woman comics, the super-heroine could use her metal bracelets to deflect bullets fired at her. Janie often did the same thing with a word or an attitude. So I went ahead and closed the routine with, "Actually, 'grammar' is the name given to the linguistic system itself. When you're talking about someone's use or misuse of it, the word 'diction' is appropriate."

Janie replied with a pun I just can't bring myself to repeat here.

We disembarked and wandered into the concourse. The place was positively gothic, in a sort of sterile, Bauhaus sort of way. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's what popped into my head. The place was way too big. I had gotten used to things on a smaller scale in my semi-retirement. I overheard a couple of people talking about a UFO that had been spotted near Gate C17, and damn if I didn't almost cut and run off in that direction. Old habits don't die hard. They don't die at all. Janie had perked up a bit. She grabbed me by the hand and led me to a table with some chairs around it. We sat.

"As a matter of fact, Dad, I've got another friend up here, and I called him too." She was smirking. I knew that she had done something she would regard as infinitely clever and startling. "He said he'd meet us at the airport. He is really looking forward to meeting you!"

"Not your friend Missy?"

Janie rolled her eyes. "Yes, Dad, I'm talking about Missy. Missy is a he. She is also two different people, that's why I said 'another friend' just now."

I gave her a scowl that bounced right off. "Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor," I told her.

"Actually, I think that's puns, but have it your way. Were you under the impression that I'm Oscar Wilde? I am of a crude and backward disposition, owing probably to my lackadaisical home training. There's virtually nothing too low for me. I also probably have some hereditary mental disorder. So, whether by nature or nurture, it's your doing-- don't point fingers at me."

I groaned, but only inside my head. I hoped it wasn't a journalism student. The last thing I needed was one of those to haul around. I wasn't much of a mentor. I had been saddled for a time with a young intern named Monique Marmelstein around about the time of the Edmonds affair. That had not gone well. At other times, I had made shameless use of students and amateurs as unpaid research staff or smokescreens for my own duplicitous activities. But never without a lofty purpose! Still…

Before I could speculate further, I saw her eyes brighten at something she saw behind me in the crowded concourse. She raised a hand and waved frantically. "Here he is! Hey! We're over here!" her hand windmilled at the end of her wrist, beckoning. I turned to look, and drew a blank for a moment. I couldn't see who she was waving to. Then a single figure separated itself from the throng, plainly headed straight for us. A fellow about my age, it seemed. He was a few inches shorter than me, several pounds heavier, and had a lot less hair. I silently thanked my Irish genes for all of that. As the man got closer I thought, hey, that guy looks just like… And then I thought, oh my god, it is…

"Gordie!" I called out, rising from my seat. "Gordie the Ghoul!"

"Carl," he replied in a voice that was just a hair this side of squeaky, "Carl Kolchak! I do not believe my eyes!"

I had given Gordie any number of tightly folded 20-dollar bills during my time in Chicago, but I never imagined myself giving him a hug. Today, however, I not only imagined it, I did it.

Gordon Spangler, universally known as "Gordie the Ghoul," had been an attendant at the Cook County Morgue before, during and after my stint in Chicago.

The Cook County Morgue has, since at least 1842, been the home of official inquiry into all suspicious deaths in the Chicago area. In 1864, the elected office of coroner was established, and from then until 1976 this official was responsible for all such inquiries. Coroners conducted the actual inquests, but staff pathologists actually performed the autopsies. The Morgue became fertile ground for the development of the budding science of forensics, medical research, and training of medical students. As early as 1900, Chicago was recognized as a world center of pathology research, owing to the quality of the work performed at the Morgue by Christian Fenger and his protégés.

However, Chicago being Chicago, other indigenous species also flourished-- Patronage, graft and corruption. The office of coroner was ultimately abolished in the 1970s, amidst charges of gross improprieties (among them, persistent rumors of a certain hack journalist being granted extraordinary access to case files, and even the corpses themselves, in return for financial consideration), and replaced with a credentialed medical examiner that would be hired rather than elected, eliminating or at least redirecting the graft. (The joke at the time was that so many dead people had been known to vote in city elections, surely they had the inside track on who would make the best coroner.)

During the waning years of the old system, Gordie had enjoyed enough free rein to operate several profitable sidelines, including a lottery based on the birth dates of the corpses that came into his temporary care. But the handwriting had been on the wall for some time, and Gordie's entrepreneurial activities withered and died one by one as the very prudent Mr. Spangler gradually dismantled them, always one step ahead of the investigators.

"So by what process is Gordie your friend?" I asked my daughter.

"I looked him up when Missy and I were researching your old bedtime stories. He's in almost every one of them, you know. I figured if there was a real 'Gordie the Ghoul,' that would prove everything. He provided a wealth of information."

Gordie and I chatted about this and that as Janie craned her neck, sweeping her eyes over the sea of humanity before us.

"Ah!" She burst out. "There she is!" Janie hopped to her feet, both arms doing a wild semaphore in the air above her head. "Hey!"

I looked in the direction in which Janie was waving and saw a figure break from the river of people. I had never actually met the storied Missy, but I'd seen photos. They had all been of a uniformly poor quality. All of them had been taken with Janie's little digital camera, which seemed to produce worse pictures than the junky old instamatic I used to haul around with me to take snapshots of whatever nightmare creature happened to be trying to kill me at a given time.

Missy was rather petite, which surprised me because she had looked a lot more substantial in the photos. But then, almost anybody standing next to Janie would look like a hulk by contrast. She was a bit shorter than me, and she wore a simple white sundress, straw hat with a wide brim, and sunglasses with very small rectangular lenses.

She and Janie hugged, but it seemed a little stiff. Both were smiling, though, and the expressions didn't appear to be any more than 15 or 20 percent forced. Definitely something uncomfortable stuck in between these two, I deduced.

"Dad," Janie said, subdued but smiling, "This is Missy Kennedy. Missy, this is my old hack journalist father, Carl Kolchak. His actual name is Karel, but he prefers Carl, for obvious reasons."

Missy smiled at me. I think she was trying to beam at me. It came across a bit watery, but it was sincere.

"Mister Kolchak," she said, taking my hand. I noticed she wore quite a bit of makeup, another contrast with Janie, who never wore any at all. "I've heard a very great deal about you. I hope we can spend some time together while you're here. I was so thrilled when Janie told me you wanted to come with her!"

"So was I," I told her, the very model of disingenuousness. "This is actually sort of a business trip for me. Janie wanted to see you again, though, and she decided to come too."

Missy frowned just the tiniest bit. "Oh." She glanced over at Janie. "Well then," she continued, "everything has turned out wonderfully." Her smile came back. "If you two want to grab your bags, we can head out to my place and you can rest a little."

"That sound great," I said. "We'll get our stuff and load up. But you two go on ahead without me. I need to do a few things with my friend, here." I introduced her to Gordie. "After that, I'll get a ride out to your place. Just write down the address for me." I was telling the truth, I did want to get started right away. But I also sensed that there was something between her and Janie that needed to be hashed out, and I figured they might be more inclined to do so if I were not hovering nearby.

Both girls seemed vaguely ill at ease, but nowhere near distraught, so my plan was adopted. Missy scribbled her address and phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. After loading Missy's car, we parted company. Missy solicitously handed me her cell phone "just in case."

Gordie had a house on Riverside Drive. As we had chatted at the airport, I learned that he was in a unique position to aid me in my mission. People can surprise you. Gordie, it seems, had made the jump from dead humans to "living" machines. He was, to hear him tell it, something of a computer genius. I had no cause to doubt him. For some reason, it seemed to fit. I was not all that startled to learn that he was now an expert hacker. He would be.

Stepping into the living room I beheld enough computers and accessories to run a NASA space mission. Gordie sat down at one of them, booted it up, taped my handwritten list of names to the bottom of the monitor and started typing.

"How long have you been doing this?" I asked, amazed.

"Oh, quite a few years now. In fact, I've been in it almost since the beginning. I left my morgue job a few years after the 'Crawlspace the Clown' deal. Carl, you should have seen all those bodies they pulled out of there! Oh, that's right, you did. And it only cost you fifty bucks. I must have been feeling philanthropic. But that whole thing was just too much for me. Things had been pretty calm for a couple of years. God, we had that rash of weird killings in '74 and '75… Bodies coming through in all sorts of ungodly conditions. Decapitated, burned to a crisp, bone marrow drained out. Remember that black guy that came through three times in a single week? Then things settled down. For a while everything was political. I rode all that out, and after the shakeup in '76, when they replaced the coroner, had slipped from the public mind, things started slowly getting back to Chicago normal. I even started some of my enterprises back up. But that serial killer case threw cold water on everything. It was high profile, and it attracted city officials and politicians in droves. Things were just never the same after that.

"Well, I had started tinkering with home computers in 1975. I bought one of those old MITS Altairs-- the thing had 256 bytes of memory! Bytes, Carl! It cost me 400 bucks, a tab which you, by the way, picked up. Thanks! By 1981 I was pretty heavily into it. I already owned some stock in IBM in '81 when they started marketing their new home PCs, the ones based on the old Intel 8088 processor."

"Gordie, you might as well be speaking Greek. Literally. I actually know a couple of Greek words."

"Sorry, Carl. I forgot you're a technophobe. But I'll bet you've heard of money and the stock market and a company called Microsoft. Add all of those together and you get Gordon Spangler bidding a bittersweet farewell to the land of the dead.

"Most of them are long gone," Gordie told me as he peered at his screen. Dead or retired and moved to Florida or wherever the cops' graveyard is. In fact… Hmmm, yeah, I can only find two of the names that are both alive and in Chicago. We're looking at Captain Warren and Captain Winwood. And… Well, this is freaky! As whatever it is that has these things would have it, they both live at the same nursing home-- excuse me, I mean 'healthcare facility.' Political correctness is so tricky these days.

"Anything else? Say, how would you like me to make all the traffic violations on your record go away? You used to get a lot of tickets, I recall."

"Don't be ridiculous, Gordie," I said, thinking about how I couldn't think of anything to think about. I had no kind of a plan, but my next stop seemed pretty clear.

"Could you jot down the address for me, Gordie? On a slip of paper? With a pen?"

Looking disgusted by my primitive ways, Gordie did as I asked and handed me the paper. You'd think I had suggested he chisel the info into a stone tablet. I thanked him and was on my way to the door when I stopped and looked back.

"How much?" I said. "For the traffic ticket thing."

"For you?" Gordy grinned. "Fifty bucks! And I'm taking a loss."

"Gordie! You're a dot-com millionaire, and you'd still hustle fifty bucks out of an old, struggling hack reporter?"

He just shrugged.

I reached for my wallet.

Captain Warren had been my foil during the Ripper case. Winwood had been up to his ass in the cesspool of lies, murder and corruption surrounding the death(s) of Francois Edmonds. Winwood had been a very dirty cop. Warren had just been a pain.

I hailed a cab and gave the driver the address Gordie had given me.

The home was called "The Hills of Lethe." It stood on an interesting piece of land. Until 1974, it had been a cemetery, one of the older ones, established when Chicago had been much, much smaller. What had been a patch of meadowland miles from downtown had at last been overtaken by urban sprawl. It had become a suburb, and what was once basically a potter's field was now a prime bit of real estate. It was purchased, deconsecrated, evacuated, eviscerated, plowed over, paved, and transformed into a smart condominium complex. For some perverse reason, the condo owners had kept the original name, one that was very familiar to me. It had figured into one of my more interesting unpublished works, the story of Harold "Sword Man" Baker, a biker who had been "accidentally" decapitated by members of a rival gang back in 1956. He rested peacefully, I would assume, until the developers dug him up a mere twenty years into his dirt nap-- all for the sake of gracious living. But Sword Man was neither of those. His disconnected head, which had been buried in the casket with the rest of him, had bounced away during the eviction process. This apparently upset him so much that he ambled out of the warehouse where the dead were stored pending permanent arrangements-- with absolutely nothing on top of his neck-- stole a motorcycle, acquired a sword, and hunted down the surviving members of the gang that had killed him. I probably don't even need to tell you what he did with the sword.

Even more perversely, once the condos had been closed down and condemned a few years later-- in the wake of some very disturbing occurrences which curiously seemed to have nothing to do with Baker, whom I had tucked back into eternity-- the new tenant also kept the name. I say perversely because the new resident was and is a nursing home catering mainly to clientele suffering from Alzheimer's. The name Lethe comes from Greek mythology. According to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, it is "a river flowing through Hades. The souls of the dead were forced to drink of its waters, which made them forget what they had done, said, and suffered when they were alive."

That could be taken any number of ways, I suppose.

Many of the original condo buildings were still standing. Some appeared to be in regular use, others looked derelict. A large, low "L" shaped building, obviously newer than all the rest, occupied the middle of the space. The whole place seemed to be in the doldrums. I swear, the second I set foot on the property, I started getting depressed. The empty buildings with their boarded-up windows created a sad and menacing ambience. Behind the windows I imagined there were rooms filled with stale time, days from long ago that nobody alive remembered, decomposing slowly into meaningless and depressing mush.

I presented myself at the reception desk and was given directions to the wing where both Warren and Winwood resided. It was a beautiful facility, almost as cheery as the mental hospital in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Every hallway looked and smelled exactly the same. I became disoriented-- a sensation not unlike snow blindness-- and lost my way for a minute or two. Everything smelled like rubbing alcohol and hospital air freshener, and underneath that was an odor I call "death waiting around to happen and getting impatient." Kind of a sour tang-- not actual decay, but it has aspirations.

I looked in on Winwood. He was asleep. I moved on down to the end of the corridor, where I found Warren's room. I quietly pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped inside.

By a fascinating coincidence (If there are such things as coincidences), my old sparring partner on the Ripper case, Captain Warren, shared a surname with the man who was the head of the London Metropolitan Police in 1888, the year Jack made his European debut. Sir Charles Warren was by most accounts an intolerant, authoritarian ass, a career army officer specializing in colonial intrigue, who was grossly miscast as leader of an urban police force. Sir Charles had achieved his greatest notoriety on November 31, 1887, when he attempted to break up a more or less peaceful demonstration in Trafalgar Square by proponents of Irish Home Rule by injecting 2,000 police officers and 400 regular army troops into the mix. The results were what just about anyone but Warren himself might have predicted, and the ensuing injuries (several hundred) and fatalities (three) became an albatross known as "Bloody Sunday" that would hang around Warren's neck for the rest of his life.

His spectacular lack of success in the Ripper case the following year was more than enough to put paid to his career as Commissioner of Police. Pressured and vigorously criticized by both the newspapers and the Home Office, Warren gathered up his toys and went back home to the Army, coincidentally (see parenthetical caveat above) resigning from the force just days before the last of the Ripper killings (officially, at least), that of Mary Kelley, on November 9.

"My" Captain Warren hadn't been quite as bad, but it was probably only for lack of opportunity. He hadn't fared much better in the wake of "his" Ripper. Official word was that the killer had, as Janie had pointed out earlier, been fatally wounded in a gun battle with the police. But there were many unanswered questions. Internal Affairs had become involved. For one thing, there was no corpse. That's because when I electrocuted him, the Ripper completely dissolved. It was the damnedest thing. I didn't much trust the evidence of my own senses on that night, but it looked to me as though he had phased out from a solid into a vapor, which was then sucked rapidly away as if by some kind of vacuum effect. His house had caught fire thanks to my wiring job and everything was destroyed. The story the police gave to the public said the killer's body had been consumed in the inferno. Privately, they didn't know what the hell had happened. There was no ID on the suspect, no explanation or resolution for any of the odd things that had happened during the manhunt. There were five dead women (at least) and nobody had any decent answers as to what exactly had transpired. A head had to roll, and Warren's was chosen by default.

And apparently it had finally stopped rolling here. The figure in the bed was about half the size of the Warren I remembered. He reminded me of one of those dolls you occasionally see with the heads made of dried-up apples. His arms and legs looked as sturdy as toothpicks. Poor bastard. Upon my entrance, his head lolled a little in my direction and he tried grabbing me with his gaze, but he was a few feet wide.

"Take off… take off your hat," he croaked.

I wasn't wearing one, but I mimed taking one off and tossing it onto a nearby non-existent hat rack.

I talked with Warren-- more or less-- for a while. I asked him if he'd had any visitors recently, and he launched into a tale about how his mother had dropped in that day, bringing "the new baby" with her. I asked him if he remembered Jack the Ripper and he told the same story again, in precisely the same words. Next he began to talk about how much he would like a Coke, and I offered to get him one. I remembered seeing a machine in the lobby. I had the same directional trouble going back to the room as I'd had before. I was gone for no more than three minutes. I saw no one in the halls, but did not remark upon it at the time because why should I?

I pushed the door open again, stepped inside, and saw the thing I saw. It didn't register for a second; I had no idea just what I was looking at. I took a very, very deep breath. I was frightened, then angry, then frightened and angry. I swallowed hard.

I hope I don't sound callous, but I have developed an automatic coping mechanism when it comes to violent death. I haven't used it much over the last 20 years, but it's not the kind of thing you lose. What went through my head was the fact that, judging by the way he looked on the outside, I would have expected Warren's insides to be kind of dry and papery, something like excelsior perhaps, wispy and insubstantial. I was surprised-- shocked-- to observe that they were in fact very wet, very red, and very plentiful. They appeared to have been dragged quite forcefully out through a huge rip in his abdomen and slung up against the wall behind his bed. Bits of intestine hung there against a Jackson Pollack red splatter background. In another bit or irreverence, I noted that he didn't smell much worse than he had when all that stuff was still on the inside.

Then it occurred to me. I was on my way to push the button to summon a nurse when it hit. I whirled immediately and took off up the hallway. I had never liked Winwood. And I believed he had never gotten the punishment he deserved for his role in the life and death and live and death (ad infinitum) of Francois Edmonds.

As I neared Winwood's door I heard a noise from inside the room. I knew right away was being made by something it would probably be best to avoid.

It was a figure wearing a dark hooded robe. It held Winwood's broken frame at arm's length above its head, giving no indication that the least bit of strain was involved. I automatically reached for the camera I had stopped using years ago. Funny how quickly a person can revert to type, no matter how long it's been. So, with nothing to occupy my hands, I stood there, gaping. The robed figure had its back to me, but I did not imagine it was unaware of my presence. Winwood, dead of course, looked as heavy as a bag of air, and it was plain to see that he had been broken in half somewhere between the pelvis and the bottom of the ribcage. Just like Francois Edmonds had done to his victims back in '74. It had taken thirty years, but Winwood finally had to ante up for his role in the death of the abominable Edmonds. It was either a mercy or a swindle that he had not had the presence of mind to appreciate that fact.

The robed figure tossed the scarecrow remains into the corner, where it slipped from sight behind the hospital bed, rustling like a bundle of straw. Then it turned to face me. I say "face," but no face was visible in the shadows of the hood. I noted that the figure seemed smaller and slimmer now than it had when it was holding the corpse aloft.

Something occurred to me. It did not seem possible, but it fit the picture I had. Who could have known I was coming here at this precise time? Only one person. Who had the organizational skill and the street smarts-- coupled with the financial resources-- to do the things that had already been done? It was crazy. Totally insane. But…

"Are you…" I began, but my voice faltered and I had to start over. "Is that you, Gor…?"

That was as far as I got before the figure, in a flash, moved to fill my field of vision. There was a bright flash of light, which I suppose was the way my brain translated the pain of the impact to my left temple. Then all the lights went out.

I got up slowly, clutching my head. This, I reflected, is a real oldie. I hadn't been knocked unconscious by a supernatural creature in 30 years. It hadn't changed much, apart from the fact that my skull seemed thinner.

And there was a note. It was pinned to my shirt, in fact.It said, "Mr. Kolchak, you can find me at the place where it usually ended for you, where you took your stories to tell them goodbye." The handwriting was familiar, and somehow I was not surprised. It had been a very short time indeed since I had seen it last.

The staff, such as it was, had apparently been rendered unconscious without violence. They were all alive, slumped over tables and chairs or splayed out in the hallways, but none bleeding and all breathing. I slipped away, and hoped that when the police finally got there, as they would once I made an anonymous call on the cell phone, no one would recall my name or description.

The note may have sounded on the face of it like a cryptic conundrum, something the Riddler might have sent to Batman in the old TV show. But it couldn't have been any plainer to me. Good God, how many nights had I dragged myself up those stairs, through those doors, to that old desk and that old typewriter and hammered out yet another story of the century that I knew would never, ever see print? It was almost a ritual. But it was the only closure I'd ever get, and I needed it. I've been known to knowingly and willingly gulp down a placebo and then pretend it's working. It's a curious habit, indicative of a fractured personality, I suspected, or some sort of dissociative disorder. At least I had done what I was paid to do. The employer might not use it, might not like it-- but I wasn't working for commissions. By feeding this relatively mild, and strangely utilitarian, bit of psychopathology, I kept far worse things at bay.

I got out my cell phone and punched in Missy's number. This time I got no answer at all, not even her voice mail prompt. I hoped she and Janie were enjoying themselves and that the morning would not find them at the Cook County Morgue identifying whatever was left of Old Man Kolchak. I wondered idly if some spiritual descendent of Gordie the Ghoul might make a few bucks showing my mutilated remains to some reporter with sketchy ethics.

I took a city bus. Riding along through downtown, I remembered the night I followed the late Francois Edmonds to his post-mortem crash pad in an automobile graveyard. Somehow or other-- I never figured it out-- he managed to board a bus and attract virtually no attention from anyone else, despite the fact that he looked like death warmed over. No… scratch that. Not even warmed over. He looked like half-eaten death someone had left out on the kitchen counter for a few days. Which is basically what he was, and his aroma was in full accord with his appearance.

And people say New Yorkers are jaded…

I got off the bus at the correct stop and walked a path that had once been so familiar as to be unnoticeable. Into the building and up the stairs, and I found myself standing at the door of the former office of the Independent News Service. The lock had been twisted off. The wood around the knob was practically shredded and it was fresh. I pushed open the door and stepped gingerly inside.

It was chilly in there and smelled like old places that were once alive but had gradually stopped living and turned into inert space. Much of the furniture was still there, including my old desk. Shadows were everywhere. The old teletype machines were long gone, probably sitting at the bottom of a scrap heap somewhere. The INS had gone belly-up two years previously. Always a struggling little fish in a sea full of larger ones, the great whale that was the Internet had finally skewered her for good.

I glanced around. I saw what I had come expecting to see.

There was the robed figure. It turned in my direction. Something glinted in the depths of the dark hood. A fang? An eye?

Two hands reached up-- slender, pale hands-- and began to slowly pull the hood away. What went through my mind was the scene in "The Phantom of the Opera" where Mary Philbin reaches around from behind Lon Chaney and yanks off his mask. But what I saw when the hood came away was not a cadaverous, desiccated death's-head.

Nor was it Gordon Spangler.

It was a woman. More of a girl. A pretty young girl with porcelain skin and bright pale eyes. I knew I had seen her before.

I looked at her face, into her eyes, for what seemed a very, very long time until it dawned on me that I knew perfectly well who she was. I recalled the first time I had seen her. The moment and the place seemed to be right there in the room with me. It was Skorzeny's house. I had broken in, several steps ahead of the police. Because I had tracked him down. I had sniffed out his hiding place. I had to see it first; I had to be there first. I left word, arranging that it wouldn't be received until I had had at least a few minutes to be there and see what there was to see. It was arrogance, I now saw. It was incredible hubris, a pride so blinded and diseased as to defy reason. I experienced the smell of the place, musty, coppery, rank. I felt the chill again and the eyes before me now were the same ones (and yet not the same) I had looked into so briefly before I heard the key in the lock and knew that the vampire had returned to his house.

She had been stretched out, prone on an old bed, wrists and ankles bound to the bedstead, a gag stuffed into her mouth. And I remembered the thing I had forgotten. No… not a thing. A girl. A person. A living victim of Skorzeny's rampage. The one he didn't kill, the one he brought home with him to use as a milk cow.

And I had… Oh Jesus, it suddenly dawned on me-- After killing Skorzeny and jousting with the police… I had forgotten she was up there!

Shelley Forbes.

Shelley Forbes, as young as she had been thirty years ago, and almost luminous, somehow more wraithlike than she had been when I found her tied to that bed, drained of all but the minimum amount of blood needed to keep her alive.

"I want to tell you some things, Mr. Kolchak. May I? I don't intend to harm you. I just want to talk. I want to say all of this before… Well, will you listen? More, will you write it down later on? I don't care what you do with it. I just want you to know it and to write it so you can end your own story after so many years."

She smiled and reached into her robe. She produced a small tape recorder, and old one very similar to the kind I had used years ago.

And I listened to her. I owed her that and more. In fact, I sensed that I would have one more payment to make before the end of the night and I was not looking forward to it. I sat down behind my old desk, the place where I had finished so many stories that never saw print, and thought how fitting, or at least symmetrical, it was that it should be the scene of my last one. I turned on the little tape recorder, gave Shelley a nod, and she began:

Shelley Forbes' Story

I was so happy; at least I thought that's what it was. I was so twisted by that time, so full of fear and other things, I wasn't sure I could really be happy any longer… I thought maybe happiness was one of those things that was never really real to begin with, you know, and I was just now learning that. But I had some hope, yes, when you came in. I would at least get out. It would go no further.

Then. Remember? You heard him coming in. You poked the gag back into my mouth and shushed me. You didn't say anything, but I thought I had a promise that you would return.

And you left me. All alone you left me. I didn't mean much. That's what it felt like.

I was up there for hours, Mr. Kolchak. It felt like weeks. They did not find me right away. The house was sealed off. They didn't search upstairs until much later. And I couldn't move or make any sound or anything. You didn't tell them! You just left me there when you heard him coming back, and later on you forgot! So I lay there for a while longer, and it already seemed to me that I'd been there my whole life. I remembered school like it was a hundred years ago, or just a movie I saw at some point.

I had started dreaming things, even though I was awake. These dreams, which were more like memories-- only they weren't my memories-- kind of superimposed themselves over the room and the bed and everything else. Most of them felt very old. Like they really were a hundred years old, but they felt brand new to me. After a while, I could tell that they came from different lives. I had never lived any of them, but they had somehow gotten into me and they wanted me to pay attention to them. One of them I thought was the Civil War. The uniforms looked right, going by what I've seen in movies. Later I found out I was right.

There was blood everywhere, more than you could imagine, and a smell that was almost solid, I swear. It did something to my eyes, but it wasn't stinging them. It was more like they were saturated. In some of the visions I had a saw in my hand and I was cutting, cutting, cutting through something and someone was splashing alcohol on whatever it was I was cutting and there was a lot of screaming. And then I noticed the thoughts going through my head that weren't my own, and they kept repeating, "I must rise above this. I must live forever."

Another group of the dreams happened in a big city, but there were no cars and very few lights compared to cities today. I don't think they had electricity. And I was in a sort of slum, with all these gray buildings pile up and shoved in together all crazy, this way and that. And there were these women, five different women I'd learned to recognize from seeing them time and again in this dream. And I was cutting in this dream too, but it was different. I was… Well, I was cutting these women is what I was doing, Mr. Kolchak.

And I had tools like a doctor would have, but I wasn't helping these women, I was just cutting them up and removing things from inside them. I didn't want to hurry, but I had to on all but the last one. She was different because she was younger and kind of pretty but she had bad teeth. I remember that. And we were inside a room, her room. This girl… I cut on her for a long, long time. I took everything out of her, everything I could find, and I threw some of it into the fireplace, and other parts I wrapped up in this heavy brown paper and tied up with twine. And there were a couple of things I just left on a little table beside her bed. I worked and worked until I had stripped most of her down to the bone, and I noticed through a little chink at the top of the door that the sun had come up. I was covered in sweat and I had blood on me too and I felt really cold. And I got ready to leave the room and go home, and I took the brown paper package with me and I think I was going to eat what was in it. I did not know it at the time, but her name was Mary Kelley and she was 25 years old.

Other dreams I had were more confused, more chaotic, and always dark. And of course there was blood, lots and lots of blood. It seemed to me that I could taste it.

I was like this for a while, drifting in and out, and eventually, suddenly, they found me. The police. They started shouting and a radio was pulled out and a bunch of squawking was coming from it. Someone took the gag out of my mouth but I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't know where I was. I thought I was still in the room with Mary Kelley, you see, and I thought perhaps I had been caught doing what I did, and maybe they were taking me out to hang me. People were feeling parts of me and asking me questions I could not even decipher. I tried to look around to the fireplace where I had thrown Mary Kelley's insides, but it wasn't there. Then there was a lot of jolting, and springs squeaking, and some straps went across my chest.

After the hospital I went to another hospital, one run by the state, and I was there for two months I think. I was discharged into my parents' care and they took me home. But home wasn't home. I still had my dreams and visions, though I had mentioned nothing about them to any of the doctors. My mom and dad knew something was wrong. Beyond the obvious, I mean. As far as Skorzeny went, they believed the official story. A mass murderer had abducted me. I don't think they had the term serial killer back then.

For a while I was at my parents' house, and at some point they got a letter from Doctor Richard Malcolm. Or Malcolm Richards, I forget which. He presented himself as a prominent psychiatrist specializing in acute trauma. Having read about my case in the newspaper, Doctor Richard Malcolm, eminent West Coast psychiatrist, took an interest in the poor traumatized Vegas girl and offered his help, free of charge. Soon, I was packed and bundled up and sent off with the doctor to his "research hospital."

And how!

You know, of course, who and what Malcolm really was. He took me back to Seattle and installed me in his little "resort" beneath the streets. And he told me things. He loved to talk.

Here are a few of the things he told me:

FACT: The individual you knew as Janos Skorzeny was not Janos Skorzeny. At least not the one you thought he was. He was much older. I'll get to that. By 1863 he had been a vampire for some years. He came to America during the Civil War and soon found employment as a mercenary-- working for both the North and the South at various times-- specializing in nighttime raids on enemy encampments.

FACT: Skorzeny, Malcolm and the Ripper were not isolated cases. They knew one another. In a sense, they created one another.

It was at Gettysburg that the three came together.

July 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1863. The battle was a veritable orgy for creatures like them. Blood literally hung in the air like a mist. Malcolm, the quintessential mad scientist, could at last gorge himself on a limitless supply of raw material for his experiments. The future Jack the Ripper could indulge his one true passion openly, with no fear of sanctions or consequences. Skorzeny was the only one with a complaint, as he could not immerse himself in the daytime slaughter. He made up for it by night, though, and on the second night he let himself get a bit carried away. When dawn came he was pinned down far from his coffin full of earth. He was wearing Union colors at the time, though on this occasion, he was working for neither side. He was merely enjoying himself. A Union patrol found him, immobilized, and carried him back to the field hospital where Richard Malcolm had been working feverishly for two score hours or more.

One of the Union men who had found Skorzeny sensed something odd and intriguing, and he remained there in the hospital-- that's really too generous a word-- with him, listening, watching, examining. When a minister came around, the vampire went into convulsions, and his Union rescuer, no fan of the clergy himself, took the opportunity to deliver a quick beating. Soon the cleric was unconscious on the ground next to Skorzeny's cot. The vampire, weakened and disoriented though he was, looked upon this spectacle and could not restrain a smile. The smile revealed not only a gleeful appreciation of cruelty, but a pair of unnaturally long and sharp canine teeth.

Presently, the doctor made his way around to where Skorzeny lay. A quick examination was enough to tell him that here was something remarkable. He formed an alliance with Skorzeny and Jack, who demanded to be cut in (and even Malcolm could see that this was not a young man to be toyed with or ignored), and the rest was history. Well, sort of. Just not recorded history. Until now. In the months ahead, Malcolm studied Skorzeny carefully.

Malcolm was working on his own immortality. Skorzeny had found his. The Ripper wanted his own, and was prepared to do anything at all to get it. He had been a monster for a long time before he found his way there. During his years of ordinary life, murder had been an easy way to achieve whatever goals he had, large or small. Early on, it had been a slightly regrettable necessity. Later, he came to enjoy it, and then to revel in it. Finally, he needed it to live, like air or water. Had killing not served this purpose, he would still have sought it as an end in itself. To do what you love and make a living at it! Who could ask for more? Well, Jack could. He asked that he be allowed to do it forever.

Malcolm "perfected" a version of his elixir with Skorzeny's blood as an ingredient.

The elixir was administered to Jack first. The effect on his system was not quite the same as it would be on Malcolm's. It has a lot to do with individual body chemistry. Or maybe "soul chemistry." After all, it was half magical, so who can say?

The Ripper had strength, speed, and agility like a vampire's. And he was nocturnal. Sunlight would not kill him, but he preferred the dark. He was stronger at night. And, like Malcolm, he needed the blood of women who had just been murdered-- it would be flooded with adrenaline and other things, concentrated in the major organs. It wasn't the blood itself he required. It was the substances the blood carried. He merely ate the raw material, there was no need for him to mix it and refine it in a laboratory.

Malcolm was the thinker, the scientist. Skorzeny was the strategist. Jack was the muscle. The other two needed him, you see, because Skorzeny could do nothing in the daytime, and Malcolm's grip on reality was so feeble even by this time that he was virtually useless outside of his laboratory. You saw what he was like at the end. Well, he was showing signs of what would now be recognized as paranoid schizophrenia before he even began his "treatments." The elixir froze him in place, physically and mentally. He got no worse, except for those 18-day periods every 21 years when the effects began to wear off and his body began to decompose, along with his reason and self-control. The three had eventually gone their separate ways, but maintained contact.

In fact, Skorzeny had been sending blood to Malcolm for years. Every 21 years, to be exact. But 1973 rolled around, Malcolm needed more of the blood, and none was forthcoming because Skorzeny was gone. Somehow, though, he had heard about me, and correctly deduced that Skorzeny had been slowly turning me. Which mean not just a draining of blood, but a mingling. Skorzeny had fed me some of his. Absolutely nauseating, I assure you.

His elixir would soon begin to break down again. He needed me. But he did not intend to use me in the way he normally used women. He thought that my blood-- tainted as it now was by Skorzeny's-- might hold some sort of key. After a few preliminary tests, he summoned the Ripper and prepared to begin his work in earnest. I was a woman. My body constantly produced the substances his formula required. Could it be stabilized using me as a growth medium? Because the other ingredient Malcolm needed was the blood of a vampire. Skorzeny had supplied him with it, but Skorzeny was gone now. But I had vampire blood in me, and I had the elixir too. Just like the Ripper. But I had something the Ripper did not. Female hormones. That was the key to everything. To life. In order to continuously renew life, you had to have aspects of both male and female. It makes sense, don't you think? Prolonging life is really the same as reproducing it. It's all about immortality. And so, to further that end, he administered a dose of the elixir to me. He did not need the fresh female blood to add to it, for obvious reasons.

Now we get back to 1973. The time of the madness came. He had to do what he always did. He locked me away. But it was to protect me during those 18 days when the desperation came over him and he could not guarantee that he wouldn't attack me. Before that, though, when we were in the early days of his research on me, I had been given the run of the place. He had no reason not to trust me. And if he had, I fear he was too unbalanced to realize it. I could come and go. I stayed, returning every evening on the days I spent outside. Because he was not an unpleasant man, and I was curious about what happened to me and to him and to his friends.

I felt the need to do something, but I did not know what. For some reason, you came to mind. I tried to find you, but you had left Las Vegas. I made more inquiries-- my intellect, my inner resources, had expanded considerably since my experiences in Skorzeny's house. I found I could be very persuasive. I found out where you were. I made the acquaintance of some people at the newspaper in Seattle. First your friend Mr. Vincenzo. He was hired away from the Las Vegas Daily News. Then you. I got word to you that you might find employment in Seattle and you came.

You look skeptical. Is it so hard to believe I arranged it? Is it easier to believe that first your editor and then you wound up in the same place at precisely the time that another near-immortal killer emerged from his seclusion by sheer chance?

And why did I do it? I don't know. I wanted you near. For revenge? For protection? I cannot say. I think I was already becoming a bit unbalanced myself by then.

But you came. Just in time for Malcolm's killing spree. Then you got mixed in and you put an end to Malcolm, and there I was again, Mr. Kolchak! Forgotten once again.

But I was found, and not so very long afterward, though once again it seemed like years. I sank deeper into the alien memories.

But I was "rescued" from that place. By the third member of the dark trinity. Malcolm had sent word, remember, asking him to come and participate in the new research. One day-- or night-- a man in a black suit and a black hat and a black cape lined with red descended into Malcolm's all but totally dead world and ripped the iron door off of my cage.

He told me his name was Jack the Ripper.

For a time, I belonged to him.

I've read so many books about him, so much speculation. Nobody ever came close. He was never what anyone thought he was. Strange. He was open to so many interpretations, like a figure from religion or mythology. He had these… meanings that were nothing to do with him, with what he really was. I was with him for a year, but it didn't seem like a year. I don't know if it seemed like more or if it seemed like less. It seemed like something else. Something that wasn't made of time at all. Time is not what most people think it is, Mr. Kolchak. It's… roomier. It must be infinite, I think, and if so, it is infinite in all directions, not just forward and backward. You can stick your arms out (which she did by way of illustration, at right angles from her body, and wiggled her long fingers), and never touch a wall, so to speak. And it is indestructible." She sighed and dropped her arms. "Some things can only be understood as metaphor, and even then…not really understood at all."

But he didn't want to kill me. He didn't need me for my blood, but he needed… I can't say he needed a friend, exactly, but… Some kind of a constant. Somebody who knew what he was, every bit of it. Not approved, just knew. Someone who would… be there I suppose. He certainly wasn't in love with me. That kind of thing was not in him. I think I was supposed to be like a… a pet maybe. Or a treasured knickknack that you take with you wherever you go and put up on a shelf so you can see it every day.

Apart from that, and his "sport…" He wanted you. You had murdered his "brothers," and he would have revenge. That's why we went to Chicago. That's why he paraded himself in public. To draw your attention. And it worked, didn't it? However, he found he had bitten off far more than he could chew.

You are formidable, Mr. Kolchak. I don't know what it is that you have. For more than a hundred years, Jack the Ripper had lived and killed and nobody could stop him. Nobody but you. I think I knew you would. I never foresaw it coming out any other way. I really had nothing against him, you know. He was never cruel to me. But absence of cruelty is not kindness, and it certainly isn't love.

I was there when you killed him. I saw it. And then something extraordinary happened.

I absorbed him. Something of his essence. Not his personality. Not his soul, if he even had one. I don't know what happened to that. But the power he had cultivated for so long. It came to me.

After that night, things were very different. I don't know what it was I absorbed when you killed the Ripper. I don't know if the electricity "boosted" whatever it was. But I had something brand new, and another set of senses opened in me. I could feel things. I knew there were many other anomalous creatures and forces in the word. If I concentrated, I could find them. Not only that-- but they could find me.

Not overtly. They didn't know why they came, or even that it was not their own idea. With the Ripper gone and his energy added to mine, I became open to these others, aware of them. The first one I sought out was your old friend Mama Loa. She was a voodoo practitioner, and a pretty ordinary one as those things go. Voodoo is mostly psychological. A houngan, or adept, serves his community as a sort of priest/doctor/judge. A female adept is called a mambo, incidentally.

She was grieving for her grandson, Francois. She wanted revenge for his death, but the spells she cast were feeble. She had been weakened by her years in America, far from the seat of belief in her religion. And in any case, she was not Bokor-- literally, 'the priest who serves with his left hand,' one who trafficks with the darker and more powerful of the Loa. When I met her, I could sense the Loa-- spirits-- all around her. They wanted to help, but her magicks were not enough to grant them access to this plane. They cannot act unilaterally, you see. But my power was of another order entirely. I brought the Loa over and I helped her raise her Francois up from the ground. Mama took me for Baron Samedi, the lord of the dead in her belief system, and I never bothered to correct her.

You never knew him in life, Mr. Kolchak, but I can assure you that Francois Edmonds was very thoroughly a monster before he died. I had no compunctions about using him as I did. The old lady was far from a saint herself. After the deed had been done, I found a way to nudge you in that direction. Because I knew what you would do. You wouldn't be able to stay away once you knew. I was there in that junkyard when you snuffed out his life, such as it was-- or should I say, forced it out of his body-- and I absorbed it. That was reassuring, since I now knew that the Ripper hadn't been a fluke. I never meant for him to kill you, and would have prevented it if he had tried.

Why you? Mr. Kolchak, you are more special than you have ever realized. Had I not brought them across your path, they would have manifested elsewhere, and nobody would have stopped them. You are still an enigma. I don't sense anything otherworldly about you, though. Maybe that's part of it… Perhaps you are so unremarkable you pass with impunity beneath anyone's radar. A vampire of any experience and standing is prepared for an onslaught by a fearless vampire hunter. He expects it. There is a certain type that gravitates to that kind of work, and they are easily identifiable, thus understandable and beatable. But a reporter with no innate magical ability, no discernible psychic ability, no history of involvement with paranormal issues…

Well, anyhow, I 'broadcast' an appeal, and they came. Catherine Rawlins 'heard' me, perhaps because I have some of Skorzeny in me, and it was enough to resurrect her. But she was terrified that Skorzeny might be waiting for her in the direction she felt compelled to travel, so she went the other way instead.

I took all the energy. Every time you killed one of them, there was a release, and I caught it. For some reason, it had to be you. I could not do it myself. It was enough to keep me going for a long while. It was my "elixir." And the monsters, Mr. Kolchak! Purging this plane of some of its nightmares and feeding me at the same time. This is an irony I believe you will like once I point it out. They were killers; they victimized anyone who crossed their path, all for the sake of their worthless power. And then you turned the tables. We turned the tables, you and I. I was always with you but you never knew. You became my stalker in the night. You did to them the very same thing they did to so many others. And you didn't know it, of course, but you were doing it for me. If-- and I say if-- you owed me anything for leaving me hanging twice, you paid me back in full and more.

After the final time-- that bizarre business with Helen of Troy-- I felt I had "turned a corner." My mind was clear and I thought my soul was too. I released you that night. As for that lizard thing a couple weeks later, I don't know what that was all about. Not one of mine. Neither was the robot. I do believe, however, that I somehow attracted those invisible aliens. By the way, they weren't invisible. You and everyone else involved saw them quite clearly. However, if your minds had actually acknowledged what you were looking at, they'd have had to shut down. That's what happens when you cram eight-dimensional creatures into three-dimensional space. They weren't from outer space… exactly. And the "saucer" you found was not a vehicle in the sense that we understand the term. The best way to express it in English would be a "temporary psuedo-Euclidian multi-point shallow interface enabler." And that's just ballpark.

Be that as it may, once I had absorbed a certain amount of whatever it was I was absorbing from your kills, I felt wonderful. I didn't kill anyone after that. Until recently, that is. My appearance froze, just as Malcolm's had. I began to believe that, in most ways, I was normal. I had no desire to return to my parents or indeed anything I had known before. Shelley Forbes was dead. Whatever I was as I passed through the hands of that succession of monsters had no name, and she was gone too. I traveled for a long while. I saw most of the world. Then I had a desire to return… not home, I wouldn't call it that. To the country of my birth, then. And once there I would start a brand new life.

I wanted to go to college. So I did. It was wonderful. I met a lot of people. Friends. One in particular. After a time, though, I realized the possibility that I might never change. I could look young for… How long? Decades? Centuries? Most of the free radicals had been purged from my system. Mechanisms that produce visible signs of aging had been suppressed. But I got older in years. Unlike other people, however, it didn't leave any marks. Twenty-five years after I was taken by Skorzeny, I was 19 years old on the outside. There was every reason to believe that in another 25 years, the same would hold true. I believed, you see, that a great many biological processes had come to a halt, or had slowed down to a level that was all but imperceptible. Not so. But I didn't work that out until much later.

I now shared Skorzeny's old dilemma. Now and then he would let his old identity "die" and assume a new one in a different place. He was actually the great-grandfather of the Janos Skorzeny you thought you found in Vegas. He killed his great-grandson as though by divine right, and "became" him. Well, I didn't want undue attention either. And if I stayed in one place long enough, I'd receive it.

I didn't want to drag anyone else into whatever my life had become. Or would become. I didn't "die," but I left. I stayed in touch, but I gave flimsy reasons for doing what I had done. This was a year ago. And, in the event, it was a very good thing I had acted in this way, because I soon started to feel different. I became angry more often. I lost track of what I was thinking or saying. The other lives in my head got louder and more intrusive. For a week at a time I might think I was in Whitechapel in 1888, and I knew what it felt like to want so desperately to spill blood, then lap it up. And along with the blood, and just as sweet, the terror. I ached to slip from the chains of conscience and reason. I craved an infantile existence of desire and immediate gratification.

It was menopause, Mr. Kolchak. Of all things. That was when I knew my eternal youth was just a façade. I look the same on the outside, but that's just cosmetic. My skin is still supple, my muscles are still toned, but on the inside, things are shutting down. I'm in my 50s now. During menopause, a woman's body slowly produces less of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. And those are the very things that keep the vampire blood and the Malcolm elixir balanced. The elixir in my system was destabilizing after twenty-some-odd years. Perhaps I could keep the changes at bay if I could receive further treatments, but I have no idea how to do that. All of Malcolm's papers and equipment were confiscated while I was still locked in my room. If they were not all destroyed, they are someplace I was never able to find.

The thing is… Did you know that women produce testosterone too? It's true. Not as much as men of course. And the level drops during menopause just as the other hormones do. But it doesn't drop off quickly enough, at least for my purposes. Testosterone is the volatile factor, the monkey wrench in the works of the Malcolm elixir. And it doesn't take much. Adding the vampire blood to the elixir did not produce any of the changes that would have been a red flag to Malcolm. He observed and tested the mix for weeks before trying it. It remained chemically stable. It should have worked.

Vampires, being dead and all, produce no hormones of any kind. There was no testosterone present in the compound to alert Malcolm to the danger. Another flaw of Malcolm's was that he saw the vampire as some sort of human aberration, an organic condition or disorder that could be understood and explained by science, given time. That is simply not the case. Call it magic if you like. Vampirism isn't a virus or a mutation or anything that can be explained in human terms. What possible biological base could there be for a lethal allergy to Christian iconography?

Crosses started bothering me. Stars of David too, oddly enough. I was raised a WASP, but… Anything that… stank of God-- that's the only way I can describe it-- put me off terribly. The sight of a Koran made me ill. I started thinking about things. Awful things. The kind of things from my dreams. But these were not dreams, and the thoughts did not come from anybody else. They were mine. My thoughts, my desires, my obsessions. I knew there was no hope. I was lucid most of the time-- I'm lucid now, but it's taking a lot of effort-- I knew I would have to be… dealt with… put down. Like the rest of them. My body chemistry has destabilized to the point that I am vulnerable to the sort of madness they all knew, to one degree or another.

I wanted it to be you. When I knew there was no way I could… come back. I knew I was going to get worse, much worse. I had to kill. I wanted to kill. I want to kill right now. Not necessarily you, just anybody. NOT you. I wouldn't. But it is now at the point where it can fairly be said that there is more than one of me; and the part of me that doesn't want to be a monster is outgunned, three to one. How can you get four whole lifetimes into one mind? Especially when three of them are unnaturally long? They outweigh me, you see. And all the while, without me noticing it, I was becoming what they were. There was no more dividing line.

I thought of you so often. Of your courage and how I had used you. And I had to do it again. I fought-- fought with myself--my selves-- over how to do it, or if I would even do it at all. I found an effective carrot, though. I offered myself the chance to murder. I made it all right because I would only murder those who had harmed you. The ones who stood in your way and refused to believe in you. I left a little trail I knew you would follow. It was the only way I could persuade myself to reach out to you. I'm ashamed of it. And I will do it again if I am allowed to leave this place alive tonight.

The tape ended and the little recorder clicked off. I started from force of habit to flip it over, but Shelley shook her head no.

"There's not much left," she said, "And the rest is better left unrecorded.

"What's left for me now is death. My own death. It's really the only way. And I cannot kill myself. I've tried. So…

"Someone who loves me should do it. It's… better that way I think. I don't know that it's necessary. But my believing it makes it necessary, if you follow. I didn't… I couldn't… There was someone, but I couldn't possibly… And I thought of you and what you had done for me before, even though you didn't know…Do you love me? Not romantically. Agape, not Eros. Even just a little, maybe? Because I love you. You were… almost like a father to me…Could you love me enough, do you think?"

My heart was breaking right then and there. I thought I knew what that felt like, thought I had experienced it, but I hadn't. Not until that very moment did I know what the phrase really meant. Oh God, this poor girl. I had been the center of her life, and I never even knew it. She walked up to me and pressed into my hands a long, sharp wooden stake and a heavy mallet. "Could you love me enough to kill me?"

That was some question. I thought about it. No, I didn't. I couldn't think anything. I felt dizzy. I don't know how long I might have stood there or how blank my mind would have gotten. But then…

"Well, if he doesn't, I goddamn sure do. Missy, what in the hell???"

From somewhere miles above me, several tons of pennies dropped, and other shoes hit floors for miles around. That voice went right through my head and made my scalp and everything else tingle. I turned ever so slowly to watch the shadowy figure emerging from what was, an age ago, Tony Vincenzo's office.

As she stepped into the light, I saw that Janie's face was blank. No expression. She looked at me like she knew me but didn't know me. At the moment, I felt the same way about her. She kept my eyes fixed with hers so I could not look down or to the side or anywhere else. The force of her personality was displaying itself in a way I had never before seen, and I was in awe of her, my little girl. This was not magic and it was not science. It was her.

There was another oddity about her appearance which didn't quite register at that moment, and which I will address later.

"Missy," she said, looking away from me, "You could have told me, you know." She was angry, but not for what would seem to be the obvious reason. "I am so pissed at you right now. You could have told me this and you should have."

"Janie," she said. "Janie, I never meant to deceive you. I never wanted to hurt you."

"Then you have some serious disconnect when it comes to pursuing your avowed goals," Janie snapped. "But never mind that. That isn't the point. You haven't got much time left, so please don't fritter it away spouting clichés. It really and truly almost never matters what a person did or didn't mean to do. That isn't why I'm pissed. I've always known who you are. You never could have faked that. I love you, and it isn't about me. I'm not a thin-skinned little buttercup, Missy. I know who you are, and what you are could never be of more than secondary importance. I'm not in love with the idea that you're a killer and a half-vampire or whatever the hell you are, but goddamn! What you must think of me! What did you think I'd do if you told me? Dump you? Kill you? Hate you? You just left. You went away."

"I didn't. I… I didn't disappear entirely. I stayed in touch, Janie."

"Oh, well then, yeah, I forgot. You wrote a couple letters. Okay, never mind then, I'm overreacting. Letters and phone calls where you said nothing, didn't answer anything, and certainly didn't continue anything. You know better than that. Do not try to present that shit as exculpatory evidence."

"Well, I…" Missy was stumped. Janie did that to people a lot. "I was afraid… When I started… changing… getting crazy… I was afraid I might do something to you. Kill you, or…"

Janie laughed. "Oh, honey, I'm not that much of a romantic. You try killing me and I'll make you forget all about Jack the goddamn Ripper. Why does everybody underestimate me? I guess it's my little wholesome pixie poppet looks or my effing sweet personality.

"And then, out of the blue, you invite me to come up and visit you, and while I'm reeling from that, in comes my father announcing that he's on his way to Chicago. I didn't tell him you were the one that made the suggestion because he's good at adding things up, as long as it's two and two. But I knew it was hinky. I mean I certainly didn't foresee anything like this shit. I didn't foresee anything. I could not begin to puzzle out how you inviting me here on the spur of the moment could have any possible connection with my dad wanting to come stampeding up here, on an equally spurious moment of his own. But there just aren't any coincidences that big, in my experience. I wanted to find out for myself and by myself what the fuck.

"So now I know. It's fucked up, but it makes sense, I guess. From a certain point of view. But I don't understand why you got me to come. Did you want something to hold over Dad's head, just in case? Tell me that is not why you invited me. And tell me even more persuasively that our whole relationship wasn't some kind of a Trojan horse."

Shelley's face was a perfect mask of anguish. "You must think… oh, I hope you don't think my whole… our whole… I didn't seek you out because of your father. That's the one thing in this that really was a coincidence. Mostly. I just happened to pick the same college you went to. I noticed your name on the bulletin board, looking for a roommate. I thought, there couldn't be very many Kolchaks in the world. I was so curious, I couldn't let it go. I called you. I met you. I moved in. Soon after that, I forgot everything else. You were… You were something I had never imagined having. I thought it might be okay. Somehow. I knew what I would very likely face eventually, but I… I let myself get caught up. I wanted to. I wanted not to think about later."

"Okay. But why did you want me here now? In Chicago, I mean. You had no intention of bringing me to this office for this... whatever. You would have succeeded in keeping me away, in fact, if I weren't so goddamn clever. So why?"

Missy raised her eyebrows. "Why? Janie. Please. Why do you think I would want you here? Why now, knowing that I am soon to die? I wanted to see you. I had to see you again before… this. I couldn't stand to leave the world without seeing your face and saying goodbye to you first."

"Oh," Janie replied, and fell into an uncharacteristic silence. Whatever was clawing at her insides right now had to be worse than any number of ghosts or zombies. Her eyes were dry, but her lips twitched and her chin dimpled up.

"You idiot" Janie said, her voice huskier than I had ever heard it. She had just swallowed a very bitter pill indeed, and was fighting to keep it down. "There's every chance I could have helped you before you let it go this far. And if I were you, I wouldn't even try telling me that there was nothing I could have done. You knew very well that I knew more about the world, the hidden stuff, than most people. You knew my dad was a bona-goddamn-fide monster-killer! And that really eats my lunch. Because now I have to do this! And if I've got the guts for it, which you're about to find out I do, then I'd have been able to come up with something before you dragged all of us here." And then my daughter whirled on me and held out her hand.

"Give, Dad."

I shook my head. "Janie, you can't…" And I just stopped talking because I knew it was not true. Whether she could or not, she would.

She held out her other hand. Slowly, I placed the stake in her left hand, the mallet in her right. I can do it, she told me, without saying a word. No telepathy or anything like that. I just knew what I was seeing in her eyes, and she knew I knew, and we agreed. She nodded and turned her gaze away from mine. My eyes felt as though some kind of physical restraint had been removed from them, and I actually swayed back and forth a little, blinking rapidly. Janie's gaze had kept my eyes cool and dry, and the release allowed dammed-up tears to suddenly spill, and my vision blurred immediately so that I could not clearly see what was happening. I was kind of grateful for that.

There wasn't much talk. No big scene. No declarations or recriminations, no laments, no screams, no crying. I heard Janie say, "What do you think, right here?"

Missy replied, "Uh-huh, that's right. Between these two ribs."

"Okay, then. Here we go. You ready?" I could not know what it was costing my daughter to maintain her calm, but I had a feeling that when the check arrived it would probably break the bank.

"I think I am, Janie. I'm sorry. I wish I had trusted you. I do love you, you know. I always have. It wasn't about you. I mean, you were about you, but the rest was…"

"I know. I never doubted you. Or me. I knew whatever was wrong was something else. It's very fortunate that self-esteem is something I have never lacked. I don't know how the rest of you get along with so little… I hate to part on bad terms, but I'm still royally pissed at you, young lady. If you do find yourself in an afterlife, I want you to ruminate on the fact that you're going to be in for an eternal ass whipping when I get there... And we…" Her breath caught. "Oh… Missy, your eyes are turning red."

"Yes. My brain is too, on the inside. I think something's happening to my soul, as well. This is it. You have to do it now. Don't wait any more. Please, let me die without ever wanting to kill you! Okay? It's okay. I'll always…"

"Shut up," Janie whispered. "I will too."

Having done the thing myself twice I knew the drill, and even though Shelley Forbes was compliant and did not scream, the sounds and the smells immediately called up horribly vivid recollections of both Skorzeny and Catherine Rawlins. I swayed on my feet again, and this time I fell over, not even feeling the floor when I hit it. My head started ringing again and I squeezed my eyes shut. I did not even attempt to see what was happening, I just listened and I heard Shelley cough and whisper "Thank you," almost inaudible over the three or four sharp pops as the mallet in my daughter's hand pounded a wooden stake into her friend's heart. When Shelly got quiet, Janie didn't make a sound for several seconds. Then she sighed. I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my jacket in time to see Janie lean down over Shelley and kiss her on the lips. Then, softly and sweetly, like a prayer or a blessing or a declaration of love she said, "God damn it to hell, Missy."

All things considered, it was an appropriate epitaph.

Missy's body dissolved. That's it. Were you expecting maybe an agonizing spectacle of blood and fire and screaming, a harrowing, climactic coda, the kind that is absolutely de rigueur in the final scene of a horror story? There wasn't one. She dissolved. First into a sort of gelatinous liquid, then something like fine sand, then vapor, and finally nothing at all. For a few seconds the air seemed to be saturated with static electricity, and I had the damnedest sensation that it was saying something I couldn't decipher.

So. All my questions were answered at last. But they left a brand new one in their place. Was it finally over? Had my daughter and I finally closed out the account that had started, for me and for Shelley, in Las Vegas so many years ago? Or… Or, had I just passed a torch that I had never asked or wanted to carry?

Janie and I stood there for a while, looking at the spot where nothing but a coarse brown robe now lay. The stake had dissolved too. I have no idea how or why. An elevated train rumbled by right outside the office windows and when it had passed I reached over and touched my girl under the chin with my forefinger, tilting her head up so I could see her eyes. They were dry, but that's about it.

"You'll be okay," I said. It wasn't a question.

She nodded. "Someday, I probably will. More or less. That was… I don't know what that was. Goddamn."

I smiled a little and asked her about the oddity I had just gotten around to noticing. "Where did you get that hat?"

On top of her head was an old straw hat with a narrow brim and a blue and red band. It looked as though someone had stomped on it repeatedly. Someone had. It looked as though it had once been saturated with sewage when its owner had gone down beneath the streets in search of a phantom swamp thing. It had. There was a small, ragged nick in the brim that an expert might recognize as having been made by the claw of a werewolf. A lot of things had happened to that hat before I lost track of it. One day it had just seemed to disappear. I had it in the morning; in the evening it was gone. Tony Vincenzo had referred to it as a "bird feeder" and an "eyesore," and he hadn't been wrong. But it was mine. I had raged and threatened dire consequences to anyone who might have taken it. Like King Lear, I promised to unleash "the terrors of the earth" upon the guilty party. But nothing had ever come of it. It was yet another unsolved mystery.

Janie motioned with her head in the direction of Vincenzo's office. "In there. It was stuck in the top drawer of an old desk. I was looking for something to hit someone with. I'd been here five minutes or so when… you know who came in. I had picked the lock. She just tore the goddamn knob out. With one hand! In that robe, I didn't know who it was. I was freaking out. Very quietly, of course. One of those things where if it were a movie, I'd have had to sneeze. I just kinda crouched down. Then you came in… But this hat…I just… I dunno, I liked the hat. The way it looked or something. I just stuck it on my head without thinking about it."

I scowled. "A desk drawer, eh? I knew it. Vincenzo. Why that…" Then I smiled. Thinking of Lear again, I was thankful that my only daughter was a Cordelia. "Come on," I said. "Let's go somewhere."

As my little girl and I walked arm in arm along the street, I thought Janie suddenly looked much older. But no, that wasn't it… Not suddenly. I just suddenly noticed it. She had always looked older, and she did it in a way that made her look impossibly young and vulnerable. And if that doesn't make any sense to you, I'm sorry, but it's the best I can do.

We did not talk because it was time to be silent and just walk together because we could.

Were the monsters all gone now? Would any of them come back? Would there be new ones? We walked past an appliance store with a big screen TV in the window. One of the all-news networks with all the extraneous crawlers and photo insets and clocks cluttering the screen. They could make you take your eyes away from whatever was actually being reported on. Or let you. The center of the screen was a window on a war halfway around the world. A tiny girl, maybe six or seven, tottering along a littered street, one arm just dangling, blood all over the sleeve of her dress. The greatest hope she could reasonably entertain for her future was to make it to the end of that street without being shot or blown up. But her skin was dark. She didn't look like us or talk like us. Cut to the President of the United States, standing behind a podium, looking vacant as he no doubt spun another web of lethal lies. His bland face reminded me of the reality of Janos Skorzeny, his presence defined more by absences than by anything that was actually there. People mistook this vacuum behind his eyes for stupidity, but I knew what it really was. Or rather what it wasn't.

Below him, the death tolls scrolled by in their thousands, with hundreds more every day, and I thought of Jack the Ripper and the 75 women he killed in 86 years. His final victim had been my friend Jane Plum, and I thought of how wonderful she had been and how much poorer the world was for her leaving it. And she was only one.

I thought of the Ripper himself, who killed because he had to, because he wanted to, not as a smokescreen for some other, even sicker, agenda. He admitted his depravity; indeed he reveled in it in his letters to the police and newspapers. "I am down on whores," he wrote back in 1888, "and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games." No justification, no attempts to blame, not a word about imaginary threats and phantom weapons programs. And I got to thinking that maybe I would miss him and his like in a strange way. The world Janie was inheriting might just be worse.

Janie spoke to me very softly. "I'm going to cry," she informed me in a businesslike tone. "In fact, I am going to have a complete goddamn nervous fucking breakdown, and I may very well wind up in an institution so I'll need for you to bring me magazines and stuff, and candy bars of course. I don't know the details right now; we'll just have to play it by ear. But I can't do it till at least next Friday, or maybe even after the weekend, depending on how busy I am."

"Of course," I replied, feeling something so bright and pure that there wasn't a word for it. "There is so much to consider with a thing like that. Give some thought to becoming delusional. You can probably get better drugs that way."

"You are such a help! It never would have occurred to me. This is why I need you, for things like this. You may lack imagination, but you're a fabulous detail man. I'm not kidding, you know. I really am gonna fall apart."

"I know, honey. Look who you're talking to. Been there, done that, as you young people say."

"I never say that. It's stupid. Way overused. It was funny maybe once. And if you had said 'got the t-shirt' at the end, I'd have killed you too."

"I'd have had it coming." There was one thing that bothered me, though. It had not struck me until that moment. "Janie," I said, "why did you go down to the old INS office? How did you figure it out? How did you know we would be there?"

She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and studied the sidewalk beneath her feet. "Because I'm clever, Dad. I'm Sherlock Holmes with tits. Not an overabundance of tits, it's true," she said, plucking at the front of her t-shirt, "but you get the picture." She chuckled. She looked up at me with a little cockeyed grin.

"You want to know the truth? I have absolutely no idea. Not a clue. I had gone to bed while Missy was out doing 'errands.' I was just drifting off when-- out of nowhere-- I knew I had to go to your old office. And I did."

"Oh. I don't know what to make of that. You had a weird thing, huh? Well, Shelley… That is, Missy did seem to have some kind of a telepathic deal going on. Or you might have subconsciously…"

"Dad. Shush. Let me have my magic, okay?"

"Sure, honey. Sorry. All I can say is thank God it never seems to occur to you to doubt yourself. You didn't save her, but it was much too late for that anyway. You didn't save me, because she wouldn't have killed me. Probably. But I think you needed to be there for your own sake, somehow. It's rough. It's horrible. Worse on you by far than on me. But you'll be okay. You're a survivor."

"Yeah," she said. A sigh. Silence for several paces. She was looking down at her feet, seemingly fascinated by the spectacle of her sneakers moving along the sidewalk. "You know why it never occurs to me to doubt myself?" She looked up at me, just a glance, less than a second. There was a smile there, though it was invisible. Then she looked back down and said, "Because you never did. You never doubted yourself, and you never doubted me. You never forgot me, Dad. You never let me down. And that's how I'm gonna survive what happened back there."

I think it was the greatest moment of my life.

What could I say to that? What would you have said? You'd have broken down and cried, which is what I knew I would do if I attempted to respond. Here was my Janie who would never back down from anyone or anything any more than I ever had. I knew it was pointless to worry over her. Not only could she never be controlled, she couldn't even be protected. It would be as pointless to try taming her as it had been trying to tame me so long ago. I wasn't Tony Vincenzo. I knew when I was outgunned. I loved her too much to insult her by thinking I would even stand a chance. Truth is, I admired and respected the living hell out of my girl. And it was mutual. I was so proud of her at that moment. And as her words sunk into my heart I was a little proud of myself, too. How could I call myself a failure now?

I grunted and jerked my head in the direction of a saloon we were passing. I looked a question and she smiled an answer. Without a word, she plucked her old straw hat from her head and plopped it onto mine. We walked into the cool dark of the bar, and that night my little girl and I got drunk together and talked as we had never talked before.

This may well be the last story I write about the weird stuff. Odds are you will never read it. You'll probably sleep better for that fact. But there will be other things for me, other stories, other experiences. I am nowhere near dead yet, and I hope I won't have to leave any time soon.

THE END

APPENDIX:

"The Night Stalker" episode listing

from 09/13/1974 "The Ripper"
Carl Kolchak determines that the death of three women were caused by Jack the Ripper, alive and well after his success in Europe. The episode had great characterization with Tony, who assigned Carl the task of answering Miss Emily's lovelorn column. This was the only episode where writers established a friendship for Carl, in the character of Jane Plumb. Her death was as close to poignancy as Night Stalker came, which was a tragedy in itself.
2) 09/20/1974 "The Zombie"
While covering the deaths of several number's runners associated with warring mob factions, Kolchak discovers one of the bodies had already been buried before at state expense. This leads him into an investigation of zombies, nearly being killed himself by the mother of Francois Edmonds, the zombie set on revenge. This was Gordie, the ghoul's first appearance in a semi-recurring role as the morgue attendant.
3) 09/27/1974 "They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be" (Shooting title: "U.F.O.")
While not going to the World Series, featuring the Chicago Cubs (which, in itself, was a bigger story than anything else happening in the Windy City), Carl becomes inexplicably interested in investigating missing zoo animals and the theft of electronic equipment. Prior to this assignment, he had extorted tickets from Ron, in a scene lowlighted by a bit of cruel characterization over female roller-bladers which did not play well. Carl determines the thefts were committed by aliens, who drained off bone marrow from zoo animals. A weak episode with few redeeming points.
4) 10/04/1974 "Vampire"
After getting a hot tip from an old pal, Cark wrangles his way to Los Angeles, where he investigates the suspicious deaths of several people who perished from a loss of blood. A classic example of how good Night Stalker could be, combining a good story with good guest stars and classic confrontation between Carl and Tony. Carl eats chocolate mousse?
5) 11/01/1974 "The Werewolf"
When Tony is prevented from covering the last voyage of an aging luxury liner by the unexpected appearance of INS auditors, Carl gets the assignment. On the first night of the full moon, passengers start dying in suspicious ways. When Carl determines the killer is a werewolf, he elicits help from one of the passengers, then sets out to destroy the beast using traditional silver bullets. Great scenes in the newsroom highlight this superior episode.
6) 11/08/1974 "The Doppelganger" (aka "Fire Fall")
When people connected with a symphony conductor are inexplicably engulfed in flame, Kolchak's investigations lead him to believe the deaths are the result of a restless ghost seeking revenge. An odd episode with an interesting premise which never quite came off.
7) 11/15/1974 "The Devil's Platform"
While covering a predictably boring senatorial campaign, Carl discovers the leading candidate, who came out of total obscurity, has sold his soul to the devil for political power. Good acting, a good script and an excellent climatic scene between Carl and the devil's advocate, Robert Palmer, make this one of the best episodes.
8) 11/29/1974 "Diablero" (aka: "Bad Medicine")
The "diablero," a legend out of Indian folklore, assumes the shape of animals to kill in his quest for precious gems. Another episode which did not quite work. The first of two back-to-back episodes featuring Richard Kiel as the monster - a poor scheduling choice.

9) 12/06/1974 "The Spanish Moss Murders"
Spanish moss, left at the scene of a murder, gives Carl a lead on the murderer. While interviewing street musicians, one fiddler gives him the background of an old Louisiana legend about "Peremalfait." Kolchak links this childhood legend to another Cajun musician, who, as part of a university experiment, has been kept asleep for six weeks without being allowed to dream. A better-than-average episode with some interesting scenes cut from it (see the "Scripts" link to read them.)
10) 12/13/1974 "Machemondo" (aka "The Energy Eater")
A fascinating idea, poorly scripted, characterized this episode about a hospital built on the ancestral site of an ancient and powerful Indian deity. As the hospital crumbles under the pressure of the angry god's wrath, hospital officials try to keep a lid on the story.
11) 12/20/1974 "Horror in the Heights" (aka "The Rakshasa")
Sole writing credit and major hoopla went to Jimmy Sangster, (British horror writer from the Hammer stable), for scripting this episode. The work went through numerous re-writes, with story consultant David Chase being credited, on the script, for his significant contribution. His name was not included on the film in order to make it appear the work was original to Sangster. Anyone who believes Miss Emily was the only person Carl trusted, totally missed the chemistry between Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland. A five-minute idea stretched out into an hour, with uncomfortable performances by all.
12) 01/10/1975 "Mr. R.I.N.G."
Reluctantly doing obit work, Carl investigates the death of a noted scientist. He discovers there was a massive government cover-up over the man's top-secret work and subsequent death. Great teaser and tag scenes highlight this well-done and interesting episode. Craig Baxley is outstanding as the robot.
3) 01/17/1975 "Primal Scream" (aka "The Humanoids")
Another fascinating idea, poorly scripted, makes this a lost opportunity. Characterized by a "man in a monkey suit," (exactly the type of "monster" Darren McGavin had fought so hard to avoid), the story revolves around 100,000 year-old cells, brought back from Arctic soil, developing into a pre-human, ape-like, murderous creature. The Monster-of-the-Week format at its worst. A better idea would have been to resurrect Ed Wood to act as consultant for the series. He couldn't have done any harm.
14) 01/24/1974 "The Trevi Collection"
A vengeful witch (played by "Dark Shadows" alumni Lara Parker) brings fashion mannequins to life in order to murder those who stand in her way as she strives to become a top fashion model. Question: Why would Carl lecture Tony about sprucing up his wardrobe when Simon Oakland's suits were clearly custom-designed, making him the best-dressed series regular on television. Didn't the writers ever watch the show?
15) 01/31/1975 "Chopper"
When aging members of a 1950's motorcycle gang are mysteriously murdered, Kolchak learns the assassin is a former member, accidentally killed in a stunt years before. In order to stop the killings, he must reunite the biker's head with his skeleton, which became separated during a cemetery relocation. One of the better episodes, marred by the tasteless inclusion of the name "Backus" on one of the disinterred coffins.
16) 02/07/1975 "Demon In Lace"
A fifteen-minute idea mercilessly dragged out for an hour, this poor episode centered around a female succubus, brought to life by the translation of an ancient tablet by a college professor. The monster goes around killing male jocks. Carl should have let this one escape. Carolyn Jones was wasted in a small, meaningless role. If the producer had thrown away the script and let her dialogue with Darren, ad-libbing scenes as they went, Night Stalker might have had a classic on their hands.
17) 02/14/1975 "Legacy of Terror"
Odd, uncomfortable characterization between the regulars set this episode apart. Otherwise, the flat script deals with (yet another) ancient legend, this time one concerning Aztec sun worshippers.
18) 03/07/1975 "The Knightly Murders"
Easily the best directed Night Stalker episode (by Vincent McEveety), and the brilliant characterization by John Dehner as the "almost a legend" police captain, overcomes the questionable merits of the script. A medieval knight is resurrected to wreak havoc on modern-day Chicagoans because he has sworn to kill all those who would derive pleasure from life. Today, he'd be the CEO of an HMO. The best of the later episodes.
19) 03/14/1975 "The Youth Killer"
After an old man is found dead from jogging, Carl discovers a bizarre dating service which seeks those of perfect body. Behind it all is the modern-day Helen of Troy, who sucks life out of youth to preserve her own beauty. Forgettable.
20) 03/28/1975 "Sentry"
No doubt Mrs. McGavin was pleased to read, in an early draft of the script, that her character, Lt. Irene Lamont, is described as "Not a dyke." This was changed, in a later draft, to "a very attractive young woman," with a "fetching smile." The script and the monster (man-in-a-rubber-suit), are embarrassments from start to finish, being an unabashed rip-off of Star Trek episodes, "Arena" (Gorn costume) and "The Devil in the Dark" (script). Kathie Browne shines as the police lieutenant slapping the handcuffs on Carl. Her scenes with Darren are a prime example of screen chemistry overcoming poor material. With episodes like this, who could bear a second season?