Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The visionary shapeshifter named Briar blinked her (currently) blue eyes and leapt from the window, long cat’s tail whipping out behind her. A moment later her stepmother stormed out from the cottage door, voice like a thunderclap:

“Briar! You get back here this instant!”

Shapeshifters were bound by tradition and law to keep their “malady” a secret. Stay passably human, they were told from a young age, and don’t make waves. And try not to grow a tail at an inconvenient time, lest you be fined, arrested, or worse.

Briar was neither traditional nor lawful, and as she wriggled out the window her form was fluid, the claws and tail needed for climbing and balance appearing almost instinctively. “Stop before someone sees you!” Mrs. Rink added in a desperate tone, her stepdaughter still ignoring her.

It was already too late. The village newspaper boy, making his rounds outside with the evening edition, saw Briar’s leap…and one look at the increasingly feline girl was enough to put him back on his bike and pedaling madly off. It was no surprise when, an hour later, there was a knock on the door.

“Mrs. Rink, a word?” The officer cut an imposing figure thanks in equal part to the dueling scar across his face and his pursed-lip grimace.

“Of course, officer, what can I do for you?” Briar’s stepmother did her best to put on an innocent, guileless facade.

“We’ve had a report of someone in this house taking on an unnatural form.” The officer was about to proceed when he paused and let loose with a racking sneeze. “My apologies,” he said, fishing out a handkerchief. “I saw a cat in your rubbish, and I’m deathly allergic.”

“Well, do come in, Officer,” Mrs. Rink said. “Allow me to put my housecat out for the night so I don’t worsen your allergies before we speak.”

The officer hadn’t a chance to respond before Mrs. Rink dashed up to her stepdaughter’s room. Briar was there, across her bed, about 50% cat by volume and still panting from the evening’s exertions.

“You’re in for it now, child,” hissed Mrs. Rink. “Someone saw you and called the police! Surely you heard him sneezing downstairs. Now change yourself into something presentable so I can take you down and show Officer Scarface there’s nothing to worry about!”

“I heard more than that,” said Briar. “I know a much better way out.”

“Not the window again, please,” her stepmother said desperately. “My heart can’t take it.”

“Of course not.” Briar rolled upright as she did so fluidly dropping everything humanlike about her in favor of a large alley cat form. “I’m going to go down there and give poor allergic Officer Scarface an asthma attack.”

“No, no!” Mrs. Rink said. “I forbid it.”

“You never let me have any fun,” Briar said flippantly, ignoring her stepmother and slinking down the stairs.

“Some days,” Mrs. Rink sighed, “I think owning a Chihuahua might do me some good.”

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On a soggy Wednesday evening, the doors of the weekly Valleyview Self-Help Club (hosted in the Presbyterian Church annexe) burst open. Five pairs of startled eyes in five startled skulls watched as police in black tactical kevlar vests poured into the room. They rounded up the bewildered club members, reading off their rights. Maude, the mousiest but most devoted attendee of the club, was the first to be loaded and by far the most fearful.

They were shuffled wquickly into a large windowless RCMP van and spirited off into the night. The self-helpers, suddenly self-helpless, sat quietly on the hard metal benches trying to communicate their fear to each other using only eyes and body language. The RCMP told them not to worry, in tones that were not very reassuring. They assured the self-helpers that everything would be all right even as the ride stretched to two hours and beyond, made all the more unsettling by the fact that no one knew the destination. The self-helpers had many among their number like Maude who suffered from claustrophobia, making the experience even more tense.

The van stopped and the doors opened, spilling the Valleyview Self-Help Club out into a farmer’s front yard, within sight of both a decrepit farmhouse and acres upon acres of cow fields that hadn’t seen a cow in ages. The RCMP marched the five to the door and inside; the dank wooden beams creaked overhead as the Valleyview Self-Help Club was shuffled across the hay-strewn floor.

“Halt!” the RCMP sergeant cried.

The Valleyview Self-Help Club obeyed. Maude started to break into a sweat. Things were moving so fast…were they being framed for murdering the Prime Minister? It wasn’t her fault that he had come to their dysfunctional self-help group, nor that he had wound up dead of a severe papercut combined with a gunshot…

Suddenly the lights came on. Those same rafters were suddenly alight with streamers and confetti flowing down from above. “Surprise!” The RCMP officers pulled off their riot gear, revealing smiling faces and a decided lack of malice.

This last turn of events was too much for poor Maude; losing that remained of her calm, she sank down onto the floor, buried her face in her immaculately-manicured hands, and began to sob loudly. “I…I don’t want a surprise…” she wailed. “I…I…just want…”

Maude didn’t know what she wanted. There was too much going on, too much for her already fragile mind to process. She retreated into herself thinking back to things that had once made her feel warm and safe.

“I just want to go…to Showbiz Pizza…with Mom again…” she snorted, remembering her eighth birthday party–the warmest and safest part of her life so far.

The rest of the Valleyview Self-Help Club nodded in agreement, much to Maude’s bewilderment. “Yes! Oh yes, please!”

“One of you killed the Prime Minister,” the lead RCMP officer said. “Killing a corrupt man like that is quite a feat, after all, even more so for a self-help group. Certainly worthy of all the pizza in the world.”

Maude stood there as the officers and the rest of the Valleyview Self-Help Club circled around her, smiling and singing amid the confetti and the flashing police lights. Maude, unsure of whether to perk up or continue her wailing, was motionless at their center.

“What’s wrong with this one?” on orderly said, jabbing his thumb in Maude’s direction. Her expression, betwixt agony and ecstasy, was certainly unusual even for the Valleyview Assisted Living Facility.

“That’s just poor Maude,” said another orderly. “Committed in ’07. She shot up her self-help club thinking that they were trying to frame her for killing Stephen Harper. We leave her alone most days, off in her own little world.”

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Neil Grabty’s DNA was utterly unremarkable, as DNA went, but that wasn’t going to stop it from living on forever. When he donated his body to science, Grabty had visions of his transplanted organs saving lives or his cold form enlightening surgical classes in an operating theater.

Instead, he’d reported to the teaching hospital for one minor operation and told to return for a checkup in ten years. Incredulous, he’d forgotten about the whole thing until, nearly twenty years afterward, he met his untimely demise in a head-on collision. His head collided with someone else’s car, specifically, after a commuter ran a red light. That put an end to Neil Grabty’s personal stakes in what happened to his DNA, at least.

His body was rushed to a nearby hospital, but despite the best efforts of the surgeons there and the paramedics en route, Mr. Grabty was dead on arrival. His body was wheeled into the morgue waiting for someone to claim it, but nobody did–Neil was the only child of only children and seventy years old to boot. That was why he’d tried to leave his body to science, after all, but his donor card–and every other piece of identification he had–had been turned out of his pockets during the crash and lost in the ensuing fire.

Slated for cremation, Neil’s mortal shell lay under a sheet until the routine post-mortem that was performed on all unclaimed bodies slated for cremation and the potter’s field. Dr. Melville performed these, as they were the only work he could get after the accusations, the trial, and the acquittal on a technicality.

Certain strange growths on the inside of Mr. Grabty’s abdomen intrigued Dr. Melville; they were something he had never seen before, and he had seen a lot in his long and arguably unscrupulous career. They weren’t tumors and they weren’t cysts…what on earth were these strange structures in a dead man’s body?

Risking further damage to his reputation, Dr. Melville decided to ignore the order to cremate Mr. Grabty and resolved to perform a torough study–far more thorough than his post-mortem–on the cadaver’s abdominal cavity and the bizarre structures within it. Under the pretext of moving some supplies, he was able to transport it to the private lab he’d secretly built out of a disused mechanical space in the hospital basement. A container of dust and wood ash went to the potter’s field instead.

In his lab, during the quietest part of the overnight shift, Dr. Melville proceeded with a more thorough dissection. The smells of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde commingled in his nose; the nauseating odor of science, as Dr. Melville was oft heard to proclaim. He positioned a camcorder to get a good view of the procedure and began making his first incisions in they mysterious structures below the cadaver’s sternum.

The body split oven violently at the virst cut, splattering Dr. Melville with all manner of unpleasant and unspeakable fluids. He jumped back, swearing and spitting, pulling his glasses hastily off his face for an emergency cleaning. The first thing he saw after shoving them back on was a massive…thing…rising out of what had been Mr. Grabty’s body.

Horrified, screeching, Dr. Melville ran for the door. The creature, emerging like a barnacled rope of twisted flesh, was behind him and gaining.

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Mattheson looked at the shambling zombie walking gaily down main street, protected by a police cordon from curious onlookers. The corpse had been carefully dressed in someone’s Sunday finest and given a complete makeover with wig, silicone prostheses, and foundation–enough that it could almost pass for alive.

“Interpol says that it’s the body of one Tobias Kurz, born 1937 in Munich and died 2013 here in town,” said Wilson, flipping through his files. “It looks like he’s trying to go to his favorite breakfast spot.”

“Too bad it closed last year,” said Mattheson. “How many is this now, Wilson?”

“Three,” Wilson said. “One every two weeks or so. Same modus: tarting them up like they’re still alive.”

Nodding, Mattheson kept his eye on Mr. Kurz’s shambling zombie as it attempted to politely lift its had to someone cowering inside a storefront. “Three or more victims…likely done for psychological gratification…totaling more than a month’s time…including a significant “cooling off period” between each of them…”

“Yeah,” said Wilson. “It fits the classical definition. We’ve got a serial lifer out there, compulsively bringing people back from the dead, and we have no idea where they might strike next.”

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With delighted quibbles, the bird alights. A cuckoo enters the nest, level and light, balancing a bit to clutch twigs for a smaller bird. A nearby sparrow shouts a warning as the interloper lays a fake.

A sparrow weathers the events beside his hen, an apology unspoken between them. The hen runs claws against her clutch, against the interloper. Nearby, in the leaves, the cuckoo waits: ready to wreck nest and meat within should things go ill.

The sparrows have decided. They will keep the child and love it with offerings of chitin as if it were their very own. Perhaps their love will be enough, and their child will no longer savage the nests of others but build its own.

Theirs is the hope of a doomed generation.

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An overpriced athlete’s performance displays her superior winter genetics, her impractical spinning icebound combat halted by a sudden whistle, a sudden horror.

A misrepresented prophet puzzles, her invective punctuated with an ambiguous lisp. It was not always thus; need it always be?

Why does the senior horde beam so, grinning beneath the ceiling fan amid a puzzling void? She sits there among them, lost in thoughts of corkscrews on the ice.

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Q: How comfortable are the doomchairs?

A: The doomchairs are as comfortable as one’s doom. So if you die safe in bed, they are actually very comfortable and many such foredoomed patrons can be found napping in them. However, if your doom is much more exciting–exploding in a reentry rocket, assassination by car bomb, or the like–the doomchairs are, to put it mildly, intensely uncomfortable. No actual physical harm can come from using a doomchair, but the sensation of being burned alive makes them unpopular with foredoomed patrons who have interesting demises.

Q: Can I use a doomchair to learn my ultimate fate and thereby change it?

A: No. The sensations are unspecific and even trained doomologists are generally unable to learn any significant details. Patrons have reported feeling different sensations at different times, but the Delta Doombrary has no reliable information indicating that lifestyle changes can lead to different dooms. This makes sense when one realizes that many such dooms are accidental in nature and cannot be predicted.

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To the Friends of Evil everywhere, Good Evening
Be it known that
JOSIAH DARKSHADOW
having completed the required course of study, is this day, by action of the Faculty and of the Board of Untrustees, declared a
DOCTOR OF DARK ARTS
of the UNIVERSITY OF DOOM and is admitted
to all rights and privileges accruing thereto.
In testimony whereof this diploma duly certified by the signatures
of the proper officers, and the seal of the University, affixed this the
31ST day of FEBRUARY in the year of our Dark Lord 2015 and in the 666TH
year of the University.

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REMINDER
Orange cars require special maintenance and fuel. Because nothing rhymes with “orange,” maintenance must be performed monthly (as nothing rhymes with “month” either) rather than yearly or after a period of weeks. Special non-rhyming fuel must also be used for orange cars; attempts to use rhyming fuel will result in catastrophic engine damage. Care must also be taken to use only oil whose hydrocarbons are unrhymed stanzas.

The converse of these requirements is that the chances of a rhyming accident, in which two automobiles are fused into a single poem, is nil. Orange cars are also immune to the kind of scansion, parallelism, and other minor damage that affects colors whith rhyming colors like red or blue.

Only you can decide if an orange car is right for you; consult your Chrysalis Motors handbook or visit your local dealer for more information.

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The captain and crew had abandoned ship, leaving Murray and his band of retirees in complete control of the MV Huron.

John One and John Two had been in the Navy during the Korean War, so they knew enough to get the boat underway. John Three and Edgar had been in the Marines, so they knew how to bust open the arms locker. Not that a motor ferry on the Great Lakes had any great quantity of small arms, mind. But a line gun, an assortment of Orion flare guns, and a Marlin Mariner with half a dozen signal rounds and another half-dozen of no. 8 birdshot were enough to make anyone at least think twice about boarding.

Murray called a meeting on the bridge. “The way I see it,” he said, “we’ve got two options. Option one, we go ashore right now and turn ourselves in. Face the music. We kind of got caught up in something that got out of hand, and they might go easy on us since we’re old as hell and likely to die in jail before we learn our lesson.”

“What’s option two?” said John Three.

“Option two is we fuel up this tub before anyone realizes what’s up and set out for open water. Take what we need from the assholes in boats and stay ahead of a Coast Guard that hasn’t dealt with anything bigger than meth heads in rowboats for a hundred years.”

Looking at the faces of his friends, Murray saw that he scarcely needed to call a vote of any kind. The pirate career of the MV Huron had begun, the first such pirate to sail the Great Lakes in living memory.

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