The Energy Eater - Recap

The city of Chicago sparkles with monuments to man’s achievement; his aspirations, his quest for the truth, his respect for the law, now a different sort of monument. There was a theory that dying institutions erect their own mausoleums before they die. This particular monument was to be a hospital and research center, dedicated to extending the life of man, improving the quality of that life. It succeeded instead in introducing a new horror, a new way of death – a mystery.

I became involved just after the hospital’s completion, covering the dedication. The building’s construction had been a little rocky. Two Indian high steel workers had fallen off the top floors, but that was quickly forgotten and never explained. No matter: now it was dedication time and everything was roses. It was all I could do to stay awake.

Carl is covering the dedication of the new Lakefront Hospital and Research Center. A cute receptionist gives him a press kit. As he strikes up a conversation with her the bar closes and a speaker takes the stage. The speaker introduces medical director Ralph Carrie and builder Walter Green, the men chiefly responsible for building the hospital. The speech drones on punctuated by Carl’s quietly cynical “bravo.” Elsewhere in the building a technician at breaker panel 15 operates switches. Behind him the wall plaster begins to crack; he whirls to shut off the power but is engulfed in sparks and flame. The panel shorts out and small flames erupt from it. Upstairs the lights flicker. The speaker cuts his words short and begins the walking tour. Due to time constraints, he says, the tour will not include the lower levels.

Carl breaks away from the official tour and ducks through a door marked “Hospital Personnel Only.” He finds an elevator to the lowest level: LL3. Inside the elevator he tries to coax a conversation from nurse Janice Eisen without success. Carl loses Nurse Eisen when she enters the pathology laboratory where she works. LL3 is very hot despite cool air flowing from the air conditioning vents. Wandering alone, Carl finds breaker panel 15 in ruins. A man nearby is sweeping the floor; Carl asks him about the cracks in the wall. He says settling from pile driver operations caused the cracks, but when pressed admits that he only knows that because his foreman told him. He won’t reveal the name of his foreman or even his own name. As Carl continues through the basement the sweeper moves so that he can see where Carl is going. In a short side corridor Carl begins to hear a high-pitched whirring and sees the walls shake and start to crack. That’s enough to scare him out of the basement.

Back at his desk Carl phones a contact and learns that the funding for the hospital came from conventional sources – no union pension funds or blind loans. Tony isn’t happy with “Carl’s” angle on the hospital condemning it for lack of geriatric facilities. He knows Carl dragooned Miss Emily into writing the two-page piece for him so he could do other work. Tony’s objection isn’t as much to the story as it is to Carl reassigning his work; Tony believes he and only he should hand out the assignments. He’s further outraged when he discovers Carl studying a set of stolen hospital blueprints!

Tony gets a call and must return to his desk. Carl continues his own research by placing a call to Don Kibbey, an architectural engineer Carl once helped out of a jam. As he prepares to meet with Kibbey, Tony returns from his own phone call and offers Carl an plum assignment: write about the shotgun murder of mobster “Little Augie” Cesaré and his bodyguards. But Carl isn’t interested in that story. He’s already got a story and reminds Tony of his own maxim, “one story at a time, Carl, one story at a time.” Tony wants Carl to do the Cesaré story. Employing his trademark trickery, Carl manages to get Tony to “show him how it’s done” by doing the mob story himself.

Carl believes the hospital is going to collapse and wants to write a story about that. To learn more Carl takes Don Kibbey into the hospital by disguising himself as a physician and Kibbey as his patient. LL3 is still very warm and there is evidence of more cracks and repair attempts. Kibbey agrees there’s a severe problem that could be the result of poor quality building materials, an error by the geologist, or even previously unknown geologic problems below the structure. Such problems might also explain the heat. Regardless of the cause, the problems are serious – but Kibbey was once the victim of unsubstantiated allegations and won’t put anything in writing. All he will admit is that Carl has turned up enough to warrant additional investigation.

The lights brighten and the strange whirring begins again; the floor shakes and a nearby light explodes. Kibbey has clearly never experienced anything like this before; he races for the elevator and flees the building. Carl chances a visit to the pathology lab and has Nurse Eisen paged. He confronts her with what he knows about the shakes, the heat and the damage. Eisen scoffs at first, but when Carl mentions that people are dying and suggests the hospital bring in an engineer she sighs and says it will take more than an engineer. She reveals that earlier in the day a patient in a heart-lung machine was “horribly killed”. She also shows Carl the body of the electrician who died while servicing breaker panel 15. All of the victims had some connection with electrically operated equipment.

Upstairs, Carl waits to visit Dr. Carrie, the medical director. When he sees a reporter turned away Carl pretends to be with Dr. Hartfield and follows him into the conference room where Dr. Carrie is discussing the deaths. Carrie describes something unprecedented in the annals of medicine: the victims’ blood has been reduced to a tar like substance. The substance contains almost no plasma; it is little more than a mass of packed cells. As Carrie begins to divide research tasks among the assembled physicians, Detective Webster enters the room. Carl is unable to evade the detective. His subterfuge revealed, he is escorted out of the building. Detective Webster scoffs at Carl’s idea that a “force beyond his comprehension” is trying to destroy the building.

A new line of inquiry takes Carl to the Starret building on Michigan to talk to the construction crew – the same crew that walked off the hospital job after several unfortunate accidents. They won’t speak except through their shaman, Jim Elkhorn. At first Elkhorn won’t say why he pulled his men from the Lakefront job. The matter is tribal business not to be discussed with reporters or outsiders. But Carl persists and Elkhorn finally tells him “Matchemonedo” killed the men. Then he slams the door to end the short interview.

Back at the Lakefront hospital, a quadriplegic named Claudia Granoff is confined to an electric bed. Moments after a nurse leaves the room sparks fly from the bed and flames erupt. Ms. Granoff’s quadriplegia becomes the least and last of her worries.

Carl sneaks back into the hospital basement by wearing a lab coat and using a stack of bedpans to hide his face. Workers supervised by Walter Green are repairing the damage. Carl confronts Green with Kibbey’s theories and suggests the building is unsafe and should be evacuated. Green dismisses the theories and suggests the evacuation begin with Carl. Carl sneaks away when Green walks around the corner in search of a police officer and again buttonholes Nurse Eisen in Pathology. Eisen tells him about Claudia Granoff’s death: all her organs “seized up” and the bed she was laying in “went crazy.”

Carl enlists Janice Eisen in his plan to visit Jim Elkhorn and learn more. Elkhorn has a weakness for pretty women, so Janice will serve as Carl’s entrée. Carl has fed Janice some questions. Between them they tease more information about “Matchemonedo” from Elkhorn. Elkhorn reveals that Matchemonedo lived about where Lakefront Hospital sits now. It predates both the Illinois and Iroquois Indians and appears in tales of the region going back to the earliest explorations. It was said to be invisible and Indian legend described it as a “bear god.” To pacify it the Indians drove buffalo to its location and it would eat them. Elkhorn suggests this last was quite a feat since Matchemonedo lacked a stomach! The monster has been inactive for many decades. Carl wonders why; Elkhorn says the land where it lives was submerged by shifts in lake geography and that may have something to do with it. The Lakefront Hospital project recently reclaimed and drained that land.

Carl, Jim Elkhorn, and Janice Eisen return to the hospital. Janice returns to work while Jim and Carl visit the basement. Carl’s plan is that Jim Elkhorn should try a tribal dance to drive the monster away. The basement shows evidence of still more damage, including an immense crack in the floor that Elkhorn says was created by “a force too powerful to be driving off by dancing.” Carl asks him to try anyway and he agrees. After about ten seconds he stops in disgust, claiming the dance didn’t work for his grandfather and won’t work for him. But something is happening. The whining begins, low and far away. It builds in pitch and volume; sparks explode from the floor. Jim and Carl race off; as they reach the elevators there is an explosion. The morgue is a ruined mess. Debris and at least one body lie strewn about. The debris includes a number of X-Ray plates that Carl grabs.

The X-rays seem to contain random images. Then Carl notices two that match. Working together he and Elkhorn find matching edges and piece together an enormous image from all the films. It is a staring eye the size of a grown man. Matchemonedo stands revealed – more or less.

Back at Jim Elkhorn’s apartment he and Carl examine books containing paintings said to be of Matchemonedo. Some of these are cave paintings. These paintings suggest that Matchemonedo predates human civilization. Other books contain writings that mention the monster. Carl spots a pattern that suggests it appears only in the summer. When Elkhorn casually speculates that perhaps it hibernates, Carl makes a further connection to the “bear god.” Perhaps that description refers to its habits and not its appearance. When the lake shifted the cold water forced the creature into perpetual “hibernation.” When the land was reclaimed the land was warm again and the creature awoke.

Carl and Jim go to Walter Green with this information and suggest he devise some way of refrigerating the area and that he evacuate the hospital. He is less than receptive. Dr. Carrie is at least a little bit more open-minded. Carl hammers at this wedge in hopes of prompting action but only succeeds in further irritating Green. The conversation is interrupted by another attack. This time the monster has invaded the cobalt storage room. Feeding on the radioactive cobalt, it bursts through the wall and door. Even the most skeptical now must concede that something strange exists down on LL3.

Green releases a cover story suggesting that weakening of the foundation requires temporary evacuation until the problem can be corrected. This press release only goes to the major news services, cutting Carl and the INS out of the story he developed! Carl visits Jim Elkhorn again but Elkhorn isn’t interested. The Indians once offered sacrifices to appease the monster. But those days a long past and Elkhorn believes since the white man now controls the land, the white man must solve its problems.

Heavy trucks have been going to and from the now empty hospital site all day and Carl is determined to find out why. He takes two cameras from storage – one for infrared film and one for ultraviolet. He hopes to capture a picture of Matchemonedo that Tony can publish. Realizing Tony isn’t buying the “monster” story Carl concocts a wild tale about “Carlos Matchemonedo,” a Cuban bantamweight fighter. Slapping the film voucher into a puzzled Tony’s hand, Carl races off seconds before Tony recovers with one of his signature rages.

At the hospital Carl discovers men feeding pipes marked “Extreme Cold” into the basement. Dr. Carrie and Walter Green are arguing over whether it is necessary to evacuate the entire building. Carrie wishes to remain behind. From this argument, Carl learns the plan is to freeze the monster with liquid nitrogen. Green really doesn’t believe Matchemonedo is real but is proceeding as if it is. And he’s very afraid of what it might do when they try to freeze it.

Carl slips into the basement to photograph Matchemonedo. It returns as he is snapping. He drives it away with a cold fire extinguisher. Then the super cold gases begin to reach it and Carl can hear its whine decrease in pitch and volume until it disappears. Carl struggles towards the exit but his vision goes blurry and then dark...

Carl wakes up in St. Vincent’s hospital, only a little worse for the wear. Sadly, the cold ruined the film except for one shot – the same staring eye. Lakefront Hospital will never open; Walter Green’s company will replace it with a marina – one with deep channels of very cold water…

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