Everyone Dies in the End

by Brian Katcher

  She held up a pink palm. “Save it. I couldn’t care less. I swore I’d never come back here, but I have to.”

  “Charlie…”

  “I haven’t slept in two days. I skipped work. I can’t eat. My parents think I’m having a breakdown. Sherman, what the hell was that thing? I have to know.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. It’s safer this way.” I sure as hell wish I could go back not knowing.

  “Something crawled out of a grave and attacked me. Start talking.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.” I was a couple of hours away from a fatal showdown and I didn’t feel like explaining myself.

  Charlie crossed the room and sat down next to me on L.J.’s bed. She patted my knee and smiled a normal smile, not her usual toothy snarl. I was reminded of how close we’d almost become.

  “Sherman, honey.” She snuggled nearer. “I will hurt you.”

  “Um…”

  Charlie caressed my ear. Then without warning, she twisted.

  “What was that thing? Tell me, goddamnit!”

  “Ow, ow, ow! Okay, stop it!”

  Instantly, she was all smiles and sweetness again. “Take your time.”

  I stood and began to pace. And suddenly it all began to flood out. The picture of the four men. Getting whupped at the pool hall. Meeting Denton. Dan Cooper and his pal. The car wreck. The attack on Denton. The strange spate of deaths in the 1930s. How Saberhagen kept returning to Missouri. The only thing I left out was my recent meeting with Saberhagen at his office; that wasn’t the sort of thing I could share with anyone at the moment. I must have spoken for half an hour.

  Charlie whistled when I finished. “That’s the last time I seduce a journalist.”

  “I know sorry won’t mean much…”

  “Then don’t say it. What I want to know is what are we going to do about this?”

  “We? You’re going to go back home and forget you ever heard of me.”

  “Where was your chivalry the other night? You dragged me into this, now I’m going to help get us out.”

  “This doesn’t concern you.” I stood, in what I thought was an unmistakable gesture of dismissal.

  For the briefest moment, I was sure she was going to drop me. I had the height advantage, but she had the weight, and in her excited state it would’ve been no contest. Instead, shockingly, she removed her shirt.

  “What are you doing?”

  Then I realized. My eyes weren’t drawn to her pale flesh, but to the bandages that swaddled her shoulders. Her fingers quickly ripped away the gauze on her left side.

  “Look, damn you! Look!”

  I couldn’t. I closed my eyes. The horrible red gashes that must have reached the muscles. The inflamed claw marks that ran from her upper back to the front of her round shoulders. I had never felt such shame. She was right, it was my fault.

  “It’s going to scar,” she said.

  “Please get dressed.” I didn’t open my eyes. “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Yes. I should have gone to the emergency room that night. I went yesterday. The doctor said it was too late for stitches. He gave me a tetanus shot and the number for a domestic violence hotline. Oh, open your eyes.”

  Charlie was dressed again. “Sherman, I’m sure you never expected this to happen. But like it or not, you got me involved. Now, what are we going to do about this?”

  I picked up the bat and thumped it against the bed frame. “It ends today. Him or me.” The phrase sure sounded macho in my head. Out loud, it kind of sounded stupid.

  “You’re an idiot. And much as I don’t really like you right now, I’m not prepared to see you dead.”

  Now it was my turn to be indignant. “You know that girl who was killed yesterday?”

  Her eyes flashed. “The one they found at the power plant?”

  “That was Saberhagen. And she was a friend of mine.” Charlie winced. “Look. Only three people know how bad this is. One of them’s locked up in a psycho ward, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anything happen to you. Maybe I’m being dumb, but I have to do something.”

  Charlie was looking at me with less contempt. “We could contact Reverend Gowen.”

  It annoyed me that she’d paid so little attention to what I’d been telling her. “Gowen faced down Saberhagen back in the 1930s. That’s no help.”

  Charlie smirked, not quite showing her teeth. “I meant to tell you the other night, but we were interrupted. I ran a check on Gowen through his denomination. They keep track of all their ministers: their congregations, their degrees, their deaths. It’s like an alumni association.”

  “You found out how he died?” I was impressed.

  “Not exactly. Sherman, we’ve been looking at this all wrong. You never found out how Gowen died, because he’s not dead.”

  – Chapter Eighteen –

  “What do you mean, he’s not dead?” I asked. “That picture was taken eighty years ago and he wasn’t a young man then! Now he’d be over…”

  “He’s one hundred and eleven years old.”

  “Charlie, people don’t live that long.” She must have mistaken him for someone with the same name. I was surprised someone who worked at the historical society would make such an error.

  “It’s rare, but they do,” she insisted. “Ten years ago, Gowen entered a St. Louis rest home. I called them today. He’s still there.”

  My head swam. Gowen, the voice from the past. The man who’d faced Saberhagen. The guy with the insanely cryptic clues. He lived? Not only had he survived his brush with evil, but with time?

  “One hundred eleven? That’s hard to believe.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Hard to believe as someone rising from the grave?”

  The room seemed a lot colder. I suddenly wished Charlie would leave. It was like the evil was closing in, and I didn’t want her around.

  “I have to try to meet Gowen. Where is he?”

  Charlie folded her arms. “I’m going with you.”

  I wanted her to go. I needed her to come, to be with me. But I couldn’t involve her more than I had. I walked over and gently touched her cheek.

  “Charlie…Christine…it’s time you left. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. It’s too…”

  My manly speech was cut short when she playfully poked me in the gut. “You forget, I’m the one with his address. I’m going to see him. If you like, I’ll let you come with me.”

  “But…” My manly high noon attitude hadn’t impressed her.

  “Sherman, you think I can ever rest until I know what’s going on? I need this as bad as you. And you need me too. Let’s do this. For your friend.”

  Few humans have ever traversed the uninhabited stretch of jungle between Columbia and St. Louis. The only access is a dirt road that the few natives refer to as Interstate 70. With only my satchel of dirty secrets as luggage, I followed Charlie to her car. Dark clouds were rolling in from the west; the whole day looked dreary and gray. I flopped down into the passenger seat and proceeded to sleep for an hour.

  The sleep was not restful. I kept having visions of a dark-haired girl who was in desperate danger, and I’d snort myself halfway to consciousness with an overarching feeling of failure.

  At Wentzville, Charlie poked me awake.

  “You’re ringing.”

  “Huh?” I looked around. The sky was so dark, she’d turned on the headlights.

  “Your phone. It’s ringing.”

  “Gah?” I mumbled into the speaker.

  “Sherman? Is that you? Are you okay?” It was Dad.

  “Fine. Can we…”

  He plowed on. “They just called me. Jesus, Sherman, that poor girl. Did you know her?”

  Remember that cute brunette we were eyeballing when you dropped me off?

  “No. Never met her. Listen, I’m kind of…”

  “I’ll be there in two hours. You hang tight, I’ll come get ya.”

  I blinked away the fuzz in my mind. “What are you talking
about?”

  “Son, there’s a murderer out there. You’re coming home.” His voice wasn’t commanding. It was as if he just kind of assumed that leaving was my only option.

  “Dad, the academy is still open.” I wanted to end the conversation. Charlie wasn’t looking at me, but the eavesdropping was obvious.

  There was a pause on my father’s end. “Sherman, I don’t like the idea of you hanging around up there with some psycho on the loose. Wouldn’t you rather come home until they catch him?”

  I’d love to come home more than anything, Dad. But it turns out I accidentally called forth a demon and I kind of have to stick around here until one of us is dead. Give my best to Janine.

  “I’ll be careful. I won’t go out at night. Listen, I have to go. Um…you be careful too, okay?” I hung up.

  Charlie gave a rare, thin smile. “Your dad worried about you?”

  “Can you blame him?”

  “At least he thinks you’re safe. My pop is gonna freak the hell out when I don’t come home tonight.”

  I recalled our earlier plans. “Yeah, you said something before.”

  She stopped smiling. I think she was remembering the feelings we’d almost shared. “So you live with your dad? Why not with your mom?”

  I shrugged. “Long story.”

  “We’ve got time. Don’t clam up, we’ve been through too much.”

  That made me laugh. “Okay. When I was about ten…” Ten years, one month, three days “…Dad tells me that Mom is going to be spending some time with her sister. And that was the last time I ever saw her.”

  Charlie turned from the road. “But didn’t she…” She left that hanging, probably unsure of which of the myriad motherly responsibilities to list first.

  “She called. Still calls. On my birthday, mostly.” My eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth and fifteenth.

  “Did she…I mean, do you have any idea why she left?”

  I fiddled with the AC. “Same old story. Girl from a rich family falls for a bad-ass high school dropout with a motorcycle. Her parents object, which makes her all the more determined to be with him. And then, years later, she realizes her friends are all having adventures, and she’s married to a plumber who can barely pay the rent. She hung around for a while, but when she got a job offer in San Diego, she took it.”

  “Sherman, I…”

  I reached over and turned on the radio. I did not want to discuss it. I did not want to remember the nights I spent waiting for her to come home, or the years living with a father I had little in common with. Most of the time, when people asked, I told them my mother was dead. It was less painful that way.

  After ten minutes, the news came on. Boone County police were still trying to identify the man who was killed in a collision with a train the other night. They suspected he was drag racing, and were searching for the other driver. In other news, tragedy rocked the University of Missouri Campus when Stephanie Lane, age seventeen…

  I clicked it off.

  We reached the first signs of suburban sprawl right when the rain broke. Charlie asked me how we were going to approach Rev. Gowen.

  “I dunno. Just ask him about Saberhagen and the photo.”

  “Sherman, this guy turned one hundred before we were teenagers. When he was a kid, Civil War veterans were still hale and hearty. He was probably already preaching by the time the stock market crashed.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, this guy may not even remember his own name, let alone something that happened eighty years ago.”

  “Well, there’s not a lot we can do about that.” Charlie had a knack for making me feel completely unprepared and out of my depth.

  “So what are we going to say when we ask to see him?” she continued.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sherman, think about it. They’re probably going to ask who we are, why we want to see him. And that’s just the staff. What if Saberhagen’s people are watching?”

  “Um…”

  “Just leave it to me.”

  The brick rest home gave me a weird sense of deja vu, until I realized it reminded me a lot of Denton’s mental hospital. The staff, however, was much less suspicious. Charlie signed us in as Juan Venada and Jane Smith, claiming she was Gowen’s great-grandniece. A young nurse led us to Gowen’s room. She stopped us at the door.

  “Mr. Gowen has his good days and his bad days. Recently, they’ve been mostly bad. Don’t be upset if he is unable to talk. Even residents who can’t speak appreciate visitors.” She opened the door and ushered us in to a hospital room almost completely devoid of decoration.

  “Mr. Gowen?” sang the nurse. “You have visitors.” She silently closed the door behind us.

  I had expected Rev. Gowen to look more or less like his photo. When I leaned over the figure in the hospital bed, I almost lurched away.

  Gowen looked like a skeleton wrapped in butcher paper. His gnarled hands lay immobile on top of his sheet, twisted toward his body. An IV tube dripped into a forearm so skinny it could have passed for a broom handle. He appeared to be naked under his sheet, I could clearly see his collar bone through his spotted, sore-covered skin. His neck was so sunken I could see his skin vibrate from his pulse. And his face—

  An oxygen tube was hooked up through a venous nose from which sprouted an improbable tuft of hair. A mouth the color of cooked liver hung loosely open, revealing a swollen tongue and diseased gums which hadn’t seen a tooth in decades. Ears almost completely covered in white hair stuck out below a yellow scalp devoid of even a follicle. His feeble breath wheezed above the hammering rain.

  Gowen’s eyes held me. They moved out of sequence and I was reminded of his glass eye. The real one stared at me, yellow, filmed over, but alive. Seeing that living eye set in the face of this mummy upset me. It was like seeing a mannequin turn its head or hearing a voice from an empty room.

  I stepped back, noticing with revulsion the urine-filled bag at the foot of the bed. Charlie, realizing that I was not going to make the first move, pulled up a chair beside Gowen.

  “Reverend? We’re sorry to bother you. You don’t know us. We need your help.”

  There was no response from the thing under the sheet. Only that hellish eye, staring at a world that no longer concerned it.

  Charlie was unperturbed. “Rev. Gowen? Does the name Saberhagen mean anything to you?”

  Gowen twitched and his mouth worked. A thin stream of drool rolled over his lips.

  Charlie took a Kleenex from the nightstand and dabbed at his chin. I felt I had to say something.

  “Rev. Gowen? David?” I held the ancient photograph in front of his face. “This is you, isn’t it? Who are these men?”

  The eye didn’t even move towards the picture. Clearly, this was a body that had outlived whatever made it human. I put my hand on Charlie’s back, ready to ask her to leave.

  And then the figure changed. The head turned. The eye narrowed. And just for a moment, the living corpse became a man. He stared at us, focused and aware, for a long moment.

  His mouth worked. “Bible,” he said, in a creaking, weak voice.

  The words on the back of the photo! “Yes!” I squeaked. “The book of Job—”

  Gowen hissed. “No. My Bible. Get.”

  Gowen had almost no personal possessions in his room. It wasn’t hard to find the Bible underneath a five-year-old telephone directory on a shelf. I flipped through the first few books, hoping to find a relevant passage underlined.

  Charlie attempted to talk to him again. “Sir? What should we do?”

  “Hold on,” I gasped. I had found what I was looking for. The entire New Testament had been removed. In its place, carefully bound in with the rest of the book, were pages and pages of handwritten entries. Diary entries. From 1935.

  “The second half of his diary,” I said. “Rev. Gowen, should we—”

  Gowen’s eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply. Wordlessly, I slipped the vo
lume into Charlie’s purse and we headed for the door. Just as we opened it, Gowen spoke a final phrase.

  “G’luck.”

  Even though it was pouring outside, the St. Charles Denny’s had the air conditioner set low enough to store meat. Charlie and I maneuvered into a corner booth. We knew it was risky to read this thing in public, but neither of us was willing to wait the two hours it would take to drive back to Columbia. I ordered a double cheeseburger while she had a Caesar salad. Only after the food came did I dare crack the precious diary. Sitting side by side, we read together.

  Oct. 20th, 1935. I cannot sleep. I rarely eat. My sermons are rote recitations. Has God abandoned me? I feel as if as long as Saberhagen lives, I am in mortal danger. We have decided to pursue a rather drastic course of action…

  – Chapter Nineteen –

  Columbia, Missouri, October 20th, 1935—The doctor who fitted Rev. Gowen’s glass eye got his start as a medic in the First World War. Though the field of prosthetics was still in its infancy, a skilled doctor could help hide a missing eye, a missing limb, a missing face. Hide, but not replace.

  Still, once the bruising went away, it would be almost impossible to tell the real eye from the false one. If you looked closer, you might have noticed the real one was bloodshot with fatigue.

  Gowen’s office also showed signs of hasty repair. Most of his wrecked furniture had been replaced with second-hand donations from his congregation. The broken window was boarded up and the scent of fresh plaster and paint hung in the air.

  Gowen shifted uncomfortably in his chair, regarding his three guests. Three men had answered his ad. He had set up this meeting as quickly as possible, even agreeing to pay the train ticket for one of them. The question was, had he just invited a murderer into his office?

  One of the invitees, a portly, middle-aged gentleman named Professor Louis Roebuck, was finishing his account. “The poor girl moved back home to Ohio. They never did catch the man. But the medallion he was wearing…I turned it over to the police, but I swear it had that same E-X symbol you described in your ad.” Roebuck had noticed the advertisement by purest chance while researching an unrelated topic at the university library.