Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Naturally, of course the mighty kraken are r-strategists, producing large numbers of planktonic offspring with each mating. Female kraken eventually mature and grow to a size large enough to menace commercial ship traffic, while males remain near-microscopic and serve only to breed during their brief lives.

Unusually, the krakens produce only one kind of offspring at various stages of their life. While below 6 inches or so in size, young tiny krakens will produce only male offspring, while between 6 inches and 600 yards they will produce only female offspring, The reason for this adaptation is not currently well-understood, especially given the relative rarity of larger kraken specimens even in the era before they were hunted on an industrial scale.

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“Why are you hiding back there?” the constable said to the golem.

“Someone wrote ‘hide’ on a scroll and stuck it in my mouth,” the golem responded. “I’m compelled to do whatever the scroll says, officer! It’s not my fault.”

“I see,” the constable said, writing PATROL THE NEIGHBORHOOD on a scroll with a stub of a pencil and rolling it up.

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“So tell me, Mr…?”

“Scarey,” the scarecrow said, removing Babathiel’s hat and bowing. “Scarey Pritchard.”

“Right, yes,” the inspector said. “Mr. Pritchard. You seem to have an unreasonably large collection of eyeballs. Care to elaborate?”

“Tell him they are just for sightseeing,” Babathiel’s hat told Scarey through their psychic link. “A joke to break the tension and make you seem less like an obvious dummy.”

“They are for seeing sights,” Scarey said, laughing uneasily.

“…indeed so,” the inspector said, unconvinced. “I’m curious why you haven’t declared them on your Form 1BDI.”

“I’m holding them!” Scarey blurted, before Babathiel’s hat could feed him any lines. “For a friend!”

“And what friend is that?” said the inspector.

“Don’t say her name-“ the hat began.

“Babathiel! My mistress Babathiel!” Scarey cried.

“Ah, well, that’s fair enough,” the inspector said. “I’ll just make a note to audit your mistress Babathiel when the opportunity arises. Naturally, as her thralls, you can’t legally he held responsible for her actions.”

Scarey looked up at Babathiel’s hat, smiling and giving a rickety thumbs-up. If the hat wasn’t capable of scowling, it certainly gave it a good college try at that moment.

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While Babathiel, the Old Witch of the North Woods, was on her extended trip around the world with her old coven, the various and sundry objects she had enchanted to sentience were found with time on their hands. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since none of them had hands except her old enchanted clock.

Babathiel’s broom had flown to Los Angeles to try its hand at acting. Her cauldron had taken on a side job with a farm-to-table co-op. And her black cat familiar, Yagnider, had found a suburban cul-de-sac to mooch off of, having convinced no less than four families that he was their sole and only cat and collecting four dinners a day.

With the enchanted clock happy to sit around and waste time, that left only Babathiel’s hat. While it had many powers—increasing spell slots, acting as a bag of holding, and being able to sort people into broad personality types when placed on their heads—the hat was not satisfied to merely exercise them.

No, Babathiel’s hat had grander ambitions.

It was up to no good.

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“You wanted to see me, Bob?”

“Yes, Ernie, come on in.” Bob gestured to a chair opposite him, while Bob stumbled over to it, dragging his gimpy leg behind him and moaning.

“What can I do for you and HR?” Ernie said, a friendly expression on his pallid face. The one eye that still worked regarded Bob brightly, while the other stared cloudily at the wall.

“Well, Ernie, the fact of the matter is, we were hoping that you would take a compensation package and retire.”

“Never!” said Ernie, shocked. “Bob, this work is my life.”

“Ah, yes. Yes, I figured you thought that after you died at your desk and then arose the next morning to clock in as usual,” Bob said. “But listen, Ernie, it’s time to go. A living employee would be cheaper for us, work less overtime, move faster, and would attract fewer scavengers.”

Ernie glanced at the raccoon gnawing on his gimped leg. “This is starting to sound awfully ageist, Bob, I gotta say.”

“Well, I hate that you feel that way, Ernie, but Legal has assured me that, as the living dead, you have no rights to speak of and that we can fire you with no repercussions if you decline to retire.”

“Decline to quit, you mean,” Ernie said. “Look, Bob, I also don’t take any breaks and I’m the only one who knows the old accounting system code that we need for legacy support.”

“Oh, we’re well aware of that, Ernie,” Bob said. “In fact, we’ll increase your buyout by 50% if you agree to train Neussbaum on the system.”

“And what would 50% more money do for me?” laughed Ernie, his voice creaking eerily. “Especially if it makes me lose the only thing that is animating this tattered form?”

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“What’s got you down, Scarey?” said Crow, settling on the scarecrow’s outstretched arm.

“Well, I’m not all that good at scaring crows, as you know,” said Scarey.

“Not all that good?” Crow said, trying to be kind. “Why, you scared Cousin Crow so much that he took an hour, maybe two, to come back and eat some corn! Uncle Crow said he’d never seen him so spooked.”

“It’s kind of you to say, but you perched on me and saying it rather proves my point,” said Scarey. “But it’s okay. I know my limitations, and I’d rather have you as a friend than an enemy.”

“So what’s the problem then?” said Crow.

“My other job, my only other job, is to be spooky on Halloween,” said Scarey. “And I’m afraid I’m not very good at that either. And if I can’t even be scary one day a year, why, they might take me down.”

“That would be the end of old Scarey, wouldn’t it?” Crow said.

“And they might get something else to keep crows away,” said Scarey. “Like guns or poison.”

“Listen to me, Scarey,” said Crow. “I swear on the good name of my grandfather Crow, sweet Granny Crow, and all the rest, that I will help you be a scary Scarey for Halloween.”

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The casting director steepled her hands on the desk and looked at the broomstick. “Are you…Mr. B. Rümschtick?”

The broomstick standing before her answered (she wasn’t sure where from) in a reedy voice: “That’s right. I’m here to read for the part.”

“Uh, I’m not sure you fit the type we’re looking for,” said the director.

“The cattle call sheet says you want tall, thin, tan, and blond,” the broomstick replied. “I think you’ll find I meet all the criteria to read for the part of Chris.”

The assistant director leaned over and whispered in the casting director’s ear: “The call sheet doesn’t specify humans. Let it read for the part or we could be in big trouble with SAG.”

“Shit, really?”

“They sued when a pig auditioned for a senator three years ago.”

Turning back to the broomstick, the casting director smiled. “Okay, we’ll let you read for the part. Would you like to tell us a little about your background?”

“You’re not allowed to make them say that!” the AD hissed.

“It can be volunteered! Don’t tell me you’re not curious!” the casting director whispered back.

“Well, I’m a witch’s broomstick, given unholy life through arcane rituals which rend asunder the veil between living and dead, seelie and unseelie,” the broom said. “But I’m trying to branch out and try different things.”

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Naturally, Boris preferred to have a reflection, since it made him less likely to be outed as an unholy creature of the night, especially in the mirrored ballrooms of Bucharest. So he had contrived to use his not-inconsiderable powers as a sorcerer to cast a spell to give him a false reflection with which to fool and bamboozle mortals until it was too late, and his fangs were already sunk deep into their flesh and draining their lifeblood.

Unfortunately, the spell was a bit of a kludge. Boris knew a spell for creating illusions, another for making them move, and a third for enchanting mirrors for the purposes of scrying, so he had simply combined all three in an attempt to create a convincing, fake, reflection.

“Heyyy, Boris! Looking a litly doughy there, my man. You just suck too much, you know?”

The spell created a fake reflection all right…and one that dispensed a never-ending torrent of insults, false prophecies, outright lies, and bad jokes.

Worst of all, Boris had cast another spell he knew—permanency—over the whole thing before realizing his mistake. Needless to say, remedying the error was top on his to-do list…assuming he could think over the inane chattering of his doppelganger.

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The grinning skull rotated itself 180 degrees, accompanied by the snapping and popping of bones.

“A construct am I, assembled in death. Speak the password at once, let your words have some heft.”

“I, uh, don’t know the password,” said Rags. “Do you know where I can find it?”

“No password you have, my instructions are clear. I must cut your head off, from all you hold dear.”

The skull emerged further into the pool of light, revealing skeletal arms and a rib cage. Rags backed up a step, alarmed, but his alarm grew a hundredfold when he saw another set of arms, and another ribcage emerged, and another, and another.

The gatekeeper or guardian or whatever it was…the skeleton had too many bones, and it was wending its way toward him like a terrifying wyrm of bleached ivory.

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