Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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“I mean, Gnashing Peaks? Mountains of Wailing? What sort of superstitious nonsense is that?” Ryk said. “If you’re trying to frighten me, there are better ways of doing it.”

“Frighten you?” Kuni scoffed. “Those named have been earned, lowlander. It’s a thousand leagues or more to the next pass in these hills, and sometimes being able to struggle a few wagons of food through after a bad harvest is what makes the difference for those of us who live here.”

“So they gnash and wail at you? Typical of you yokels up here, ascribing a malevolent will to whatever you can’t understand,” said Ryk.

“The gnashing and wailing is ours, lowlander, when our children and elders die because a caravan was snowed in at the pass.” Kuni pointed at the serpentine road winding its way up between the Gnashing Peaks, splitting the Mountains of Wailing in twain. “If you want to march up there, be my guest. But the only way you’ll see your lowlands again is from the hereafter.”

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“What happened?”

The corporal shook his head, his pupils dilated. “He just…walked up to us. And one by one, I saw the guys fall over as he came near. I thought they were dead, so when he came to me, my gun was up.”

Not a hint of concern flittered across Revatī’s face. “That didn’t work,” she said.

“No. I couldn’t pull the trigger. He reached out, touched me, and then I was down.”

“Did it hurt?” Cosgrove said.

“No, not at all. It was…it was like lying in warm sunshine. I felt like I was back in Paris–my honeymoon–asleep in the summer sun. Everything was warm and golden and I couldn’t…I couldn’t have been happier.” The corporal choked back a sob. “It’s…it’s been almost two years, since she died, and this…I just couldn’t…”

“Uh-huh.” Revatī turned away. “As we thought.”

“Another detail you neglected to mention?” Cosgrove said. “I don’t remember anything about a euphoria of golden memories in your report.”

“I imagine it’s different for every one of them,” Revatī said. “And I imagine most of them would do anything to return to that state of bliss. We should go. If he comes back and asks them to kill us, I have no doubt every last one of them would pull the trigger.”

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You may have heard that the strange glyph ETAOIN SHRDLU was an artifact of hot-metal linotype machines, that it was nonsense text that operators would enter after a mistake by running their finger down the keyboard in order to key in a corrected version, sometimes slipping into print as a result of inattentive typesetters.

This is, of course, a lie.

It is writ large in the Codex Malasterium that ETAOIN SHRDLU is one of the 9,999 names of the dread entity many know as Køs the Cruel Star, Baleful Køs, Køs the Lamented. She manifests most often as a great light, shining from the upper atmosphere with cold radiance outpacing the sun, and to be touched by any natural light she has contaminated is to risk madness or death. When she appeared above Korton in the dreamlands eons ago, the people there traded with the Dark itself for relief, in the form of a dusky shadow that shrouds the town to this day.

But what is little-known is that Køs may be summoned into any world simply by writing her name–any of her 9,999 appellations.

No one knows the exact number of times it must be written. Perhaps there is some dread name that will summon her at once. But what is certain is that the Society of Køs snuck one of her names into thousands, millions of printed papers between the 1890s and 1980s. Digital expressions will not work; ink must touch paper.

It is said that, when the technology was discontinued, most of the work had already been done and that only a few hundred thousand instances remain before Køs will appear and rain her horrid light down upon this world. To forestall that, and the erosion of sanity in ordered space that will bring, we beg of you.

Please.

Please do not print out this post.

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Name: Scorchy
Species: Hellhound
This charming orphan was left behind when a demon-summoning ritual went awry. Keep in mind his predisposition to evil, her 550-degree body temperature, and remember that he is hellworm positive and will need to see a veterinary exorcist.

Name: Bastet
Species: Deity
Bastet, She-of-the-Ointment-Jar, Eye of the Moon, Lady of Beni-Hassan, is the cat goddess of protection, perfume, fertility, pregnancy, children, music, the arts, and warfare. She expects to be treated as divine and infallible, pampered and precious. So she is essentially the same as most of our other cats.

Name: Chiron
Species: Phoenix

Chiron is classified as an elderly pet, meaning he will require special care commensurate with the waning days of his 1000-year lifespan. Keep in mind that your home will also have to deal with the searing flames of his eventual rebirth.

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I look at the Zoom class
Names suspended in the void
Voices from the dark
They may be learning
Asleep
Even dead
But I teach on, smiling
Before a careful backdrop
This could have been over
But you insisted
On your constitutional right
To breathe on the barista
As she worked for seven bucks
While her grandmother died

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Mr. Squeakums
Sitta pusilla, brown-headed nuthatch

People don’t like snarls of old pine, the skeletons of dead trees. They get in the way of subdivisions, of farms, of chain restaurants. But to someone who is quick and clever, for whom a pine scale is a tool and the labyrinth of pinebark is a larder, what better home could there be? But they are so hard to find, now. You flit about, a rubber duck that is quick and alive, echoing from the pinetops with your kin, hoping that somewhere a great old pine will fall and give your children a home.

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With the Zombie House of Preservatives and the Senotaph both likely to impeach, but unlikely to convict, Zombie President Brayne left the Blight House for the last time, attending a “heavy metal going away concert” at Joint Zombase Sinews. Still refusing to concede the election to “Dully” Oblongata or acknowledge his role in the insurrection that led to members of the Zombie Congress being eaten by his followers, President Brayne insisted that he was still in charge even as he boarded a plane for his retirement in Festeria.

In his inaugural address, Zombie President Oblongata pledged to heal divisions between the parties, promised not to pursue recriminations against the Mortician Party, and pledged not to undertake any “divisive” actions that the Morticians might not like, essentially handing the opposition party a de facto veto over the now-ruling Necrotic Party. In exchange, the Mortician Party reiterated its belief that Brayne remained the legal president and its desire to see President Oblongata “torn to shreds and eaten.”

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Blooj
Cyanocitta cristata, blue jay

Formed by light and not by pigment, going brown in the wrong light or when crushed, one of a handful of blues in a world of green, red, and brown. When angry, you show your crow side, angry and harsh, caws for alarm. But when the mood is light, when your loved ones are near, a lighter trilling note that speaks to the soul of a songbird. And of course, when a puckish mood strikes, the perfectly imitated cry of a hawk to put everyone to flight while you watch.

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King Bird
Gallus domesticus, feral rooster

The last survivor of an urban flock, shipped poultry class when no one could tell that he wasn’t a mother-to-be. Would be city limits farmers moved away, abandoning their birds to a world full of hawks in the sky and foxes that yowl in the woods. One by one the hens were taken, but long spurs and caution have left him alone, the wary king of the woods. Like jungle ancestors in the Indian under-canopy, he scratches out a living, and his crowing is a triumph of survival. The other birds pay him deference, for he is the largest, he is the escapee, he is the survivor.

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