Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Teeming teaming terrors, it’s the Grinpire, the smiling vampire!” cried Mouse-Boy, the most uniquely rodentlike sidekick in the International Brotherhood of Sidekicks Local 420. “And Simpltron, the killer robot who reduces everything to binary opposites!”

“I see them, Mouse-Boy.” Super Chin, the world’s only chinchilla-themed detective superhero, narrowed his eyes.

“That’s right, you fuzzy freakazoids,” chortled the Grinpire, his chalky-white skin leering above his gleefully dancing fangs. “And with our powers of anarchy and logic combined, to say nothing of our shared immortality and immorality, it’s curtains for you!”

“01110100 01110010 01110101 01100101!” zotzed Simpletron.

“You suck, Grinpire!” riposted Mouse-Boy in return.

“No, now, Mouse-boy,” scolded Super Chin, his thick and luxuriant hair swaying with every shake of his head. “While it may be technically true, the implication is that of a childlike insult, and heroes are neither childish nor insulting. Unless they’re Child-Man or Insulterine, naturally.”

“What are you going to do to stop us, Super Chimp?” the Grinpire laughed hysterically. “Scold us to death?”

“01100110 01100001 01101100 01110011 01100101!” computed Simpletron. “01100110 01100001 01101100 01110011 01100101!” It began to whir and smoke and glow, and the ambient temperature nearby skyrocketed.

“Holy horrible heatstroke, Super Chin!” Mouse-Boy gasped. “Your one weakness, aside from diabetes from too many sweet raisins or other dried fruits!”

“That’s right, Mouse-Boy,” Super Chin agreed through gritted teeth. “Temperatures in excess of 80°F (25°C).”

“And when you collapse with heatstroke, the Grinpire will be here to move in for the suck!” added the undead crime kingpin. “What do you say to that, Stupor Chin?”

“01100100 01101001 01100101! 01100100 01101001 01100101! 01100100 01101001 01100101!” chanted Simpletron with its Chant Simulator 98 software package.

“There is only one recourse,” said the visibly uncomfortable rodent detective superhero.

“No!” squeaked Mouse-Boy. “Surely you can’t mean…!”

“I have no choice,” said Super Chin. “I must…take a dust bath.”

Based on characters created by and courtesy of Scott M. Watson.

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STUDENT: If you think about it, I pay your salary. You’d better raise my grade.

INSTRUCTOR: I think you sorely overestimate how little they pay me, and underestimate how many students are at this university, if you think dropping out will affect my bottom line. With the way the money goes, you’d probably have a bigger effect on the football team.

STUDENT:…I’ll be good.

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This post is part of the December 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “250-Word Story Chain, or, The Blog-O-Phone.”

Cal, Alan, and Beth regarded each other coolly, the former two dripping with red dye that formed a rosette around the coveted tree. They all wanted the standoff to end, but none was willing to let their guard down.

It was a Mexican standoff, in the snow.

An unexpected sound broke the treehunters’ focus. A shadow on the branches, a wheezing intake of breath, and who should appear shuffling through the snow but Old Man Wiggins himself, clutching a gas can after finding out the hard way his fuel gauge was kaput.

“Holy mother of dog!” he cried.

“It’s not how it looks!” cried Cal, who with hefted axe looked like he was about to chop Alan down like a cedar.

“It’s not how it looks!” screamed Alan, whose own axe seemed poised for a counterblow.

“It’s exactly how it looks!” added Beth, hoping that in her perch she could be mistaken for the voice of Dog imparting divine wisdom.

“Murder! Treason! Trespass!” Wiggins didn’t have his shotgun with him, but he charged the tree anyway, gas can a-swingin’, determined to interrupt the murder in progress before having the perpetrators hauled off to prison and the prison hospital respectively.

Alan and Cal dashed off in the same direction. But a leering snowman, built by the Wiggins grandchildren, soon appeared to block their path.

Beth, secure in the tree, was sure her moment had come…until the branch she was perched on began to give way as Wiggins passed beneath in pursuit.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:

Ralph Pines
ishtar’sgate
Angyl78
MsLaylaCakes
pyrosama
BBBurke
sweetwheat

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The StopShort gas station on the corner of 3rd and East first noticed something amiss when they ran due diligence on their transactions and noticed that only gas and snacks bought with cash had been paid for. At first, they suspected an employee of theft, but the shortfalls from credit and debit purchases cut across all their workers. Worse, 8 out of the 10 StopShort locations in Tecumseh County were affected–too many for even a large conspiracy of workers. What’s more, the transactions were supposed to be secure, with cashiers having little input at all into the process.

Baffled, the StopShort approached the local authorities. It soon came out that over a hundred gas stations and retail outlets in the tri-county area had been affected, with losses in the millions. No rhyme or reason could be found–the credit companies insisted that they had never gotten any information from the transactions, and banks with debit cards reported the same. But customers’ bills displayed the charges, albeit under the strangely generic descriptor “point of sale payment.”

It wasn’t until an investigator noticed a key detail that there was a break in the case: all of the credit machines were made by the same company.

Aftermarket models designed for small businesses, the machines used the existing high-speed internet architecture to send information with a proprietary encryption. In theory, the encryption was impossible to break without the key, but the thief had hit upon a much more elegant solution. The company that made the readers, a local outfit called ScanSmart Technologies, had gone out of business in 2008, amid the global recession. That made little difference to their customers–in fact, it broadened their base considerably when the market was flooded with liquidated machines, which could be had for as little as $1 each (provided at least 500 were ordered, naturally).

Someone had bought hundreds of the machines, and rewritten the internal software to redirect the money to their own shell account. Then, posing as a service technician, they had replaced the machines and let the money roll in.

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“You’re a Javamancer, Henry. Come to Earl Grey’s School of Brewing and Baristery to join the struggle against the Bean Eaters, masters of the dark roast. And then obsess over the school’s Competitive Brewing team to the exclusion of world-shattering threats and let your friends or luck do most of the heavy lifting.”

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You find the message in your inbox, just like any other:

Greetings,

Sincerely Yours,
The Chronological Communication Systems LLC. Team

You sit and stare at the screen, silent and wracked with doubt. The message will be sent, that much is certain–it is worth almost any price, and others have reported success.

But what message to send?

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[BUD BRAYER appears in a fashionable suit holding a microphone, his spray-on tan and white pompadour immaculate]

BRAYER: Hi, I’m Bud Brayer. You might remember me as the host of game shows like The Cost is Correct and Consequentiae Nec Veritas, but what I’m here to talk to you about today is no game. I would like to urge all of you viewing at home to participate in a program of spaying and neutering that will reduce population pressures and cruelty on a beloved member of our household families.

[Soft music begins to play, specifically Grasp of the Seraphim by Chana Marschall]

BRAYER: I am, of course, talking about coat hangers.

[An image of a closet jammed with coat hangers appears]

BRAYER: We all know that, when left to their own devices, coat hangers will breed ferociously, overcrowding closets with nightmarish tangles of metal. Many families, unwilling or unable to care for the hangers, are forced to abandon them, or leave them in overcrowded and underfunded shelters.

[An image of a trash can stuffed with coat hangers appears, followed by a group of forlorn hangers on a thrift store rack]

BRAYER: Excess coat hanger population also leads to horrible acts of cruelty, as the innocent hangers are used for art projects, opening car doors, and other terrible abuses.

[An image of a coat hangar unfolded and in use to open a 1989 Honda Civic is shown, followed by an image of a ramshackle papier-mâché pig with a coat hanger skeleton]

BRAYER: Feral populations of coat hangers also lead lives of deprivation and struggle, and they are often too wild to be adopted.

[An image of a feral coat hanger lying by the side of the road appears]

BRAYER: So please, I beg you: remember to have your coat hangers spayed or neutered before putting them in the closet together.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a public service announcement from PATIO, People for the Acceptable Treatment of Inanimate Objects.

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“So that was you?” said Anderson. “The messages scrawled in blood?”

“Pig’s blood, from Poledouris’s Gyros and Deli,” Annelise said. “Those Keystone Cops sent it away for tests that won’t be done for months.”

“The apparitions?”

“Smoke and mirrors, literally. Fog machine, dry ice, and a projector with an image I printed out off of the internet.”

Anderson reeled visibly. “But…why?”

“Business was slow at the paper…we were in danger of going under. Don’t you see? Everyone was as bored with it as I was, and some Scooby-Doo shit was just what we needed.”

Anderson shook his head. “Then why come to me? You could have kept going indefinitely, until you were caught.”

“Well…” Annalise said. “You know the stuff that’s been happening recently? The screaming in the old Clarke Building, the mutilated squirrels in the park, and the people being stalked by shadows?”

“Yeah?”

“That wasn’t me. I didn’t do it,” Annelise sobbed. “I’ve been faking supernatural occurrences…but now they are happening without me. inputI’m afraid that in faking all this stuff…I may have awoken something that does it for a living.”

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This post is part of the December 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “250-Word Story Chain, or, The Blog-O-Phone.”

Everyone knows that Mossfallow Wood has the best—free!—Christmas trees around. Everyone knows that once Old Man Wiggins leaves town for the month, it’s time to charge in past the no trespassing signs to claim the perfect pine and drag it home. People even camp out to nab the best shot.

As Wiggins’s F-150 trundled down the road, Cal Ostafinski revved the engine of his pickup. He had a reputation to maintain, after all, as having the largest and most well-decorated tree on his block despite his meager salary working on a Matryoshka doll assembly line.

“OSTAFINSKI TREE BREAKS NEW CITY RECORDS FOR HEIGHT, ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION” the page-six story had said on a slow news day. Ostafinski meant to keep things that way.

A half-mile away, Beth McHugh twisted the throttle on her snowmobile with attached snowtrailer. Her children’s most recent whining was etched into her consciousness:

“Mom, we want our tree this year! We have ornaments from school that need hanging!”

“Fine, fine, fine! Bring Mommy her chainsaw and climbing spikes.”

On another side road, Alan Nussbaum gunned his Subaru with the roof rack, his conversation with his daughter fresh in his mind:

“I have to go out there early to get a tree big enough to impress everyone on the block, especially those finks Ostafinski and McHugh.”

“But Dad, we’re Jewish.”

“It’s the principle of the thing!”

And so all three charged into Mossfallow Wood, unaware of the others and of what awaited them inside.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:

Ralph Pines
ishtar’sgate
Angyl78
MsLaylaCakes
pyrosama
BBBurke
sweetwheat

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The stained glass windows in the Imperial Chapel had been designed centuries ago, before the Art had been all but lost, to reflect the fortunes of the Empire. Triumphant victories, calamitous defeats, the crowning of new Emperors…they were all duly reflected in the shifting panes. The Pontifex had been silent on how he had affected such an enchantment, but the subsequent Emperors did not care. They trumpeted each feat they performed which was noted in the Chapel as “worthy of the glass” and hired artisans to copy the designs for reproduction throughout the realm once they had vanished.

In time, though, the glass began to shift. Fewer scenes were of triumph, or even of defeat; instead they showed scenes of misery and disorder from throughout the Empire and abstract visions of death and decay. The Emperors soon realized that, as the royal family and its entourage were the only ones with access to the chapel, they could easily lie about the windows’ content. As far as the populace knew, the deeds of later Emperors continued to be “worthy of the glass.”

Things came to a head with Emperor Septimus IX. He gathered an army to repulse a challenge from his half-brother for the throne, only to have the Imperial Chapel glass reflect a terrible defeat–before he had even set out. Fearful of the prophecy coming true, Septimus IX avoided open battle, conceding field after field and undermining confidence in his leadership. When the glass finally changed, appearing to predict a great victory, the Emperor triumphantly rode with his troops into battle…and a massacre. The Battle of the Three Rivers has entered the annals of Imperial history as one of the most disastrous ever fought; meeting on poor ground in a wood that prevented effective communication, the two armies all but wiped each other out, with both Emperor and usurper unhorsed and killed.

Chaos descended over the realm, until a minor noble from a cadet branch of the royal family entered the Imperial chapel and, to his surprise, found words written in the glass for the first time: LET US RULE THROUGH YOU.

As the long-ago Pontifex Maximus had neglected to mention, the Imperial chapel glass was sustained by a gestalt of the spiritual energies, the souls, of the strongest of the departed Emperors. No longer content to watch, observe, and reflect, the glass had sought and obtained total power over the realm through a series of weak puppet Emperors. Dependent on the glass’s ability to see a short distance into the future, and given succinct orders etched in blood-red translucence, these late Emperors were unworthy of the glass in the old sense–for the glass itself had become worthy in a sense.

The Empire was, in effect, ruled by the glass for the next two hundred and fifty years, until the Imperial Chapel was sacked and smashed by the Holy Successors.

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