The Cramps were always more than just a band to me, and Lux was more than just another singer. My life is richer for his having lived, and though he is gone, what he left behind remains as potent and transforming as ever. The Cramps will never die.
Lux and I shared a hometown (Akron), and much else. Music, movies, a sense of the potential inherent in life. Who would have thought he would have reached 60? And once he did, who would have believed he would ever die? not me.
The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.
US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.
US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases in countries bordering or near to Iran.
US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000 pound "bunker buster" bombs.
The US government is financing terrorist and separatist groups within Iran.
US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations inside Iran.
US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.
Bush's war threats against Iran have intensified during the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.
Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening "the security of nations everywhere" and of the Iraqi resistance for "a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power." Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration. The Pew Foundation's world polls show that despite all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than demonized Iran.
Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American, and is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time. The vast majority of "kills" by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.
Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians "over there," Bush says, "before they come over here." There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have no air force, no navy, no modern military technology are going to "come over here," and no indication that they plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and have been for centuries. That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial rule. If Muslims were united, the US would already have lost its army in Iraq. Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.
Meanwhile the US media focuses on whether Republican Senator Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying to be one of them. The run-up for the public's attention is why a South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is unable to find the United States on a map.
The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact.
Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran "back into the stone age." Punishing air and missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy Iran's nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure, the economy, and the ability of the government to function.
Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. Last summer the Bush administration demonstrated to the entire world its total disdain for Muslim life when Bush supported Israel's month-long air attack on Lebanese civilian infrastructure and civilian residences. President Bush blocked the attempt by the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles.
The Bush administration has made its war plans for attacking Iran and positioned its forces without any prior approval from Congress. The "unitary executive" obviously doesn't believe that an attack on Iran requires the approval of Congress. By its absence and quietude, Congress seems to agree that it has no role in the decision.
In the improbable event that Congress were to make any fuss about Bush's decision to attack yet another country, the State Department has devised legalistic cover: simply declare Iran's military to be a "terrorist organization" and go to war under the cover of the existing resolution.
The "Iran issue" has been created by the Bush administration, not by Iran. Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear energy program to which it is entitled as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
The Bush administration has brushed away this fact, which should be determining, just as the Bush administration brushed away the fact that weapons inspectors reported, prior to Bush's invasion of Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Bush administration managed to disrupt the work of the pesky IAEA weapons inspectors in Iran. Iran has been working successfully with the IAEA and has achieved what a senior IAEA official recently described as a milestone agreement. The Bush administration instantly went to work to discredit the agreement and unleashed its new lapdog, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to threaten "the bombing of Iran."
The Bush administration's position is legally untenable and is really nothing but a contrived excuse to start another war. Bush claims that Iran, alone among all the signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, must be denied its right under the pact to develop nuclear energy, because Iran, alone among all the other signatories, will be the only country able to deceive the IAEA inspectors and develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, Iran must be denied its rights under the agreement.
Bush's position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is as legally untenable as his position on every other issue – the Geneva Conventions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, habeas corpus, the constitutional separation of powers, and presidential signing statements that he cavalierly attaches to new laws in order to override the legislative power of Congress. Bush's position is that the meaning of laws and treaties varies with his needs of the moment.
Bush has declared himself to be the "decider." The "decider" decides whether Americans have any rights under the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the "decider" has decided that Iran has no such rights, the "decider" decides whether to attack Iran. No one else has any say about it. The people's representatives are just so much chaff in the wind.
Whatever form of government Bush is operating under, it is far outside an accountable constitutional democratic government. Bush has transitioned America to caesarism, and even if Bush leaves office in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive will remain. Unless Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, there is no prospect of the US Congress and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches of government.
TRUTHS AND CONSEQUENCES By Chuck Miller Story copyright 2007 by Chuck Miller Characters and situations copyright 2007 by Jeff Rice Background info may be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolchak:_The_Night_Stalker
Janos Skorzeny- "The Night Stalker" (1972) Dr. Richard Malcolm- "The Night Strangler" (1973) The Ripper- "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" premiere episode (1974)
(Author’s note: There are a number of significant differences between the account of Kolchak’s involvement in the Janos Skorzeny case as chronicled in the novel “The Night Stalker” by Jeff Rice and the one in the TV movie screenplay adapted by Richard Matheson. In the story that follows, I use elements from both, but the emphasis is on the TV version.)
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 by… well, I don’t know by what or whom or even why. 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. “Astronomical” is far too mild a word. It could not possibly have happened. None of it. But it did.
My name, for anyone reading this who does not know, 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.) I was a crime reporter, back in the days when that meant getting your hands very, very dirty, and often taking your own life into those dirty hands. I was, in fact, incredibly adept. If news were a religion, I would have been a formidable shaman.
However-- and this is difficult to write, even now, but-- though I was one of the best (I know it now as I knew it then) my career was, in my own mind, defined not by any of the myriad successes I had, but by my greatest failure. Or so I have always thought. The time may now have come to rethink that. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This thing must be orderly, even if the events it describes are not. I’m a reporter, and that’s the only way I know how to write. Of course, I’ve already broken THE cardinal rule of journalism. My first paragraph should have distilled the who, what, where, when and why, for those who never read below the fold. But I couldn’t do that because I don’t know what they are.
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, ditto. 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. All the mad little truths pointing to the great big truth.
My real job was to tell you the truth. 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.
And now… Now everything looks different. It wasn’t blind chance. How could it have been? But, as I said above, every element of my tale must come in the proper order. That much at least I can control. I think… I’m starting to suspect that it was a detail I once overlooked that brought on everything that would follow. The story I’m writing now is, in many ways, the same one I started writing… when? When I first learned to use words? I guess I’ll find out… maybe…
All the little truths… Janos Skorzeny was a vampire and I killed him by pounding a wooden stake into his heart. I say “killed,” but he had in fact been technically dead for decades by the time I encountered him. 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. 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. 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. Richard Malcolm killed five women every 21 years, and that was all he needed to keep himself alive for the next 21. Doctor Richard 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 unshakable sense of illogic. 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. For whatever reason, Skorzeny had taken care to bury her body outside of Vegas. His other victims had been tossed aside almost carelessly near the places where they died. Cheryl Ann Hughes had been folded in half—her spine snapped in the process—and stuffed into a garbage can. Why he took such care with Catherine I will probably never know.) There was a series of murders, and they all had a couple of things in common. The bodies were found 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, too, was on his hit list, though I was blameless in his death—at least his first death. I put him back in the ground to stay because I knew what he was—a zombie—and how to stop him. And there were more. Many more names that would mean nothing to you, that meant everything to me for a week or two. There was a witch. There was a werewolf. A couple of very nasty demons. I killed them all, or escorted them out of our world, and you never heard about any of it. And that’s why I’m a failure.
Oh, I saved many lives, I have no doubt. Perhaps I saved yours. And I’m glad. And if you have accepted, if only for the sake of argument, that what I say is true, you might ask me how I can consider myself a failure. Well, the answer is incredibly simple. 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 did it twenty times, more or less, from the summer of ’74 through the spring of ’75, usually in Chicago. Without even trying. That’s right. 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. Each of them offered a mutually profitable alliance. All I had to do was sell my soul, which actually seemed like a pretty cheap price at the time, but something prevented me. Not nobility. I guess I’m just more Hamlet than Faust. Be that as it may, in spite of these pronouncements, many of my closely 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. I always had a reputation, but now it’s the right kind. I have enjoyed it, and I think I deserve it-- as much for the things I didn’t write as for the ones I did. 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 declawed 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.
It was a manila envelope. It looked quite new, the paper was still crisp. 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 the deaths were being investigated by homicide detectives in both the city and county departments.
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, but that may have been a little wishful schadenfreude on my part. Not that a brutal (the word was used in both stories) murder wasn't misery enough for me to enjoy. But I didn't enjoy it. It made me feel cold. It made me feel a sudden, horrifying déjà vu. 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. 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, there was nothing he could do. Had I known earlier what he would pull-- I still would have saved him. At least I tell myself I would have. 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&mdashrobably 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 malicious, 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. They had a very nice précis on vampire folklore courtesy of this reporter. 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 was not ironclad. On either count. 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 more subtle 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.
“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. They, um… You know, international. It's real busy, you know, lotsa business, what with… everything the way it is.”
“That’s great, Bernie.” He sounded bad. He sounded broken and diminished.
“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 Kathy, 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.” I knew full well that I had to be ripping open whatever stitches there were in Bernie’s psyche. I don’t think it was malice, but there certainly wasn’t any compassion in it either. Guilt toward, and resentment of, Bernie Jenks-- the two of them had been brawling inside my head-- had declared a momentary truce. Like me, I suppose, they wanted to hear what came next.
"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. And um… 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 conveyor belt sort of thing they put the casket on in a normal cremation. It just shoots right into the furnace, you know, the chamber. We got all the… boxes and everything in there, and him in his bag. He 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 he was rolled 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. It was late in the afternoon. We’d been there since just after sunup and we…” 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, during which time I very studiously thought about nothing at all. 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 one. The first victim, I mean. Cheryl Ann Hughes. We hoisted her crate up onto the belt. We didn’t look inside. The boxes had been sealed before we left the cemeteries We turned on the motor and the crate started jerking slowly toward the opening, to the fire. And then…” The rush of words abruptly cut off. “And then… and then…” He repeated that a few more times, but I said nothing. In a moment or so, he continued. “The belt was moving, the crate was moving, 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 a way that was guaranteed to multiply whatever personal hell he had endured since Vegas. 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&hellip 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. I was familiar with the public version (Dark Star Coven was the name given to the hapless Satanists I mentioned way back near the beginning of this tale), and the real one (an undead hooker), though I kept that last bit to myself. She asked me if my "next book" was going to be about the murders and I told her it very well might, which was the truth if you consider this a book.
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. 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 that had accompanied 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 himself. 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.
You will certainly remember Rep. Bob Allen, the Florida Republican who got busted for offering an undercover cop $20 for the privelege of blowing him. He then came out with a confused story about how the whole thing was a ploy on his part to avoid violence, as there were several black men present in the park where this happened. I have written him a letter of support because I believe in fairness, benefit of the doubt, and "innocent until proven guilty." I want to share it with you:
Dear Representative Allen:
I was very moved by the story of your recent difficulties. When you found yourself in that park surrounded by black men, and you feared that some racial violence might go down, you used your head and came up with a brilliant plan to remain safe until the whole thing could blow over. You demonstrated not only quick thinking, but lots of spunk. You must have been terrified to find yourself alone in a public restroom with a large black man. Odds are, of course, that he was perfectly harmless, rational and sane, but you just never know when you're going to get a nut. My God, you could have been set upon and sliced to pieces, like those contractors in Iraq a couple years ago, your mutilated corpse hung from a bridge for all to see-- sort of a human fillet show. But I have great faith in your quick thinking and ability, and I think that had the individual you encountered not been an undercover officer, you would have been able to jerk any potential assailant around, thus allowing you to slip away before there could be any shooting. Had it come to blows, however, I have no doubt you could have easily manhandled an attacker. After all, you are a well-built man, not some little squirt. Even so, it took great courage to stand erect in the face of potential danger, and I make no bones about my wholehearted support for you. Come what may, your bravery and ingenuity will see you through this crisis as your political opponents try to use this incident to give you the shaft. Go deep within yourself and you will find what you need to stiffen your resolve. You will encounter those who will doubt you, who may become hostile and go off on you. I foresee many sticky situations for you in the months ahead. Just stick to your guns and show them you can not only take a licking, but you can give as good as you get. To use a baseball metaphor, you might have to take a few balls on the chin, but I know you'll come out swinging.
Bush plays Legion of Doom card to bolster support for Iraq policy
Bush says super-villain group "responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq."
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thu, June 28, 2007
WASHINGTON — Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called the Legion of Doom "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.
The reference, in a major speech at the Naval War College that referred to the Legion of Doom at least 27 times, seemed calculated to use lingering outrage over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster support for the current buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq, despite evidence that sending more troops hasn't reduced the violence or sped Iraqi government action on key issues.
The Legion of Doom was a group of super-villains led by Lex Luthor that appeared in Challenge of the Super Friends, an animated series that starred superheroes from DC Comics. In each episode they appeared in, the Legion of Doom would enact various plots against the Super Friends, only to be met with defeat by the end of the story. Often, however, they would escape capture through a last-minute escape plan.
Bush called the Legion of Doom in Iraq the perpetrator of the worst violence racking that country and said it was the same group that had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
"The Legion of Doom is the main enemy for Shia, Sunni and Kurds alike," Bush asserted. "They're responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq. They're responsible for the sensational killings on U.S. soil."
U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to LoD are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as the Legion of Doom in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to Lex Luthor until October 2004 and isn't controlled by Luthor, the Riddler or the Scarecrow.
Bush's use of the Legion in his speech had strong echoes of the strategy the administration had used to whip up public support for the Iraq invasion by accusing the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of cooperating with Luthor and implying that he'd played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Administration officials have since acknowledged that Saddam had no ties to Brainiac, Black Manta, Solomon Grundy or 9-11.
In his speech, Bush referred only fleetingly to the sectarian violence that pits Sunni Muslim insurgents against Shiite Muslim militias in bloody tit-for-tat attacks, bombings, atrocities and forced mass evictions from contested areas of Baghdad and other cities and towns.
U.S. intelligence agencies and military commanders say the Sunni-Shiite conflict is the greatest source of violence and insecurity in Iraq, while super-villain activity is almost nil.
(Mike Drummond of The Charlotte Observer in Baghdad and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this report.)
Dedicated from the heart to GWB, Dead-Eye Dick, Condi (who, oddly enough, fits the profile), Rummy (tough break, daddy-o) and the rest of the crew...
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1899
This famous poem, written by Britain's imperial poet, was a response to the American take over of the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War.
Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden-- Have done with childish days-- The lightly proferred laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!
I hardly ever do anything like this, so I guess I have some karma on account. I am selling tickets for the June Bug Jam, a fundraising event for Transition House Inc., which is a VERY worthy cause. www.thouse.org
Tickets are $10.00 each. If you can't actually attend, donations are smiled upon. You may buy a ticket from me, or get in touch with Bonnie or Ilene at transition House (405) 360-7926. I personally get nothing out of it, except for the fact that if I sell a bunch of them, everyone will admire me for a couple days or so.
Local people, please pass this on to anyone who might be interested. And THANK YOU!!!
ME: Chuck Miller
Transition House, Inc., A NON-PROFIT AGENCY, provides transitional living and community outreach for adults recovering from mental illness. Our Vision is to be a model program that provides community based mental health services to mental health clients in transition to community living. Our Mission is to provide low cost, high quality transitional housing and supportive care to those persons with mental illness, enabling them to gain increased independence and self-reliance. The organization will seek to prevent emotional and economic dependency as well as to promote personal self sufficiency and self support. For more information on Transition House, Inc., visit our website at www.thouse.org or e-mail transitionhouse@coxinet.net Contact information: Transition House, Inc., 700 Asp, Ste. 2, Norman, OK 73069 ~~~ (405)360-7926 ; width: 200px; background-repeat: no-repeat; position: absolute! important; top: 0px; height: 130px; border: 0px">; width: 200px; background-repeat: no-repeat; position: absolute! important; top: 0px; height: 130px; border: 0px">
"The Joker's Comedy of Errors!" AKA "Batman's Greatest Boner!"
Reader, you're not going to believe this one -- but it's true! And it may be our funniest issue ever. I used Photoshop to restore the color and clarity of the panels below, but you have my word as a comic fan that I did NOT alter the dialogue in any way!
The panels seen below first appeared in "The Joker's Comedy of Errors," written by Bill Finger, drawn by Lew Sayre Shwartz, from Batman #66, August-September 1951.
Oh, and one more thing reader -- in days gone by, the word "boner" used to mean "mistake," so the phrase "greatest boner" meant "worst mistake." On with the story! WARNING: Don't read this one at work! You may just explode trying to contain yourself.
A stupid mistake ruins one of the Joker's master crimes, and t he newspapers love it...
The Joker gets Batman to make a boner... "Batman's Greatest Boner!"
But Batman turns the tables, and manages to find the Joker's new hideout !
Err... with all due respect, Robin, let's hope we have NOT heard the last of BONERS!
COMING MONDAY on DIAL B for BLOG
THE HULK! CYCLOPS ! THOR! ARE THEY MARVEL SUPER HEROES? NO! IT'S HALLOWEEN! THEY'RE ALL... Marvel Super-MONSTERS!
African dust bringing
toxic chemicals to U.S.,
Caribbean; is it killing
corals? Hurting people?
:: I
Source: invw.org
It’s
one of those increasingly
frequent stories
demonstrating that
ecologically, the whole
globe is connected &a...
Start a New Thanksgiving
Tradition - Adopt A
Turkey
Source: www.care2.com
The Adopt-a-turkey
project is an alternative
to traditional
Thanksgiving where people
can become the guardian
for a rescued turkey.
Protection Sought for
Colorado River Cutthroat
Trout Under the
Endangered Species Act
Source:
www.biologicaldivers...
Protection Sought for
Colorado River Cutthroat
Trout Under the
Endangered Species Act
Rare Trout Was Denied
Protection Based on .....
BBC - Earth News - Rare
whale gathering sighted
Source: news.bbc.co.uk
The sighting, of the
largest group ever
recorded, is also the
first time this species
of whale has been seen
socialising at the water
surface.
Betrayal at the ASPCA :
Nathan J Winograd
Source:
www.nathanwinograd.com
Over the last several
days, the
ASPCA’s
killing of a dog named
Oreo has ignited a furor
among animal lovers
nationwide. The ASPCA
tried to justify it by
clai...
I wish all my friends and
all the people of the
world a happy
Thanksgiving.
Let's all just be nice
and love one another.
hasta luego amigos and
amigas
Tommy
Mass Animal Sacrifice
Planned in Nepal | Humane
Society International
Source: www.hsus.org
HSI is calling for an end
to mass animal sacrifice
at the Gahidmai Jatra
festival in Nepal.
 Â
;Â Â&nbs
p;TAKE ACTION...
Shark Bill Advances : The
Humane Society of the
United States
Source:
www.humanesociety.org
The Humane Society of the
United States, Humane
Society International and
Humane Society
Legislative Fund commend
the U.S. Senate Committee
on Commerce, Sci...
Obama demands release of
Burma democracy champion
Aung San Suu Kyi - Times
Online
Source:
www.timesonline.co.uk
President Obama demanded
the release of Aung San
Suu Kyi, the Burmese
opposition leader, during
an unprecedented
encounter yesterday
tha...
"Payne Creek Village is
like many subdivisions -
speed-bump-quietened
roads with names such as
Quail Run, Fawn Lane and
Mallard Drive. A brick
entrance monument greets
visitors adjacent to the
management office.
By the numbers
Cost Comparis...
robably 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 malicious, walking corpse. 
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. I was familiar with the public version (Dark Star Coven was the name given to the hapless Satanists I mentioned way back near the beginning of this tale), and the real one (an undead hooker), though I kept that last bit to myself. She asked me if my "next book" was going to be about the murders and I told her it very well might, which was the truth if you consider this a book. 
get the feed
