Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Item #32A is a vintage 1950 Chillaire™-brand refrigerator, serial number 2398-4762-190A, manufactured in [REDECTED] and given a factory white enamel finish. Sold to Low Al’s Appliances of [REDACTED], #32A was subsequently bought by the [REDACTED] family at a clearance sale in 1955. No one seems to have noticed anything strange at the time, and interviews with current and former Low Al’s employees yielded no insights.

The refrigerator remained in the [REDACTED] family home, and several witnesses who were there as guests attested that the family fridge was working as intended, at least until April 1960. Service records from Chillaire™ indicate that Mr. [REDACTED] put in a service request at Low Al’s that was forwarded to the company. In it, he complained of excessive coldness, spoilage, dimming of the interior light, and a “suction effect” that made the door difficult to open. While Chillaire™ only offered a one-year factory warranty on the refrigerator, they nevertheless agreed to send a repair tecnician to the [REDACTED] home with the understanding that any major repairs would have to be paid for out of pocket. Due to a substantial backlog, the technician was not able to visit the family until May 13, 1960.

The next day, Mr. [REDACTED] failed to show up to work, and his two children were absent from school. The repairman, a Mr. [REDACTED], also failed to report to his next work assignment. Wellness checks were independently called in from Chillaire™ and from Mr. [REDACTED]’s place of employ.

Local police arriving at the scene found the repair truck parked in the driveway, and the interior of the house was in disarray–described as “a tornado scene”–with many small items disturbed as if by a strong wind. The fridge itself could not be opened.

A more thorough analysis in police impound reportedly succeeded in forcing the door open, but at the cost of several lives–officially recorded as “missing in action.” No further attempts to open Item #32A have been made in the years since. In fact, as the years have worn on, it has been reinforced several times as it was been observed to be buckling in several places as if on the verge of implosion.

Entity 07-28 was referred to us by the [REDACTED] shelter in [REDACTED]. It had been collected on the street by local animal control and taken into care. Nothing seemed outwardly unusual about it until the following details were noted:

1. Entity 07-28 was mirrored from the usual internal anatomy of a dog, a fact which was initially believed to be a rare, but not unknown, condition known as situs inversus.

2. Entity 07-28 refused all food and water, and when force-fed, would vomit it up, undigested. This did not seem to have any effect on Entity 07-28’s overall level of health.

3. All attempts to trim Entity 07-28’s nails and hair have failed due to damage to the cutting tools. Those tensile strength measurements that have been obtained are “off the charts.”

For these reasons, despite otherwise seeming to be a normal canine, it is believed that Entity 07-28 hails from another, alternate, dimension, and that its strange traits are normal for creatures from said skein. It has been confined for observation, but given regular walks as it does not seem to be a danger to itself or others.

“Remember well the cautionary tale of Akfas the Wizard.”

“What’s the cautionary tale of Akfas the Wizard?”

“There once was a wizard named Akfas who supposedly was incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous. It was said that he often took the form of a mighty bear and roamed the woods looking for mischief to cause. So when the local village noticed a bear with a wizard’s hat in their woods, they were terrified, avoiding it and even feeding the bear to keep Akfas at bay. It was only after years of this that they realized that it was not a wizard at all, but just a bear with an old hat on its head. The moral is, what seems terrifying may not be what it seems.”

“So was the bear harmless?”

“No, it mauled a bunch of people.”

“This is the stupidest fable I’ve ever heard.”

In the year NE 177, an astrophysicist discovered a revolutionary new kind of wormhole. Small and stable, it could connect any two points in existence instantaneously across time and space! But there was a problem: it would react explosively with most metals and plastics, disassembling them on the molucular level! Worse still, anything living put through the wormhole was never seen again, vanishing into some undetermined nexus trap along the Einstein-Rosen bridge! This meant that, due to some immutable laws of the universe that are not yet fully understood, nothing synthetic could pass through, but anything living would disappear!

Naturally, it was put to use delivering pizza.

Wormhole Pizza™ is the world’s leader in instant pizza delivery! From our wormhole terminus in sunny Antarctica, far from any ecosystems that might be affected by radiation leakage, our banks of ovens chrun out pies 24/7 which are instantly zapped to you while still steaming hot! Bulk delivery of ingredients and economies of scale means that we can offer you pizzas for pennies on the dollar and delivery that’s second to none!

With a small, one-time $20,000 down payment, you can have a Wormhole Pizza™ terminus installed in your home, allowing for instantaneous delivery, with an average order time of less than five minutes! Short on cash? You can order from a franchisee too, and have the pizza delivered to you via GrubDoor or DoorHub, with an average order time of only ten minutes!

Better still, if yours is one of the 1% of pizzas than vanishes in transit, Wormhole Pizza™ has a satisfaction guarantee! And if you are one of the .01% of customers whose pizza comes out Not Quite Right, in exchange for signing an NDA and surrendering the anomoly for study, you can get a cash bounty of up to $100!

Wormhole Pizza™: we don’t know why it works, but it just does.*

“Walk me though it again. Help me see your reasoning.”

“Okay, so dragons are lizards, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But they’re not real. Never were.”

“Okay, with you so far.”

“What’s the closest thing to dragons that ever existed?”

“Uhh…”

“That’s right, dinosaurs. But they’re extinct, right?”

“Right?”

“WRONG! Not all dinosaurs are extinct. Birds are dinosaurs and they’re still around.”

“…I’m sorry, it’s still a huge leap to call penguins ‘tiny ice dragons.'”

“You just have no sense of style.”

“That cloud looks suspiciously like a spaceship, don’t you think?” said Elo’Niss

“And that cloud looks like a wild mud-weasel,” said Engineer Xamket. They loudly uncorked a bottle of Obet mush-ale and took a swig. “But you don’t see me getting scared even though it’s a natural predator.”

“It’s a Vatna Incursion-Class marauder,” Lt. Cutec said. “Here to rescue me, I suppose.”

“Rescue you? I didn’t think rogue Vatna maurauders rescued people,” Elo’Niss said. “I thought wild, indiscriminate slaughter was their modus operandi.”

“I think maybe the lieutenant means that they are here to rescue him from this predicament by rescuing him from his life,” Briee said.

“CONTAMINANT DETECTED,” H0-1D barked for the umpteenth time. “RECOMMEND FULL NUTRON PURGE.”

“Wait a moment,” Cutec said. “Dr. Briee, are Vatna vulnerable to neutron purges?”

“Only if they have protons.”

With a weary hand, Lt. Cutec pressed the flash-frozen bread into the toaster, hoping for at least the warm smell of reheated and freshly toasted bread to provide some relief. The toaster trembled violently at someone attempting to use it for its intended purpose, before beginning to buck wildly on the surface of the table.

“Is it…supposed to do that?” Cutek said.

“I dunno, I’ve never used another toaster,” said Elo’Niss. “A human thing, really. But I do know that Engineer Xamket rigged up a miniature virtual intelligence core and matter-antimatter reactor to it.”

“Are you telling me,” said Cutec, “that the toaster is haunted by the vengeful spirit of an antimatter-powered virtual intelligence?

“It’s haunted, but it’s friendly,” Elo’Niss said. “It helps me make d’olh, after all. What human toaster has ever done that before?”

“So,” said Lt. Cutec, “my report to the Star Confederation on the state of this outpost will include a drunk Obet chief engineer, a Zypger weapons officer who blew up a planetoid with an illegally modified maser cannon as ‘target practice,’ an Ebzhyna counselor who somehow derives actual sustenance from the mental illnesses of the crew, a human medical officer in a medically induced coma, and a maintenence robot that repeatedly attempted to purge organic life from the station using a neutron surge. Am I leaving anything out?”

“Hey! H0-1D is a very confused robot, but it’s trying its best! It’s not our fault that it regards biological life as contamination!”

The shape was only visible where its form blotted out the stars set in the great dome of the sky, but as it capered and cavorted, Warts had the sense that it was a felid…an impossibly huge, or perhaps only impossibly thin cat made out of the very stardust it blotted from the sky.

“You are attempting…to understand me,” it said.

“Th-that’s right,” said Warts.

“Tell me. Do you understand yourself? Why you want what you want, why you need what you need, why your body works as it does?”

“I…no, not really,” Warts replied.

“Then let us dwell no more on you understanding me, or on me understanding you,” said the star-cat. “For if we cannot understand ourselves, what use is there in understanding others?”

“It is the Professor-Wizard’s opinion that a being’s physical and metaphysical forms are divisible, in that the one can be set free of the other,” said Assistant Il-Bhig.

“I assume, since the Professor-Wizard is still quite visible, and audible, to us…that this has not yet been a success?” said Inspector Revilo.

“The first experiment relied on finding a songbird with a very high Ω value,” said Il-Bhig. “When we found one, the Professor-Wizard attempted to use the focused crystal nexus to seperate its physical from its metaphysical.”

There was a long silence. “Well?” said Inspector Revilo. “Was the Professor-Wizard successful?”

“The bird is invisible now. It still sings, and we can occasionally see seeds disappearing, but it seems to be quite physical still, and we have not bee able to recapture it for some time. The Professor-Wizard does hold out some hope that it will mate and produce half-visible offspring.”