The Rake
Kolchak fan fiction
Koroporomo
A commenter on last week’s post, Made In DNA, offered a little cross-promotion for this week’s short story. One of my favorite Night Stalker episodes, “Horror in the Heights,” has Kolchak squaring off with a rakshasa, a shapeshifting demon from Hindu myth. Turns out that the concept (carried by Buddhists) made it to Japan, where it became rasetsu. Made In DNA, who actually lives in Japan, has posted a rasetsu story in response to our Notes conversation about the creature.
As mentioned last week, I originally wrote the following for the officially licensed 50th Anniversary volume, as a Kickstarter bonus story that would fit in between the comix. Alas, I did not make the final cut, which meant I’d either have to rewrite the piece with a different protagonist or resign it to fan fiction purgatory.
I like the character of Gray Chalmers, based on the real life SF superfan Ray Palmer, ably presented in biography form by Fred Nadis in The Man from Mars. I may do something with him in the future, but I really liked the way Kolchak’s voice came through in this piece, so fan fiction it is.
I added in the links just for Substack. Let me know what you think.
There are also more detailed research notes behind the paywall.
As a little boost to Samuraipunk (and myself), I include a link to The Sample, an AI-driven newsletter recommendation service.
The Rake
I pushed my straw hat back on my head so I could scratch under it in a quizzical fashion, while I gave him the look. “Owls.”
“That’s what they said, them big gray hoot owls with the yellow eyes.”
“You ever seen an owl around here?”
“One or two.”
“But not …” I looked down at my scribbled-on notepad, “…‘Twelve to fifteen’ of them at a time?”
“No, sir. I ain’t never seen a flock of ‘em.”
August 21, 1959. Hawaii was to join the Union later that day, after the Earth spun far enough under the the new polar satellites launched earlier in the month. Was I covering either of those important events? No. I was sweating through my suit at a motel office counter in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, at the behest of one Gray Chalmers, who published a magazine called Fringe in Chicago.
“At the Limits of Human Knowledge” was the tagline. Chalmers thought of himself as a poor man’s Robert Ripley, but maybe a better comparison would be Charles Fort. Flying saucers, government cover-ups, mind control rays from secret underground caverns — really far out stuff. Chalmers was a weirdo, but he paid well, and he had been a lifeline for me during some difficult periods, professionally, when I was “between positions.” So when he asked me to drive 400 miles each way to cover the anniversary of an alien visitation, I rolled my eyes and filled my gas tank.
Roadside views showed that the tobacco harvest was well underway. Men sweated in the fields, cutting the thick stalks with hatchet-like knives and spearing them sideways on wicked-looking conical metal spears atop wooden sticks jabbed into the ground. Injuries were rare but bloody. A man might hack off a toe if his attention drifted, or drive a spear through his wrist if a loaded stick fell over at the wrong moment.
They would leave the crop in the fields for a day or two, standing in rows of miniature green and yellow teepees, to take some of the water weight out of it before hanging it in two-to-three-story barns to “cure.” Then they would sell it, and buy it back in cigarette form for ten times the price. That is, the ones who weren’t chewing it and spitting streams of fragrant brown juice onto the ground every few seconds.
According to the local Historical Society that afternoon, there had been some interesting vigilante shenanigans around the price of tobacco, years ago, as a group of farmers called the Night Riders tried to enforce a boycott of the buyers’ monopoly. I wondered out loud if “Night Riders” was a euphemism for the Ku Klux Klan, and was invited to leave.
I’ll admit I was a little disappointed. Ever since Superman made fun of them on the radio in ’46, the Klan had more or less disappeared from public view, and while I had no interest in them or their politics at a personal level, they might have made good villains for my article. Way more interesting as night-time assailants than a flock of horny owls.
That’s if the State Police and the MPs from the local Army base were wrong about it being nothing more than a hoax by a family of half-drunk farmers and their relatives, visiting on a break from the carnival circuit. After their report to the State Police, the whole clan had supposedly cleared out the same night when the “little green men” returned at three in the morning. Never to be heard from again . . .
Saturday the 22nd, 10am. A conversation with the night janitor at the State Police station had led me to an ice cream truck on the darker side of this still segregated Southern town. The owner, Veodis Watson, 44, had seven children, and had started selling sweets in financial self-defense. There was no better way to spend a hot summer day, he swore, than driving around in a refrigerated box. He was the latest person to repeat the story about the owls.
“Veodis” — he insisted I call him Veodis, once I had bought cones for all the standing children (Chalmers was paying for expenses, ‘within reason’) and sent them off to eat so we could talk, and he could have a cigarette — “do you believe that story?”
He looked at me for a long moment before shaking his head, slowly but emphatically, and blowing out twin trails of smoke through his nose. “Nobody ‘round here does, but we don’t say nothin’ — not to the police, anyways. They always lookin’ for any excuse to do what they do.”
“So you don’t think it was a hoax?”
“No, Carl, I do not. But they ain’t no sky people neither. They come up, from under the ground.”
It was at that exact moment that a heavy hand clapped onto my left shoulder and spun me around.
The eyes staring at me from under the shade of a Homburg hat were amber-colored, and had four-cornered pupils like a goat’s. I blinked a few times, thinking to clear my vision, but they were so strange I couldn’t look away. I heard the truck’s engine start behind me, and the crunch of gravel fading as it pulled away, but distantly.
Then another voice broke in: “The God of my rock; in him will I trust.” The eyes released me and looked down and to my right, where a young girl was holding a Bible up between them, blocking her own vision, and reading. “Where’d you come from?” I gawped.
She stepped between me and the Homburg man, who was wearing a black suit, still reading in a loud clear voice. “He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my savior; thou savest me from violence.” She backed into me, bumping me towards the edge of the road.
“Hey, kid—”
“I will call on the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies!” she shouted, just as the ice cream truck’s front bumper slammed into the man in black. He went down, and the truck skidded to a stop over top of him.
I shouted something that was not in the least Biblical and dropped to my knees. Not to pray, but to see under the truck.
There was nothing there but tire tracks. No body, no blood.
I needed to check in with Chalmers.
“There were dents in the grill of the truck, which the driver swears were not there before.”
Saturday the 22nd, 1pm. I was at Veodis Watson’s house, which had one of the neighborhood’s few home phones — thankfully not a party line — and I had called Chalmers, collect, in Chicago.
“Neat trick,” Chalmers commented. He had been hit by a truck himself as a small boy, and the accident had left him with a twisted spine and stunted his growth. He wasn’t much taller than the Bible girl watching me from the kitchen table. Her name was Gloria, and she was ten, the youngest of the Watsons.
“Where’d he go, Chalmers? How does a physical being capable of manhandling me and leaving dents in metal just disappear?”
There was a pause. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his brain, though maybe that was just the static in the line. “There are stories about tulpas from Tibet, and maybe other places in the East…”
“What’s a tulpa?”
“A mental projection by an enlightened master.” Chalmers was deeply into that stuff, about to publish his own version of an 1800s spiritualist text, supposedly dictated from Beyond through a medium using one of the first typewriters.
I thought a typing spirit was a pretty funny idea.
My hosts had a more conventional interpretation. They assumed the man in black was an agent of Satan, “walking to and fro in the world, and up and down in it,” an immortal spirit or demon of some kind. And they had dealt with these men, or things, before.
It had started with the Kelly incident. The Kellys, a white family on a farm outside of Hopkinsville, spent several hours shooting at small, long-armed humanoids with huge eyes and pointed ears, which kept approaching their home and peeping in through the farmhouse windows.
Bullets and shotgun pellets supposedly had no effect. Being white, the Kellys felt perfectly comfortable reporting this bizarre incident to the police. The press got hold of the story and reported it as another example of alien invasion, trying to recreate the media frenzy around the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which ironically sold a lot of newspapers, after the fact, what with all the lawsuits and Congressional inquiries.
Of all the people who had reported dealings with UFOs in the past fifteen years, only one was black. The jazz musician Sun Ra made public claims about visiting Saturn with friendly aliens. The more conservative black community did not trust the police (with good reason, in many cases) and interpreted their sightings based on their own Biblical traditions:
Ezekiel saw the Wheel, way up in the middle of the air.
There was even a hymn based on that story. They weren’t aliens; they were angels with flaming swords, soldiers in the ongoing war between Good and Evil. The floating goblin-things from the Kelly farm weren’t aliens — or owls, either. They were demon imps from down below, and the glow in the woods was not a flying saucer (or glowing fungi, locally called “foxfire,” as the authorities claimed) but the fires of Hell. The Kellys were not being attacked. They were being mocked, or tempted, their faith tested by the ordeal. And when they ran to the police, they failed. They didn’t lose themselves on the carnie trail. Their cowardice doomed them to the Pit.
A precocious kid, that Gloria. Entrepreneurial, too. She hired herself out to me as a guide for the rest of the afternoon. Led me to the local newspaper office (their archives on the “Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins,” which had also sold a lot of papers locally, were extensive) and the public library, where I had to vouch that she wouldn’t steal anything. How do you steal something that your own parents’ taxes paid for?
I’ll tell you how. You push the key to the building into a blob of Silly Putty, and then take your mold to a friendly hardware store. Like I said, an enterprising kid.
Morning of the 23rd, 2am. Closing time in Chicago was irrelevant here in Hopkinsville, a dry city in a dry county — Christian County, to be redundant. Not that I’m a big drinker, but I like to have the option. No restaurants open at that time of night, either, so I couldn’t even get a cup of coffee if I felt like working. The only vending machines were for cigarettes. So I turned in early.
I was half-dozing on the thin mattress in my locked hotel room, listening to the crickets or the cicadas or whatever they were sawing away outside my open window. Moths fluttered against the screen, their shadows huge on the opposite wall in the moonlight. One of those shadows looked at me, with eyes that glowed like green mirrors, the way a cat’s eyes will shine in the headlights of a car.
I was suddenly awake, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I lay there, frozen, struggling even to breathe, as the shadow became a man in a dark suit and a dark hat, very much like the one Veodis Watson had run over the day before. He moved leisurely around my room, picking up my things, examining my notebook — he seemed to have no trouble reading it in the dark — while I lay there shivering and following him with my eyes, which were the only things that I could still move.
This went on for several minutes before he finally turned to me and tipped his hat. I clearly heard the words, “Go home, Mr. Kolchak. Do not speak of these matters.” And he disappeared, right in front of me.
Those green glowing eyes were the last things to fade away, and once they were gone I could move again. The first thing I did was check the lock on the door. The second was to go through it and visit the bathroom down the hall so I didn’t piss myself. Dry county, my ass. I was soaked through with sweat — and cold, for such a hot August night.
“Come on, Carl, devils and imps are not selling magazines right now, not even in the Bible Belt.” I was back on the phone with Chalmers, collect, from a pay phone in a local diner, whose Sunday special was something called Tennessee Hot Chicken. I was just having coffee and a bowl of banana pudding. They were waiting for me at the counter.
“You want me to write about tulpas? In Kentucky?”
“No, I like this underground angle,” Chalmers said. “Isn’t Mammoth Cave out there somewhere?”
“About a hundred miles away!”
Monday morning, the 24th, found me on the road again, driving another fifty miles east to Bowling Green, where the local branch of the state university had a geologist who consulted with the coal companies. He showed me a map very much like the one reproduced below.
Those twin black areas down below Lake Michigan are enormous karst deposits, stretching from the Appalachians to the Ozarks. Karst is a soft limestone that dissolves slowly in water, meaning that those black areas are riddled with underground caverns, carved out by groundwater flows over the course of the past several million years. The crust of the earth in that area of the country is less crusty and more like Swiss cheese.
Bread and cheese. I needed a sandwich.
Monday the 24th, 2pm. The Early Bird Cafe on Route 68 had soup beans with green onions and cornbread on the board, and pickled baloney in a jar on the counter. I was actually eyeing the latter, which I could eat one-handed on the road, when the waitress asked, “Are you Mr. Cold Check? ‘Cause we’re cash only.”
“Excuse me?”
“That man waiting for you in the booth back there said your name was Cold Check.”
“He did, did he? Well, he was just kidding.”
“He says he’s from the government, but I ain’t ever seen no government man dress like a Mennonite, all in black like that. You know they’re moving in around here. I guess Pennsylvania got full of ‘em or something.”
“Mennonite?”
“Or Amish, or something. Driving horse and buggy, like it was a hundred years ago.”
“I didn’t see any horses outside.”
“Didn’t hear the bell ring above the door, neither. He was just sitting there when I come out from the back. It was sort of strange.”
“Well, can you just bring me a cup of coffee and a slice of pie?”
“You want vanilla ice cream on top of that?”
“Sure. In the back, you said?”
“Back by the bathroom.”
I sauntered back with my hands in my pockets, whistling, jingling my keys. The man in black looked up, his strange eyes weighing me. His suit was out of fashion, both in cut and in material. Black wool in the summertime? Maybe he only had the one suit. It wasn’t an unheard-of situation to be in.
He was having the pinto bean special and a tall glass of iced tea, which they put a lot of sugar in down here. “Ah, Mr. Kolchak,” he said, “Please join me.” His accent was strange. I couldn’t place it.
I didn’t waste any words. “Were you the one in my hotel room a couple nights ago?”
“In a manner of speaking. I see you chose not to take my advice.” Was it Scandinavian? Not German, definitely, at least not any German I ever heard. And living in Chicago, I had heard a lot. Also Polish, Czech, and most of the other European languages. I couldn’t speak most of them, but I knew them when I heard them.
“And I saw you fade into nothingness. You want to tell me how you did that? Hypnosis? Some drug you waved under my nose while I was asleep?”
“Oh, no,” he laughed. “Nothing so dramatic. Paralysis is not uncommon in humans, during the transition from sleeping to waking. It’s like shifting gears in your car. A minor mistake with the clutch, or with the shifting lever, and you get stuck in between gears for a moment.” Dutch? Maybe he was Amish. This was driving me crazy. I normally have a good ear for this sort of thing.
“Except something similar happened while I was wide awake on the street the day before.”
“Some people are more susceptible than others.”
I digested that while the waitress zoomed in with coffee and pie (actually a cobbler — cinnamon peach, quite good). Russian? No. This was really bugging me.
The waitress looped back to refill the man in black’s sweet tea. “I gotta go in twenty minutes, so if you could settle that up before then, it would be much appreciated,” she said, popping her chewing gum. “No checks.”
“Right, right,” I said, and waved her off. When she was out of earshot, I leaned in and cocked my head in her direction without looking away. “You told her you were some kind of government spook.”
“I tell people what I need to, in order to get what I want,” he said, with a small shrug of his shoulders. “Most are satisfied to have their expectations confirmed. It’s comforting for them to believe they understand how the world works. But you, Mr. Kolchak,” he continued, using my name again to underline the fact that he had the advantage of me there, “You are a bit different. You are a seeker.”
“What am I seeking?”
“Why, the truth, of course.” Then he started to spin for me a yarn about another, not-quite-human species, who had been taken from Africa millions of years ago and bred for slave labor by aliens from an as-yet-undiscovered tenth planet, which he called Yuggoth. The labor involved was not so much physical as mental, imagining things. He claimed that his race, which he called Shadow-kin, had over generations actually constructed an artificial world for these fungal alien beings in “liminal space,” a set of Dream-lands they could use to keep their collection of disembodied brains from going too mad.
“So they use human brains the way we use vacuum tubes and transistors? To build radios?”
“And other computational devices, yes.” This Shadow-kin still wouldn’t give me his name, but he would give me the entire history of his hidden kingdom, and its revolt against their flying-mushroomy, brain-collecting, ice-crab overlords? Right.
“So where is your fraternity now? Still hanging around in the Dreamlands?”
“The Dreamlands are a decaying remnant of what they once were. No, we built our castles in the air here, on Earth, in the Americas, until the glaciers opened up and brought those disease-bearing marauders from Asia in to ruin us.”
I scowled. “You mean the Indians?”
“That’s what you call them, collectively. They didn’t think of themselves that way. And just like your squabbling nations, ten thousand years later, they killed most of us off before they even knew we existed.”
“With germs?”
“You’re a reporter. Check out Fort Detrick in Maryland some time. The Russians have similar programs. But this was unintentional. They were too busy slaughtering the mammoths and the ground sloths and every other large mammal to pay us much mind. We were too busy dying to deal with them.”
“And it was your people who built all the giant earth mounds scattered around the Midwest? The ‘pyramids of the Americas’?”
He made a face. “My people build with ideas and images, not dirt and rocks. Here, in the physical world, our thought-forms are much less durable. They don’t fossilize. With our numbers so diminished, they just … faded away.”
“Like you faded out from under that ice cream truck a couple of days ago.”
“As you say.” The ice in his glass had melted, and there was a puddle of condensation around the base of the glass. He had been talking for some time. I wished I had one of those newfangled tape recorders. As it was now, I’d be typing all night from memory.
“Why the sudden reversal? Why spend three days trying to scare me off and then — now — spill the beans?” I looked at his lunch. “I mean …”
“Because I recognized that your persistence could be useful. Your species — your culture, especially, young as it is — has leaped onto technology ‘with both feet,’ as they say around here. Fort Detrick. Oak Ridge. Los Alamos. Other places, other technologies. You’ve unleashed forces that you cannot control, and that could render this entire planet uninhabitable to anything larger than single-celled microbes for millions of years. And that culture is built, entirely, on secrets and lies. You know this.”
“Yeah, well …”
“You know this,” he repeated and, before I could react, reached across the table and tapped me on the middle of my forehead, right above the bridge of my nose.
As he drew back, he changed, physically. He shrank to about two-thirds the size he had just been, and his teeth got sharper, and his nails became claws, and his eyes went from having squared-off pupils to catlike slits. Or maybe snakelike. “I’ve opened your third eye, partially and temporarily, allowing you access to certain other layers of reality.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a brown paper bag, folded over itself, with a rubber band around it. “These mushrooms will extend and stabilize the effect. They are similar to the ones Gordon Wasson wrote about in Life magazine two years ago, if you’d like to read up on them first.”
“You … you’re like … a monster!” I stammered. I stood up, grabbed my hat, and backed away from the booth until I could turn and bolt for the door.
“Hey, hon, you ain’t paid yet,” the waitress drawled from behind the counter. When I looked directly at her, she was another one of those Shadowkin things.
“It’s on him!” I shouted as I hit the door. The bell rang merrily behind me as I ran for my car. A few miles along the road back towards Chicago, I calmed down enough to pull over and find a pay phone. Chalmers was going to love this story.
The ‘waitress’ came back with the pitcher of sweet tea. “He left the mushrooms.”
The first man, still seated, picked up the packet and put it back into his black jacket. “He’ll still see hidden things for a while; he just won’t have any understanding of them.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“We can try again, or he may come across on his own. Psychedelics are about to become very, very common in this country. It doesn’t really matter. His basic personality was already in place. It just needed activating.”
“So we just leave him to run amok?”
“At the very least he’ll be a distraction. Who knows? Maybe he’ll spark a fire and burn down their whole rotten culture. Him, and others he infects with his ‘monster’ stories.”
“One muckraker?”
“Epidemics have to start somewhere. And we’re the muckrakers. He’s just the rake. Ugh. Mixed metaphors.” He stood, and put on his hat, as the table, the pitcher, and the whole diner faded away. The pair stood squinting in the sunshine at the side of the empty road. “Could you get the car? I need a nap.”
“Sure thing.” The other Shadowkin stepped back and gestured until a black sedan faded into being between them. “You rest; I can drive. Where are we off to?”
“Just drive. I’m sure we’ll come across someone who saw something that needs to be ‘suppressed,’ sooner or later.”
“Humans are so contrary.”
“Conturry. That’s how they say it out here. Conturry. Rhymes with curry.”
“Magic words. I could really go for a samosa right now. Or some Peshawar naan, with the nuts and raisins baked in? So tasty.”
“Just drive.”
“Sure thing.”
The author was introduced to Carl Kolchak not through the series directly, since it was on too late at night, but through oral retellings by his older brother, a true fan, who died in 2011. This story is dedicated to him.
As a little window into the creative process, below are my research notes for this story, some of which made their way into the article “The Haunting of Carl’s Hat,” from last week, originally published in ParABnormal Magazine.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Doctor Eclectic to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.