Once The truth is revealed can you ever forget it?

So here I am, another day in LA.

Not too hot. Not too windy. Not raining frogs, bleeding walls, or anything that would make a sane man turn around and move to Idaho.
Just another normal day. Which, for me, usually means the fuse is already lit, and I am the only idiot standing close enough to smell the smoke.  I used to think strange things happened around me by accident. Bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time. Maybe the universe had a sense of humor, and my name was written on the bathroom wall somewhere between HELP ME and CALL THIS GUY FIRST.

Now I know better, these things find me.  The unexplained. The impossible. The ugly little cracks in the world where something reaches through and starts pulling. I do not understand why it always seems to be me standing there when it happens, but I have accepted one thing: if something crawls, flies, melts, whispers, bites, curses, or decides humanity looks better from the inside out, sooner or later, it knocks on my door, sometimes literally.  That is why I started keeping a bag in my car. Nothing fancy. Nothing government-issued. Just a collection of things a normal man should never need unless his life has gone badly off the rails. Tools. Salt. Tape. Wire. Whatever I can get away with carrying without someone asking too many questions.

Why, that is simple. I feel like I am a magnet for the unexplained and the unknown. And when those things show up, they usually do not come with a polite note or a return address. They come hungry, angry, enchanted, half-rotted, half-hidden, or wearing a face they borrowed from something that should have stayed dead.  How do I deal with them? Well, it's also simple. I remove them from the planet.  Yeah, sometimes that means I kill, maim, break, burn, crush, or destroy. Occasionally, that involves a building. Sometimes fire. More fire than my insurance agent would probably enjoy hearing about. I do not hear about anyone else handling this kind of thing on what feels like a monthly schedule, but I know one thing for sure.

It is always me they come looking for, as you might be wondering what the point of this is. That is fair. Let’s deal with that now.  Lately, with the oddities stacking up, every friend I thought I had seems to vanish once I tell the truth. I come clean because that feels like the responsible thing to do. I explain what I saw. I explain what happened. I explain why there is a hole where there should not be one, why a person who was alive is no longer shaped like a person, or why a room smells like death and melted pennies.  Then come the colorful words, before they leave me standing alone again.

So I have decided that since I cannot get comfort from a shoulder, a laugh, or one decent human being willing to say, “Karl, that sounds awful, and also maybe you should stop climbing into places that want to eat you,” I will get it from my second love, the page. Just a note. An account. Something written down before memory gets brave enough to start lying to me. I am calling them the Kolchak Papers or Files. The name hasn't been settled yet, anyway. It can wait until there are more of them. If I live long enough, maybe I will even pick one.  And yes, you are probably wondering how you are reading this if these pages are supposed to be for my own collection. Here is the truth. When writers write, they want someone to read what they put their time into. We can pretend otherwise, but that is just another kind of fiction.
So I know that someday I will feel the pull to set this straight for the world. To explain what was out there before someone else gives it a cleaner name, locks it in a file cabinet, or calls it mass hysteria with a straight face.

This will be the first file. So when that day comes, I will remember exactly what I was thinking on the twentieth day of October, 2014, just today, and just me.  Just the quiet before whatever comes next decides I have had enough peace.  So now I will close this file, which I am sure will eventually be filled with something. I wish there were a better word, but “thing” seems to cover it when you do not have enough information, it has too many teeth, and it wants me dead.  I will wait for the next THING that wants me dead.  It will probably start on the next page, because that is how this works. I'm sitting here, minding my own business, then poof, there it is.

Whatever it is,  just so you know, no, I am not crazy.  Even though this has started, and I am sure you might think I escaped Belview just yesterday. I did not. I am still here. Still writing. Still breathing. For now.  So there you have it, the first words from he who will be hunted by many.

With that, I will bid you bye from my 36-year-old me until you read what is next when it comes for me, they always do, that is sure, they always do.