Kenyon Hall Gothic Manors

Kenyon Hall Gothic Manors

“It was all very queer—

but queerer things were

yet to come.”

—William Holden,

Sunset Blvd

Yes, this is Kenyon Hall, Emporia, Kansas.

It's about 5 o'clock in the morning. That's the demolition squad, complete with cranes, trucks and jack-hammers. They’ve done their job renovating and remodeling the old wreck of a building.

The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis—out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion.

Come to think of it, the whole campus seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis... out of beat with the rest of the world... crumbling apart in slow motion.

There was once a college... or rather the ghost of a college... with faded buildings and sagging roofs... And of course it had an administration building. What college didn't then?... It was empty now. Or was it?

It was a big pink elephant of a place—the kind that crazy college people outta the past built. An old dumpy place gets an unhappy look—and this one had it in spades.

It was like that old dame in Great Expectations—that Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress. And her grudge about being stood up—taking it out on the world. But now the game was up—either renovate and remodel it into a senior housing apartment building… Or tear it down.

They renamed it the Kenyon Hall Gothic Manor—the single and double bedroom apartments soon filled up. The same with the Broadview Hotel—down on Sixth.

I paused in the desolate overgrown patio—overgrown with the usual decaying Emporia decadence. A naked Cupid here & there—an empty building left standing. The Carnegie Library a domed fossil ruins…

“What kept you so long?”

I looked up at one of the apartment windows. It was Anita B. Rice—good gawd, I thought she died years ago.

“That’s what they all thought,” she said. She could almost read my mind—I was simply shocked.

Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad acting can be. This promised to go the limit.

There's nothing tragic about being a thousand years old. Not unless you're trying to be like a hundred.

How could I breathe and exist in this retirement home full of Norma Desmond clones? Around every corner, Anita B. Rice... more Anita B. Rice’s... and still more Anita B. Rice’s?

So she was waiting for me—she’d heard through the grapevine that I was doing a story on Kenyon Hall Gothic Manor. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Anita B. Rice. She was ready now to tell her whole Story...

Thanks to genetic engineering and the wonders of modern medicine—she’d not only undergone a face lift but also she’d been transplanted into a new cloned body crafted after the visage of Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch of the East from The Wizard of Oz!!!!

The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her in an aura of terrifying horror. She had the same out-of-style teardrop eyeglasses perched on her pointy nose—with tiny little glinting rhinestone fake diamonds glittering at the ends of her glasses.

I couldn’t see them but I bet that she was still wearing those lace-up black clod-hopper boots—the ones with huge heels the size of Firestone tires. And she was mean-looking too—looking forward to getting her claws into me once again after all these years.

“You're a writer, they say.”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, are you or aren't you?”

“That's what my byline at the Emporia Gazette says.”

“And you have written biographies, haven't you?”

“I sure have. Want a list of my victims?”

“I want to ask you something. Come up here.”

“Last one I wrote was about Lorne Anderson. The whole thing played on a torpedo boat.”

(I was thinking about the old familiar story. You help a timid little old lady cross a crowded street, she turns out to be a multimillionaire and leaves you all her money.)

Upstairs in her apartment, Anita had piles and piles of manuscripts. A whole history of EHS and generations of dummies. It was going to be a small town expose—entitled “I’m Simply Appalled!”

“That's the trouble with you writers, you think you know all the plots.”

“Anita, you're a woman of 150, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being old, not unless you try to be 50.”