Everyone Dies in the End

by Brian Katcher

  My phone rang. Jeez. Didn’t my father realize I could spend the night away from home without his help? It had been years since Boy Scout camp.

  But it wasn’t him. The screen just said Restricted.

  “Hello?”

  “Sherman Andrews?” said an adult voice, raspy and serious. It was after nine in the evening, so this probably wasn’t a salesperson.

  “Speaking. With whom am…”

  “Mr. Andrews, I understand you’re interested in information about Reverend David Gowen.”

  I rushed to the door to the relative quiet of the hall. “Yes! Do you know something?” God, what luck, I hadn’t posted those messages an hour ago.

  “Why, exactly, are you interested?”

  I played it close to the vest. “I’m just curious. I found a document that mentioned some sort of a fire…”

  The person on the other end laughed. It sounded forced. “Around about 1935? I think I can help you. There was a fire at the local Masonic Hall, and one of the reverend’s parishioners died. They’d been serving alcohol there—this was during Prohibition, mind you—and the reverend pulled some strings to make it look like the guy died at home. Not very well, I’m afraid, it leaked out, and he caught hell for his involvement.”

  I pressed my forehead against the cool, cinderblock wall. Damnation. Not only was the scandal public knowledge, it was lame. So much for dreams of being Bob Woodward. Now I’d have to go out and do the dull assignments Mr. Hopkins had given me.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled into my phone. “How do you know all this?”

  “I dabble. I hope this is the info you’ve been looking for. I’m sorry it’s not the least bit interesting.”

  “Yeah…” An odd thought occurred to me. “Um, how did you get this number?

  “From the Missouri Historical Society message board.”

  “I posted my e-mail address there, but not my phone number. In fact…” I tried to remember my exact message. “I didn’t even leave my last name.”

  “You’re mistaken.” The voice brooked no argument.

  “No, no. I never give out this number.”

  “Then how am I calling you?”

  “Uh…” He kind of had me there. “I guess I must have…”

  “Yes, you did. Good evening.”

  “Who is this?”

  I was talking to a dead line.

  Dejected, I walked back into my room. So much for my first big scoop.

  The guys were just starting another episode.

  Come and knock on our door…

  I looked at my computer, then at the sitcom. I lowered myself to the floor next to my roommate. He passed me a bag of chips.

  I reached up to my desk and grabbed the letter from Gowen, rereading it in the desperate hope I might have missed something.

  I think we would all do well not to mention what we discovered to anyone. I’ve spoken to Sammy and Sgt. Knowles and they agree.

  Sammy and Sgt. Knowles. I wondered who they were. Too bad I didn’t have their full names.

  Somewhere in France, April 3, 1918—Sergeant Herbert Knowles surveyed a scene that would have driven most men mad with horror. He lit a cigarette. Knowles was only dimly aware of how dead he was inside. After seeing so many men die, after killing so many men whose names he didn’t know and whose faces he saw all too clearly…that’s when the numbness started. After that, the trenches become just another workplace. All it cost him was a tiny part of his soul.

  Sgt. Knowles crushed his cigarette and hiked forward through the blasted field of mud, where not so much as a blade of grass grew. He cut a striking figure in the sickly afternoon sun. At 6’2”, with sandy hair and a lantern jaw, he was the sort of doughboy you’d see on a recruitment poster. The folks at home would be delighted to hear how many Huns he’d shot. Knowles had just turned nineteen.

  Wasn’t there a time when the stench of the unburied dead would have made him vomit? Did the far off reports of artillery once feel like nails in his brain? When did life become so cheap? When did socks and toilet paper become so goddamn precious?

  The field of mud and reeking, stagnant water held little of interest. A coil of barbed wire. A caisson, burned and mostly buried. Busted sand bags. Part of a horse.

  The patrol served no purpose. The lines had been broken, Jerry was on the run. There wasn’t an enemy within five miles. Still, orders were orders. If the captain wanted to be sure the area was secure, then Knowles had best see what was beyond that ridge.

  There was a man beyond the incline. For just one second, Knowles felt he was back home in Missouri, back at the Methodist church on a Sunday morning. But the thought crumbled from his mind. Jesus had a beard. The man on this cross was clean shaven. And naked; Jesus would never be naked.

  It took the sergeant’s shell-shocked brain a moment to comprehend what he saw. Then, to his horror, the numbness vanished.

  Knowles had seen men die. Men he’d marched with, talked with, eaten with. He’d seen soldiers trying to stuff their own guts back in. He’d killed rats that had gnawed at the wounds of his dying comrades. He’d seen men vomit bits of their lungs during gas attacks.

  When he saw the man on the cross, he did what he had never done. He ran.

  Not far. Just behind a hill, so he wouldn’t have to look. Crouched in the mud, Knowles gasped for air that suddenly seemed ranker than usual.

  The rumors were true. He hadn’t wanted to believe what he’d heard. The Krauts really didn’t do that sort of thing. Taking turns with grade school girls, cutting the hands off Belgian children, cannibalism…that was just wartime propaganda.

  But the crucified man was real. The Germans were monsters. Swine. Shit.

  Knowles had to cut the man down. He couldn’t leave him there for the greasy, fat crows. With fear that he’d not known since his first battle, he crept nearer the hanging man.

  The cross had been crudely constructed; two pieces of rough board hammered together. The man wasn’t nailed there. He had been tied on with barbed wire. His head hung down. The face was not visible, for which Knowles was immensely thankful.

  Though flies buzzed around the corpse, it bore few wounds. Just gashes where the barbed wire dug into the flesh, and a strange series of cuts that crisscrossed the man’s hairless chest. Almost deliberate. Like a sideways letter ‘E’ with a cross below it.

  And then Knowles realized two things which would cause him to wake up screaming, far after the end of the war. The man raised his head. He was alive. And his eyes had been removed.

  Knowles collapsed. The man’s head lolled, and Knowles prayed that this horrible ghoul would not come alive again. Scrambling for his knife, he stood up. For a moment he considered slashing the dying man’s throat. It would almost be a mercy.

  As Knowles began to cut the man’s bonds, he realized his prayers were not to be answered. Slowly, the man’s head rose again. Mere inches from Knowles face, he turned his empty sockets to his rescuer.

  The knife fell from Knowles’ hand. Flies crawled out of the bloody eye sockets, as the ocular muscles writhed horribly. The man, who by all rights should have been dead, smiled. An awful, ghastly, insane smile. And then he spoke. And then he died.

  The words of the crucified man followed Knowles as he sprinted back to his unit. They haunted him through Armistice Day, and tortured him at random moments during the 1920s and 30s.

  Knowles never knew what the man said.

  He spoke German.

  The man on the cross was an enemy soldier.

  The monster that had done this to him was an American.

  – Chapter Four –

  The next morning I headed downtown, determined not to give up on my quest for information about Rev. Gowen. The guy on the phone said there’d been some kind of a scandal, right? Maybe Mr. Hopkins would give me props for digging up dirt. Hell, it was either this or interview some elderly alumnus about the way things used to be.

  The former Holiness Church, now First Baptist, was only
about half a mile from campus. Obviously an old structure, it resembled a gothic cathedral welded to a middle school. This was a Tuesday, and I had no idea if anyone would even be there, though there were a few cars in the lot.

  I paused to straighten my collar and adjust the tie I’d worn despite Mr. Hopkins’s advice. I triple-checked to make sure my notepad and Dictaphone were still in my case.

  I am a real reporter.

  Locating the entrance, I poked around the dimly-lit hall until I located an office with the light on. A man sat at a desk, reading a file. He looked up and smiled when I knocked.

  “What can I do for you?” He was very young, with copper-colored hair and a ruddy face.

  “I have a question about your church.”

  He stood and shook my hand. “Reverend Zeke Morely.”

  I held out my press pass. “Sherman Andrews. I’m with the Missourian.”

  The reverend frowned for a moment. I remembered what Mr. Hopkins had said about people distrusting the press.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be a reporter?”

  That stung. “Aren’t you a little young to be a minister?” Not the most professional response, but still…

  Fortunately, he smiled. “Point taken. Actually, I’m the youth pastor. Now what did you need?”

  “I’m interested in one of your ministers. A man named David Gowen. He was a pastor here in 1935.”

  Rev. Morely paused. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Tell you what, we have a little booklet about the history of our church, let me grab you a copy. In the meantime, there’s pictures of all our past ministers down the hall, why don’t you have a look.”

  Excellent. Excited to place a face with my guy, I hurried to the wall of holy men. It began with a charcoal portrait of the staid-looking Elias Holiday, 1885-1887, and ended with bald Dr. Wallace McKay, 2007-present. Backdating, I searched out the 1930s section of the timeline.

  “So why are you interested in our church?” called Morely from the office.

  “Um, my great-grandfather went here. Mentioned Rev. Gowen in his journal. Thought it might make an interesting historical piece.” I was only half paying attention. Something wasn’t right. The chronology continued unbroken all the way till bespectacled Harvey G. Baker, 1920-1931, then leapt straight to Jacob Howard, 1936-1938. There was no entry for 1931-1936, when David Gowen would have been minister.

  “Ugly looking mugs, ain’t they?” The reverend appeared behind me, grinning. “Which one’s your guy?”

  “Um, he’s not there. Any idea why there’s no photo for these years?”

  He checked the dates. “I never noticed that. Odd. But a photo like that would have been over seventy years old. It could have gotten ruined sometime.”

  “I guess.” I wasn’t willing to chalk this one up to coincidence. The only missing picture is of the one guy I’m interested in?

  The youth minister scratched his head. “Although…” He paused, and studied me, as if internally debating something.

  “What, what?” I asked, almost jumping up and down.

  “It’s probably nothing, but there was this old parishioner I knew, maybe five years ago. And I mean old. One time he mentioned that a minister here was once dismissed because of some kind of a scandal. Maybe that was your man. They might have taken his picture down if he embarrassed the church somehow.”

  Scandal? Yes! “Do you remember any details?”

  Rev. Moreley raised an index finger and made a thoughtful groaning noise. “Aaah….no, sorry, it’s gone.”

  “Could I talk to the man you mentioned?”

  “I’m afraid he’s no longer with us.” He handed me a photocopied booklet, bound with spiral plastic. “At any rate, here’s our little history.”

  I glanced at the cover and slipped it into my bag. I suspected a booklet that contained ‘over fifty time-saving recipes from our parishioners’ wouldn’t help me much.

  “Reverend, do you have any old church records I could look at? Papers, files, that sort of thing?”

  He rubbed his almost hairless chin, then glanced down the hall as if looking for someone. “There’s some old files down in the basement. Let’s go have a look.”

  No matter how many times a building is renovated, the basement always stays the same. In the century and a half this church had existed, they’d added electricity, plumbing, and central air, but the cellar was still the same dank, brick-walled pit that it must have been in the 1800s. I followed Rev. Morely down the creaking, wooden steps, into the musty, cluttered basement.

  This place had obviously been a dumping ground since before the Second World War. A quick glance showed me a water damaged pew, a banner for a decades-past rummage sale, and a rather frightening nativity shepherd. My guide motioned me forward, until we came to a bank of file cabinets.

  “Most everything is on computers these days,” he said, slashing through a spider web. “Everything before that went in here. We moved them down here a while ago. Lord only knows how far back the papers go.”

  Splendid. I was about to politely suggest that he could return to whatever he’d been doing, when a shadow fell across the door to the main floor.

  “Reverend Morely?” came a commanding, though elderly voice. “Are you down there?”

  It was hard to tell in the darkness, but I think he went slightly pale. “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re waiting for you.”

  “I was just…”

  “We’re waiting.” I don’t know why, but I got the chills.

  The minister turned to me. “I have to go now. There’s a flashlight in that tool chest. Try to leave things as you found them. You can use the copier in my office if you need to.”

  Without turning, he began to slowly, deliberately, ascend the stairs.

  “Reverend?”

  “Yes?” He stopped, but didn’t turn.

  “Um, where are you going?”

  He paused, then let out a long, agonized sigh. “The yearly budget meeting.”

  I watched him go, wishing I could do something to save him.

  Once I was alone, I located the flashlight and began digging. It didn’t take me long to realize the task might not be as hopeless as I thought. While the cabinets themselves were in no particular pattern, I soon discovered that the files inside were in meticulous chronological order. After fifteen minutes of searching, I found the drawer that corresponded to 1935. It was on the bottom, of course. I kneeled on the grubby floor, bracing the flashlight in my armpit, squinting at the crabbed titles on the musty cardboard folders.

  David Gowen

  There it was. I was almost afraid to touch it. I took it in my trembling hands, already planning how to sneak it out the door without anyone noticing.

  And it was empty. I knew by its weight as soon as I picked it up. There was nothing inside.

  What the hell had this guy done that they’d tossed his files? Despondently, I turned the folder over and gave it a shake.

  Something fluttered out.

  It was a photograph. I gingerly picked it up and held it in the beam. While I didn’t know much about photography, the faded black and white picture seemed ancient. I squinted at the figures. Four men standing in front of what appeared to be the steps of a large brick building.

  The first man on the left was bearded and well dressed. He wore a dress shirt, tie, and the tab collar popular before the Second World War. He stood still and erect, arms folded. Though it was hard to tell from the grainy photo, he looked to be around sixty.

  Squatting on the stair next to him sat a man of about forty. He was wearing a long jacket. Squinting into the camera, he grimaced in an unpleasant manner. His arms, which were visible out of the front of his sleeves, were muscular. A cigarette dangled from his mouth.

  Next to the powerful man stood the sort of person who might have been called a hippie, had he been born many decades later. He wore sandals, old pants, suspenders, a straw hat, and a partially unbuttoned shirt. He was also the only one in the pictur
e who was smiling. I’d have guessed him to be twenty at the oldest.

  Lastly, standing to the far right of the group, stood a nervous looking man in a suit. Balding, he looked to be in his late thirties. He seemed to be cross-eyed, though that might have just been a flaw in the film.

  Eagerly, I turned the photo over. On the back, in large letters, someone had printed Columbia, Missouri Nov. 1935.

  Below that were four names. I squealed with delight when I read them: Prof. Louis Roebuck, Sgt. Herbert Knowles, Sammy Hollerback and Rev. David Gowen.

  Under the names, someone with different handwriting had scrawled three dates: January 14, 1937, November 14, 1936, and August 31, 1937. Only the rev had no date. Finally, at the bottom of the picture, JB 1:15 (2) was written in bold, block letters.

  I turned the photo over, wishing I had a magnifying glass.

  Who the hell were you people? How were you connected?

  Northern Missouri, March 3, 1935—Sammy Hollerback always wore an expression like he’d just walked into a surprise birthday party. Not that anyone had ever thrown him a birthday party. He’d lived on the road since he turned twelve, almost eight years ago. His silky blonde hair and smooth cheeks made him look even younger.

  The night was overcast, but without the threat of rain. Sammy whistled as he walked along the silent rails of the Chicago-Pacific Line. Winter was over. The deep woods that surrounded the tracks already showed green tints of new life. Crickets sang in the blackness. Farther off, frogs groaned in a hidden pond. The woods held that scent of earth and decay and new life that you only smell in the early spring. It would soon be warm enough to sleep out every night. For six months he could stop worrying about frostbite and pneumonia.

  Sammy felt as though he were master of all he surveyed. This was almost literally true, as it was too dark to see much of anything, and all he owned in the world he carried in a small pack on his back. If Sammy were to find a magic lamp, his first wish would have been for a pouch of tobacco, and his second for fifth of Scotch. It might not have occurred to him to make a third wish.

  Sammy knew that he’d reach La Plata before dawn. There he could catch a few hours of sleep in the shed behind the railroad station, before hopping the 10:15 freight to Phoenix. Or the 11:05 to New Jersey. He hadn’t decided yet.