JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES AND THE DEATH OF BARON GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT
by T. Casey BrennanCopyright 2000 by T. Casey Brennan
This is the story of Jackie of the Old Places. No,
this is the story of how I sold my soul to the devil
in 1958; my mother wrote gothic novels and was a
little crazy, so she made me read the Lord's Prayer
backward in front of a black candle on Ember Day. I
was nine years old, I think, but she gave me up to the
Old Ones. She called them up from the Old Places.
And it was so easy.
I grew up in an old farmhouse in Michigan; born in
1948, my earliest memories were of books so old, that
now they would be considered quite archaic: children's
books of cloth pages, illustrated with grim, unsmiling
visages of Mother Goose or Aesop. Books of old
stories and legends with pages so brittle, that
corners flaked off at the turning, books made for the
children of my father's era, when students were
routinely beaten, sometimes to death, by their
teachers. Legend has it that the Brennan family came
to Michigan from Canada, when a teacher had inflicted
fatal punishment on one of their children. The child
was forced repeatedly, in the course of a day, to
stand in front of a hot furnace, then to stand outside
in the brutal Canadian cold of winter, again and
again. The child died of pneumonia. The Brennans,
seeing this as part of a death plot against Irish
Catholics, left Canada.
Old Books. Collections of stories and essays by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Voltaire, and
Cotton Mather. And sometimes, not here, but in the
OLD Places, where THEY wait (coiled serpents who once
ruled, for Aeons before man, they ruled, now they long
to take back their world), beneath the Earth,
sometimes only a heartbeat away, there, and only
there, I beheld the Necronomicon.
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?
In the last month of the last year of the twentieth
century, I write JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES, four years
after the world had accepted "Conjurella" as art, but
dismissed it as testimony.
So this is the story of Jackie of the Old Places, the
REAL Jackie, who put up the great T. Casey Brennan fan
page, who promoted me and said I had a fan club at her
school, the REAL Jackie, who, at 13, posted my old
comics from the 1970s, and tried to help me to defect
to Iran, Iraq, or Cuba, the REAL Jackie, who, only in
dreams, had given herself up on Amber Day to the
serpents of the Old Places.
The REAL Jackie, not the one in "Conjurella", not the
one in David Ferrie's gunsight, as I collapsed to the
floor after firing my single, only shot, trying
desperately to push the braced rifle out the window as
I fell, as my tormented father shouted through
Ferrie's gunfire:
"Don't shoot Jackie, Ferrie! Don't shoot Jackie, or
I'll kill ya right now!"
Somewhere on the Internet, I read that Baron George
deMohrenschildt had something to do with a charity
that had something to do with Jackie Kennedy. He had
known Lee, and testified before the Warren Commission.
Of my memory of him, demolished by Dr. Earnshaw's
amnesiac injections, only this remains: he was a
basicly good man, caught up by circumstance, not
because of the Kennedy assassination, because none of
us had anything to do with it (well, except for me,
and I was so drugged and hypnotized and terrorized
that I didn't even know what I was doing), but because
of something else.
DeMohrenschildt was of Russian birth. The war years
had concealed the murderous purges of Stalin, as well
as the true extent of the Nazi death camps. While
Dresden burned under saturation bombing, railroad
lines leading millions into camps like Auschwitz and
Dachau went untouched by Allied attacks. And while
Stalin carried out a similar persecution and murder of
millions - some in Russia, and in the rebellious
Soviet occupied Baltic states, chose to favor the
temporary rescue from Stalin's troops that a Nazi
victory might bring. Like my late mother's agent,
Kurt Singer, served the O.S.S., deMohrenschildt served
the Nazi intelligence apparatus. Those Russians who
made this choice must be judged in the context of
history; Stalin massacred whole villages - to a
Russian whose parents had been killed by Stalin, those
two deaths carried greater meaning than the six
million Jews killed by the Nazis.
DeMohrenschildt: I forgive you, now, too late, in the
year 2000, more than twenty years after I have,
unwittingly, brought about your death. Serpents of
the Old Places, hear them: grant them peace, grant
them rest.
From the mid-'70s to the late '70s, I lived at Xanadu
Cooperative House, at 1811 Washtenaw Avenue, in Ann
Arbor. So it must have been around then that it
happened. One day, Daddy said:
"George deMohrenschildt says you're an awfully smart
boy."
Daddy shouldn't have said that. He knows he shouldn't
have said that. Has he forgotten what David Ferrie
and
Dr. Earnshaw told us about talking about the people in
Dallas?
The CIA's MK-ULTRA trauma conditioning sets in. I
must scare Daddy now, the way he scared me when I was
a little boy. I must not remember about my single
shot, must not know, not yet. I say:
"Don't ever say that to me again!"
Daddy smirks, and is silent.
But it doesn't work.
This is the second memory of JFK witness, Baron George
deMohrenschildt.
I first moved into Xanadu in 1974, but the memory of
helping Dr. Earnshaw kill Baron deMohrenschildt must
have come in the later years, sometime before I left
for the last time, in, I think, 1980.
1973 had killed my mother and taken away the two
girlfriends that I wrote about in the "Conjurella"
sequel, "Conjurella Messiah: Necronomicon Monks". The
automobile accident that had claimed my mother's life,
had left my father a temporary cripple. I was 25
then, and alcoholism and irresponsibility and artistic
idealism had left me the mental age of 13, the age
that Jackie is now.
So it was then that I met The Russian Girl, who wasn't
a girl at all, but was almost three decades older than
me. She and her husband offered to help. They
brought food, did laundry, and offered consolation.
The Russian Girl taught me how to make pancakes for my
dad; when I lost her love, I lost that talent, and I
never can again.
One day, she was helping me wash dishes, and
chattering about nonsense, and I couldn't take it any
more, so I pushed her into a corner and kissed her.
She was old, and wrinkled, and gorgeous. She said for
two cents, she'd leave her husband and marry me, but I
didn't have two cents, and she left me.
It still hurts, even though now, she's probably in a
nursing home, and hobbles along on a walker, trying to
find her false teeth. But I'd still hold her again,
the way I did...
The way I did the last time.
At first, we were so bold as to hug and kiss in the
next room, as, nearby, her unsuspecting husband
discussed sports and hunting with my bed-ridden dad,
as I played the radio, loud. Then, in October of
1973, she took me to the Detroit Triple Fan Fair comic
convention, where, as a celebrity guest, I was
provided with a free table to sell all of my comic
book collection, and move to Ann Arbor, or perish.
Though my support at Warren Publishing Company had
weakened, in October of 1973, I was still a comic book
star, and fellow comic book stars like Barry Smith and
Steve Skeates rallied about me. My dealer's table did
well, but in a few weeks, I was broke in Ann Arbor,
and I called again for the support of The Russian
Girl.
She met me in the bus station in Detroit, with a
handful of tens and twenties, and a clipped out ad for
a place advertising cheap nightly rooms, called,
ironicly, the Camelot Hotel. Broken, penniless except
for her money, homeless, half-orphaned, I held her
again, told her that I would love her forever, and
then, the tears came, as she broke away, slowly,
gently.
That was the last kiss of The Russian Girl. Nearby, a
middle-aged woman looked sidelong at me in amusement
as I wept. Lost and bewildered, I followed her exact
directions on city buses to the rundown,
cockroach-ridden Camelot Hotel, somewhere in Detroit's
sprawling ghetto. In the morning, I returned to Ann
Arbor, with The Russian Girl's money. By the summer
of 1974, I had entered Xanadu Co-op in Ann Arbor, a
combination of student housing and hippie commune,
still intent on joining with the leftist campus
activists, still intent on concealing my rightist
past. There, I attempted to fraternize with campus
Maoists and Trotskyites, learned the Hebrew Qabalah,
and adopted a mode of thinking which termed my former
friends, the conservatives, "neo-Nazis". All in all,
students or not, the co-opers were a seedy, drunken,
drug-infested lot, except for an ever changing
contingent of upper class New York Jewish girls, whom
I admired greatly, and were, through some strange
quirk of fate, the only Xanaduvians who were ever nice
to me.
DeMohrenschildt, meanwhile, had beaten up his wife,
been in and out of a mental institution, and
reportedly had, in his last days, given himself over
to the care of a mysterious doctor much like Dr. J.H.
Earnshaw. In those days, I traveled back and forth
repeatedly to stay at my father's house in Avoca,
Michigan, alone with him now, no longer with the
comforting arms of The Russian Girl. It must have
been during one of those trips that it happened.
Earnshaw, still intent on imposing CIA MK-ULTRA
mind-control conditioning on me, though we had long
since killed John Kennedy, took me into his office
again.
"You don't like Nazis now?" he said.
Drunken by his poisonous injections again, I launch
into a slurring rant.
"Come on," he says, "There's something I want you to
do."
In the car, on the way, they program me with the words
that will trigger the post-hypnotic commands that will
end the life of the now chronicly suicidal Baron
George deMohrenschildt.
They take me to a phone booth and dial
deMohrenschildt's number. DeMohrenschildt answers,
and I identify myself. He is congenial, kind, pleased
to hear from me: he always was. But there is no time
to think now, no more time than there was in Dallas
when David Ferrie ordered me to fire, no hope of
defying them, no hope of being free of MK-ULTRA.
"DIRTY NAZI BASTARD!" I say, "I HATE YOUR GUTS! KILL
YOURSELF NOW! 764321 DIE! DIE, NAZI BASTARD, DIE!"
I learn later that deMohrenschildt has killed himself
with a shotgun blast to the head, while taping a
television soap opera, so there would be no doubt that
it was suicide and not murder, just before he was to
testify before the House Assassinations Committee on
the Kennedy assassination.
But this was not the story of deMohrenschildt who had
been forced into the service of the Nazis, not the
story of the upper class Jewish girls I loved so much
at Xanadu, not the story of The Russian Girl and her
last kiss. This was the story of Jackie of the Old
Places, not the Jackie that deMohrenschildt knew, but
the little girl who put up the T. Casey Brennan fan
page, and said I had a fan club at her school. Not
because I ever really knew her, not because I ever met
her or heard her voice, but because, somehow, I
believed she was my last hope to solve the Kennedy
assassination for the world. And in dreams, in
dreams, in dreams, she is with me.
The End
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