So, I guess it was a book like that where my mother, soon-to-be Gothic novelist, Alice Brennan, found the story about how to sell your soul to the devil by reading the Lord's Prayer backward on, I remember the book called it, "Amber Day". So my mother decided it must be EMBER Day, which has something to do with Lent, I think, I forget what. So, on Ember Day, she took a copy of the Our Father, and started typing it out backward. Then she stopped, and half-smiled and half-cried, and said: "Casey, I don't want to do this!" But she kept typing anyway, and I read, "Nema, live morf su reviled..." On Ember Day. And here it is, almost half a century later, and I have a GOOD job emptying garbage at the Taco Bell, plus they're going to give me some more hours now. But this was the story of Jackie of the Old Places. She summoned me up from Hell. A decade ago, I had been in a homeless shelter. Now, T. Casey Brennan Internet fan pages spring up constantly. One of them is by a brilliant 13 year old computer student named Jackie. Of all the T. Casey Brennan fan page posters, she is the most attentive, and the most skilled. She sends news that enemy nations have accessed her T. Casey Brennan fan page repeatedly: Iran, Iraq, Cuba. I immediately gather emails for government officials in all three countries, and try to defect, not so much because I support their form of government, but because... Because when I was thirteen, I was being prepared for the blood. I had started school in 1953 in the first grade at five, so, in 1961, I entered Peck High School, in Sanilac County, later to become infamous as the alleged origin of the Oklahoma City bombing plot. At 13, I had already become enamored by the pamphlets provided me, sometimes in huge stacks, by my school board official parents' right-wing political friends. These ranged from the rabble rousing populism of Myron Fagan and the Cinema Educational Guild to the scholarly essays of Dr. Fred G. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, which shared offices with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. Later, in my senior year, Peck teacher Robert Losie would teach a class called "Communism", based on the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade textbook, YOU CAN TRUST THE COMMUNISTS - TO BE COMMUNISTS by Fred G. Schwartz. At 13, it was eight years since, drugged and terrified, I had first met David Ferrie; two years since I had been taken before the hypnotist J.H. Earnshaw, D.O.; and another two years before those men would kidnap me from the Yale, Michigan airport on November 22, 1963, and force me to fire from the sixth floor storage room of the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas. In 1996, I wrote of that Hell in a story called "Conjurella", fictional because only some of the names had been changed. It had spurred, not government investigations, as SHOULD have been, but numerous T. Casey Brennan Internet fan pages, from the world over, reminiscent of my former fame as an award winning writer for the Warren comics, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, in the 1970s. Among these pages, is one by Jackie, the teen-age genius. She writes on her page and in her emails of mad rock stars and vampires. In dreams, I wonder: Is she, like me, of the Old Places? Did she, like me, call them up from Hell? Did she, like me, feel their yearning, those dark cold serpents who ruled before man, reveling in the endless darkness, breathing methane gas, now yearning to take back their ancient home, always waiting, always hoping, to take back the Earth in serpent glory? Did she, like me, smell their sulphurous breath, and chant, ABOMINATIONS, WALK, COME FORTH FROM THE OLD PLACES, TAKE BACK THE WORLD, TAKE BACK THE NIGHT? Continued on Page (4 of 9) ... Back