Read Online Kolchak The Night Strangler by Richard Matheson, Jeff Rice - Free Book Online Page A

of arms and legs. She tasted as sweet as she smelled. I don’t think life had ever been so good. And I told her so.
     
    “You know, Carl, there’s someone out at the university I think you should talk to. You may not be too crazy about her, but she’s just the one to see. She’s an expert on every crazy subject in the world. Ghosts, demons, vampires, ghouls …
    “After lunch today I got to thinking about what you told me about Las Vegas. Prepare yourself for a little shock.”
    “Go ahead. Shock me. I am impervious to surprise.”
    “Her name is Dr. Kirsten Helms. Your mouth is open, Carl. Carl!”
    “Well, I’ll be damned!” was all I could say.
    “No doubt you will. But many years from now, I hope.”
    There are clichés for this kind of situation. “Life is just full of little coincidences” and “Here we go again” come to mind. A good editor will tell you that in writing fiction (have never mentioned it, but I once tried my hand at the short story form for men’s magazines and failed) one must not lay on the “convenient coincidence” too heavily or too often. But the facts are that—here comes another cliché—truth is often stranger than fiction.
    Two years away from Las Vegas. In a town as different as a place could be by virtue of weather, industry, and people. And thus far two souls who were intimately acquainted with my disastrous adventure in Las Vegas had turned up in my life once again. Vincenzo and Janie Carlson. Now there was Kirsten Helms, the very same Kirsten Helms who had given me the necessary research materials in Las Vegas to convince me I was not insane and very definitely on the right track.
    However, consider the following: In Las Vegas (and probably many other places) it is not unheard of for an editor to leave his paper more than once and return. Vincenzo had left twice to take public-relations jobs on the Strip only to give up in frustration—he could never smile enough or say the right, phony things—and had once or twice tried Los Angeles. And, as much as he disliked Janie Carlson, I noticed he never stinted on giving her assignments when he wanted them done in a professional manner. His taking her along with him to Seattle was not altogether out of his character.
    Which brings me to Dr. Helms. It is hardly unusual for a university-level instructor with tenure and several years beyond honorable retirement age to move from school to school in the pursuit of knowledge or some esoteric fact. I had taken a few classes from her myself at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. She was somewhere near eighty years old, though she admitted to “around 70” and looked, when I had last seen her, to be in her mid-50’s. She was feisty, acid-tongued, and very sharp of mind. It had taken heaven and earth to move her out of UNLV’s humanities department where she had held sway as the “unofficial chairman.” It was she who had told me to gather my facts about what I have supposed (correctly) to be a vampire and write a book—fiction, of course. For my health, I believe she had said.
    The feeling of déjà vu began to creep over me again.
    And so did Louise.
    “You know something? It must be love.”
    Louise nibbled my ear. I think I would follow her anywhere.
     

Chapter Nine
     
     
     
    Thursday, April 13, 1972
     
    I left Louise sleeping and crept out to the kitchen where I made some coffee, then got the Chronicle from her front doormat. Half of An Loc had fallen to the North Vietnamese. “Justifiable homicide” was the ruling of an inquest jury on the fatal shooting of John Augustus, Jr., who had shot six Seattle cops from his Bush Hotel room window on March 18. Governor Dan Evans would up his statewide tour “positively convinced” of “widespread dissatisfaction with our state’s tax structure.” And the Seattle School Board had decided to go ahead with its bussing plan for the Hamilton, Eckstein, Wilson and Meany-Madrona schools.
    And where was my story? In the