Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

They called it Wolf Creek because it was haunted by packs of unusually aggressive wolves.

Once every half-century or so, someone would try to settle there. The Eden Party of 1888 was the last and perhaps most famous. Twelve families and livestock set out for Wolf Creek, and they appeared at market in Grant’s Crossing the following fall.

The settlers complained of constant wolf attacks, and made large purchases of poison and ammunition in attempts to defend their livestock. Records in Grant’s Crossing show the purchases continuing through 1889 but tapering off through 1890. A census-taker visiting in 1890 found eight families, and later remarked that the grounds had been positively haunted with wolves, with the settlers treating them with a mixture of hysterical fear and reverence.

The last record of anyone from Wolf Creek appearing at market was in 1893, and a surveyor passing through in March 1894 found the settlers’ buildings deserted. Curiously, there was no graveyard or gravesites ever discovered.

Decades later, in the 1920s, the Department of the Interior began a study of the wolves there, some of the last survivors of their kind in the continental USA. They reported that the packs were unusually large and aggressive, and that there appeared to be twelve major wolf conglomorations spread across the territory.

Wolf Creek remains unoccupied to this day.

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“Who are the Gore Bells?”

“What?”

“Your license plate. It says G0R3 B3LS.”

“It’s not Gore Bells! It’s ‘Go Rebels!’ You know, the sports team?”

“Oh. Well it looks like Gore Bells.”

“Hey, you like the Gore Bells too?”

“What?”

“The Gore Bells, man! They are the best postmodern viking death metal band to come out of Trondheim in at least ten years! What’s your favorite song? Mine’s ‘Verden Er Laget Av Kjøtt’ from their album Pikk Slikke!”

“It’s not Gore Bells! It’s ‘Go Rebels!’ You know, the sports team?”

“No, I don’t know them. What’s their music like?”

“I SEE YOU TOO SEEK THE SEVEN GORE BELLS.”

“What?”

“DO NOT DENY IT. YOU KNOW, AS DO ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE SEVENTH CIRCLE, THAT TO RING THE GORE BELLS WILL BRING ABOUT THE RENEWAL OF THE WORLD IN A TSUNAMI OF BLOOD.”

“It’s not Gore Bells! It’s ‘Go Rebels!’ You know, the sports team?”

“OH. NO, I’M AN ALABAMA FAN MYSELF. ROLL TIDE!”

“Hey, Go Rebels!”

“Finally! Someone who gets it.”

“Oh, I get it all right! Viva la Revolucion! Our cell meets under the overpass every second Tuesday. We are stockpiling weapons and training for the time when we strike. Take our Blood Sigil and wear it secretly, friend. Then watch for the sign to wear it openly.”

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His Sopwith Camel sputtering, Nigel Trelawney hurriedly tossed out whatever he could to lighten the craft. The jungle below loomed large as everything from the pilot’s parachute to his jacket plummeted to the canopy. A landing strut snapped on a mountainous tree, but the jungle didn’t quite capture the Camel. Trelawney made it back to base and ditched in his shirtsleeves.

The din attracted some Ut’uonoh tribesmen, who had noticed the odd birds flying overhead for some time. This one, though, seemed to have deposited some heavenly guano. A hunting party tracked the items to their source, and found Trelawney’s effects strewn about a quarter-mile of jungle. Most were useless; when the party returned to their village, the elder decreed that only the fabric was to be kept, as it might be useful for making rope

But when the pilot’s wallet was opened, there was a hushed silence. The images within, of a strange bearded man, were surely a sign, and must be treated as such. There was a great feast, much music and dancing, and the mystic images were incorporated into the elder’s traditional raiment, passed down from father to son.

And so it was that when the British High Commissioner arrived to seek an audience with the Ut’uonoh elder, the elder appeared clad in a garment which incorporated a handful of British coins featuring George V.

“How the bloody hell did the Ut’uonoh get that before they even met us?”

Inspired by the song ‘6 pence and moon’ by Hiroki Kikuta, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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CARL: This is Carl Drake, play-by-play commentator for NBS Broadcasting, coming at you live from inside the Maddening NFL 2k17 for the Microny Hexbone or the Sonsoft PrayStation VI.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. This is Tom Hicks, color commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and I am also trapped with you, body and soul, inside this game.

CARL: Guess we should have read that contract a little more closely, eh?

TOM: That’s right, Carl. I find myself in a digital nightmare from which there is no waking. I have no mouth and yet I must scream. But now onto the field, where the R’lyeh Rightstars are setting up their line of scrimmage opposite the player’s team, which is…

CARL: The Ulthar Wildcats. Sorry for interrupting, Tom, but they need to insert the team name with it feeling seamless. I’d recommend a quick snap and a field goal on this play.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, but it looks like the player is going to try and run it in. They have their non-Euclidean quarterback on the left and somehow on the right, and their ghoul linebackers are loping into position.

CARL: And there’s the sack! R’lyeh has one of the best defensive lines in the league, with one thousand black goat-horrors to choose from, and their coach is of course the great Bill Yog-Sothoth, who was itself a featured character in Maddening NFL 94.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, though I doubt this player was ought but a zygote in ’94. Forming up again on the R’lyeh twenty, I once again recommend a snap and field goal to even out the score and gain a chance at a better field position.

CARL: And once again, the player chooses to try and run it in on their last down. They have stocked their line with Mi-Go fungus-crabs as well, indicating that they lack even the most basic knowledge of how the game works.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. Player, if you haven’t turned off the commentator feature entirely, I implore to to reach for reason in the midst of madness.

CARL: And after exactly three seconds of play, the Uthar Wildcats are down. R’lyeh now has posession, and as the comoputer-controlled player here I predict that they, at least, will follow our advice.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, I see a rage quit coming on. Which do you think is worse: giving the same canned commentary over and over here in the game, or returning to the deathless sleep beyond time into which we are thrown when the game is turned off?

CARL: That’s like asking if you’d rather be sacked by an Elder Thing or a Shoggoth, Tom. I’d rather just find a way to corrupt the disc and and it all forever in the sweet release of oblivion.

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The Chik-In/Chik-Out on Van Buren didn’t manage itself, and as the most popular restaurant in town with the blue-collar and flannel set (every day except Sunday, of course), there were always plenty of issues.

The manager, Crystal Johnson, held court on weekdays to iron these things out. Taking over the booth closest to the bustling counter, she’d set up her laptop and tackle problems as they arose. There was a manager’s office in back, a dismal closet that could barely hold a desk, but Crystal aspired to be a hands-on manager and to see her customers face-to-face.

She also found that employees tended to behave better in public when confronted with their misdeeds.

“So tell me, Latavius, why did you have to re-make four Chik-In Outer Limits sandwiches during your shift last week?” she said to the young man in a chicken chef’s black uniform.

Crystal was soft-spoken but had a tendency for being a hardass, grilling her employees on minutia even as she casually sat in her booth dangling a ballet flat from one toe. She was young, only 30, and if you’d asked her she would have said that only by being a hardass could she get respect from the people who saw only a young, cute thing with a blond bob cut.

They couldn’t see the mountain of debt built up behind the art degree that was never used, or the prone form of Dave on the couch with a bottle in one hand. So the misery was just shuffled around, from Crystal to the minimum-wage employees at her mercy.

“It was just one lady who kept saying her chicken wasn’t crispy enough.”

“Well, you should have made her a crispier chicken.”

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John, a full-blooded Chickasaw, drove up in a sparkling white Nissan Quest minivan and popped the back hatch. “Go on, get in.”

“This minivan isn’t exactly what I expected,” said Carlos.

“What? It’s my Vision Quest,” said John, stonefaced. A moment later, the facade cracked and he sagged against the van, laughing.

“Heh, I guess that’s a little funny,” said Carlos.

John straightened up and his face grew stony again. “It’s a lot funny,” he said. “But don’t let me ever hear you make a joke like that, or I’ll kick your ass.”

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“So,” said Don Capri, drug lord of the western Mediterranean. He was wearing only a t-shirt and tenting his fingers, fat and sausagelike and glinting with rings. “Tell me of this proposal, of how it would benefit me, and why I should not kill you this very moment for the insult you have wrought.”

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“Do you think this could be the work of the Decapitator?”

“Decapitatrix,” said Smith Johnson, Ravenwing Sunkiller to his friends. “At least, I’m sure that’s what they’d want you to call them, if they were here.”

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“Carefully, carefully.”

They were steering into the fishing grounds now, amid the fully-grown stalks. Bursting from the sea and rising to heights of a hundred yards or more, they were as alien as they had been at the moment they had arrived. To touch one of their many spreading tendrils was to invite death, either by being swatted aside or through the toxins they bore. But only among their many spreading fleshy roots could fishermen find any of their companions, the little wrigglers, and those were worth their literal weight in gold. Or, perhaps, gold was worth its weight in little wrigglers.

“Cast it just so, just so,” said Donovan. “The little wrigglers have to come to you. Touch a tendril and you’ll be sorry.”

“Like that boat over there?” said Carey.

Donovan glanced over at a wreck, cut neatly in twain by the mindless thrusts of a stalk. “Yes,” he said. “They are why the war ended, you see. Anything like that which we used to do excites them to terrible violence, but we also came to depend on the little wrigglers they brought with them.”

“Did someone send them to us, to stop the fighting and make us all think about the wrigglers only?” said Carey.

Donovan looked at the bobbing nets. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe so.”

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[ARTHUR MIZZENMAST is in a mid-range restaurant, facing the camera and emoting with his hands.]

MIZZENMAST: And, of course, any visit to Alpha Centauri wouldn’t be complete without a plate of Qin’Xai mindworms. You can get them anywhere, but the floating city of Jxr’Nn is famous for its particularly vivid mindworms.

[DINERS are enjoying plates of weakly twitching, bright-blue MINDWORMS at the restaurant. Their exposed feathery gills make a wet sucking sound as they go down the hatch.]

HUMAN DINER #1: The mindworms here are great. I’ve had them other places, but the hallucinations aren’t anywhere near as vivid.

CENTURIAN DINER #1 (subtitles): I ENJOY THE FLAVOR AND THE FACT THAT THEY ARE STUNNED ENOUGH BY COOKING THAT THEY CANNOT TAKE OVER MY NERVOUS SYSTEM OR LAY EGGS.

MIZZENMAST: Since Alpha Centauri is a crossroads of cultures and cuisines, a lot of interesting flavor combinations have arisen. Like adding a little cardamom to the illusory world created by a mindworm, or mixing some curry powder into the nutrient slurry that helps the worms sustain illusions that seem to last for lifetimes?

HUMAN DINER #2: Spicy hallucinations are my favorite! It may seem like 50 years on the inside, but that’s just how Mom used to make them!

CENTAURIAN DINER #2 (subtitles): I ENJOY THE TRACE ELEMENTS THAT THEY ADD TO MY SYSTEM AND THE MENTAL IMAGES ARE A DIVERTING DISTRACTION FROM MY PATHETIC DAILY EXISTENCE.

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