Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Lone parking lot beer
Unlike those who cut it loose
It’s never been drunk

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Ebenezer “Ben” Cooke
The Cookes are a large family from Ednam in Roxburghshire, Scotland, and Cooke’s grandfather traveled to the New World as an indentured laborer to find his fortune. He was successful enough that his son, Cooke’s father, inherited a large plantation with slaves.

Mrs. Cooke died in childbirth giving birth to Elizabeth “Bess” Cooke, Cooke’s older half-sister. Lonely, the elder Cooke fell in love with one of his slaves, Belinda. Though they could never marry, they lived together as husband and wife to the great scandal of their neighbors, and the remaining slaves were freed and rehired as laborers at her urging.

Cooke was Belinda’s only child and recieved a thorough education from his bibliophile father and mother. The elder Cooke rewrote his will to legitimize Cooke as his heir, effectively disinheriting Bess, who had in the meantime married a wealthy local doctor.

When both Belinda and the elder Cooke died in a yellow fever epidemic, Bess and her husband used the opportunity to take Cooke’s inheritence. They hired local bushwhackers to kidnap Cooke and the other workers and had them taken to the slave markets of the Caribbean to be sold. Cooke was 13 at the time.

On the way to the market, the ship was stopped and boarded by pirates (or privateers) led by Captain Roxburgh. Cooke led the pirates to the hidden valuables aboard in exchange for putting the others ashore unharmed as free men. Impressed by Cooke’s acumen, Roxburgh took him aboard as a cabin boy. It was aboard that ship that Cooke had is apprenticeship as a seaman.

When the pirates captured a Dutch Indiaman some years later, Cooke, as mate, was given the prize to sail himself. Christening it the Fancy Rat, he was able to escape the destruction of Roxburgh’s flotilla later that year. Since then, Cooke has continually upgraded and modified his ship and engaged in piracy largely based out of Jolly Port.

The one thing that sets him apart from his fellow ruffians is his refusal to sell slaves on captured ships – he will instead put them safely ashore. He also loathes his given name, dismissing it as a ridiculously trendy appellation, and prefers to go by simply “Cooke” or, if pressed, “Ben Cooke.”

Physical Description
Cooke describes himself as having “his father’s nose after it was smashed flat against his face.” His hair is wildly curly and often barely kept under control with ribbons or hats; he wears it long out of vanity. He had strikingly-colored eyes, a “blunderbuss of dark freckles to the cheeks;” these features plus his darker skin make his mixed ancestry very clear.

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The highwayman pushed Father Dunwich back. “Dun need yer prayers,” he snapped. “Jus’ yer money or yer life.”

“I’ve no money, my son, as I told you,” replied Father Dunwich. He leaned in again, but this time, he slipped the highwayman’s dagger from its sheath and plunged it three times, quick as lightning, into the chinks between plates of boiled leather armor.

“Ere now, what are ya-” The other robber made to swing his sword, but Father Dunwich had already closed the distance between them and the thug’s sword arm bounced harmlessly off the good priest’s shoulder. The dagger was deep between his ribs before anything else could slip out of his lips.

“Wh…wha…how…?” The first highwayman had sunk to his knees, each breath forcing more air from his punctured and deflated lung into his chest cavity.

“I tolja, I’s a sin-eater,” growled Father Dunwich. “Yer bleedin’ out cuz I’s taken yer sins upon m’self. The sin o’ how to stab folks afore they know what poked em, fer instance.”

Father Dunwich knelt over the fallen men, saying the Obeisances in their ragged patois as their life ebbed away.

“Gonna jaw an’ think like ya for a spell,” he said, “but it’s no thing. Yer absolved an’ I was damned afore.”

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“Ah ches,” said the Inspector. “Just zo. But we muzt azk ourzelvez, muzt we not, how the victim came to be found on zhe train?”

“I hate to interrupt, Inspector,” cried the engineer, “But we’re on the roof of a cargo train and a tunnel is coming. Perhaps the investigation can wait?”

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Sun, jealous at his lover Moon’s newfound dalliance with Earth, took up a great obsidian knife and stabbed her. She was swollen with eggs, and they spilled forth upon Earth. The eggs were every thing that runs upon Earth, swims within Earth, soars above earth.

Moon, her energy spent, grew silent and cold. Earth, mourning his love, cared for her children in the distant way of a stepfather. Sun grew hot with jealousy but respected Moon and her children and allowed her half the sky.

But the time will soon come, children, when Moon will reawaken, when Earth will woo her once more, when Sun will grow jealous anew. The obsidian blade that is the night remains, and Moon has once again grown full of new children.

When Sun slices her again, what will become of her old children when the new spill down upon us?

They may brefriend us.

They may devour us.

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Magicists have long since concluded that a very particular type of hex, the hexus malificus, was responsible for most curses. This curse, widely known as the Common Hex, Merlin’s Hex, or less politically correctly as the Gypsy Hex, afflicts millions every year but is easily treated by commercially available and safe counter-curses and counter-hexes.

However, newly discovered documents from notable hex researcher Jumbicus the Magnificent indicate that many occurances of what are presumes to be the Common Hex may actually be a much rarer and more serious curse, which may also occur alongside and worsen the Common Hex. Named the Swiss Curse after the first cases were catalogued near Chur in Grisons, it may explain why some otherwise normal Common Hexes last for years with debilitating results.

If a Common Hex curse is actually the Swiss Curse, or is inflicted alongside it by natural magic or by design, it may explain why normal counter-curses are sometimes ineffective as well.

The American Magical Association has declined to comment, but many fringe elements have declared this new research a victory and validation.

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Being psychic must be great, they say. You’d get all the free stock tips you could ever want, be able to dominate conversations, and rule the world. Asimov wrote about a psychic mutant so powerful that he conquered the known galaxy.

Me? I deliver pizzas to drunk Southern Michigan University students in Hopewell.

You might ask, or think about asking, why this is. I’ll know either way, but only if you’re coherent.

Peoples’ thoughts are a disorganized soup from which comprehensible words and images only haphazardly arise. So while it’s easy to see what someone’s about to say, the lead time is really short–a second or less. Most people just don’t think that far ahead, and they think so fast that it’s tough to keep up.

That’s when you aren’t getting flashes of suppressed desires and gummed-in stale jokes. So much of what I pick up is farts and sex. SO MUCH.

Add to that the fact that I have to focus and pay attention. If I think about something else, it’s like overhearing a conversation a room over. I might get the gist, I might not. But it can be exhausting and distracting picking up on the sexual fantasies of a 68-year-old in the next apartment over when you’re trying to study, believe you me.

I also don’t fit into the “Esmerelda the gypsy” mold that people expect from psychics. I am built like a linebacker, six feet tall and 200 lbs plus. Ladies aren’t meant to be that big, at least not according to clothing stores. People don’t think as much when you intimidate them, and their thoughts often turn to critiquing my appearance as a Bride of Frankenstein.

Which leads me to Papa Przewalski’s Pizza. It offers three things that are extremely valuable to a psychic: flexible hours, free food, and long stretches where I can plug my headphones in and blast other peoples’ thoughts out of my head with heavy metal music.

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“It’s really quite a simple process,” says Zadume Magarabad, the initiative’s local team leader. “We send out the drones, which are modified from commercially available bomb disposal robots, and they distribute the pellets in every direction using a little feed ramp like the ones you use to feed livestock.”

The pellets are specifically designed to attract local wildlife with their sweet taste. When small animals–hares, stoats, voles, and the like–eat the drone-scattered pellets, they become innoculated against sylvatic plague, which is largely spread by fleas.

Some have asked why Magarabad’s team has to use drones to vaccinate bunnies, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with their stated purpose. “Bunnies are its food!” he laughs. “If you vaccinate the food, you vaccinate the food chain.” When pressed about why his team isn’t addressing the problem more directly, Magarabad adds “Have you ever tried to find a yeti to give them their shots? It’s not easy.”

Sylvatic plague, which was introduced by climbers to the Himalayas in the 1960s, has decimated the already fragile yeti populations. During an outbreak, up to 100% of a yeti family group may die. By inoculating their food supply, the team hopes to save the gigantopithicids from extinction. With the population already pressured by a decrease in its natural range and illegal hunting, some experts fear that the sylvanic plague might be the last straw for the endangered species.

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At the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today, the Nobel Committee bestowed the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics to chart-topping singer-songwriter Tom Petty for his epochal 1989 single “Free Fallin’.”

In a prepared statement, the Nobel Committee announced Mr. Petty’s win “for having created new awareness of equations for falling bodies and expressing the notion of universal gravitation in the great American pop tradition” through the song. As a laureate, Tom Petty will recieve a gold medal, a diploma, a stipend of 8 million Swedish kronor, and a lifetime honorary appointment to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Academy’s spokesperson, neurologist Dr. Sven-Olaf Larsson, noted in his statement that some may take issue with the award being “frivolous.” “I understand that this is an unexpected choice,” Dr. Larsson said, “but after much reflection and discussion and reflection, the Committee was unable to think of a figure with a greater role in promoting universal gravitation than Mr. Petty and his song ‘Free Fallin’.'”

Reached for comment at his home in Encino, California, Mr. Petty demurred when asked to make a statement but declared himself “honored and surprised.” A statement issued by his publicist later in the day declared that “Mr. Tom Petty is delighted to accept the award, and urges all his fans to continue to fly high whilst maintaining a healthy respect for gravity.”

Others who had been favored for the award included Swiss high energy particle researcher Dr. Lana Kleinschmidt, American quantum string theorist Dr. Caesar Hernandez, and Russian astrophysicist Dr. Ivan Lebedev. Their projects had included safe and reliable nuclear fusion, time travel and probability, and machines to recycle extraterrestial CO2 into oxygen for future colonization of Mars.

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Shortly after the demon posessing the artifact slew the CEO and inhabited her still-bleeding form, the GesteCo board of directors meeting dissolved into chaos.

Shareholders attempted to force the revenant from its (?) position, citing Clause 32 of the company bylaws (“in cases where the CEO dies or is incapacitated”). However, a white knight investor in the form of Necrotech Holdings prevented this. It injected capital into the company by buying shares and citing the case of its own CFO, a demonic gestalt of corrupted souls inhbiting the husk of a 13th-century alchemist.

Under the new (or the same?) CEO, GesteCo posted record profits its following quarter, due largely to its expansion into dark energy research, soul oil extraction, peonage, and consumer products.

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