News.RttP{Casey Brennan (Vampirella) in new band FRANKENHEAD, posts video}

WOW! Thanks, Reverend -- quite an honor to be on your page! These are the first two T. Casey Brennan JFK stories:

Castle Mirage - The Prelude: Conjurella
by T. Casey Brennan

(c) 2005 by T. Casey Brennan

This is the story of little mice. David Ferrie's mice.
No, this is the story of Conjurella, and her daughter,
Glinda; they were both there when I first met David
Ferrie in Ohio, at the Old covered Bridge; so were
Mama and Daddy and Uncle Johnny. Everyone is dead now,
except me, and, I think, Glinda, so there is no one to
ask. But I think it must have been the summer of 1953.
I started school in September of 1953 at Swamp School
on Bricker Road in Emmett, Michigan; a one-room school
on a gravel road which boasted my late mother as the
CEO of its Board; it was sometime around then that the
meeting at the Old Covered Bridge took place.

It looked something like a covered wagon, over a small
stream through a narrow road cutting through fields
and brush that stretched on forever. This was 1953.
The only war we might have lost had been over for less
than a decade. Oh-ess-ess was a whisper that lingered
in the air; a song that was over, yet the melody
haunted us. War measures meant many things to those
caught in the web of that whisper, oh-ess-ess, so
softly spoken, a love song, a lullaby, a death threat.
I don't remember, but I think that whisper was in the
air when we first met David Ferrie. Uncle Johnny
helped arrange it; Uncle Johnny said he was a finder.
Daddy and Uncle Johnny park the car right on the
bridge, and get out "to take a walk" -- there is
something on the car radio, or maybe Daddy and Uncle
Johnny tell us, about "two escaped convicts" believed
loose in that area. Mama and Conjurella get in the
front seat. Glinda and I are in the back seat. Has
MK-ULTRA begun yet? They must have given me some of
the amnesiac hypnotic drug that Dr. E, the hypnotist
whose work formed the basis for Mama's obsession with
hypnosis as noted in Castle Mirage, would later fore
on me in a more conventional setting. Glinda is my
age, she is five. she sees the Perfect soldier, David
Ferrie, standing guard. Everyone has told me: "Don't
see that soldier," but Glinda says, "He Sees that
soldier."

David Ferrie uses his O.S.S. code name, Perfect
Soldier. I don't remember how I know that. He assumes
battle stances, brandishes his rifle, and threatens
the children with rape. but it is Conjurella who is
raped, by the "escaped convicts" who inevitably appear
as David Ferrie looks on. Glinda and I are spared,
and, I think, so is Mama. But I was too still in that
back seat throughout the attack, too oblivious to what
was happening - they had used something akin to Dr.
E's "red lollipops", a favorite drug ploy of the
MK-ULTRA hypnotist who would some day send the Perfect
Soldier on a mission to kill John Kennedy.

I have the Brass Monkey, I think Uncle Johnny gave it
to me. I don't know if it had anything to do with the
OSS. It's not brass all the way through, and it says
"Germany" on the bottom, not "Deutchlann" - Germany.

David Ferrie is hard to remember.

I said I went to Swamp School, that was for my first
and second grades. In the third grade, I started
parochial school, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish
School, also in Emmett. That was in September of 1955.
I attended Our Lady of Mt. Carmel for my third,
fourth, fidth, and sixth grades. Daddy, who had always
had intermittent violent fits, accusing my mother of
an extra-marital affair (and me, of being the
offspring of a local handyman from Texas, Frank
Tilton) was on his best behavior through that period.
He had been elected, or appointed, I forget which, to
a position on the St. Clair County Board of Education,
to match my mother's, on the Swamp Board. I am trying
hard to be a Catholic religious sissy, worrying about
mortal sin, telling me priest in confession about my
Brigitte Bardot pin-ups, and studying prayerbooks. But
in the summer of 1959, after my sixth-grade year,
Daddy got in trouble. Getting out of it involved using
his family "in hypnotic experiments".

That was how we met Dr. E. And how we all met David
Ferrie again. Keep going north on M-19, and you will
reach Yale, Michigan, a tiny town with its own tiny
airport. David Ferrie, Who is calling himself David
Ferris by then, flew into the Yale airport in he
pre-dawn hours to meet with my Dad, and follow behind
us in a car, as we drove farther north, to Hopeville,
to meet the hypnotist, Dr. E. There was no doubt about
it; we were in custody.

My Dad is introduced, and he extends his hand to David
Ferrie/Ferris and says "I attended to Ferris Institute
in Big Rapids..." He stresses the word Ferris; he
knows he is in trouble and he is looking for something
that will give him an edge conversationally. but there
is to be no conversation. A committee of MK-ULTRA
agents roughly hustle him back to his car. Back in the
car, he tells Mama: "We're cooked. This is the same
guy Johnny took us to meet".

My memories of Doctor E are very sketchy, and they are
not always easily rendered sequential. I know that at
some point, through the use of amnesiacs so we would
have no recollection of the more threatening
encounters, he gained our trust, although it is
important to remember that it was as difficult
remembering just what had taken place previously with
Dr. E then, as it is now.

I know that at one point, Daddy was in Dr. E's office,
and Mama and I were in the waiting room, and Dr. E
came out and said, "I want to see how fast you can eat
a red lollipop," and handed us two red candies, which
caused us both to pass out immediately; I only vaguely
remember us being carried limply into his private
office, and that, only after over three decades.

We went up north in August of 1959 on a trip, and I
started back to school in September, at the old Swamp
School again, and it was around then that I met Lee
through Dr. E. Lee flew into the Yale airport with
David Ferrie; I was always afraid of David Ferrie, but
I was never afraid of Lee. He did not know about the
threatening circumstances of our initial meetings with
Dr. E and David Ferrie. He said that Dr. E was going
to give him "almost god-like powers", and that he was
doing "something important for the government". He
said he was going on a trip, but he would be back to
see me every so often. He spoke of great authority
that he would have on his return, and his explanations
of that coming authority vacillated between the
governmental and the mystical.

I saw Lee only a very few times, and one of the
memories of that era is an implant, because Dr. E.
shoved me up against his screen, as I'll describe
later, and said, "You're going to meet Lee Oswald
again at swamp School, but this time it won't be
real." the meeting that was real is sketchy. I don't
remember how he got there, but I remember he was
standing at the very edge of the road, telling me he
was concerned bout how I was being kicked around, but
he was going to do something about it. A lady who
drove by and saw us, Kathy Malarkey, was later put
into a mental institution, though I don't know if
there's a connection.

I only saw Lee the first few days of September of 1959
when I entered the seventh grade. By the time I
finished that school year, the U-2 incident had taken
place, and Dr. E told us: "Don't worry about that one.
We control both sides." On another occasion, someone
associated with David Ferrie told me that MK-ULTRA,
which was directly overseen by then C.I.A. Director
Allen "You're a Good Man, Mr. Dulles" Dulles, was in
the process of artificiaally creating a disease that
would Make the people who caught it hairless "just
like David Ferrie".

I am trying to place all this timewise; I know that in
the early days, I took home a comic book from Dr. E's
waiting room; it was in issue of Robin Hood, under the
brand Quality Comics, and several years old. By this
time, Mama and I were so disoriented by Dr. E's
sessions, that we had forgotten the early, threatening
encounters, and Mama encouraged me to leave a comic
book in the office in return, which I did, a copy of
Brave & Bold #28, an issue which introduced the
Justice League, a team of DC Comics superhereos, I was
later to have some marginal connection with DC Comics,
and my stories appear in some late 1970s issues of the
former DC title, House of Mystery.

I am also thinking that my parents may have taken
other children from the neighborhood to see Dr. E, and
I am wondering if there are any witnesses.

We do not see David Ferrie again with Dr. E, but there
are disjointed memories of meeting with David Ferrie
in my home, and in a neighbor's home, under so much
drugging that I was only dimly, barely aware that my
surroundings were real. it must have been later in his
life, not around the Old Covered Bridge meeting,
because in 1953, he still looked like a man, but by
the time these meetings took place, he was just a fat,
bald old blob. He looked something like my Catholic
godfather, Paul, who was also fat and bald, so I
asigned him the name "Bad Paul", which he liked, thouh
he always did his best to be as threatening as
possible during these meetings, though he never Laid a
hand on me.

I further remember them harassing me at a campground
outside St. Ignace, around the time of the launching
of Telstar, the first satellite to relay television
signals, which you could then see orbiting like a
shooting star. It was in August of 1962, before I
started my tenth grade year, no longer at Swamp
School, but now attending Peck High School in Peck,
Michigan. Campers, including my parents and myself,
liked to sit around a campfire, and watch Telstar. We
loved Telstar; I even had the 45rpm it inspired. but
on this particular occassion, we were discussing the
U-2. A man at the campfire said, well, Powers was just
a coward; he had a lethal injection to take if he was
shot down, he should have taken it. But one by one,
everyone, including my parents, leave the fire, and
this one man remains, and he says, the C.I.A., that
the U-2 was with, he works for them also. I say, hey,
great. He looks guilty for a second, collects himself,
and tells me the CIA has a use for me.

In October of 1962, we flew to New Orleans with David
Ferrie and Air America, as I could help with the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee very briefly. To understand
the manner in which the Hopeville MK-ULTRA office -
The Project, as I learned it was called- could be
lethal with its participants one week, and a
cooperative confidant and ally with them the next, it
will be useful to understand, by way of a comparison,
the effects of two drugs known to the general populace
today; Rohypnel and Ritalin. Rohypnel produces
unconsciousness and amnesia; Ritalin produces a very
singular one-pointedness in users allowing them to
concentrate on exactly what they are doing, and
nothing else. It is possible for a person under the
MK-ULTRA counter-parts of these drugs, combined with
hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion, to, for
instance, blithely pass out Fair Play For Cuba
Committee literature in New Orleans, without ever even
questioning how he got there, or believing that it
should be questioned. also, there are processes of
MK-ULTRA induced amnesia which make it virtually
fool-proof. In the induced trance state, the victim is
subjected to threats on his family members and
himself. He is forced to witness real or contrived
torture-killings of other human beings while in this
state. Then, he is withdrawn from the scene of this
abuse, given hypnotic commands in conjunction with
drugs, told that the abusive treatment was all
imaginary, and that he must not remember it; if he
will not remember it, it will not be real.

I remember the Fair Play For Cuba Office in New
Orleans, and I remember the Christian Anti-Communism
Crusade office on the other side of the building. I
remember asking someone, I don't remember who, but it
wasn't Lee, "Are we for or against Communists?" And he
said, "Both." and I laughed.

Anyway, Lee says the big Fair Play For Cuba campaign
was in August, and I missed it, but we pass out a few
pamphlets, and on the way back, we go into a store,
it's just the two of us, on foot, and he buys me a
candy bar, and he tells me to give them a pamphlet,
tell them you're Lee Oswald, he says, and I do. And he
laughs. Not far down the street, he stops by a tree.
He wants to talk.

He says, "I'm doing dangerous work. If anything
happens to me, I want you to take care of the family."

"Sure," I say.

But I really don't want any part of this. After we fly
back, that night, Daddy pretends to have a fit. I say
pretends, because now that I am an adult, and not
under the influences of the substances forced upon me
during the incidents, I see very well how his
threatening, seemingly erratic behavior, contributed
to the process of drug-and-hypnosis induced amnesia.
My first example of it was, in the early days of
visiting Dr. E, Daddy and I took separate pills,
voluntarily this time, on the premise that they would
help to "induce hypnosis", which, at that time, we
thought we were studying. Driving back, Mama is
crying, and I am lathargic and disoriented. I mention
the pill I took, and Daddy flips out: "I took that
pill, not you!" He stops the car and becomes more
threatening. I say to Mama: "Daddy has gone crazy."
Mama says: "This is a lot worse than Daddy going
crazy."

The incident following the flight from New Orleans was
a parallel; he began yelling "I want you to forget
that trip! You're going to forget that trip!" And I
did, again, for more than three decades.

I also forgot this:

At some point, Dr E asked if I would like to play the
shooting gallery game that he had. I said that I
would. He put me in front of a kind of television
screen with a head brace on the seat in front of it.
He says, "We don't have the gun that goes with it
hooked up yet. But when you see the cowboy shoot the
penny, you'll have good luck."

I look at the screen coming on, and he hits me with
something, I think an injection in my neck, it hurts,
and I slump. But the pictures form on the screen, and
I can hear the words through head-sets.

First there is a picture of a penny.

"SEE THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."

Then there is a picture of John Kennedy.

"THEN THINK OF THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S
HEAD."

(Girl's chuckle.)

Girl's voice: "IT'S NOT REALLY LINCOLN. IT'S JUST A
CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."

Then there are moving pictures of a cowboy tossing a
penny into the air.

"Pop!" he shoots it with a revolver, but instantly,
the picture is of John Kennedy.

The voice says: "THINK OF THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S
HEAD, THEN SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S
HEAD."

At another point, Dr. E shows me a whole film. It is
sometime after I have seen something on real
television, I think Disney, about the MacGregor family
of Scotland, which I liked, about all the oppression
they endured, and how, in the end, everybody stood up
for them, and they are back on top. Dr. E. tells me he
has something similar about the Fitzgerald family. I
watch it, and I only remember the ending. It's set in
the late middle ages or something, the Fitzgerald
family is put through all sorts of problems, but in
the end, there's a big crowd scene, and the speaker, a
Fitzgerald himself, has just won some major victory,
and he has everyone in the crowd with Fitzgerald blood
yell "hooray for the Fitzgeralds!" The voices start
up, and in seconds, you see that they are all over the
place in the crowd. And that's the end.

Dr. E says to Daddy: "Well, I scared him with it.
He'll be scared as hell of that story some day."

On the morning of November 22, 1963, I am awakened by
Daddy unexpectedly in the pre-dawn hours. He says we
are going to see Dr. E, then we are going on a trip. I
think he means vacation, so I say fine.

We reach the tiny Yale airport, deserted in the
pre-dawn hours, in no time. Daddy and I proceed to
David Ferries plane, where Dr. E is waiting. Dr. E
produces a hypodermic needle. His face is grim and he
is wearing a parka in the pre-dawn cold.

Now I am scared, and try to get away. I yell "I don't
want a shot!" and try to run. I know now that I m
about to be kidnapped. I am fifteen years old now, but
a pale, sickly fifteen, and I am in no shape to fight
these men for my freedom. I struggle, but Dr. E
injects me anyway, and I fall. The last thing I se
before falling is the parka-clad face of Dr. E.

When I awaken, in the storage room of the sixth floor
of the Texas Book depository building in Dallas, it is
broad daylight. They have obviously brought me in
crated up, or rolled up, in something. Anyway, I get
dumped out, and David Ferrie kicks me in the ribs, and
turns to my Dad.

"There's the assassin," David Ferrie says.

Daddy and David Ferrie make me stand agaisnt some
cartons of books, and not look around. I am groggy.
Sometimes when I would go up north to the Upper
Peninsula with Mama and Daddy, they liked to explore
abandoned buildings, places where I didn't always feel
they had a right to be. I can't remember the injection
now, and I amtrying to place just what is going on,
whether it is one of these unauthorized romps Daddy
liked to take through old buildings.

"Are we supposed to be here?" I asked, groggily.

David Ferrie laughs.

"Don't worry about that," he says, "If anybody bothers
you for being here, you send them right to me!"

Daddy and David Ferrie are laughing now, and I'm
beginning to think everything is all right. At some
point, someone has told me that I am in Dallas, where
Lee is now, and I ask to see him before we leave.

"Did you want to talk to him about comic books or
something?" David Ferrie asks.

I say yes, that I wanted to tell him about the new
Justice League comic just out, and that lee liked the
Justice League, talked about how great it was that DC
comics had brought back their old comic book series,
the Justice society, from the 1940s.

"Well, he's downstairs pushing a broom. He's down on
the second floor pushing a broom."

At some point, the lights went out. I don't know if I
was injected or dosed somehow again, or whether
post-hypnotic suggestion alone did the trick. Anyway,
a hood was placed over my head, and then part of it
pulled away and the gunsight pressed against my left
eye.

Daddy gives the hypnotic command: "WHEN I YELL NOW,
PULL THE TRIGGER."

Remembering this over three decades later, I can hear
David Ferrie saying "I don't want him to see the
gun!!" as he pulls the hood over my face.

David Ferrie says to Daddy: "Can he keep that right
eye closed? If he can't, I'll kill him."

Now that funny screen of Dr. E's, at first it said
"SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD". But
just at the last, when they made me watch it, it said
"SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN
SHOOT THE COWBOY BESIDE HIM. YOU DON'T LIKE COWBOYS
ANYMORE. YOU DON'T LIKE THIS COWBOY (Picture of
Governor Connaly in a Cowboy hat). SHOOT THE SQUIRREL
WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN SHOOT THE COWBOY
BESIDE HIM."

Then they lift me up, in front of the open window.

I hear the voices: "Can he get up by himself?" "Lift
him up!" "Don't let him open that eye!"

Slowly, I am lifted up, groggy and disoriented. I hear
Daddy's crying voice say: "Please don't open that
right eye, please don't open that eye, oh god, please
don't open that eye."

David ferrie says "Can you see John Kennedy on the
little screen?" My heart leaps as I see John Kennedy
in the convertible six floors below, but only through
the "little screen", i.e. the gunsight; I secretly
like John Kennedy, though Daddy hates him, and I am
glad to see him on "the little screen". But it all
happens so quickly, seeing John Kennedy and then Daddy
yells:

"NOW!"

My finger automatically contracts on what I now know
was the trigger. I have never seen the Zapruder film,
except in little glimpses. In my recollection of the
incident, this is what took place: My shot hits the
President in the chest. To my amazement, he writhes
sideways as the bullet hits. David Ferrie takes the
rifle instantly, and fires two more shots as I
collapse.

As he does, Daddy shouts: "Don't shoot Jacky, Ferrie!
Don't shoot Jackie, or I'll kill ya right now!"

David ferrie says: "Shut up, Bill!" - then, as three
more shots ring out from elsewhere on the street -
"Back-up! Good men! They could have left me hanging,
but they didn't!"

I look out the window now, but David Ferrie gives the
hypnotic command: "Don't look at the man we just
shot!"

Either Daddy or David Ferrie says: "It's the end of
the world. There's nothing but chaos out there now.
Nothing."

I am groggy and disoriented, and am trying to take
these words in a Catholic religious sense. I am
looking around for signs of a Biblical Judgement Day,
even though I cannot look toward the convertible at
all, even if I wanted to, that was how great their
power over me.

The next thing I remember is a man with glasses and a
business suit, thirtysomething, short hair and
professional-looking, entering. By now, we are all
away from the window.

I call him Ultra Subaltern.

Ultra Subaltern says, matter-of-factly: "Everything go
all right?"

David Ferrie says, "Well, Bill lost his head for a
minute, but he's all right now." Daddy had no right to
fly in David Ferrie's face like that over Jackie,
they're thinking. Daddy nods nervously.

"You'll pay for that though, Bill," David Ferrie says.

Ultra Subaltern goes to the window.

Daddy says "You're going to the window?!" Ultra
Subaltern says: "I was told to assess the situation.
One of the ways to assess is by looking. Everyone is
looking out windows now."

Ultra Subaltern leaves.

The next thing I remember is David Ferrie yelling
"There's the signal!" Immediately, we were hustled
into the hallway, with him carrying a suitcase. We
walk rapidly down to the second floor. I do not yet
know that the President has been shot, in spite of the
fact that I've just witnessed it, and participated in
it. My head is coming together a little now, and I say
groggily that I'd like to see Lee now that we're in
dallas."

"You'll see him," says David Ferrie, then: "Casey, you
never believe me on these things, but they don't even
remember you. We slipped them something. You'll see."

We see Lee in the halls of the second floor, sweeping.
I say, "Hi, Lee!" but he doesn't even look toward me.
Immedi_tely, David ferrie starts yelling at him: "I've
got some friends here and I'm telling you we're
through with you, you dumb sonofabitch, you goddamned
fairy, yeah you goddamned fairy..."

I don't remember it all, but in the end, David Ferrie
pushes Lee in the chest hard. I am embarrassed by this
hostility toward a man I intended to meet as a friend.
Lee is stoical, tight-lipped, and condescending, like
he's just barely putting up with this abuse.

During this, people run by, and a woman yells,
"Something's going on out there!"

Lee starts to walk away, and David Ferrie says, "Where
are you going?"

Lee says: "I'm going downstairs for a Coke." The
altercation with David Ferrie has prevented Lee from
learning that the President has been shot.

As Lee walks away, I step forward apologetically, and
say. "Er...uh...Lee, the new Justice League comic came
out..."

He looks at me blankly, and keeps walking. I feel my
face redden. What could I have done wrong?

I don't remember the trip back, but the next thing I
know, I was in a chair in front of a desk with Dr. E
in it. Dr. E says, "we're taking you to school. Walk
as fast as you can, and the faster you walk, the
faster you'll forget this. you'll be late, so walk up
to a girl, and tell her you went squirrel hunting,
this morning, and as soon as you do, you'll forget all
this, and the whole trip never happened."

Next I was hurrying down the halls of Peck High
School.

But this was the story of little mice, David Ferrie's
mice, that he used in his experiments while he made
the disease that would make everyone who got it bald
like him. No, this was the story of Conjurella, who
divorced Uncle Johnny, and though she wrote for a
while, I never saw Glinda again. No, this was the
story of Castle Mirage, and my mother's obsession with
hypnosis as demonstrated in this book, and how that
obsession might have come about, in an alternate
world, in a paralell time. Not what truly happened,
for that, no one knows, nor will, ever. Not truth, but
Gothic Fiction; Alice: Life, what is it but a dream?

II.

Conjurella Messiah: Necronomicon Monks

by T. Casey Brennan

This is the story of Conjurella Con II. No, the blood
has dried now; the Conjurella memories are no more.
Gone the voices: "Lift him up!", gone the memory, gone
the blood.

It is a decade beyond 1963 now: ten years are passing.
No longer Dallas, but Toronto. David Ferrie is dead.
We are free.

No, this is the story of Cosmicon II, the last weekend
of January, 1973, a comic book convention held at
Winters College, part of York University in Toronto,
an extravaganza that would include future Tonight Show
guest host, P. J. O'Rourke, Ted Nugent, the first
computer game installed in North America (in the
basement of Winters), and, at the last moment, the
blood-stained legend, T. Casey Brennan

No, this is the story of women named A, of abbreviated
names, of Vampirella, of the Absinthe Cafe, of secrets
and legends and dried blood.

This is Cosmicon II. The sixties that spilled the
blood of John Kenedy were over. A memory. A blurred
vision of high school years, followed by the early
sales of fiction stories by T. Casey Brennan...was the
first a cover-featured story in the Major
Magazines/Candar Men's Group men's magazine Charger,
Feb. 1968? (they left out the "T" on my name on the
cover), or was it "Family Curse" in Jim Warren's Eerie
magazine, 1969?

Who knows? This is 1973. David Ferrie is dead; Dallas
is an aborted memory, a dream that couldn't be.

But Cosmicon II will be the scener of another murder,
the murder of the mind of the greatest comic book
publisher that ever lived, Jim Warren. A quarter
century later, a zine called Hungry Freaks would
publish Jim's accouint of a condition which seemed to
attack his central nervous sysytem, a condition which
left him helpless as his company was led to ruin, and
a court-ordered Chapter VI bankruptcy.

Dr. E is close behind; I can feel his cold presence.
Jim Warren has taken to publishing a great many of my
stories. Dr. E is displeased. I am so unsure of
myself; the sudden conversion from being a shy country
boy with few friends and a secret life, to an
overnight celebrity for the award and award
nominations I received for "On the Wings of a Bird",
drawn by the late Jerry Grandeneeti, in Creepy #36,
November 1970 issue, all at the New York Comic Art
Convention at the Statler Hilton in July of 1971. I
stepped off the stage at the awards presentations,
with the Ray Bradbury Cup of Warren's own Frazetta
Awards, and nominations for both the Comic Art Fan and
Shazam Academy of Comic Book Arts awards.

Eerie #38 carried pictures of me receiving that trophy
in 1972; I think there are copies of that issue
floating around Cosmicon II. Flash-bulbs popped, fan
journalists stormed me with tape recorders, mikes, and
questions, and a new era was born in my life. Somehow,
I imagined that, in and amongst the sad, melodramatic
artistry I had perfected -- Warren's letter columns
referred to "the classic T. Casey Brennan allegory",
and compared me to Dali and Rod Serling -- I could
drop little hints and clues of those secrets I carried
so well.

One of my Warren stories began with a man who
resembled me leaning out the window with a rifle,
thinking "Something's going to happen soon...", but I
didn't know then, not all the time, couldn't bear the
Conjurella memory yet.

Some months earlier, I had written "shadow of Dracula"
for Warren's Vampirella comic book; it was recently
reprinted by Harris Comics, who bought Jim's
properties at auction after a court-ordered
bankruptcy, as Vampirella of Drakulon #3, in May 1996.
It was about the Van Helsings from the Bram Stoker
classic, Dracula, it's back in 1897, and they're
attempting to create a blood serum to cure vampirism.
Comic book writers often like to emphasize certain
words in bold-face, and when I showed Daddy, I had
emphasized the words "The Project" on the manuscript,
in a reference to this anti-vampirism nonsense.

Daddy points at the words "The Project", and says:
"You can't do that."

I say: "Why not?" Then I stare in bewilderment, but
inside, that bewilderment is a lie.

Deep within, the Conjurella memory lurks; deep within,
the truth that cannot be: I am only a boy, shy, frail,
sensitive, artistic, but it was my hand that pulled
the trigger. Kidnapped, drugged, tormented, injected:
I am the true cold, dark legend, Lee was innocent. I
killed the President. I shot John Kennedy.

Daddy growls the name of Dr. E.

Closer comes the Conjurella memory; Daddy is right, I
know, but I don't know how, can't remember how Dr. E
could loom forth from the 1950s to forbid me to write
something in a comic book in the 1970s.

In one world, The Project is the Port Hope office of
MK-ULTRA, a hellish reality of forced drug and
hypnosis experiments on children, that will lead to
the asassination of the President.

In another world, The Project is a component in a
vampire comic, a skillful plot device involving a cure
for Vampirella, from the socially inept but brilliant
comic book writer that many readers now feel is Jim
Warren's best ace: T. Casey Brennan.

The two worlds must not collide, but they do, only for
a moment, and I say, inexplicably: "I'm not a little
boy any more. He can't tell me what to do any more."

And now it is 1973 Toronto. Time has washed away the
blood; Dr. E's injections have washed away the memory.
Kennedy is a name in a history book, like Howard
Leslie Brennan. I carry no guilt, no shame, no
recollection of the blood here: JFK in this world was
killed by a lone nut with a defective weapon and no
motive.

I never knew him. I never wept. Not here, not now, not
in the parallell world of Toronto, 1973.

In the days preceding Cosmicon II, I had met, first
Asian A, then American A, and fallen in love with them
both. They weren't spies, public figures, or comic
book publishers, so to put them among the Necronomicon
Monks, they must be half known and half concealed:
Pretty girls named A____ who loved me, once.

Now they are gone, like their love for me. Now they
are memories; now their words of love are as distant
as Dr E's words of torment, or Jim Warren's words of
praise for my comic book stories.

Once they were real. The taste of memories is
bittersweet. In November of 1972, Asian A and I took
the train to Toronto. Asian A put her head on my
shoulder; there is a scent and a taste to Asian women
easily as intoxicating and as addictive as opium. It
Cannot be washed off; it cannot be concealed, and even
now, the scent of an Asian woman will set my heart
pounding, and my lungs hyper-ventillating. The story
of the Necronomicon Monks is truth, but it is absurd
truth, so I will take this one step further, for this
also is true: if an Asian girl, particularly a pretty
Asian girl (which would include about eight out of ten
of them), enters my space, I will know where she is,
what hallways she has walked down, what rooms she has
entered, by scent alone.

But this was the story of the Necronomicon Monks.
Daddy's stories for Street & Smith's 1940s pulp
magazine Love Story were one of the few things that he
ever did that I liked. It was also one of the few
things he ever did that he didn't somehow figure out a
way of using against me. I'd seen Letters to Daddy
from Love Story editor, Daisy Bacon; I think she
published only two of his stories, under the
authorship, Bill Brennan. But he was there, in the
pulps, like Cthulu, Conan, and L. Ron Hubbard, like
Lovecraft's hypothetical book of sorcery, the
Necronomicon. And in 1973, I was developing a strange,
lethal obsession with black magic, that went far
beyond the fictional devices we all used for the
stories in the Warren magazines, Creepy, Eerie, and
Vampirella.

The Necronomicon has always been a subject for debate
among the followers of Lovecraft and the pulps. Some
say Lovecraft created the Necronomicon, like L. Ron
Hubbard's former literary agent, Forry Ackerman,
created Vampirella. Others say it was an actual book
of ancient sorcery, that Lovecraft had discovered and
decided to use in his stories in another 1940s pulp,
Weird Tales. In this latter category is found this
legend: The Necronomicon was discovered by the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, and sealed behind stone in
a monastery in Tibet...even they, who could slaughter
thousands of their own kind, still feared its dark
power.

No: I bear the Dulles Stigmata: protracted delusions
of a religious or occult nature, which are the
trademark symptom of those who were subjected to the
CIA's illegal mind-control experiments of the 1950s,
directly overseen by CIA Director, and later Warren
Commission member, Allen Dulles.

But this is Toronto in 1973. This is Cosmicon II.
Dallas is a decade in the past, and the basement room
where I would remember, and write Conjurella, is more
than two decades in the future. In that fateful
world-to-be of the nineties, I would make contact with
others who plausibly and recognizably (to me, who had
lived it) claimed to have been adbucted and abused by
MK-ULTRA. Yet, the stories would wane into occultism:
terrifying tales of unmistakable CIA abductions are
peppered with the absurd. Abductees, after presenting
what would otherwise be valuable testimony, go on to
relate accounts of neighbors with mind-reading rays,
NASA officials with time machines, and visions of Rose
Kennedy as an ally of the assassins. Nor was I less
guilt in this also. Relating now, in the nineties, my
memories of Dr. E, and the real-life Project, I am
constantly reminded that in the seventies, I wrote
essays for a variety of occult publications, claiming
to be the reincarnation of noted occult figure,
Aleister Crowley. This was as intended by the CIA. I
also carry the Dulles Stigmata. If we are all
reincarnations of Aleister Crowleys, time travelling
through hell with NASA and Rose Kennedy, then our
testimony is far less plausible, except to a very few.

But in Toronto in 1973, I am innocent: not still the
assassin of Dallas that no one saw, not yet the
assassin of Conjurella that no one believed.

Sometime after I fell in love with Asian A, and before
Cosmicon II, I met, and fell in love, with American A.
American A was pretty, but not really quite as pretty
as Asian A, who was indescribably gorgeous. Yet,
American A was not without power over me, and her
power was words of love...promises and whispers, her
fine, slender strands of blonde hair brushing across
my face, so different from the thick, long, sleek
black hair of Asian A.

In the days before Cosmicon II, American A spoke in
promises and whispers, swore she would love me
forever, and begged me not to go to Ontario, where she
knew Asian A awaited me.

But within, there with the memory of Dallas, somehow
concealed and omnipresent, like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart,
was he memory of Linda. Like John Kennedy's blood,
Linda's tears poured over me; like the mythical
Necronomicon of Tibet, Linda's memory was sealed up in
stone, sealed within.

Uncle Johnny was the bad uncle. Quite unlike Uncle
Charley, also of Columbus, Ohio, who had one wife, and
one set of kids, Uncle Johnny married and divorced and
remarried frequently, throughout his unlamented life.
Some time in the early 1950s, he married Aunt Bonnie,
whom I immortalized with the fictional appelation
"Conjurella", in my story of the same name. Her
daughter was Linda, who was the same age as me; for a
while, she came to live with us in Avoca, Michigan.
She was a perfect, exquisite little girl, long blonde
hair, a high I.Q., and an air of placcid quality, even
at the age of five. When she left us with Aunt Bonnie,
in 1953, shortly before I started school, she wore
white muffs with sugar cubes in them; that will always
be my archtypical memory of her, Linda and Aunt Bonnie
leaving. It would not be, it could not be, that
fleeting glimpse of Linda, that day in Dallas, that
hallway on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository Building, that fleeting glimpse, so cruel,
as the MK-ULTRA operatives hustled her past so
quickly.

But this was Toronto in 1973: Linda was only a whisper
here, from two decades past. Here my heart was filled
with Asian A and American A, as I drank heavily,
autographing copies of Creepy and Eerie, wandering
through the maze of Winters College, attempting to
cope with my chaotic love affairs, my alcoholism, and
my new-found fame. Yet deep within, the memory of
Linda lurked, deep within, I knew: she, like me, had
been of the chosen ones. She, like me, had been born
to kill, born to serve The Project, born to kill John
Kennedy for MK-ULTRA, born to serve the hellish
renegades of the Office of Strategic Services who had
chosen us to end the power of the Kennedy dynasty
forever.

Perhaps, sometimes when American A's blonde hair
brushed against my face, there was that whisper of a
memory of Linda. This was Toronto in 1973, this was an
alternate world. I feared the intense cold of Toronto
in the parallell world of Cosmicon II, 1973, and
Winters College was a vast, unchartable labyrinth.
Sometimes, in my wanders through it, I would come upon
a door leading to the cold, white world outside. For a
moment, I would stare transfixed at the wind blowing
little whisps of snow through the bitter cold. Beyond
those doors was the cold world from which I had come,
and the cold world to which I would return. Beyond
those doors was a cold past in which I had lost Linda
and shot President Kennedy, a cold future in which I
would remember, and transcribe, those things in the
legend of Conjurella.

But within those doors was Cosmicon II, a world of
Asian A and American A playing tug-o-war with my
heart, a world of adulation for the poetic, panelled
prose that had suddenly been evoked from me, a world
of comic book stars and comic book fans, a world with
no John Kennedy writhing in blood from my single, only
shot, a world where The Project was only a brief,
emotion-packed scene from Vampirella. Within the doors
of Cosmicon II, this was truth; the other world, the
alternate world, where The Project was a hell that
MK-ULTRA had created for children, was far behind and
far before.

Yet, paradoxicly, obscenely, unfairly, in that
alternate world of Toronto 1973, Dr. E had stalked me,
and now Jim Warren was his target. Here ate Cosmicon
II, I had found my Shangri-La, a world of comic book
and trivialities, a world of American A and Asian A
battling inside my head for my heart, a world with no
blood of JFK that I had spilled, no sinister designs
of Dr. E and The Project.

But somehow, beyond the lies, in the labyrinth of
Winters College, Dr. E lurked, stalking Jim Warren;
somehow, beyond the comic books, beyond the scent of
Asian A and the whispers of American A, the memory of
The Project lurked.

"You're part of the New Frontier, Casey," Dr. E had
told me earnestly, in the presence of two associates,
after the Kennedy election victory of 1960.

To those who knew, but had been lied to,The Project
was the CIA's ultimate weapon against Castro's Cuba: a
secret invasion force which would combine the
traditional warfare of the past with the super-science
of the future.

Lee believed. Major General Edwin Walker did not.
Walker had been a prominent activist for the
right-wing John Birch Society, which, in that era, had
still been enamored of America's Military, and
America's espionage apparatus. MK-ULTRA had sought a
protective cover of rightists and paramilitarists,
standing ready with their own troops, to aid in the
supposed "invasion of Cuba". Those who did believe had
included American Nazi Party leader, George Lincoln
Rockwell, the scholarly but sinister Dr. Fred G.
Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade
(which shared offices with the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee in New Orleans), and martial arts expert
Bruce Lee, hell-bent on liberating his people from the
murderous brand of communism which had overtaken
China.

But Walker had refused altogether, and Lee, under
orders from David Ferrie, his commanding officer in
the Civial Air Patrol, had fired on Walker and missed,
deliberately, as a warning. Lee believed, but Walker
did not. George Lincoln Rockwell, chess player,
essayist, Nazi leader, friend: he believed also. ("Get
Lincoln out of that Nazi suit, and talk to him
man-to-man, and he's all right," someone had told me
then.)

"Call George and tell him the invasion is off," David
Ferrie said, light-heartedly, after the assassination.
Someyears later, Rockwell would write, sympatheticly,
"Casey thinks he's a Jew but he's not."

But Rockwell, like Edwin Walker, like Bruce Lee, like
Lee himself, would perish. The sicties would claim the
lives of George Lincoln Rockwell and Bruce Lee; Walker
would die later, and horribly.

Rockwell would be shot outside a laundromat, by one of
his own men, in a virtual coup-de-tat by the CIA,
which would place the American Nazi Party squarely in
the camp of the Kennedy assassins, directed no longer
by their own eccentricities, but by the very
government which they had purported to oppose. Major
General Edwin Walker would be stalked and homosexually
raped at a freeway rest stop,, by men who would later
identify him as a willing participant; he died shortly
thereafter, the pain and humiliation were too great.

And Bruce Lee: the cut-outs of memories, the fleeting
glimpses of a past somehow lost, like that fleeting
glimpse of Linda...

That fleeting memory; no before, no after, just the
memory. We are in a hotel room, somewhere. It is
before the JFK assassination, sometime.

Lee is there, like Bruce. They have both seen the
children, Dr. E's children, sitting limply in chairs
with needles in their necks, headsets on their ears,
screens before their vacant faces. Dr. E says: it is
necessary: child assassins formed with the
super-science of the future, child assassins, a proud
tradition of both sides of the now concluded great
warr, child assassins necessaruy for the invasion of
Cuba. It has already grated on Lee; later, he will
seek a friend and confidant in Dallas police officer,
J.D. Tippitt, whom he will tell.

But for Bruce, it is intolerable now.

"Get rid of the kids," Bruce says, "We don't need
them."

Lee sits, staring downward, his hand on his forehead,
wearing that sly, secret smile, only ever-so-slightly
visible.

"I can't," Lee says softly, and matter-of-factly.

Bruce side-steps into position and gestures toward me.

"Get rid of the kid," Bruce says, "Get him out of
here. Take him home. Lose him. Anything."

"I can't," Lee repeats, like deja vu.

Bruce begins a series of blocks, cries, and kicks.

I look at Lee questioningly with drugged vision: Dr. E
or David Ferrie must have injected me again, recently.

Lee says, chuckling, "Well, Bruce goes a little crazy
like that sometimes. There's nothing we can do. It
will pass."

Under the hypnotic drug, I take these words literally,
not as a joke, a game. I wait, horrified, for Bruce's
supposed attack to pass. After, Lee says to Bruce, in
earnest: "That was great. That was magnificent."

But this is Toronto in 1973: this is Cosmicon II. I
never knew them here. The air-tight doors of Winters
College seal out the cold, the wind, the drifting
snow, seal out the tormented past of Dallas, seal out
the bleak future of Conjurella. Within these doors,
there are no memories of the aborted invasion, no
memories of the single shot which my hand fired, no
memories of Christian Anti-Communism or Fair Play for
Cuba...only comic books, and fans of my Warren
stories, only the spectral phantasms of American A and
Asian A, not present, but there in spirit, battling
for the heart of T. Casey Brennan, not the child
assassin, but the poet, not the pawn of Dr. E and
MK-ULTRA, but the pawn of pretty girls, touching,
whispering, promising, their hair in my face, their
scent in my nostrils.

Here, in this sealed off world of Winters College in
1973, T. Casey Brennan was not the secret assassin; he
was Archie, torn between Betty and Veronica; he was
not the drugged, helpless pawn of Dr. E, he was Dobie
Gillis, lost in philosophy and love affairs...

Yet, Dr. E lurked, even here. Inexplicably, Jim Warren
had been strip searched by customs officials, upon
entering Canada, en route from New York. What did they
know, what did they suspect? What motives did they
attribute, what foul plans did they suspect?

Initially, it had seemed impossible to make it to
Cosmicon II, where I had received an invitation to
appear, complete with complimentary room at Winters
College; Winters College, where the doors could block
not only cold, but memories...

And American A, who still loved me then, had begged me
not to go. But go I did, riding into Port Huron with a
friend that morning. I call a Canadian taxi from Port
Huron, ride across the Blue Water Bridge, and soon, I
am at the Canadian National Railway station in Sarnia.
Or maybe I went to Asian A's apartment before the
train station; I don't know anymore, I'm not a
witness, I can't remember.

The Sarnia-based taxi is called "A Stan-Lee Taxi". The
driver gives me his card, and later, I show it at the
convention, as a take-off on the name of the Marvel
Comics publisher known as Stan Lee.

The driver lays a rap that could be entitled: "Great
Tips I Have Been Given". He tells me of a rider
employed by a tire manufacturer, who ships him a full
set of tires, later, as a tip.

He wants comic books. But soon I will have no comic
books. Soon, the bleak future of Conjurella will
propel me into a network of hippie communes, homeless
shelters and free meals. Soon, the insulating doors of
Winters College willinsulate me no more. I sent him no
comic books, though I may have promised.

I board the train for Toronto in Sarnia. I watch, sad
and melancholy, as the Canadian countryside and the
memories flicker past me.

I am alone now. Not the sleek black torrents of hair
of Asian A on my shoulder now, not the promises and
whispers of American A, only sadness, when there
should have been hope.

Within are the memories, forgotten, but not gone, like
a word on the tip of one's tongue, but somehow out of
consciousness, somehow out of reach.

In the last days of David Ferrie's life, in mid-1966,
and early 1967, David Ferrie met with us on several
occassions. I was always drugged and hypnotized during
those meetings, so the words would just barely filter
through, in little bits and fragments. I was no
credible witness, then or now. But I knew Dr. E and
David Ferrie were creating a disease to attack Africa.
It must have been 1966 when David Ferrie told me they
had successfully infected someone.

"It's going to fly!" David Ferrie said of the AIDS
virus, grinning proudly. Daddy smiled a sheepish
smile, and nodded. He was afraid then. So am I. Even
now.

But within the insulating doors of Winters College
awaited the Absinthe Cafe. The memories are
non-sequential now, blurred visions of comic books,
Jim Warren, fellow celebrity guests, and probably the
most outstanding performance ever given by noted rock
musician and hippie deerslayer, Ted Nugent.

Nugent did not socialize with us, but future Tonight
Show guest host P.J. O'Rourke drank that night at the
same table with Jim Warren, me, and a second-rate
comic book writer named Denny O'Neil. The subject of a
controversial underground newspaper called Screw comes
up, then managed by Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein.

Someone, I think Denny O'Neil, says: "Jim Buckley,
he's the real intellectual behind that operation." At
some point, Al Goldstein will be arrested in Cuba and
charged by Fidel Castro with being a fellow CIA agent.

And then someone says, "The Mafia does a pretty good
job of distributing it."

P.J. O'Rourke frowns, sips his drink, and says, "Yeah,
until they take it over."

But my mind is on American A, on the promises and
whispers. She wants me to leave Asian A, wants me to
marry her, wants me to believe in witchcraft, as she
does...

And within, the Dulles Stigmata lurks, like the scars
of Dr. E's needles in my neck. In the Hebrew bible,
the serpent who tempts Eve is NChSh, and the Messiah
yet to come, is MShYCh. In Hebrew, every letter is a
number also, hence, the Qabbaliastic science of
Gematria, the study of the letters and the numbers.
Hebrew is called, by its proponents, a mathematically
correct language: words with the same numeration, are
words with the same meaning, in spite of any apparent
differences, which must be resolved by meditation.

The Dulles Stigmata lurks. NChSh is Nun (50), Cheth
(8), Shin (300), 358. MShYCh is Mem (40), Shin (300),
Yod (10), Cheth (8), 358. Brennan, transliterated into
Hebrew, is Beth (2), Resh (200), He (5), Nun (50), Nun
(50), Aleph (1), Nun (50), 358.

The Dulles Stigmata lurks. Amwerican A wants me to
believe in magic, and I do. And in timeless time,
beyond Dallas, beyond Toronto, beyond the 60s, or the
70s, or the 90s, the words form: I am the Last
Witness. I speak great things and blasphemies. I am
the first to shoot, and the last to testify. I wash
clean the blood. They must have given me clues as to
how they made it; somehow, somehow, I know, AIDS was
begun in Dachau...the torture was only incidental, a
means to an end. Somehow, it was necessary to break
down the resistance of human flesh through torture, so
that such a condition, flesh without natural defenses,
flesh without immunity, could be duplicated in a
laboratory. And Dr. E was an Osteopath; was Osteopathy
only a cover, or was it a component in the creation of
the virus that the World Health Organization would
later spread, in vaccines, throughout Africa? Later,
in the 1980s, the World Health Organization would
write about me in their Geneva-based journal, World
Health, in their October 1983 (page 30) and
January-February 1986 (page 9) issues.

The Dulles Stigmata lurks, and soon, I will be
attempting to duplicate the exact style of roaring
twenties occultist, Aleister Crowley, in a variety of
occult journals, both great and small.

This The Dulles Stigmata lurks, but for now, in the
Absinthe Cafe, there is no memory of the blood of John
Kennedy, only the memory of American A's kisses, and I
want to call her, to tell her again that I love her.
Somehow, I find my way through the labyrinth that is
Winters College, to a wall with two (or is it three)
secluded pay phones. I call American A in Michigan,
and breathe the most oft-repeated phrase of my youth.

"I love you."

She is sad. She wanted to bolt from Michigan and
follow me to Toronto.. "Don't be surprised if I show
up there, after you," she says before I leave for
Cosmicon II. She asks me to swear that I will love her
always, and that I will always be true to her. And I
do swear. It is only half a lie. I can love her
always, but I cannot be true.

I return to the Absinthe, and this is mystery.

Jim Warren says he has called for a prostitute to be
sent to his room.

"To a man like me, time is money," Warren says, "I
don't have time for the kind of courtship that you
do."

All of the guests, including myself, were provided
with complimentary rooms at Winters College, and to
anyone who remembers Cosmicon II from the guests of
honor's perspective, any prostitute who could find the
damned rooms on her own, would have to be considered a
possible CIA agent from the gitgo.

Warren leaves, and returns shortly. He remarks to me
are Suddenly inexplicable, out of rational context.

"Well," Jim Warren says, "I want to keep using your
stories, but she says I can't. She says I have to get
rid of you."

This is the way home:

It would be a matter of split-second timing. I would
take the train from Toronto to Sarnia, where Asian A
would meet me. I would stay overnight with her, then,
in the morning, she would take me across the Blue
Water Bridge to Port Huron, to the bus station, where
I would take the bus down M-21 as far as Emmett, to
the cemetary at Bricker Road. There, Americvan A would
meet me, and drive me the rest of the way home.

In the morning, at Asian A's, I hear Crocodile Rock on
the radio, a song they played so frequently on the
radio whilke American A and I would be parked in front
of my parents' house, making out. I am sad, and full
of longing: will I lose American A? Will I let her
love, her promises and whispers, slip away, for the
sake of holding Asian A?

I go down on Asian A in the morning; I hardly have
time to pull my tongue out of her vagina before she
speeds me to the Port Huron bus station. We just make
it, and I get on the bus to Emmett just before it
leaves. There is no time to wash my face, rinse my
mouth, no time for anything at all.

The bus lets me off at the cemetary at Bricker Road
and M-21, where both my parents will someday be
buried. American A arrives, a few minutes late. She
leaps from the car, and embraces mwe, beaming. I
resist her, only so slightly.

"Don't you want to kiss me?" she exclaims.

Then her tongue is raping my mouth, and her blonde
hair is in my face, which I have just pulled from
Asian A's pussy.

There was so little time.

This is the way of conjecture:

To those who believe, anything proven by the Qabballah
is true absolutely. There is simply no question.

Hypothetical Jim Warren enters the room at the end of
the labyrinth, the prostitute on his arm. With mock
impulsiveness, she embraces him, giggling, and her
ringed finger finds his neck. It is only a pin-prick
at first that he feels there, a jagged fingernail,
perhaps, a harmless scar of love. But suddenly, there
is the weakness; he wants to pull away, wants to
question, wants to wonder at this, but he cannot.

There is so little time.

The girl counts the seconds as hypothetical Jim
Warren, all but overcome now, succumbs to the tiny
hypo concealed in her ring. A decade later, he will be
a virtual invalid, as the deadly MK-ULTA poison
accomplishes the long-term job for which it was
intended.

At last, hypothetical Jim Warren slumps to the floor.
It does not matter; he will not remember.

Dr. E enters with two henchmen, nods to the prostitute
matter-of-factly, and says:

"So this is the great Jim Warren."

But as hypothetical Jim Warren falls, I rise up, the
Dulles Stigmata gnawing at my soul, as the ring poison
has on his. I am the cold, dark one. I am the Last
Witness. I wash clean the blood.

The End