But I still thought about those days in New Castle and what happened. From time to time it entered my mind and I would play it over.
And then, just a few days ago in this rest home, back in New Castle…
By strange coincidence, my oldest daughter and her husband moved to New Castle to be near their adult son. They urged me to come with them. Ellen had been gone for over a dozen years, so I went back. I lived with my daughter and her husband until it became hard for me to walk and control certain body functions, so Jennifer and Patty and I had a talk and we decided it would be best if I entered the place where I’m at now. It’s a wonderful facility. They take good care of me here.
And it was at this place where I saw her.
Of course I knew it was Allison Kenyon. There was no mistaking it. It was those eyes, the curve of her nose, the shape of her face. While old age had done a number on it, and senility had robbed her mind, turning her eyes to muddy pools, I could still see the fifteen-year old girl in them. I verified her identity a day after she was admitted as a patient when I asked one of the attendants who she was. “Her name is Allison Devonshire. She’s suffering from dementia. Her children admitted her here just yesterday.” I nodded. The first name was all I needed to verify it was my Allison. Allison Kenyon.
Her son and daughter came to visit the next day. When Allison was sleeping, I casually asked them if their mother’s last name used to be Kenyon. “That’s her maiden name,” her son replied, looking at me curiously. “Did you know her?”
I nodded. “Years ago. When she was a child. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. My wife and I…we lived next door to her grandmother.”
Her son and daughter nodded, recognition filtering through their features. “She’s talked about you,” the woman said. She appeared to be in her fifties, was slightly heavy-set. She resembled her mother very strongly.
I managed a smile. “I’m sure she has.”
And then, a few nights ago, and what prompted this narrative.
I woke up suddenly from a sound sleep. The moon was full and it cast a reflective light in my room. I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and turned to my right.
And there was Allison, sitting at my side, watching me.
I gave a little start, my heartbeat racing. I quickly smiled, trying to put her at ease. I was sure she had woken up and, in a state of dementia, had somehow managed to make her way to my room, pull a chair up to my bedside. I couldn’t help but think back on her accusations of vampirism against Doug. Despite that foolish thought, my left hand groped for the buzzer to call the nurse. Before I could get to it Allison stopped me with her voice. “Thank you,” she said.
My groping hand paused and I regarded her from my bed. Those once empty eyes weren’t vacant the way they were before. They seemed full of life, of a bright intelligence, of memory. Even her face was different. Whatever life had been taken from her due to the dementia, it was back now, shining strong and true. “Why are you thanking me?”
“For doing what you did.” Allison’s voice was old and brittle, but beneath there was a sense of strength.
“Do you know who I am?”
A slow nod. The tips of her mouth curved up in a smile. “I recognized you the day they brought me here. Sometimes my mind…it goes away. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for awhile now.”
I smiled back at her. “And here I am!”
Allison chuckled slightly and for a moment I was transported back in time to when she was a fourteen-year-old girl and she accompanied Grace and I on long walks through the country, the woods, our little neighborhood, and I would listen to the minutiae of her day, the struggles with her mother, entertain her with my toils in the pulp jungle, and encourage her own interest in detection and police work. “Yes, here you are. Here we both are. It’s so good to see you again.”
“It is,” I said.
“And I’m glad I have this opportunity to thank you for what you did for me when I was a child. For encouraging me, for being there for me. That period was a tough time for me, as you know.”
“Oh, I know. I remember.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said. She had reached out and taken my right hand in both of hers, enclosing it lovingly in her old, brittle fingers. “If it wasn’t for your support, for the help you gave me, I don’t know how my life would have turned out. Thanks to you, I developed the strength to live a great life.” Her smile beamed. “It wouldn’t have happened otherwise without your efforts.”
“I’m glad I was there for you,” I said. “I’m glad that whatever encouragement and emotional support I offered helped you.”
Allison leaned forward slightly, that smile still on her face. When she spoke next, her voice was lowered, almost a whisper. “You did more than lend a sympathetic ear to a young girl in an abusive home life, Mr. Brennan. You did far more. You know it, and I know it, too.”
I felt a stab of fear burn through my gut. For a moment our eyes were locked together. Allison’s gaze was strong, determined. “I don’t understand,” I said, my mouth beginning to go dry. “I…I was there for you, yes, but…I didn’t really do anything. Once your mother moved on, you were free from her.”
“That’s why I’m thanking you,” Allison said. “For helping my mother get gone.”
It was just the two of us in that nursing home together. It was just the two of us at that moment, in the world, alone. “I’m sorry, but—”
“I found out,” Allison said, her voice a dry whisper. “Years later, when I became a Pittsburgh detective. I remembered, too. I know you had a good relationship with Jack Henderson, our neighbor down the street. You remember him, don’t you, Mr. Brennan?”
I could only nod. I couldn’t speak. Those eyes had me. She knew.
“Of course you do. Somehow you found out, too, didn’t you? When did you begin to suspect?”
I hesitated. I knew if I were to evade her question, she would know. “I was never one hundred percent sure,” I said, my throat dry. My voice came out as a rasp. “I had my hunches. Especially after…”
“After what?”
“After…observing him. Seeing him come and go at odd hours. Observing his reaction to things. Learning about…his history. And…following him…following him and that doctor friend of his to that old pool house set way back on their property.” That had not been a dream, I realized later.
“And what did you see there?” Allison asked. “What did you learn about his history?”
I told her. I only told her what Jack revealed himself. His youth. Where he lived. How he’d lived around the corner from that elderly woman who was nearly beheaded in 1921. The way he described that incident to me at my home that fall night in 1939. How he spoke of her with reverence and perhaps a bit of sadness. As if he were remembering something he did. The way you or I remember our first kiss, or the first time we make love.
And then I told her of that night when I went home drunk, after being turned away from Jack and Dr. Sweeney, who seemed to be so eager to get involved with something else, something they didn’t want me to be a part of. I told her that I thought I had dreamed what happened next. Those images…of that man strapped to the table, the things that were done to him…I thought I had written too much shudder pulp material for the magazines I wrote for, thought that the things I made up for their pages like underground torture clubs for deranged perverts was a tool to make my stories more lurid, more sensational; I thought that what I had dreamt during my drunken state that evening was a reflection of that. But deep down inside, a part of me felt that wasn’t the case. And it was this part that had planted a tiny seed in my mind to tell Jack explicit details of James Nicholson and Susan Kenyon.
When I was finished her gaze remained on me. “I used to think it was my uncle, Doug. Remember?”
I nodded.
“When my mother disappeared, we never went to the police because we believed she had run off. Even when James was identified in 1940, shortly after those McKee�
�s Rocks murders, the police never came around. The transient underground could not tell the investigators very much at the time. And because my mother did not have a criminal record, and fingerprints could not be obtained from that female corpse, she remained unidentified. It wasn’t until many years later that I decided to investigate her disappearance. She never came back, you know. I’m sure you know what happened to her.”
Once again, I could only nod silently.
“When the news hit the papers, you never said anything. You never said anything even after you moved away.”
I sighed. “I didn’t.”
Allison regarded me for a moment, her smile fading but her eyes remaining strongly focused on me. She squeezed my hand once. “I learned a great deal about Mr. Henderson. During my career as a homicide detective, I closed the majority of my cases. The city awarded me with a medal in 1969, and again in 1974 for the highest rate of closed cases on the force. When I retired, I decided I wanted to find out what happened to my mother. My grandfather and my uncle Doug were the first suspects I looked at. As a child, I was convinced my uncle was a supernatural creature that lived off human blood. I was certain he stalked the night as a vampire. It was very easy for me to believe that because it’s what I wanted to believe. I was living a real nightmare with my mother, and reading the kind of stories you wrote, of supernatural creatures and horrendous fiends preying on the innocent…well, those stories affected me. I had a wild imagination and I let it run wild whenever I had the chance. Later, though, as an adult, I realized my uncle was simply an odd man, very much like my grandfather. My grandfather was never officially tied to any of those crimes. It felt good to exonerate him. It felt good to find some closure on that ugly aspect of my family history. Do you understand?
I nodded. I understood completely.
“I realized I had to look at all the men in our neighborhood. You know who I quickly focused on…don’t you, Mr. Brennan?”
“Yes,” I said. I was feeling a weight of relief press down upon me.
“Unofficially, my mother is still listed as a missing person,” Allison continued. “And the female victim of the New Castle Railroad Man—because that’s what some writers and crime historians have called him—was never officially identified. I was able to make an unofficial identification, though. I was able to pull the right strings and have her remains exhumed. A simple DNA test was all it took to make a positive ID. Once that was done, I was finished. I didn’t need to dig for the truth anymore. I’d found all I needed.”
“So…what did you do?” I asked.
Allison stood up slowly. She rested both hands on the guardrail of my bed to support herself. “Why, nothing, Mr. Brennan. I found out what happened to my mother. And through my own memory of those events, and the circumstantial evidence I uncovered, I learned who killed my mother. I also hazarded an educated guess on who might have alerted my mother’s killer to her potential…vulnerabilities, you might say, and the only person I could think of was you.”
Another stab of fear raced through me. Allison sensed it and smiled. “But there’s no reason to dredge up old news like that, now is there? I just wanted to thank you for all you did for me. So thank you, Mr. Brennan.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I was stunned.
Allison started to turn away to hobble out of the room. “We’ll just let sleeping dogs lie, won’t we, Mr. Brennan?”
“Yes,” I said.
Allison smiled once more, then turned and began to hobble away, leaving me in a jumbled state of excitement, dread, and relief.
And that is why I have written this account down. To document it. To put some finality into it. To make it official.
But I won’t publish it. And consider this a strict edict that this piece is never to be published, ever. What I have written is only intended for my close friends, my close family and, if my executors permit it, for Allison’s children and grandchildren. What is contained in this narrative must never be made public. That is my final wish.
To just let sleeping dogs lie.
About The Author
J. F. Gonzalez is the author of over a dozen novels of terror and suspense including Back From the Dead, Primitive, Bully, The Beloved, Survivor, and is the co-author of the Clickers trilogy. He also works as a technical writer and a screenwriter. A Los Angeles native, he now resides with his family in Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
Scream at Midnight!
Chapter Two:
Cloaked in Crimson
Chapter Three:
Tortured Souls
Chapter Four:
A Night of Violence
Chapter Five:
A Corpse In The Woods
Chapter Six:
Shopping for Death
Chapter Seven:
A Witness To Torture
Postscript
About The Author
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
Scream at Midnight!
Chapter Two:
Cloaked in Crimson
Chapter Three:
Tortured Souls
Chapter Four:
A Night of Violence
Chapter Five:
A Corpse In The Woods
Chapter Six:
Shopping for Death
Chapter Seven:
A Witness To Torture
Postscript
About The Author
It Drinks Blood Page 8