After drifting off to dream of other things and better, notforprophet never did reawaken.

It’s somewhat sad, but it appears that the Dreamland he so loved claimed him for its very own right on his verge of novel discovery.

The police, however, are treating the discovery of his cadaver atop a hillside in LakeView Cemetery as an open case.  Though they do not yet suspect foul play, it seems that he was found the next morning after his death—estimated by signs of rigor mortis to have occurred somewhere around dusk, Sep. 4^th, the night before—with a laptop aside of him that was still running.  Police have confirmed with computer experts that the particular make and model of the laptop that was found aside him could not possibly have sustained its active session throughout the night without the battery going dead.  So this alone, notwithstanding the pending autopsy, has raised suspicions.  Police, at the time of discovery, mentioned to a reporter nearby something else that was curious:  the session of Word that was open on the laptop had a manuscript typed or pasted into it that was 200 pages long.  And it was unsaved.  For evidentiary purposes, one of the responding investigative officers, using latex gloves, saved the manuscript for fear that the battery would, indeed, eventually wear down. 

As it turns out, this cop who saved the manuscript was himself a blogger who just happened to have read notfprophet’s Xanga blog from time to time.  The cop recognized that the locale, the modus operandi, and even the appearance of the poor dead guy matched up pretty damn well with notforprophet’s own previous self-descriptions and self-portraits posted on the blog.   So he conjectured, quite rightfully, that a Xanga Meet-Up had just been established.   Small world, eh?  

After the cop saved the manuscript  with the title of “posthumous.doc”, he glanced at the first few lines.  Something about a dog and a ghost writer.  But, wait…apparently there was a girl who saw him sometime before he died.  Was she the female presence that’s also mentioned, he wondered?  The cop recognized the ambiguity inherent in the prose he was reading as ‘classic notforprophet’.    So he began to think that maybe this dead guy, that others had once affectionately called ‘nfp’, did really commence writing this protracted stream of consciousness.  But did he write all of it before he died?  The cop, not resisting his curiosity, scroll-barred to the end of the saved manuscript and read the last couple of paragraphs…

.  “O God, no.  NO.”   —he gasped.

Then he did something strange.  He rummaged through the bulky backpack found aside the corpse, found a floppy, took it out, and inserted it into the still ticking laptop.  And he proceeded to copy a certain file.  Then he removed the floppy from the never-say-die laptop, looked about to assure no one was watching, and surreptitiously slipped it into his shirt pocket.

—this is the second chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—