JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES AND THE DEATH OF BARON GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT

by

T. Casey Brennan

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.