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

Vegas fighting tooth and nail against the obvious. Vampires don’t exist! Everyone kept saying it! And women kept right on dying! Let’s not play that stupid game again! Besides,” I grinned, “if I do say so myself, it’s a great story.”
    “It’s a goddamn piece of toilet paper, is what it is! Fabricated! Filled with screwball speculations!!”
    “Speculations!? How the hell can you…”
He cut me off again. “Give me facts, Kolchak. Facts! Or stay the hell away from me. Capiche? ”
    “What the hell’s the matter with you, Tony? Going soft in the belly or something?”
    He must have been because immediately he grabbed his stomach and doubled over in obvious pain.
    “If you’d scream a little more you wouldn’t have that ulcer.”
    “ Bastardo! Stupido! Out! Get OUT!”
    Things had returned to normal. In a way it was almost like coming home again. Vincenzo slapped his forehead.
    “And I went out of my way to hire this… this… Vincenzo, sei un cretino!”
    I left him growling in his mother tongue and caught a cab to the Space Needle. At least on the Seattle Daily Chronicle there was a small expense account for such niceties. I intended to take advantage of it.
    As Louise and I rode the elevator up to the Space Needle restaurant I couldn’t help blurting out my feelings.
    “It’s like déjà vu , I swear it is. Every detail of it! Multiple murders. A weird-looking, way-out killer. Vincenzo on my neck. The owner-publisher down on my copy. Facts being soft-pedaled to prevent a panic, I tell you, Louise, I have been this way before.”
    Louise shifted uncomfortably as the others in the elevator stared at me. But my big mouth just kept flapping.
    “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” And, of course, she didn’t. We had been busy with other things and I didn’t wand to blow our burgeoning relationship with anything that would lead her to think I was missing some of my marbles.
    “When I was working for Vincenzo in Las Vegas last year, I covered a series of murders that turned out to have been committed by a vampire… a real one! You know—out of the coffin at night and go for the jugular.”
    “Carl, shut up, will you please?” Louise was actually embarrassed. It had been a long time since I had met a woman who could be a woman and still get embarrassed.
    “Okay. Okay. Have it your own way. If you don’t want to listen, fine and dandy. You don’t want to believe? Okay.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Nobody believed it at first. But finally they had to. Except that after it was over, they clamped down on the story and kept me from reporting what I’d seen by hanging a murder rap over my head—I’d pounded a wooden stake through the sonofabitch’s heart, you see…”
    The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Louise shoved me out into the restaurant. The other passengers crowded past us and openly stared at me. I did my best to look innocent. I turned to Louise who looked disgusted.
    “What do you think?”
    “ I think those people will remember this elevator ride for the rest of their lives. I had no idea was riding this elevator with a certified looney. And a stake-wielding killer to boot.” She grinned and dug me in the ribs.
    I watched the view outside as Seattle slowly revolved below. The restaurant turns very slowly but continuously. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t them… but me.”
    “Come on, Carl. We came here to have lunch and enjoy the view.”
    “No! There’s something crazy going on here. There’s no getting away from it. Six women strangled every 21 years since 1889—except for this most recent series which is a year short of the pattern period. Vagaries of a madman’s mind? Some new development? Or someone new trying to duplicate the pattern? No! While common sense tells me I’m nuts, deep in my gut I know every one of them was strangled by the same man. But what kind of man? Some character more than a century old? A guy who