Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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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“So you see, that’s the miracle of EctoCo,” said Madison Grobb, EctoCo COO of BOO. “Ghosts are immortal, already know everything they need to do the job, and are not legally considered people. So we can put them to work to serve the living in a variety of mential jobs once they’re raised.”

“How do you compensate them, or at least force compliance?” asked Blaire Burroughs, the WSJ Correspondent for Underutilized Labor. “I’m assuming pay is out of the question.”

“Of course,” Madison laughed. “I mean, what would they even spend it on? No, the patented PolterAmp™ technology that allows for ghosts to affect the material plane more efficiently works in reverse as well; by dialing in a negative resonance value we can cause them to partially or fully dissipate, the former being painful and the latter being permanent.”

“What happens to a ‘dissipated’ spirit?” asked Blaire.

“We leave those question to the philosophers,” Madison replied. “Ah, we’re just about to raise one now.”

She steered Blaire to a patch of earth, containing mortal remains and a restless spirit, which was undergoing PolterAmp™ testing. As they watched, the ghostly ectoplasmic figure of a person rose from the earth, confused and disoriented.

“You there, what was your job in life?” Madison said. “We’ve got openings in low-level assembly work.”

“I…in life, I was a…steno pool typist,” the spectral being said in a hollow whisper.

“Oh. Ew. No one needs typists anymore.” Madison looked over to the PolterAmp™ tech running the equipment and drew a finger across her throat. “Purge it.”

Blaire watched, raptly taking notes, as the tech smashed a red button and the spirit was torn to pieces as the device inverted itself. The remains and hallowed earth were sluiced away as well to make room for the next occupant.

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Thanks to its large size and asymmetric shape, the pumpkin had repeatedly resisted attempts to tame it. The thing had repeatedly tipped over on the porch, often rolling about and knocking things over. It had blocked the door several times, forcing Frank to go around the back way to get out of his own summer house. Worst of all, it had proven to be entirely impenetrable to the carving implements he had available, bending two knives.

When he final attempt to decorate the gourd with paint failed due to its knobby surface, Frank had enough. He chucked it into his front bed and beat is with a hoe, as if setting an example to the other gourds there.

Once the exceptionally mischevious pumpkin was literally beaten to a pulp, Frank finished packing and left for Florida the day after Halloween. He returned in May, only to find his entire front porch overgrown and begourded. The children of his vanquished pumpkin had risen, it seemed, and they were out for revenge.

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“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” shouted Sedgewyck.

“Oh, the tea is a little hot, so I’m adding some ice cubes to it,” said Rags. “So it doesn’t burn my mouth.”

Sedgewyck rose, furious. “WATERING DOWN the tea? COOLING the tea? This is an insult MOST GRAVE, child!”

“I wouldn’t mind a spot of milk or a bisuit to dunk myself,” said Codswallop.

“You INSULT me, sir!” screamed Sedgewyck. “This is the ancient ELDER TEA, passed down from our forebears who were first wrecked here, and you are DISRESPECTING IT!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Rags said. “I’ll take the ice cubes out.” He reached for a teaspoon, only to have Sedgewyck swat it out of his hand with his cane.

“It’s too late! An insult this grave can only be answered with blood!”

Codswallop had reached across the table for milk, which he had quietly added to his tea. “Are you sure about that, Sir Sedgewyck?” he said mildly. “I have found you and your people affably amusing thus far; it would be a shame to shed your blood over something as trivial as the temperature and composition of tea.”

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“I think, with all the brown and the gas cells, it looks like a loaf of bread,” said SA-1.

“Bread is not made of high-pressure sulfuric acid made by a runaway greenhouse effect,” said SA-2. “It is an obsolete, if artisan, form of sustenance.”

“But imagine if you were on the surface,” countered SA-3. “It would look like…a bread sky. Or something.”

“Again, this is a toxic, high-pressure world with a surface pressure and temperature that leads to rivers of liquid lead and corrosive rains,” said SA-2.

“Ha!” laughed SA-1. “But imagine if you could land there and look up at that bread sky. Before you were crushed and melted.”

“Baked and sliced,” offered SA-3.

“Buttered and toasted,” SA-1 replied.

“Enough!” SA-2 barked. “It needs a designation other than M2859271b.”

“Call it Breadworld,” snickered SA-3.

“Yeah,” SA-1 said. “It’s the yeast we can do.

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“You look displeased, Zorpnor,” said Crumbulax. “Do you disapprove of my choice?”

“It is…very primitive,” Zorpnor said.

“Our force fields will provide the necessary strength, just as they do with your fragile tinfoil ship,” said Crumbulax.

“But it will surely begin to…decompose soon,” Zorpnor replied, turning his antennae up in disgust at the sight of Crumbulax’s new ship.

“In the absence of Earth germs and oxygen? I doubt that very much,” Crumbulax chortled. “But I have lacquered it, if you’re worried about all that.”

“I know you are a big fan of Earth culture, even though the terrifying giants who live there fill me with ghastly horror,” Zorpnor said. “But Crumbulax, I do not think it is safe, or wise, to build one of their primitive totems into a spacecraft!”

“Bah,” said Crumbulax, climbing into his jack o’lantern spacecraft through its garved mouth. “This is why you fly around in an unstylish box, my friend. No vision!”

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The bathroom was strangely immaculate; Lozow did not seem to have actually used it, preferring an outhouse and washbasin in the yard. Instead, he seemed to have given over the entire room to more models, with both the sink and the bathtub converted to wet/dry landscapes filled with miniature soldiers and other people.

The bathtub, especially, had been partly filled with dirt to form a small archipelago of dry islands, each lush with fake foliage and teeming with small figures seemingly assaulting the tiny islands thusly formed.

Chuck Lozow had apparently been in the middle of reconfiguring the waterscape when he died, as half the tub was a squadron of World War II US Marines locked in combat with a detachment of regular Japanese Army troops, while the other half was space marines in cerulean armor rooting out dug-in green-skinned aliens.

And, as there had been in each of the other rooms, there was a tiny Chuck Kozow in each army. He was a space marine holding a chainsaw sword aloft, a green alien exorting the crew of a rickety red tank to victory, a Marine sergeant on a radio, and a Japanese officer, sword in hand, leading a charge.

Chuck Lozow had rarely left his house after his parents had died, and never left town aside from his abortive time at university. But in the confines of that tiny bathroom alone, he had lived—hell, was still living—four lives.

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