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James

There's a man going round, you might have seen him. He knows you, he knows where you live. This man can only tell you things you have never thought about before. Tales of strippers and bloody fingerprints and blank sheets of paper. No one knows his name, but he's a real person, no doubt about it. Some call him James. James Johnson. I think they settled for that name because it rolls easily down the tongue, but still it rolls like a coin or button or something you're not used to having in your mouth. Nevertheless, it feels good to have a name for such an elusive character.

I can't tell you what James favorite story is, because I promised not to. I could however... Rephrase it for you. Just don't tell him I did so. Deal? Then here we go.

There was once a woman named Odina Bendle who got lost on her way home, and decided to take a shortcut. How does one shortcut in a strange neighbourhood, you might wonder? You simply stop, look around and feel really carefully where your gut is telling you to go and then you choose the opposite direction. That's how you find shortcuts in a place where you've never walked before. The trick is to stop trusting your instincts, because the minute you think you're safe and on the right track, that's when bad things start to happen. You remember what happened to Hansel and Gretel? Yes, that was a fairytale but all fairytales spring from some kind of truth, or so James always says, and the political connotations were added in arrears. Little Red Ridinghood came to be long before the French Revolution, for example.

In this particular city there lived a monster of a man named William Pern. He enjoyed changing people's lives, for the worse and for his own pleasure. A slight shove here, a nasty word there and maybe even an exorbitant knife fight in a dark alley if things got interesting.