Braineater Jones

NOVEMBER 1, 1934-2

Thing was, hiding in the closet would have all but boxed me in. Let’s say those latter-end-of-the-alphabet morons woulda come bursting in with guns, and it turned out I was still vulnerable to guns. Well, it woulda been curtains for me. Lot of “what ifs.” But hey, who’s going to take their life into their hands over a case of not knowing?

Life. Funny word. Wrong choice. Dislife? Ex-life? Unlife? Whatever.

So that left the window. I thought of the old sheet-rope trick but panicked because there didn’t seem to be enough time. And besides, all the sheets were silk or satin or something. Would they even hold my weight?

I flung myself at the pane. Turned out, there was a trellis, so that cut out the need for a middleman. Not only that, but the whole wall was practically full of ivy, so I could climb right to the trellis. It would probably be a tough climb, but it beat searching for enough sheets to tie together while praying they would hold.

Besides, by then, they were already at the bedroom door.

“What do you think?” X’s muffled voice wafted through the crack under the door.

“If he’s got it anywhere, he’s got it in the safe,” Y said.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Do or die time. I grabbed two big handfuls of the ivy. With a little luck, I could just swing over to the trellis like Tarzan, Viscount Greystoke. Then a climb down, and boom, I’m done. Easy Street.

Well, it didn’t hold. Rich bastard had brand-new ivy. Brand spanking new. It didn’t even hardly stick to the wall.

I fell.

I fell like a sack of wet newspaper.

Then I was lying on my back with two clumps of cheap-ass ivy in my hands, my nose in the dirt, and my neck twisted all the way around like a bowtie pasta.

“Son of a bitch.” I stood and found myself looking down at my own backside.

You ever have one of those days? One of those days where you wake up and you’re already out of cigarettes, but it doesn’t matter because it’s raining and your umbrella has a hole in it? Then, by the end of the day, sometime between when your boss handed you the pink slip and your old lady left you for your brother, nothing fazes you anymore because you’re so numb?

I may, and I may not have, but I must’ve at some point in my past life, because that’s what jumped to mind at that point. So what if my face was on backward and I was still thinking about it and able to move? That was all after being naked, wet, dead, chased, and jamming myself into some fatbody’s clothes.

I took a minute to twist my head back the right way. But then, it was twisted all the way around instead of just twisted back the way it came. I grabbed the sides of my head and got it all straight, and by that point, it had been too long.

They shot at me. Dumb bastards. They sat up there in that window and watched a man literally screw his head on straight and then took a potshot as if a bullet would do something.

I took off running.

“Hey, come back here!” X yelled.

I don’t guess they got a good look at my face, but, heck, they might’ve with all the time I sat there rotating it in different directions.

Daddy Warbucks had a hedge maze. A hedge maze! Who really has a hedge maze? Nothing Rothering owned surprised me at that point. I was waiting to trip over King Tut’s sarcoffa... sarcaca... coffin. From the wild gunshots, I figured X and Y were pursuing me even as I plunged into the bushes.

What can you say about a hedge maze? If I ever get to Vegas, I’ll put down good money that it spelled out “Ernst Rothering” if read from an aeroplane. But from on the ground and in the weeds, I just saw an unnavigable mess. I almost wished I was back in the pool, staring at those three lovelies, but there wasn’t much for it.

I would figure that with two guys, one would go in one entrance to the maze and the other would go to a different one, then they could cut off their quarry. But no. Those guys weren’t exactly Rhodes Scholars. They both chased me, coming from the same direction.

I kept hitting dead ends. But, then, you know what I did? Just went straight through it. I mean, it was a shrubbery fer Chrissakes, not a brick wall. What good even is a hedge maze unless you’re willing to go along with the illusion? I got all cut up from the briars, but compared to the scratch in my chest and the kink in my spinal column, that was small potatoes.

So after a spell, I gave them the slip. I discovered that I was in the suburbs, so to speak, of Ganesh City. I didn’t see a whole lot of green, which was strange because the rich guy’s mansion wasn’t all that far from the part of Ganesh called the Welcome Mat.

In my ill-fitting clothes, all I needed was a bindle and a glove with no fingers, and I would’ve fit in perfectly.

The Welcome Mat is a slum. They don’t call it that because it’s welcoming. They call it that because it’s where the city wipes the s**t off its shoes.

Turning toward the Mat from Lionel Avenue, I was greeted by a decaying gothic archway, a relic of the last century when the Mat was a different kind of place, proclaiming it had once been called Matthew’s Parish. I was reminded of the entrance to a carnival, partly by the archway and partly by the weird smell of carnies.

The graffito was good there. Some of it was glow-in-the-dark. I ran my finger across a tag, wondering what made it glow. I stopped almost as soon as I started. It occurred to me that whatever was making it glow was not something I wanted to get on my bare hand.

The entrance had a message in Bohunk or something. I grabbed a Tribune-Chronicle from the ground to write down the words. There, I saw the date—October 31, 1934.

Of course, it’s after midnight now. I copied the note with a piece of charcoal I found on the pavement.

Now that I’ve got this notebook, I’m going to recopy it. I’ll keep all my clues here, just in case. Never know when I might need to be reminded of something.

I don’t know if it’s important or not. The graffito was in a different language. Rothering was a foreigner. Coincidence? I think not. Here’s what it said:

PER ME SI VA NE LA CITTÀ DOLENTE,

PER ME SI VA NE L’ETTERNO DOLORE,

PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE.

LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE.

4. What does the cryptic entrance sign mean?

I read the paper to get my bearings. It took a whole lot of words to say not a whole lot of things. All the articles were about the rich part of town, the Altstadt, and the landscaping work in Kelly Park. No mention of Rothering. If he was as big of a bigwig as his house made him out to be, that was a little surprising, but maybe he was trying to keep a low profile for some reason. The paper never mentioned the Welcome Mat, so it seemed like a convenient place to disappear.

I felt like a troll when I settled under the footbridge. A couple of other derelicts were already there.

Christ, I’ve only been undead for a day and I’m already thinking of myself as a derelict.

Anyway, I was feeling tired. Bone tired.

That raises all sorts of questions.

5. Why does a—whatever I am—need sleep?

6. What am I?

I guess I’m a dead man. A living dead man. A nonbreathing, walking, jumping, tap-dancing living dead man. Or something. Damn it. Leave it to me to get philosophical now while I’ve already got six mysteries to solve. Where am I getting all of these big ideas from? Maybe I was a professor before I died, or a doctor.

7. Who or what was I before I died?

8. For that matter, why can’t I remember anything from before I died? Is that artificial, or is it part of the resurrection process?

This list keeps getting longer and longer. I’ve got to get to the bottom of it all. I guess I’d better figure out how I’m going to tackle this. I need information, first and foremost. I’ll have to find out if there’s a library or a university where I can look up some of this egghead stuff. For the rest of it, I’ll have to hit the streets and find some underground contacts. Do I have any underground contacts? Probably not. And if I did, I doubt they would talk to me now or even recognize me. Well, maybe I did. Maybe I have family.

For some of the more existential stuff, I’ll have to find others like me. Unless I’m the only one, which is a depressing thought.

9. Are there others like me?

Anyway, I collapsed under the tunnel and threw the pages of newspaper that I hadn’t written on over my face. I wasn’t there for more than a few minutes before I started feeling a dull thump in my sides, like when you’re watching a clock pendulum and you can sort of feel it moving back and forth. It wasn’t until one of the bums snatched the blat off my head that I realized they were putting the boots to me.

You wouldn’t think that bums would be so picky about their company. But then again, I guess you never know when somebody’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

There were two, one on either side of me, and they were kicking damn hard, too. One was even wearing steel-toed boots. And you know what? It didn’t hurt. It was annoying. Degrading, even. But I felt no pain.

A third bum flitted in and out of my field of view, encouraging the other two.

“You’re the king of the devil’s army of fishermen Visigoths,” the third said.

The crazed kingmaker started folding up my newspaper into a little hat.

I raised my hand. “Hey, I need that.” I heard my voice for the first time.

Do I really sound like that? Is that what I always sounded like, or was it just my vocal cords rotting out? Well, it couldn’t be worse than getting my neck twisted the wrong way around. My voice sounded as though, instead of just a frog in my throat, a whole swinging big band of amphibians had set up shop in my neck.

“Get out of here, braineater!” said one of the kickers, who was clearly more cogent than the one wearing the newsprint crown.

“Yeah, we know what you are, you bastard,” Steel-toed Boots said.

They didn’t really let up on the kicking enough for me get out of there. But hey, logic takes a holiday with these people, right? Their spiritual leader was spouting sweet nothings into the cold, empty universe. Unfortunately for me, I was thinking, “Hey, here are some answer men.” Yeah. Right. Derelicts are always full of useful information.

“What do you know about me?” I croaked in that unfamiliar voice. “What am I?”

“You’re not welcome!” the boss yelled, the first meaningful thing he had said since muttering to himself about “techno-vampires” and infested fruits and Sha and God alone knew what all else.

I tried to get up, but my muscles refused to respond. It was as though my whole body was revolting against my brain. I thought it was a symptom of the booting, but there was something deeper there, a sluggishness I hadn’t felt before I went to sleep under the bridge. I probably muttered some nasty black curses.