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KOLCHAK DOES NOT QUIT. He digs, gets to the bottom of things.
It is late. He is watching a rerun of The Night Stalker on ABC, on his black and white TV in his bedroom. The episode is titled “The Sentry.” He is excited because the summary in TV Guide suggests that Kolchak encounters some kind of small tyrannosaur in an underground storage facility—a small tyrannosaur, for the Kid, meaning allosaur, no question. The show begins as usual with Kolchak entering an empty, darkened newsroom, whistling like the Kid’s father, tossing his hat onto the coat stand (which he always misses), and seating himself at a typewriter where he bangs out: DARREN MCGAVIN AS—then the title of the program. Then the clock and fan stop and he looks over his shoulder and the frame freezes, fading out on his terrified eye.
“The Sentry” begins with Kolchak in a Merrymount Archive, Inc. golf cart, humming down seemingly endless corridors lit with banks of white florescent lights, until he stumbles upon a labyrinth of rough-hewn tunnels, lit only by propane torches. “This is one story I may not get to file in person,” he says into his tape recorder, “so I’ll have to talk fast.” This is followed by flashbacks in which two Merrymount employees, Kipper and Coogan—who is last seen installing light bulb fixtures in a seemingly endless corridor—are killed. The men are killed by a clawed, scaly thing in the dark—heard but barely seen—which smashes lights one after the other as it approaches. “And now,” says Kolchak, “it’s after me.”
But Kolchak is always one step ahead. When he wants to see the autopsy of a victim he dresses in scrubs and goes right in; when he wants to examine the locations of the killings he poses as a representative for a company seeking to rent storage space; when told by the General Sales Manager—Ritchie Cunningham’s father from Happy Days—that there’s no time to view the facilities today, Kolchak just smiles and escorts him into the elevator. When the G.M. has a confrontation with an eccentric staff scientist, Dr. Verhyden, Kolchak listens, eyes darting back and forth between them, while Verhyden speaks of “mysterious occurrences” and “strange people who aren’t what they appear to be.” When the G.M. has to take a phone call from Irene Lamont, a comely, leggy Police Lieutenant with a history of spellbinding and misdirecting reporters (all, that is, except Kolchak), Kolchak does what any good reporter would do, he ducks from the room—into the Union Workers’ break room, where he chats up a worker eating lunch, works him for info, telling him he’s an insurance investigator, bribing him with everything in his wallet, asking him where was Kipper’s body found? Was Coogan killed in Sector R? His body was found in Sector M? Where’s Sector M? No, no, they haven’t changed the alphabet, ha-ha! Then M comes before R, Sector M is on the way to Sector R, ha-ha, sure... How do I get out to see M and R? Just follow the signs, sure. I’m a fool to go out there without extra hazard pay? Ha-ha!
The Kid is startled when the commercials come on—the audio level is so much higher than the program’s. He cranks the volume down, glancing at the ceiling tiles, directly over which lays his parents’ bedroom. The near-silence is startling in its own right. He hears something tick against the window high on the wall, so softly he wonders if he has imagined it. Then it comes again, barely audible, tick...tick, as though the slightest twig is brushing the glass. On the TV, Kolchak searches dark halls with a big silver flashlight—swishing its beam back and forth over the ceiling, illuminating broken bulbs in pools of light.
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THE STEP LADDER RATTLES as he sets it sideways beneath the window, pressing the aluminum hinges down, locking its legs. “I’m gonna rip the lid off this lizard creature affair,” says Kolchak on the TV. “And I’m gonna find out who those guys in the water department really are...” The Kid climbs the ladder slowly, gripping his flashlight. He can hear the ticking clearly now that he’s closer to the glass. “Carl, look...” —Tony Vincenzo again, Kolchak’s brash but lovable editor—“Just drop the whole thing. I told Lt. Lamont that I would agree to back-peddle to keep you from hindering her investigation. She agreed if anything happened to phone the exclusive directly to me.”
The Kid pauses on the third rung from the top, his legs trembling—he is not quite eye-level with the window. It will have to do; he doesn’t want to go higher. He hears a door jamb squeak down the hall—his brother, he supposes, making a bathroom run.
“To you?” says Kolchak. “To me.”
“Not to me?”
“No.”
“To you?”
“Yes.”
He switches on the flashlight. The first thing he sees before the beam dims is a solitary yellow-jacket—scurrying along the molding on the other side of the glass. It startles him—in the brief white flare—the angry yellow stripes, the busy little legs, the undulating thorax.
“You sucker. Because she ain’t never gonna call, and I think that it comes from very high up.”
He bangs the flashlight against his palm, trying to revive it. It pulses white and burnt-ocher. He aims it through the window, pressing its lens against the glass. Two more wasps scurry past, then a third, a fourth, some in the opposite direction so that they pile and flop over each other. The flashlight’s beam falters. He bangs it against his palm, sees the papery edge of a hive before the brown beam dims to nothing. He is shaking with excitement, can barely hold the flashlight; his legs feel like rubber. He climbs back down the ladder.
He empties the dead batteries onto his bed, finds his tape recorder, uses a penny to open the little hatch. He pries out the batteries—smooth, shiny polyethylene coatings reassuring his fingertips—loads them into the flashlight, thwump, thwump, like missiles in a grenade launcher. He glances at the TV, where Kolchak is climbing into a wooden crate marked: FRAGILE / PRECISION INSTRUMENTS. “Watch the hat!” says Kolchak as they tamp the lid down. “You are now a precision instrument,” says one of the tampers.
He remounts the ladder, ascending more confidently, pausing nonetheless on the third rung from the top. He aims the flashlight carefully, wanting, when he thumbs it on, to see it all in a rush; the hive in its entirety, the scurrying bees, the crepe paper layers. He slides the magnet-switch forward. Nothing happens. He slides it back and forward, still nothing. He unscrews the base of the flashlight. The batteries slide into his palm—clicking, rolling—he fumbles them in his excitement, holding onto one while the other claps and clangs down the rungs of the ladder.
He grips the aluminum legs, doesn’t breathe.
“Carl,” says Lt. Lamont on the TV, “if you have any info that will shed light on this you better start belching it up, or I guarantee you a graduate degree in license plate making down at the state farm. You don’t know how bad I can be.”
“Oh, I got a pretty good idea, baby!”
He climbs down gingerly and gets under the covers, switching his pillow to the foot of the bed so he can watch the rest of the show. He still is not convinced that his mother has not heard, that she is not cinching her bathrobe and heading his way right now. He watches Kolchak, knowing she could not punish him for watching his favorite show, on the TV they put in his room. Kolchak is being spoken to by the Union Foreman/U.S. Colonel, one of Verhyden’s “strange people who aren’t what they appear to be,” saying, “Look, I don’t know how long I can hold off Miss Lamont. She wants to bust you bad. Open up with me.”
The Kid exhales, rolls onto his back. He stares at the ceiling tiles.
“Yeah, well, it’s little things, like how you’ve kept a lid on all this. Yeah, see, you think that maybe there’s more of these creatures. That maybe they’ll get into your secret silos, your underground missiles and SAC bases—maybe they have already, huh? Well—did you ever think they might be down there in the subways too and underground tunnels and underground garages? Did ya ever think about that? I mean, when you gonna warn the general public about this?”
“When we feel the time is right.”
“And who is we?”
Then there’s a crashing sound and the kid flips around, sees the titular creature, “The Sentry,” crashing through the cinderblock wall. But it is not an allosaurus. It is just a crocodile-like thing which walks like a man and is the size of a man, with arms like a man, and legs like a man. When the commercial break comes there is dead silence, followed by a title card which reads: STAY TUNED FOR THE CONCLUSION OF “THE SENTRY.” TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR HEE-HAW. KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER HAS BEEN CANCELLED BY ABC. The last thing he hears before falling asleep is a worker yelling, “Verhyden’s dead, and I’m getting’ out of here. You’re on your own!”
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HE DREAMS that he is at the Starlight Drive-in Theater, swinging next to Sheldon, who knifes his legs and arches his back, swinging higher and faster with each pendulous arc. In the dream he has forgotten their differences. He has forgotten that he himself would prefer to swing slowly, leisurely, and so kicks the sand again and again, trying to catch up, trying to fly as high as his brother. But he cannot do it; he feels mired in the air like quicksand, his limbs made of concrete, while Sheldon swings faster and higher, laughing, his velocity making a whooshing and whirring, like radial tires on the highway or yellow jackets swarming, or the sound of dead air in secret tape recordings. Surely Sheldon must know something that he does not. Sheldon has been given a secret gift or curse as it may be; whatever, it has made him taller, smarter, more powerful. He flies while the Kid, who has come to a complete stop, can only watch: as his brother swings higher and higher, becoming harder and harder to track, until he cannot see him at all, only blackness, the straw hat fluttering down, the empty swing swaying, chains jangling, its rubber seat rocking from the sudden imbalance.