Truths and Consequences Part Two

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 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. He'd been ripped.

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. 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:

ALMOST DONE! Click HERE to go to the egress...