February 7, 2000

So anyways, now I had an address to work from right? Plus the lousy weather seems to have cleared up at least a little bit, which means I can go outside invisible for short periods of time without immediately freezing my butt off. So I wrote down the address as soon as I could so I wouldn’t forget.  Then I had a tough time finding the place on the map (and for good reason, as you’ll see!) I had to go over that lousy map with a magnifying glass for hours before I finally found it. But I did. So me & Sore Throat flew out to this undisclosed location, rented a van (easier than a car for me to undress in) and drove out to the address.

Well, I can’t tell you what I thought when we got there. Once again, I had the sick feeling that this whole thing was somebody’s idea of a great big joke on me. I had the feeling the moment we started rolling through the neighborhood where this address supposedly was. It was a cruddy little town on the outskirts of the main city, and I guess there was some kind of ordinance in the town that said that every house had to have at least one nonoperational vehicle parked on cinder blocks in front, because every house had one (at least one!) I was starting to get mad, but Sore Throat was driving, so he kept his cool.

Finally, we pulled up to the address. I took a look and immediately "lost it." I was so MAD! Because we were in front of a cruddy old broken-down wreck of a house, with cruddy peeling paint, busted windows, shingles coming off, the works. Planted in the middle of the dirt-and-crabgrass front lawn was a sign that said, "For Sale-Great Fixer-Upper!"

I totally went off on Throat, saying this couldn't be the right place, somebody's gotta be playing a big joke on me, etc. But even when I said this, I couldn’t imagine who. Throat calmed me down & suggested I go & take a look around the place anyway, that maybe I’d find a clue. I was still mad, but I agreed to give it a try, since we came all the way out here.

So I undressed in the back of the van (and kept yelling at Throat to stop looking—he kept giving me the once-over in the rear-view mirror) and got out. I walked up the creaky front steps, and looked through the windows (broken and otherwise.) It was hard to see, because the glass was so dirty & dusty, but I could tell that the place was deserted. I walked all the way around the house, looking in windows, but only saw more of the same: dirt, dust & cobwebs.

I was just about to turn & walk back to the car when something caught my eye. Through the window I saw there was part of a broken full-length mirror on one of the doors, and the door was at a funny angle so that I could see something reflected in it. What I saw was a door, which couldn’t be seen directly from the window, but only from inside the house (or from a mirror at a funny angle.) What caught my attention was the fact that, beneath the doorknob was one of those fancy, electronic locks, with a ten-key pad, where you have to enter a bunch of numbers to unlock the thing. I wondered why they’d need something so high-tech in such a cruddy, run-down dump. So I ran back to the van & told Throat what I saw. We both agreed we were maybe onto something & decided to stick around.

I went back to the house, tried the door & all the windows, but they were all locked. But I found one window with part of the pane broken out, and my arm was just skinny enough to squeeze through the opening, reach down & unlock the window. I opened it & climbed inside.

I wandered around inside ‘til I found the door with the tricky lock on it. By now my feet were becoming visible from all the dust & dirt on the floor, and I started to panic. I tried wiping them off with my hands, but all that did was make my hands start to turn visible too from the dust.

I found an old painter’s tarp in a corner & tried wiping my hands & feet off with that. Fortunately, I could wipe enough of the dust off so that, in the low light inside that house, you couldn’t see my hands & feet unless you looked really really close.

I went back to the lock. I don’t know much about these things, but I could tell this thing must’ve cost a lot of money. And I wondered what could be on the other side. I started punching out numbers on the thing at random, just for the hell of it. I punched in my drivers’ license number, my birthdate, my social-security number, anything I could think of. Who knows? I thought. Maybe I’ll hit the lucky number.

I did, too. However, the luck was bad. Because apparently there was some booby-trap that tripped off an alarm if some dufus (like me) started punching in several wrong numbers in a row. A siren went off, horns blew, all hell broke loose. I freaked & ran for the front door.

Behind me, the door with the tricky lock opened, and three of the biggest guys I’d ever seen in my life came running out. They didn’t look like anything I expected. Well, I don’t really know WHAT I expected, maybe Men In Black or something. Anyways, these guys all looked exactly alike, like triplets, and they were all dressed exactly alike, too: overalls, plaid shirts and John Deere caps. They came barreling out the door, armed with those big-assed flashlights, the kind you can beat somebody over the head with if you want. They looked around, this way & that, but they didn’t see me (I hid away in a corner, so they didn’t even see my dirty feet.) One of them opened the front door and looked outside.

There was a window near the corner where I was hiding. I looked outside & could see the front curb. I saw the van I came in pulling away from the curb—fast. Sore Throat was laying rubber all the way.

I was left behind in the shack with the three Gargantua Brothers.

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