After the journalist’s death, they mummified him in newspapers from faraway lands. Those who attended the burial looked inside his sarcophagus and read of his sentencing to the electric chair in the Agarthan suburbs, the terrible hunting accident that claimed his heartbeat on the outskirts of El Dorado, and the crocodile that tore out his throat in the sewers of New York. Apparently he had even taken a sharpshooter’s bullet while serving as a war correspondent in Troy. Every inch of skin and each hypothetical wound was obscured by contradiction.
The only story that most believed was the one that covered his heart, that he had been assassinated in the Gray City after learning too much about its inner workings. Gravediggers searching for the truth would later unearth the corpse and tear away its wrappings. Much to their surprise, the body contained within belonged to someone else entirely, nullifying all outstanding theories; whoever it belonged to, however, had suffered each and every mortal wound written of on the exterior.