Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Oh no, you guys. Morbund is my LIFE. I’m actually literally lying here screaming. I’ll have to get another copy, because this one’s stained with tears. If this is the end . . . I don’t know what I’ll do . . .

The user was an administrator, which would fit someone involved with the Mongrels in an organizational role: president, perhaps. It did sound an awful lot like Brooke to me. I scrolled through the replies, a mix of commiserating with MongrelWrangler22, outright denials that Morbund could be dead and one alarming post saying All we need to do is get to McTavish. I’m sure we can . . . convince him . . . with the right motivation, next to a little emoji of a hammer.

I got tired of the deluge of comments and instead clicked on MongrelWrangler22’s profile. The avatar was a cartoon version of Morbund himself, I assumed, given his rugged Scottish appearance, and the location was listed as Australia, but other than that it was anonymous. All of MongrelWrangler22’s recent comments were neatly listed below though. I clicked one at random:

Can I just say something? I love these books because I feel like he’s speaking to me. You know? Like they are written just for me. A bedtime story or a special treat. I know you guys all love the books as much as I do, but that’s how it feels when I’m reading them. Like it’s me and him. Let me know why you read the Morbund books. Would love to hear from everyone else ☺

What had Majors said about obsession? That it’s the ability to center another’s experience on yourself? This matched it to a T.

I clicked back to MongrelWrangler22’s profile page and opened the most recent comment, just to see if it mentioned the Ghan. The comment had been posted three days ago in the Dawn Rises—Spoiler Discussion thread:

Stand down. I repeat. Stand down. I can breathe again.

Archie fucking Bench!

The comments that followed were variations of Who’s Archie Bench? and I don’t get it, what’s the big deal? but MongrelWrangler22 hadn’t posted since then. Conveniently, the timing of the post fit neatly with stepping onto an outback train with limited phone reception. I couldn’t see how it would be anyone but Brooke.

Stand down. Was that a figure of speech, or literal? Everything’s literal on the internet these days, like literally everything, so it was hard to tell. Stand down from what?

On a whim, I tried “Wolfgang art project.” But the search was too vague, and I was subjected to pages and pages about his namesake: the famous Austrian musician. I wondered if Wolfgang spoke German, and if he could help me with Reich. Next I tried all combinations of Wolfgang’s name and the words writer, art, interactive and experience. All I got were hits like this very festival, with the same line repeated at the end of every bio: His next project is an interactive art project titled The Death of Literature.

A fleeting thought whisked across my mind—Just how interactive is your project, Wolfgang?—and was gone.

My phone was struggling. I typed in one last Hail Mary search, which took five minutes to load and so I knew it was the last bit of twenty-first-century help I was going to get. But this one wasn’t clue-hunting, it was simply pure curiosity. The article was from the New York Times in 2009 and was titled “Crime Debutant Jasper Murdoch Can’t Match It with Crime Fiction’s Best” by Harriet Sykes, freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia.