TRUTHS AND CONSEQUENCES PART ONE

TRUTHS AND CONSEQUENCES

By Chuck Miller
Story copyright 2009 by Chuck Miller
Characters and situations copyright by Jeff Rice
Background info may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolchak:_The_Night_Stalker

BASED UPON the ABC TV series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" (1974-75), starring Darren McGavin, Simon Oakland, Ruth McDevitt and Jack Grinnage; and the TV movies "The Night Stalker" (1972) and "The Night Stranger" (1973)

Janos 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.)


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.

I uncovered the truth about many strange things in those days. But there was one major truth that remained hidden for a very long time. I found that truth recently. Actually, it's more accurate to say that it found me. And it was the mother of all truths, the answer to all the questions I never asked.

And when all was said and done, I knew the identity of the person who had thoughtlessly set the whole thing in motion...

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 seedy compared to Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

You may have heard the name Skorzeny before. He was a footnote in a few true crime books about Las Vegas and its environs. He was a serial killer, right? A sick freak who drained his victims’ blood. I suppose, technically, he was a serial killer. If only that were all he had been.
Janos Skorzeny was a vampire. A far cry from the charismatic, cursed nobleman of fiction, Skorzeny was more like the Richard Speck of the undead set, and I killed him with my little stake and mallet.

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.
The story of Janos Skorzeny was my first book. You never read it because it was never published. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to write the damn thing, considering the fact that while I was working on it I was drinking myself into lengthy blackouts once or twice a week. I typed it up myself on some nice vellum paper and tied a red ribbon around it. I called it “The Night Stalker,” and the night I finished it I took it with me on a long walk, right to the end of the proverbial short pier somewhere on the West Coast of America. There, I screamed at the manuscript, slashed it with a knife, wadded up the bits that the wind didn’t blow away, doused those in lighter fluid, put a match to it and tossed it into the goddamn Pacific.

Anyhow, 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.)

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.

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 by comparison. But "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. 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."

The reliable source was, of course, my own imagination. I just wanted to toss that into the well and see if it made a splash. I waited for a couple of beats, but the thing never did hit bottom. Bernie's silence was ear-splitting.

"Bernie," I said slowly and calmly. "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. Anemia. Loss of blood. Vampire. Rawlins, Catherine. And so on. No way there could be any connection. Total coincidence. Get a grip, Kolchak. There's nothing here.

Like hell.

There's always something here.

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 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, daughter. Click HERE for PART TWO