ENDNOTES
[1] Anna Kendrick played me in the movie. She did right by me, I guess, but I still think she needed to put on more muscle. I was really worried about her during some of those action scenes.
[2] Speedy says the Parthenon has always had some version of a snack stand. Go figure.
[3] Okay, so there aren’t nearly as many ghosts as there are different types of bacterium. Sorry. I just like that analogy. They’re still everywhere, though. Ghosts and bacteria. Now go wash your damned hands.
[4] I’m getting grumpy about it, by the way. Filling out police reports is really time-consuming, and there’s always someone to lecture me on how I should make an effort to not get kidnapped. It’s gotten so bad that when a stranger throws off a kidnappy vibe, I run at them while shouting, “Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”
[5] It’s χλωροφόρμιο, which I found to be rather intimidating until Speedy said it’s pronounced chlorofórmio, so there’s that.
[6] I have no idea what they said, but let me translate that for you anyhow:
“No animals in the store!”
“Fuck you and the dog who cooks your dinner.”
“Don’t talk about my wife…like…koala…what…thing…”
[7] Okay. Say you’re a man, and you have a really good male friend. You and your friend strike a bargain that the first one of you to die will be skinned from the waist down. This skin has to be removed in a single flawless piece. Then, go steal a coin from a grieving widow, and put it in the scrotum of your new skin pants. Add some ancient Icelandic mumbo-jumbo rituals, and the scrotum will fill with money. Also? You can never get out of these pants or the magic will stop working, unless you convince another really good friend to wear them for you while you go and set fire to your own body while muttering, “Unclean, unclean…” So. Infinite moneymaking best friend corpse pants. That’s a nábrók.
[9] Or potted plant. Speedy’s not picky.
[10] All right, all right. We might have been committing a little bit of data theft. Semantics. We’d leave all the originals where we found them.
[11] Koalas have the best poker faces, but they have terrible poker ears.
[12] Sparky asked me once why I wanted to go into medicine when I felt these things so clearly. I said it was because I planned to go down fighting with the corpses of disease and injury in my fists, because those fuckers didn’t deserve to keep getting away with their shit.
[13] Seriously. We’re a bunch of schmucks and a talking koala, and we know firsthand what happens when you go public with a major conspiracy. Based on humanity’s track record, taking an even bigger Full Disclosure Bomb to modern civilization will end in blood. War. Probably mass genocide as various factions decide to resolve their old religious disputes. Like hell that’s our call to make.
[14] There are more than fifty recent unsolved monkey attacks in the Washington D.C. area. Sparky and I have a monkey in reserve, just in case. Don’t worry about what might happen to the monkey. That monkey knows what it did.
[15] If I could see him. Which I probably couldn’t. Whatever. I got to go to Rhodes.
[16] Smithback really should have asked Mike if this was okay with him first, but what can you do? Last requests are last requests, regardless if you’re still able to check in and make sure those requests being followed.
[17] Teary on my part, since I had convinced myself I’d finally straighten out my head while I was gone and I’d never see him again. Ben just smiled and said he hoped I’d have some good stories to tell him when I got back. Which I did.
[18] It’s straight from the koala’s mouth and I didn’t pay him to do it, so it’s likely Speedy has taken some liberties with the word choice and phrasing.
[20] And if I stepped outside of the room, then it would be outside, and if I went back inside, than it would be inside, and if I went back outside…
[21] Maybe. While we were researching locations, we found a lesser-known myth called “Helen Dendritis,” or “Helen of the Tree.” In this myth, Helen came to Rhodes after the Trojan War, was betrayed by a friend, and was hanged from a tree until dead. So, yes, there is a dedicated shrine to Helen of Troy on Rhodes, but we decided against using that one because of the part where it celebrates her murder and thank you, but we were actively trying to not piss her off, so no. Just no.
[22] I’ve always been a little worried about the cult status of serial killers. Once, Ben and I got drunk sat down and had a long talk about what might happen if a psychopathic ghost built up some serious fame. We decided the odds were against it, but also that I should stay the fuck out of London’s Whitechapel district, just in case Jack the Ripper was waiting for a lady psychic to come along.
Also? History is full of murdering assholes, and I’ve never heard of most of them. It’d really, really suck to be wandering alone down a country road in Southeast Nowheresville and find out the hard way that it was haunted by the ghost of Somebody-Something the Mangler. Sticking fame into people is dangerous for so many reasons.
[25] It’s not like we left her body where she had died. We buried her as best we could, and each of us said a few words over her grave. Funeral services performed by psychics and super-geniuses are fairly unique; our eulogies were all different versions of Sorry, but I told you so.
[26] We buried them, too, and their eulogies were mostly apologies about poor life choices and how it sucked to be on the receiving end of Not Thinking Things Through.
[27] I also used that time to track down Darling’s mother, because more guilt. Turns out she’d already been dead for a couple of months, so take that to mean whatever you want about the state of the Petrakis family, or Darling, or my shitty judgment.