Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“At first it was only a few minutes, but it’s been getting longer and longer each time. Nobody says they see me when I’m…out…but I turned on the GPS on my phone to see if it could track me.”

“Uh huh,” Mike said. “And so that’s why we’re at a cell phone tower in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s where Locate My Phone says it is,” snapped Emmy.

Sure enough, a few moments’ poking around led to a phone, thankfully still in its weatherproof case, lying by the massive support girder for the cell phone array. There were no footprints in the soft earth nearby, nor were there any signs of disturbance.

“I’ll be damned,” whistled Mike. “There it is.”

“Run the GPS to see where I went while I was…out…” said Emmy. “I can’t bear to watch.”

Mike opened the app and scrolled through the data. “It says that you haven’t moved.”

“What?”

Flipping the phone over, Mike held it out. “See? 0.0 miles. It has you in your apartment until 1:01AM and then suddenly it’s here without recording a single inch of travel.”

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Once the cameras had snapped and the first shovelful of ground had been broken for the new McDougal’s fast-food joint, the owner waited until the crowd had dissipated before making a quiet call into his cell.

Fifteen minutes later, an unmarked car drove up. It was from the local McDougal’s lodge, no. 421, and out stepped the local representatives of that most noble order. First an Apprentice, wearing only the striped shirt and hat. Then a Journeyman with a striped cape, fluttering in the afternoon breeze. And finally the Master himself, with a striped robe and a staff topped with the symbol of the Most Sublime Double Order of McDougal’s, the All-Consuming Maw.

“Is the way prepared?” said the Master.

“Yes,” the owner said. He led them to a small concrete receptacle that had been prepared at the exact mathematical center of the new building’s footprint. A small stone casket lay there, prepared with mortar to seal it for all eternity.

“Very good.” The Master reached into his voluminous robes and produced a freshly-made McDougal’s milkshake, still glistening with condensation. Reverently, he placed it in the receptacle whilst singing the sacred words: “Pull up, pull up, pull up to the second window.”

“The second window will take your money and give you healing,” said the Apprentice and Journeyman.

Grasping the proffered spade, the Master covered the milkshake with earth while repeating the singsong liturgy. Once that was done, he sealed the container with the mortar. “This McDougal’s is consecrated now,” he said. “Mind that you treat McDougal’s #3891 with the due reverence it demands.”

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Maybelle had always been a girl with an odd coffin.

It dated back to a tie when she was very much alive. Her father, Augustus, had been a joiner and amateur silversmith. He had made a hobby of preparing lavish coffins for every member of the family, to spare the bereaved the expense. His own coffin was guilded in stainless silver leaf taken from an old serving tray, with griffin claws at each angle holding orbs engraved with dog Latin, for instance.

For Maybelle, even after she went to live with her fiancée, Augustus had seized upon her love of Dickens to produce an engraved tableaux of mourning characters from Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Rather than griffin-clawed orbs, the corners were protected from postmortem breakage by the shapes of London buildings, at least as they were known to a book-loving South Dakotan of modest means and no money for a railroad ticket.

Ironically, when the time came to lay Maybelle amid her Dickensian silver, a load of bricks topped with mementoes was put under instead, for the boiler explosion had left nothing to bury. Maybelle herself thought this rather a waste, and began her career as a specter orbiting the casket much as she might have if it had been filled with her mortal form rather than her diary and the contents of her hope chest.

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By the end of 1944, the Soviet summer offensive led to the German troops around Pzevsk being completely cut off. They were isolated from both the retreating forces of Army Group Center to the south and the remnants of Army Group North which had been trapped on the Courland Peninsula in Latvia.

All told, about 10,000 Germans were trapped around Pzevsk. The Soviets, preoccupied both by the much larger Courland pocket to the north and the continuing offensives to the west, were content to blockade Pzevsk in order to starve their opponents out. Pzevsk was a city of modest size with no natural resources, and there were not enough supplies to sustain a large group of soldiers without resupply. Naturally, the German command refused to evacuate or surrender Pzevsk; the last orders sent to the pocket in April 1945 called for it to resist.

After the surrender in Europe, the Courland pocket was surrendered to the Soviets but the much smaller Pzevsk pocket did not respond to demands for surrender. A belated Soviet attack on May 10 met no resistance, and rapidly overtook the position.

This was because every last soldier in the pocket was already dead.

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“So wait,” said Zane. “Every ant in this hill is a Platonic ideal?”

“That’s right,” Queenie said. “Over there? That worker is the platonic ideal of a slice of pepperoni pizza. The one crawling up your leg? She is classical music.”

“What happens when one of them is…you know…squished?” Zane said, looking very carefully at the pepperoni ant.

“I beg your pardon,” Queenie said. “Are you thinking of squishing pepperoni pizza out of the universal experience?”

“N-no! Well, maybe. I am a vegan after all.”

“My anthill is eternal,” said Queenie. “When one of my daughters dies, the concept dies with them. It is as if it never existed.”

“That’s impossible,” Zane said. He took a moment for the absurdity of saying that to a talking ant queen and expecting an answer to sink in before he continued: “I’d remember the pizza I ate before I went vegan.”

“Oh really? Do you remember zorgbl? My daughter representing zorgbl was taken by an anteater two weeks ago.”

“You’re just making that up.”

“See? You don’t remember. Pity, too. Zorgbl was the favorite food of many a human. And I’m sure you don’t remember cypipre either, or yttuggmix.”

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“The Creator, who lies dead and dreaming…has dreams for us all. And…and when It wakes, It will…”

“There, there, that’s enough,” said Inspector Bryar. “You’re shaking like a leaf, Sister Ethne! An inspector from the Sepulcher is no reason to tremble so.”

“M-my…m-my apologies, Inspector,” said Ethne with a deep curtsey. Her mask, fine-featured and impassive, did not match the quailing tone issuing from it.

“We are not used to our ceremonies being attended by outsiders, I’m afraid,” said Father Yser. He spread his hands in an apologetic way, his fingers doing what his scarred visage could not.

“Of course, I understand completely,” said Bryar with a gentle laugh. “Half the time, I forget the liturgy myself whenever I’m called to recite it.”

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It was originally, if you can believe it, a janitor’s closet. So it had the hookups for water and gas but only one entry. When they turned into Noodleman’s, that was a problem–with one entrance that was going to be the order and pickup window, how were we going to get in and out?

Well, we did it by climbing through the pickup/takeout window.

Now, you might wonder how that would work, with us putting our shoes all over the same counter people are served food on, especially after stomping around on a food prep floor for hours at a time. You’d think people would be disgusted by this.

Nope!

You forget that Noodleman’s was a hipster restaurant, catering to people who were used to terrible seating and used to being served on dustpans. So it didn’t bother them that there were footprints on the counter, just like it didn’t bother them that the only seating was a foot-wide shelf bolted to alley bricks with surplus science classroom stools as seats.

Heck, it didn’t even bother them when they closed the place down for health reasons. I still hear people waxing nostalgic about our cold peanut noodles!

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After it was abandoned around 1400 due to its conquest by the Aztecs, the city of Zapultepec wasn’t discovered and excavated until 1930. The statuary was long sunk into ruin, but there was one fascinating artifact that mystified its discoverers and continues to excite speculation to this day.

A cube, rough and not perfect, but seemingly made of stone. Bizarrely, it appeared to be made out of steel-reinforced concrete with heavily pitted and rusted rebar sticking out in several spots. This was particularly impossible, as steelmaking did not exist in pre-Columbian Mexico, and steel-reinforced concrete in particular was not invented in the form of the cement cube of Zapultepec until 1884.

More bizarrely still, the cube seemed to have fallen to the Zapultepec site from a great height, at least 300 feet if not more than 1000. This was evident in the strata and ejecta of the impact, still visible after hundreds of years. But is it was impossible for rebar-embedded concrete to be there, it was doubly so for it to have fallen from such a great height.

Largely thanks to the cube, Zapultapec’s otherwise unspectacular ruins have become a tourist attraction. It’s cited by many in paranormal circles as a prime example of an OOPART, an out-of-place artifact that demonstrates that some form of time travel or alien intervention has taken place.

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“She’s in the Nose” was the most popular sitcom on NBS in 2002, telling the story of teenage prodigy plastic surgeon Jessica Chalmers. Spoiled and sequestered, she nevertheless managed to embark upon a series of wacky adventures doing nose jobs and tummy tucks for a cavalcade of celebrity guest stars. The show, and Chalmers’ oft-repeated catch phrase “the nose knows, ‘kay?” were massive hits for the first season but rapidly tanked in the second thanks to the addition of a wise-cracking 8-year-old-nurse, who audiences hated.

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“Fascinating,” said Leanorel. A few more brush strokes revealed the final portions of the mural. “This hallways was used by the dwarves to record their entire history as it happened, from the founding of the settlement to its ultimate failure.”

Aviss, her fellow archaeologist from the Elven Exploration and Excavation Society leaned forward. “We’ve seen the years of plenty, but everyone knows about those from the other settlements. Let’s see the good stuff.”

“This panel…the dwarves seem to be triumphant over the goblins, but the runes tell a different story. They say that the overseer demanded a triumphant mural but it is only a monument to death.”

“Interesting, and not unlike a dwarf to say,” drawled Aviss. “What about that last bit there?”

Leanorel recoiled. “That’s not engraved in the same way, it was chiseled in roughly over another half-finished triumph.”

“What’s it say?”

“DWEAVAN YOU ASSHOLE YOU’VE KILLED US ALL.”

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