ISSUE #9 | Excerpt, "Brain Trust"

WRITTEN BY HAILEY PIPER, AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #9

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Cover illustration by Alyssa Alarcón Santo

“It was me who found it,” Rogers said, leading Jacobi inside. “Passersby complained of the smell, and that’s when I spotted the red dew on the stairs.”

A thick trail, like strawberry jam, coated the steps inside. Up two flights, it crossed a single-room tenement’s threshold, where Rogers had made his gruesome discovery.

“Like I always say, don your gloves when you handle organs.” Jacobi plucked his own rubber mitts from his pocket as he spoke. No one lasted long in this work without a sense of morbid curiosity—or better still, morbid enthusiasm. He crossed the gooey, water-warped floorboards and stopped beside a clawfoot bathtub, its porcelain forever stained crimson.

From end to end, the bathtub was filled with brains.

Even gloved, he was hesitant to poke and prod. The strawberry jam-like residue coated wrinkly flesh. A shadowy spiderweb of copper pipes and black rubber tubing spread from the tub, threatening to snatch anyone who slipped too close. It looked to have caught a couple dozen people already.

“The materials are new,” Jacobi said at last.

“Stuff that went missing from the factory,” Rogers said. Went missing. Funny choice of words for how the factory workers had handed off supplies to strangers for reasons they couldn’t remember, whose faces they hadn’t seen.

“This is only a fraction of it. A test for whatever Waisley’s colleagues are up to.”

“Then they’ll have the rest of the materials elsewhere.”

“All the materials.” Jacobi loomed over the tub, where the smell was a living thing. It wore the rot of human tissue, but also a disgusting medicinal sweetness. He could only imagine living with it. “Passersby complained? Why not the neighbors?”

“Tommer’s with them downstairs.”

Jacobi followed Rogers through a crack in the downstairs wall, where handprints painted the stairwell’s sides in strawberry slime. The slate floor bore a deeper shade of red. The building’s residents had held a meeting in the basement, where their two dozen or so bodies now lay. Some were naked, others wore night skirts. A jagged cavity opened each skull where the brain should have been. Their fingers clutched kitchen knives and shards of glass as if driftwood at sea, post-shipwreck. To let go would bring true death. Their faces threw long shadows under the lantern light, dark screams made visible.

Inspector Tommer knelt at the edge of the slaughter. “They murdered each other. Every man for himself. And every woman.”

Jacobi knelt beside him. “Waisley’s colleagues made them do it. Like the factory workers.”

Tommer snickered. “Suggesting mind control again?”

“People aren’t birthday gifts you unwrap and empty. Someone made them kill each other, and took what they needed—the brains. I suppose that makes you the safest man in town.”

“You’re mad as Waisley himself.”

Jacobi didn’t argue. The bodies did that for him. Disembodied brains were exciting, but he struggled to keep enthusiastic when the dead had faces. Could’ve happened to you, they said. Jacobi hoped he wouldn’t have the dream again tonight. “I want another crack at him.”

“Waisley’s lost it.” Tommer stood. He’d had enough death for tonight. “But I can arrange a meeting if you’ve time to waste.”

“They have the other factory parts, and they’ve made two dozen people kill each other. They’ll do it again. No, there isn’t time to waste. Waisley knew them. The brains might jog his memory, make him tell us where to look.”

That was the big question. Where? If Jacobi knew that, he could’ve ended this when Waisley’s colleagues were only stealing machinery, not lives.

The lamplighters had finished their work when Jacobi walked home, a yellow-green glow that followed him from the house of death. He lit his apartment with candles to soften the night. The wicks cast warm, blobby shadows past his sparse furniture.

A smaller shadow walked in the door as he was settling down. Rosie threw a hand to her chest and gasped. “Papa, you scared me.”