Kill the Mouse! (short story)
Kill the Mouse! was the second story in the Bernice Summerfield anthology A Life of Surprises. It was written by Daniel O'Mahony.
Plot
On Ganesh, Benny and a team of Braxiatel's people are kept from the archaeological sites by COMBINE's sub-contractors; a woman has been shot off of Benny's roof and James and Marco have been expelled from the planet for pederasty. Whilst Benny waits for Braxiatel to arrive to resolve the situation, the police find her and take her to the hospital where she finds that Braxiatel has a completely smooth and featureless face.
Benny is driven home by an officer, but the car is attacked and the officer's face stolen. She chases the attacker to an underground shrine where the stolen faces hang from hooks. The attacker, wearing an elephant mask and identifying himself as Janus, offers to return Braxiatel's face in return for everything she has. After collecting all of her things, she returns to the shrine and finds Janus with a girl that she has been speaking to; he accepts her offering and removes his mask to prove that he is not Kint, a man whom Benny believes to be a spy, but a cacogen which does not belong in this dimension.
Braxiatel's face is restored and he offers money to Janus, but Benny detects that there is "bad blood" between them. Before she leaves the planet behind, she sees the girl again, entertaining a cat with a catnip-filled toy mouse that Benny had given to Janus. She decides to leave the conversation that she had with the girl behind and does not record it in her diary, but notes that the girl decided to call her cat "Wolsey".
Characters
- Bernice Summerfield
- Irving Braxiatel
- Marco
- James
- Kerry
- Richard
- Gareth
- Kint
- Janus
- Little girl
- Captain
Worldbuilding
- James is arrested for pederasty.
- Benny's possessions include clothes, pens, paper, archaeological tools, condoms, an impromptu diary, beer cans, Jack Daniels, a photograph of Jason with a biro moustache, a photograph of a friend whose wedding she had missed, Russian dolls from Ganesh, a black sock covered in cat hairs, earrings, a copy of Nights at the Circus, COMBINE currency, lipstick, a bag and a toy mouse stuffed with catnip.
Notes
to be added
Continuity
- A subsidiary of COMBINE runs Ganesh. (PROSE: Heart of Glass)
- Benny is working on the Collection for Braxiatel. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)
- Janus was one of the faces from mythology worn by members of the Pageant. (PROSE: The Man in the Velvet Mask)
- Benny remembers God and his yellow dip. (PROSE: The Also People, etc.)
