Someone on ABC Tales is trying to kill me

Someone on ABC Tales is trying to kill me. I hadn’t seen who, but I knew that there were several people on the site who were jealous of my uniquely high standard of writing and it was no surprise that one of them would try to get rid of me.

The first attempt was when I was commuting to work, waiting for a tube train and just as the train was pulling into the station somebody shoved me from behind. I lost my balance, tumbled forward, but just managed to steady and save myself. I did however, knock my rucksack under the train. Everything in it was crushed to smithereens.

The rucksack incident led to the train being delayed, somebody apparently thought it was a bomb. When the police grabbed me I assumed they were going to tell me that they’d caught my would be killer, but they actually arrested me for the suspect bomb. “But the bag’s been crushed under a train,” I said, “if there was a bomb in it, it would have gone off. You must think I’m the worst bomb maker in the world.”

I was eventually released, though I was so delayed I didn’t get home to nearly midnight.

The next attempt on my life came a few days later. I was in my local pub for the weekly folk gig and there was some confusion over my pint of Guiness, myself and another guy had both been waiting for our pints to settle and be topped up and the bar staff weren’t sure which was which.

Ten minutes later the guy collapsed, stone dead, less than half his pint drank. The police were called, but they just sent a kid who dismissed my fears. “The guy was 93 years old” he said, “he just had a heart attack. Nothing suspicious, witnesses say he’d been smoking all day and was on his sixth pint, the only surprising thing was that he’d lived this long.”

That’s what the officials said, though I notice that nobody touched the unfinished half of his pint, an unheard of act of honesty in this pub, where you couldn’t usually put your beer down to scratch your arse without your pint disappearing.

I knew that if I didn’t do anything whoever it was would get me eventually, but that was the problem, I had no idea who it was. I decided to disappear, while I tried to find out the identity of my killer. This is easier said than done, of course, as I could hardly stop turning up for work without losing my job and facing financial ruin.

There was only one solution, horrible though it was.

Words cannot express how delighted I had been to rid myself of the Other Terrence Oblong (see story of the same name), the clone version of myself. Though he was an exact clone and identical to me in every physical way, he nonetheless seemed constructed of purely my worst features. He was overly competitive and entirely focussed on outdoing me in every aspect of life.

However, as an identical version of myself, Terrence was the perfect person to pose as me while I shadowed him and tried to identify his would be killer. If all went well he might even get bumped off in the process.

Although The Other Terrence Oblong had been deleted, bringing him back to live proved a simple process, I just had to click on the ‘undelete’ button.

I explained why he was being brought back to life and he reluctantly agreed to pose as me. Every morning he would leave for work, and I would follow behind, in disguise, looking out for anyone suspicious.

What could possibly go wrong?