MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Death? You mean when your heart stops beating? Bah, that doesn't matter. Listen, I've been without a body for a month now, and that doesn’t prevent me from living on. At first, when I heard the surgeon yell, “Oops, I was thinking of Debra and my hand slipped. Has anyone seen the liver? Watch out, don't step on it!”, I didn't think I'd make it. Then everyone in the operating room began to walk on all fours in search of my liver. I took that as a bad sign... When they found my liver it was too late: my heart had stopped beating. "I’ve already lost three patients this morning!" the surgeon was yelling, out of his mind. "They aren’t going to renew my license!". Then a nurse covered my body with a sheet, and I realized that I could not count any more on it. I was in shock. It’s understandable, because up to this instant everywhere I went, my body was with me. Suddenly I had become independent and, well, a vertigo seized me. "What am I going to do...

FIRST DAY JUDGE: Franz Kafka, you are accused of playing dead in order to steal all the gold watches from the city of Prague. How do you plead: guilty or innocent? KAFKA: Innocent, your Honor. JUDGE: Well, in that case, you can leave. PROSECUTOR: I object! JUDGE: It's okay. Stay. But tell me, how did you come up with that insane plan? KAFKA: I just wanted to know the time, your Honor. JUDGE: So you didn’t steal gold watches because of their economic value? KAFKA: Oh no, your Honor! Why would I want a watch if it wasn’t to know the time? JUDGE: But we are not talking about a single watch. We talk about all the watches in the city. Moreover, all the gold watches. KAFKA: I wanted to check the time of all the watches because I needed to know the exact time. And the most reliable watches are the gold ones. JUDGE: Why did you need to know the exact time? KAFKA: It was a matter of life or death. I can’t give more details. PROSECUTOR: I object! He's ...

Mr. Landgroom, director of The NYSM (New York State Museum), had contacted ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S.L. on the occasion of the donation of an extremely strange artifact. Although it was supposed to be over a thousand years old, this artifact did not look more than twenty. It had been found by a certain Jonas “Birdbrain” Kalgary in the basement of his house in the neighborhood of Canarsie, in Brooklyn. According to his testimony, Birdbrain was digging a grave to bury an enemy of his whom he had just killed (this naive confession caused him to end up in jail) when his shovel stumbled over a head. He cursed his luck because he thought the grave was already occupied, but then the head opened one eye and then the other. Birdbrain felt a great relief because if the head was alive he could get it out of the hole without desecrating any grave. (Desecrating tombs was, for Birdbrain, the greatest sin a man could commit.) So he took out the head and deposited it on the table. Its features were Indian ...

I will confess a secret: I see dead people. The problem is that I also see people alive, and I can not differentiate between one and another. That's why I always carry a pin with me. Any stranger who speaks to me goes through the little torment of secretly receiving a puncture in the ass. If he reacts, it is that he is alive; if he does not, he's dead. I know that among the dead this is considered an unworthy behavior ... but who cares what the dead think about one? The living ones do not hold me in much esteem either, but I do not care. The only thing that matters to me in this life is what a girl named Susan Spitzberger thinks of me. I consider her my girlfriend, although I'm not sure how does she considers me. This does worry me. I'm afraid she thinks of me as a weird guy. Of course, with her I have not dared to practice my Life-or-Death Test..., which sometimes makes me doubt whether she is alive or dead. It surprises me that she never talks to people. But I tell ...